“Jake, where’s your dad?”
“He’s upstairs.”
“You’re sure?”
“He’s here. Was that you who just called?”
“Yeah.”
“Oh, he left his phone downstairs as usual. Want me to get him?”
“No, that’s fine. I wanted to make sure he’s okay. Thank God.”
“Why?”
“I’ll—I’m at the airport, on my way home. I’ll see you soon, honey.”
So she knew who it was, who it had to be: Philip Hersh. What had the doctor said? This patient is critically ill.
Who else could it be?
She called his mobile phone number, and it went right to voice mail.
* * *
—
The 10:00 P.M. American Airlines flight out of Reagan National Airport arrived in Boston at 11:30 P.M. Just about everything in the airport, every concession, was closed. Whole sections were dark.
She told the cab to take her to Boston Medical Center. She got there a little before midnight. She had court in the morning and needed her sleep, but there was no choice. She had to see Hersh.
She told the nurse on duty that she was looking for a patient who’d been admitted to the ER within the last few hours, no ID on him.
“And you are—?”
“Juliana Brody.”
“Are you a family member?”
She hesitated a second or two. “No. I’m a friend. Dr. Kapoor called me a few hours ago from the ER because my number was in the victim’s pocket.”
“Ah, yes.” She directed Juliana to the neuro ICU. There, she identified herself the same way, and a nurse came around from the counter, a stocky redhead of around forty, holding a metal clipboard. “The patient I think we’re talking about was around fifty? Balding? He had no wallet or ID on him, just your number in his back pocket.”
“Can I see him, please?”
“I’d first like to get some information.”
“Take me to him and we can talk on the way.”
“Okay,” the nurse said with a shrug. She pressed a disc on the wall and buzzed them both into the ICU.
“How is he doing?” Juliana said.
“He’s out of surgery, in recovery.”
“Surgery.”
“I’ll let the doctor fill you in.” They arrived at a glass-walled room, a glass box.
The man on the bed looked nothing like Hersh. His eyes were purplish and grotesquely swollen shut. His nose was broken and bloodied, crooked and out of place. There were black sutures on his cheek. He had tubes coming out of his nose and mouth, and more tubes coming out of his head and his arms. His head was covered in white bandages. Each arm was in a splint. Only when she saw the fat gold wedding band on his left hand, the knuckles bloody, did she know it was Philip Hersh.
“Oh, my God,” she said.
He had been beaten nearly to death.
But he was alive.
It was oddly quiet, for everything that was going on, the monitors and the IV stands and the tubes and the wires. She heard only the soft whooshing of the ventilator, in time with Hersh’s breaths, and a low beeping.
“You’re a friend?” the nurse asked.
Juliana nodded.
“What’s his name?”
“Philip Hersh.” She spelled it for her.
“Do you know where he lives?”
“I can give you his office address. I don’t know his home address.”
“What about next of kin? Do you know anyone who might—?”
“I don’t. I don’t really know him that well.”
“I’ll page the doctor,” the woman said, and left.
Tears streamed down her cheeks. She looked at Hersh’s brutalized, misshapen face, listened to the whooshing. She wondered what exactly had happened.
She wondered if he’d been tortured.
She thought about his voice message, replayed it in her head.
I have a file for you. . . . I don’t trust your e-mail, frankly. . . . Happy to drop it off wherever you are. Happy to bring it to your office. Maybe I’ll do that. Or you can stop by my office and pick it up, if that’s on the way. But I think you need to see this. Okay?
Did he have this file with him, and had it been grabbed when he was beaten?
Or had he left it at his office?
She noticed a large clear plastic bag in the corner with the words PATIENT BELONGINGS printed on it. The mud-spattered leg of a pair of jeans spilled out. His stuff.
She picked up the bag, pulled out the jeans.
She felt the jingle of keys in his pants pocket. She checked the other pockets. No wallet. No cell phone. Nothing besides clothes in the bag. No file, no pieces of paper, folded or crumpled or anything. If he had a file with him, it was certainly gone.
She had a thought and reached into the jeans pocket and grabbed the ring of keys.
There was a knock on the open door. She looked up. A young man in a white doctor’s coat, wearing a tie. Had he just seen her take the keys?
“I’m Dr. Robiano,” he said. “I take it you are a friend of the patient’s.”
“Yes. Juliana Brody. Are you a surgeon?” she asked.
“I’m the neurocritical care fellow,” the doctor said, nodding. He was surprisingly alert for the middle of the night. His eyes shone. He had short brown hair and an appealing, very white smile. He also looked like he was about fifteen years old, though in reality he was probably in his midthirties. He reminded her of an adolescent who’d put on his dad’s white medical coat and tie.
He took a sip from a can of Coke Zero. “Look, I’m going to be very direct with you. I don’t have very much good news. His injuries are such that he could die.”
Juliana’s eyes flooded with tears. She nodded.
“We have him in a medically induced coma now, but he arrived with a Glasgow coma score of one-one-one.”
