Albatross (3 page)

Jack’s smiled faded a little bit but returned quickly. “Well, did you see one? You were just there,” he said.

“I didn’t look. The guy told me to go out into the lobby and look outside to make sure I believed him,” she offered.

Samantha watched Jack stand up from his chair behind the podium desk and look out the lobby windows. He was about to say something when a flash of red, white, and yellow flames shot out of the top-floor windows in one of the condo units facing the hospital. The sound finally caught up with the sight, and the windows shook violently.

Samantha stepped back, and Jack turned ash white. Even though she expected an explosion, Samantha was caught off guard at the size and violence of it. Once she regrouped, she saw Jack run back to call for police and noticed that one of the lines was lit with someone on hold. He looked at her, and she immediately picked up the phone. In a shaking voice, she finally asked, “Did you set that off?”

She waited a moment. She then responded to a fictional voice by saying, “What do you mean … there’s one in the second lateral file near the nursing station in the ER and one on the maternity floor?” Samantha made sure to widen her eyes as if in shock or surprised. Jack had no idea how many times Samantha had played a role for men. There was a number of staff coming out to look at the ensuing flames. Cell phones were ringing, and the switchboard was beginning to light up. Jack stayed transfixed on the nurse, waiting for more information. Then she started to say, “Hello? Hello? Are you there?”

Jack snatched the phone from Samantha and listened, but there was only silence. While Samantha and Jack headed back to the emergency room, they were slowed by the tide of staff heading toward the lobby to see what had happened. The nurse came around to the other side of the nursing station and looked for a lateral file cabinet.

Samantha had to admit that for the first time Jack seemed more interested in his job than her butt. Right now, he was in full security mode and was the first to see a lateral file at the far end of the desk. He approached the cabinet slowly, and as he began to open it, the nurse whispered, “Be careful, Jack.” If she had not been there with her hand gently touching his back, he might never have opened the file at all. She could see that machismo got the better of him. As Samantha watched Jack open the file cabinet, she saw blinking red, yellow, and green electronic light emitting diode lights with wires going in and out of four separately wrapped blocks. There also seemed to be a white piece of paper with some writing on it. The writing seemed foreign with the exception of the last part, which clearly read, “May 2.” Jack stepped back, and Samantha audibly gasped.

Samantha said quietly, “Isn’t it May 2 today?”
I said that well
, she thought.

It was easy to see that Jack was all business. He moved himself and Samantha back to the main nursing station. To be convincing, Samantha allowed Jack to physically move her away from the dangerous-looking bomb. If it wasn’t for the bomb threat and the impending crisis to come, Samantha might have chuckled that Jack finally got his wish to lay hands on her. But Samantha was feeling some guilt, knowing that she was responsible for starting this part of drama. Jack turned suddenly to her and said, “Get an outside line and call 911. Get fire, police, and bomb squad to the hospital.”

Samantha immediately went to the phone and started her tasks. At the same time, she heard Jack’s voice going over the hospital’s public announcement in a firm, calm fashion: “Code black. Code black. Maternity ward is the first to move, emergency room second, remaining floors next. Code black. Maternity room first and emergency room second. This is not a test. This is not a drill.” With that public address, a flurry of activity from medical staff began by going to all the rooms to round up patients for evacuation. Good thing this all happened close to 7:00 a.m., when there were overlaps in both shifts. After his announcement, Jack gave Samantha a reassuring nod and moved off to assist coordinating with the hospital evacuation.

Samantha wrapped up her 911 calls to police and fire departments and, she added for good measure, a request for a hazardous material team. During her calls, she was also multitasking on her smart phone. Her text was short and two the point: “Alpha, Charlie. White bishop on the move. Bravo out.” She pressed “send” and was on her feet with her jacket and her bag. As all staff ran around her, Samantha ducked into the nurse’s changing room and took less than five minutes to change. In no time, she removed her nurse uniform, black wig, and white shoes and replaced them with navy blue slacks, a white paramilitary shirt, and an orange safety jacket with EMT on the lapel and back. With her clothes changed, she was now in her “paramedic” identity. In addition to her change in uniform, she now emerged from the changing room with long red hair pinned up under a black cap with a medical insignia. The former nurse “Smith” was now fully donned in a paramedic uniform, and she completely blended into the chaos. While all medical staff and patients were evacuating to the parking lot, the designated “safe zone,” EMT Smith was heading into the “danger zone,” where the bomb had been placed. Her destination was the ambulance parking lot, which was right next to the evacuating emergency room. After two attempts, she finally found an ambulance with the keys in the ignition. She got in, closed the door, turned the engine on, and started to carefully drive out of the parking lot, making sure to avoid hitting people passing and running away from the emergency room. At first, Samantha heard lots of sirens getting closer, and then they started to recede as she drove in the opposite direction. Back on her phone, she made another text: “White bishop secured transport. Black bishop, you are a go. Bravo out.”

Samantha began to consciously focus on relaxing her arms and shoulders. She was so tense from the explosion, bomb, change of identities, and stealing an ambulance that her body felt locked up with stress.
I don’t know how Burns did all this shit for a living without getting ulcers,
she thought. Her mind stayed with Burns for a moment. He was probably the second person she had loved other than her sister, Becky. It was hard for her to sift out how she cared for David as opposed to Burns. She loved Burns, and their relationship was sexual; however, she never thought of him except in his last name—
Burns
.
Somehow using the last name makes it safe for me to love him
, she thought. She loved David but more as a father. The kind of father that treated children like children and not like miniature adults. Samantha shook off the memories of prior foster fathers and her own parents.
Pleasant thoughts,
she told herself. As for Becky, well, she was as close to family as Samantha ever knew. Of all the people she had known, she would put her life on the line to save her—no matter what. As scared as Samantha felt about what she was doing, she was doing it for Becky first and foremost.

