Code White

by Scott Britz-Cunningham

  “Here it comes, boys,” said Harry. “The shit has officially hit the fan.”

  Harry opened the e-mail:

  RESTORE IMMEDIATE COMMUNICATION WITH DIRECTOR OF COMPUTATIONAL RESEARCH. FAILURE TO COMPLY WILL RESULT IN SWIFT AND SEVERE PENALTY.

  “What’s the return address?” asked Lee. “Evidently O’Day has a confederate.”

  “Not a human,” said Harry. “This is Odin.”

  Scopes was dubious. “The computer? Are you saying it can act by itself while we have O’Day in custody?”

  “His wife says it can.”

  Scopes laughed. “How do we know his wife didn’t send the message?”

  “Because she’s the one who turned O’Day in.”

  “Let’s call its bluff,” said Lee to Harry. “Type an answer: Director O’Day is in police custody in this building and will not be released. Detonation will result in the death of Director O’Day. Refrain from any unauthorized activity. Assist in the disarming of explosive devices and Director O’Day will not be harmed.”

  “Not sure that’s a good idea,” said Harry. “Who knows how Odin might react?”

  Lee went into professorial mode. “So-called thinking machines work by identifying the presence of key conditions, and matching these to a limited repertoire of preprogrammed responses. These are laid out by the programmer, and consequently fall entirely within the range of his own predispositions. I doubt that Mr. O’Day would have included any response that could cause his own death. Therefore, Odin, his creation, cannot choose such an action. On the other hand, the programmed response set may very well include actions designed to protect Mr. O’Day from harm. We can exploit those to our benefit.”

  Harry shook his head. “You sound awfully sure of yourself. From what I saw on television this morning, I’m not convinced that Odin was put together that way. Ali—Dr. O’Day, that is—thinks that Odin is not to be fucked with. She’s scared as hell about what he might do.”

  “What would you suggest? Release this prisoner?”

  “No.”

  “Give him access to the computer?”

  “No.”

  “Then your position is to refuse the ultimatum. You can do that tacitly, by simply doing nothing, or you can choose to reply, and hope that Odin’s response will reveal something about his programming and the options available to him. You don’t risk anything by answering. You can’t anger a computer. The risk lies in rejecting the ultimatum itself—and we’re both agreed on the necessity of doing that.”

  “No, we’re not agreed on anything. Quite frankly, I think you’ve got your thumb up your ass, and you’re likely to get us all killed. We need to bring Dr. O’Day down here, and get her take on this. She knows what we’re dealing with. We don’t.”

  “Absolutely not!” said Lee. “I don’t trust her. In fact, if your holding cell weren’t already occupied, I’d have her in custody already.”

  “What? She fingered O’Day for us. She risked her life helping to bring him in. How the hell can you not trust her?”

  “She has too many … points of intersection in this plot. Her brother. Her husband. Her phone records. This mysterious computer. There are many reasons why a coconspirator might sell out her accomplices. All I know is that she seems to stand at the exact center of this affair. I don’t know why, and until I do, it’d be foolhardy to regard her as anything but an object of suspicion.”

  “What a crock of shit!” said Harry. “I didn’t know they were giving out Federal badges to cretins this year.”

  Lee’s face turned red. “Mr. Lewton, I’m permitting you to remain in this room only because you seem to know something about Kevin O’Day. Quite frankly, I don’t trust you. And I don’t trust this woman you’re covering for.”

  Harry threw up his hands and kicked back his chair. “You want to send a message, you type it.”

  Lee scooted forward and began typing, using his two index fingers. When he was done, he hit “send” with a smart jab.

  Harry watched as Lee and Scopes huddled over the screen. A minute elapsed, then two, but nothing happened.

  “Checkmate,” said Scopes.

  “Let’s not celebrate yet,” said Lee. “Why don’t you make those phone calls while we’re waiting?”

  “Already on it,” said Scopes.

  Forty-one minutes left on the doomsday clock. “Shouldn’t you be trying to squeeze O’Day?” said Harry.

