Angel Face (25 page)

Up to now, he’d barely allowed himself to think about what was happening at the hospital. He’d gone from one extreme to the other; hyperresponsible and believing the place couldn’t run without him to disappearing from its corridors with barely a wave good-bye. How the hell had that happened? And what the hell was he doing in a foggy harbor meeting CIA agents? He hoped his valve team was handling things, especially Teri Benson. And he hoped Judy Monahan had made it.

He had no idea how his sister was doing, either. Or the damn bird.

He’d been gone less than a week all told, but it felt like years. It also felt like he might never get back. He gave a symbolic shudder and looked around, wondering where the hell Firestarter was. That’s what a foggy night did to you. It set you up to think that something
had
to go wrong.

T
ERI
Benson’s bad day got worse that night. She hadn’t been able to leave the hospital after the valve replacement surgery. She’d had a full day of following up
on patients, evaluating new intakes, updating charts, and putting on the best performance of her life. She had to pretend that everything was fine while her guts were being eaten out by maggots and fanged insects.

Conducting evening rounds was the worst. By then
everyone
knew of her humiliation at Steve Lloyd’s hands, including the students she instructed, and they were pointedly silent. It was as if they were embarrassed for her, and that had nearly destroyed her. But she’d kept up, kept on, while they talked about her behind her back. Did they think she couldn’t hear the whispers, the laughing?

The entire Cardiac Care Unit was having a field day at her expense.

By the time she got home that night, she had a prioritized list of ways to butcher Steve Lloyd like a squealing pig. Plotting his death and the disposal of his parts was the only thing that made her feel human. She’d planned to write the list down and expand on it when she got home. She’d planned to wallow in blood and gore, but she was robbed of even that satisfaction.

Waiting for her in her voice mail box was more bad news.

Jordan Carpenter was back.

He’d left an odd message asking her to check on his surgery schedule for the following week and make sure that whatever couldn’t be reassigned was rescheduled. He also wanted her to look in on his postop patients and see that they were getting the care they needed. But he ended by swearing her to secrecy. He needed a few more days to finish his business, and meanwhile, no one else was to know he was back.

What the hell was he up to? Some new breakthrough? He would probably win the Nobel for this one, lucky bastard. The very idea enraged Teri. How many women had ever won the Nobel or any other prestigious award, for that matter? Medical science was just one more old boys’
club. Women weren’t encouraged or recognized and never had been.

Jesus, I hate them all,
she thought.

But it was Carpenter she hated the most. There had been others at other hospitals, but he was her nemesis at California General. If he’d given her the respect and support she deserved, Steve Lloyd wouldn’t have dared to treat her like an idiot child. None of them would.

Moments later, standing in her modestly furnished, discount-house wonderland of a living room with the cordless phone at her ear, Teri called the service that Carpenter used. His message had caught her off guard, but it could be this was the opportunity she’d been looking for. In fact, he might have blundered right into her hands by choosing her to confide in.

She was the only one who knew he was back in town.

Maybe it was Jordan Carpenter who was the idiot child.

A
NGELA
had no trouble getting into the SmartTech labs. No one had changed the parking lot’s combination code, and her ID was accepted when she swiped it at the door. Of course she wasn’t requesting entry into the high-security areas or any of the clean rooms. All she had to do was get to the glass bubble without anyone spotting her.

She’d been inside the lookout tower many times, which was how she’d come to think of Peter Brandt’s office. The issue now was how to search his room without being spotted by the night shift. She wasn’t greatly concerned about the security guards or the surveillance cameras. She knew how to avoid those, but like most labs, SmartTech had researchers who didn’t go home except to visit. Angela was one of them. She knew what it was like to be so involved that even an act of God or nature couldn’t have made her look up from her computer screen. With
luck, none of night shift would look up, either.

What startled her most was the state of her boss’s office. It was hermetically clean. His desk was neater than she’d ever seen it, which was an immediate red flag. This was not Peter; he was a brilliant slob.

It was a good-sized room, and to avoid being seen, she had to go over most of it on her hands and knees. When that became painful, she pulled off her backpack and switched to a crouch. But she found nothing that would tell her what Peter Brandt had in mind when he left the message on her phone. The place had been wiped clean, not unlike her memory.

