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
T
ired 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.
Superfluous now, he stepped back out of the way and set himself the task of discovering what had befallen her. Checking out the bathroom was tops on his list, so that’s where he headed.
“She must have tried to get up,” another of the nurses said as he came back out of the bathroom, sure now that no one was in there. All he could see of the group huddled over Jessica was the tops of their heads as they crouched around her. Except for the security guards, who were standing back out of the way, frowning as they watched. “Maybe she was trying to get to the bathroom or something. It looks like she’s knocked herself out.”
“She’s catheterized.”
“Well, maybe she didn’t realize.”
“Think she hit her head on a corner of the table?”
“Possible. Or the floor.”
“Yup, there’s a bump back here. No cut or anything. It’s swelling, though.”
“Look, she pulled out her IV.”
A round of tongue-clucking followed this discovery.
“Help . . .”
Faint and panicky, it was Jessica’s voice. Weak as it was, Mark recognized it instantly through the sea of chatter.
Abandoning his quick turn around the perimeter of the room just to see if there could possibly be someone concealed in a corner somewhere that he could have missed—there wasn’t—Mark moved in closer to hear what she had to say.
“It’s all right, you fell out of bed. We’ll just get you back up and . . .”
“There was . . . a man. He tried to put something in my IV.”
A brief silence greeted this. While Mark frowned—this was emphatically not what he wanted to hear—a couple of the nurses exchanged significant looks. It was clear from their expressions that they didn’t put much stock in what she was telling them.
“I was in here earlier.” The orderly stood up. He was a skinny twentysomething in blue scrubs. Medium brown hair pulled back in a short ponytail. Traces of acne on his chin and cheeks. He held up both hands as if to deflect blame. “But I just checked the fluid level. I didn’t put anything in the bag.”
“He had . . . a needle. He tried . . . to stab me with it.” Jessica’s voice was faint and shaky, and it was clear that speaking cost her considerable effort. But the urgency underlying it carried the ring of truth—as far as Mark was concerned, at least.
Shit. Shit, no.
“Well, that settles it. Definitely not me.” With a humor-the-poor-fool smile, the orderly shook his head.
“I tried to run—I couldn’t move my legs.” Jessica’s voice was shriller now, and stronger. “Why can’t I move my legs?”
Jesus, was she paralyzed?
“You need to try to calm down.” The nurse’s tone was soothing. “Can you roll onto this? No?” There was the briefest of pauses and a kind of shuffling sound. “Okay, everyone, one, two, three.”
A moment later, Jessica was lifted back onto the bed and positioned so that she lay flat on her back. She was shivering violently, Mark saw, as they straightened out her limbs. The green hospital gown covered her from her neck to mid-thigh. Her legs were slender and pale and well-shaped, and her feet were narrow with unpainted toes.
As the orderly positioned her legs carefully side by side, she lifted her head a few inches off the mattress and looked down at them with obvious horror.
“My legs aren’t working.”
She sounded frightened. He couldn’t blame her.
“Could you look straight at me, please? I need to check your pupils.”
The blond nurse leaned over the bed, shining a penlight into each of Jessica’s eyes in turn. For a moment Jessica cooperated, seeming bemused as she stared into the light.
“Looks fine,” the nurse said.
“I need to sit up.” Jessica moved her head restlessly. “Please.”
Someone pressed the remote control, and the head of the bed rose with a whirr until she was in a semireclining position.
“Get her vitals.”
The light was withdrawn, the bed rail snapped back into place, and she was situated more comfortably on the bed, the pillows adjusted under her head, the covers smoothed and tucked into place, all in a flurry of organized movements. As they finished, Jessica lay limply back against the big white pillows, looking absolutely exhausted and about as vigorous as a rag doll.