Pursuit

by ROBARDS, KAREN

  “Yeah, well, we hear that she’s a lawyer who works for John Davenport. We’re trying to get hold of him now, but he’s not at home and he isn’t answering his cell phone. The information we have—and it’s preliminary, but we think it’s good—is that the First Lady called Davenport, and he sent the car.”

  “Why?” But at least that probably meant Annette Cooper wasn’t out there chasing the drugs she was being slowly, forcibly weaned off of after all. Or maybe she was, and Davenport had found out and sent a car and a subordinate to get her off the streets.

  “Who the hell knows?” Lowell looked grim. “Look, you go to this Ford woman, and you keep her the hell away from the press. Stay with her until you find out what she knows. And if she knows anything, anything at all, that could in any way be harmful to the First Lady or the President, you get her to keep her damned mouth shut.” The glint in Lowell’s eyes reminded Mark just how ruthless the Chief of Staff could be. “You fucked up, now you clean up the mess.”

  Mark’s mouth compressed. Then he nodded and stepped into the elevator.

  5

  Something woke her. What?

  Jess didn’t know. All she knew was that she was breathing hard. Feeling weird. And instantly uneasy. Even as her mind came to full awareness her senses were alert, spurred by a kind of edgy sixth sense that told her something was wrong.

  Where am I?

  Her eyes blinked opened on—nothing. A blur of darkness. The feeling of being inside, with four walls around her and a ceiling she could not see not too far above her head.

  Cold, so cold.

  Biting down on her lower lip, she tried to control the violent shivers that claimed her. She felt groggy, disoriented. As if she were floating, almost. Her head throbbed. Her mouth felt like it was stuffed with cotton balls. Her body was one big dull ache that, paradoxically, did not hurt as much as she knew it should have. She had the feeling that she was alone, although earlier, she was almost certain she had heard her mother’s voice. Others she knew, too. Her sister Sarah’s, maybe.

  There were no voices now. No sounds, except a steady mechanical beeping and a dull hum and the slightest of drawn-out creaks. She didn’t know how it was possible that she could be so cold; she seemed to be swaddled to the armpits in layers of cloth. Against her body, the texture of the cloth was tightly woven and smooth, while the cloth her hands, which were on top of the pile, rested on was coarser and fuzzy. That, plus the firm resilience of the surface upon which she lay and the mounded softness beneath her head, led her to conclude that she was in a bed. A sharp, distinctive smell—antiseptic?—defined it further: She was in a bed.

  In a hospital.

  Annette Cooper. The wreck.

  Horror washed over her in an icy wave. Her stomach turned inside out. She felt a surge of dizziness so strong she almost sank back into the blackness again.

  Something’s wrong.

  That was the thought that kept her present. It was strong enough to beat back the wooziness that threatened to carry her away again.

  What?

  The darkness was not absolute, she discovered, as her eyes adjusted: There was the faintest of bluish glows to her right. Slowly she turned her head—moving required so much effort—to find that the bluish glow emanated from a cluster of free-standing machines near the bed. One showed what appeared to be a zigzagging line; it was the one producing the steady beep, and she thought it might be a heart monitor. If so, hers seemed to be beating right on track, with a good, steady rhythm. The deep hum seemed to come from somewhere overhead, possibly from the ventilation or heating system. The narrowing crack of light outlining the door beyond the machines pinpointed the source of a creaking sound: Someone was slowly, carefully closing the door to the room where she lay.

  Even as she discovered it, the sliver of light disappeared. The faintest of clicks announced that the door was now securely shut. The area behind the instruments had gone completely dark. But a blur of movement in the shadows where the sliver of light had been told her that she was not alone. A cold frizzle of wariness tingled along her spine.

  Who?

  Her heartbeat quickened as she heard light, quick footsteps. Her eyes widened as someone stepped around the machines. Then she got a blurred look at a tall form in blue scrubs.

  A doctor, then. Or a nurse. Someone medical, anyway.