She wasn’t able to gain access to his voice mail or E-mail, but she did break into a locked file cabinet, using the wire handle from one of the Thai takeout cartons. That turned out to be a dead end, too, although she hadn’t expected anything else. Security was tight at SmartTech, and Peter would never keep anything compromising in a locked cabinet. This one contained personnel folders, which appeared to be routine job application and evaluation forms, including her own.

Frustrated, she settled back on her haunches to think through her next move. If she didn’t go back to the hotel, she might miss Jordan’s call, but the waiting had been maddening. It had pushed her to the edge, and she couldn’t risk that.

She stared at the credenza against the wall, but there was no voice telling her what to do this time. Only as she rose to get up did a ribbon of white leap out at her from the blur. She wasn’t even sure what had caught her attention, but as she scanned the credenza, she spotted what looked like something jammed in the shredder. There was a glass window that revealed whether the machine was full. This one looked empty, except for that ribbon.

She gingerly pried the teeth loose with the same wire handle that had opened the file drawer and then she
coaxed free the handwritten note jamming the works. It was riddled with teeth marks but mostly legible. She didn’t recognize the handwriting, but the message was chillingly blunt.

“If you don’t take care of the matter we discussed, I will.”

That was all she could make out, but she knew in her gut the words referred to her. There were times when you just knew, and this was one of them. The rest of the note had been shredded and dumped, except for the paper ribbon she’d spotted, which had one mangled initial that looked like a capital letter, an
F
or possibly an
S
.

Angela stared at it in confusion. It was part of the signature, and the first name she thought of was Sammy. But he would never write such a threatening note to his own boss. Her psychiatrist’s last name started with an
F,
but Mona had nothing to gain by Angela’s death. And there was Silver, who lived on a cocoa plantation half a continent away. Silver had said she visited the States frequently. She was away on some kind of trip when Angela was sent to the mission by Pedro.

Angela’s mind began to spin. She tried to get to her feet and was nearly knocked over by the force of her thoughts. They were whirling so furiously she couldn’t get her balance. She was reeling. That cold and deliberate machinelike persona was gone.

What was Adam’s real name? She had to find out Adam’s real name. Maybe he wasn’t dead after all? She’d begun to shake, and her heart was beating too hard. The agent had told Jordan to kill her. Someone wanted her dead. Or they wanted Angel Face dead, whoever Angel Face really was, and they just thought she was Angela. Could it be a bizarre case of mistaken identity? There were so many possibilities, Angela couldn’t make any sense of it. She still didn’t understand why anyone would
want to frame her. Why not just kill her if they wanted her out of the way?

She found her backpack and crept from the office. There was an emergency exit stairway where the sweep of the video camera fell slightly short. She had never consciously thought much about the company’s security measures during her time here, but she’d obviously been paying attention on some level.

“Angela!”

Her name came sailing down the corridor, straight at her. She was on the first floor now, but she couldn’t turn and run the other way. It was Sammy, and he was rushing toward her. She halted, not knowing what else to do.

“Angela, where have you been?” He scrutinized her as if she’d been in an accident and was standing there bleeding right in front of him. “Are you all right? What’s happened to you?”

She remembered her reflection in the bathroom mirror, the pinched expression, the chalky skin, and frozen eyes. She had scrubbed herself raw, and that must be what he saw now. The blue jeans and man’s T-shirt she’d changed into were large and ill-fitting

“I haven’t been well,” she told him. “I just came in to pick up some things, and I have to go.”

He blocked her way when she tried to get around him. “I’ll go with you to your office,” he insisted. “There’s something you have to see.”

There was only one thing Angela had to do, and that was get out of the building, but if she brushed him off and headed for the exit, he would surely report her, even if only for her own good. If he knew anything about her situation, then he probably thought she was breaking down again.

“Come on,” he said, waving her with him. “You won’t believe this.”

“Sammy, what is it?” She wasn’t going anywhere until he explained.

“Your study. I filled in for you.”

She followed him into her cubicle, startled to see her equipment going full blast. “What are you doing on my computer? Running my study data?”

