on her jeans waistband in the small of her back, pulling the sweater down over it. She checked the dial tone of her phone to make sure she hadn’t missed a call, grabbed her car keys, and left for Blacksburg.
Forty minutes later, she checked in with the main reception desk at the Montgomery County Hospital and learned that Lynn had been moved from I.C.U to a semiprivate room on the fourth floor. She took the elevator upstairs and was relieved to see that there was no longer a police officer stationed outside the girl’s door. Lynn’s door was open, and she appeared to be dozing in the semi darkened room. It was after visiting hours, but the nurse who had been in I.C.U the day before remembered Janet and waved her by. The girl woke up when Janet came into the room and gently shut the door.
“Hey,” Janet said.
“How are you feeling?”
“Better,” Lynn said.
“The deputy got me some real food before he left.
Made a big improvement over Jell-0.”
“Do you feel up to moving?”
“Moving? As in out of here?”
“Yes. As in checking out and coming with me. Per your father’s urgent instructions. There’s someone after him, and that someone may try to take you in order to trap your father.”
” What!” Lynn exclaimed, sitting up in the bed.
“But he’s retired. Who’s after him? And why?”
“Lynn, I’ll tell you everything once we’re in the car. But your old man gave me the impression we have minutes, not hours. Do you have clothes here?”
The girl looked around the room with a bewildered expression.
“I
don’t know—check that closet.”
Janet got up and looked in the closet, where there were a pair of battered jeans, a shirt, a jacket, and some hiking shoes. There was no underwear or socks. She brought it all out and then turned away to give Lynn some privacy. The girl got dressed, but it was obvious that she was still pretty weak. Janet had to help her tie the laces on her hiking shoes. She explained quickly about the Agency woman, and she also told Lynn she had resigned from the FBI over the handling of the bombing case. Lynn put her hand on Janet’s forearm.
“Describe the woman,” she said. Janet did, emphasizing the extraordinary black eyes, pale white face, and the detached, almost lifeless expression.
“Shit,” Lynn said.
“I think she’s been here. But she was dressed like a doctor. She stopped by my door about, oh, I don’t know, an hour ago? I was dozing, but I remember that face. There’d been docs coming and going all afternoon. But I distinctly remember that face.”
“What did she do?”
“Nothing. She stood in the doorway. I was kind of tired of being poked and prodded all day, so I didn’t really open my eyes. But when she looked at me, I had the feeling she knew I was watching her. It was creepy.” Lynn looked pale and drawn, and her clothes appeared to be too big for her. She sat on the edge of the bed and held herself upright with rigid arms.
“She’s apparently pretty dangerous,” Janet said.
“I’ll tell you more in the car. But first we have to get you out of here and not spend three hours doing paperwork. I—” Just then, from outside the room, came the jarring blare of an alarm system, which emitted five obnoxious Klaxon noises, followed by an announcement that there was an electrical fire on the second floor and that all floors were to begin evacuation procedures. Then came five more blats, with the announcement repeated. There was an immediate bustle of people and gurneys out in the hallway.
“Quick,” Janet said, going to the door, cracking it, and looking out into the corridor.
“Your father said this is how she’d do it—start a fire and grab you in the confusion.” Two nurses went hurrying by, one pushing two wheelchairs in front of her, while the other consulted a metal clipboard and talked on a cell phone. There was another wheelchair parked across the corridor from Lynn’s door. Janet stepped out, grabbed the wheelchair, and pulled it back into Lynn’s room. The fire alarm sounded again, repeating the fire announcement. We got it, we got it, Janet found herself thinking.
“Okay, let’s go,” she said.
Lynn sat down in the wheelchair. Janet folded a blanket over Lynn’s legs and rolled her out into the corridor. Janet knew the elevators would have gone out of service, which meant that everyone would head for the stairs. They joined a procession of nurses and patients, some ambulatory, some in wheelchairs, and a couple of frightened patients being pushed on gurneys. The movement was orderly toward the end of the corridor, where Janet could see red exit signs. But suddenly, the overhead lights went out and there was a wave of concerned noises up and down the corridor.
Small emergency lights along the edge of the ceiling came on, which helped until a sudden and very distinct smell of acrid smoke broke into the hallway from the ventilation ducts. Janet couldn’t see smoke, but she could sure as hell smell it, and it was getting stronger. The parade of wheelchairs and patients surged forward. If the noise was any indication, the level of anxiety had gone way up. She could also hear the sounds of angry congestion down at the end of the corridor near the exit doors.
That did it. Janet turned Lynn around and pushed her rapidly back up the darkened hallway, away from the growing traffic jam at the other end.
She went past Lynn’s room and came to a cross-corridor intersection. She looked both ways but saw no exit doors. The smell of smoke was getting stronger, and now there was a gray pall building along the ceiling. Janet turned around to look back at the original route. There appeared to be one large elevator still working, and everyone appeared to be trying to get in it or into the stairwell. It was genuine bedlam down there, with both patients and hospital staff shouting at one another.
“There has to be another exit, at least a stairwell,” Janet said.
“But I sure as hell don’t see it.”
“Try the passenger elevators?” Lynn suggested. Her face was still pale, and she was clutching the blanket as if she was cold.
“They won’t work once the fire alarm’s gone off. Not until the fire trucks get here. That’s probably what’s happened down the hall there.”
The smoke was getting strong enough to sting Janet’s eyes, but the evacuation effort at the other end of the hall sounded as if it was rapidly turning into a disaster as sixty or so people tried to get patients and wheelchairs into the single elevator or down four flights of stairs. Janet decided to look one more time, but after two more minutes of trotting the full length of the cross corridors, she gave up. There really was only one exit down. As she wheeled Lynn back to the intersection, the smoke was thick enough that she could no longer see what was going on down at the exit stairwell. But she could hear it, and it was not a pleasant sound. The smoke stung her eyes and smelled of burning plastic.
“We’re going to have to find a room with an exterior window and wait this thing out,” she said.
“The fire department will have a ladder truck.”
She took Lynn all the way back to the end of the right-hand cross corridor and began looking into every door that wasn’t locked. She finally found a small lab room of some sort that had windows, through which the lights in the parking lot were visible. She wheeled Lynn backward into the room and shut the door. There was a stink of smoke in the room, but it was not as strong as out in the corridor. Sirens were audible outside, although she couldn’t see fire trucks.
“You okay?” she asked Lynn as she searched for towels or rags to stuff under the door.
“Yeah, I’m good. I’d help, but my head is spinning a little.”
“Sit tight. They said the fire was on the second floor. We have one
floor between us and the fire. They’ll have it out pretty damn quick. If it’s electrical, they turn off the power, and that usually stops it.”
