Code White (16 page)

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As soon as the door latch had clicked, Avery whistled. “That’s one cold-blooded tootsie you’ve got there.”

Lee rested his chin on his hands. “Remarkable, yes,” he said. “Except for a couple of moments, her voice and facial expressions were perfectly controlled. Even when she did show some emotion, she never gave anything away. Very disciplined.”

Avery clapped his hands on the desktop and slouched back into his chair. “We should have taken her downtown. The prospect of a night behind steel bars might’ve gotten her singing.”

“I doubt that,” said Lee. “She’s a gutsy one.”

Harry couldn’t believe what he was hearing. These guys had botched it. They had taken a very remarkable, classy woman who had no reason to stonewall them and then they had poked her and prodded her and shredded her self-respect until she had no choice but to act like a cornered animal. There was no need to abuse her like that. Five minutes of intelligent conversation would have told them everything they wanted to know. But instead they had made her hostile. Good luck getting anything out of her in the future.

If Harry had had his way, he would have ordered all these bunglers out of his office and taken over the investigation himself. It was his medical center and his people who were at stake. Avery was a ham-fisted bully, and Lee was even worse. Lee liked to sit there like Yoda and pretend he could get into people’s heads and lay traps for them and little by little turn up the heat until he could force them to reveal the truth. Even when shit like that worked, it was the long way around. Harry didn’t crack that Colombian ring by giving anyone the third degree. He got a lot further just by sitting down with the right person over beer and nachos.

“I don’t see her like you guys do at all,” said Harry. “Actually, I thought she looked pretty scared.”

“Scared?” asked Lee. “Scared of what?”

Harry resisted giving him the obvious answer, in four-letter words. “You came on a little hard.”

“You did say you thought she was holding something back, didn’t you, Mr. Lewton?”

“Well, the e-mails … Something cracked her cool, yes.”

“Yes, I saw it, too. A tiny chink in her armor,” said Lee, tapping his chin with his fingertips, his hands folded like a monk in reflection. “She resisted frontal pressure very well. But when you showed her sympathy, you took her by surprise. What do you suppose was behind it?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think she’s guilty. Do you? Seriously?”

“I wouldn’t say ‘guilty.’ Only that she’s … interesting.”

Scopes looked at Lee. “What do you want to do?”

“Well, it’s clear that questioning her further won’t give us anything. We’ll learn a lot more just by watching her. Mr. Lewton, will we have any trouble keeping an eye on her with this high-tech system of yours—what did you call it, Cerberus?”

Harry sighed.
More of the long way around.
“There are virtual gateways at several key locations in the hospital. They’re kind of like the drive-through E-Z passes on the tollways. Every time you walk through one of them, your ID badge registers on the system. It’ll give us a rough idea of where she is at any given moment. If you need finer detail than that, most of the corridors and public spaces are under video monitoring. You can switch between cameras, and orient them by keyboard controls. Like so.” He adjusted the controls, flipping between cameras until he caught an image of Ali, who looked like she was sleepwalking down the Pike. “There she is. See her?”

“Good. We can watch her from here. Will we know if she tries to leave the hospital?”

“Yes.”

Lee turned to Avery. “Give your men orders to arrest her if she does.” Then, swiveling his chair toward Scopes, he tapped his index finger against the palm of his other hand, as if counting to himself. “Call the district office. Tell them to get hold of a federal judge. We’re going to need a couple of search warrants ASAP. Phone and e-mail records, premises of house and office.”

“Let’s not rush to judgment here,” said Harry.

“Relax,” said Lee haughtily. “If it were to come to that, she’d already be in shackles.”

Harry was surprised to see how Avery and Scopes jumped into action when Lee gave the word. Scopes was a colleague, and Avery was the Incident Commander, the one who was supposed to be in charge. But both of them took orders from Lee like an office girl taking shorthand.

There was a knock on the door and Harry got up to answer it. Through the glass of the door he could see Tom Beazle’s scraggly, freckled face. Tom was breathing hard, and was looking up, down, and in every direction like a frightened pigeon.

“What is it, Tom?” asked Harry, letting him in.

