Devil Wind (Sammy Greene Mysteries)

by Linda Reid

  Miller nodded as he sprinkled a pinch of the salt over his left shoulder. “And, tomorrow, on Christmas Day, you’ll have it, too.”

  “ID please.”

  “Huh?”

  The librarian slid Benjamin Franklin half-lenses along her narrow nose and peered at Ana as if she’d just arrived from Mars. “To use the Santa Monica Library Internet,” she explained, exasperation evident in her tone. “We need proof that you live in the city.”

  “Oh, sure.” Ana pulled Sylvie’s license from her jeans pocket and waited anxiously as the older woman studied the information. Fortunately, the resemblance between Ana and Sylvie was so close—especially after Ana had dyed her hair blonde—that no one was likely to question her identity. It was something the two of them often joked about.

  Still, Ana held her breath until the librarian handed back the license and indicated the computer room across from the stacks. “You can use it for one hour if no one’s waiting.”

  At just past ten a.m., six of the eight PCs were already occupied. A few people glanced up when Ana entered. They quickly resumed their own work once she’d settled down at a free computer farthest from prying eyes.

  She pulled the thick Jazz disk from her pocket. There were several slots on the computer. One by one, Ana tried them all without success. None fit. Now what? Ana stared at the desktop icons for a moment, then double clicked on Internet Explorer to enter the World Wide Web. She located CNN’s homepage and searched the text for details of the California fires. Scanning the story, she drew in a sharp breath when she saw that a victim found on Roscomare Road had been taken to LAU Medical. Roscomare wasn’t that far from the party!

  Could they have been writing about Sylvie? But why would she leave the mansion without her car? Ana reread the article, searching for more details. There was no name reported, no other facts. If Sylvie was the victim, there had to be a good reason why she’d been alone and gotten caught by the flames. Trying to escape the people who’d destroyed her apartment? Ana prayed her roommate would recover quickly in the hospital. And then resolve in the future not to take so many risks.

  Behind her a teenager dressed all in black hovered, tapping his foot. Ana craned her neck to see him point to his watch, mouthing “five minutes.” She nodded and turned back to the keyboard, typing in the log-on to open e-mail. Her inbox was empty.

  Feeling very alone, Ana made a quick decision. Dear Baba, she typed to her father, Don’t worry, I’m okay. I’ve been clean for a year. I have more news. I’ll try to get in touch as soon as I can. Merry Christmas. She sat staring at the screen, ignoring the youth’s toe tapping, considering how to sign off. It had been years since she’d offered endearments to her father, longer still since he’d offered them in return. Impulsively, she typed, Love, Ana, then quickly logged off.

  Ana gathered her things with calculated slowness and finally eased her chair back so she could stand up and stretch. She favored the angry teen with a sneer as she sauntered past him out of the computer room and into the stacks. In one corner she found a well-worn chair and soon settled into its comforting arms to take stock.

  Ana was certain that Kaye would take care of things. The madam was known to have LAPD connections. She could call off the cops. Then Ana could go home, and get things ready for Sylvie once she was discharged from the hospital. She’d help nurse her friend back to health. Nurse, Ana thought ruefully. That was what she’d wanted to be when she volunteered as a teenage candy striper in Boston. Before she ran. Before Teddy.

  Ana closed her eyes and tried to conjure up Teddy’s smile.

  The librarian shook her gently. “Sorry, miss.”

  Ana opened her eyes, realizing she’d been sleeping.

  “It’s almost three. We’re closing early because of the fires and Christmas Eve. You can’t stay here. You have to go.”

  Donning a white coat pilfered from a clean laundry stack delivered to the county hospital next door, Yevgeny took advantage of the lax security in the understaffed, overworked Los Angeles County morgue and followed two technicians returning from a late lunch into the back entrance, down the stairs to the basement. He waited until they’d disappeared into one of the labs off the narrow corridor, then hurried to a room marked PROPERTY.

  He jiggled his penknife to open the locked door. Stepping inside, he flipped on the overhead light, illuminating a small dusty room with rows of wire trays on shelves labeled with the names of victims. After a few minutes, he located a tray for Pappajohn, A. and lifted it out from the top row. Inside a large manila envelope were a charred silk purse, a driver’s license, one key, and a few dollars. Nothing that could conceivably hold Kaye’s client list. Yevgeny looked through the purse again and then searched the tray. Didn’t the girl have a cell phone? There was none in sight. Damn!