“I don’t know what that means.” A plastic bag of blood hung from one stand, fluids from another. A tube came from under the sheet filled with what looked like pinkish urine.
He didn’t bother to explain. “He sustained a really serious injury, but for now he’s stable.”
“So what happened to him?”
“He had injuries consistent with an attack. This is a nonmedical observation, but to me it looks like someone went after him with a tire iron.” He finished his Coke and tossed the can into the trash.
“Jesus.”
“I’m guessing some good Samaritan called 911. Anyway, there was a lot of facial trauma. His jaw is broken. We put a tube down his throat to protect his airway, then put him on a breathing machine and gave him some medication so he’s protected and he’s not in any pain.”
“Okay.”
“Unfortunately, we found a large amount of bleeding in his brain, an intracranial hemorrhage that required surgery.”
“Oh, dear God.”
“A subdural bleed—under the dura.”
“Was the surgery—successful?”
“We evacuated the hematoma, yes. We stopped the bleeding.”
“Is there—is there going to be brain damage?”
He looked at her for a couple of seconds. “You don’t ever know what the damage is going to be. Just putting all my cards on the table, he has a high risk of death or permanent disability. You just never know. Or he could recover and go back to a normal life.”
She nodded hopefully.
“If he does recover, though, there’s a good chance he’ll never be the same person again.”
“My God.”
“This is a marathon we’re looking at now. It’s impossible for us to predict today what the outcome is going to be, and he’s going to be in the coma, on the ventilator, for easily another twenty-four hours.”
&n
bsp; “Then what?”
“Then we wean him out of the coma, and he’s extubated. This is a significant and serious injury. I should tell you—I don’t know what Mr. Hersh was like, physically, before this. But he gave as good as he got.”
“What do you mean?”
“You see what we call ‘fight bites’ on his hands? That laceration in the knuckles, from punching someone in the mouth. We found a tooth embedded in one of his knuckles. Whoever went after him probably has some serious dental work in his future. You can tell from his hands he didn’t go down gently.”
She nodded. “When can I—speak to him?”
“When? I don’t know if you’ll ever be able to speak to him.”
66
It was a few minutes after one in the morning, and she was beyond exhausted. She felt jittery and strangely wide awake. She stood on the sidewalk outside Boston Medical Center, stunned, horrified by what had been done to Philip Hersh. She wondered if it had happened because of her. Surely he was also working on other cases.
But what if it was because of her case that he was so badly wounded? What if it was over this file he mentioned? The possibility sickened her.
There was a surprising amount of traffic for that time of night. She watched the cars for a moment, then looked at her phone. Duncan had called several times.
His voice messages sounded increasingly worried. I thought your flight gets in at like eleven thirty. Call me. Where’d you go? Jules, where are you?
She called him back, told him she’d be home soon, and she’d explain.
Then she hailed a cab to the Park Colonnade Building, in downtown Boston.
Maybe he’d left this paper file in his office. What had he said? I’d be happy to drop it off . . . you can stop by my office.
I think you need to see this.
If the file was in his office, she needed to get over there right now and get it. Whatever it was.
The cab pulled up to the Park Colonnade Building, and she got out. It was dark, nobody else around.
That means no one is following me, she thought.
At least no one that I can see.
She took the stairs to the third floor. The hallway was dark, as were the offices, which she assumed were all empty and locked this late at night.
She walked down the hallway in the darkness, her footsteps echoing. At the door to Hersh’s office, she took out her cell phone to use as a flashlight and Hersh’s key ring.
And began to try the keys, one by one.
The fifth key turned the lock.
She waited for an alarm warning tone, but there was just silence.
No alarm? That surprised her. Hersh would make sure his office was alarmed. He would take security precautions. That was the kind of guy he was.
Maybe the alarm had been turned off. Or hadn’t been set in the first place, for some reason.
She didn’t want to turn on the overhead lights, which would spill light into the hallway and arouse the curiosity of any passing security guard. Instead, she continued to use the flashlight function on her phone. It illuminated a broad area with a dingy light.
And she saw that his office had been searched. File cabinet drawers were all open, files spilling out of them. His desk was heaped with file folders. Piles of folders were scattered here and there on the carpet. Hersh’s office had been untidy, but there was no way Hersh had left it like this. Someone had been here and searched aggressively, not bothering to return it to its previous condition, not caring who knew what had happened. It almost looked as though they were making a point—we can do whatever the hell we want. Not just to the office, but to anyone who gets in our way.
She heard footsteps in the hallway and immediately fumbled with her phone, trying to turn off the damned flashlight, finally swiping up and finding the right icon and pressing it to switch off the light.
The footsteps came closer. She froze, standing there in the dark, in the middle of this tiny office. A security guard? If so, she didn’t know what she could say. She had Hersh’s keys, which counted for something. He’s in the hospital and asked me to pick something up for him.
That might work.
