Miracle Cure (36 page)

Would the story play any better with the police? With Carolyn Jessup?

Brian took the wide corridor to the BHI lobby, flashed his ID at the guard, and headed up the stairs to the ward. What else was there to do except to keep on picking up scraps of data, piece them together, and hope that at some point they might suggest an explanation that made sense? Of course, he would have to do so while steering clear of the professionals who were trying to kill him.

Pop, where are you when I need you?

Brian trotted up the five flights of stairs, pausing at each landing to listen for footsteps. He changed into scrubs in the on-call room. Jen, the usually perky unit secretary, brightened considerably as he came on the ward.

“Oh, Dr. Holbrook, I’m so glad to see you,” she said. “What an awful day this has been. What happened to you?”

“Just a touch of the GI flu.”

“No, I mean to your face and hands.”

“Oh … ah … gardening. I really get into my gardening sometimes. Any word on Phil?”

She shook her head grimly.

“Nothing. Dr. Pickard just left for his office. He’s been caring for the patients on the floor. I never knew he was such a good doctor.”

“One of the best anyplace.”

“Dr. Holbrook, he said you were on-call for tonight, and he left you the code-call beeper.”

She passed over the emergency pager and Brian hooked it to his belt. Then he handed her a slip of paper with the name
ALLISON BROUGHAM
printed on it—the next of the Phase One patients on his list.

“Could you call down to the record room and have them send this woman’s chart up here, please? Better still, if you can leave your post long enough to go down and get it, that would really help.”

“I shouldn’t leave the desk unattended, but Beverly is coming in at three to take over. I’ll go down then.”

“Perfect.”

The clinical-research ward was in reasonably good shape. Fifteen patients, all fairly ill, but none critical. By three-fifteen, when he was summoned to the front desk, he had been in to check on nine of them. Each had a meticulously written progress note from Ernest Pickard. Brian saw that he had described his boss well. Despite all the nonmedical responsibilities of his job as head of Boston Heart, Pickard was a truly outstanding cardiologist. With two of his junior staff missing, and the President’s visit just two days away, helping the cardiology fellows care for patients was probably the last thing the man wanted to be doing. But from what Brian could tell from his progress notes, the chief had been thoroughly briefed and had gotten involved with each case.

“There’s a phone call for you from Jen,” the new ward secretary said, handing over the phone. “She’s calling from the record room.”

“Jen, it’s Brian.”

“Dr. Holbrook, I’m here in the record room. There’s no Allison Brougham, B-R-O-U-G-H-A-M, in their computers. No one by that name has ever been a patient here.”

Oh, yes she has
, Brian wanted to say. But there was no point. Loose ends were being tied up. No more missing pages of lab reports. The Phase One patients were being systematically eliminated from the hospital’s data banks.

By the time Brian left Freeman, he had written down everything he had learned, along with what amounted to a few meager conclusions. Freeman was annoyed at Brian’s “If anything should happen to me” speech, but in the end, he took the papers and promised that one way or another, the powers at the FDA, the newspapers, and anyone else who might listen would get them.

Before returning to make rounds on the last six patients, Brian paged Phil and called his apartment. Nothing. Carrie Sherwood was out, too. Could she and Phil have married? Would Phil have gotten so swept up in the spontaneity, romance, and sex that he decided to abandon his workaholic, responsible persona for this one day? The explanation might have temporarily assuaged some of Brian’s fears, if only Phil hadn’t left that message on his answering machine about Angus MacLanahan.

It was after four when Brian finished seeing the last of the patients. Just in case, he selected another name from his Phase One list, and asked the evening unit secretary, Beverly, to send down for the chart. Then, realizing that he hadn’t had a thing to eat since breakfast, he signed off the ward and headed for the cafeteria. He reached the stairway door, then stopped, returned to the on-call room, and withdrew his briefcase from under the bed. He was wearing a knee-length lab coat over his scrubs. The revolver, wrapped in his sock, felt awkward and a bit
frightening in his coat pocket. Instead, he returned it to the briefcase, which he decided to carry with him.

