Pretending to search for his sister-in-law, he was able to cross the few people seated in the lobby off his running list of obvious lookouts. No police either, or any discernible security sensors like a metal detector or X-ray machine. Not that he had expected to find that kind of security in Palos Hills. He might find a cop at the emergency entrance on the opposite side of the hospital. Not that it really mattered. His pistol was concealed, and there was no reason to search him. He sensed a presence behind him.
Instinct told him it was Tom, but it could be anyone. Well-practiced and perfected skills beat instinct any day in this business. Not that his current skill level met either description at the moment. Covert operations field craft involved highly perishable skills, their easy expiration directly related to an abysmally low survival rate. He turned his head slightly, confirming the red vest. He hated living like this. They couldn’t get back to the sailboat quickly enough.
“Do you see her?” asked the man.
The guy was relentless, which Daniel decided might work to his advantage.
“I don’t see her,” said Daniel. “She’s supposedly been here a while. Like almost an hour.”
The man took a quick look around, shaking his head.
“I’m going on five hours here, and I haven’t seen anyone hanging out in the main lobby for that long.”
“Maybe hidden back in the café?” said Daniel, looking in that direction.
“Café closed at six thirty. That group just sat down a few minutes ago to grab their kids a snack from one of the accessible vending machines,” said the man. “She might be waiting in the hospice wing. They have a comfortable lounge for family there.”
Tom had the lobby locked down tight. Anyone lingering here would have drawn his attention long ago.
“Maybe she went back up to the hospice floor. Let me move my car, and I’ll get this all sorted out,” said Daniel. “I know she didn’t walk home. At least I hope she didn’t. Right?”
The man nodded, feigning a smile. All business. Daniel returned to his car in time to take a call from Jessica.
“I’m turning onto the main entrance road,” she said.
“I’ll meet you at the parking garage entrance. The lobby is clear.”
“I can’t wait,” said Jessica.
She sounded distinctly different than a few minutes ago. In fact, she sounded remarkably like she had in Belgrade during their final days in that mess. The closer she got to seeing her mother, the worse this would get. The trick was keeping her from a complete breakdown, and if anything had the potential to trigger one, this was it.
Daniel pulled the car out of the drop-off zone and waited at the top of the drive for Jessica. He prayed for a short visit, fully aware that it would be a long night no matter what.
Chapter 19
Palos Hills Community Hospital
Palos Hills, Illinois
Jessica rode the elevator up to the fourth floor, single-mindedly focused on one thing: not freaking out. Actually, she was more concentrated on not showing any outward signs that she was on the verge of breaking down. Daniel’s concerned glances and sympathetic smiles indicated she wasn’t doing a good job. Or maybe she was. She had no idea. All she knew for sure was that she would see her mother in a few minutes, and the thought terrified her.
It shouldn’t. If anything, this moment should be one of those cathartic, transcendent kind of moments that alter the course of your life, but she wasn’t interpreting her body’s response that way. She knew exactly what it felt like to have a nervous breakdown. She’d spent the better part of a year downing Xanax like Tic Tacs to little avail in Serbia. And another year after that convinced that the new life she was building with Daniel would come crashing down at a moment’s notice.
“Fuck. This shouldn’t be so hard,” she murmured, barely aware that she had spoken out loud.
Yeah. She wasn’t doing a good job at concealing this at all.
“Sorry,” she said.
“About what?”
“This.”
“You’ve endured worse,” said Daniel. “Way worse. Don’t lose sight of that.”
His words didn’t make a dent in the field of nervous energy that radiated from her chest. She was nearly shaking from it, like an adrenaline boost, except this neurochemical reaction wasn’t helping her in any way she could interpret. It was drawing her inward, where she could least afford to be. For all practical purposes, they were in enemy territory, and she was dead weight. No. She was worse than dead weight. More like a zombie.
When the elevator door opened, Daniel stepped into the lobby and glanced around, nodding for her to exit when he saw it was safe. A backlit sign on the wall pointed them in the direction of the room block used for hospice care. Rooms 440–459. Elevator C would have delivered them closest to the rooms, but Daniel insisted they use a different elevator as long as the areas connected. She would have taken the shortest route. The most obvious route.
She hesitated for a moment, desperately wanting to return to the lobby. Daniel placed his hand against the inner door, making sure it didn’t shut. He kept his eyes in the hallway, waiting for her to move or stay put. It didn’t matter to him one way or the other. Right now, he served as her bodyguard and not much more than that. He wasn’t her husband, lover, or best friend. Daniel was her only protection from a potential attack or trap.
Jessica stepped out of the elevator and immediately felt dizzy. She didn’t stumble, but it must have been clear from her face, because Daniel looked worried.
“I’m good,” she said, starting to walk.
A firm grip on her shoulder stopped Jessica in place.
“Wrong way,” he said, giving her a funny look.
“What?”
“You need to get this out of your system,” he said.
It was an odd thing for him to say, especially after successfully tiptoeing around her for nearly two days.
She shook her head. “I’m sorry. What?”
“You need to find the nearest bathroom and reboot your system,” he said.
