Code White

by Scott Britz-Cunningham

  “For Christ’s sake, why do those speakers need to be so loud?” he said. “Can’t we turn them d-down somehow?”

  “You say that every time,” said Esther, the scrub nurse. “You know there’s no volume switch, Doctor.”

  “Well, I’ll buy dinner at Spiaggia for anyone who puts a bullet through the damned thing.”

  Just then, as if to taunt him, the speaker erupted again, seemingly louder than before. “Mr. White, please report to Security. Mr. White, please report to Security.”

  “Geez, anybody know where this White character is? I’ll bet he’s out grabbing a smoke in the c-courtyard.”

  “It’s a code, Doctor,” said Esther. “There is no Mr. White.”

  “A code?”

  “A security code. Code White.”

  Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Kevin O’Day sniggering over his keyboard.

  “Right. I should know what that is, shouldn’t I?” Every year, the hospital credentialing commission sent its spies out to randomly quiz staff about security procedures, which even department chairs were expected to memorize. Bureaucratic nonsense! Fire, flood, whatever—his response would be the same: to go on operating. What would they expect him to do? Leave a patient with his head cut open so he could run off and spray a fire extinguisher? Of course not. But this announcement was the real thing, not a drill. Not knowing what it meant annoyed him. “Code White. It’s one of those baby things. Stolen baby. Runaway baby. Baby copping a smoke in the courtyard.”

  “No, it’s not a baby,” said Esther. Her eyes flared anxiously above her surgical mask.

  “What is it, then?”

  At that moment a tiny spray of blood showed that the paper-thin wall of one of the vessels had been breached.

  “Bovie, please,” said Helvelius.

  Esther slapped a white cauterizer into his hand. He lifted the blood vessel with the probe in his left hand, and gently touched the blunt metal tip of the Bovie to the source of the spray. The current came on, and with it a tiny puff of smoke and steam, and a whiff of cooked tissue, not unlike the smell of frying bacon. The bleeding stopped.

  At a nod from Helvelius, Ali rinsed the operating field with saline and then suctioned it clean. Helvelius watched for a moment, to make sure that there was no more bleeding, and then handed the cauterizer back to Esther. He switched the probe back into his right hand and prepared to go on with the dissection.

  He took a deep breath, clearing his body of tension. “All right. If Code White isn’t a baby, what is it?” he asked in his former bantering tone.

  It was Ali who answered. “It’s a bomb,” she said. Her voice was solemn, muted—almost a whisper. “A bomb in the hospital.”

  As if on cue, the CD box was playing the “Dies irae,” the Latin hymn for the dead:

  Confutatis maledictis,

  Flammis acribus addictis,

  Voca me cum benedictis.

  Apart from that, there was utter silence in Operating Room Three.

  8:24 A.M.

  Harry Lewton was standing in the Pike with Captain Glenn Avery of the police bomb squad. Like the dozen or so hospital security guards and police officers on the scene, the two men hugged the wall on the side of the Endocrinology Clinic. The double doors of the clinic had been propped wide open to diffuse the force of any blast and to minimize the amount of glass shrapnel in case a bomb went off. About fifty yards away on either side of the clinic, the fire doors had been closed to seal off the Pike from foot traffic.

  Inside the lobby of the clinic a single man, wrapped in a bulky green Kevlar EOD suit and wearing a helmet with a wide, wraparound face shield like a deep-sea diver, knelt near the far window in front of a fan-shaped portable CR 50XP X-ray machine. He had moved the planter to one side, and set the X-ray next to the shopping bag. He carefully slipped the flat twelve-inch digital phosphorescent detector plate behind the bag, and adjusted the voltage controls of the CR 50XP. Too low a voltage and the image would turn out a murky bunch of shadows. Too high and it would be useless glare. Either way, there could be a loss of a critical detail—a potentially fatal error.

  Out in the corridor, the south side fire door opened, and Harry watched a tall, light-skinned African-American man in a dark suit come into the corridor. The stranger coolly scanned the faces along the wall, and without a break in his stride walked straight toward Harry. From one glance Harry took him for a Fed.

  “Are you the security director?” he asked in an assertive baritone.

  “Yes, Lewton’s the name. Harry Lewton.”

