Code White (42 page)

The operator was still talking on the other end when Harry dropped the phone and started back. Passing a men’s room door, he reached inside and grabbed a handful of paper towels.

Kevin was white as a clamshell, and so weak that his fingers merely rested on top of the pressure point. Harry lifted Kevin’s right arm and wadded the paper towels into the armpit until he could feel solid bone. As he did, he noticed that the spurting of blood had stopped. He had seen enough as a cop to know that that could be a bad sign.

“Fuck it. Fuck all that,” mumbled Kevin. “Just get me to a terminal.”

“Okay, sure. Give me a minute.” Harry felt a sickening chill.
You’ve screwed up royal, kiddo. If you lose this son of a bitch, you and everyone in this hospital can kiss their ass good-bye.
Trying to keep Kevin from losing consciousness, he turned him onto his left side, keeping the wound high and the brain and heart low. Then he pushed down on the wounded arm with all his weight, using the arm like the lever of a bookpress to keep up pressure on the armpit. Still, the blood kept on oozing out. The artery was too deep to close off that way.

Kevin’s voice was breathy but weak. “T-t-tell her I’m sorry. An’ get her … out … out of this … wha-whatchmacalit, hospital. D-do it now, f-f-fascist.”

Harry heard someone running down the hall. “Here they come,” he said. A resident in a white coat and scrubs appeared in the lead, followed by half a dozen people and a red crash cart. “Over here!” shouted Harry. “He’s going fast.”

“Jesus Christ!” said the resident, when he saw the four-foot-wide pool of blood. He pushed Harry aside as he knelt down and lifted Kevin’s arm for a look under the paper towels.

“Carotid pulse barely palpable,” said a curly-haired woman, kneeling at Kevin’s head.

“No respiration,” said a short, Hispanic-looking lab tech who stood beside her.

“Okay, bag him,” said the resident. “You’re not going to find a vein. Start two sixteen-gauge tibial cannulas for intraosseous access. One on each side.”

“Lidocaine?” asked a blond nurse, who was squatting by Kevin’s feet.

“No time. Just stick ’em in. Believe me, he won’t feel a thing.”

The nurse pulled up Kevin’s pants leg, bent his knee slightly and, holding his leg firmly, began twisting and pushing a needle into his shinbone, just below the bump where the tendon of the kneecap inserted. There was a visible give when the needle broke through the hard outer wall of the bone. Without wasting a motion, the nurse attached a syringe and drew back a small amount of blood to confirm that the needle had made it into the soft, pulpy center of the bone. Then she attached an IV line to the needle, while the Hispanic lab tech slipped the other end of the line onto a plastic bag of lactated Ringer’s solution.

“Squeeze that bag,” said the resident to the lab tech. “Squeeze the hell out of it.”

A shout on the left announced that a second line was ready in the other leg. From down the hall, Harry heard a rumbling as two orderlies raced to the scene with a gurney.

“Want some epi?” asked someone at the crash cart.

“No time for pressors right now. Let’s just get him to the OR.”

“Excuse me,” said Harry, almost shouting to be heard above the bustle. “Does someone here have a laptop? This man needs to access the hospital computer network. It’s urgent.”

The resident glared at Harry. “Are you out of your fucking mind? Who are you?”

“Chief of Security.”

“Well, if you’re not part of this code team, you’re nobody. Now kindly get the hell out of our way.”

“Kevin!” shouted Harry, over the shoulder of the resident. “Kevin!”

There was no answer from Kevin. From the floor, the curly-haired woman called up. “I’ve lost his pulse.”

Sweet Jesus!
thought Harry.
This isn’t happening.

“Start compressions,” ordered the resident. Before the woman could begin, the two orderlies brought up a long white slab of plastic and laid it on the floor alongside Kevin. “Okay, turn him. Slide it, slide it,” came the order. Several pairs of hands rolled Kevin onto his side, while the plastic was shoved under him. “Everybody got a handle? All right, on three. One, two, three!” The team lifted the limp body by nylon loops attached to the corners and sides of the slab, and quickly placed both body and slab on the gurney.

“Leave that backboard on the stretcher,” said the resident. “We need it for the chest compressions.” Without further direction, the curly-haired woman crossed her hands on top of Kevin’s breastbone and began pumping down on it in a sharp, rapid rhythm. She didn’t miss a beat, even as the gurney started moving down the hall. “Call Trauma,” said the resident to someone standing by the phone. “Tell ’em we’re coming. We need ten units of type O blood to start. And get Dr. Bittner if he’s available. Bittner or Hughes.”

