They regarded Gordian, who lay there under his blankets with his eyes closed, his ventilator making its pumping sounds into the silence. A young man in a white intern’s coat entered the room, checked Gordian’s nutrient IV bag, noted aloud that it required changing, and left. Behind a concrete rampart three hundred yards away, the sniper cradled his rifle in his hands and waited for the signal.
Megan glanced at her watch.
“We’ve got about an hour before Eric Oh and the team from Sobel arrive with the antivirals,” she said, her voice filled with ongoing wonder and admiration over their ability to synthesize them literally overnight. “How about you let me treat you to breakfast while we’re on standby?”
A sudden look came into Ashley’s eyes. Sober, knowing. At first Megan wasn’t quite sure what to make of it.
Kneeling on his rooftop perch, the shooter watched her turn from the foot of the bed and step in front of the window, dead-center between his crosshairs. His finger was curled over the trigger. One squeeze and her heart would burst in her chest.
“Breakfast sounds like a good idea,” Ashley said, her eyes still solemn, her voice dropping to a very quiet volume. “We need to talk in private, and I think it might be the right opportunity.”
Megan gave her a questioning glance.
“Sword business is Sword business,” Ashley said. “I don’t have to know everything about how you do your work. In many ways I prefer not knowing. It’s a part of Gord’s life that scares me. And because I think of you and Pete as family, it makes me scared for you, too.”
“But you want me to tell you something now,” Megan said slowly.
Ashley nodded.
“If men died in Canada so my husband can live, I would like their names and as much information as you’re able to provide about the circumstances under which they were lost,” she said. Her voice had lowered another notch, and Megan realized she did not want to chance it carrying across the room to Gordian. “Thanksgiving’s just a few days from now. I need to call their families ... express my gratitude and indebtedness. And my sorrow. They should know how important they are to me. That I’ll always be available to help them as best I can.”
Megan looked at her.
“It’s going to be difficult,” she said.
“Yes,” Ashley said. “I expect it will.”
Megan studied her face a moment, then took her handbag from where she’d hung it over the back of her chair.
“We’d better head down to the cafeteria,” she said.
Ashley nodded again, and went to the bed table to pick up her own purse, stepping away from the window.
The sniper breathed, gripping the stock of his weapon. There was a point when it took a tremendous act of will to refrain from firing. When everything was aligned, and you knew you had a sure kill, the target was almost inviting you to take the shot. But this wasn’t about either of the women. His orders were to wait for the signal.
Ashley had almost moved out of his sight picture when he finally got it.
Three shots, that was how many Megan would remember.
Three, fired in swift succession. She didn’t see any muzzle flashes. Didn’t hear any audible reports. The room simply appeared to begin exploding around her. But she was fairly certain of the number of shots.
The first obliterated most of the window just as she was about to rise from her chair. Glass pelted over her in a shower of hooks and needles, a large shard cutting deep into her left temple. She dove to the floor, saw Ashley standing frozen in place, looking from the knocked out window to Gordian, plaster spouting from the wall across the room now, bits and pieces of it flecking her blouse, shot number two. “Ashley, get down!” she shouted, blood streaming over her face in rivulets.
Ashley gave no indication that she’d heard her. Eyes wide with shock, she started toward the bed, toward her husband.
“Listen to me, Ash! The bullets can’t hit him over there, he’ll be okay, please, please get dow—”
“No!” Ashley screamed, still on her feet, moving over to the bed, not caring about herself, not thinking rationally about lines of fire, knowing only that bullets were flying here in the room where her husband lay helpless and vulnerable, wanting only to protect him.
Even before the third shot came, Megan was scrambling toward her on all fours. But the guard had already launched off his seat, propelling himself at Ashley, clutching her around the waist, taking her down to the floor, protecting her with his own body.
There was another crash as more jagged fragments of glass blew from the window frame, round number three, singing through the air, impacting the wall inches from the previous shot, punching a wide hole into it.
Then Megan saw the door fly open, and people rush into the room. Sword guards, hospital personnel, maybe eight or ten of them seeming to flood through the door all at once. She didn’t know whether it was the gunshots or the closed-circuit television cameras below the ceiling that alerted them, didn’t particularly care. She was just glad they had arrived.
Somebody was yelling to move Gordian out, move him out of here! Then the shift doctors and nurses crowded around him, hastily detaching his ventilator hoses from their outlets, rolling his bed toward the door, pushing the wheeled IV stands along as they steered him through it. A couple of the guards accompanied Gordian and the staffers to the secondary room that had been readied down the corridor, weapons drawn. A few stayed behind momentarily, one member of the Sword team scrambling toward Megan, a second moving over to Ashley and the guard who’d shielded her from harm, yet another going to the shattered window and taking a position beside it, carefully craning his head to peer out at the rooftops for any sign of the triggerman, staying flat against the wall, using the wall for cover.
“Looks like you’ve got a nasty cut,” the man who’d raced over to Megan was saying. He helped her off the floor, urging her to keep her head below the windowsill. Meanwhile, she could see Ashley being hustled out of the room. “We’ll move you out of here, find a doctor to take care of it....”