The cafeteria, the pride of White Memorial, had a number of small public and private dining rooms surrounding a vast, horseshoe-shaped central eating area. At the open end of the horseshoe was the serving area, with a salad bar, pizza kitchen, grill, full-meal section, and dessert bar. With a thousand or more employees working any number of shifts, the cafeteria was almost always busy.

Clutching his briefcase and constantly vigilant, Brian joined the human stream entering the massive restaurant. There was no one in the line he even recognized, let alone anyone he knew well enough to sit and dine with. He flashed briefly on the Suburban Hospital days, when there was always an animated group in the physicians’ dining room and there was not a soul, from housekeeping to the CEO, with whom he didn’t have some sort of history. Now, he was virtually anonymous, and the one person he was close to had disappeared.

After a brief feint toward the salad bar, he settled in the line headed toward the grill. He was just about to order a half-pound cheeseburger with fries, when he noticed a man some distance away, heading out of the cafeteria with a loaded tray. Brian’s vantage point was at a sharp angle from behind, but the height, thin waist, and powerful shoulders were a giveaway—especially since Brian had just watched a video of him murdering an old man in cold blood.

Brian bolted from the line, trying to move quickly without calling attention to himself. Leon was wearing the same outfit—jeans and a blue dress shirt—he had worn that evening by the machine canteen. Whether he was checking to see if he was being followed, or searching for Brian, there was no way to tell, but he stopped a couple of times to look around. He moved into the main
corridor and turned in the direction of Boston Heart—back toward the spot where Brian had first seen him. Brian hung back a good distance, now almost certain that Leon was headed toward the staircase to the subbasement.

As they approached the basement of Boston Heart, the corridor was virtually deserted. Brian had to hold back so far that he actually lost sight of the killer. Finally, he reached the stairway to the subbasement. To his right was the stairway up to the ground floor of BHI, and thirty or forty feet past it were the cath lab, the cath film library, and the elevator doors. Ahead and to the left was the machine canteen, and at the far end of the hall was the animal facility. Leon was nowhere in sight. Almost certainly, he had headed down.

Brian descended the staircase cautiously, expecting at any moment to have Leon appear below him, pocked face grinning, gun leveled. Hospital subbasements frequently housed the laundry, central equipment supply, and some portion of the power plant. Leon could be working in any of those units, although Brian couldn’t see why they would be located in the BHI subbasement and not beneath the main hospital.

The subbasement of Boston Heart was somewhat dimly lit by incandescent bulbs set into the concrete ceiling and diffused by opaque, flush-mounted plastic covers. The hallway itself was unpainted cement, and completely unadorned. There were no doors except for the one from the stairwell and a steel door some distance away on the right, at a spot roughly beneath where the cath lab was. The elevator apparently stopped at the floor above.

Brian took a few tentative steps forward. The steel door had a recessed grip that suggested it slid open. Two more steps, then Brian hesitated, opened his briefcase, and removed the snub-nosed revolver from its covering, dropping it into his coat pocket next to his stethoscope. He was
no more than twenty feet away from the door now. The corridor beyond it seemed to dead-end at what would correspond to the animal facility a floor above. If someone came down the staircase now, he would be trapped. He slipped his hand inside his pocket and gripped the revolver.
Did it have a safety
—something he had to release to fire it? This was a hell of a moment not to know, he thought. Flattened against one wall, he took another step.

Suddenly, his code-call beeper began sounding, nearly startling him into a coronary standstill. Somewhere in the hospital, there was a cardiac arrest or dire emergency. His hand shot down and quickly deactivated the sound. Then he risked glancing down at the LED display.

BHI-7
, it read. The cardiac surgical floor of Boston Heart. There was a cardiac crisis in Laj Randa’s kingdom. Of all the places in the entire hospital, BHI-7 was the one where Brian knew he would be the most superfluous at a Code 99. Randa had a virtual army of postdoctorals, fellows, and surgical residents. Besides, Randa had so little respect for him, it was doubtful the man would even want Brian anywhere on his service.

He hesitated. One possibility was watching the doorway from the stairwell. Another was going over and trying the door. The options rumbled through his head, but he could not seem to get past the issue of whether he was capable of ignoring a code call. No, he decided—not even one for which they probably didn’t need him.

