Code White (26 page)

Loki screeched as Kevin slammed his own black bishop forward and brusquely yanked the white bishop off the board.

“Yes, it’s harsh, little monkey, but an example must be made. For the great Doctor’s sins are not only of the mind. It wasn’t enough to reduce me to peonage; no, he had to reach out his grasping hand for the one thing I had left. Remember the ancient
Droit du seigneur
? In plain monkey language, it means he thought me such a worm that he thought he could get away with
fucking my wife
.”

Kevin addressed the cloven-headed chess piece in his hand. “You’ve been begging for years for someone to blow away your ass. Guess what? That day has come, you nine-fingered sack of shit!”

He hurled the bishop into the sink across the room. From the crash, he could tell that the finely carved elkhorn had shattered into pieces as it landed. Loki screeched and sprang for the safety of the dark recesses of the lab.

Kevin turned back to the chessboard, his face taut and pale.

“And you, my snowy-white queen, what shall we say of your treasons? I awakened you! I taught you to think, and to recognize your own genius! For that alone, you ought to be grateful. Forget that I loved you, that I held nothing back from you, that I … believed in you.”

Odin broke in with a suggestion.
“UNDER SECTION 11-7 OF THE ILLINOIS CRIMINAL CODE (720 ILCS 5/11-7), ADULTERY IS CLASSIFIED AS A ‘CLASS A’ MISDEMEANOR, AND IS PUNISHABLE BY A TERM OF IMPRISONMENT FOR UP TO ONE YEAR.”

“There is an older law than that, Odin. The law of the aggrieved husband. The law of honor.”

“THE CODE OF HAMMURABI STIPULATES THAT BOTH PARTIES TO ADULTERY SHALL BE EXECUTED BY DROWNING, ALTHOUGH THE WOMAN MAY BE SPARED IF HER HUSBAND CHOOSES TO PARDON HER.”

“That’s more like it.” Kevin once again addressed the white queen. “No Class A Misdemeanor for you, jasmine flower. Punishment must fit the crime. It was one thing to betray me. But you have betrayed yourself—your youth, your beauty, your genius. It makes my flesh crawl to think of you … yoked with this mediocrity. Why not an ape? What possessed you to defile yourself like that? How could you give over the innermost sanctum of those lovely, smooth, sculpted hips of yours to … to the … offspring of this soulless piece of shit? I know it’s Dildo’s and not mine. The last time I made love to you I could feel how your womb froze up inside you. My seed couldn’t possibly have taken root.… It’s Dildo’s, all right. And from shit can come only shit. I won’t let you live to see such a degradation. I’ll first see that bastard’s bastard dribble in bloody chunks between your legs. Squirt him out! Let that lying cunt of yours reject him as it rejected our own son Ramsey.”

Kevin felt an urge to sweep the pieces off the board. He sat with fists clenched and reddened nostrils, as image after unclean image rushed before his eyes—blood and shit and whoredom and revenge. In the end, it was the thought of Ramsey that broke the surge of the storm. Ramsey, who had known no life but suffering. Ramsey, so small, so helpless, so doomed. Thinking of how he had held his lifeless son’s body for a final farewell, Kevin slumped over the chessboard, his eyes glazed and unmoving.

“But the woman may be spared,” he mumbled at last. “So says Hammurabi. Well, look to it, then. There may still be … even now … hope.”

He turned his chair away from the desk and faced the big wall monitor. He needed to think of something more positive, something calming.

“Odin, bring up the latest Landsat views of Isla Viscacha.”

In place of the ever growing ransom total, the screen was filled with an aerial image of a wooded island, surrounded by a purplish, churning sea. Several miles in the background were the rocky headlands of the southern Chilean coast—one of the most sparsely populated areas in the habitable world. In the farthest distance, barely distinguishable from the cirrus-clouded sky, was the snowcapped peak of Monte San Valentin, towering over the North Patagonian ice fields.

“Can you enlarge it? I want to see the dock.”

A U-shaped bungalow, two guest cottages, and a large utility building came into view, clustered around a sandy cove on the eastern shore.

