The Patient

by Michael Palmer

  Nothing.

  Of course. At Malloche’s orders, Richard Marcus had sealed off the area, and had probably done everything he could to delay intervention by investigators from state or federal agencies. It appeared as if no one had been in the lab since the disaster, so the lights had to have been shut off at the fuse box—probably for the whole pathology unit—to discourage anyone who might have made it past security. Another break. Alex inched his way along the base of the lab bench. Then he stopped and slowly set aside the stopper from the bottle of concentrated acid.

  Derrick, wounded from the monitor screen, irritated by losing his quarry, and now distressed at having to be in the center of such an unpleasant stench, had to be off balance, as ripe for taking as he ever would be. The muted sound of his footsteps said that he was just on the other side of the lab bench now—not five feet away.

  Alex held his breath and could hear Derrick’s panting, possibly as he tried hyperventilating through his shirt.

  Are you feeling ill, bastard? Close to puking? Well, with any luck you’re going to feel a hell of a lot worse in just another few seconds.

  Alex shifted his weight for better leverage, grasped the bottle tightly, and tried to imagine how Derrick was positioned—where he was facing. Slowly … slowly, he began to straighten up. Derrick was just three feet away, facing toward the far wall, searching for him in the carnage he and his employer had created. Alex raised the bottle over his head. Then, barely audibly, he cleared his throat. As Derrick swung around, Alex whipped his arm down, sending a full splash of the acid directly into the man’s eyes. In the same motion, he ducked back behind the counter for safety. Piteous screaming erupted instantly from the terrorist, who managed to fire a short burst before his weapon clattered to the floor.

  Alex shook his hand against the intense burning where several drops of the acid had hit him. He stayed low until the uncontrolled wailing had given way to whimpering. Then he rounded the lab bench and struck a match. The killer’s eyes, brows, and much of his nose were already eaten away. Smoke was still rising from his flesh. His moans were unintelligible.

  The semiautomatic was, in fact, an Uzi. Alex cradled the gun and headed for the door. Then he turned back.

  “My brother’s name was Andy Bishop,” he said.

  And he emptied a burst from the Uzi into Derrick’s skull.

  CHAPTER 37

  “ATTA GIRL, JESS,” EMILY WHISPERED AS JESSIE turned back to the table. “I’ve been itching to tell her to fuck off, too.”

  Cursing at Grace had been a great release for Jessie, but otherwise didn’t seem to have had much effect, except to shock the scrub nurse, Jared, into dropping a hemostat.

  “Em,” she said, “I don’t think Alex could have gotten away from that guy. I just can’t believe this is happening. What do we do now?”

  “First we finish,” Emily said. “Then we worry.”

  Jessie nodded across at her friend. The right advice at the right time, as always. First things first. When in doubt, just do what you can do. Simple wisdom until you try and give it to yourself.

  “Thanks, pal,” she said. “You’re the ultimate friend in need.”

  Friend in need. For almost the first time since the surgery on Malloche had begun, Jessie’s focus shifted to Sara. The diagnosis of acute hydrocephalus and the treatment she had begun with the twist drill were right; she felt certain of that. But had she been in time? It was possible that at this moment Sara was already dead. Sara and Alex. Was there any way she could just wake up from this day and discover it had never happened?

  Jessie looked down at the monster, sleeping so peacefully, secure in the knowledge that he had covered all the bases. For Claude Malloche, it was all about manipulation—his surgeon would perform a perfect operation because she wanted to keep her patients alive. Richard Marcus would lie and cover up murder to protect masses of people outside the hospital. If Sara Devereau died, so what? To Malloche she was worth keeping alive only so long as she added to their leverage. Jessie made a claw of her hand and, shielded from Grace, set it down over Malloche’s face.

  “I want to kill him, Em,” she whispered fiercely. “For as long as I can remember, I’ve gotten guilt pangs from just swatting a mosquito. But right here, right now, I want to dig my fingers into his eyes, and rip his evil face right off.”

  “You were thinking about Sara?”