He looked startled. “Someone had to do it, Angela. You’ve been gone for days. And while I was at it, I checked your E-mail, too. There was one marked Urgent from someone named ‘runninwyld.’ You probably ought to take a look. She wanted you to meet her.”

“What?” Sammy was right. Angela couldn’t believe it. Without her password, he would have had to hack into her E-mail account. That was frightening, but she didn’t have time to confront him. She had to get out of the building!

“Wait, Angela,
look,
look at these images. This dude’s brain is about to explode.”

Now he was pointing at her computer screen. There were multiple images up there, a SPECT, an MRI, and an EEG, all of the same brain and all showing abnormal amounts of activity. Angela had never personally witnessed this phenomenon before, but it had a name: firestorm.

“My God, who is that?” she whispered, but she knew.
She knew.

“He may have gotten too much juice,” Sammy said. “I hope to hell somebody’s got him in a straitjacket.”

Angela wasn’t sure whether Sammy meant the radioisotopic solution the subjects drank or the constant bombardment of electrical and magnetic signals, but it sounded like something had gone wrong with the study.

She broke for the door, terrified that Sammy would try to stop her.

“Hey, come back!” he said. “Where are you going?”

This time she listened to her impulses and kept running, but she couldn’t block out Sammy’s voice.

“For Christ’s sake, stay away from him! He’s dangerous! Stay away from Jordan Carpenter!”

Angela kept running, running and praying no one would seal off the lab before she got out. As the sliding door rolled shut behind her, she sprinted for the corridor. Terror drove her faster and faster. She was afraid to look back and see if Sammy was behind her, but she knew she couldn’t let him catch her. She no longer trusted him. How had he known about Jordan Carpenter?

E
MPTY
beer bottles littered the concrete sidewalk that spanned the boat docks. Jordan picked one up and lobbed it into a nearby trash can, shattering the hush the fog had created. He’d been waiting too long. The agent was over an hour late, and he wasn’t answering his phone. Jordan had already left three messages. He would give the man five more minutes, and then he was gone. His intuition had been right. This was a bad move. He should have set the terms for the meeting, picked the time and place.

It was more than the tide that stank in Long Beach harbor.

At least his pager hadn’t gone off. That meant Angela was okay, unless something had happened that she couldn’t call. That thought chilled him to the bone. He wasn’t going to let himself go there.

A shrill ring brought him out of his festering thoughts. He’d parked the car on a side street, and he was on his way back there when the cell phone rang. Jordan had barely hit the Talk button before a voice was hissing at him through the receiver.

“There’s one born every minute! You should have killed her, Carpenter. She suckered you good, you fool.”

It was Firestarter. Jordan wanted to snap the man’s neck with his bare hands, but a high-pitched tone alerted him. His pager was going off. He dug the thing out of his pocket and saw by the digital display that it was his answering service. Not Angela, but he had to take it anyway.

“I’ll get back to you,” he told Firestarter, disconnecting the agent with savage pleasure.

He sprinted back to the dock to use the pay phone. He was reasonably sure that Firestarter could trace him on the cell phone and possibly even listen to his calls, and he wasn’t taking any more chances. It wasn’t clear why the answering service hadn’t contacted either Steve Lloyd or Teri Benson, who were supposed to take Jordan’s calls, but it was probably just a glitch. Somebody didn’t read a notation.

The service answered immediately. There was an emergency, he was told. A new patient, on his waiting list for scheduling, was having chest pain. The patient was minutes away from Jordan’s Belmont Shores office, so the service had arranged for the man to meet Jordan there.

He arrived just moments after Jordan did, an older man, who’d managed to drive himself there without any help, but he was obviously in great pain. Jordan started him on 325 milligrams of crushed aspirin and checked his vital signs. His symptoms were classic. He was suffering chest pains, radiating arm pain, cold sweats, weakness, and dizziness. His pulse was erratic, and his face had a bluish tinge.

In all his years of practice, Jordan had never lost a patient to bad judgment, but tonight could mar that record, and he knew it. It wasn’t just that his focus was off, his whole attitude had changed dramatically in the last few days. It was only beginning to dawn on him how dramatically. There was now something more important to
him than his quest to save lives. One life. One woman.

