The Patient

by Michael Palmer

  She continued her dissection and nodded that the mike was off once more.

  “Where are the vials of soman, Claude?” Alex asked. “Where are they?”

  “Quincy … Market … rotunda …”

  One.

  “Go on. Where else?” Alex injected more hypnotic. “Claude?”

  Malloche looked to be unconscious.

  Too much! Jessie’s eyes cried out. You gave him too much!

  “Government … Center … green … subway …,” Malloche murmured suddenly.

  Two.

  Jessie turned the mike on and held a conversation with Hans Pfeffer that must have struck the radiologist as strange for its vapidness. Anything to keep the rhythm going and Grace and Derrick distracted. The dissection was more than 80 percent complete now. Only fragments of the tumor remained to be melted. It appeared Malloche was going to get his cure.

  Just then Alex did, in fact, inject too much hypnotic. Malloche’s breathing slowed and he slipped into unconsciousness. Jessie feared she might have to stop the operation to try to put a breathing tube in him. But just as she was about to make a move, Malloche coughed and muttered something unintelligible. A minute later, he had rasped out the third location—Filene’s Basement.

  “That may be it,” Alex said as Jessie flipped the mike back on.

  She held up three fingers on one hand and four on the other.

  Which is it? her eyes asked.

  Alex shrugged and shook his head.

  Frightened of having questioned Malloche too often, Jessie took him through some unnecessary maneuvers with his feet.

  “Right foot up … now down … now left … now down.”

  Finally, it was time. Alex got another 5 cc of hypnotic and injected some.

  “Claude, the last vial. Quincy Market, Government Center subway, Filene’s, and … and where?”

  “Don’t know …,” Malloche responded dreamily.

  “Is there another vial of soman?”

  Jessie anxiously put a finger to her lips and motioned for Alex to lower his voice. Again, through the corner of her eye, she sensed Grace shifting to get a better angle. Clearly they were running out of time.

  “Don’t know …,” Malloche said again. “Don’t know … don’t know …”

  “He seems confused,” Jessie whispered. “Maybe if there was a fourth vial, it was the one here in the lab. We’ve got to stop.”

  “Naehring said to give him one shot of two ccs at the end. Supposedly, once I do that, he won’t remember any of this.”

  “Just don’t kill him.”

  Jessie turned the microphone on once more and again issued some orders to Malloche until it was clear he was unable to respond anymore. Across the room, over Alex’s shoulder, she could see Derrick. He had moved to one end of the console and was leaning forward, peering intently through the observation window. He was suspicious. She felt certain of it. Thank goodness they had ended the interrogation.

  “Well, Mark,” she said, “that was a terrific job. Michelle, Emily, we’re almost ninety percent done. We could stop here, and I doubt the tumor would have enough blood supply left to survive. But I want this to be perfect, so we’re going to keep working. Michelle, if you can keep him on the way to never-never land, we should be able to wrap this up in forty-five minutes or so. Em, do you want to come back and replace this genius, here?”

  “Your wish is my command.”

  “Thank you, Dr. Naehring.”

  “I look forward to working with you again, Dr. Copeland,” Alex said.

  As he turned to move past Emily, Jessie saw her suddenly thrust a piece of paper into his hand. He reacted to the surprise not at all. Instead, without even the slightest hesitation, he slipped the paper beneath his surgical gown and deposited it into his scrub pants pocket. Then he removed his gown and gloves and dropped them where the circulating nurse indicated.

  Jessie held her breath as he approached the OR door. Half a minute more. No more than thirty seconds and he would be on his way out of the hospital with more information than she had even dared to hope for. As he opened the door, he checked back over his shoulder at her. The triumphant spark in his eyes was unmistakable.

  Just then, through the observation window, Jessie saw Derrick stride up to Alex.

  “You, Doctor,” he ordered, “pull down your mask.”

  CHAPTER 36

  KILL OR BE KILLED. WHEN ALEX ARRIVED AT THE operating room, he had been approached and asked his identity by Malloche’s man Derrick, who introduced himself as a security guard assigned to monitor this section of the hospital. Now, as the man strode up and confronted him, Alex sensed that this was it. One of them was going to die.