  “How did—?” Jessie laughed ruefully. “Yeah,” she said. “I was.”

  “You did everything you could up there. I pray she’s okay. But either way, you did everything you could. Just hang in there, Jess. What goes around comes around. Our turn will come.”

  Emily’s words unlocked the dam of Jessie’s emotions. Tears of sadness, anger, and intense strain began to blur her vision. Ignoring her sterile field, she reached up a gloved hand, lifted her glasses, and wiped her eyes dry on the sleeve of her surgical gown.

  “What’s going on there?” Grace demanded, moving in close.

  “Oh, nothing,” Jessie replied. “We’re just getting ready to bring our little friend ARTIE the robot back from Brainland. You’re absolutely right, Em,” she added without bothering to lower her voice. “What goes around comes around. Let’s do it. I’m putting just a little bit of tension on the cord. Please put all six pods in reverse for a short burst right … now. Good. I got about an eighth of an inch back. And … again.”

  The extraction of the tiny robot took most of twenty minutes, during which Jessie’s voice and the soft gurgle of flowing oxygen were the only sounds to penetrate the tension and fear in the OR. The final move in the recovery was simply a gentle, blind tug. ARTIE, bloodied but intact, popped out through Malloche’s nostril, still firmly connected to its polystyrene umbilical cord.

  “Yes!” Jessie said softly. “Welcome back, little fella. You were immense.” She sutured the insertion hole closed, then called out, “Michelle, we … are … finished. Could you wake up our patient, please?”

  “One awake patient comin’ up,” the anesthesiologist said.

  Jessie packed Malloche’s nose with gauze, then stripped off her gloves and stepped back from the table. She could tell that Grace had a grip on the pistol that was tucked into the waistband beneath her scrub shirt. It might be possible to overpower the woman and then try to make some sort of deal with Arlette—a trade involving Grace and Malloche for the hostages on Surgical Seven. But there were too many ifs and too many potential casualties to chance it. And if Grace was as competent as Malloche had boasted she was, disarming her might be extremely costly.

  No, Jessie decided. For the moment, this one was simply going to have to play itself out.

  “Now, what about my explanation?” Pfeffer demanded petulantly. “My lab tech is dead up there.”

  “I’ll give you the explanation,” Grace said.

  She marched quickly out of the operating room and straight over to where Pfeffer was standing beside the console. Then she pulled the snub-nosed revolver from beneath her shirt and jammed the barrel up under his chin.

  “What—?”

  “Not another sound from any of you, or I’ll blow this man’s brains out,” she said. “And after I’ve done that, then I’ll move over and do her.”

  She motioned toward Holly, the console tech. Then, without moving her gun from beneath the radiologist’s jaw, Grace picked up a phone, tucked it between her chin and shoulder, and called up to Surgical Seven.

  “Arlette, the operation’s over,” she said. “Everything went well in that regard. The tumor has been removed and Claude is waking up. But there has been some trouble. I need Armand down here right away.… Derrick? He’s—um—he’s not here. He fired at a man who was down here, and then chased him. It’s been about an hour since he left. But the other man wasn’t armed. I think it’s just taken Derrick a while to catch up with him. Now, please, send Armand down. I’ll explain everything that happened when we get back upstairs.”

  There was nothing Jessie could think of to do at
this point but cooperate and wait. It had been an hour since Derrick took off after Alex, and now she knew that Malloche’s right-hand man hadn’t returned to Surgical Seven either. He was heavily armed and wasn’t that far behind his unarmed prey when he took off. Could Alex’s hatred and determination possibly have been enough to overcome such odds?

  One thing was certain. If Derrick didn’t return with Alex or an account of his death, there was going to be hell to pay on Surgical Seven.

  ALEX SMASHED THE window to the chemistry lab and found a flashlight and a first aid kit. He used gauze pads and tape from the kit to stem the bleeding from his shoulder, and ointment to ease the burning on his hand and arm. The concentrated acid that had plashed on him had left a dozen or more deep sores along his right forearm and across his hand. Finally, covering Derrick’s Uzi with a towel, but keeping it at the ready, he left the hospital by a staircase in the back of the pathology department. In five years, he hadn’t so much as bruised Malloche or his tightly knit, suicidally loyal organization. Now, at last, he had done some damage.