That was right! Danny remembered. As a deep cover CIA operative in Serbia, she occasionally induced vomiting before a nerve-racking mission or field operation, particularly if she felt like she was losing the battle with anxiety. Initially admitting that to her handler had put her under close scrutiny.
Excessive anxiety was viewed as a liability. The CIA’s behavioral health division maintained that a certain degree of anxiety was beneficial to the job. It tended to keep operatives on their toes—and alive—but they didn’t like the kind that led to mistakes, which ultimately led back to the agency. A few months after confiding in her handler, she was ordered out of the field. An order she refused, because she’d reunited with Daniel, and they’d hatched a plan to walk away from it all. Together. With a lot of money. They were on the cusp of escaping again. This time for good. The thought made her smile, and she felt oddly better.
“I can hold your hair for you,” said Daniel.
“I’m wearing a wig,” she reminded him.
“I didn’t say I would go into the bathroom with you,” he said. “I can hold your hair in the hallway.”
“Such a gentleman,” she said, seeing an illuminated bathroom placard down the hallway.
He gripped both of her shoulders and stared into her eyes with determined love and seemingly infinite compassion.
“You’re going to be fine. I know that’s the last thing you want to hear, but—”
“No. I need to hear that,” she said. “We’re going to be fine, as soon as I get to that bathroom.”
Chapter 20
Palos Hills Community Hospital
Palos Hills, Illinois
Daniel situated his far more lucid-looking wife on a deep, brown leather couch in the hospice lobby and made his way to the caregiver station. A tall intense-looking man with glasses looked up from his computer monitor as he neared, the screen reflecting in his wire-rimmed glasses.
“Ca
n I help you find someone?” asked the man.
“Yes,” said Daniel. “My wife is here to see her mother, Vesna Erak.”
The man started typing on his keyboard. “Just a second. Ms. Erak hasn’t received any visitors since arriving in hospice. I need to see if—no, she hasn’t placed any restrictions on visitation. You’re welcome to stay as long as you need. We’re pretty well appointed here, as you can probably tell. Family members can order from the hospital’s twenty-four-hour menu. Anything you need, don’t hesitate to let me know. I’m here until eight in the morning. My name is Dave. Your wife’s mother is in room 451. Would you like me to show you the way?”
“Thank you, Dave. That’s all right,” said Daniel, glancing over his left shoulder in what he assumed was the direction of the hospice rooms.
It was the only hallway open to the generously furnished and empty lobby. The hospital had gone out of its way to make the hospice area as soothing and comfortable as possible for grieving families. The walls were painted a warm color and the lighting was softened compared to the patient hallways they’d travelled to get here from the distant elevator. The institutional feel had been erased, a far cry from the room his mother had died in. Not that he ever saw her alive in that room. She’d been delivered to the funeral home by the time he managed to get back from Japan. Car crashes didn’t wait for your ship to pull back into port.
“All of the rooms are down this hallway, right?”
“Correct. 451 is on the left side, about halfway down,” said the attendant.
“May I ask you an odd question?”
Dave slid his chair to the left of the monitor and looked at Daniel over his glasses. “Yes?”
“My wife hasn’t been back to this area in a long time,” said Daniel. “A lot of that has to do with an ill-tempered ex-fiancé connected to some unsavory Serbian gentlemen. Organized crime, she thinks, though he’s never been formally linked. Anyway, this guy has gone out of his way to harass my wife in a number of different states. We live in Baja, Mexico, now, if that gives you any indication of the degree of hassle he’s given her. This won’t be a long visit for that very reason.”
Dave looked absolutely enthralled by his tale, barely blinking.
“There’s obviously a sizable Serbian community in the surrounding towns, so it wouldn’t be unusual for Serbian Americans to visit the floor, but have you seen any men in their mid-thirties that might fit the bill? Perhaps someone visited her mother and left quickly or hung around here waiting? Someone asking questions?”
The man shook his head slowly. “I’m not the only person that works this station, but we always log activity, even information requests. Nobody has visited her or asked about her. I can’t speak for the other attendants, but nobody comes up here unless they have a relative or friend in one of those rooms. Hospice gives people the creeps.”
“You aren’t kidding,” said Daniel. “All right. If you don’t mind, I’d like to check out the room first. I know it sounds crazy, but—”
“That’s fine.”
“I might glance into the other rooms from the hallway, just to be sure.”
“I don’t have a problem with that, as long as you stay out of the other rooms.”
“How many rooms are occupied?”
“About half,” Dave said.
“Last crazy question. Is the room directly in front of hers occupied?”
The man looked uncomfortable with the question.
“I know it sounds paranoid, but these people have given us hell over the past several years.”
“The woman across the hallway is asleep. Her family left about an hour ago. She sleeps soundly through the night.”
“Serbian?”
“Hispanic. And nobody has entered her room since they left.”
“Final question. Not a crazy one.”
“Your questions are fine,” said the man, looking relieved.
“Does her record say what happened? Why she was put in ICU in the first place? We didn’t get any details. A friend of my wife’s got in touch with us a few days ago. She didn’t have any information.”
