“He’s a strong boy, Dr. O’Day. He’s strong, and—”
“But he shouldn’t have to be strong. He’s only seven, for God’s sake. There should be someone to be strong for him.”
“I agree. But—”
“Can he be adopted?”
“Adopted? By whom?”
“Me.”
Mrs. Gore gave Ali an astonished look. “You, Dr. O’Day?”
“Yes, me.”
“You mean, if the operation is a success? If he gets his sight back?”
“Sighted or blind. As he is.”
Mrs. Gore raised her hand to her gaping mouth. “I … I’m flabbergasted, Doctor. How long have you been thinking about this?”
“Since … day one.” It was true, although she had only just now realized it.
With a nurse cradling Jamie’s head, the orderlies grabbed the transfer board and lifted him from his bed onto the gurney. The board barely sagged under his feather weight.
“Well, surely you know the difficulties,” said Mrs. Gore. “A blind child needs constant supervision. With all your medical duties, can you manage that? The home environment needs to be redesigned to meet safety guidelines. That’s expensive. There are other costs, too. The state pays his tuition now, but you would be taking it on yourself.”
“If he were my natural child, I would have found a way to do all that. I’ll find a way now.”
“What does your husband say?”
Kevin? Ali was taken aback by the question. “I have to tell you, Mrs. Gore. My husband and I are divorcing.”
“Oh, Lord!” Mrs. Gore averted her gaze. “That makes it twice as hard, Doctor.”
“Just tell me, can it be done?”
“Maybe.” Mrs. Gore looked back at Ali. “I’ve noticed how Jamie’s face lights up each time he’s with you. When you two talk, it’s like you have your own secret language. There is something special there, I admit it. Something he doesn’t have with his teachers … or with me.”
“Would you back me up?”
The whites of Mrs. Gore’s eyes shimmered under a film of tears. Her lower lip trembled ever so slightly. “I … I don’t know. Forgive me, this is all just so sudden. I mean, yes, of course I would. You’d make a fine mother, Dr. O’Day. And in Jamie … in Jamie you’d be finding a wonderful, sweet, loving, and very courageous boy.”
“How do I start?”
“You’ll need to petition the court. I can help with that. They’ll appoint a social worker to do a home study. There’ll be more paperwork than you could ever imagine. CORI check, tax returns, things like that. It’ll take six months, maybe a year to get through it.”
“I would like to take him home with me the day he leaves the hospital.”
“That … that’s imposs—” Mrs. Gore looked into Ali’s eyes and met the steel-hard gaze of a surgeon who robbed death for a living. “Okay, I can ask the court to appoint you as a temporary guardian.”
“Yes. Please.”
“Tell me, are you sure about this?”
“I’ve never been more sure about anything.” Ali smiled, nervously, not knowing why. As her lips stretched, she felt a tear roll out from the corner of her eye. “I … I love Jamie, Mrs. Gore. I want to be his mother.”
Mrs. Gore, wide-eyed, lowered her voice to a near-whisper. “All right, I’ll go and make some telephone calls. Get things started.” The two women looked at each other for a moment, then Mrs. Gore turned abruptly and hastened away, her heels clicking a fast but uneven staccato against the floor.
A clang. Jamie’s gurney was rolling toward the door. Ali held out her hand, signalling the orderlies to pull up. Bending over the bed rail, she looked down at the unconscious Jamie, admiring his curly hair, his beautiful snub nose and rosy lips. Her son! Through the simple magic of opening her heart to Mrs. Gore, the whole world had been transformed in an instant. Forget the court rigamarole. She was already Jamie’s mother. Nothing would change that—now or ever. She reached under the blanket and touched his hand—pink, warm, and yielding—feeling his unspoken cry for reassurance, and answering him with her touch. I’m here for you, Jamie. You are loved. You always will be loved.
She lost track of time as she looked at him. Finally, one of the orderlies coughed, and she reluctantly pulled away her hand and allowed the progress of the gurney to resume. She followed them with her gaze, watching long after the door had stopped swinging back and forth in their wake.
I am a mother now!
And yet it might all turn out to be a daydream. First, they would both have to live out the day.
