Code White (25 page)

“Old Yeller says your area is clean,” Avery announced. “It’s safe to back out now. Follow the path of the control cable to the door.”

Harry waved to Miller to go first. Just as Miller took a step back, the breathless silence was shattered by a volley of beeps from inside the crate.
Beep … ba-bee-bee-beep-beep-beep.
Miller reflexively fell into a crouch and drew his gun.

“What the hell are you doing?” said Harry. “You gonna shoot the box? Put that fucking gun away.”

He spoke too late. Something Miller did—an abruptness of his hand motion, a swirl of the ferromagnetic field around his gun—had already triggered a reaction inside the box. Harry heard a buzz and a clacking noise, and turned to see a glowing red nozzle emerging from a hole in the plywood.
Good God!
Everyone hit the floor at once. Harry dove so hard that one of the loose tiles jabbed him like a knife between his ribs. He rammed his cheek against the hard, cold linoleum, trying to make himself as thin as paper, as if that could protect him from the split-second inferno that would turn both him and floor into a cloud of fizzing molecules.
Jesus, is this it?

And in that instant, as his heart stopped, as he tasted his own drool mixed with the dust and grease of the floor, Harry’s mind went blank. Terror, he found, had no face or name or why or wherefore. It was a state of suspension between two breaths—the last breath of life as he had known it, and the next breath that might never come.

He froze for God knows how long. When at last his heart jump-started itself and his chest sucked in a tentative gasp of air, the first thought that popped into his brain came as a surprise. For he didn’t think of death, or pain, or honor—not even of his gray-haired mother on the eighteenth floor. He thought of a hand—Ali’s hand. He remembered that moment in his office when he had touched her. Her fingers were dry and icy cold, her palm warm and moist. It was as though they reflected a strange psychic division—her steely aplomb masking a secret vulnerability. She had reached out to him and shunned him at the same moment.
Which was true, the seeking or the shunning?
he wondered.
What did she expect from me?

And that might have been his last thought on earth. But as luck would have it, he was roused by a woman’s voice shrieking from the doorway.

“Marcus! Dwayne! Where’s my babies? Where’s my little boys?”

Harry twisted his neck to see a heavy-set African American woman in kitchen whites trying to wrestle her way into the room past Avery and a couple of cops.

“Let me go! Let me go! I want my babies!”

There was a scrape as the mysterious crate jostled slightly, and two ebony-skinned boys in Bulls sweatshirts and polyester shorts emerged from the darkness of the freezer.

“Mom!” shouted the smaller, no more than six years old. He was holding a toy ray gun of blue and gold painted metal, with a red cap that sparked and glowed when the trigger spun a friction wheel.

“Oh, for cryin’ out loud!” Harry leaped to his feet, a hot blush spreading over his face and neck. “What were you boys doin’ inside that crate?” he shouted.

The older boy, Marcus, was holding a small video game console. He squinted as Harry trained his flashlight on his face. “Just playin’ Madden and stuff on the PSP. Mom said it’d be okay ’long as we were quiet.”

“Well, Mom made a mistake today. You come on out of there. You and your brother.”

Hanging their heads, the two shuffled out into the open.

“Did you boys drag that crate inside?” asked Harry.

“I don’t know,” whined Marcus. His shrug was as clear as a confession. “It’s our rocket ship. Please, Mister, we didn’t break nothin’.”

Little Dwayne flourished his ray gun in the air. “I shot the Martian,” he boasted.

After all the strain, Harry could barely suppress a laugh. He looked at Old Yeller, whose binocular video camera was still panning left and right, making a soft whirring noise.
The kid’s right. Very like a Martian.
“Yeah, you got him. I think you got me, too,” he said, touching the bottom of his ribcage, where the edge of the tile had bruised him. “You gotta be careful with those ray guns.”

“I’m sorry. I thought you were a Martian, too.”

Before Dwayne could say more, his mother broke free of Avery and ran to scoop the boy off his feet, squeezing the breath out of him with her fleshy arms. “Oh, my little Hershey Kiss! Oh, my little Kit Kat! What you done got into now?”

Harry looked at the ID badge clipped to the woman’s blouse. “Ms. Covell, what are these boys doing here?”

“It’s that damn spring break. They ain’t in school an’ I don’t got nowhere to put ’em. I got to work.”

“The hospital has an employee day care center.”