  “In good time,” said Lee. “If we push him too hard, it’ll just feed his God complex. We’re better off pretending to be a bit slow—even stupid. Once our cyber people get here, I’ll resume the interrogation, with our captive genius looking on as they fumble away at the keyboard. O’Day won’t be able to resist telling them off, and once he opens his mouth he won’t be able to shut it. After that, he’s ours. He’ll beg for the chance to take the bomb apart himself, just to show us how smart he is.”

  Too pat, thought Harry. You don’t even know this son of a bitch. How can you be so sure of what he’ll do?

  Scopes hung up the phone. “Warrants are coming by fax. The Cyber Team is on its way over with a police escort. They should be here in fifteen minutes.”

  “Now we’re in business,” said Lee. He got up to go to the fax machine, which sat on top of a lateral file cabinet. As he moved across the room, Scopes leaned forward to let him pass.

  These FBI pricks are hopeless, thought Harry. He needed to get to Ali, who had the only sane grasp of the situation. She had power over Kevin, too. The bastard was still stuck on her, and that translated into major leverage. But where was she? In the ICU? Harry turned to the row of video monitors behind his desk. Closest to him, he saw the feed from the utility shaft where the bomb squad was working. In the foreground was a man in a Kevlar helmet who was trying to drill into the metal housing of the bomb. Below him, half obscured by the glare of spotlights, a few other faces peered up—Avery among them.

  Harry tapped the toggle key on the monitor until the NICU came into view. Ali was sitting behind the nurses’ desk, writing in a chart binder. All he needed was an excuse to get away. “I’m going to check on the search teams,” he announced.

  “Are they still working?” asked Lee.

  “Damned right. And they’ll keep working until I know that every ounce of C4 is accounted for.”

  “Go, then. When I need you for O’Day I’ll put out an overhead page.”

  One last thing. Harry toggled a few more times until the ICU on 18C appeared. The picture was grainy and full of shadows, but he could make out his mother in the corner bed. She was awake, and even on the monitor he could see the rolling hand tremor of her Parkinson’s disease. If she’s awake, she must be doing better, he thought. I should check with Weiss.

  Suddenly, Harry felt his chair lurch up from the floor. There was a crack like splitting timber, followed by a deafening boom and a staccato trill of shock waves that knocked Lee to the floor, and sent books and planters crashing from the shelves. The room was thrown into darkness. In the distance, he heard a rumble and a chorus of terrified screams.

  “No! No! No!” shouted Harry. “Oh, fuck! He’s gone and done it!”

  There was a strange-smelling dust in the air, and Harry could hear someone coughing beside him. “Ray! Ray!” gasped Scopes. “Are you all right?”

  “My shin … yeah, yeah, I’m all right. Shit!” came the answer.

  The rumble died away, followed by waves of high-frequency vibrations. Then all was still, and the fluorescent lights began to flicker back on. From the corridors outside came the whooping sound of the automatic fire alarm. There were a dozen flashing red lights on the big status screen on the wall.

  “Was that it?” asked Harry. “Was it the big one?”

  “It was plenty big,” said Scopes.

  Together, Harry and Scopes lifted Lee to his feet and helped him to his chair. He had bruised his shin in the fall, but was otherwise unharmed.

  “That came from the towers, didn’t it?” asked Le
e.

  “Yes,” said Harry, studying the status screen.

  “Hell!” grumbled Lee. “Goddamned lousy hell!”

  “I’ve got some bad news, fellas,” said Scopes. The row of monitors on the back wall had rebooted, and Scopes was peering at the farthest one, as he leaned on the countertop with his arms spread wide.

  “What? What is it?” asked Lee.

  “We’ve lost the video from the bomb squad.”

  4:44 P.M.

  As Harry, Scopes, and Lee came running down the stairs to the second basement level, the first thing that hit them was the smell—an acrid smell of scorched insulation that reminded Harry of that house fire in Nacogdoches, but compounded with an odor Harry had never smelled before, something that made him think of vaporized steel and concrete. The fire alarm was blaring a glissando up and down like a slide whistle at an ear-splitting volume. As the three pushed through a pair of closed fire doors, they entered a darkened section of corridor, lit only by a couple of portable lights in the distance. Those marked the alcove where the bomb squad had gone to work barely an hour and a half before.

