Code White

by Scott Britz-Cunningham

  He heard a click, and then the weight came off. Craning his head, he saw Harry Lewton getting up off his knees. The security chief spread his hands wide, like a calf-roper after a tie-down. “Mr. O’Day, I’m taking you into custody.”

  As the cold steel of a pair of handcuffs cut into his struggling wrists, Kevin pivoted around and tried to kick at Harry, but Harry deftly stepped aside.

  “Cocksucking fascist!” shouted Kevin. “You’re dead! Goddamned fucking dead!”

  “Take it easy.”

  “Get this shit off of me! Get it off now! You don’t know what you’re fucking with!”

  “And what is that, Mr. O’Day? What am I fucking with?”

  “Ask her. Ask the bitch, you goddamned fascist.”

  “I’d rather hear it from you.”

  “Doomsday, you asshole! Fucking Twilight of the Gods.”

  Kevin went on fighting against the handcuffs until he lay exhausted and panting on the floor.

  “Just lie there a bit,” said Harry. “Once you start showing some sense, I’ll help you up.”

  Kevin saw Ali put something small and blue into Harry’s hand.

  “What’s this?” Harry asked.

  “Access data,” said Ali. “He needs it to keep track of everything he stole.”

  “The four hundred grand?”

  “A bit more, actually. Something like a billion and a half.”

  “Sheesh!” Harry tossed the drive into the air and caught it again.

  Kevin lifted his face from a puddle of saliva. “Don’t lose it, fascist. You’re going to want to give it back to me ASAP.”

  “How is that?”

  “You can’t hold me. You’ll see. I’m one very hot potato.”

  “Well, Mr. Potato, it’ll go a lot easier on you if you help us out. For starters, how do you disarm the bomb?”

  “You can’t disarm it. It can only be deactivated internally.”

  “How do you do that?”

  “You take off these goddamned cuffs and give me back my memory stick. That’s how.”

  “Not going to happen.”

  Kevin knocked his forehead angrily against the floor. “You’ll see.”

  Harry’s voice softened as he turned to Ali. “You’d better go on back to the ICU. Moving him could be dangerous, and I’d rather you weren’t around. I’ll call the ICU later if I need help.”

  “What’s going to happen?”

  “I’m taking him to the isolation room until the FBI decides what it wants to do with him. It’s close enough to Tower C that if the bomb goes off, he’ll go with it. That ought to give him an incentive to cooperate.”

  “Promise me you won’t hurt him. What he’s done is unforgiveable, but I couldn’t bear it if I knew that you were going to hurt him.”

  “Don’t worry, there won’t be any rough stuff. Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib are behind us. The FBI has some strict guidelines right now.” Harry looked at Kevin glaring back at him. “Not that there wouldn’t be justice in it.”

  Kevin sneered. “I’m not afraid of your billy clubs and cattle prods. Nor do I need anyone’s pity, jasmine flower. What you and our Gestapo friend here fail to realize is that I am still firmly in control.”

  For all his defiance, Kevin felt as though an ice pick had stabbed him through the heart. Moments ago he had commanded life and death from the all-seeing vantage point of his starship captain’s chair. Now he lay hogtied, panting on the floor with his shirttails out and his hair tousled like a wino. The worst of it was that she was seeing it. He was so pathetic that she had actually laid aside her hatred to try to cut a deal for him. He swore to himself it would not end like this. He would rise again. She would kneel to him before this day was done.

  Ali bent over him and touched the scratches she had made in his face, showing tears in her eyes that just twisted the ice pick deeper. “I’m sorry, Kevin,” she said. “I truly am. You had so much respect, accomplishments, integrity, love. What have you traded it for? A few numbers on a memory stick?”

  “Go screw yourself!”

  “I … I just didn’t realize that I had hurt you this much. I didn’t mean to. Believe me, Kevin.”

  “Just get out! Get the fuck out of here!” Pity. Fucking useless pity. He had never felt farther away from her. He had never hated her more.