“Trouble. We got trouble. That TV crew? The ones filming that surgery? Well, they’re out by the bomb squad trailer, taking pictures of some of the techs. They’re onto it all by now.”

Harry smiled. “It was just a matter of time. Don’t worry, Tom. I’ll go down and talk to ’em.”

“Better hurry!”

“Okay.” Harry turned to the men behind his desk. “I’ve got to go plug a leak. If you guys need anything in the meantime, ask for Judy in the control room.”

Lee tapped his pencil on the desk. “Make sure you do plug it. If this gets on to the air prematurely, we could have a full-blown panic on our hands.”

Now Lee was ordering him around, too. “Check!” said Harry, raising two fingers to his eyebrow as he sprinted out the door.

11:38
A.M.

In the alleyway between the main block of the medical center and the row of research buildings that had sprung up behind it, a thirty-foot-long white motor home was parked between a red fire truck and a row of blue-striped police cars. On any other day, the presence of the fire truck and police cars alone would have raised more than a passing curiosity, but today the motor home, with its eye-catching inscription “Chicago Police Department Bomb Squad,” commanded attention like a condor in a flock of sparrow-hawks. In particular, it had become a magnet for the film crew of
America Today
.

As Harry strode down the alley, he saw a huddle of people beside the motor home, some of them in police duds, some in the T-shirts and jeans that were the internationally approved uniform of cameramen and sound men and lighting technicians. There was a glow in the air, and Harry was surprised to see that powerful lights had been turned on to illuminate a scene that was already in broad daylight. As he got closer, he saw Kathleen Brown, now out of her scrubs and wearing a crème turtleneck and dark green skirtsuit, holding a microphone in the face of a slightly bewildered bomb tech.

“… and that was all the department told you?” Kathleen Brown was asking.

“Uh, yeah. Standby,” said the tech.

Harry stepped through the ring of lights and reflectors. “Ms. Brown, my name is Harry Lewton,” he said, commandeering the attention of everyone on the scene. “I’m the chief security officer for this medical center.”

“At long last, Mr. Lewton.” Kathleen Brown feigned a smile. “I’ve been trying to reach you by phone all morning.”

“I’ve been busy, as you might understand. I believe that your assistant—who did the calling for you—was informed that Dr. Gosling, the president of the medical center, would be providing a full statement this morning.”

“I have a copy of that statement, Mr. Lewton. It’s a pathetically skimpy whitewash.” She held up a sheet of paper and began to read aloud.

“‘As of 7:45 this morning, the Fletcher Memorial Medical Center has been operating under a Code White, due to a bomb threat received from an as yet unidentified source. While no bomb has been found, a standard search protocol is ongoing, and the police and fire departments have been requested to assist in the investigation. Bomb threats against this medical center occur several times a year, but have never resulted in a single injury or explosion. We are, however, taking every possible action to ensure the safety of every patient, visitor, and staff member at FMMC. Their well-being is our highest priority.

‘Further updates will be issued as they become available.’”

“That’s as accurate as can be,” said Harry.

“Did you write this statement, Mr. Lewton?”

“More or less.” Harry suddenly found himself in the center of the glow of lights.

“This amount of police presence seems unusual for a routine, unsubstantiated bomb threat. I’m told that the FBI has also been called into the investigation—something not mentioned in your statement.”

“Some FBI advisors are here unofficially, at the request of the Chicago Police Department.”

“Is that routine?”

“As long as I’m the chief of security, yes, it’s routine to use every available resource to guarantee the safety of this hospital and the people in it.”

“That’s a great line, Mr. Lewton, but I don’t buy it.”

“I’m not selling anything.”

“What did you find in the second-floor Endocrinology Clinic this morning, Mr. Lewton?”

Harry suddenly felt like a lone tuna in a school of sharks.
Ah, the dainty little powder-puff poodle wants to play bloodhound
. He had had run-ins with reporters before, and there wasn’t a single one of them who wouldn’t sell his grandmother for a scoop. The memories turned his stomach, but he knew that if he wanted to keep things from getting out of control, his best leverage would lie in Kathleen Brown’s ambition. “Any discussion of that will have to be off camera,” he said.