Isla Viscacha, the thirty-seven-acre retreat of a reclusive film director, had been on the real estate market for over three years. It was the realization of a pipe dream that Kevin had cherished since graduate school at Stanford—a naturally fortified sanctuary where he could shut out the world’s inanity and hypocrisy, and devote himself single-mindedly to his work. Using the assumed identity of Padrig de Rais, a Breton French hotelier from Saint-Malo, Kevin had negotiated an option for the purchase of the property. An attorney in Santiago was already waiting to proxy-sign the deed for him, and there was needed only a tiny disbursement from today’s proceeds to complete the deal. When Kevin arrived in person in a few months, having dissolved and reconstituted himself in an untraceable chain of guises, he would supervise the construction of a discreetly camouflaged underground laboratory—soon to become the most advanced cybernetics research complex on the planet. There he would build the next-generation version of Odin, using his vision of a four-dimensional plasma containment field instead of silicon as the basis of his CPU. Moore’s Law would be blown to smithereens. No longer would computing power double every two years. It would leap by orders of magnitude at a single bound. He and Odin would rule supreme over the fields of cybernetics and bionics. With inexhaustible funds at his disposal, he would no longer be held back by mental pygmies like Helvelius, Dr. Gosling, or the bureaucrats and chicken-shit reviewers at the NIH. A cornucopia of inventions would pour out to enrich mankind. Pilgrims would flock to his rocky outpost as to a new Oracle of Delphi. And after that, no one would question how the Age of Isla Viscacha had arisen out of the ashes of Project Vesuvius, just as no one ever asked what crimes might have lain behind the discovery of fire or of the wheel. His genius alone would make him inviolable.

Odin’s voice roused him from his reverie.
“QUEEN TO QUEEN’S KNIGHT TWO. CHECK.”

He had moved too late to neutralize the threat of the white queen, and she had now gone on the move against him.
Check
—it was an attack on his king. He had to move to evade it, and in so doing lost the initiative in the game. In the best-case scenario, he would spend the next dozen moves improvising escapes, hoping for a blunder that would allow him to reverse the attack. If white’s queen did not relent, it could only end in checkmate.

“Fuck you, then! Do your worst!” he snapped, speaking to the white queen herself. “There’s another game afoot—a game you will not win. Do you see the hands sweeping across the clock? Time is short, oh, so fucking short, my sweet jasmine flower! The hour of reckoning is at hand! One last chance, and then … Choose well, my darling! To quote the old runes,
‘Earth shall be riven / With the over-Heaven.’
You and your precious Helvelius will piss yourselves when you behold the bonfires of the Twilight of the Gods!”

1:32
P.M.

“Thanks, Mac,” said Harry as he took the cigarette and drew a long, hungry puff off it that turned the end of the stick a glowing red.

The fireman put the lighter back in his pocket and went back to jawboning with his crewmates as they sat on the rear bumper of the truck.

A grateful Harry turned and went back the way he had come, toward the ambulance dock behind the emergency room. It was his first smoke in six months. Those six months had cost him a hell of a fight, but he needed to get calm enough now to think. Between the e-mails and the alarms and the C4 and the clamor of the press, he was beginning to feel like he had ants crawling up and down his nerve fibers.

He looked up, where the early afternoon sun glared down at him from the steel and glass exterior of the Goldmann Towers. The roof of the towers was so high he had to arch his lower back to see to the top. Somewhere up there, behind one of those shiny windows, his mother was fighting for her life. And here he was, the goddamn chief of security, no better than a cigarette butt on the asphalt, for all the good it did her. After Oklahoma City, the Beirut barracks, and the Khobar Towers, Harry knew that five hundred pounds of C4 could tear apart even a massively reinforced building like it was tissue paper. She wouldn’t stand a chance. He knew this, and still he couldn’t get her out. He felt totally fucking useless.

He had avoided going back to his office after the debacle of the mystery crate. He needed to get out here, into the sunlight, with the breeze streaming across his face—here, where he could be alone for a few minutes to sort things out. With each drag on the cigarette, things came clearer into view.

What came into view was unsettling. Almost six hours had passed since the first bomb warning had hit his pager, and still he and the cops had very little to show for it. Fourteen search teams had failed to turn up a single trace. Lee, the expert psychologist, hadn’t dug anything out of Rahman. No one even knew if Rahman was the brains of the dog or just the tail. Did he have a confederate in the hospital? Did he have the kind of technical information that would help to locate and disarm the bomb? These were the essential questions. Now that Lee had passed the ball to the Justice Department, it could take hours to get that little piece of paper that would let Scopes and Avery interrogate Rahman the way they wanted to. Those would be hours wasted, while, for all Harry knew, the investigation might have been better off looking somewhere else.

