“Looks like you’ve got a nasty cut,” the man who’d raced over to Megan was saying. He helped her off the floor, urging her to keep her head below the windowsill. Meanwhile, she could see Ashley being hustled out of the room. “We’ll move you out of here, find a doctor to take care of it….”
She wiped a trickle of blood from her face, felt an awful stinging as her fingers passed over the gash.
“That can wait,” she said. “I want to make sure the boss is okay.”
“Ms. Breen, I’m not sure that’s advisable-”
“I’m doing it anyway,” she said.
As a youth in South Philly, Pete Nimec had learned how fiercely combative people could be about their turf, and the rough lessons driven home with fists and bats had stayed with him into adulthood. In negotiations to put Sword manpower on someone else’s beat, he never forgot the rules of the street. Keep the boundaries in mind. Pay your due respects. Know when to stand your ground-and when to meet your opposite number halfway.
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The administration at San Jose Mercy had expressed a slew of reservations about his desire to take charge of Roger Gordian’s security on hospital premises, most of which revolved around matters of civil liability. Although they had been willing to tinker with routine security mechanisms, the board members were leery of any perceived attempt to infringe on their responsibility for a patient’s safeguard.
Nimec’s comeback was to advance a version of the arrangement he’d worked out with many of the foreign nations that played host to UpLink facilities. Absolute consideration would be given to San Jose Mercy’s legal and ethical obligations, with all procedures implemented by Sword to be subject to the board’s review. His plan had called for a single Sword employee to join the hospital’s uniformed security personnel at key entry and exit points, the establishment of a fixed guard post in the corridor leading toward Gordian’s room, installation of a Sword-monitored CCTV camera inside the room, and the designation of an additional space to which Gordian could be rapidly transferred in an emergency situation, its location to be known only to top members of his caregiving team. These specifics had been approved without exception. A final request that Sword techies be allowed to conduct a thorough security rundown of the hospital’s computer network was vetoed, but Nimec had expected that would be a touchy issue, and been prepared to abandon it for the sake of expedience.
It was Nimec’s inability to convince the hospital to let him protect its data resources-this single blanket restriction imposed on him-that gave the infiltrator a soft spot that could be exploited.
In a room just a few turns of the hall from the com440
BIO-STRIKE
motion stirred by the shooting, the man wearing the intern’s coat held the intravenous bag he’d readied, and listened as Roger Gordian was delivered to him. Laced in with the feeding solution’s carbohydrates, vitamins, and other nutrients was a massive concentration of digitalis -a glycoside effective at slowing rapid heartbeats when prescribed in therapeutic dosages-that was sufficient to bring about full cardiac arrest in the healthiest individual. Given his fragile state, Gordian would be dead within minutes after the drug entered his bloodstream.
It had been so easy, the infiltrator thought. Almost effortless. Hacking into the hospital’s computer system. Adding a name to the electronically generated list of staffers who were permitted access to Roger Gordian’s room. Then forging identification to match, a laminated card worn on his breast pocket, again nothing complicated. And while there was no official record of an area designated for Gordian’s emergency use, the nearness to his room of a conspicuously blocked off section of the ward had marked it as a probable fallback-and the infiltrator’s vigilance over the past few days had borne out that suspicion.
Now the sound of movement in the hall grew louder, nearer. Suddenly the door to the room swung open, and Gordian was rolled inside, surrounded by a bustle of orderlies, plainclothes guards, his wife, and the other woman who had been with him when the infiltrator radioed his firing command to the nearby rooftop.
He stepped back from the entry as the bed was pushed through, urgently waved the orderlies toward a nest of monitoring and life-support equipment.
Easy, so easy.
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“Over here!” he said, raising his voice above the clamor. “Let’s get him hooked up!”
Megan was thinking that it didn’t make sense.
She reached the fallback room and was hurried inside by guards and hospital staffers, Gordian’s bed wheeled ahead of her, pushed toward the attending intern who’d checked his drip bag right before the gunfire broke out. Somebody in the press of bodies dabbed her open cut with something cool and moist, slapped on a stitch bandage, put a gauze pad over it and a strip of tape to hold the dressing in place, and then left her to join the activity around the bed. Ventilator hoses were connected to pumps in the wall, waiting machines activated, the depleted IV bag unhooked, replaced with a fresh one by the attending, and still Megan was thinking it made no sense, none at all, who had the sniper been shooting at? Gordian had been out of harm’s way, she’d been out of sight, and Ashley could have been hit when she was standing in front of the window if she’d been the intended target. So why pull the trigger?
The question gnawed at her as she waited by the door with Ashley, both women standing clear of the busy professionals, watching the handful of guards that accompanied them pour back into the corridor to seal off access, watching the cluster of orderlies dissolve as they completed their tasks, all of them and filing out of the room now, leaving the intern to start the IV….
An image from moments ago suddenly came into Megan’s head, came into it in a flash. The intern. Waiting here in the room. Alone. The drip bag in his hand as Gordian was jostled through the door.
Waiting.
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She had seen the intern a number of times over the past several days, moving about the corridor with a clipboard in hand, but never in Gordian’s room. He was not one of the regulars on his case, she was sure of that. Yet somehow he had known about the fallback, known where it was situated though that was privileged information, and moreover had been the first person inside it, giving orders to the orderlies as they entered.
She looked at him. He had moved the IV stand close to the bed, run the catheter over the safety rail, and was leaning over Gordian, about to work the needle into his wrist.
“Hold on,” she said. Stepping toward him. Her mouth dry, her heart pounding away in her chest. “What are you doing?”
The intern turned his face toward her.
“The fluid bag needs to be connected,” he said. “It won’t take a minute.”
She took another step closer to him, another, quickly crossing the room, leaving Ashley standing at the door in confusion.
“No,” she said. Shaking her head. “What are you doing here?”
He straightened up, looked at her without any response.
His eyes boring into her eyes.
Reading them.
“Ashley,” she said. Not turning from him for an instant. “Open the door and call for help, this guy doesn’t belong in-”
His hand released the feeding tube, simply let it drop over the rail, and went under his white hospital coat. Megan couldn’t see what he was reaching for, didn’t
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need to see, what she had to do was stop him.
She moved in fast, bringing up her hands, ducking her head under his arms, remembering what Pete had told her in the training ring. Her fist jabbed out, aimed at the middle of his chest, her shoulder rolling behind the motion, her entire back in it, her knuckles digging between his ribs as they made solid contact.
He produced a grunt of pain and surprise, doubled over, gasping for breath, his hand appearing from inside the coat, an automatic pistol spilling from his fingers to hit the floor.
Megan heard Ashley shouting into the hallway at the top of her lungs, and a split second later heard the hurried pounding of feet behind her, and a male voice ordering the guy in the intern’s coat to stay put, telling him not to even think about reaching for the gun, and he kept hugging himself and coughing, trying to catch his breath….
And then the Sword security team came in the doorway and were all over him.
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TWENTY-SIX
VARIOUS LOCALES NOVEMBER 23, 2001
“. . . STIRRING FOR THE PAST HOUR. ONE OF THE
nurses on shift noticed … about to regain consciousness. I phoned you right away.”
“I thought it would be yesterday, Elliot. I was sure. He seemed to be trying so hard.”