Miracle Cure (44 page)

“Now!” he heard her say.

Jessup exploded the vodka bottle over the stocky man’s head, dropping him in a hail of glass and booze. The younger guard turned away from Brian toward the commotion. Although Brian’s movements were slowed by the clothesline and the pain in his side, his attack was still quick enough. He swung his hands over the man’s head. The clothesline binding Brian’s wrists caught the guard around the throat. Brian snapped the cord taut and threw himself backward. The Chechen fell heavily on top of him, his face to the ceiling.

Ignoring the pain boring into his chest from the guard’s weight, Brian pulled down with all the strength left in his arms. The young man thrashed wildly but there was no way he could turn over. His elbow was a spear, thrusting again and again into Brian’s injured side. Then suddenly the blows stopped. The man’s body went limp. Brian, blood streaming into his eyes from his nose, kept intense pressure on the rope.

“You can stop, Brian,” Jessup said. “He’s dead.”

Brian shoved the corpse aside, unable to avoid staring
at the protruding violet mass that was its tongue. He was surprised at how little remorse he was feeling at having killed for a second time. Carolyn, still breathless, knelt beside him and undid the knots.

“Is the other guy dead?” he asked.

“No. Actually, I think he’s waking up.”

Brian helped roll the semiconscious man onto his stomach. They lashed his arms and ankles behind him.

“Do you want to stay and try to ambush Leon?” she asked.

“I want to get out of here. I’m in no shape to get the better of Leon.”

“In that case, we have to get to my office as fast as we can,” she said. “If we can get those videos over to the Hippodome and show Alexander Baird what we have, we could still stop the ceremony.”

“I promise I’ll tell anyone who will listen about how you saved my life,” Brian said as she helped him stand. “It will help.”

Jessup bent over, took the revolver from the shoulder holster of the corpse, and offered it to Brian.

He shook his head.

“A dear friend wisely told me just yesterday that my having a gun greatly increases the odds that someone will choose to shoot me first and question me later.”

“I don’t care if they shoot
me,”
she said, cradling the gun. “I’ve never even held one of these. Any tricks?”

“Point and shoot, just like the camera.”

They cautiously opened the door to the communications center. The room was just as Brian had imagined—state-of-the-art recording equipment, half a dozen monitoring screens on the wall.

The corridor outside was deserted.

“Let’s go to the first floor and take the elevator up to the fourth floor from there,” Jessup said.

“Looking like we do, I think we’d be better off sticking to the stairs.”

Carolyn pulled a tissue from a box on the counter and wiped some of the blood from his face.

“Stairs it is. Hang on, Brian. It’s almost over.”

“I hope so,” he said. “Tell me something,” he added as they hurried down the hall to the stairwell. “How do you think Art got to your place last night the way he did? Do you think you were followed?”

Jessup considered the question for a few seconds.

“I don’t know,” she said finally. “I stopped for a while at the beach by the end of the causeway, and the place was absolutely deserted. Mine was the only car in the little parking area. If someone was following me, I don’t know how they kept me from spotting them. Why?”

“It’s bothering me,” Brian replied. “That’s all.”

F
UELED BY ADRENALINE BUT SLOWED BY INJURIES
, B
RIAN
followed Carolyn Jessup up to her fourth-floor office. Getting in enough air was a problem for him. His nose was completely clogged with drying blood and his ribs were painfully monitoring every movement. Still, he made the six flights from the subbasement without stopping. As Carolyn had said, it was almost over.

Not surprisingly, given the hospital’s guest of honor, the stairway was deserted. They reached Jessup’s office without encountering a soul. Jessup punched in the code and unlocked the outer door to her darkened suite. She led Brian quickly through the reception area into the inner office. The EKG machine was right where she said it would be. Alongside it was the four-drawer oak file cabinet. Jessup groaned.

“The key’s on my ring,” she said.

“No backup?”

“My secretary has one, but I think she keeps it on
her
ring.”

Brian searched the receptionist’s desk and came up not with the key, but with a fairly sturdy letter opener.

“Having Senator Louderman referred to me for a cardiac evaluation was a totally unexpected godsend,” Jessup explained as Brian worked at prying open the drawer. “Straight out of the blue. Once we made him a believer, the entire Vasclear timetable was accelerated.”

“But he didn’t have heart disease.”

“No. Plain old esophagitis.”

She still couldn’t keep a note of smugness from her voice, Brian noticed. At the moment he was certain the opener was about to snap, the drawer popped free. Louderman’s
films, properly labeled, were in a small soft-leather valise.

“We have to hurry,” Brian urged. “Leon’s probably returned with that coffee by now. They’ve got to be looking for us. Come on.”

As they started toward the door into the reception area, Brian said, “I’m not sure I’m presentable enough to meet the—”

The spit of a silenced pistol stopped him in mid-sentence. He whirled just in time to see Jessup, clutching at her upper chest, spin fully around and fall heavily by her receptionist’s desk. Standing by the doorway, guns drawn, were Leon and the stocky killer they had tied up. Brian groaned as he remembered Carolyn suggesting that they go directly to her office, not thinking the man on the floor was conscious.
Stupid!
But not nearly as stupid as failing to take the man’s gun.

Desperate, Brian looked toward the window as the two killers moved into the reception area. Jessup’s office was on the fourth floor, but one story down, maybe twelve feet, was a roof—the roof of the surgical-observation unit, Brian figured. Was there any way he would have the nerve to plunge headfirst through the plate-glass window? Could he survive such a move?

