Code White Part 8

"So we have a name," said Harry.

"We have several."

"That's good news."

"Not entirely. The, uh, ordnance that was stolen ... Well, it was a major break-in. Over two hundred kilos of C4 are missing. Close to five hundred pounds."

Avery raised his hands, as though he were weighing two hundred kilos in the air. "Jesus! That much explosive could incinerate a city block."

"I think we have to a.s.sume that a large portion of that materiel may have been deployed in this medical center," said Lee.

Harry felt his stomach sink. "Then we've got to find a way to speed up the search."

"You know this hospital better than anyone, Mr. Lewton," said Lee, a little snidely. "Did you learn anything from my course? Think like a terrorist. Your aim is to kill and destroy. Where would you want to place the bomb? Where would you have a maximum effect?"

Harry's thoughts raced to his mother, lying helpless on the eighteenth floor. His mouth suddenly went dry. "With that amount of explosive, you could easily bring down the Goldmann Towers. That's the heart of the inpatient hospital. You have hundreds of patient rooms, several clinics and operating theaters, probably a thousand people concentrated together."

"All right. Focus the search there," said Lee.

"I'm on it." Harry was already on his feet and needed no prompting from Lee. But he didn't get far. As he opened the office door, he was pushed back by Scopes, who charged into the room, panting excitedly.

"I found a tie-in," Scopes announced.

"Good doggie!" said Lee.

Scopes, all grin, rustled a sheaf of papers as he pulled up a chair beside Lee. "I cross-checked our names against the Immigration and Naturalization records, as well as one or two other databases that shall remain nameless. Came up with a very interesting link."

"To what?"

"To here. To this hospital."

"Lemme see." Lee grabbed the papers and rifled through them, shuffling each page to the bottom of the stack. Then he stopped abruptly and stared fixedly at a single line.

"I believe that this may be of interest to you, Mr. Lewton."

"Oh?" Harry came back from the doorway and craned his neck toward the papers. Lee made no move to share them.

"Do you have a foreign national employed here named Aliyah Sabra Al-Sharawi?"

"Never heard of him."

"Her."

"Never heard of her. We have over thirty-five hundred people working in this medical center. I'd have to check the personnel register."

"She's married to an American citizen also employed here. He works in Computational Research. His name is O'Day. Kevin O'Day."

"Kevin O'Day? Are you serious?"

"Do you know him?"

"Yes, I know him. Or of him."

"And his wife?"

"I don't think we're talking about the same man. O'Day's already married ... I mean, he is married ... to one of our most prominent neurosurgeons. Ali is her name. Dr. Ali O'Day."

"Aliyah."

"Oh, you've got to be s.h.i.tting me!"

Lee's face was Mount Rushmore. "Do you know her whereabouts, Mr. Lewton?"

"Yes. Yes I do," he said, a little indignantly. "She's been on television all morning, in fact."

"We need to talk to this woman. Immediately."

10:55 A.M.

With light footsteps, Ali slipped into the family lounge on the second floor-a small room with flowered curtains, oak bookshelves, a wide plasma screen TV, and a sofa and chairs arranged to look like the living room of the average patient of the Department of Surgery. Jamie's legal guardian, Mrs. Gore, was sitting on the sofa, next to Kathleen Brown. She wore a pink satin dress with a high waist that artfully underplayed her middle-aged plumpness. Her short bottle-blond hair suffered a little from the excessive curliness that follows a fresh perm.

Dr. Helvelius, in his surgical scrubs and a long white coat, leaned forward from a chair and listened attentively while Mrs. Gore extolled the virtues of the Grossman School.

"We're on a par with the best private schools, with a complete K-12 live-in program, accommodating students from all over the Midwest, even from Canada. Two-thirds of our teaching faculty have master's degrees. We have a fully staffed counseling division, with weekly case review conferences. We have to be ready to deal with anything, you know. Not all of our students are strong like Jamie. Many have other issues, like attention deficit disorder, cerebral palsy, developmental delay, or autism."

"Not surprised," said Helvelius.

"Do you work with adults, too?" asked Kathleen Brown.

"Oh, yes!" said Mrs. Gore, her eyes lighting up. "Our mission goes far beyond the two hundred and forty-seven students who formally study with us. We conduct training seminars for teachers in the mainstream school system. We operate a senior learning center to help older people adjust to life with sight problems. And then, of course, there's the Braille and audio book library..."

