Code White Part 27

Don't think, try! she thought.

The kiss had left Kevin's lips burning, as though he had soaked them in nitric acid. What a f.u.c.king screw-up! he thought. What an a.s.s I was to reach out to her! He sought for a line of retreat, some way to piece together his lost dignity. "Look, babe," he said, trying to appear blase. "I guess I got a little fresh there. But I think you've overstayed your welcome."

Ali seemed not to hear him. She had a funny, distant look. She pointed to the untouched coffee sitting on the far side of the desk. "If you don't want that, can I have it?"

Kevin raised his eyebrows, in a kind of weary facial shrug, and leaned back as she reached across him for the cup. Let her take it and leave. Anything. Just get rid of her.

"Oh, h.e.l.l!" she cried as her grasp fell short. Kevin turned and saw the cup slip from her fingers and tip over the edge of the desk.

"s.h.i.t!" he cried. By reflex, he grabbed for the cup, twisting his body around the corner of the desk. It dashed against his fingers, popping its plastic lid, and releasing sixteen ounces of hot latte over a stack of papers on the floor. "s.h.i.t! s.h.i.t! G.o.dd.a.m.n f.u.c.king s.h.i.t!" he roared.

He spun around to curse Ali herself, but the stool was empty. His gaze shot across the room. There she was, racing for the door, drawing back the slide-bolt while still in midstride. In her left hand he saw her clutching something small and blue.

"f.u.c.k!" shouted Kevin. "Bring it back!"

On his feet in a second, he vaulted with one hand over the corner of his desk. He flung the door open and charged after her. She had no more than a six-foot lead, and he closed the gap quickly. He lunged and reached for her hair, missed it, but caught the hem of her scrub top, tearing the fabric under the armpit. The drag pulled her off balance and swung her into the wall. If she hadn't grabbed onto a water fountain, she would have wound up on the floor. Now she was trapped-caught in the angle between the wall and the fountain. Kevin moved in, slapping her hard against the temple. "Give it back, you b.i.t.c.h!"

Ali winced with pain. She thrust the flash drive behind her back, pinning her hand tightly against the wall so Kevin couldn't reach it. The men's room door was just across the hall, ten feet away. She had to cross those ten feet somehow. She had to break free.

She couldn't reach the alarm pen. Should I call out for help? she thought. No, I musn't! One glimpse of Harry, and Kevin will bolt for the lab. There won't be another chance.

Kevin kept hitting her, again and again, on the side of the head. With his left hand, he grabbed the lanyard of her ID badge, and wound it tightly around his knuckles, digging a deep furrow in her throat. A little tighter, and the carotid blood flow to her brain would be cut off. Ten seconds after that she would be unconscious.

G.o.d, oh, G.o.d! I've got to do something! He's going to kill me!

Kevin could feel Ali weakening. His hands felt supremely powerful, charged with rage. He clenched the lanyard tight as he pushed her hard against the fountain, knowing that the faucet must be digging into her spine. He felt closer to her than he had ever been in the act of love-his knee forced deep between her thighs, his breast crushing hers, his sweat and hers mixing into a single slick.

She bore it all in silence, as though there were nothing more to be said between them, but only a contest of strength and will. The end was foreordained. He had twice her power and stamina. Her muscles, spent of all their reserve of glycogen, quivered and began to sag.

At last, he felt her go limp and begin to slide away from the fountain and toward the floor. Her dead weight pulled him off balance, and on reflex he let go of the lanyard and tried to brace himself against the wall. But as he did so, Ali whipped back to life like a sprung coil. She wrenched hard toward the fountain, twisting him halfway around. He felt a sensation like fire in his right eye, as her fingernails gouged four searing tracks across his face, ripped his gla.s.ses from him and flung them to the floor.

Off-balance, half-blinded, and stinging with pain, he lost his grip. She tore free and ducked under his arm.

f.u.c.k! I'll kill her now! I'll really f.u.c.king kill her!

She sprang across the hallway like a rabbit for the nearest hole.

He lunged after her.

Ali hit the door of the men's room, still half-doubled over, and tumbled inside. Her momentum driving her, she slipped and fell onto one knee between some urinals and a trio of bathroom stalls. In the split-second it took her to fall, she saw an utterly empty room-nothing in front of her except a bare white wall.

A rush of despair came over her.

Oh, G.o.d! Where are you, Harry? Why have you let me down?