  This is just the beginning, Claude, he was thinking. Just the beginning.

  After the death-cave horror of the micro lab and the darkness of the pathology department, the bright noontime sunshine hit him like a slap. It took time to get his bearings. He was on a largely deserted street, behind the main building of the hospital. The van, with Stan Moyer and Vicki Holcroft, was a block and a half to his left. They had stayed up with him all night, chasing down first Mark Naehring in Hawaii, then the hypnotic truth concoction in his office. Now, with more than four hours gone since he left for the OR, he felt certain they were beginning to get antsy.

  Alex carefully made his way out to the street. He had no doubt that once Malloche and his wife realized their man wasn’t coming back, there would be trouble for Jessie and the others. Having reduced the opposition on Surgical Seven by 20 percent—40 with Malloche now out of commission—he even gave thought to putting a force together, heading up to the floor, and attempting to end matters then and there. But according to what he had learned from Jessie, it was a good bet the neurosurgical unit was sealed off with Malloche’s notorious thoroughness and skill.

  There would doubtless be reprisals for his showing up in the OR as he did, and also for Derrick. As long as Malloche needed medical care, it seemed likely that Jessie was reasonably safe. But it was also clear that as long as one of Malloche’s crew was roaming about with the trigger to three or four vials of soman, the people of Boston weren’t. As things stood, an assault of any kind just didn’t make sense—at least not yet. But whether they stormed Surgical Seven or found another way, one thing was sure—Derrick was not the last of the body count.

  Stan and Vicki were struggling to come up with a Plan B when Alex knocked twice, then once on the rear door of the van. He fell as much as climbed inside, and lay on the floor for a while. He was mentally and physically exhausted, and much more battered than even he had appreciated. Vicki redressed his wounds from an elaborate first aid kit, as he filled in the two FBI agents on the events in the OR, and later, in the microbiology lab.

  “Remind me not to get on your bad side,” Moyer said when he had finished. “Hydrochloric acid. Nasty. Tasteful, but extremely nasty.”

  “It wasn’t Derrick’s best day,” Alex replied.

  “So,” Vicki asked, “where do we go from here?”

  “You know Boston better than I do. What do you think of the three places Malloche gave to us?”

  Holcroft and Moyer decided with their eyes who should respond. Vicki won.

  “The way I see it, they may have made a big mistake.”

  “Tell me.”

  “Assuming the information you got from Malloche is the truth, all three places they chose to hide the soman can be sealed off from the public and searched. The search crew is standing by.”

  “How many?” Alex asked.

  “As many as we can get. The number’s probably growing by the minute.”

  “But they’re going to need time and some sort of serious exposure suits,” Moyer added. “And if Malloche’s man on the outside realizes what we’re doing, and there is a fourth or even a fifth vial of the gas, all hell’s gonna break loose.”

  “Wait, tell me again,” Alex said. “All three locations—the rotunda at Quincy Market, the Green Line at Government Center, and Filene’s Basement, are normally locked for the night?”

  “I’m not sure what time,” Vicki answered, “but yes. Probably by one A.M. they’ll all three be closed off. Filene’s a lot earlier.”

  “The break we have is that Malloche doesn’t have a clue that we know anything.”

  “What about the people who were with you in the OR?” Moyer asked.

  “Jessie’s the only one who knows why I was there. I don’t think they’d hurt her.”

  “The question may not be whether or not they hurt her. The question may be how well she can stand up to watching someone else get hurt.”

  Alex was silent. Of course they wouldn’t touch Jessie. With Malloche just recovering from surgery, they couldn’t afford to—and they wouldn’t have to. They could get at her through Emily, or Sara, or little Tamika, or any of the others she cared so deeply about. And if she broke before the soman locations could be sealed off, the vials could easily be moved to new locations … or even detonated.