He was so obsessed with protecting her it was hard to muster the right doctorly concern for a stranger, even for this patient who was suffering in his office. That had never happened before. He’d always been able to subjugate his needs to the patient’s, and he’d always believed a dedicated doctor should do that.

“Let’s get your shirt off,” Jordan said. “I’m going to take some blood and get you hooked up to an electrocardiogram. Then we’ll see what’s going on.”

Jordan took a quick medical history while he helped the man undress, and was surprised to discover that his patient was a semiretired surgeon. Doctors were often the worst patients. They knew what could go wrong, but this one was in too much pain to care.

Unfortunately, Jordan didn’t have the man’s records available. These days his private practice was limited to pre- and postop surgical care. He generally did his intake evaluations at the hospital and had duplicate files sent here to the office, but that hadn’t been done in this instance. In fact, he didn’t recall having done the intake, but considering the last couple of days, that wasn’t surprising. If he called the hospital now for the information, he might as well hold a press conference and announce that he’d returned. He couldn’t risk it. He needed anonymity until he’d dealt with Firestarter.

Jordan hadn’t hooked up an EKG in awhile. That was done by trained technicians, but within moments he had all the electrodes in place. He was adjusting the settings when the man suddenly doubled over in a choking fit. He clutched himself and slid off the examining table, coughing and gagging.

“Help me!” he rasped. “Help me, it’s my heart!”

He collapsed on the floor, and Jordan dropped down next to him. The man appeared to be unconscious. His pulse was thready, and Jordan immediately began chest
compressions.
Lean and release, lean and release, twenty-five pounds of pressure.
But as he rocked up and down, forcing life back into the failing heart, he was gripped with foreboding.

Fear? That had never happened before, either.

Fear and doubt didn’t enter into his thinking when he was working on patients. There was a computer-like feedback loop that took over. He processed facts and made decisions accordingly, maybe too coldly. He’d been criticized for his machinelike efficiency, but Jordan didn’t lack for compassion. Losing a patient was devastating, but there was no room for fear when you were trying to save one.

An AED unit sat next to the EKG. Jordan had come to loathe the sight of defibrillator paddles, but they were his only option now. The chest compressions weren’t working. Fortunately, this particular unit came equipped with a voice activation option so that Jordan could operate it by himself.

He got the machine going, applied the conductive gel pads to the patient’s chest, and positioned the paddles, one near the sternum, the other outside the nipple.

“Two hundred joules! Execute!” he shouted. The unit responded instantly. At the first jolt, the man’s body jumped off the floor, but there was no change in the pattern.

“Three hundred joules! Execute!” Jordan sent another charge through him, and the heart hesitated its mad flight. It had been stunned into submission. If it fell back into its normal pattern, the patient would make it. Otherwise—

Jordan tried another jolt and another, but the frozen organ wouldn’t budge. He couldn’t bring it back. His patient had gone into massive cardiac arrest. The man was gone, and the EKG was a screaming red line. Jordan didn’t even have to look at it. It pierced his brain like a
bullet, leaving him as frozen and unresponsive as the heart.

He couldn’t move. The paddles were gripped in his hands as if they were attached to him. It was only as he shook them off that he saw it. Something was wrong. A red warning light flashed on the AED unit and the number of joules displayed was nearly twice what Jordan had ordered.

It may not have been heart failure, he realized. The paddles may have killed him. Jordan was thunderstruck.

Call an ambulance,
he told himself.
Get him to a trauma unit. There’s nothing more you can do here. Call now!

As he reached for the phone, he saw that the message light was blinking. He held off answering it long enough to call 911, even though the thought hammering in his head, the hope, was that it might be a message from Angela. A moment later, he was faced with the truth of that premonition. It was her.

“It’s not so difficult to kill, is it?” she whispered over the line. “You might even get as good as me. Still love me?”

Fooled you, fooled you!

The words echoed in his head, and her laughter made him physically ill. The phone receiver crashed into the cradle. Fluorescent lights flared brightly, rendering the room shock white as he turned around. The tightness in his chest made him feel as if
he
were having a heart attack.