He turned to head back to the staircase and froze. Behind him, mounted on the ceiling, virtually concealed in the corner between the ceiling and a concrete support, was the nozzle of a small video-surveillance camera, virtually identical to the one in the Vasclear clinic.

At that moment, the metal door behind him began sliding open.

B
RIAN MOVED QUICKLY BACK TOWARD THE STAIRWELL
, passing beneath the overhead camera, then out of its range. Even though he felt certain the person about to emerge from behind the sliding door was a 230-pound professional bent on killing him, he had the irrational urge to stand his ground—to pull the revolver from his pocket, gain an advantage on the man, and demand some answers. The code-call page on his belt sounded once again, snapping him back to reality. Without waiting for Leon to show himself, he whirled and bolted up the stairs, expecting any moment to hear the crack of a gun and feel an explosion of pain from the small of his back.

Breathless, Brian reached the main lobby of BHI. There were still seven flights to go to the surgical floor. His knee was beginning to throb. The elevator was the obvious way to go, but the notion of being trapped in a
steel box with Leon somewhere in pursuit made him uneasy.

Yielding to his own imagination, he hurried back to the stairwell. He made the seven flights with a single stop on three to catch a few extra breaths and listen for footsteps. Nothing. But now, thanks to the subbasement surveillance camera, they knew he was getting closer. Maybe it was for the best, he thought. He was armed and had no intention of going anywhere in the hospital that wasn’t full of people. There was no way Leon, or whichever killer was emerging from that door, would be able to take him by surprise. And if they acted hastily and took risks to stop him, there was a heightened chance they would make a mistake.

Who was that guy in the TV series trying to convince people that there were aliens infiltrating Earth in human form?… Vinson. That was it, Roy Vinson
.

All Brian needed was one captured alien—one of Newbury’s Russian killers trying to explain to the police what he was doing behind a steel door in the Boston Heart Institute subbasement, and why he or one of his pals had murdered Angus MacLanahan and Bill Elovitz and was trying to murder Brian Holbrook.

The surgical unit was identical in its layout to the medical one except that the nurses’ station was larger and the rooms had glass walls and doors on the hallway side.

The crisis, evidenced by a crash cart and two medical students by the door, was at the far end of the corridor in room 703. Brian was relieved he had answered the page when he saw that inside the room there were three nurses, a lab technician, and only one physician—a resident. On the bed was a middle-aged man, supine and naked, who appeared near death. He had a recent sternotomy incision running from the top of his breastbone to the bottom. The skin was held together by a railroad-tie arrangement of
dozens of two-inch paper-tape strips, stained with dry blood. A similarly closed incision ran down the inside of the man’s right thigh—the site where a vein had been harvested for bypass grafting.

Two or three days post-op
, Brian thought immediately, noting that the chest tubes, routinely inserted at the time of surgery, had already been removed. The heart rate on the monitor screen was quite rapid—130, 135—but the cardiographic pattern of the beats looked surprisingly regular. The man’s color was awful—his skin mottled, his lips purplish. His breathing was labored.
Severe shock.
.

Brian identified himself to the resident, who was clearly rattled.

“I’m Mark Lewellen,” the man said. He looked to Brian like a teenager. “I’m a first-year resident and I’m really glad you’re here. Usually there are lots more surgeons on the floor. One of our teams is at the main hospital in the OR. Dr. Randa and the rest of the staff were at a conference at Boston City, but it ended fifteen minutes ago, so they’ve gotta be on their way back.”

“I’m not getting any pressure,” the nurse kneeling by the bed said.

Brian had already checked the pulses at the man’s neck, elbows, wrists, and groin. Now he pulled out his stethoscope and listened briefly.

“Get a catheter in him, please,” Brian said evenly to the nurses. “Hang a dopamine drip, open his IV wide, and have someone call down to see if there’s any blood still cross-matched for him. If there’s just a unit or two, we need four more stat. Make that six.” He turned to Mark Lewellen. “Okay, talk. Quickly.”