She wiped a trickle of blood from her face, felt an awful stinging as her fingers passed over the gash.
“That can wait,” she said. “I want to make sure the boss is okay.”
“Ms. Breen, I’m not sure that’s advisable—”
“I’m doing it anyway,” she said.
As a youth in South Philly, Pete Nimec had learned how fiercely combative people could be about their turf, and the rough lessons driven home with fists and bats had stayed with him into adulthood. In negotiations to put Sword manpower on someone else’s beat, he never forgot the rules of the street. Keep the boundaries in mind. Pay your due respects. Know when to stand your ground—and when to meet your opposite number halfway.
The administration at San Jose Mercy had expressed a slew of reservations about his desire to take charge of Roger Gordian’s security on hospital premises, most of which revolved around matters of civil liability. Although they had been willing to tinker with routine security mechanisms, the board members were leery of any perceived attempt to infringe on their responsibility for a patient’s safeguard.
Nimec’s comeback was to advance a version of the arrangement he’d worked out with many of the foreign nations that played host to UpLink facilities. Absolute consideration would be given to San Jose Mercy’s legal and ethical obligations, with all procedures implemented by Sword to be subject to the board’s review. His plan had called for a single Sword employee to join the hospital’s uniformed security personnel at key entry and exit points, the establishment of a fixed guard post in the corridor leading toward Gordian’s room, installation of a Sword-monitored CCTV camera inside the room, and the designation of an additional space to which Gordian could be rapidly transferred in an emergency situation, its location to be known only to top members of his caregiving team. These specifics had been approved without exception. A final request that Sword techies be allowed to conduct a thorough security rundown of the hospital’
s computer network was vetoed, but Nimec had expected that would be a touchy issue, and been prepared to abandon it for the sake of expedience.
It was Nimec’s inability to convince the hospital to let him protect its data resources—this single blanket restriction imposed on him—that gave the infiltrator a soft spot that could be exploited.
In a room just a few turns of the hall from the commotion stirred by the shooting, the man wearing the intern’s coat held the intravenous bag he’d readied, and listened as Roger Gordian was delivered to him. Laced in with the feeding solution’s carbohydrates, vitamins, and other nutrients was a massive concentration of digitalis—a glycoside effective at slowing rapid heartbeats when prescribed in therapeutic dosages—that was sufficient to bring about full cardiac arrest in the healthiest individual. Given his fragile state, Gordian would be dead within minutes after the drug entered his bloodstream.
It had been so easy, the infiltrator thought. Almost effortless. Hacking into the hospital’s computer system. Adding a name to the electronically generated list of staffers who were permitted access to Roger Gordian’s room. Then forging identification to match, a laminated card worn on his breast pocket, again nothing complicated. And while there was no official record of an area designated for Gordian’s emergency use, the nearness to his room of a conspicuously blocked off section of the ward had marked it as a probable fallback—and the infiltrator’s vigilance over the past few days had borne out that suspicion.
Now the sound of movement in the hall grew louder, nearer. Suddenly the door to the room swung open, and Gordian was rolled inside, surrounded by a bustle of orderlies, plainclothes guards, his wife, and the other woman who had been with him when the infiltrator radioed his firing command to the nearby rooftop.
He stepped back from the entry as the bed was pushed through, urgently waved the orderlies toward a nest of monitoring and life-support equipment.
Easy, so easy.
“Over here!” he said, raising his voice above the clamor. “Let’s get him hooked up!”
Megan was thinking that it didn’t make sense.
She reached the fallback room and was hurried inside by guards and hospital staffers, Gordian’s bed wheeled ahead of her, pushed toward the attending intern who’d checked his drip bag right before the gunfire broke out. Somebody in the press of bodies dabbed her open cut with something cool and moist, slapped on a stitch bandage, put a gauze pad over it and a strip of tape to hold the dressing in place, and then left her to join the activity around the bed. Ventilator hoses were connected to pumps in the wall, waiting machines activated, the depleted IV bag unhooked, replaced with a fresh one by the attending, and still Megan was thinking it made no sense, none at all, who had the sniper been shooting at? Gordian had been out of harm’s way, she’d been out of sight, and Ashley could have been hit when she was standing in front of the window if she’d been the intended target. So why pull the trigger?
The question gnawed at her as she waited by the door with Ashley, both women standing clear of the busy professionals, watching the handful of guards that accompanied them pour back into the corridor to seal off access, watching the cluster of orderlies dissolve as they completed their tasks, all of them and filing out of the room now, leaving the intern to start the IV....
An image from moments ago suddenly came into Megan’s head, came into it in a flash. The intern. Waiting here in the room. Alone. The drip bag in his hand as Gordian was jostled through the door.
Waiting.
She had seen the intern a number of times over the past several days, moving about the corridor with a clipboard in hand, but never in Gordian’s room. He was not one of the regulars on his case, she was sure of that. Yet somehow he had known about the fallback, known where it was situated though that was privileged information, and moreover had been the first person inside it, giving orders to the orderlies as they entered.
She looked at him. He had moved the IV stand close to the bed, run the catheter over the safety rail, and was leaning over Gordian, about to work the needle into his wrist.
