A Heartbeat Away

by Michael Palmer

  From a small television set embedded into the back of the cabby’s seat, Angie watched the latest Fox News report from the Capitol. The broadcast reporter was a sharply dressed woman in her late twenties, and behind her were hundreds of television cameras from other news outlets jockeying for the most eye-catching shot. Despite the reporter’s complete confidence in her story, Angie knew the information she was reporting was woefully inaccurate. Allaire’s PR machine had done a masterful job categorizing the virus threat as flulike and explaining the extensive security measures as precautionary only.

  Angie turned the volume off, unwilling to listen to any more misinformation. She knew the truth—hell, she had the story of the century to report. All she had to do was direct the driver to any of a number of media outlets in New York, and in no time she’d be given her choice of plum jobs and probably a seven-figure book deal as well. But the country was at stake, and for the first time in her professional life, she opted for perpetuating a lie over printing the truth.

  When she arrived at her Midtown destination, Angie paid the fare plus tip in cash. Genesis had found ways to frame Griff and to bypass the security system at the State of the Union Address. There was no reason at this point to underestimate their resources, creativity, or viciousness. It was hard to believe her credit card transactions were already being monitored, especially given that Genesis had no reason to know who she was or how she was involved with Kalvesta, but there was no sense in taking chances.

  Angie had never lived in New York City, but she always felt at home there. Once on Broadway, she located Sliplitz’s number, and rang the buzzer to apartment 3E. Seconds later, she heard the intercom click on.

  “Da?” said a man’s voice.

  “Gottfried, it’s me.”

  “Ah, zis gloomy day is suddenly brighter,” replied the heavy German accent.

  Angie quickly opened the outside and inner doors, entering the dreary foyer before the buzzer shut off. She walked up to the third floor, carrying her small suitcase rather than bouncing its wheels against every stair. Her energy was returning—the fog that had slowed her down following the horrible ride from Kalvesta had lifted. She was back on the job. This was what she lived for. Her ADD personality was made for the frenetic, unpredictable world of reporting.

  The man who answered the door to 3E was short, fat, bearded, balding, and, he had told her over the phone, recently divorced for the fourth time. Of all her professional contacts, Gottfried Sliplitz had proven to be one of the most useful. When they first met, Sliplitz was an analyst with the Health and Human Services Agency in Rockville, Maryland. Angie was researching a story about salmonella contamination at a local drug manufacturing plant, and Sliplitz was a source. Within minutes of her concluding their first interview, the affable German professed his love for her. To prove it, he falsified documents that gave her unprecedented access to plant employees and corporate records.

  The story of greed gone bad and public safety ignored was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. It didn’t win, but she came close to winning a jail sentence for contempt of court, for not giving up her contact at the HHSA. She knew never to turn on a source—especially one like Gottfried Sliplitz. As a result of that code, she had come perilously close to jail for contempt on several other occasions as well. Now she needed the man’s help again. And with his adoration for her still in bloom, he was more than willing to oblige.

  “You look vonderful, liebchen. Can you come in for a while?” Gottfried asked, his eyes begging the way a puppy might plead for a pat.

  “Thanks for the offer, Gottfried, but I don’t have time. Were you able to get me what I need?”

  “I am chief analyst for ze New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene,” Gottfried said. “Big step up from Rockville. Good money, too.”

  “Strange name, though.”

  “It could have been vurse. Ve are also responsible for dog licenses, developmental disabilities, und STD prevention, to name just a few.”

  He extracted a manila envelope from a drawer and handed it to her. “With these papers, you are officially an investigator in our department.”

  Angie kissed Sliplitz on the cheek and hugged him.

  “You’re the best, Gottfried. I promise, soon as I can I’ll make it up to you.”

  “On a date?”

  She smiled at him.

  “I’ve just started seeing a terrific man. Besides, I need to keep our relationship professional. Think of what could happen if we turned sour? I would lose a dear friend and an invaluable resource.”