As Samantha drove toward the off-ramp, she wondered if Becky was faring better than she was in the espionage department.

Becky was completely focused as she watched the third text come in. The first one gave her time to get the truck started. Prior to starting the truck, she flipped the door up on the flatbed after she made sure the barrels didn’t move a whole lot when she would drive. By the time the second text came in, she was making sure the menacing electronic box with blinking lights attached to the barrels were actually blinking. She had checked the batteries twice to make sure. When the third text came in, she was just covering the barrels and sides of the pickup truck with a heavy tarp, about to tie it down. She made sure to read the last text carefully. Once Becky finished tying the tarp up the sides of the flatbed truck, she then climbed into the cab. She started the truck up, which stirred a four-and-half-year-old sleeping girl in the truck’s passenger seat. The little blond-haired girl simply shifted her head to the other side of the seat to get comfortable, pressing her face into the seat even more. She was glad that David wasn’t there to see that Emma wasn’t in her baby seat. He was really overprotective of her. He was overprotective of them both, actually. Becky smiled at the little girl again and then began the slow drive to her athletic club. She had been there more than a dozen times, so she knew the fastest way with few lights to get there. It was especially important to take the roads that had few or no traffic cameras. She was nervous when she heard a large number of sirens whirring in the distance. As she pulled the truck over the railroad tracks, she turned left into the industrial park, where her health club was situated. She had chosen this particular athletic center because of its proximity to professional offices and the lack of surveillance cameras both in the parking lot and in the gym itself. For 7:20, the parking lot was pretty full. While the other businesses were not open yet, the club was already abuzz with the overachieving moms, students, and professionals getting into their spinning classes and weight machines.

Instead of going to her usual space closer to the gym, she parked right in the middle of the large parking lot away from the gym. Rather than parking within the parking lines, she parked across them and in the center of all the surrounding buildings. As casually as she could, she exited the truck, extracted a jogger stroller from the backseat, and placed her little girl in it. Becky had started running nearly three years ago when she finally had the motivation to stop smoking and stop eating everything in sight. Emma was one of those motivators. David, her boyfriend, was the other. Still though, even though Becky had the classic runner’s body, she still would wear oversized tee shirts that covered her behind.

After Becky made sure Emma was buckled into the jogger’s stroller, she put the keys in her running suit and pulled her dark brunette hair in under her hat. She then untied the tarps and flipped them into the truck, exposing writing on the side of the truck. The script was familiar to her—Arabic, she was sure. There was no mistake of the date stamped at the end of the writing: “May 2!” She also removed the tarp from off the top of barrels she had transported. As Becky came to the rear of the truck, she dropped the door and exposed what appeared to be some kind of control device with blinking lights, a device attached to taped blocks that had wires going into barrels in the flatbed. The sun was below the tree line in the parking lot. Once the sun hit the tops of the barrels, it would ignite a dry-ice substance that would smoke profusely for about an hour until it dried out. That would draw a lot of attention, and she was sure to be long gone by then.
Not parking within the lines would be enough to draw ire from this neighborhood
, Becky thought. She then casually put on her sunglasses and pulled out her smart phone and began typing as she used her stomach to slowly push the stroller away from the truck. The text went out to two recipients: “Black bishop has delivered the package and is on the move. Heading to lair. Charlie out.”

Becky pressed “send” and then placed her phone in her pocket.

“I hope all this works,” Becky said to herself. She had noticed that since she had become a mom, she would often talk to herself. She thought it was because she was anxious. David told her it was to reassure herself. Still though, Becky never thought in a thousand years that she would be involved in such an elaborate plan. Years ago, planning her lunch at work was her big decision.
Second thoughts as always
, she thought.

“Too late now,” she muttered.

She pulled the oversized tee to cover her small frame and smoothed it out as she began her run back to the office. Becky did remember she had promised Emma a donut, so she knew she had to stop on the way. David would not be happy about the stop, but it was a rare treat. It had been a long time since she had had a donut. After she had lost nearly fifty pounds over the past years, she had made it her life’s work to reduce temptations. But even David would say, “Once in a while is fine.” It was such a beautiful day in May after all.

Chapter 2

It’s already a bad
day from the start
, Andersen thought. It began with a call at 7:00 a.m. from the watch commander about needing to redeploy the day shift to the neighboring town’s hospital to deal with an actual bomb situation. There was also a burning building right across the street from the same hospital.
What are the odds of that happening?
Andersen thought. To make matters worse, there was a shooting on the other side of his town in a new development. Sure, getting up early to get to work was really not that bad, but the day had proceeded downhill. He had cut himself shaving, dropped his coffee mug in the driveway, and dealt with more traffic than usual as he had headed to the richer side of North Reading. It was a pretty quiet town for a New England suburb of large homes with dual incomes. In these labile economic times, he was lucky to be employed. Steve Andersen was a lieutenant in the local police department, and his wife was a nurse. The kids were healthy, and he liked his in-laws. Andersen was lucky for the most part. Even though his wife was sick with some stomach bug, at least she was not at the hospital, where there was a bomb scare happening. She was pretty nonresponsive when he told her about the hospital and the fire; she had been throwing up all night. It was still not a great day, though, to have multiple bodies in a new development of a new home in a soon-to-be secured, gated community. That would really affect resale value. All this news fell in sharp contrast to a beautiful day.