“Naugh-ty doctor,” Leon said, grinning grotesquely through the office door at Brian. “Stay here,” he ordered to his man in English.

He took a single step forward. Behind him, Brian could see Carolyn begin to move. Her guard was paying no attention to her, but instead was looking past Leon at Brian. His inattention was quickly fatal. Carolyn’s shot, from an awkward angle, caught the man squarely in the forehead. He was stumbling backward when Jessup fired again. This time,
Leon
cried out and clutched his shoulder.
Carolyn, on her knees, managed to scramble behind the desk as Leon fired at her.

Brian knew this was his moment. He dove for the door from the office to the reception area, slammed it shut, and bolted it. From beyond the door came another shot, then another. He considered calling the hospital operator for help, but just as quickly changed his mind as first one, then another bullet shattered the wood around the lock. Instead, he lifted Jessup’s heavy leather desk chair over his head and hurled it with all his strength through the window. Cool, wet night air flooded the office. Outside, a wind-driven rain was falling through a pitch-black sky. Another shot. More splinters.

Brian kicked out a few remaining shards of glass, slipped his hand through the handle of the case with Louderman’s films, and lowered himself out the window until his arms were at full extension. The throbbing in his chest and finger made the effort excruciating. The roof seemed farther down than he had estimated, but what difference did that make now? At the moment the door above him shattered open, he let go.

Give and roll
, was his only thought as he fell through the rain.
Give and …

He hit the gravel roof with his legs virtually straight, and pitched awkwardly to one side. No give, no roll. Air exploded from his lungs. Already-damaged ribs separated even further. His bad knee popped out, then back. He hit the wet stones with his shoulder and the side of his face, tearing away skin that was already badly bruised. The blow stunned him, but he managed to respond to the voice shrieking in his head.

Move! … Move!

Brian rolled away from the building as a bullet snapped into the gravel not far from his neck. Leon, at the window above, fired again. This time the shot tore
through the muscle of Brian’s thigh. He cried out but kept rolling across the roof. He looked back just as Leon, able to use only one arm, lowered himself out the window.

Clutching Louderman’s angiogram films, Brian forced himself to his feet and, dragging his injured left leg, hobbled across the roof toward what he prayed was some sort of fire escape. What he found instead was a broad scaffolding coming off the roof, and pressing flush against the next building. Ahead of him, maybe fifty yards, the night was awash in light. Spotlight beams from several buildings shimmered down through the rain, focused on a single area. The dome!

If he could get close enough, he could throw the case with the films through the glass, and then try to make it down the scaffolding alongside the Pinkham Building. At least the proof would survive. The drop to the amphitheater floor was perhaps twenty-five or thirty feet, but the videos seemed reasonably well protected.

Brian glanced over his shoulder just as Leon hit the roof. Despite his wounded arm, the killer rolled with expert grace and leaped catlike to his feet. No linebacker Brian had ever played with moved like that. He dragged himself painfully out onto the scaffolding and hobbled through the downpour toward the light, knowing it would not be much longer before Leon caught up with him. The brilliant colors of the dome were growing closer. Brian heard the pounding footsteps behind him. He had just seconds now. There was no hope of getting off the scaffolding; no hope of finding a way to the ground. Quickly, he folded the soft leather valise around the film boxes, then hefted it in his hand. He passed it like a football at the moment Leon’s gun hammered down on his back. The pouch crashed through the stained glass about halfway up the dome.

Brian could hear screaming from below as he stumbled forward several more steps and fell, not a foot from the edge of the glass. Instantly, Leon was on him. Furious, he grabbed Brian by the front of the shirt, pulled him to his knees, and rammed the barrel of the silenced pistol into his mouth. Brian could only close his eyes and wait for the end.

“Secret Service! Drop it, right now!”

The voice came from the window of the building behind Leon and to Brian’s left. Brian could see the Secret Service man, rifle aimed, perched on the window ledge. Leon’s grip on his shirt loosened. Slowly, he drew the gun barrel back. Then suddenly, he swung his arm around toward the Secret Service agent and fired. There was an immediate burst of gunfire from the window. Brian could feel the slugs as they hammered into Leon’s body. The behemoth, still gripping Brian’s shirt, toppled forward onto him, forcing him over backward onto the stained glass.

There was shrieking from beneath him as Brian crashed through the glass, with Leon’s deadweight on top of him. He girded himself for the fall to his death, but the drop ended after just a few feet when he slammed onto the narrow metal scaffolding inside the dome. Leon’s full weight hit him from above, driving rib into lung in an explosion of pain. Then slowly, exquisitely slowly, the huge killer rolled off to one side and vanished from Brian’s sight. An instant later, Brian heard the thud of Leon’s body on the seats below.

“Move and you’re dead!” a man screamed up at him.

Brian smiled weakly and closed his eyes.

Don’t worry
, he was thinking.
I’m not movin’ for a while
.

———

Brian had no idea how long he lay there. When he opened his eyes, he was still on the scaffolding. A man in a dark blue windbreaker was standing over him, keeping a pistol leveled steadily at a spot just between his eyes.

“I’m Secret Service, Holbrook. Don’t even think about moving. They’re getting a ladder in place now. We’re going to strap you to a board and lower you down. Can you hear me okay?”

Brian just nodded, concentrating on getting air in past the intense pain in his chest. Moments later, the ladder clanked against the scaffolding. A second Secret Service agent and an EMT scrambled up carrying a body board.