The Sixth Wicked Child

by J. D. Barker

  The plane came to a stop.

  The television blinked off as the power in the plane cycled.

  Porter looked out the window, expecting to see a dozen law enforcement vehicles and a hundred officers out there waiting for him, but there was no one but an airport employee placing wooden blocks under their tires.

  “What did you do with the virus, Sam? Do you remember where you left it?”

  Something in his brain clicked. Porter understood what Bishop was doing.

  He hung up on her and dialed Poole.

  104

  Nash

  Day 6 • 5:27 AM

  Warnick pushed through the steel door at the bottom of the stairwell and stepped into the vast space with trepidation. The air was cold and moist, filled with dust.

  Between all the boxes and discarded medical equipment and furniture, Nash couldn’t see much of anything beyond where they stood. The bare fluorescent bulbs hanging from the ceiling buzzed softly. “What was the maintenance guy’s name?” he asked Kloz.

  “Ernest Skow.”

  Nash cupped his hands around his mouth. “Ernest Skow, are you down here?”

  With all the clutter, his voice didn’t carry as much as he hoped. He shouted again, louder this time.

  “It’s late. Maybe he’s gone.”

  “Or maybe he’s not,” Nash replied, unsnapping the safety strap from the Beretta on his hip. He didn’t draw the weapon, not yet, but he wanted to know nothing would slow him down if he needed to.

  Klozowski pointed up at the ceiling. “She said they followed those wires back to the outer wall—they’re phone lines and Internet. The phone company leases space in the tunnels, so she hoped the lines would lead her right to the tunnels. The outer wall was sealed off, though, cemented over. Apparently, the foundation was rebuilt back in the eighties, and she said it looked like they closed up the tunnel access when they did the work.”

  From up ahead on the left, several bedpans stacked on an aluminum gurney tumbled over and crashed to the floor. Warnick raised both hands in the air and stepped back from the mess. “Sorry.”

  Nash recognized the gurneys. They’d wondered where Bishop had gotten them. Nash counted more than twenty of them just where he stood; there might be a hundred of them down here. Bishop easily could have taken a few unnoticed. He might have even returned them when he was through, like this was his own medical storage facility.

  “This part of the hospital isn’t connected to the old tunnel system,” Warnick said. “Never was.”

  Nash crossed over to him, stepping over the bedpans. “You know what we’re talking about?”

  A smug look rolled over Warnick’s face. “I want my gun back.”

  “Kloz, go ahead and shoot this man. Just the leg, maybe his knee. Whatever gets him talking.”

  For a second, Kloz looked like he thought Nash was serious. Then he shook his head and turned back to the wiring on the ceiling.

  Nash pushed Warnick’s shoulder, nearly knocked him back into the gurneys again. “Spill it.”

  Warnick brushed some dust from the elbow of his suit jacket. “We’re standing in the new Stroger Hospital—this section was built in 2002. If the bootlegging tunnels connect anywhere, it will be in the old part. The section that used to be Cook County General next door.”

  “You know this how?”

  “Developers have had their eye on the old Cook County building for years. It’s huge and right in the middle of the city, prime real estate sitting vacant. There’s a proposal on the table right now to rehab the entire space—turn it into apartments, a hotel, new parking, office space, shopping, the works.” He sighed. “The design was promising, but everything came to a halt when Talbot died.”

  “Arthur Talbot was behind the project?”

  Warnick nodded.

  Nash and Klozowski exchanged a glance.

  “How do we get there from here?” Nash asked Warnick.

  Warnick’s brow furrowed, and he turned in a small circle, looking around and over all the discarded equipment. He stopped and pointed toward double doors near the back of the basement. “If I remember correctly from the plans, those doors lead to a hallway connecting both facilities. When this building was finished in 2002, they transported all the patients from Cook through there to this side, then upstairs to the correct department. Took the better part of a day to move everyone. The more critical ones were brought over by ambulance above ground, but most went this way. The Cook building has been locked up ever since.”