She breathed in, and out, and stayed perfectly still.
The footsteps were right outside the door.
She exhaled slowly, silently.
The footsteps moved on. She waited for another thirty seconds or so to make sure the guy was gone.
Then she put the phone-flashlight on and began to search through the chaos.
The first open file drawer seemed to have client files. There was a gap in the B section. Maybe that was her file. If Hersh had made a file with her name on it, someone had taken it.
She went through the other files, looked over the piles on the desk and on the floor. Nothing that had to do with the Russian man, Protasov, nothing that had anything to do with her case.
Either someone had found what he wanted and took it—or he’d searched and given up. But as far as she could see, the file wasn’t here.
* * *
—
She didn’t get home until after two in the morning. She had to be in court no later than eight thirty. She could push it to maybe a few minutes before nine, if she really needed the sleep. She’d get five hours. That would be fine. In law school there’d been nights when she didn’t sleep at all.
But she couldn’t sleep. She was wired and tense. She thought about Hersh, so badly wounded, beat up nearly to death. And about how nervous Paul Ashmont, this CIA career professional, was about her getting close to Protasov.
You would be putting yourself in great danger, he’d said.
Now she found Duncan in their bedroom, awake and distraught.
“Jesus, Jules, where the hell have you been?” he said angrily.
She told him about Philip Hersh and what she’d seen.
“Do you understand how worried I’ve been?” he said.
“I’m sorry. You’re right. I should have kept you in the loop. I’m sorry I didn’t.”
He exhaled. “Tell me what happened in DC.”
She told him about the Russian oligarch and his minions in Washington. About the CIA guy she’d met at the bar and his theory of Yuri Protasov.
And she told him her plan.
After about an hour she was finally able to go to sleep, but it was a light, troubled sleep.
It felt like just a moment later, though it was more like a couple of hours, that she heard Duncan whisper her name. She opened her eyes, saw that he was standing by her side of the bed, in his T-shirt and boxers. She sat up. “What?”
He put a finger to his lips. Shh.
She whispered, “What is it?”
“Do you hear that?”
“Hear—what?”
He cocked his head to one side. “Downstairs.”
“What?”
“I heard something from downstairs.”
“You think it might be Jake?”
He shook his head. “Someone’s in the house.”
67
She listened for a few seconds, looked at Duncan, shook her head. She didn’t hear anything.
“What did you hear?” she whispered.
But he didn’t seem to be listening. He walked around to his side of the bed and knelt. He pulled something out from underneath it, something dark in his hand.
She gasped. “No!” Then she whispered: “Duncan!”
He was holding a gun in his right hand, black and squared-off, a semiautomatic pistol. She had very little experience with guns. When she’d tried skeet shooting as a teenager, she had used a shotgun to hit the clays. She’d fired a revolver once—she’d asked her father to teach her how—but was freaked out by how loud it was. She hated it, hated anticipating the explosion, and it always messed up her aim.
“Do you
know how to use that thing?” she said.
He didn’t reply. He kept moving toward the hall.
“What if it’s Jake down there?”
“Shh.” He padded out into the hallway.
Her heart was racing. She got up and followed him out. She caught up to him. She put an arm on his shoulder and whispered in his ear, “Duncan, call the cops.”
“No time,” he said, heading to the stairs. “We can’t wait twenty minutes.”
“Honey, don’t,” she whispered again, but he wasn’t listening. She descended the carpeted stairs right behind him. At the landing he froze.
“Oh, Jesus,” he breathed.
The door to her study—the old pantry that they’d converted into her home office, long and narrow—was open, as it always was. And she saw a pale spill of light.
In her study.
Far off, maybe thirty or forty feet away.
The light was jittery, moving. Like someone was holding a penlight.
Someone was in the house. Someone was there.
They’d nearly killed Philip Hersh, and now they were coming for her. Or for her family. They were professionals, they were assassins, and they’d already killed several people. These were people who wanted something, and she was standing in their way, and they wouldn’t hesitate to kill her.
Or Duncan.
He put a hand in the air, signaling stop.
He cocked his head. She listened.
And she heard what he heard. She heard a drawer being opened slowly.
Duncan moved swiftly, barefoot, toward her office, his right hand up, the gun pointed. There is a safety on most pistols, she thought. Was the safety on? What if he aimed the gun, and it was grabbed from him, turned back on him?
Now he was standing at the threshold to her office, his right hand extended, the gun pointed, and he said, in a quiet but firm voice, “Don’t—fucking—move.”
And then came the explosion, deafeningly loud, so loud that her ears shrilled a high-pitched squeal. She saw a flash of fire at the end of the muzzle, and then the gun jerked back, nearly coming out of his hand.
And she heard a shout, more like a roar, like the bellow of a wounded animal. She raced to the study, frantic. There was a crash. A gust of cold air hit her. One of the French doors was open, a few small panes of glass shattered, the pebbles of glass on the carpet twinkling in the moonlight.
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