* * *
“You saw it? With your own fucking eyes?” shouted Harry, panting as he bounded down the stairway two steps at a time.
Ed Guerrero was right behind him, but Ed, too, had to shout to be heard over the jackhammer stomp of eight pairs of feet flying pell-mell down the metal stairs. “Yeah, I saw it. Didn’t go in … but saw it.” On his heels were Judy Wolper, two helmeted firemen, two janitors in blue chinos, and Tom Beazle, wearing a yellow surgical gown that trailed three feet in the air.
They had sprinted four floors since Ed had come rushing up to Harry outside General Surgery with the news. A team in the basement … Something big. To Harry the announcement had come like a thunderclap, unleashing five hours of tension—hours of waiting, of taping X’s on doors to nowhere, of dead rats and false fire alarms. Big, really big. He felt relieved, almost gleeful, at the chance to spring into action. No more groping after phantoms. For better or for worse, he was about to see what he was dealing with. If he could see it, maybe he could beat it.
Harry charged past the first basement level—the level of his own office. Gonna need reinforcements, he thought. “Judy!” he called out, without slowing. “Get Avery. Tell him to bring that robot of his. Old Yeller.” Judy’s thin, squeaky voice was drowned out by the rumble of the stampede, but the grind of a steel door opening up above told him she had gotten the message.
He charged down flight after spiraling flight, grabbing the central newel posts to swing himself around each landing, feeling the centrifugal force as his feet barely skimmed the floor. He kept thinking as he ran, We’re under the Pike, and not the Towers, thank God. We can evacuate this section in five minutes. We can do it under the radar if we have to.
Second basement level—thirty feet below ground. No more stairs. Harry swung around to a finger-stained, orange-painted door, and with nary a break in his momentum, yanked the handle and charged into a whitewashed cinderblock corridor. “Which way?” he shouted.
“Follow me!” called Ed, dashing to the left. Harry ran after him into a dog-leg off the main corridor, his shoes squeaking against the polished floor. Together they made a sharp right-angle turn, and then nearly skidded into a group of uniformed cops and jumpsuited men with white ribbons who huddled peering through a darkened doorway.
Still panting, Harry pushed through the group and swept his flashlight across the room. It was empty except for some dismantled shelves and small piles of plaster debris scattered over the dilapidated linoleum flooring. Through the half-open door of a big walk-in freezer, Harry glimpsed the edge of a dark, rectangular object, standing five feet high.
“Jesus, God!” he muttered. Something big. Big enough to contain five hundred pounds of explosive, all right.
“This used to be the kitchen,” said Ed, wincing with exhaustion. “They’re renovating it for a new Engineering shop.”
“Who knows this room?”
An HVAC man from the search team spoke up. “I do. I’ve been remodeling in here.”
“Wanna fill me in?”
“When we came to check the room we noticed that this outer door was ajar. The lights were off, because the power’s been shut down for construction. But we could tell someone’s been in there. There’s dust on the floor, and if you look you can see scrape marks where that crate has been dragged inside.”
“Did you get a look at the crate, Kyle?” he said, reading the man’s
ID badge.
“Just from the doorway here. We knew right away something wasn’t kosher. Sometimes people put crates out in the hallway for trash pickup. But the freezer was empty yesterday, and no one but us has been working in there.”
“Why is the freezer door open?
“It just hangs that way. It doesn’t latch. We took the handle off to keep someone from getting trapped inside.”
Harry had heard enough. Turning to Ed, he gave the command, “Evacuate the kitchen and Engineering. I want a two-hundred-foot perimeter on each side.”
“Yes, sir.” Ed sped off through the crowd and down the hall.
In the dark recesses of the empty room, Harry saw something move. Instantly, he trained his flashlight on a man in a dark blue uniform edging toward the freezer at a half crouch. “Who’s that?”
“Miller. Chicago cop,” said Kyle.
“What the hell is he doing?” Harry extended his neck and shouted through the door. “Miller! Freeze!”
Miller turned and squinted into the beam of the flashlight.
“You have some kind of a death wish, Miller?”
“I’m trying to get a look.”
“Take a look at the goddamn floor, will you? You see all these loose tiles? Perfect camouflage for a booby trap.”