Barely a leap behind her, Kevin slammed into the men's room. He saw Ali still skidding across the floor on one knee, bracing herself with her hand and a stiffly outstretched leg. She looked back at him with such an expression of terror that he could already savor his triumph. But then, a shadow flew toward him out of the recess behind the door. Sooner than he could twitch a muscle to react, he felt a blunt, hard blow at the base of his skull. There was almost no pain. The room seemed to disappear in a flash of light, a swarm of spiraling fireflies. When his focus returned, he was facedown on the hard tile floor, bucking against the weight of someone's knee on his back. He was powerless with his hands pinned behind him. Still, he struggled and moaned with as much breath as he could squeeze out.

He heard a click, and then the weight came off. Craning his head, he saw Harry Lewton getting up off his knees. The security chief spread his hands wide, like a calf-roper after a tie-down. "Mr. O'Day, I'm taking you into custody."

As the cold steel of a pair of handcuffs cut into his struggling wrists, Kevin pivoted around and tried to kick at Harry, but Harry deftly stepped aside.

"c.o.c.ksucking fascist!" shouted Kevin. "You're dead! G.o.dd.a.m.ned f.u.c.king dead!"

"Take it easy."

"Get this s.h.i.t off of me! Get it off now! You don't know what you're f.u.c.king with!"

"And what is that, Mr. O'Day? What am I f.u.c.king with?"

"Ask her. Ask the b.i.t.c.h, you G.o.dd.a.m.ned fascist."

"I'd rather hear it from you."

"Doomsday, you a.s.shole! f.u.c.king Twilight of the G.o.ds."

Kevin went on fighting against the handcuffs until he lay exhausted and panting on the floor.

"Just lie there a bit," said Harry. "Once you start showing some sense, I'll help you up."

Kevin saw Ali put something small and blue into Harry's hand.

"What's this?" Harry asked.

"Access data," said Ali. "He needs it to keep track of everything he stole."

"The four hundred grand?"

"A bit more, actually. Something like a billion and a half."

"Sheesh!" Harry tossed the drive into the air and caught it again.

Kevin lifted his face from a puddle of saliva. "Don't lose it, fascist. You're going to want to give it back to me ASAP."

"How is that?"

"You can't hold me. You'll see. I'm one very hot potato."

"Well, Mr. Potato, it'll go a lot easier on you if you help us out. For starters, how do you disarm the bomb?"

"You can't disarm it. It can only be deactivated internally."

"How do you do that?"

"You take off these G.o.dd.a.m.ned cuffs and give me back my memory stick. That's how."

"Not going to happen."

Kevin knocked his forehead angrily against the floor. "You'll see."

Harry's voice softened as he turned to Ali. "You'd better go on back to the ICU. Moving him could be dangerous, and I'd rather you weren't around. I'll call the ICU later if I need help."

"What's going to happen?"

"I'm taking him to the isolation room until the FBI decides what it wants to do with him. It's close enough to Tower C that if the bomb goes off, he'll go with it. That ought to give him an incentive to cooperate."

"Promise me you won't hurt him. What he's done is unforgiveable, but I couldn't bear it if I knew that you were going to hurt him."

"Don't worry, there won't be any rough stuff. Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib are behind us. The FBI has some strict guidelines right now." Harry looked at Kevin glaring back at him. "Not that there wouldn't be justice in it."

Kevin sneered. "I'm not afraid of your billy clubs and cattle prods. Nor do I need anyone's pity, jasmine flower. What you and our Gestapo friend here fail to realize is that I am still firmly in control."

For all his defiance, Kevin felt as though an ice pick had stabbed him through the heart. Moments ago he had commanded life and death from the all-seeing vantage point of his starship captain's chair. Now he lay hogtied, panting on the floor with his shirttails out and his hair tousled like a wino. The worst of it was that she was seeing it. He was so pathetic that she had actually laid aside her hatred to try to cut a deal for him. He swore to himself it would not end like this. He would rise again. She would kneel to him before this day was done.

Ali bent over him and touched the scratches she had made in his face, showing tears in her eyes that just twisted the ice pick deeper. "I'm sorry, Kevin," she said. "I truly am. You had so much respect, accomplishments, integrity, love. What have you traded it for? A few numbers on a memory stick?"

"Go screw yourself!"

"I ... I just didn't realize that I had hurt you this much. I didn't mean to. Believe me, Kevin."

"Just get out! Get the f.u.c.k out of here!" Pity. f.u.c.king useless pity. He had never felt farther away from her. He had never hated her more.

She did as he asked, her knee joints cracking softly as she stood up. Her lips seemed to tremble, or perhaps she was silently sobbing. Hands hanging at her sides, she shuffled slowly toward the exit.

Harry headed her off, lowering his voice. "Could you do me one favor when you go upstairs? Phone Security and ask for Judy. I need her to send down Tom Beazle and Ed Guerrero right away with a stretcher and a couple of extra sheets. And then I need her to go down herself and manually disconnect the surveillance cams in the isolation room and the guardroom outside."