She suckered you good, you fool.

Firestarter’s snakelike hiss came back to Jordan. It cut into his thoughts and forced him to face the unthinkable—that Angela had something to do with this. That she was Angel Face. The sound that caught in his throat didn’t even resemble laughter. It was cold, burning cold. That
was
unthinkable. He couldn’t go there any more than he
could imagine her hurt, dying, unable to answer the phone.

He needed to move, walk, think, but there wasn’t time. He had to continue the compressions, keep the oxygen flowing until the paramedics arrived. Where the hell were they? He had a Code Blue on the floor of his office! And whose voice had he heard? Not Angela’s. It could not have been her. He had to find a way to make his brain work. He had to cling to the only thing sanity would allow him to believe. There weren’t any other options now. Someone, that bastard agent, was trying to plant suspicions that were beyond comprehension.

What the hell did Firestarter want him to think? That Angela had rigged the equipment and set him up to execute the next victim on her list? Was that what the agent was implying?

Beyond unthinkable. That was impossible.

A shadow fell over Jordan’s splayed hands, and he looked up to see a woman standing in the doorway of the exam room. His breath nearly scalded him, and it was all he could do not to lose the rhythm of the compressions. The dark hair, the dark eyes, completely threw him for a moment. She could have been—

No, she looked nothing like Angela Lowe.

“What are you doing here?” Jordan’s voice rose over the EKG’s signal. It was Teri Benson in his doorway, and her hesitation confused him. She looked like a spectator at an accident scene. Her expression was a strange mix of excitement and repulsion, and it gave him the creeps, but whatever else was going on, she was still a doctor. Why wasn’t she down here helping?

“The service called me,” she explained. “They said there was an emergency. What happened?”

Jordan didn’t mince words. “Either the defib unit malfunctioned, or I did. He got too much juice and his heart gave out.”

“Malfunction? What do you mean?”

“Never mind that now. The paramedics are on their way. Take over for me until they get here, will you? There’s something I have to do.”

She was acting so oddly, he expected her to protest, but she replaced him on the compressions without missing a beat, and she asked all the right questions about the patient’s condition. He had to believe she was going to be okay, but maybe the pressure was getting to her.

“Teri? Can you handle this?”

“Yes, go!”

He reached for his jacket and realized the gun was still there, hidden inside. As he slipped the jacket on, a thought flashed into his consciousness, one terrible unbidden thought.
He should have killed her when he had the chance.

There wasn’t time to analyze where it had come from. His nerves were firing like machine guns, and his brain was dangerously overtaxed. There was only time to heave the thought violently out of his mind and go in search of her.

I
T
was a sobering moment of déjà vu for Jordan. His house was ablaze with light when he drove up, exactly like the night he found the dead bird on the floor. He’d driven back to the hotel after the tragedy in his office, but Angela was gone, and when he searched his mind, trying to imagine where she might be, he had a sudden flash of insight.

It would end where it had started: his house.

How could he have forgotten that on the same day she collapsed, sobbing over a bird, she had also pulled a flare from her coat and blinded him? Maybe he
was
a fool. And maybe it had to end here so that this time he could see her for exactly who she was. He wanted her to be
innocent,
his
innocent, and he wanted to save her, possibly so that he could save himself. Maybe that was all that had mattered to him, who he wanted her to be.

The truth was, he had no idea who she was. And he was beginning to wonder who he was. One thing he did know. He had won the battle with his hero complex. It was dead on the floor of his office, along with the patient he’d lost and any illusions he may have had that he was capable of saving anyone. It felt like there was nothing left to save at this point, nothing worth saving. Everything he believed was in question. His mind and heart were fatigued to the point that any more pressure would snap them. And it hadn’t taken an act of God or nature to bring it about. It had taken only one woman.

She was standing in the living room, her back to the door when he came in. Her eyes narrowed with shock as she turned around, and her pale face flinched tight. You could almost see tendons pulling like drawstrings. He had thought once that it hurt to look at her she was so beautiful. It hurt now, although no one would have called her beautiful.