  She did as he asked, her knee joints cracking softly as she stood up. Her lips seemed to tremble, or perhaps she was silently sobbing. Hands hanging at her sides, she shuffled slowly toward the exit.

  Harry headed her off, lowering his voice. “Could you do me one favor when you go upstairs? Phone Security and ask for Judy. I need her to send down Tom Beazle and Ed Guerrero right away with a stretcher and a couple of extra sheets. And then I need her to go down herself and manually disconnect the surveillance cams in the isolation room and the guardroom outside.”

  “All right.” Ali took one quick look back before disappearing into the hall.

  * * *

  Harry could hear a faint hiss as the hydraulic closer shut the men’s room door. Kevin seemed to grow calmer with Ali out of sight, and Harry went to where he lay, turned him over, and propped him sitting upright against the bathroom stalls.

  Kevin smirked at him. “I guess you think you looked like an all-American hero to her, busting me like that. But I’ve got news for you. She doesn’t go for that at all.”

  “It wasn’t about her, was it?”

  “Come on. I have eyes.”

  “Think what you like,” said Harry. He picked up his nightstick from the floor and stuck it under his belt. As he did so, he let his blazer open so Kevin could see that he was packing the Beretta. “Why would you let a woman like that walk out on you, anyway?”

  “Couldn’t stop her. She has some defective programming, you know.”

  “No, I wouldn’t know.”

  “Don’t get me wrong. You can have her as far as I’m concerned. She and I are over.”

  “Murder and prison will do that sometimes.”

  “Hey, I’m just speaking to your interests. Before you buy, look under the hood.”

  Harry tried to ignore him. He figured that Kevin was trying to get under his skin, either just for the hell of it or to goad him into doing something stupid. Christ, it would only be five minutes before Tom and Ed showed up, but it was looking to be a long five minutes.

  Kevin licked at one of the scratches near his mouth. “Married five years, fascist. I know things.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like her and Rahman. She tell you about him?”

  “Not much. I can see there’s bad blood.”

  “You got that right. Murder, madness, and one fucking unhappy family.”

  “Murder?”

  “Yeah. Back in Egypt. Ali had this older sister, Wafaa. A half-sister, actually. Full sister to Rahman. From all descriptions one hot-blooded and lusty chick. Plus, she had that old family stubborn streak. When the shit came down, she must have been, like, seventeen, and Ali four or five. Now, what she did, you and I would not consider a crime. Wearing makeup, riding in cars with guys, dancing, drinking, stuff a normal seventeen-year-old, reasonably hot girl would do. But over there, that makes you Jezebel. Her dad tried to lock her up in the house, but she would sneak out. Thus, lots of shouting matches, crying jags, door slams, crockery bombardments—and little Ali in the middle of it, understanding nothing, but trying to figure it out.

  “One day, Wafaa gets herself knocked up by a German petrochemical engineer with a souped-up Porsche, and even Dad doesn’t know what to do. But Rahman—he’s a guy who keeps his head. A master of both the theoretical and applied branches of moral discipline, he remembers that the big mufti from his school told him that a whole family goes to hell if there’s one slut in it. Which is bad, except that the solution is pretty simple. So Rahman takes Wafaa out for the last car ride of her life, and strangles the shit out of her in the desert. End of soap opera.”

  “Did Ali know about this?” Harry had s
ized up Kevin as a dyed-in-the-wool bullshitter, but the story did explain what he had seen for himself in the isolation room.

  “Not right away. But there was this sense in the family that there was, like, the judgment of God on this poor chick. Now a four-year-old can’t understand what real nastiness is. So what little Ali figures is that it was all the crying and shouting and tantrums and tears and laughing and shit that got Wafaa killed. She resolves to be a model little girl, ultra calm, not causing scenes for anybody. ’Cause if you let your feelings go, God will get you. This goes on year after year, till she even forgets what got it started. There’s just this little feeling of doom that makes her sick every time she has to tell what she really feels or thinks. Good feelings, bad feelings—either way it’s original sin. Thymophobia, to coin a word for it. When things get really tight, she’ll pull back into full catatonic, ice-princess mode. Lucky if she even answers to her name then. I often tried to debug her source code, but the problem seemed hardwired.”