  The man flipped open a bifold wallet to show a photo ID and a small metallic shield surmounted by an eagle. “Special Agent Terrell Scopes, with the FBI’s Evidence Response Team. I happened to be in town for a meeting and was notified by local law enforcement that you might have a situation here.”

  “Glad you could come. I’ve already turned the scene over to Captain Avery and the local bomb squad.”

  “Has there been a confirmation of the threat?” asked Scopes.

  “Any minute, now.”

  Scopes was agreeably businesslike, but when the door opened again, there appeared a short, slightly built Asian man in the same regulation black suit. Harry felt his shoulders stiffen as he recognized the owlish glasses, the upthrust jaw, and the mincing step of the newcomer. Aw, Christ! he groused to himself. Not that conceited little prick! Not in my hospital!

  “Gentlemen,” said Scopes, “this is my colleague, Raymond Lee, with the FBI’s Critical Incident Response Group.”

  Lee walked right past Harry without even looking at him, making a beeline for Avery’s blue tunic and brass bars. “Glenn! Just the man I’d have liked to see here,” he said in a thin, nasal voice. “Good to see that Chicago’s sent out its A-team.”

  “Well, well, Ray!” exclaimed Avery. “We must be in a heap of doo-doo for you to show up.” Lee was a good ten inches shorter than Avery, and looked almost diminutive standing beside the Captain’s strapping bench-press bulk. But Harry noticed how Avery, who up until then had been strutting, arms akimbo like a dockside boss, now drew his stance a little narrower as Lee approached.

  “Just a courtesy visit,” said Lee. “You guys carry on like we’re not here.”

  “This is the man who found the package,” said Avery, pointing to Harry.

  Lee craned his neck back toward Harry. Then his jaw dropped like someone had punched him in the solar plexus. “You’re that fellow from Texas, aren’t you?” he muttered. “Lewis.”

  “Lewton.”

  Avery, not very observant of the chill between them, chuckled. “You guys know each other?”

  “Had the privilege,” said Harry, without moving a muscle. Lee said nothing at all.

  It had happened on the FBI’s turf. Harry had just been appointed to lead the Tactical Unit of the Nacogdoches Police Department, and his chief had sent him out to the Hazardous Devices School at Redstone Arsenal, in Alabama, “to find out what those FBI folks know about dynamite.” Lee taught a course there in psychological profiling. He was the kind of teacher who was more feared than liked, his great failing being that he was too doctrinaire for someone who was, after all, in the guessing-game business. He did not like to be questioned, and if you forgot that, he would use all his logical and rhetorical skill to flay you alive, Only a stubborn Texan would come back for a second or third helping of that piccalilli.

  But the field, not the classroom, was where things really went sour between them. Lee was the mastermind behind the HDS Final Practical Exam, a simulated render-safe procedure at a mock drug lab in a trailer in the woods. Each examinee went out there solo, knowing that every square inch of the site was booby-trapped. One slip-up, and he’d get his face splattered with red ink from one of those little dye packs that bank tellers sneak into the loot during a holdup. It took days to wash the stuff off. During exam week, as Harry waited his turn, he noticed how the barracks began to fill up with a lot of very red-faced young men. It seemed that no one came ba
ck from that Practical Exam unscathed. It was said, in fact, that no one had ever beaten it—that it could not be beaten, that it was designed to be unbeatable, so as to give you a sense of your own mortality when going up against something as cold and capricious as a bomb.

  Which meant nothing to Harry. He still remembered the day of his exam, down to the smell of the dew-damp honeysuckle on the edge of the clearing. The mission was to bring back a briefcase full of “evidence” from inside the trailer. Harry had already officiated at busts at real drug labs in the woods, so it was a cakewalk for him to evade the pathetically obvious trip wires and step fuses along the path to the site. He knew by instinct, too, that there would be a pressure-plate waiting for him outside the door, and contact switches under every window sash. These things were all fair game. But what incensed him was that, when he peered into the windows, he could see that the door and windows had also been booby-trapped from the inside, completely out of reach. In laying out the exam, Lee must have exited the trailer from a small skylight—but even there, traces of red paint in the overhanging branches told the story of the last poor bastard smart enough to figure that out. It was a sadistic setup. And in those days, when he was still young and cocky, Harry’s favorite pastime was teaching bullies a lesson.