“Hold on,” she said. Stepping toward him. Her mouth dry, her heart pounding away in her chest. “What are you doing?”
The intern turned his face toward her.
“The fluid bag needs to be connected,” he said. “It won’t take a minute.”
She took another step closer to him, another, quickly crossing the room, leaving Ashley standing at the door in confusion.
“No,” she said. Shaking her head. “What are you doing here?”
He straightened up, looked at her without any response.
His eyes boring into her eyes.
Reading them.
“Ashley,” she said. Not turning from him for an instant. “Open the door and call for help, this guy doesn’t belong in—”
His hand released the feeding tube, simply let it drop over the rail, and went under his white hospital coat. Megan couldn’t see what he was reaching for, didn’t need to see, what she had to do was stop him.
She moved in fast, bringing up her hands, ducking her head under his arms, remembering what Pete had told her in the training ring. Her fist jabbed out, aimed at the middle of his chest, her shoulder rolling behind the motion, her entire back in it, her knuckles digging between his ribs as they made solid contact.
He produced a grunt of pain and surprise, doubled over, gasping for breath, his hand appearing from inside the coat, an automatic pistol spilling from his fingers to hit the floor.
Megan heard Ashley shouting into the hallway at the top of her lungs, and a split second later heard the hurried pounding of feet behind her, and a male voice ordering the guy in the intern’s coat to stay put, telling him not to even think about reaching for the gun, and he kept hugging himself and coughing, trying to catch his breath....
And then the Sword security team came in the doorway and were all over him.
TWENTY-SIX
VARIOUS LOCALES NOVEMBER 23, 2001
“... STIRRING FOR THE PAST HOUR. ONE OF THE nurses on shift noticed ... about to regain consciousness. I phoned you right away.”
“I thought it would be yesterday, Elliot. I was sure. He seemed to be trying so hard.”
“It helps that you’re here. Talking to him. Bringing him along. His response to the inhibitor’s been tremendous.... You shouldn’t be discouraged if it doesn’t happen right now ...”
Gordian opened his eyes. The room was very bright with sunlight. Ashley stood at his bedside, in the brightness, looking down at him. Elliot Lieberman was next to her in his white doctor’s coat.
“If what ... doesn’t happen?” he asked.
Ashley looked at him, an almost startled expression on her face, and then leaned over the bed rail.
“This,” she replied into his ear. “Oh Gord, Gord, this, right here. Right now.”
He slowly raised a hand off his sheet, touched her cheek, felt its moistness.
“Knew I had an angel on my shoulder,” he said. “Didn’t know angels cry.”
She kissed his face, kissed it again, and again, and then raised her head, smiling, her fingers clasped around his, her tears flowing freely over the smile, spilling onto their joined hands, tears of gratitude for the blessing she’d been granted, tears of heartbreaking sorrow for those who had paid the ultimate price for it.
“They let us,” she said. “One day each year, they let us.”
He looked at her. “When?”
“Thanksgiving,” she said.
Tom Ricci sat alone at his kitchen table, its surface bare except for the quart bottle of Black Label he had bought at the liquor store the previous night, last sale date before the holiday, a Thanksgiving dinner he aimed to remember.
It was five o’clock in the afternoon, the window shades drawn in every room of his apartment, phone off the hook, and he was about to dive into his liquid meal, swallow down as much forbidden nectar as his belly could hold. One hundred percent malt, twelve-step program be da
mned.
Yes sir, he thought. Yes sir, Tom. Gobble, gobble.
He stared at the bottle, his hand on the table, slowly reaching across it, slipping and sliding across the table to close around that smooth, cool curvature of glass.
Ricci closed his eyes, tightly holding the bottle. In his mind’s eye he saw a scale, like the kind you saw in pictures of blindfolded Lady Justice. Nichols, Grillo, Simmons, and Rosander on one side. Roger Gordian and the rest of the planet on the other.
The whole damned planet, yes. Billions of possible victims of a germ that, in the end, because of the sacrifices of those he had led on his mission, had claimed only one good man in a small corner of Latin America.
The balance seemed to tip lopsidedly in favor of the mission having been a success ... and for Ricci it would have been no less successful if he himself had perished with the men who had bled out their lives behind the gray concrete walls of Earthglow.
World’s end. Last stop on the civilization express.
Ricci gripped the bottle. He could handle the losses, handle giving up the measure of blood that seemed periodically due to keep whatever was good and worthwhile about existence from falling into darkness. Harsh and unfair as he sometimes found the bill was, he’d always made his payments with a kind of bitter, uncomplaining dependability.
The problem for him now, though, was that the scale had been jiggered. Somebody had fooled with the weights, tampered with the balance, thrown the whole damned system of measurement into question.
The killer ...
Ricci would never again call him by the name Wildcat, would never again lend him the dignity or power that name endowed....
The killer was free, out there somewhere beyond the drawn shades of his apartment, breathing air that his victims could no longer breathe, feeling the sunlight that was warming the ground atop their graves.
The killer ... and whatever nameless, faceless, task-master he served.
Bio-Strike (2000) Page 37