  Cursing, Yevgeny returned the belongings to the envelope, and placed it and the tray back on the shelf. Turning off the lights, he peeked out the door to see an empty hallway and slipped out, aiming for the back exit, mission unaccomplished. Kaye was not going to be happy.

  Trina Greene waited for Julia to step into the elevator going down before emerging from the shadows at the far end of the hallway and heading for the Coronary Care Unit. Though she and Jeffrey had socialized with both Prescotts for years, Julia always managed to remain somewhat aloof. Perhaps as a second-generation debutante from a rich Texas family, she considered the Greenes and their real estate fortune nouveau riche.

  Or maybe Julia was wary just because Trina’s Euro-glamorous allure never failed to turn a male eye and she knew her husband was not above temptation. Prescott had come on to Trina—more than once—but she’d rebuffed him. Not that she hadn’t enjoyed a dalliance or two herself now and again. She simply imagined the congressman’s stodgy conservatism would make him a less than imaginative lover. For Trina, Neil Prescott was a stepping-stone to building Greene Progress into a billion dollar corporation. Why complicate their relationship with sex?

  Trina pressed the button for admission to the Coronary Care Unit and walked briskly past the nurses’ station to bed three, ignoring their protests. Prescott was easy to spot in the glass-enclosed cubicle across from the entry. As Trina walked up, he was resting with his eyes closed, opening them at the clicking sound of her high heels. “How did you—?”

  “Jeffrey tried to call this morning. Julia wouldn’t put him through.”

  “I just had a heart attack. She’s trying to protect me.”

  “If I didn’t know better, I’d swear you were trying to avoid us.”

  “I already explained to Jeffrey last week. I can’t do anything that the press could use against me. Have you seen what they’re doing to our so-called president?”

  “Don’t worry, love, no incriminating evidence here. Jeffrey just needs a quiet word from you to the folks at Seaside, and the Playa Bella Partnership deal goes through. Easy. Let me remind you, without that deal, our campaign contributions might come up a little . . . short. And I might have to start charging you for damage control.”

  She said nothing more, but the grimace on Prescott’s red face and the few extra beats erupting on his cardiac monitor indicated that she’d made her point. “We both share secrets,” he whispered.

  “True, though right now I honestly think you have more to lose than me.” Trina put a manicured hand on Prescott’s arm. “Don’t you agree?” Without waiting for a reply, she leaned over and pressed her lips to his cheek, “I’ll tell Jeffrey he’ll be hearing from you within the hour,” she said, then turned to go. “Oh, and Neil,” she added, looking back at him, “remember, the electorate may be fickle, but I’m true to my word. If Greene Progress goes down, you go down.”

  Fahim sat back in his chair, considering Miller’s “surprise.” If this resonator truly worked, it would be a far more spectacular weapon than any dirty bomb. How much might the young prince be willing to pay for such a weapon? Billions?

  Years of gambling in Vegas and Monte Carlo had taught Fahim to es
timate odds. If Miller stayed true to his track record, this resonator could be a winner for Fahim and for al-Arabiyya. It wasn’t as if Miller was backing down on the original plan. He still promised that the miniaturized nuclear weapon—the suitcase nuke—would be in Fahim’s hands on Wednesday. Plenty of time to deliver it to al-Salid and his men so it could be secreted in place by New Year’s Eve to disperse its deadly radiation.

  No. No downside. Either way, even without the resonator, Fahim would still be twenty million dollars richer. Enough to clean his tab and give him spending money for a New Year’s celebration in Las Vegas.

  A sudden blast of wind blew the salt shaker over again and Fahim smiled. The hand of the devil. A good sign. As long as Fahim played his cards well, his web of deceit might not backfire after all.

  The Klaxon reverberated throughout Schwarzenegger Hospital at exactly 11:37 a.m. The paging system echoed the alert: “Dr. Firestone, Dr. Firestone, please come to Room C294, Dr. Firestone.”