  The alcove was gone. In its place was a pyramid of rubble. The ceiling was lacerated by a ten-foot-wide hole, through which dangled sheafs of wires and twisted pipes and ripped-out struts—the sinews and nerves of a once-proud architectural wonder. The severed sprinkler pipes hemorrhaged water, making everything slick, turning the dust that covered everything into a half-inch layer of gritty white mud.

  Two bodies were already laid out on the driest portion of the floor, their faces blackened and unrecognizable, their upper bodies soaked in blood. Beyond them, in the apex of light, a half-dozen men frantically clawed through the rubble with crowbars and fingernails and the pick end of a fire axe. They panted and groaned as they heaved skull-sized chunks of concrete down onto the clattering floor. Their hands were bloody, but still they dug. One of their own was buried under the rubble.

  Someone shouted, “Jamal! Jamal!”

  Then something dark and glistening showed amid the rubble. A face—the face of a young black man, with a bit of police blue showing at the collar. Instantly everyone scrambled to pull away the debris that covered him.

  “Jamal! Jamal!” came a shout, above the infernal whooping of the fire alarm. Jamal neither answered nor opened his eyes. Once his chest had been cleared, his body slid easily out of the rubble, with no right arm and no legs to anchor him. The men carried him down the small hill of concrete and laid him on the floor, next to the two other bodies they called Bill and Roman.

  Captain Avery, his chest heaving, his hair dripping with water from the broken pipes, led the rescuers. Among them Harry counted four bomb techs, Wilks, and an HVAC workman. The HVAC man had a deep gash over one eyebrow that was still bleeding down the side of his face.

  “Who else? Who else?” shouted Avery above the fire alarm.

  “Tony. Tony’s missing,” one of the techs shouted back.

  “Where was he?”

  “In the shaft.”

  “Oh, God! Oh, Jesus! Tony!” Avery turned and clambered back up the pyramid, getting almost to the top before his way was blocked by a sagging steel beam. “Tony! It’s Glenn! We’re gonna get you out, Tony! Just hold on for five minutes. Five minutes, for Chrissake! D’ya hear me, Tony? Five minutes!”

  “I can see his foot!” shouted one of the techs, who had climbed to Avery’s side. Together they clawed away the rubble, sending a small avalanche of concrete chunks down the side of the pyramid. In a moment they had recovered it—a human foot, still clad in a spit-polished black steel-toed duty boot—and that was all.

  While the techs went on digging, Avery slowly slid down to the floor, holding the boot like a Communion chalice, never taking his eyes off of it. Then he got up, and with wobbly, sleepwalking steps, made his way to the trio of bodies and laid the boot in their midst. For a moment he stood, viewing the remains of his men. Harry thought he saw Avery’s lips moving—whether praying or simply trembling with emotion, he could not tell.

  Suddenly Avery turned and charged to the base of the pyramid. “What are you doing, you sons of bitches!” he shouted. “Lay into it! Clear that shit away! Dig like you give a fuck, you good-for-nothin’ momma’s boys!” And then he turned around, addressing no one in particular. “For the love of God, can’t somebody shut off that God … damn … fire alarm!”

  Just then a team of orderlies raced up with a pair of gurneys, and in their wake came a dozen firemen carrying ropes, oxygen tanks, crowbars, and ammonium phosphate fire extinguishers. In a moment the area around the rubble pile was thronged with diggers. Among them Harry saw a flash of something black and white—the uniform of his own security force. Pushing his way through the crowd, he found the face of Tom Beazle.

  “Tom!” shouted Harry. “Over here! I need you to get to a house phone and have them shut off the alarm. Got that? Also the sprinkler water, the gas and oxygen to this sector. I need it all shut off now!”

  Tom said something inaudible and took off running.

  Harry made his way over to Scopes and Lee. Lee was using his cell phone to take photos of the bodies.

  “Was that it?” Harry shouted.

  “What?” Lee shouted back.

  “Was that it? The bomb? The big bomb?” Harry felt his heart go out to the men who had just died. But the hospital was still standing, with only four dead and not a thousand. If this was all the bomb could do, it would be a relief. He could live with four dead instead of a thousand.