He smelled a colossal screw-up in the making.

As he saw it, there was one good chance to cut through the impasse—Ali O’Day. Rahman seemed to hate her guts, but that wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. They were brother and sister, and there were buttons that she and nobody but she knew how to push. All the more so if there was animus between them. Anger was a button, too.

Lee was blind to this. The whole damn FBI and Justice Department had gotten to be a hindrance and not a help to the investigation. Barely four hours were left until that plane to Yemen boarded, and here they were—bogged down in
paperwork
.

“Fuck it,” muttered Harry. His mind was perfectly clear now, only sometimes clarity can be a bitch. There was no escape clause for this one. If the investigation was going to go anywhere, he was going to have to take the wheel and drive it there himself.

He threw down the stub of his cigarette and crushed it under his sole. Crushed it and recrushed it, long after the glow had gone out.

This could be Nacogdoches all over again, couldn’t it?
he thought.
Do the right thing and get crucified for it.
But this was his turf and he had sworn to protect it. Two thousand lives in the balance—one piddling career was a small thing to weigh against that.

“Aw, fuck it,” he said again.

He took one last look at the sunlight, and then went in through the ER doors.

*   *   *

Jamie came back from Nuclear Medicine with a scan result that showed an intermediate probability of pulmonary embolism.

Dr. Brower took that as the signal to start anticoagulation therapy.

“No,” insisted Ali. “An intermediate probability scan is inconclusive. The chances of a clot are in the range of twenty to eighty percent. That’s a huge window. It could still just be his atelectasis.”

“Well, it’s all we have to go on. It’s not proof but it’s evidence. At some point, we have to actually begin treating him for something.”

“We are treating him. For seizures and cerebral edema.”

“Without success.”

“Oh, hell!” said Ali. She didn’t trust Brower. But what else had she come up with? She was angry at herself for having failed Jamie. She was desperate to do something—anything—to help him. But was she being too protective? Maternal feelings were starting to cloud her judgment, and that in itself added to the danger. “You win. But I won’t have you giving him anything more than low-dose heparin. I want to be able to reverse it if there’s a problem. Low-dose heparin, do you understand?”

Just then, the nurse at the station called Ali to the phone. It was Dr. Helvelius.

“S-sorry I took so long to get back to you. These damn pagers still aren’t working. I got called in to assist on a trauma case. Motorcycle versus SUV, with an ugly spinal fracture at C2. Took me a while to get it s-stabilized. I’m on a five-minute break.”

“We’re having problems with Jamie. He’s had a seizure and he’s in coma, no better than seven on the Glasgow scale. He’s showing progressive tachycardia and tachypnea, which could indicate brainstem dysfunction. No response to Dilantin or Solumedrol.”

“Who’s on duty in the ICU?”

“Brower.”

“Hmm. Watch out for him. He thinks of the brain as a black box. He’ll go by the book, without trying to p-puzzle things out.”

“I know. I’ve already had a tussle with him over pulmonary embolism.”

“Well, let’s reason it out. What about normal perfusion pressure breakthrough?”

“I’m worried about it. But there’s no direct evidence.”

“Why don’t we add nitroprusside, just to keep his b-blood pressure down?”

“All right.”

“You don’t sound very confident, Dr. O’Day.”

“I … I don’t know. It’s confusing. What about a blood clot, a hematoma? If there were bleeding that got missed on CT, the clot could be expanding and raising the intracranial pressure.”

“Possibly. If the ICP rises above twenty, give him a gram of mannitol. If that doesn’t do it, then we may have to take him back to the OR.”

“The AVM was so close to the brainstem, I’m afraid any problem could rapidly turn catastrophic.”

“That’s a risk we accepted when we took on this case.” He paused, perhaps expecting a reply from Ali. When she said nothing, he softened his tone. “Why don’t we have Electrophysiology come down and record some somatosensory evoked p-potentials? If we can pass a test signal from his leg through to his scalp, then that would help to show that his b-brainstem is okay.”

“Yes, that would be reassuring.”