  “You, Doctor,” Derrick demanded, “pull down your mask.”

  His knee-length lab coat barely concealed the weapon that was slung over his right shoulder—a semiautomatic of some sort, Alex guessed. He probably had a pistol concealed somewhere as well. He was about Alex’s height, but much broader across the shoulders and ten or fifteen years younger. The hardness in his pale eyes said that he would kill without hesitation.

  Slowly, Alex untied the upper strings of his cloth mask and let it flop over onto his chest. Derrick studied his face. Then Alex saw recognition spark in the man’s eyes.

  “I believe I have seen you before, Doctor,” Derrick said, easing his right hand inside his lab coat toward his lower back. “Where could that have been?”

  Kill or be killed.

  Derrick was reaching for a handgun. Alex was certain of that. He also knew that surprise, his only advantage, was fading fast, and would be completely gone in another second or so. He viciously brought his foot up between Derrick’s legs, catching him firmly in the groin. The killer’s knees buckled, but he stayed on his feet and reacted with the quickness of a professional, spinning away from the looping right hook Alex threw at his chin.

  The console tech shrieked as Derrick pulled the pistol from his waistband and fired. But Alex was already sprinting away through the anesthesia prep area, staying low and weaving from side to side like a running back. A bullet pinged off the cement column by his ear. A second grazed his scalp. Over his years in the CIA, he had been shot at several times, but never at this close range, and never without a weapon with which to defend himself. The only choice he had right now was to run—try to put some distance between himself and the younger, stronger man who was intent on killing him.

  He pulled several rolling carts into the path behind him as he reached one of the many tunnels connecting the various EMMC buildings. This tunnel, to the main hospital, was too long and too straight for him to chance making it to the end. Instead, Alex bolted one flight up a staircase and cut to his right. He was in the basement corridor of the Kellogg Building—the largest building in the hospital. The brightly lit hallway was almost deserted. But again, it was long and straight. Alex charged across the polished tile and dove through a doorway and into the computer lab. Alex knew that at best, he had bought himself a few seconds. Even if Derrick hadn’t actually seen the computer lab door close behind him, he would know that Alex couldn’t possibly have made it down the hall. Alex hit the light switches as he passed, throwing this end of the lab into relative darkness.

  “Hey,” an accented voice called, “what are you doing?”

  “Shhhh.”

  Alex raced toward the voice and found a bookish, rail-thin young man, interpreting the MRI data and monitoring the progress of the case he had just left in the MRI-OR.

  “What the—?”

  “Get down and stay flat,” Alex ordered, shoving the man face first to the floor just as a prolonged burst of machine-gun fire shattered the computers and video screens over their heads.

  An Uzi, he guessed from the sound.

  He forged ahead on his knees, casting about for a weapon—any kind of weapon. There was nothing—nothing except the computers themselves. He crawled around the corner of a row of instruments and screens just in time to see the edge of
Derrick’s lab coat as he crept around to where the computer geek lay.

  “Please. Please don’t hurt me!” the man begged.

  Instantly, there was a brief burst of gunfire, an unearthly cry, then silence. Alex cringed and angrily clenched his fists, but he kept crawling. Derrick was exactly opposite him now, separated by the bank of workstations and instruments. Alex slid himself up and placed his hands on either side of a seventeen-inch video monitor screen. Slowly, noiselessly, he lifted the heavy screen off its base. Then, certain the soft scraping sound beyond the workstations localized Derrick, he stood up quickly, raising the monitor at arm’s length over his head. The killer whirled, but not in time. Alex hurled the monitor down on him, striking him in the forehead. The picture tube shattered with the sound of a shell burst. Derrick cried out as he was knocked backward, but he was firing even before he hit the floor. Alex, up on the counter, preparing to leap at him, was hit in the shoulder and grazed alongside his chin. The shots spun him around and hurled him into the instruments across the aisle. He fell heavily, blood instantly staining the sleeve of his scrub shirt.