"All right." Ali took one quick look back before disappearing into the hall.

Harry could hear a faint hiss as the hydraulic closer shut the men's room door. Kevin seemed to grow calmer with Ali out of sight, and Harry went to where he lay, turned him over, and propped him sitting upright against the bathroom stalls.

Kevin smirked at him. "I guess you think you looked like an all-American hero to her, busting me like that. But I've got news for you. She doesn't go for that at all."

"It wasn't about her, was it?"

"Come on. I have eyes."

"Think what you like," said Harry. He picked up his nightstick from the floor and stuck it under his belt. As he did so, he let his blazer open so Kevin could see that he was packing the Beretta. "Why would you let a woman like that walk out on you, anyway?"

"Couldn't stop her. She has some defective programming, you know."

"No, I wouldn't know."

"Don't get me wrong. You can have her as far as I'm concerned. She and I are over."

"Murder and prison will do that sometimes."

"Hey, I'm just speaking to your interests. Before you buy, look under the hood."

Harry tried to ignore him. He figured that Kevin was trying to get under his skin, either just for the h.e.l.l of it or to goad him into doing something stupid. Christ, it would only be five minutes before Tom and Ed showed up, but it was looking to be a long five minutes.

Kevin licked at one of the scratches near his mouth. "Married five years, fascist. I know things."

"Like what?"

"Like her and Rahman. She tell you about him?"

"Not much. I can see there's bad blood."

"You got that right. Murder, madness, and one f.u.c.king unhappy family."

"Murder?"

"Yeah. Back in Egypt. Ali had this older sister, Wafaa. A half-sister, actually. Full sister to Rahman. From all descriptions one hot-blooded and l.u.s.ty chick. Plus, she had that old family stubborn streak. When the s.h.i.t came down, she must have been, like, seventeen, and Ali four or five. Now, what she did, you and I would not consider a crime. Wearing makeup, riding in cars with guys, dancing, drinking, stuff a normal seventeen-year-old, reasonably hot girl would do. But over there, that makes you Jezebel. Her dad tried to lock her up in the house, but she would sneak out. Thus, lots of shouting matches, crying jags, door slams, crockery bombardments-and little Ali in the middle of it, understanding nothing, but trying to figure it out.

"One day, Wafaa gets herself knocked up by a German petrochemical engineer with a souped-up Porsche, and even Dad doesn't know what to do. But Rahman-he's a guy who keeps his head. A master of both the theoretical and applied branches of moral discipline, he remembers that the big mufti from his school told him that a whole family goes to h.e.l.l if there's one s.l.u.t in it. Which is bad, except that the solution is pretty simple. So Rahman takes Wafaa out for the last car ride of her life, and strangles the s.h.i.t out of her in the desert. End of soap opera."

"Did Ali know about this?" Harry had sized up Kevin as a dyed-in-the-wool bulls.h.i.tter, but the story did explain what he had seen for himself in the isolation room.

"Not right away. But there was this sense in the family that there was, like, the judgment of G.o.d on this poor chick. Now a four-year-old can't understand what real nastiness is. So what little Ali figures is that it was all the crying and shouting and tantrums and tears and laughing and s.h.i.t that got Wafaa killed. She resolves to be a model little girl, ultra calm, not causing scenes for anybody. 'Cause if you let your feelings go, G.o.d will get you. This goes on year after year, till she even forgets what got it started. There's just this little feeling of doom that makes her sick every time she has to tell what she really feels or thinks. Good feelings, bad feelings-either way it's original sin. Thymophobia, to coin a word for it. When things get really tight, she'll pull back into full catatonic, ice-princess mode. Lucky if she even answers to her name then. I often tried to debug her source code, but the problem seemed hardwired."

Harry looked away again. "I'll bet you tried real hard."

"f.u.c.k you, fascist."

There was a knock. Tom and Ed had brought the gurney.

"Okay, pardner. Ready to move?"

"Where are you taking me?"

"To the ER. We have a special little room there for our really wacked-out psych cases."

"I need to talk to whoever's in charge. You obviously haven't got the brains to see the big picture."

"Soon enough."

Together the three lifted Kevin onto the stretcher and cuffed his right wrist and left ankle to the rails. Harry then covered him with a sheet, like a corpse. There were at least a dozen surveillance cameras in the corridors between the men's room and Isolation. A human following the cameras would not be fooled by a mere sheet; he would question what was traveling under the sheet, and why it was being moved, not by orderlies, but by three security men. But what would a computer see? Might it not see as a dog sees, losing all thought of the ball when it is hidden behind one's back? Harry was about to bet his life on it.