  “I’ll take ze risk.”

  “But I won’t. Look, I have lots of friends I can hook you up with,” she promised. “Just not right now.”

  “You break my heart.”

  She kissed him again on the cheek.

  “Luckily, you heal quickly. Between us, right? Nobody knows about this?”

  “Between us,” Sliplitz confirmed.

  Angie gave the man a final embrace before she departed. As she headed down the staircase she passed a man on his way up. He was wearing dark sunglasses, and grunted a greeting as he brushed past her.

  Once on the street, Angie flagged another cab. As they pulled away, headed downtown, the driver of the Town Car parked behind them set his cell phone aside and followed.

  CHAPTER 34

  DAY 5

  2:00 P.M. (EST)

  Angie stepped from her cab into a world as far from the rolling plains and bison ranches of western Kansas as imaginable.

  Chinatown.

  The lower Manhattan neighborhood featured pungent odors, tightly packed shops and apartments, cracked sidewalks, brick buildings with red-painted fire escapes, double-parked trucks casually blocking traffic, and nerve-shaking noise from blaring horns and a dozen active construction sites. Storefront signage was in Chinese with a smattering of English subtitles. Many of the goods displayed in windows underneath neon signs were unlikely to be found in any other part of the city. Fruit stands, fish markets, and shops selling knickknacks to tourists lined the narrow, winding, overcrowded streets.

  Angie stood in the entrance of a redbrick building she guessed might have once been a tenement. There was no sign identifying the nursing home, although she confirmed the address was the one on the brochure she had found in Sylvia’s office. She pressed the only button on the building’s facade and a high-pitched voice on the intercom said something in Chinese.

  “Department of Health and Mental Hygiene,” Angie said, holding up her fake ID badge to the security camera installed overhead. The photograph laminated into the card was one Gottfried Sliplitz had taken from her Facebook page.

  There was a lengthy pause before the door buzzed. She entered into a cramped, poorly lit hallway, dominated by an ornate, rickety wooden staircase that ascended steeply in front of her. The unmistakable odor of cooked fish and salt drifted down from the floors above.

  Stepping into character, Angie hid her suitcase behind the stairwell. She looked around for an elevator, but saw none. Curious. Surely a nursing home had to have one.

  Eschewing the stairs, she headed down the hallway, which turned once to the right and ended at a heavy metal door that was locked. It was possible there was an elevator somewhere behind it, but that made little sense. Perhaps the nursing home had been merged with the building next door and that was where the elevator was.

  Finally, she returned to the front hallway and trudged up the steep stairs, still wondering how a nursing home could exist without some sort of transport for disabled and wheelchair-bound residents. As she ascended, the sound of voices grew louder. She stopped on the fourth floor, where the chatter was the loudest, the odor the strongest. A small sign nailed to a shuttered door read RIVERSIDE beneath its corresponding Chinese characters.

  Angie paused to catch her breath, then knocked. A haggard, middle-aged Chinese woman responded. She had short dark hair streaked with gray, and wore a black blouse with a swirling, orange floral design. Angie held up he
r Health and Mental Hygiene identification card, and was suspiciously invited one step inside. She felt slightly foolish at having come so far on such little evidence. If she were wrong about the Riverside, she would be flying back to Garden City by morning.

  “Does a Mrs. Chen reside here?” she asked.

  The woman shook her head, shouted something into the space behind her, looked quizzically back at Angie, and shook her head again. Angie wished that she had the picture of Sylvia and her mother to show, but Griff had warned her that the chemical and ultraviolet decontamination process required to remove it from the Kitchen would have ruined the image altogether.

  “May I come in?” she asked.