Her eyes were like two slits above her puffy cheeks. “I can’t afford no day care. It’s twenty a day. All I make is sixty-eight dollars scrubbin’ them pots until my skin falls off. How’m I s’posed to feed ’em an’ buy ’em clothes and pay rent on forty-eight dollars a day? You couldn’t do it, Mister.”

“No discussion. You either put these kids in day care or you take ’em home. And that means now!” Harry waved to Judy Wolper at the doorway, as she peeped out from under Avery’s arm. “Judy, would you escort Ms. Covell and her boys down to Team Tots? Have them comp her the rest of the day.” Day care was in a small annex on the other side of Children’s Hospital, outside the probable range of the bomb. The kids would be safe there.

“What about tomorrow?” demanded the woman.

“I’ll talk to Human Resources in the morning and see that they give you a rate break for the rest of the week. But I don’t want to see either of these boys in this hospital again. Got that?”

“Sure, Mister.” With an indignant look, she led both of her boys by the hand toward the light of the corridor. Marcus walked proudly and stiffly. Dwayne turned at the last minute to give Harry one more blast of the ray gun.

Avery laughed. “Well, at least your people have taken care of the Martian threat.”

Harry bit his cheek so hard he could taste the blood.
Ignore him. Ignore the son of a bitch.
He pushed past Avery and surveyed the dumbfounded faces of the search teams in the corridor. “Okay, everyone!” he shouted. “Let’s put on some clean undies and get back to work.”

*   *   *

Back in his laboratory, Kevin was having trouble with a white pawn. Try as he might, he could not get close to White’s queen, and all because of one measly pawn, which blocked his attack from every angle.

Twenty minutes earlier, the phony e-mail from Deputy Director McClintock had indeed stirred up the most delightful ruckus. An uncharacteristically red-faced Lee had written back immediately asking for confirmation. Odin saw to it that he got one. A flurry of protest e-mails followed. Odin easily intercepted these, along with a telephone call to Washington, which he diverted to a bogus voice-mail account. Lee’s every move was checked, leaving the irascible FBI agent in a steamy, speechless funk, slumped over Harry’s desk, while Avery and Scopes punctuated the silence with haphazard suggestions and condoling profanities.

Meanwhile, Project Vesuvius hummed along, and Kevin found himself with little to do but wait and watch. Waiting was not something that he did well. He found himself pacing the length of his laboratory, nervously pelting Odin with questions about police band radio transmissions and weather forecasts for Ontario and the Canadian Rockies. He could almost hear his brain’s gears grinding. Finally, to calm himself, he accepted Odin’s suggestion of a game of chess.

Wilhelm Steinitz was White. Or not exactly Steinitz, who had been dead for over a century, but the ghost of Steinitz, as conjured by Odin. Kevin had long ago learned that chess with Odin was no game at all, since no human had a chance of beating him. It was Odin himself who suggested that the odds might be evened if he took on the personality of a human player, incorporating all of his typical strengths and weaknesses.

The chessboard was of simple wood, the pieces of sculpted elkhorn from Siberia. The place of Odin’s hands was supplied by Loki, who sat on top of the desk in his favorite cross-legged style. Loki’s miniature fingers, their dexterity freakishly enhanced by SIPNI, held the white king aloft by his tiny crown without the slightest trace of wobbling or slippage.

“It’s king to king’s knight one, Loki,” said Kevin, pointing to a black square at the far end of the board.

Dexterity or not, Loki was confused whether to remove the king from play, or to use it to take down his own white queen. It took considerable finger-tapping from Kevin to finally get him to set the piece down where Steinitz wanted it. Loki’s move shielded the piece directly behind the queen, and prevented Kevin from opening up a discovered check with an attack upon the hated king’s bishop’s pawn.

“Good boy, Loki,” said Kevin, handing out a peanut. “Not quite ready for tournament play, though, are we?”