“The camera is the eye of the public. Why are you afraid of the camera, Mr. Lewton?”

“Spare me your slogans. I’m offering you an exclusive, but for background only. If that doesn’t suit you, Dr. Gosling will have another statement for you this afternoon.”

“All right.” Kathleen Brown called to Dutch, her cameraman—a body-builder type with a blond crew cut, wearing a ratty gray sweatshirt with the sleeves hacked off in the mid-deltoids. Dutch nodded silently as she spoke to him, and then turned away. In a moment, the hot, bright lights had been cut.

Harry looked around for a place to talk. “Why don’t we go in here?” he said, nodding toward the motor home. Opening the door, he climbed in and sat sidewise in the driver’s seat, while Kathleen Brown took up a place across the gear-shift. They were alone. In the unlit compartment behind them was a work counter, a handful of computer monitors, several bomb suits hanging from ceiling hooks, and a cache of equipment and cables. At the very end was a drop-down door and Old Yeller, the bomb squad’s mascot, a three-foot-tall remote-controlled robot shaped like the Mars rover.

Harry started out matter-of-factly. “What I found was a paper bag with some components for making a bomb. Not an actual bomb.”

“A fake?”

“No. More like a message.”

“Sent by whom?”

“Not sure. We’ve received e-mails from something calling itself the Al-Quds Martyrs’ Brigade—”

“Muslim terrorists?”

“I wouldn’t jump to conclusions. That may just be what they want us to believe.”

“What are they demanding?”

“Money, naturally. Plus the release of two terrorists in New York. Meteb and Mussolimi, or something like that. You can look them up.”

“Are you complying?”

“On the money, yes. The payment is scheduled for noon, just a little while from now. The terrorists are another matter. Washington’s thinking it over.”

“This is really not a routine bomb threat, is it?”

Harry stiffened. “‘Routine bomb threat’ is an oxymoron. A bomb threat is never routine. The contents of the bag in Endocrinology indicated that whoever left it for us is capable of constructing a real, and very powerful, explosive device.”

“Why don’t you evacuate?”

“This is a hospital, not an office building. The logistics of evacuation are almost insurmountable. You have a thousand bedridden patients, some of them unconscious or in critical condition. You have surgeries in progress in the operating rooms. You have premature babies in incubators. You can’t just pack up and get out. We have evacuation protocols, but they’ve never been implemented. Not under real-life conditions. Even the best written plan will fall apart once you add the ingredients of risk, fear, and panic. Chaos is inevitable. Chaos in this context means injuries, wreckage—even death.”

“I see.”

“Plus, there’s factor number one: the ransom message specifically said, ‘Don’t evacuate.’ They want to play this out smoothly and quietly.”

“Well, you don’t have to do what the bomber wants, do you?”

“Actually, we do. As long as they can detonate a bomb in this facility, we can and do have to follow their instructions to the letter. And by ‘we,’ I mean us and you—now that you’ve inserted yourself into the equation.”

“I’m in the business of reporting events, not keeping them quiet.”

“You’re in the business of covering human-interest features, if I’m not mistaken. Movie-star weddings, world’s ugliest dogs—things like that. This is a little bit out of your normal line.”

Kathleen Brown took on a prickly tone. “I was an investigative reporter in Tulsa before I joined the network.”

Harry bit his lip. He had taken a cheap shot and needed to backtrack nimbly. “Okay. You have your job and I have mine. But our interests don’t have to be at odds.”

“If you play along, I could make you look pretty good.”

“That’s not what I mean. I don’t give a damn about anything except protecting this medical center. If you help me to do that, I’ll let you and your crew have the run of the hospital. Film whatever you want, as long as you don’t get in the way. And that’s an exclusive. You’re here because … well, because you’re here. But I’m not letting any other news teams in. That gives you a pretty sweet setup.”

“What do you want in return?”

“To avoid panic. We’ve been instructed not to evacuate. The group responsible for this threat has been very specific about that. If you start scaring people, there’ll be a stampede out of the hospital—the ugliest you’ve ever seen. This, as you now know, would be in direct violation of our instructions. I don’t want to risk what might happen then.”

“So you’re asking me to hold back the story.”