  The woman nodded, spoke again in Chinese, and then motioned for Angie to enter. They stepped into a narrow, oak-floored hallway that featured rows of doors with numbers, but no glass, presumably residents’ rooms, extending in both directions. It was more dormlike than any nursing home Angie had ever visited, but the corridor was also remarkably clean and fairly free of clutter. Several walkers and wheelchairs were pushed up against the wall, plus an empty hospital bed provided the only visible clue as to the building’s function.

  Angie followed the woman until they came to an open, brightly lit common area. There were two dozen or so elderly Chinese women and men seated on couches and easy chairs, or clustered around foldout bridge tables. Many of them were talking, seemingly at the same time. Some of the residents were playing games—backgammon, cards, and Mahjong. Others were watching television. A few were simply staring off, perhaps at their memories.

  Angie scanned the room for Sylvia Chen’s mother. Lack of any possible candidates continued to erode her confidence in her conclusions about the place. Had she put Gottfried at risk for nothing? Melvin too? Suddenly the nonlinear thinking of her ADD, which had so often helped her break a story, seemed childish, misguided, and even worse, potentially dangerous.

  A stunning young Chinese woman approached from across the lounge, requested her credentials, and examined them with care.

  “Hello, Ms. Donna Prince,” she said finally, in perfect English. “My name is Wu Mei. Please call me Mei. I am the floor manager and duty nurse in charge. My aunt told me you are looking for someone.”

  “Yes. I’m looking for a woman. Her family name might be Chen. I have reason to believe she’s a resident here.”

  “We have several Chens living here,” Mei said with a brief laugh. “It is a very common Chinese name. Perhaps if you could be more specific.”

  Again, that photograph.

  “Her daughter’s name is Sylvia if that helps.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “Is there some sort of problem?”

  “We have reason to believe Mrs. Chen’s daughter may have come in contact with a very contagious virus, and then visited her mother here,” Angie said, retelling the story she had conjured up during the flight from Denver. “We are searching for both the mother and the daughter. I’ll need access to all the rooms in this facility.”

  “Goodness!” Mei replied, setting her hand to her lips in a show of genuine alarm. “Nothing like what’s happening in Washington, I hope.”

  “Possibly. We need to find these women to do some blood work.”

  “I’ll be happy to help you look,” Mei said. “This floor is for our low-acuity residents. Higher-acuity patients are on the upper floors.”

  “I appreciate your cooperation. It will be noted in my report.”

  “Right this way.”

  Mei led Angie back to the stairs.

  “Pardon me, Wu Mei, but I went to take your elevator up here and could not find one on the first floor. I wondered how you transport your residents from floor to floor and down to the street.”

  Mei did not reply immediately, and in fact, kept walking to the stairs. The silence was awkward. Suddenly, the nurse stopped and turned.

  “Could I see your credentials again, please?” she asked.

  Angie felt herself go cold. Her backup plan, which probably could have been her first choice all along, was simply to tell the truth. But with the FBI failing to find Sylvia Chen, and Genesis eerily prescient, some sort of deception seemed called for.

  Now, it appeared, she had been caught.

  She handed over her ID.

  The young nurse, looking genuinely distressed, scanned it briefly and handed it back.

  “We have one,” she said gloomily. “At the back of the building. But we don’t use it very much, and I believe my aunt and uncle, who own this place, have had a long-standing arrangement of some kind with the building or the nursing home inspectors. Please, please don’t say anything about it in your report. The elevator is very old, but I have heard my uncle say that the cost to replace it and the structural support around it would force them to close down. And there is really nothing like this place for our Chinese elders.”

  “I understand,” Angie said. “You have nothing to worry about from me.”

  “Oh, thank you. Thank you so much. I was going to walk you up to the sixth floor. Why don’t we ride instead?”

  Angie kept the visage of Sylvia’s mother clear in her mind as she followed Mei down the hallway and to the right. The elevator—truly ancient—was precisely where she had guessed it would be. Mei lifted the wide, double doors and Angie stepped inside the darkened car, turning around and then instinctively backing a step toward the rear wall.

  “Stop! Don’t move any more!” Mei cried out in alarm.