The conversation broke off as Ali approached. Kathleen Brown scooted over on the sofa, opening up a place, but Ali sat down in an armchair next to Helvelius. She was annoyed to see a cameraman crouching behind a low tripod where a coffee table used to be. Alas, there was no escape from the relentless, all-prying lens.

"Good morning, Mrs. Gore," said Ali.

"Is he doing okay?" asked Mrs. Gore with a quavering voice.

"He's doing fine. He came out of anesthesia and we spoke a bit."

"Did he say anything?"

"He's just eager to see what SIPNI can do, that's all."

"Naturally!" Mrs. Gore snapped her fingers. "We're all eager for that. Will we be able to talk to him soon?"

"After we move him to the Intensive Care Unit. Right now he's in recovery until the anesthesia wears off."

"He's a brave boy, isn't he, Doctor?"

"Yes, he is."

Kathleen Brown looked at Ali with the same put-on thoughtfulness that she had displayed in the operating room. "Dr. O'Day, is there any evidence that the SIPNI device is working?"

Jamie had asked almost the same question. Ali did not have the answer for him then, nor did she have it now. "It's too early to say," she replied."At this point, SIPNI's sending out recruitment pulses, scanning Jamie's brain to find all the loose ends, and working out a map of possible connections. In our animal experiments, it took several hours for the first functional neural nets to reorganize. Complete restoration of function took a couple of weeks. But those were dog and monkey brains. Jamie's brain is more complex, and his version of SIPNI is more complex, too. It could take more time or less time. We'll have to wait and see."

As Ali spoke, Kathleen Brown suddenly seemed to lose interest in her, and turned to look toward the door. Ali followed her gaze. She saw a tall man at the threshold, dressed in light brown pants and a midnight blue blazer that fit closely about his burly shoulders and chest. He was well-tanned, his skin finely creased like an outdoorsman. His neatly combed black hair showed flecks of gray, making him seem about forty years of age. But the most striking thing about him was the way he stood-at ease yet purposeful, like a captain at the helm of a steady ship, or a country squire surveying his manor. The mysterious man did not speak, but after catching Ali's eye he nodded, signaling that it was for her that he had come. Ali was puzzled, for she had never seen him before. Offering apologies to Kathleen Brown, she got up and went to the door.

"Excuse me. Are you looking for someone?"

"Harry Lewton, chief security officer for the medical center. I'd like you to come down to my office, Dr. O'Day. Just for a minute."

She was startled to hear him address her by name. "I'm rather busy right now," she said, gesturing toward Jamie's family and the camera crew.

"I can see that. I wouldn't ask if it weren't urgent."

"What is this about?"

"It would be better not to talk about it here. My office would be more private."

Dr. Helvelius was watching from his armchair. When Ali failed to return immediately to her seat, he got up and pushed his way into the tete-a-tete. "Problem?" he asked.

"Just a minor security matter," said Harry. "It won't take long."

"You're d.a.m.ned right it won't." Helvelius scrunched up his nose, pushing his gla.s.ses higher so he could read the name on Harry's ID. "Can't you see what w-we're doing here? You have no right to bother us now."

"I'm afraid that I must insist, Dr. Helvelius."

Helvelius turned brusquely toward Ali. "Would you like me to call Dr. G-G-Gosling's office?"

Ali sighed. "No. No, it's all right. I'll be right back."

"If he gives you trouble, p-page me. I need you today, Ali."

Helvelius said no more, but c.o.c.ked his head and scowled as Ali stepped into the hallway. Harry gently closed the gla.s.s door on him.

"Do you know who you were just talking to?" said Ali. "This had better be important."

"Let's go this way," said Harry. He led her across the Promenade, a gla.s.s-enclosed court humming with echoes of footsteps and carts and gurneys, and into an empty elevator. He pressed the b.u.t.ton for the first bas.e.m.e.nt level.

"I saw you on television this morning," he said in a small-talk tone of voice. "Very impressive, what you're doing. It's all over my head, of course, but I can see that it's a big deal for medical science."