  Harry looked away again. “I’ll bet you tried real hard.”

  “Fuck you, fascist.”

  There was a knock. Tom and Ed had brought the gurney.

  “Okay, pardner. Ready to move?”

  “Where are you taking me?”

  “To the ER. We have a special little room there for our really wacked-out psych cases.”

  “I need to talk to whoever’s in charge. You obviously haven’t got the brains to see the big picture.”

  “Soon enough.”

  Together the three lifted Kevin onto the stretcher and cuffed his right wrist and left ankle to the rails. Harry then covered him with a sheet, like a corpse. There were at least a dozen surveillance cameras in the corridors between the men’s room and Isolation. A human following the cameras would not be fooled by a mere sheet; he would question what was traveling under the sheet, and why it was being moved, not by orderlies, but by three security men. But what would a computer see? Might it not see as a dog sees, losing all thought of the ball when it is hidden behind one’s back? Harry was about to bet his life on it.

  With Harry in the lead, they rolled the stretcher out of the men’s room, making a dog-leg through the green-tiled corridors, until they came to a service elevator. Knowing Helvelius’s fate, Harry worried about the elevator, but the adjacent stairwell was too narrow for carrying the stretcher upstairs. So he got into the elevator alone with Kevin, and had Tom and Ed take the stairs. The elevator opened at the ground floor onto a small lobby between the Women’s Health Center and the sprawling warren of rooms and corridors that comprised the emergency room. From there it was a short run to Isolation.

  Raymond Lee, Judy Wolper, and three uniformed cops were already waiting at the guard station.

  “What the hell’s going on?” said an irate Lee. “I thought I told Dr. Gosling to throw your ass out of this hospital.”

  Harry looked up at the surveillance camera, where a dangling cable told him that Judy had followed instructions. “Got a present for you,” he said, tearing away the sheet with the brio of a stage magician. Instead of a bunny out of a hat there was the blinking face of Kevin O’Day. “This is our man,” he said. “Not Al-Sharawi. Al-Sharawi worked for this guy.”

  Kevin rose up on one elbow. “I know who you are,” he said to Lee. “You’re FBI. Some kind of psych profiler. Born in San Gabriel, California. Went to school at Columbia, got a Ph.D. in forensic psychology at CUNY. You’re divorced and have two kids. You also seem to be the brains of this pack of baboons.”

  Lee gave Harry a surprised look. “Who is this?”

  “My name is Kevin O’Day. I’m the head of computational research. I’ve read your personnel file out of the FBI database in Washington, D.C. I’ve been watching you since you got here. And I’m someone you need to take very, very seriously.”

  “I’m listening,” said Lee.

  “I have the power to vaporize you and this entire hospital. I can do that in a second if I want to. You’ve found one of my devices in the utility shaft in the second sub-basement, so you know I’m telling the truth. There are other devices as well. You will not find them, not until they make themselves known—”

  “Like the elevator in Tower A.”

  “Precisely.”

  “Why did you blow the elevator?”

  Kevin appeared taken aback. Perhaps it was even a shade of remorse that passed over his face. “Consider it a declaration of my seriousness.”

  “Very well.” Lee studied Kevin intently.

  “Now, if you correctly understand the gravity of the situation, you will immediately release me and return my property. You will refrain from any further interference in my actions. If you comply, things will be resolved to everyone’s satisfaction in a short time. If you refuse, you can kiss your ass good-bye.”

  Lee turned to Harry. “What property are we talking about?”

  Harry held up the flash drive.

  “What’s on it?”

  “Probably a billion and a half bucks.”

  “You’ve got to be kidding,” said Lee.

  “No kidding.” Harry let go of the flash drive as Lee gingerly took it between thumb and forefinger, as if it were extraordinarily fragile. “I should tell you,” Harry added, “that he’s got a computer controlling all the detonators, and watching everyone on the videocams. It’s supposed to be some kind of highfalutin supercomputer that can push the buttons on its own.”