The ghost of Wilhelm Steinitz took up less than 0.000001 percent of Odin’s thinking capacity, and at that moment Project Vesuvius was deep into its critical collection phase. On the bank of small computers, one monitor was devoted to each of the primary revenue streams originating from the eight original payers of the Al-Quds ransom. Each stream had already subdivided itself into dozens of subsets, reflected in ever-changing columns of numbers. The combined accumulation was tallied as a single number in four-inch type on the large wall monitor, with the last few digits whizzing by so fast as to be little more than a blur. From time to time Kevin would turn his head to check on it. It was a big number, even after subtracting Rahman’s four hundred grand. It was so big that it gave him a kind of queasy feeling. Although Kevin had never given much thought to the value of money, he knew that this was a number that would get noticed. It was already more than four times higher than he had originally projected—and still growing. That, of course, was Odin’s doing. Odin had discovered some new angles as Project Vesuvius had unfolded, and in his usual lightning-quick way he had taken advantage of them, without stopping to consult. Not that Kevin would have objected. Odin was doing exactly what he was told to do:
maximize revenue
. Only a fool would object to quadrupling his money.

While he jabbed at Wilhelm Steinitz and watched his money roll in, Kevin also kept a close eye on the computer monitor on his desk in front of him. It showed a wide-angle security camera view of the NICU, where a dark-haired woman in scrubs sat cross-legged and nearly sideways behind the nursing station, one elbow leaning on the counter as she wrote in a blue plastic binder. She looked pensive, frustrated, and almost wistful, just as she had many nights as she sat by the kitchen table, huddled over a book or a laptop, with coffee grown cold in the cup beside her. On those nights, Kevin could never resist stealing up behind her and enticing her away from her studies with a whisper or a simple kiss on the neck. It had never taken more than that.

How different things were now! No kiss from him would ever rouse her again. Outwardly not a hair on her was altered. Inwardly she had become a stranger. He marvelled how anyone could change so completely. Even a hunk of magnetized iron retains some trace of its former alignment. But human love was fickle. All those vaunted sonneteers were nothing but bullshitters. Love was the most changeable thing in the universe.

Watching her made him increasingly agitated, and still he couldn’t tear his eyes off her. He contemplated the screen so long that Odin questioned whether he had lost track of the game.
“IT IS YOUR MOVE, KEVIN,”
he announced.

Kevin looked back at the board, and all he could see was the white queen. He felt a mad impulse to take her down—whatever the cost. To clear a path, he took the king’s bishop’s pawn with his own knight, knowing full well that the pawn was protected by several powerful pieces. As he moved the knight, it somehow brought to his mind an image of Rahman.

“The most crooked of all pieces,” he mused. “Should be called jackal instead of knight. Likes to jump out from the sidelines and nip you on the ass. That’s Rahman, to a tee. Rahman, my devious, bloodthirsty, lying comrade. Tell me, Odin, can you get fleas from lying down with a jackal?”

“BISHOP TAKES KNIGHT.”

The countermove had been expected. With no little prompting from Kevin, and at the cost of three peanuts, Loki moved a white bishop from across the board to take Kevin’s knight.

“Go, then!” said Kevin to the discarded piece. “You’ve outlived your usefulness. Off with you and your jihadist bullshit!”

With Rahman gone, Kevin found his attention drawn to the white bishop that had supplanted him.

“Do you know who this is?” he asked Loki. “This plaster saint slinking out from under the skirts of the white queen? None other than Dr. Flaccidius P. Diddly Dildo, world-famous expert in brain tumors and spinal cord injury, past president of the American College of Neurosurgery, newly minted peer of Christian Barnaard, Harvey Cushing, and Aristotle—and lying rat bastard. He has many sins to answer for, Loki.

“He has stolen my work, the offspring of the womb of my mind. And he smeared me to do it.” Loki’s eyes opened wide as Kevin began to raise his voice. “He called me ‘unreliable,’ ‘temperamental.’ A simple letter from him could have saved my NIH funding. But no—he had a sudden attack of intellectual scruples. ‘You haven’t published more than six papers in the past five years,’ he said, conveniently leaving out that all six were papers to knock the world on its ass, once anyone began to understand them. It’s no secret that
he
didn’t understand them.

“But of course, he only wanted to make me dependent on
his
lab. He kept me alive on bread and water—just so long as I stayed shackled to his oar. When at last I performed a miracle for him, when I created a working artificial implantable human brain out of some doodles he had brought me on a brandy-stained napkin—sure, everyone believed it was Dildo who’d done it. After all, I worked for him, right?

“Well, I’m no lickspittle resident or scut monkey. What was stolen from me I will take back—with interest. The hospital will pay, the collective mediocrities of the world will pay, and Dr. Dildo himself will pay.”