18
In the dressing room, Drummond burrowed through scrubs cabinets. “I worked up an escape route,” he said, as if that were something he usually did, like turning on the lights when entering a dark room. He tossed Charlie a surgical gown, cap, pants, a mask, and a pair of disposable booties.
“You want to leave disguised as doctors?”
“As it happens, it worked for me at a similar facility in Ulaanbaatar, a couple of years ago, just after the Tiananmen Square protest.”
Charlie began to put on the scrubs in the faint hope that his father’s plan was more substantive than the Marx Brothers’ plot it smacked of. Clearly a high percentage of Drummond’s mental channels were open. At issue were those that weren’t. He never said “a dozen” if he meant eleven or thirteen; only twelve. Similarly he used “a couple” exclusively for 2.000. The Tiananmen Square protest was not a couple of years ago, not by anyone’s measure; Charlie had been in grade school at the time.
As if sensing Charlie’s misgivings, Drummond added, “In Ulaanbaatar, my life came down to getting through a single door. It had granulated tungsten carbide locking bolts and eight inches of steel and Manganal hard plate-or enough to repel a tank. Opening it from outside required an eye scan, a thumbprint match, and a numeric code. But opening it from inside required only knowing how to use a push bar, which I did, and no one saw me do it. As you may have noticed, there are hardly any surveillance cameras here, and obviously the guards are elsewhere. The security in these places is geared toward keeping people out, not in. Our job is to get away without being noticed, and that’s all about camouflage.” He launched himself toward the exit. “You’ll see as we go.”
Charlie’s concerns were allayed. Until Drummond inexplicably bypassed the exit door and headed back into the operating room. Charlie stumbled after him toward the recovery room. The doctors and nurses were startled as Drummond smashed through the double doors.
“All of you come with me except your patient and you and you,” Drummond said. With Mortimer’s gun, he pointed to the anesthesiologist and a nurse-the two men closest in size to himself and Charlie.
Charlie realized that Drummond’s idea was to pose as part of an evacuating surgical team, while retaining its original number and composition. Once more he felt better about the idea’s cogency, but he wondered whether incorporating the doctors and nurses added too many variables, not least of which was their cooperation.
No sooner did the thought strike him than the surgeon instructed his team, “We’re not going anywhere.” With a bold step forward, he told Drummond, “Our first responsibility is the well-being of the patient.”
“I’m aware of that, sir,” Drummond said. “It’s my hope that the club’s security force is aware of it too. Now, please?” He indicated the door.
The surgeon stood fast.
“Sir, what’s your name?” Drummond asked.
“Rivington.”
“Dr. Rivington, I don’t want to shoot you, but I will if you don’t do exactly as I say.” Drummond waved his gun at the rest of the men and women. “That goes for every one of you.”
They all shuffled into the operating room. Following alongside Drummond, Charlie could practically see the fear rising off them.
“Now I want you to place that man on a gurney,” Drummond told them. He pointed to the unconscious Cadaret. “Put an oxygen mask on him, plus the fishing hat and the sunglasses your patient had on, and a blanket.”
Charlie didn’t entirely understand the thinking, but it wasn’t the time for Q amp; A. The doctor act would play better, he guessed, with a patient, and Cadaret was a more manageable prop than the real patient.
While the members of the medical team readied Cadaret, Drummond threaded an IV stand through the handles of the recovery room doors. If the nurse and anesthesiologist sought to thwart the escape, they would have to break down the doors.
Next Drummond snatched the handset from the wall-mounted intercom and dialed 9. When it was answered, he exclaimed, “This is Rivington in the OR. We have a code green!” Then he tore the intercom from the wall.
19
The “surgical team” hurried up the ramp to the lobby. Drummond brought up the rear, his gun trained on the real doctors and nurses from beneath his surgical gown. Charlie was glad Drummond had assigned him, along with the scrub nurse, to push the gurney. The solid side handles enabled him to appear steady.
At the top of the ramp, the clubhouse resounded with taproom chatter and the occasional ring of silver against china-none of the hurried tread of guards’ jackboots or the rattle of rifles he’d been bracing for. He considered that the club members, accustomed to the sounds of gunfire from the various ranges, had been given no reason to think anything was out of the ordinary-and ordinary encompassed a lot at this place.
As they turned onto the marble hallway, the scrub nurse narrowly avoided ramming her side of the gurney into a member-one of the tennis players Charlie and Drummond had been marched past in the portico on arrival. He wore a madras sport coat now and was drinking scotch from a tall glass. Given their surgical caps and masks and gowns, Charlie put the odds of the man recognizing them now at astronomical. The problem was that the fright in the scrub nurse’s eyes was like an alarm beacon.
The tennis player hopped out of her way. “Code Green?” he asked.
“Yes, sir,” she said tremulously. It came off as urgency.
“Godspeed,” he said, raising his glass to exhort the team.
Only at the Monroeville Hunt and Fish Club, Charlie thought.
“This way,” said Drummond, pointing to the door across the hall-the library, according to the letters chiseled into its marble archway. Because going to a library made no sense, Charlie expected the big oak door to veil something else, hopefully the armory.
The door indeed opened to a library, a lofty room with leather-bound books crammed into creamy pine shelves so high that three tiers of balconies were necessary to access them. Inside, two octogenarians sat hunched over a backgammon board the size of a suitcase. They nodded to the team in polite greeting and returned to their game. In their time here, Charlie thought, they probably had seen so many surgical teams rushing past that the sight rated as less compelling than double twos.
Within the bookshelves on the far wall was a round-topped door leading to the terrace. The frosted glass transom and side lights offered no clue whether club guards-or the National Guard-waited outside.
Drummond gingerly drew the bronze handle, the door opened inward with a lengthy creak, and he peered out.
“Okay,” he said, beckoning the team.
Charlie was last onto the empty terrace.
“Now to the tennis courts,” Drummond said, starting toward the path. The “news radio” helicopter sat quietly on the far court.
“Can you hot-wire a helicopter?” Charlie asked, curious as much as anything. He took it for granted Drummond could pilot one.
“Most helicopters don’t require keys,” Drummond said. “There’s nothing to-” He was interrupted by a loud and spine-chilling rifle bolt lock-and-load.
Charlie turned around slowly, as did Drummond and the doctors and nurses. The older of the two backgammon players stood in the library doorway, eyeing them down the barrel of an enormous rifle-quite possibly the one used to bag the elephant in the entry hall. He said, “Those of you who would rather not be on the receiving end of an eleven-millimeter round, place your hands in the air.”
Isadora’s Colt was tucked into Charlie’s waistband, beneath his gown. He raised his gloved hands because, like the doctors and nurses, Drummond was raising his.
Swinging the rifle toward Drummond, the backgammon player asked, “Are you pretending not to remember me, Drummond?”