  Forcing himself not to panic, Alex righted himself. Derrick had absorbed his best shot, and it hadn’t been enough. The man was hurt, though—he had to be. From the other side of the workstations came the angry bellow of a wounded animal and another wild burst of gunfire, most of which ripped through the wooden shelves and snapped into the ceiling. Malloche’s man was still on the floor, Alex reasoned, firing upward. But any moment he would be back on his feet. At that point, if Alex wasn’t out the door, he was dead.

  He crawled to the door and pulled it open. Light from the corridor flooded the darkened area of the lab. Instantly, a volley of shots slammed off the wall above his head.

  Alex plunged out into the eerily deserted corridor, scrambled to his feet, and bolted to his right, toward the pathology department, twenty yards away.

  “WHOEVER HE IS,” Grace whispered to Jessie, “he’s a dead man.”

  Jessie could only look across at Emily and shake her head. Their counterattack against Malloche and his people had gone so well. Then, in seconds, everything had come apart. She felt ill, and very frightened for Alex.

  “Jessie, what on earth is going on here?” Hans Pfeffer asked. “Who were those men?”

  “Hans, I’ll have to explain it all to you later. For now, it would probably be best for us just to get through this case. I have very little left to do.”

  Jessie guided ARTIE into the last remaining portion of Malloche’s tumor. The dissection—clean and complete with virtually no damage to intervening vital neurologic structures—was exceeding anything she could have done by hand. Now, though, she was working with far less composure and concentration than she had been, coupled with an overwhelming sense of foreboding.

  “How much longer?” Grace asked, no longer bothering to lower her voice or even pretend to be a graduate student.

  “Ten, fifteen minutes,” Jessie replied.

  “I don’t see any more tumor.”

  “Well, there’s just a tiny bit right at the tip of where the robot is now. It’s yellow on the screen.”

  “I’m still not sure I see it.”

  “I don’t care whether you do or not. It’s there.”

  At that moment, the feed from the computer lab to the OR viewing screens went dark. Pfeffer tried calling his associate for an explanation. There was no answer. Bewildered and angry, he raced upstairs to the lab. A few minutes later, he was back, pale, and shaken to the point where he was barely able to speak.

  “Jessie,” he called into the OR, “Eli Rogoff is … is dead. He’s been shot … many times. There’s blood all over.… My … my lab has been destroyed.”

  Jessie whirled and confronted Grace, but the young killer could only shrug and shake her head.

  “Well, your friend has really messed things up for us,” Jessie said. “As far as I’m concerned, this is it for this case.”

  “But you said you weren’t done. Will this hurt Claude?”

  “I don’t know. We may not know for years. What little tumor remains may not have enough blood supply to regrow. Or it might. It doesn’t matter now. We can’t get at whatever is left, and that’s that. Even if I did a craniotomy and open procedure, I doubt I’d be able to find it.”

  “I’m going to call the police,” Pfeffer said.

  “Hans, just wait a little while! Let me finish this case and get this man out of here, or a great many people could be killed. I’ll explain to you and everyone else after I’ve gotten ARTIE out of his head.”

  “And just how are you going to do that without an MRI,” Pfeffer cried shrilly, “put your foot on his face and pull?”

  “Emily and I will just have to back it out.”

  “Do it now,” Grace said. “I want to get Claude back upstairs as quickly as possible.”

  “Who in the hell is she?” Pfeffer demanded.

  “Hans, please,” Jessie begged. “Em, you take over the controls. I’m going to put some gentle tension on ARTIE’s cord. We’ll bring him out together. Each time I say now, hit straight back reverse for like two seconds, then stop. With any luck and the right touch, I think I might be able to guide it back along the track it made going in. If we can’t do this, we may have to open him up and go in after it.”

  “You’ll do nothing of the sort until Arlette approves it,” Grace said.

  “Oh, just shut the fuck up!” Jessie snapped.