  The three of them made their way across the basement to the double doors. As they neared, Nash pointed his flashlight at the ground. “We’ve got a lot of foot traffic here.”

  Several dozen tracks riddled the dust, heading in both directions.

  “The door’s been jimmied,” Klozowski said, pointing at some scratches near the lock.

  This time, Nash did draw his gun. “Warnick, get behind me. Kloz you follow behind him. He does anything, you shoot him. This time, I’m not kidding.”

  Positioning himself on the side of the doorway, Nash pulled open the door and quickly moved through, leading with his gun and flashlight. He found a light switch and flicked it on. Bulbs crackled to life above them, only about half still working.

  The hallway was about two hundred yards long, smooth, white tiles on the walls and floor. Another set of double doors on the far end.

  He slipped his phone into his pocket and started down the hallway, gun first. Judging by the tracks in the dust, at least three different people had walked through here recently. One far more often than the others. There were also wheel marks, most likely gurney tracks. “Warnick, does the old building have any kind of security?”

  “No alarm, if that’s what you mean. All the outer doors are either chained or bolted shut, and hospital security checks them regularly as part of their rotation. It’s been on the sanctuary list since it closed, though, so we know people can get in and out somehow.”

  “The sanctuary list?”

  Warnick waved a dismissive hand through the air. “We’ve got buildings all over the city used by the homeless. We let them. Keeps them off the streets. It’s one of those unspoken things in city government. People claim they want to help the homeless, but few actually do. At last check, we’ve got nearly 80,000 in and around the city. We don’t have the shelter infrastructure to support that, but we have to put them somewhere. Nobody wants to see them on the streets. Seeing them reminds everyone there is a problem, so we give them places to go where they won’t be visible. Like safe spaces. They stay out of view, we leave them alone. There’s this unspoken rule.”

  “Lovely.”

  They were about halfway down the hallway when the lights went out.

  Darkness swallowed them.

  A gun went off.

  The bullet cracked into the tile a few inches above Nash’s head. He dropped to the floor, landing in a crouch. He held his gun out to the dark and fumbled for his phone with his free hand. “Kloz, did you fire?”

  “No. Where’s Warnick? Can you see him?”

  “I can’t see shit.”

  He had his phone halfway out his pocket, when someone kicked him in the gut. The air left his body with a gasping rush and his phone cracked hard against the tile floor somewhere near his feet.

  Another shot echoed loudly off all the tile, followed quickly by a pain-filled grunt.

  “Kloz? Are you okay?”

  For a moment, nobody spoke. There was only heavy breathing as all three men tried to suck in air.

  “Yeah,” Kloz finally said.

  Someone ran. Heavy steps down the hallway toward the old hospital. Nash heard the doors at the far end push open and swing shut again.

  “I’m sorry, Nash,” Kloz said softly.

  The butt of the gun slammed into the side of Nash’s head. His head cracked against the wall, then the floor as he fell, and all went dark.

  105

  Poole

  Day 6 • 5:31 AM

/>   When Poole answered his phone, he didn’t get a single word in before the other man began to speak, his voice rushed yet low. “Frank, he’s working with Kloz. They’ve got Clair. I don’t know where, locked away in some room. I saw a video, but that was a few hours ago. Bishop said he’d kill her if I called you before now. I know what he’s doing. You need to get all those people away from the Guyon.”

  Poole waved a hand at SAIC Hurless, mouthed Porter’s name. Hurless was on another line. He tapped the shoulder of a third man sitting at a communications station in the FBI surveillance van, rolled his finger through the air, and pointed back at Poole. The man nodded and began tracing the call.

  “We’ve been looking for Klozowski. Nash and Clair too,” Poole told him. “Where are you, Sam? Are you back in Chicago?”

  “The virus attack on the hospital, that wasn’t real, was it?” Porter asked.

  “No. It was a hoax. The needle Clair found did contain the actual virus, but the girls were only infected with a potent strain of the flu.”