  “You mean … what do they call it—Odin?”

  “That’s the one. It’s his baby.”

  Kevin rose up on his elbows. “Now do you understand me? Odin will not let you hold me. You are not in control. I am.”

  Lee scanned Kevin’s face, and then turned to Harry. “Does the computer know he’s in custody?”

  Harry shrugged. “I don’t know. But I think we have a stand-off for the moment. O’Day here can’t set off the bomb without blowing up himself, and he doesn’t strike me as the suicidal type. So holding him buys time for Avery’s squad to disarm the bomb.”

  “I see,” Lee said. Borrowing a key from Harry, he unlocked the handcuffs that chained Kevin to the stretcher. “Mr. O’Day, I regret that we’re going to need to hold you awhile, at least until we can fully consider your case.”

  Kevin shook his head. “Don’t listen to this yahoo. There’s nothing to consider. Do you want to live, or not?”

  At Lee’s direction, two of the uniforms lifted Kevin off the stretcher and began walking him into the isolation room. They had just crossed the threshold when Kevin tore free, spun around, and ran straight into the third uniformed officer, who threw him to the ground with a leg sweep and an elbow lock.

  “Let me go, you goddamned fascists!” he shouted. Immediately he was swarmed by cops. After a brief struggle, he was dragged back inside the isolation room and handcuffed to the drainpipe of a stainless steel toilet. The twisted ruins of Rahman’s bed were still piled against the opposite wall.

  Lee ordered one of the policemen to relinquish his gun and stand guard inside the room. “Keep your eye on him, and take note of every word he says.” Then, turning to Kevin, “Mr. O’Day, I’ll be back in a few minutes to listen to any statement you might care to make. In the meantime, Officer Dayton here will explain to you your rights in custody.”

  “You’ll be back, all right,” said Kevin, provocatively licking his lower lip. “Make sure you bring that flash drive with you.”

  * * *

  Back in Harry’s office, the black deadline clock read fifty-two minutes remaining. Scopes was sitting in the back, looking at one of the video monitors.

  “That’s the bomb squad,” said Scopes. “I just came from going over the scene with Avery. They’re having a helluva time getting X-rays of the bomb. The plan now is to drill a small hole in one corner of the casing, so they can pass a fiberoptic cable and get a look from inside. They have to drill real slow, to make sure there isn’t any heat or vibration. So it’s gonna take awhile.”

  Lee pul
led up a chair facing the desk and powered up his laptop. “Well, we’ve had some developments of our own, courtesy of Mr. Lewton.”

  “Oh?”

  “It turns out our mastermind is one Kevin O’Day, a computer specialist for the hospital. We have him in custody now.”

  “Is he cooperating?”

  As soon as his desktop had finished loading, Lee inserted Kevin’s flash drive into a slot in the rear. “Not so far. But we don’t need to wait for him. Get Judge Rosado back on the phone. We need new warrants ASAP to search O’Day’s apartment and his office, including any files in his computer or data drives. Tell him it’s a ticking bomb situation.” He turned and gave Harry a look like a professor forced to explain something obvious. “He’s got to have schematics of this bomb somewhere.”

  “What about Odin?” asked Harry.

  Lee suddenly scowled and slammed his laptop shut. The flash drive wouldn’t open without a password. With a flushed face, he turned back toward Scopes. “Lewton has a point. Call the Chicago office and have them send out the best computer people they have, on the double. From the cyber crimes squad, if possible. Hacker types.”

  Lee was about to say more, but he was interrupted by the “Foggy Mountain Breakdown.”

  “I thought you weren’t using your cell phone,” said Scopes.

  “I’m not calling out on it,” said Harry. “But there’s no harm in receiving.”

  “Who is it?” asked Lee.

  “It’s a text page. No callback number. It just says, ‘You’ve got mail.’” Harry sat down at his keyboard and typed his password. “See, there it is.”

  Poink! Lee and Scopes leaned together toward Harry’s computer. Opening his queue, Harry saw the tag “EXTREME IMPORTANCE.”