“Oh, God! Gee, I … I’m sorry.” Miller confusedly took a step back.
“Goddamn it! Don’t you know what ‘freeze’ means? You can trigger a pressure plate by stepping off it, just the same as stepping on.”
“What should I do?”
“Be a goddamn statue until the bomb squad gets here.”
Harry swept the room again with his flashlight, this time focusing on the floor. “Did you touch anything?”
“No. This is as far as I went.”
“What can you see from where you stand, Miller?”
“Inside the freezer, there’s a wooden crate. Several feet high, standing upright. There’s something written on it.”
“What’s it say?”
“I don’t know. I think it’s, like, German. Some kind of Ultra Instrument.”
“What else do you see? Any wires?”
“No wires. There’s a sort of bluish glow. Flickering. Plus I can hear ticking.”
“Ticking?” Harry was skeptical. In this digital age, bombs didn’t tick. “Are you sure about that?”
“Yeah, ticking.”
“Like a clock?”
“Not exactly. It goes off and on. Maybe it’s more like scratching.”
“Come on, Miller! Is it ticking or scratching?”
“It’s, uh … I don’t hear it anymore.”
Good God! Didn’t Police Academy teach you anything? Either this fellow Miller was a complete lunkhead or the crate had a live mechanism—a timer or a gyroscope or maybe something that amplified the floor vibrations. Harry had to find out before someone got killed. Gingerly, in contravention of his own written protocol, he crept into the room. He heard the rasp of a loose tile against the concrete subflooring. He heard his own shallow breathing. But ticking, no. The only sign of life was a faint blue glimmer against the dark void behind the crate. He ran his flashlight over the black stenciled lettering on the rough plywood panels:
Ultraschallsystem Acuson X300
Vorsicht! Zerbrechlich!
Medizinische Instrument
Whatever that means, it’s not a message from our bomber, thought Harry. He turned one ear toward the crate, listening. In the opposite direction, far down the hall, there was a murmur of voices. Good! Kitchen evacuation’s started. Ed’s on the ball.
And then Harry heard something else. Soft, almost like the scratching of a mouse. Ta-tat … tat … tat … ta-tata-tata-ta-tat …
Miller moaned. “Mr. Lewton, I need to take a leak pretty bad.”
“Whatever you do, don’t. Urine on the floor is a strong electrolyte. It’ll short-circuit a booby trap sensor.”
“Oh, God.”
What the fuck is that tapping? Harry didn’t dare step any closer. His experience with booby traps in the pot fields and meth labs of East Texas was no help to him now. This bomb was unlike anything he had ever seen, and the mentality behind it seemed unfathomable. There had been no more than a half-assed attempt at concealment. The outer door had been left ajar, for God’s sake, as if in invitation. Did the bomber want the crate to be found? Was it a decoy? Or was the son of a bitch just cocksure that Avery and his men could never disarm his brain-child?
Avery. No sooner did the name pop into Harry’s mind than the captain’s voice boomed forth from the doorway. “Got a present for us, Lewton?”
“Mystery crate, five feet by three by three, showing signs of internal activity—evidently running off its own power source. It’s yours if you want it.”
“Sure, we’ll take it off your hands.”
“Is it safe to step back? Are we boobytrapped?”
“Hold on a sec. Old Yeller’s on his way.”
A moment later, there was a clatter as two bomb techs arrived and lifted the robot off a dolly. Harry craned his neck to watch as Old Yeller rolled forward, trailing a control wire, at the speed of a turtle running on all cylinders. It looked and moved like a tank made out of dull silvery titanium, with rubber treads and a storklike folding arm rising out of a turret. A video camera and lamp was mounted on the arm to give a close-up view of the pincer action, while a second camera in back rotated from side to side to give a panoramic view of the room.
As Old Yeller came near Harry’s ankle, a hollow cylinder extended toward him with a whirring of gears, while a small black-tipped wand wagged parallel to the floor. A hiss, and a puff of air was sucked into the cylinder, ruffling the bottom of Harry’s trousers.
“What’s he gonna do next? Hump my leg?”