Ali replied with a chary smile. Out of the corner of her eye she stole a closer look at Harry Lewton. He had a prizefighter's face-jutting cheekbones, broken nose, and long permanent folds on either side of his mouth. Although she imagined that some women would have found him handsome, he had the kind of man's face that typically repelled her-coa.r.s.e and unintellectual. But there was something else, something out of place. His eyes. She glanced several times at his caramel-colored eyes, mobile and perceptive, spoked at the corners by creases that hinted at gentle humor and even sympathy. Because of his eyes she wasn't sure what to make of him.

"Wasn't there a Code White this morning?" she asked.

"Um-hmm."

"Is it over yet?"

Harry shook his head.

"No? Then don't you have something more important to do than pester me? What is this about, anyway? Illegal parking on the traffic circle? Overdue library books?"

Harry c.o.c.ked his head and smiled. "It will only take a few minutes. Believe me, I wouldn't bother a big shot like you if I didn't have to."

"I'm not a big shot," she replied tartly. "I'm just an a.s.sistant professor-a couple rungs from the bottom of the faculty ladder. I don't even have my own lab, just a small K99 grant that's supposed to help me find my independence one of these days. It's the team I work with that's big."

Harry, still smiling, turned to her with a direct, penetrating look that unnerved her. "From what I've seen, it looks like your day has arrived," he said.

There was a ding, and the elevator doors opened.

"Just to the right here, and across the hall," said Harry.

He led her through the control room, where she saw one woman and three or four men studying a bank of video surveillance monitors. At a door in back, Harry swiped his badge, pressed his thumb against the gla.s.s plate of a laser scanner, and entered the office as soon as he heard the door lock click. Inside, Ali saw three men staring grimly at her from behind a long mahogany desk. This tribunal-for so it seemed to be-consisted of a small Asian in a black suit, a tall African American, and a beefy, red-haired Caucasian in a blue police uniform with twin silver captain's bars on his collar. They made no sign of greeting as she entered. The silence was broken only by the rattle of a flimsy metal and fibergla.s.s chair, which Harry placed in an empty area in the middle of the room.

Ali glared at Harry as he walked behind the desk and seated himself in a tall leather chair, in the very midst of the tribunal. He's set me up. Whatever is happening here, it's no "minor security matter."

A cool impression was called for. With as much dignity as she could muster, she sat in the chair Harry had provided for her, primly locking her ankles. She waited through an uncomfortable silence, her knees pointed to one side, as though expressing an unconscious wish to head for the door. The coiled stethoscope in her pocket jangled as she adjusted the knee-length white coat she wore over her blue scrub suit. She clasped her hands in her lap to suppress her nervous habit of twirling her finger around the lanyard of her ID badge. But she said nothing, asked nothing. She forced the men who had summoned her to make the first move.

It was the Asian who spoke. "Good morning, Dr. O'Day," he said in an officious tone. "I am Special Agent Raymond Lee, with the Federal Bureau of Investigation. This is my colleague Special Agent Terrell Scopes, and over there is Captain Glenn Avery, of the Chicago Police Department."

"Am I in trouble?" Ali asked coldly.

"No, certainly not. We just have a few questions." From his jacket pocket, Lee took out a digital voice recorder, about the size of a pack of gum, and laid it on the desk. "For the purposes of accuracy, this interview is being recorded. This is as much for your benefit as ours. Do you object?"

"No," she said. But her eyes spoke otherwise. Of course I object, they said. I object to being brought down here this way. I object to answering any questions from you at all.

"Are you aware that this hospital is currently operating under a Code White?"

Ali glowered at Harry, who looked back with a face of stone. "A bomb threat, yes," she said curtly.

"Could you state your full name for us, please?"

"O'Day, Ali, MD, FRCSC, FACS."

"Have you ever used any other name?"

Ali shifted in her chair. She felt her own hand touch her throat. The question had surprised her. "Excuse me. Do I need an attorney here?"

"To state your name?"

"I am not comfortable answering questions without knowing why they are being asked."

"Of course, it is your right to consult an attorney. You may use that telephone to call one, if you wish. Advise him to meet you at FBI Headquarters, 2111 West Roosevelt Road."

Lee's tone was matter-of-fact, but the threat was obvious. "Are you arresting me?" asked Ali.

"No, but I do have the power to hold you for questioning, for up to twenty-four hours."