  But Scopes shook his head. “Nowhere near five hundred pounds of C4. The blast was directed downward, from a point several feet below the device we saw an hour ago. This was a booby trap—not the main bomb.”

  “Not the big one?” Harry wasn’t sure he’d heard Scopes right.

  “Not the big one. Think a hundred times this big.”

  “Aw, Jesus Christ!”

  Lee pinched Scopes’s shoulder. “Stay here. See what you can figure out. I’m going to call upstairs and see if our hackers are here yet.”

  Harry noticed that some of the lights in the area were moving around. When he looked more carefully he saw a blond woman in a turtleneck standing in the midst of all the pandemonium. It was Kathleen Brown.

  Harry pushed his way over. A technician was moving a portable light from side to side while Dutch held up a meter to check the white balance reflected off Kathleen Brown’s face.

  “Are you out of your minds?” shouted Harry. “It’s not safe for you to be filming here.”

  Kathleen Brown cupped her hand over one ear.

  Harry repeated himself, louder, exaggerating his lip movements to make sure she understood him. “I said you can’t film here.”

  “We have an agreement,” she shouted back.

  “No. Not for this.” Harry grabbed her by the wrist and dragged her through the crowd, off toward the place where the corridor started to get dark again.

  Just then the fire alarm shut off, but Kathleen Brown still went on shouting. “We have a right to be here! The public has a right to know what’s going on!”

  “No, it’s too dangerous. We could have a cave-in. Plus there’s still a massive bomb just above us that can go off at any time.”

  “It’s our job. Dutch was a war correspondent. Danger is nothing new.”

  “That’s right,” said Dutch. “I was embedded with the 101st Airborne in Baghdad.”

  “Look at this pile of rubble,” said Harry. “That could be you.”

  “Are you throwing us out?” asked Kathleen Brown. “Do I need to have our network president call Dr. Gosling?”

  Harry fished a quarter out of his pocket and slapped it into the palm of Kathleen Brown’s hand. “Here. The call’s on me.”

  “I know why you don’t want us reporting this story. You’re afraid of what I might say about you.”

  “The hell I am.”

  “I know all about Nacogdoches, Mr. Lewton—or should I say, Police Lieutenant Harry Lewton. Don’
t act surprised. We get paid to ask questions. Sometimes the ghosts of the past don’t want to stay buried, do they?”

  “You don’t know jack shit about Nacogdoches.”

  “Well, now, here’s the deal. I can either report on this bomb, or I can find something else to put on our evening news show. How about an old story about police incompetence, cowardice, a couple of dead kids? There’s human interest for you. That’s what I’m good at, right? A promising young lieutenant finds his life on the skids after being run out of town for … for what?”

  “Save it for the pigeons. Put it on a prime-time special, for all I care. I’ve been there before. But let me tell you, my conscience is at peace with Nacogdoches. I did what I knew to be right. And I’ll do it now, too. God knows, it would give me satisfaction to see you people blown to dust. But I’m responsible for the safety of everyone in this hospital—and that includes you.”

  Captain Avery—hatless, seeming a decade older now that his dark hair was flecked with white dust and plaster—came stumbling toward the camera lights. “What’s going on?” he asked.

  “Mr. Lewton is telling us we can’t film here,” said Kathleen Brown.

  “Well, you shouldn’t. It’s dangerous,” said Avery. “I just had three … four men killed.”

  “We’re willing to accept the risk,” said Kathleen Brown. “We’ll stay out of your way. But there’s a nationwide audience that deserves to see the courage and dedication of these men of yours up close.”

  “Network TV, is it?”

  “Yes. By tomorrow you’ll be one of the most famous men in the country, Captain Avery.”

  “Screw that.”

  “What about these men that died? I can guarantee you the whole country will know and honor their sacrifice. They’ll be celebrated as heroes.”

  Avery looked back toward the rubble. At the top of the mound, one of the firemen was trying to hack his way into the utility shaft. “How many people do you need?” he asked Kathleen Brown. “Bare minimum?”

  “Three. Me, Dutch, and a lighting man.”

  “All right. As long as you accept the risk. And I won’t have you taking pictures that will upset the families of these men that died.”