  Her breath released in a near-silent whoosh. It was only then that she realized she had been holding it.

  Who were you expecting?

  “Are you awake?”

  The question was soft, so as not to disturb her if the answer was no. Although the darkness coupled with her bad eyesight kept her from getting a good look at him, it was obvious that the speaker was a man. A stranger. Could he see her eyes glinting at him through the darkness? She didn’t know. She knew only that the soporific tone of his voice contrasted oddly with his movements, which were swift and sure as he strode toward the head of her bed.

  “Yes.”

  Her voice was a mere thread of sound, creaky and tired. Her mouth was so dry that it was hard to form even that one short word.

  Swallowing to moisten her throat, she followed him with her eyes. She wanted to ask for information, for the conditions of the others in the car, but she didn’t have the strength. Her tongue felt thick and heavy, and pushing words out past it required more effort than she could summon at the moment.

  “Do you remember what happened?”

  He took hold of the tall metal pole standing at the head of her bed. When she saw the plastic bag swinging from it, saw the tubing, she realized that it was an IV pole. And she was attached to it, by a long, clear tube that ran down into the back of her hand.

  The liquid in the bag was emptying into her vein. Tape on her hand secured the needle in place.

  “Wreck,” she managed.

  “That’s right.”

  He was holding a syringe, she saw, and fiddling with her tubing, right there where it joined the bag.

  “What are you doing?”

  The vague sense of unease she had felt since opening her eyes intensified. He was lifting the syringe toward the tubing—which, since he was a doctor, shouldn’t have alarmed her at all.

  But it did.

  Why?

  “This will help you go back to sleep, sugar. Just close your eyes.”

  Again with the soft, soothing voice. Her lids drooped as his suggestion tempted her. To just close her eyes and drift into unconsciousness . . . How good would that feel? And how easy would it be to do?

  All of a sudden she remembered the nightmare shapes. But they belonged to the wreck. Not the hospital. She’d been found, rescued, and now she was safe. She could sleep if she wanted to.

  So tired . . .

  The light from the machines cast a blue glow over the floor. Jess found herself noticing it as her eyes drifted downward and he moved again, his feet shuffling in and out of the light. She forced her lids wide open and her gaze up and watched as he tugged impatiently on the tubing.

  Despite her best efforts, her lids felt as heavy, as if her lashes were made of concrete. She wanted to close her eyes in the worst way. But still that prickly sense that something was wrong would not leave her.

  “Are you . . . a doctor?”

  “Mm-hmm.”

  The tone of the murmur was comforting. The tubing was cooperating now, and he was, she saw, holding a port and positioning the syringe so that he could send its contents down the tubing into her body with a single quick depression of the plunger.

  Not good.

  The disturbing thought made her frown even as her eyes slid down his body toward the floor again. Where he was standing now, the blue glow spilled over his legs, illuminating them to the knees. The scrubs were too short for him, their legs ending some three inches above the hem of his black pants, black suit pants. Worn over shiny black wing-tip shoes marred by just a few stray bits of . . . what? Her vision was too fuzzy to be certain, but it could have been dead grass.


  Prickly grass cushioning her cheek . . .

  Jess’s heart gave a great leap and her eyes shot wide open. She sucked in air.

  “No! No, stop! Wait!”

  But he didn’t stop. He didn’t even glance her way. Instead, his thumb clamped down on the plunger. Jess couldn’t see clearly enough to watch it happen, but she imagined liquid shooting out of the needle into the tube that emptied into her vein.

  What liquid?

  The question exploded in her mind even as she grabbed for the needle in her hand. Her nails scraped at the tape and she yanked at the tube right where it met her tender skin. The needle—no, a small, clear plastic tube—ripped free of her flesh with a sharp, burning sensation that was as nothing compared to the terror rocketing through her veins.

  WHAT LIQUID?

  “What the . . . ?” The man snatched at the tubing, caught it, and stared at it in stupefaction for a split second as he saw that it swung free.