  “I think Bishop used the hospital as some kind of trial run—practice to see how fast the first responders would react. You need to get everyone away from the Guyon, now.”

  SAIC Hurless disconnected his own call, scribbled something down on a sheet of paper, and handed it to Poole. When Poole read the note, he frowned. To Porter, he said, “You think Bishop plans to release the virus here?”

  The back door of the van opened, and Captain Dalton climbed inside. He pulled the door shut behind him. Hurless told him who was on the line.

  Porter said, “Are you alone right now? Can you talk?”

  “SAIC Hurless is here. Your captain, too. Do you want me to put you on speaker?”

  Porter fell silent.

  Poole read the note again, then handed it to Dalton.

  The note said: Confirmation—Porter rented a room at the Traveler’s Best in New Orleans, paid for three nights, stolen vial of virus found in trash—empty.

  Without waiting for a response, Poole put the call on speaker so the others could hear. “Are you still there, Sam?”

  “Yeah.”

  “We found the woman at the farmhouse.”

  Porter went quiet again.

  “Sam, are you here in Chicago?”

  “Did she tell you where they’re holding Clair?”

  Poole glanced at the two men staring at him from across the van. “The woman we found…she’s dead, Sam. I think you know that. What happened there? Can you tell me about all the other blood?”

  “She’s not dead, she just…”

  “Sam, you’re not well. I think you know that. I read your file from the doctor at Camden. I know what you’re going through. Let me help you. Can you do that? Tell me where you are.”

  “Why not just wait for the trace? I know I’d be tracing this call.”

  “Things would be better for you if you just turned yourself in.”

  “They’re all in on it,” Porter said. “I can’t trust anyone.”

  “It just feels that way. Paranoia is a part of the illness. If you turn yourself in, I’ll make sure you get the proper help.”

  “You can’t let Bishop anywhere near that crowd. That’s what he wants. Find Clair, get her out of there. Don’t trust any of them.”

  SAIC Hurless leaned over the phone. “We know you have the virus. You need to surrender, now.”

  Porter hung up.

  The man at the communications terminal pointed at a map on his monitor. “He’s moving, heading south by southwest.”

  “Heading toward here,” Hurless said, studying the map.

  The man nodded.

  106

  Poole

  Day 6 • 5:35 AM

  “I’ve got snipers in place on four of the surrounding rooftops, uniforms on the ground, and two dozen undercover officers,” Dalton told them. “There’s no way he’s getting in here unseen.”

  “Porter’s been with Metro for how long?” Hurless said. “You don’t think he won’t recognize his coworkers? He knows your methods, your strategies. I’ve got twelve agents out there right now and two dozen more en route. Your people will just get in the way.”

  “I think we can use his familiarity with Metro’s personnel and practices against him,” Poole said. “Use that to drive him somewhere, maybe funnel him through the crowd to someplace we can safely take him into custody.”

  Hurless shook his head. “If he’s got the virus, we need to take him out the moment we’ve got eyes on him. We can’t let him near this crowd.”

  “What happens if the virus isn’t on him? You kill him and we lose our best shot at finding it. If the hospital was some kind of distraction, how do we know this isn’t too?”

  “I’m not even sure who we’re talking about here.” Dalton said. “Who’s our focus? Bishop or Porter?”

  “Maybe they’re both working together and the plan is to consolidate law enforcement here while they release the virus down at a train station, or a school somewhere.”

  “We need to take them both alive, get them isolated.”

  A knock at the van door.

  Dalton reached over and tugged the latch. A man in a Chicago Metro baseball cap and thick black coat stood there with four cups of coffee balanced precariously in his gloved hands. “Thought you might need some caffeine, sir.” With his chin, he pointed at each cup. “This one is heavy with sugar, this one has cream, and these two are black.”

  Hurless reached past Dalton and plucked one. “Sugar is mine.”

  The tech said, “Black, please.”