In a moment, Harry and the resident were left alone, standing by a pool of blood in an empty corridor.
Fuck all this blood! Why did he have to point the gun at me?

“Sorry about the rudeness back there,” said the resident, “but your man’s in no shape to be checking his e-mail. What hit him, anyway?”

“Nine millimeter.”

“Looks like the bullet shattered on a rib and pretty much diced his axillary artery, right about where it comes out from under the clavicle. That’s a bleeder, no question. Where’s the gunman?”

“I shot him.”

“
You
did? Jesus!”

Harry jerked his head and looked at the resident, sharply, like the doc was a perp under the spotlight. “Is he going to make it?”

“Fifty-fifty.”

“Look, he’s got to pull through. He’s
got
to. You … you don’t know how much is riding on it.”

“If you like, I can have somebody page you when we know more.”

Harry shook his head. “I’ll go down with you myself to the operating room, in case he comes to and says anything.”

“Suit yourself.”

Harry turned to follow the resident. They had gone but a couple of paces when Harry looked up and froze in his tracks.

Oh, Christ, no!

At the far end of the corridor, where it made its right-angle turn, he saw a standard security camera mounted high up near the ceiling, covering the whole bloodstained scene in its direct line of sight.

A tiny red light indicated that the camera was in record mode.

He and Kevin had not been alone.

The unsleeping eye of Cerberus had witnessed everything.

5:15
P.M.

The first thing Ali saw when she came through the double doors of the main surgical suite was Harry Lewton standing next to the counter of the central nurses’ station. He had thrown a yellow surgical gown over his street clothes. His face was grim.

“Ali,” said Harry.

“What’s going on, Harry? I got a phone call in the ICU—”

“I had the nurse call you. We need to talk.”

“Oh, God!” His eyes told her everything. “This is about Kevin, isn’t it?”

“I won’t mince words. I was forced to shoot him. He’s in serious condition.”

“
Shoot
him? For God’s sake, why?” In disbelief, she looked up at the enormous dry-erase board behind the station that listed the status of each operating room. At the bottom she read:

Trauma Room One         O’Day, K.
Dr. Bittner     GSW     17:30.

“He pulled a gun on me. I had no choice. I aimed for his shoulder, but—”

“Kevin pulled a gun on you? He doesn’t even know how to hold a gun.” She grabbed a yellow gown from the cart by the door, and quickly put it on, leaving the ties in back to dangle. In a second, she had slipped a pair of paper booties over her shoes and stormed past Harry to Trauma One. At the door, still tucking her hair under a blue surgical cap, she looked through a small window. She saw Leon Bittner, the tall, portly trauma surgeon, hunched over the operating table, along with a resident, an anesthetist, and a couple of nurses. Ali was relieved to see so much activity. Activity meant life.

Harry caught up to her. “Look, I’m really sorry,” he said.

She hit him sharply on the chest with the side of her fist. “You promised me! You promised you wouldn’t hurt him!” Her lower lip was trembling. “When I told you about Kevin, it was to make sure that nobody else got hurt. That included
him,
goddamn you! I expected you to protect him—from himself, if need be. But this—”

“There isn’t time for recriminations, Ali. In forty-five minutes, the deadline to release Meteb and Mossalam is going to pass, and I have no idea how Odin has been programmed to react when it turns out they’re not on the plane. As we speak, Kathleen Brown’s network is getting ready to tell the whole world we have a live bomb on our hands. There’s been a steady exodus or patients and visitors ever since the Tower explosion. As soon as word about the big one gets out, there’ll be panic and a full-fledged stampede.” He grabbed her by the shoulders. “I need your help, Ali. Kevin said something to me about a safe-recovery shutdown procedure for Odin. Do you know anything about that? Is there really a way to shut Odin down?”

“Yes. Of course there’s a way. Kevin shut him down each time he upgraded the operating system.”

“How did he do that?”

“You’d have to ask him,” she said, looking away through the window. A stark silence fell between them. Then she gave him a sideways glance. “Look, I’m not being flippant. It’s not a simple procedure, and I don’t know how he did it.”

“Did Kevin write it down somewhere? Did he make notes of secret passwords, or anything like that?”