  He dove for her. She screamed. The bed, on wheels that apparently hadn’t been locked, careered toward the far wall as his body slammed against it.

  His hand, sweaty and warm, clamped around her wrist just as the front-left corner of the bed smacked into the wall and bounced away. As more screams tore out of her throat, she yanked her arm free.

  Run.

  Every instinct she possessed shrieked it, but to her horror she discovered she couldn’t run: Her legs just would not obey her brain’s urgent command. Desperate, Jess kicked violently, but the “kick” message somehow got scrambled on its way down to her legs and she ended up bucking on the hospital bed like a landed fish, screaming and fighting him off with flailing blows that missed more than they landed while the bloodied catheter she had torn from her arm swung behind him, spewing tiny drops of a cold viscous liquid that made her shudder with horror when they sprayed over her arm, her neck, her leg.

  He’d put something terrible in the bag. . . .

  “Shut up, you!” It was a hoarse growl.

  The empty syringe came flashing down toward her. With a burst of horror, she saw that he was wielding it like a knife now, meaning to stab her with it. Then a glimmer of light caught it and she realized that it wasn’t empty at all, or perhaps it was another, backup syringe, because it was full of liquid. His aim, she realized in that frozen instant in which she watched the clear tube with its glinting needle drive toward her body, was to plunge the needle into her, to release whatever liquid was in that syringe into her flesh directly, and never mind the IV now.

  Black shapes circling the flaming car . . .

  “No! Help! Help!”

  Screaming like a siren, Jess threw herself violently to one side just in the nick of time—and toppled off the side of the bed.

  6

  Tired to the bone but so wired he couldn’t have slept even if he had ignored Lowell and gone home, Mark pushed through the metal door that led from the hospital’s emergency staircase to the third floor. According to an ER nurse who had been extraordinarily cooperative from the moment he had flashed his badge—and smile—at her, Jessica Ford had arrived on that floor some fifteen minutes earlier. As they’d talked, he’d seen a plump blond woman the nurse had confidentially identified as Ms. Ford’s mother leaning over a desk and filling out paperwork. He wanted to reach Ms. Ford before her mother did, just in case she might be conscious and feeling chatty. He’d chosen to take the stairs rather than the elevator because the press was already on the trail of the story and had gathered in a seething, amorphous, ever-growing pack in the hospital lobby. The difficulty lay in the fact that some of them might recognize him, and then his presence at the hospital would become part of the story, leading to all kinds of speculation. No doubt at some point the harassed-looking security guards would force them outside, but he didn’t have the time to wait for that. It was easier to take the stairs and avoid the problem.

  If Ms. Ford had anything to say, he wanted to hear it first. There was nothing else he could do for Annette Cooper now except try to keep her all-American-mom image intact.

  He pushed the stairwell door shut behind him with an elbow and was striding down the hall toward Ms. Ford’s room when a blood-curdling shriek froze him in his tracks.

  It was a woman’s terrified scream, so shocking in this hushed, over-cooled, sterile environment that it made the hairs on the back of his neck spring to attention. A cold, hard fear seized him even as a terrible premonition jolted his world, even as his gaze shot down the long hallway that right-angled out of his sight just beyond the nurses’ station.

  For as far as he could see, the hall was dim and nearly empty and utterly incompatible with the explosion of sound that filled it as the woman screamed again and again, raw, jagged screams of pure fear that covered the pounding of his heart—and of his footsteps as he catapulted into a dead run.

  Jesus Christ, it wasn’t possible. . . .

  Mark didn’t finish the thought as he raced down the hall toward room 337, the room where Ms. Ford had been taken, where he knew with every bit of gut instinct he possessed that she was screaming like a crazy woman now.

  Why?

  It was useless to speculate. He didn’t want to speculate. He wanted the suspicion that oozed like venom through his brain to be wrong.

  Passing a frightened-looking nurse who had apparently paused to ring the security button before going to her patient’s aid and shoving aside an orderly, Mark burst into Ms. Ford’s room with his Glock at the ready and his heart pumping like a six-cylinder engine.