  Dalton handed a cup to the FBI communications tech, passed the other black coffee to Poole, and took the one with cream for himself.

  Several reporters noticed the open door and started toward them.

  Dalton quickly thanked the man and pulled the door closed. “We need to keep them both away from the cameras too. We can’t let this play out on live television.”

  Poole set the coffee down on the desk beside him and looked out the window. He could see three satellite dishes on portable towers attached to news vans off to the left. He knew there were at least two more on the opposite end of the parking lot.

  Due to the extreme cold, everyone wore heavy coats, gloves, hats, scarfs—many wore ski masks. Nothing but eyes visible on half the people shuffling around out there. He wasn’t sure he’d recognize his own mother, let alone Porter or Bishop. “Any luck reestablishing that trace?” he asked the man at the terminal.

  The agent shook his head. “He went dark after he hung up with you. Probably took the batteries out.”

  On the desk at his side, Hurless pressed a microphone button. “Carmichael, are you in position?”

  “Affirmative. We found a tunnel access point in the Guyon’s basement. I’ve stationed two men on it. There are obvious signs of recent use but no sign of Bishop or that detective today. Not yet, anyway. I’ve got six other agents conducting a room-by-room, but the building appears to be deserted.”

  “Keep me posted.”

  “Copy.”

  “I don’t think he’ll use the tunnels,” Poole said. “Bishop wants to keep this public.”

  “Porter might,” Dalton said.

  “I don’t think he would, either,” Hurless said. “He’s got to figure we’re watching, and he knows it would be near impossible to get out of the building. If he’s got the virus, he’ll want maximum exposure to all these people.”

  Another voice crackled over the communications system. “Sir, this is Chen. I’ve got a body, male, in a room up on the third floor. Ear, eye, and tongue removed, all in white boxes. Somebody carved I am evil all over him with a razor blade or something similar. He’s been dead—hold on a second.”

  When he didn’t come back right away, Hurless said, “Chen?”

  “Sir, we’ve got two more, same condition. A female and another male. Father, forgive me is written on the wall in the second room. I don’t think they were killed here—there’s not enough blo
od for that. They’re covered in some kind of white powder too. I think it’s salt.”

  Hurless turned to Dalton. “Your people did a complete sweep of this building when Porter was found here, right?”

  Dalton nodded. “These were placed recently.”

  “This is Capshaw, on the fifth floor. I’ve got one up here too. Male, late sixties, early seventies. Same condition.”

  “Sir? I’ve got Porter again.” This came from the FBI tech.

  “Where?” Poole asked.

  “I’m triangulating pings on towers 191390B, 191391A, and 191392B. That’s here. He’s outside somewhere.”

  Hurless turned back to the microphone and began barking orders. Dalton was back on his phone, doing the same.

  “I’m going out there.” Poole pushed out the back door of the van into the crowd before either of them could object. He was halfway to the Guyon’s rear entrance when a boy of maybe twelve or thirteen tugged on the corner of his jacket.

  “Are you Special Agent Frank Poole?”

  “Yes.”

  The boy shoved something into his hand and vanished in the sea of people before Poole had a chance to say anything else.

  A photograph, folded.

  Although taken a number of years ago, Poole immediately recognized the man in the picture. His gaze returned to the van, hung there a moment, then returned to the photograph.

  On the back, Porter had written, Not just Kloz—him too.

  Poole started pushing through the crowd toward the building.

  He had to find Porter before they did.

  107

  Nash

  Day 6 • 5:37 AM

  When Nash woke, pain sliced through his head like a shard of jagged glass. He was on the floor, his arm folded under him. He still had his gun; he could feel it pressing into his gut.

  Hallway still?

  He couldn’t be sure. It was too dark. Felt like it, though.

  He didn’t know how long he’d been out.

  When he tried to sit up, the world spun and his stomach lurched.

  His phone wasn’t in his pocket. Then he remembered trying to take it out a moment before—