  She pointed behind Angie at a gap of about two feet between the steel elevator floor and the wooden back wall. Immediately, Angie took a precautionary step forward. Mei closed the doors, then used a key to engage the motor. The car clattered to life and traveled slowly upward, with Angie wondering how close this lift might be to the original one built by Otis in the mid-nineteenth century.

  “How long has Riverside been in business?” she asked.

  “Since the nineteen forties. My great-grandparents opened the place because too many Chinese were forced to send elderly parents to facilities that did not respect our traditions.”

  The elevator came to a hard stop and Angie momentarily lost her balance. Mei turned the key once more to lock the system, then lifted open the door, and motioned for her to follow.

  They started with the room closest to the elevator, and immediately, Angie felt a jolt of excitement. Her search was over. Seated on a small vinyl-covered chair, in the corner of a stark space illuminated by light coming through a small, grimy window, and also from a bedside table lamp, was a woman probably in her eighties. But as Angie introduced herself, knelt down, and studied the woman’s deeply etched face at closer range, her certainty faded as quickly as it had come.

  She could be Sylvia’s mother, Angie thought—but just as probably, she is not. The eyes, the vague expression—there was something about them that made Angie now feel that her initial reaction had been wrong.

  “That’s Mrs. Li,” Mei said, not bothering to move away from the woman. “She is one of our Alzheimer residents. She drifts in and out of lucidness, but as a matter of fact, she does have a daughter who visits.”

  “Go on, please.”

  “Well, first of all, her daughter has been badly scarred by a fire, and keeps her face covered, so I really can’t describe her.”

  “That’s all right,” Angie said, feeling a nugget of suspicion materialize around what seemed like something of a coincidence.

  “Let’s keep looking,” Mei said.

  Three floors and sixty room checks later, they were back where they had begun.

  “And you’re sure that nobody’s off-site?” Angie asked. “Visiting with family? Out shopping?”

  Mei shook her head.

  “Not at so close to dinner. And no, I checked the books after we finished in the rooms at the change of shifts. All of our residents are on the premises.”

  Angie felt a wave of frustration wash over her.

  What now?

  She asked to see Mrs. Li
one more time, but the visit was again unproductive. The woman was significantly older than the one Angie remembered from the photograph in Chen’s office. For a moment, Li seemed to brighten at the mention of the name Sylvia, but just as quickly the glimmer went away.

  “Well, I want to thank you again for your cooperation,” she said. “You’ve been extremely gracious with your time.”

  “If I come across anybody named Chen with a daughter Sylvia, I’ll be sure to contact you, Ms. Prince.”

  “Thank you,” Angie said, though she knew the phone number on the business card Sliplitz had made for her would connect to a nonworking number.

  Back to Kansas.

  Angie retrieved her suitcase and stepped outside into a biting, late afternoon wind. She searched for a cab, saw that none were coming, and trudged off in the direction of Houston Street, where more were sure to pass. She crossed the alley dividing Riverside and another brick building, which brought her in front of a Chinese restaurant. It was only then that she realized how long it had been since she had last eaten.

  The aroma wafting from the modest-sized place beckoned her inside. Even at this hour, the restaurant was busy, mostly with Asians—the indicator Angie had always, without any hard evidence, come to associate with quality, authentic Chinese food. There was an open table near the kitchen. She maneuvered through narrow gaps between chairs and dodged the hustling waitstaff on her way to a seat.

  How will Griff take the news? she was wondering.

  In one inspired burst she had failed to find the only link to Genesis and the ultimate proof of his innocence.

  “It was still worth it,” she said aloud, though her words lacked conviction.

  Lost in thought, she did not notice the waitress standing beside her table. The woman turned over Angie’s teacup and filled it from a steaming, metal pitcher. Angie glanced up and her breathing stopped.

  The waitress was Professor Sylvia Chen.

  CHAPTER 35