“You’d have to ask the doctor that admitted her or Ms. Erak herself. Patient confidentiality. Once they come through these doors, we keep them comfortable according to the plan they have in place. I can tell you that she’s on palliative care, which means…that’s pretty much it,” he said. “Sorry.”
“I understand,” said Daniel. “Thank you.”
Daniel returned to Jessica, who looked a little less composed than when he left her. He needed to get this moving along. She was starting to slide backward.
“I’m going to take a quick look around. Make sure we don’t have any surprises. Be back in a minute. Are you good here?”
“I’m fine,” she said.
“Okay.” He leaned over to kiss her forehead.
The plan was simple. Walk up and down the hallway, looking into each room. He’d briefly enter Vesna’s room, checking the bathroom and any possible hiding spots. It was the best he could do under the circumstances. Once Jessica was inside the room, he’d move one of the chairs where he could watch the hallway and wait for Jessica to emerge.
He could generally guess which rooms were occupied by the lighting scheme or the obvious presence of family members. Each room contained a couch that was visible from the hallway and a comfortable-looking chair, though he suspected the rooms likely contained more furniture that could be moved closer to the bed. Room 451 had a solitary light on somewhere deep in the space, probably on a table next to Vesna’s bed. He kept going to the end of the hallway. Nothing stood out from what he could tell, and he now had a good sense of which rooms held patients and posed less of a threat. Someone would have to go through a ton of trouble to hijack an occupied room. He filed the information away for later. All of the rooms were well within his center-mass pistol-shooting capability, the majority of the rooms an easy headshot. The problem would be the time needed to make the shot if someone darted out of nearby room. He’d have to borrow Jessica’s handbag to conceal his pistol in a quickly accessible location. There was no way he could draw from the concealed holster on his right hip.
The only other thing that kind of bothered him was the service elevator located at the end of the hallway. Generally, it was an odd location for an elevator, which he suspected had been selected specifically for the hospice floor. Patients put in these rooms always left the same way. The elevator’s remote placement spared anyone resting in the lounge from an early funeral procession. From a security perspective, it represented a significant danger.
The elevator was a wild card. He and Jessica could be under remote surveillance right now, a sizable team waiting in the basement for the right moment to take the elevator to the fourth floor. Daniel would have no warning, just a sudden rush of men from the end of the hallway, which he’d meet with rapid, accurate gunfire. Once Jessica’s gun joined the fight, they could neutralize the threat and withdraw. The more he thought about it, the elevator was his only real concern at this point.
Now for room 451, just in case. He stepped lightly inside the room, finding the bathroom where he expected it. Like nearly every hotel room, it was right next to the entrance. He pushed the bathroom door open slowly, finding its hinges surprisingly quiet. A quick check confirmed it didn’t hold a hidden assailant. Backtracking out of the dark bathroom, he faced the rest of the room. Almost tiptoeing at this point, he approached the corner wall of the bathroom, which gave the bed privacy from the hallway.
Daniel peeked around the corner, observing any remaining hiding places. The room was clear. He glanced up at Vesna, expecting her to be asleep, but instead finding her eyes wide, locked onto his own. Shit. He barely recognized her. Actually, he didn’t at all. She looked moments from death. Grayish-yellow, a look beyond exhaustion. The face of someone trying to will themselves to die because they’re too physically weak to end it with their own hands.
Staring into her eyes, he felt an over
whelming compassion for the woman, despite his brief history with her. He’d met her twice, under rushed and strained circumstances, one of them overtly hostile when he had to rescue Jessica, then Nicole, from a family dinner turned violent. He’d wanted nothing to do with her family after that, which had suited her fine. She didn’t seem to want anything to do with them either.
He nodded at her, and she formed a thin smile.
“Nicole came to see you,” he whispered.
Her smile broadened for a moment, then waned, as if the simple effort of using her facial muscles was too much to bear. This was going to be hell on Jessica, but there was no going back. His words had sealed that.
When he returned to the lobby, Jessica sat on the edge of the couch, waiting. She stood and walked over to meet him.
“Did you see her?” she asked, glancing nervously toward her mother’s room.
“I did.”
“And?”
“Are you sure you want to do this?”
“I have to do this,” said Jessica.
“The room’s clear,” he said. “As far as I can tell, the floor is clear. There’s a service elevator at the end of the hallway that makes me a little nervous. I’m going to move a chair where I can watch the entire corridor. If anything happens out here, I’ll yell ‘left’ or ‘right,’ and you’ll know which direction to scan for targets. I need your handbag to keep my pistol immediately accessible.”
She handed him the bag, her hands shaky. “I can’t believe I’m like this,” said Jessica. “I’d rather be in a knife fight.”
“A knife fight sounds wonderful right about now,” he said. “Not with you, though.”
She stifled a quick laugh.
“Take your time,” said Daniel. “Regardless of what happens inside, you close this chapter in your life by walking through that door.”
Jessica’s eyes moistened.
“Get on with it before you change your mind,” he said, and briefly touched his lips to hers.
OMEGA: A Black Flagged Thriller (The Black Flagged Series Book 5) Page 12