  So Harry bribed a groundskeeper to open a tool shed, borrowed a chainsaw and used it to cut a two-by-two foot hole through the side of the trailer. When he marched into Lee’s office and triumphantly presented him with that briefcase full of fake cocaine, Lee scoffed at first. Not believing his own eyes, he dragged Harry back to the trailer for a look. There was the hole, like a humongous mouth laughing at Lee to his face. Words cannot describe the shade of red he turned. He had a security officer escort Harry to the school administrator’s office, and demanded that he be prosecuted for destruction of Federal property. The administrator, fortunately, was a more cool-headed sort. Harry just cocked his head and gave a redneck grin, like it was nothing but an overgrown schoolboy prank. And the administrator of the school let it go at that.

  But from the look on Lee’s face today, Harry could tell that Lee had not let it go.

  Just then, the green-suited bomb tech stepped into the hallway, holding a silver laptop computer. He walked toward Avery with a wide-straddling Frankenstein gait.

  “How bad is it?” asked Avery.

  The tech ripped away the velcro flaps that held his helmet and visor in place. He seemed relieved to be breathing room air.

  “It’s not a working bomb.”

  “You mean it’s a hoax?”

  “Not exactly. The bag has all the components of a bomb—timer, detonator, even a mercury switch for a motion sensor. There’s a block of something that’s almost certainly C4. Enough to blow a canyon right through this section of the hospital. The strange thing is that the components aren’t assembled. They’re just lying about loose in the bottom of the bag.”

  “What’s the point of that?” asked Harry.

  Lee studied the image on the screen. “It’s obviously a demo, to get our attention. Our bomber probably wanted to make sure the thing didn’t go off accidentally.”

  “Maybe he was afraid to wire it together,” said Avery. “Afraid he’d blow himself up.”

  Lee arched his eyebrows. “Perhaps, but I doubt it. I think it’s more of a gesture of contempt. It’s a way of saying that we aren’t worth the trouble to put together a real bomb. If that’s true, we’re dealing with someone with a highly exaggerated sense of superiority. Also someone unwilling to show his true hand.”

  “Well, one thing is certain,” said Scopes. “Whoever left this is telling us that they know how to make a bomb. Judging by the mercury switch, they know how to booby-trap it, too.”

  “Sick bastard,” said Avery.

  “So what happens now?” asked Harry.

  “Ransom demand, most likely,” said Avery. “You said on the phone that another message was coming?”

  “Yes. Eight-thirty. Right about now.”

  The four men—Harry, Avery, Lee, and Scopes—turned to watch as the render-safe tech strapped his helmet back on and returned to the lobby. In a moment, he reemerged, gingerly pushing a three-foot blue metal container studded with U-shaped bolts and handles, like a naval contact mine on wheels. All gave him a wide berth as he passed on his way to the elevator.

  As the tech went by, Harry switched on the two-way intercom that connected to his diving helmet. “Make sure you take that out through the rear door, next to the ambulance dock. We have a TV crew in the hospital, and I’d rather not let them get you in their camera sights.”

  Lee motioned for Harry to hand him the intercom. “Where are you taking it?” he asked the bomb tech.

  “To the Bat Cave. That’s our disposal site down on the South Side.”

  “Hold the bomb in the lab when you get there,” said Lee. “We want to look it over before you go all Fourth of July on it. Special Agent Scopes will follow you. He has a direct clearance and password to AEXIS.”

  “What’s AEXIS?” asked Harry.

  “It’s a restricted computer database—the Arson and Explosives Information System—that the ATF maintains at the U.S. Bomb Data Center in Washington. There’s a good chance that we can trace this material. Detonators usually carry origin codes and serial numbers. The C4 may be traceable, too. Since 9/11, the military’s been tagging explosives with glass microspheres. They’re too small to be seen with the naked eye, but they contain microscopic ID chips that can be read with a special infrared scanner. Same principle as the chip you implant in a dog’s ear.”

  As the elevator doors clanged shut, the fire door opened, and Harry heard the sounds of “Foggy Mountain Breakdown.” A young blond woman in the white blouse and black trousers of the hospital security staff held up a cell phone.

  “That’s my phone,” Harry explained. “I didn’t want it going off near the bomb.”

  As the woman handed him the phone, Harry saw a text display, consisting of a single line:

  YOU HAVE MAIL.

  “Eight-thirty, on the dot,” said Lee, checking his own watch.