  THE GLASS DOORS to the pathology unit were closed, and behind them all was dark. There were stretches of yellow plastic ribbon across the entry, and above them a DANGER KEEP OUT sign, along with a red skull symbolizing lethal biologic activity. Alex charged toward the door, expecting to hear the staccato volley of shots at the instant a cluster of bullets slammed into his back. The shots came just as he reached the doors, but miraculously, none of them hit home. Instead, the heavy glass door to his right suddenly spiderwebbed from top to bottom. Without breaking stride, he lowered his uninjured shoulder and rammed into it. The weakened glass shattered inward. As Alex barreled through the opening, he stumbled to one knee and rolled, sending a dagger thrust of pain from the gunshot wound up into his neck. Then he struggled to his feet and pounded on, deeper and deeper into the windowless darkness of the pathology department, away from the glow of the corridor lights.

  Ahead of him, just to the left, was another door marked with plastic yellow ribbons and a warning sign. Through the dimming light, he could still make out the gold-leaf lettering on the glass half of the door: MICROBIOLOGY. Over his shoulder he could see Derrick nearing the shattered main door. He had, at best, a few seconds. Sensing what awaited him inside, Alex raced over to the microbiology door, carefully turned the knob, slipped in under the warning ribbon, and closed the door behind him.

  The stench of death in the room was overpowering. Crouching low, he retied his surgical mask over his mouth and nose, making breathing a bit easier, and perhaps giving him the first tiny advantage over his pursuer since they left the OR. Remaining in a crouch, he duck-walked away from the door, then suddenly hit against a body and fell over it. His eyes had adjusted enough to see the face of a woman awash in drying vomit. Her mouth was agape and her eyes open. He shuddered and scrambled off her, then backed farther into the lab.

  Six years ago, he and a badly wounded friend had spent the night huddled on the brink of a shallow, open death pit in Angola just a foot or so above at least a hundred decaying corpses. If that was the most sickening, repugnant situation in which he had ever found himself, this place was a close second.

  Derrick’s silhouette appeared at the door. Alex got up on his knees and ran his hands along the countertop, feeling for something that he could use as a weapon. He tripped over a second body, lost his balance, and inadvertently set his hand down on the face of a third. As he quickly moved his hand away, it hit against a small cardboard box. Stick matches!

  He crawled with the matches to the end of the lab, where
the fourth body lay spread-eagled amid shards of glass from equipment that the man’s death throes had swept off the countertop. Cautiously, Alex raised his head above the counter and peered across at the door. Derrick’s silhouette was gone, although certainly not for long. Assuming he was outside the microbiology lab when Malloche released the soman, and that he didn’t see Alex enter the room, it would be the last place he would want to search. His eyes still fixed on the door, Alex struck one of the matches and cupped it in his hand.

  The corpse next to him was a grotesque shade of violet. Its wide-open mouth held a pool of vomit. Alex gasped for a breath and shook out the match. Then he checked the door once more. Nothing yet. He tried another match. This time, his eyes were drawn immediately to the one intact piece of glassware on the floor, an opaque, glass-stoppered bottle, nestled in the crook of the corpse’s rigid right arm. “Hydrochloric Acid—1m,” the label read.

  Now we’re talking, Alex thought, shaking out the match.

  He had no idea what the “1m” signified, but if it meant strong, he had his weapon. Another check of the door, and he lit a third match. Then he carefully removed the top from the nearly filled bottle and poured some of the contents on the chest of the corpse. Instantly, amid a swirl of smoke and even more stench, the concentrated acid ate through the dead man’s shirt and into his skin.

  Bingo!

  Now, all he had to do was get close.

  He dropped down once more and worked his way through the debris toward the door. He was on the other side of the central lab bench from where he came in. It had been three minutes, maybe even four. Had the killer given up and left?

  At that precise moment, Derrick’s silhouette reappeared at the glass. The door slowly opened, and he stepped inside the room. From where he was crouching, Alex could just make out the man’s form as he looked about, no doubt trying to adjust to the heavy, fetid air. Then he turned to the wall by the door. The lights! His first move was going to be to turn on the lights. Alex pressed against some cabinets and steeled himself as he heard the switches being thrown.