“Relax,” said Avery. “It’s a spectrometer that picks up explosive residue. That little wand you see is a galvanometer. It looks for electric currents like you might have in a sensor or detonator.”
With a click and a whir Old Yeller backed away from Harry and transferred his affections to Miller, who stood a little to the rear. Although Harry remained stock still, his shadow skated back and forth against the far wall as the robot’s rear camera light panned the room. In the background, Avery talked over the sensor readings with the tech handling the remote control.
“Old Yeller says your area is clean,” Avery announced. “It’s safe to back out now. Follow the path of the control cable to the door.”
Harry waved to Miller to go first. Just as Miller took a step back, the breathless silence was shattered by a volley of beeps from inside the crate. Beep … ba-bee-bee-beep-beep-beep. Miller reflexively fell into a crouch and drew his gun.
“What the hell are you doing?” said Harry. “You gonna shoot the box? Put that fucking gun away.”
He spoke too late. Something Miller did—an abruptness of his hand motion, a swirl of the ferromagnetic field around his gun—had already triggered a reaction inside the box. Harry heard a buzz and a clacking noise, and turned to see a glowing red nozzle emerging from a hole in the plywood. Good God! Everyone hit the floor at once. Harry dove so hard that one of the loose tiles jabbed him like a knife between his ribs. He rammed his cheek against the hard, cold linoleum, trying to make himself as thin as paper, as if that could protect him from the split-second inferno that would turn both him and floor into a cloud of fizzing molecules. Jesus, is this it?
And in that instant, as his heart stopped, as he tasted his own drool mixed with the dust and grease of the floor, Harry’s mind went blank. Terror, he found, had no face or name or why or wherefore. It was a state of suspension between two breaths—the last breath of life as he had known it, and the next breath that might never come.
He froze for God knows how long. When at last his heart jump-started itself and his chest sucked in a tentative gasp of air, the first thought that popped into his brain came as a surprise. For he didn’t think of death, or pain, or honor—not even of his gray-haired
mother on the eighteenth floor. He thought of a hand—Ali’s hand. He remembered that moment in his office when he had touched her. Her fingers were dry and icy cold, her palm warm and moist. It was as though they reflected a strange psychic division—her steely aplomb masking a secret vulnerability. She had reached out to him and shunned him at the same moment. Which was true, the seeking or the shunning? he wondered. What did she expect from me?
And that might have been his last thought on earth. But as luck would have it, he was roused by a woman’s voice shrieking from the doorway.
“Marcus! Dwayne! Where’s my babies? Where’s my little boys?”
Harry twisted his neck to see a heavy-set African American woman in kitchen whites trying to wrestle her way into the room past Avery and a couple of cops.
“Let me go! Let me go! I want my babies!”
There was a scrape as the mysterious crate jostled slightly, and two ebony-skinned boys in Bulls sweatshirts and polyester shorts emerged from the darkness of the freezer.
“Mom!” shouted the smaller, no more than six years old. He was holding a toy ray gun of blue and gold painted metal, with a red cap that sparked and glowed when the trigger spun a friction wheel.
“Oh, for cryin’ out loud!” Harry leaped to his feet, a hot blush spreading over his face and neck. “What were you boys doin’ inside that crate?” he shouted.
The older boy, Marcus, was holding a small video game console. He squinted as Harry trained his flashlight on his face. “Just playin’ Madden and stuff on the PSP. Mom said it’d be okay ’long as we were quiet.”
“Well, Mom made a mistake today. You come on out of there. You and your brother.”
Hanging their heads, the two shuffled out into the open.
“Did you boys drag that crate inside?” asked Harry.
“I don’t know,” whined Marcus. His shrug was as clear as a confession. “It’s our rocket ship. Please, Mister, we didn’t break nothin’.”
Little Dwayne flourished his ray gun in the air. “I shot the Martian,” he boasted.
After all the strain, Harry could barely suppress a laugh. He looked at Old Yeller, whose binocular video camera was still panning left and right, making a soft whirring noise. The kid’s right. Very like a Martian. “Yeah, you got him. I think you got me, too,” he said, touching the bottom of his ribcage, where the edge of the tile had bruised him. “You gotta be careful with those ray guns.”
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