“Passwords aren’t needed with Odin. It’s just like one person recognizing another. Odin can tell who the operator is through his facial features, his voice print, the way his fingers move on the keyboard—unique personal traits. He knows when Kevin is interfacing with him. It’s more secure than a password, because it’s impossible to counterfeit.”

“Will Odin accept commands from you?”

“Absolutely not. Not from me or anyone else, not unless Kevin authorizes it. It’s a very jealous relationship that they have.”

“And if Kevin dies?”

Ali turned and glared. “
Dies
? Then we’d be sitting on the Mount Everest of trouble, Harry. Two thousand people—this entire medical center—would be at the mercy of Odin. There would be no possibility of shutting him down, or even communicating with him.”

“Christ!” said Harry, looking down at his feet. He took a deep breath and seemed to be nodding to himself. “Look, I have to go. All hell is about to break loose upstairs and I’m going to have my hands full just trying to keep people from trampling one another. I need you to think about Odin. You know him better than anyone, next to Kevin. There’s got to be a way to neutralize him, or at least, to buy time. If you can think of anything, anything at all, no matter how insignificant, call me.”

“I’ll do what I can,” she said. “Maybe Kevin will—” She was reluctant to speak of hope. She was a realist, a hard-nosed scientist, and wishful thinking felt awkward on her lips. “You know what I mean,” she said. But when she turned and looked for Harry he was gone.

*   *   *

“You’re not sterile, Dr. O’Day,” said Leon Bittner, as Ali leaned over the operating table where Kevin lay.

“I have to see him.”

Kevin’s face was almost unrecognizable. His ruddy, freckled complexion had gone bone white. An inch-thick corrugated plastic tube entered his mouth, and was held in place by strips of white tape that crisscrossed his cheeks. He was no longer breathing on his own.

“He’s lost a lot of blood,” said Bittner. “We’ve been giving him whole blood full-bore through a central line, but it’s difficult getting enough volume in without a heartbeat.”

“You mean he’s in asystole?”

“Since he got here. We’ve given him epinephrine a few times. Atropine, too. So far no result. He’s been getting external chest compressions for about fifteen minutes.”

“What about open chest cardiac massage?”

Bittner cocked his head and made a soft clucking sound, something he often did when he was annoyed. “That rarely works, Ali.”

“Do it, Leon. Will you?”

“Okay, sure.” Bittner called for an armrest to be attached to the operating table, and for Kevin’s left arm to be extended and taped down onto it. Then he picked up a scalpel and deftly cut through the left side of Kevin’s chest, in the space between the fifth and sixth ribs. A surgical resident inserted a pair of rib spreaders and opened a gap of about six inches. The edges of the wound were red, like a pair of lips wearing bright red lipstick, but they did not bleed. Through the hole, Ali could see the stubby apex of the heart pointing toward her. It swayed as the ventilation machine rhythmically inflated and emptied the surrounding lung, but the heart was not beating on its own.

“My hands are too big for this,” said Dr. Bittner. “Could you help us out here, Dr. Song?”

The surgical resident, a petite Korean, reached inside with her tiny hands, clasped Kevin’s heart between them, and began gently squeezing the heart about once per second.

Even as Ali watched, she knew it would come to nothing. Bittner was going through the motions for her benefit, but she knew that maybe one patient in twenty could be revived this way.
Oh, Kevin, you mixed-up, selfish little bastard!
she thought.
You could have had anything. There’s no honor or reward that couldn’t have been yours. But look what it’s all come to. You’ll be remembered as a thief, a murderer and, worst of all, a failure.

Ali stepped away from the table. On the floor was a pile of blood-soaked clothing—jeans, underwear, a blue-and-white checked shirt that she herself had bought for Kevin at a little western shop in Colorado Springs. With no time to undress him, the OR team had simply cut Kevin’s clothing away with scissors and thrown it to the ground. Ali knew that his wallet and passport were probably still in his pockets, but she couldn’t bear to retrieve them. She couldn’t even bear to look at the pile of rags.

As she paced about the operating room, Ali tried to calm herself by breathing deeply and slowly. Being in an operating room often calmed her, but not now, when it was her own husband on the table. She was flooded with the kind of feelings she always shunned—outrage at Kevin, grief for Helvelius, guilt over the wreck of her marriage, dread of the looming cataclysm of Project Vesuvius, and above all weariness, weariness, weariness. She fought to suppress it all, to distance herself from the baggage of her life, as though she were not she, but an anonymous patient waiting for some treatment still to be defined.