  On every floor of the tall tower, nurses and medical assistants hurried from room to room, trying to calm patients aroused by the sirens and the sounds of hospital personnel racing through the halls. “It’s only a drill. Everything’s going to be fine.”

  Riders on the high-speed elevators screamed as the cars shuddered and stopped their ascent, then dropped smoothly to the ground floor. Frightened visitors flew out as the doors opened, moments before the elevator lights and power shut off.

  Crashing computers, darkening monitors, silent TVs, all fell victim to the damaging blaze reportedly out of control in the ultramodern high-tech, high-security Incident Command Control Center in the subbasement.

  The fluorescent lighting that brightened the labyrinthine hallways of the hospital faded to black, wing by wing, like a series of falling dominoes, replaced by recessed lights that signaled the launch of generator power. Fire doors, hermetically sealed when closed, clanged shut as negative pressure ventilation systems began operating in each section.

  “Dr. Firestone, Dr. Firestone—” The incessant pages were drowned out by shouts from staff ordering those able to ambulate to move to the lighted atria near the fire stairs at each corner of the building.

  Assigned to clear out the cardiac Step Down ward, Michelle helped move patients in wheelchairs through the panicked crowds to the “fortress,” an auditorium-sized steel well in the center of the tower containing generator wiring and a fire-resistant freight elevator. Flushed from her own efforts, she wondered how Reed was faring, knowing he had a much harder challenge in the CCU with the acutely ill cardiac patients. Thank God this drill wasn’t real!

  Like burrowing ants, five members of Hassan al-Salid’s terrorist cell used the cover of the disaster drill to practice infiltrating the hospital.

  Two clean-shaven Arabs dressed as orderlies, complete with fake identification provided through Miller, helped Michelle move patients to the secure core of the tower. Another two men, formerly with the Irish Republican Army, had taken their places with the facilities staff, making their way through the electrical and plumbing conduits implementing rarely used shut-down protocols.

  The fifth man, al-Salid himself, entered the high-security Incident Command Control Center, ICCC, on level B3, by scanning his microchipped Emergency Operations Officer badge through the Omnilock. He nodded curtly to his colleagues, all diligently monitoring the “emergency.” Hospital Security Chief Richard Eccles waved, revealing the perspiration stains on his too-tight uniform shirt.

  Miller was right. Hospital security here was a small-time operation. Smart to use former IRA, rather than al-Salid’s Arab compatriots to infiltrate the ICCC. The Belfast men, both fair-haired and freckled, easily passed as Americans. The fact that al-Salid had inherited his German mother’s green eyes and light skin and acquired a flawless German accent while living as a teen with her, made his own false identity—an engineering graduate student of Turkish descent from Hamburg—all the more acceptable to Eccles when he’d applied for the job.

  Al-Salid slipped into an empty seat at a workstation in the far end of the room, smiling as he passed the tall, stiff, gray-haired man in the pressed white coat whose gaze remained fixed on the data reports and visuals popping up on three screens. Dr. Franklin Bishop was ex-military. Despite Miller’s reassurances, it was best to remain on guard.

  Al-Salid typed a log-in for Hans Sanger, his manufactured German-American persona, on his own keyboard, and watched several fifteen-inch flat-panels facing him come to life, each recording images of hospital staff guiding patients to the safety of the core with its independent, filtered ventilation system. The core, he knew, on December 31 would baptize them with focused radiation from one carefully targeted dispersal device. A dirty bomb.

  “Dr. Firestone, Dr. Firestone—”

  Reed apologized as he reached out a strong arm to guide Prescott into a wheelchair. “We’ll get you moved to the Step Down unit as soon as this drill is over.” He attached Prescott’s nasal cannula to a portable oxygen tank and transferred the IV to the wheelchair’s IV pole. “Is your wife here?”

  “She went home to get some sleep,” Prescott said. “Where’s your boss?”

  “Dr. Bishop’s the medical director of our disaster response programs. Probably monitoring us right now from Mission Control.”

  Prescott’s vital signs jumped, causing his monitor to eek out a beep. “Mission Control?”