  It was all up to Jessie. Somehow, regardless of the pain Malloche’s people inflicted on her patients, she had to keep herself from giving them any information until they were no longer suspicious that she had caved in too easily. Then, smoothly and convincingly, she had to come up with some believable explanation for who Dr. Mark Naehring was, and what he was doing in the operating room—some explanation other than the truth.

  Too much, Alex thought. It was too much to ask of anyone.

  “We’ve got to assume Jessie will eventually tell them what Malloche disclosed to us,” he said.

  “Would she do that?”

  “It depends on how they try to break her down. They’ll probably go after her patients. I don’t know how she’s going to respond, but we’ve got to assume the worst.”

  “If we seal off those places now, we’ll be tipping our hand just as surely as if she did tell them everything.”

  “What time is it?” Alex asked.

  “One,” Vicki said. “A little after.”

  “Do you think we could get teams mobilized at all three places by midnight with the suits—or at least with gas masks?”

  “Assuming the Boston police continue to cooperate, and I have no reason to think they won’t.”

  “Everything’s got to look perfectly ordinary until the teams are inside the gates. I want them brought in gradually from directions where Malloche’s man out there wouldn’t notice. Damn! I wish we had some clue as to what he looked like.”

  As Alex was speaking, he almost inadvertently slipped his hand into the rear pocket of his scrub pants. The folded paper Emily had given to him in the OR was still there. The sheet was an anesthesia record. At the top of the page, in pencil, was a decently done three-inch sketch of a man’s face. Below the picture, Emily had printed:

  white male, 6’2”, slim, 160–170, short light-brown hair, blue eyes, nose looks like it was broken and poorly set, name may be Stefan

  Alex studied the page, then handed it over to Moyer. Emily had done the drawing in the OR while she was pretending to work with the anesthesiologist. If she had been caught by either Grace or Derrick, it would have gone very poorly for her.

  “Jessie’s nurse risked dying for this,” he said. “It’s got to be Malloche’s man on the outside. It gives me an idea.”

  “I think we’re already right with you on this one,” Holcroft said.

  CHAPTER 38

  THEY WERE HERDED AT GUNPOINT UP TO SURGICAL Seven in two groups. First, Grace took the console tech Holly, radiologist Hans Pfeffer, Skip Porter, the scrub and circulating nurses, and Emily. After the elevator was brought back d
own, Jessie and Michelle Booker made the trip with Malloche, on a gurney, and Armand. The young killer seemed high-strung and edgy, and never lowered his pistol.

  “How is my patient in seven thirty-seven doing?” Jessie asked him as they approached the elevator.

  Armand looked at her blankly and motioned her with his gun barrel to move ahead.

  “Jesus,” Jessie exclaimed. “I just saved your boss’s life. The least you can do is answer my question. Do you understand me?”

  “He speaks English,” Malloche said hoarsely, but with surprising force and clarity. “He just doesn’t like to.”

  Since waking up from anesthesia, his responses had been groggy and monosyllabic. Clearly his condition was rapidly improving. He rattled at Armand in French and got a terse reply.

  “Armand says your patient is alive,” Malloche reported. “But he cannot vouch for her condition. The fact that I am this awake and alert and we have yet to return to the floor suggests that things have gone well for me, yes?”

  “I suppose you could conclude that,” Jessie said. “Believe it or not, I told you just a few minutes ago that the operation was a complete success. It may be a while before information hits your memory bank and gets deposited. You were actually awake quite a bit during your surgery.” Then, heart hammering, she added, “Do you remember anything of that?”

  “Remember anything? Not really. I remember getting wheeled onto an elevator and heading down the corridor to the operating room. Then the next thing I remember, I am being wheeled back.”

  Jessie silently sighed her relief. It appeared that neither Malloche nor Grace had any idea who Dr. Mark Naehring was, why he was in the operating room, or, in Grace’s case, why Derrick confronted, then chased him. Jessie suspected that soon, though, very soon, they were going to be looking to her for answers. And whatever those answers were, they had better have the ring of truth.

  Michelle Booker had been silently watching and listening. Jessie reached over and squeezed her hand.