  “Let’s go to my office,” said Harry. After giving orders to reopen the corridor, he led Lee and Avery down one floor in the elevator, and then into a suite of rooms in a rear corridor, which he accessed by swiping the ID card he wore around his neck. They passed through a large room filled with cubicles and cupboards, then a smaller room filled with banks of CATV monitors, and lastly into the innermost keep of the castle—Harry’s office. To enter the office required both a card swipe and a thumb scan.

  The three men sat down close together behind Harry’s desk, while Harry tapped his keyboard to bring up his e-mail queue. The queue was empty.

  “Let’s give it a minute,” said Harry.

  “Impressive control room back there,” said Avery. “Beats what we have downtown.”

  “Nowadays a hospital is a pretty controversial place,” said Harry without taking his eyes from the monitor. “We get targeted by abortion groups, animal rights groups, patient rights groups, unions, neo-Luddites of all persuasions. I’m sure you noticed those picketers as you came in. Plus we’re a target for old-fashioned theft. We have half a billion dollars worth of equipment to keep an eye on—microscopes, computers, you name it. The narcotics stashed in our pharmacies could supply every junkie in Chicago for the next six months.”

  “No such thing as too much security, huh?” said Avery.

  “Not for us, anyway. We just spent fourteen million dollars on an upgrade of Cerberus, our automated security system. From this command center, I have an overview of everything that goes on in this hospital. There are cameras and sensors in every public area. If a window or door is ajar, I know it. If an emergency alarm goes off, I can press a button and lock or unlock any fire door or any exit to contain the problem. I can override controls to any critical plant function—elevators, electricity, water, thermal regulation, ventilation. I can call up a list of every card used to swipe any
scanner in the medical center at any time over the past three months. And I can tell you that, at this exact moment, there are, uh…” Harry hit a couple of keys on the keyboard at his desk, bringing a column of numbers to the screen. “There are … two thousand eight hundred and sixty-two people inside these buildings, including the three of us … and, uh, two babies born on Tower B this morning.”

  Lee was unimpressed. “Quite a rung up for a small-town Texas cop. But fancy technology is no substitute for old-fashioned analysis and clarity of thinking.”

  Harry shrugged. “Never said it was.”

  Avery ignored them both and looked over the row of monitors on the counter behind the desk. “Are there surveillance tapes of the lobby where the bomb was found?”

  “Certainly.”

  “I’d like to have a look at those.”

  Poink! A water-drop alert sounded from the computer, and Lee pointed at the monitor with his index finger. “Mr. Lewton, I think you have mail.”

  “Ah, yes. Here we are.” Harry scooted his chair forward, and clicked on the boldfaced line that had just appeared on his e-mail queue: “NOW THAT WE HAVE BEEN INTRODUCED.”

  A rectangle crammed with capital letters filled the center of the screen:

  PRAISE BE TO GOD, THE ALL-MERCIFUL, AND TO HIS PROPHET. THE DAY OF REPENTANCE OF ALL UNBELIEVERS IS AT HAND. SHOW CONTRITION AND YOU WILL OBTAIN PARDON. DEFY THOSE WHO FIGHT FOR GOD AND YOUR DESTRUCTION IS SURE. BY 18:00 CENTRAL STANDARD TIME TODAY MARTYRS MOHAMMED METEB AND HASSAN ABO MOSSALAM SHALL BOARD GULF AIR FLIGHT 401 TO SANAA YEMEN FROM NEW YORK. SIGNAL WILLINGNESS BY PAYMENT AS FOLLOWS. FLETCHER MEMORIAL MEDICAL CENTER. NORTHWEST CITY BANK. ILLINOIS STATE TEACHERS PENSION AND RETIREMENT FUND. CHICAGO HOUSING AUTHORITY. ILLINOIS STATE LOTTERY. ROSENBACH FOUNDATION. CHICAGO BOARD OF TRADE. CHICAGO TRANSIT AUTHORITY. FROM EACH $25,000 TO EACH OF TWO ACCOUNTS PAID AT 12:00 AND 12:05 EXACTLY. ACCOUNT NUMBERS WILL BE PROVIDED. DO NOT UNDERESTIMATE OUR RESOLVE. THE LIVES OF MANY ARE IN YOUR HANDS. GOD IS GREAT.”