  “Level B3, in the basement. Dr. Bishop took me there when we first launched the Y2K response training. Looks like NASA Houston. High tech-equipment, computers, monitors, power center. Runs the entire hospital,” Reed explained. “Hospital security’s got a whole emergency operations center down there. We’re lucky to have Dr. Bishop’s army experience on board. Heard he commanded a MASH field unit in Desert Storm.”

  Prescott didn’t respond right away. In fact, Reed thought the congressman seemed more than a little agitated. No surprise, with all this commotion, and what he’d been through the last twelve hours. And maybe before with that blonde.

  Reed laid a comforting hand on Prescott’s shoulder. “Please don’t worry. You’re perfectly safe. With all the high-tech gear, Dr. Bishop said he can see and hear everything.” He pointed to a tiny camera mounted on the ceiling overhead. “Security wants to make sure everyone’s trained and ready in case something goes wrong on Y2K.” Reed began wheeling Prescott out of the cardiac unit. “Boy Scout motto: Be Prepared.”

  Running late, Sammy cursed the midday traffic, which had slowed to a crawl. It seemed as if the entire city was out on the freeway heading for the airport. Rush hour usually started after four. Wasn’t anyone in L.A. working today? Swinging off the freeway onto Century Boulevard toward LAX and Terminal Two, she entered the parking garage, her frustration unrelieved. Not a single free parking space on the lower floors. Amazing how many people traveled on Christmas Eve.

  Sammy carefully steered up the last ramp onto the uncovered roof where spaces were surprisingly plentiful. It was only when she drove into the sunlight that she understood why most had avoided this area. Not only was it unseasonably warm from the Santa Anas—ninety degrees in December—but the winds buffeted her Tercel like a Hot Wheels toy. Turning into a free slot, Sammy shut off the engine and struggled to push open her car door. Outside, she guessed that the fires still blazed, judging from the sky, browned by haze. From her high vantage point, she could see menacing puffs of black smoke clouds drift up between distant mountains to the north.

  Racing toward the elevators, Sammy had a fleeting worry that the winds might whisk her off the edge of the building and blow her clear over the runways into the cold Pacific Ocean. Fortunately, the elevator doors opened quickly. Inside, she relished the respite, though not the annoying synthetic holiday music that accompanied her down to the ground floor.

  Only as the elevator reached its destination did she recognize the tinny instrumental as “Let it Snow.” When the doors opened to the blasting furnace of smoky heat, she laughed at the irony.
Christmas in Los Angeles, an oxymoron if there ever was one. For a moment, she missed the soothing comfort of a blanket of freshly fallen Vermont snow. And Grandma Rose’s Chanukah latkes.

  Pappajohn’s flight was due in less than fifteen minutes. Sammy grabbed her purse from the X-ray conveyor belt and made a beeline for the arrival area. Poor Gus. How difficult this journey must be for him. He hadn’t often mentioned his daughter, but when he did, his references to Ana had always seemed a mixture of anger and regret.

  First-class passengers had disembarked by the time Sammy reached the gate. Flight must’ve come in early, she guessed, scanning the waiting area for her old friend. About to check at the counter, she spotted him, shuffling slowly up the ramp with a small carry-on slung over his shoulder. Sammy hadn’t seen Gus Pappajohn since graduation from Ellsford University three and a half years ago. Still, this man was a shock. He appeared as if he’d aged a decade, the salt-and-pepper hair turned the color of slate, his mustache almost white. And though he’d kept his ample paunch—probably from his penchant for Greek sweets—it was now accompanied by stooped shoulders.

  “Ya’sou,” Sammy greeted him softly as their eyes met. His twinkle had vanished, she noted, though he managed a weary smile.

  “Shalom,” Pappajohn returned, sticking out his hand for a shake.

  Sammy drew him into a hug instead. “I’m so sorry.”

  Pappajohn pulled away, nodding.

  “How did Eleni take the news?”

  “I didn’t want to spoil her holiday, he said, his voice cracking. “Besides, what could she do here? She’ll know soon enough.” Changing the subject, he pointed to his carry-on bag. “I brought you some kourambiedes, though after that rough flight, they’re probably all broken up in pieces.”

  “Yeah, the Santa Anas have really kicked up. The weatherman’s predicting more “devil wind” for the next few days.”