  “Freeze!”

  As the door bounced open he was through it, assuming firing stance, the echoes of her shrieks ringing in his ears as his eyes scanned the blue-tinged darkness for her—and whoever might be threatening her.

  Only she wasn’t screaming now. No one was. Except for the thundering of his pulse in his ears and the blip-blip-blip of some damned machine, the room was quiet as a cemetery at midnight.

  No one was there.

  No one that he could see, anyway.

  “Jessica!” he called.

  It was a two-person room, complete with two beds and two TVs and a number of chairs and what appeared to be enough medical instruments to keep half the hospital alive. The partially drawn curtain separating the halves of the room fluttered slightly, but despite that small movement, the room did indeed appear empty: Certainly both beds were unoccupied. They were out of place, though, with the nearer one much closer to the door than it should have been and the far one catty-corner against the window wall.

  Careful.

  His left hand hit the light switch as he advanced into the room on high alert, continuing to scan his surroundings although there wasn’t a soul in sight. The sudden brightness made him blink. Including the bathroom, the door of which was ajar, there were only a few places that he couldn’t immediately see, which meant there were only a few places for an intruder to hide.

  “Jessica?”

  Someone had been there, he could sense it, feel the energy of a recent presence. Despite the current silence, there was also no doubt in his mind that he had followed the screams to their source.

  So where the hell was she?

  “Jessica?”

  Coming warily around the foot of the far bed, the one that was pushed out of position, the one with the askew pillows and missing covers that the glowing machines facing it indicated had seen recent use, he found her. Swaddled in blankets, looking small and fragile, she lay facedown on the slick, gray floor, one delicate bare leg and foot curved toward the door, the other concealed by the bedcoverings that were twisted around her. Part of her back was bared, too, by the green hospital gown that imperfectly covered her. Her bare right arm stretched toward the bed. The other must have been tucked up under her body. Her tangled dark brown hair concealed her face, but still he had no doubt that it was her.

  “Jessica?”

  Mark crouched beside her, cautious still, keeping one eye on his surroundings, not quite ready yet to holster his gun. She was
breathing, he saw at a glance, and as far as he could tell had no obvious new injury. There was no pool of blood, no knife protruding from her back, nothing like that. His fingers closed around her wrist: She definitely had a pulse. He could feel it beating fast and strong.

  “Jessica, can you hear me?”

  Her head moved, and she murmured something that he couldn’t understand. She resisted his touch, trying to pull her wrist away, and he let go.

  “It’s okay. I’ve got you. You’re safe now.”

  As he glanced swiftly around the apparently empty space around them, suspicion continued to niggle at the edges of his mind. But so far suspicion was all it was; the truth was that he had no idea in hell what had happened to her. Maybe he’d get lucky and find that she’d just fallen out of bed.

  He prayed to God that was all it was.

  In the circles he moved in, the circles of loosely connected spooks and spies and personal protection officers and government agents who were all to differing degrees ready, willing, and able to do the dirty work of the powerful, the name of the hospital where she had been taken would be common knowledge by now. . . .

  Even as that thought arose to bug him, the orderly, several nurses, a couple of security officers, and who knew how many others burst through the door in a big, untidy knot.

  “Miss Ford . . .” It was a male voice.

  “Oh my God, he’s got a gun!” one of the women cried, and then they all practically fell over themselves as they tried to reverse or otherwise get out of harm’s way.

  “Secret Service.” Mark stood up, flashing his badge, and holstered his gun. Reassured, the security guards—a pair of retired cops from the look of them—stopped fumbling with their weapons and the rescue party resumed its mission, crowding around the woman on the floor.

  “Miss Ford? What happened?”

  One of the nurses, a thirtyish blonde, smoothed the hair back from the patient’s face. Mark caught a glimpse of a smooth, white cheek and a full, pale mouth. Her lashes flickered, but there was no reply.