Desperate Measures

announcer had pointed out.

Instead, the story had been about another possible scandal in Millgate’s background. To the government’s dismay, a copy of a Justice Department special prosecutor’s report had been leaked to the press this evening. The report, a first draft never intended for publication, implicated Millgate as a negotiator in a possible covert attempt- unsanctioned by Congress-to buy nuclear weapons from the chaos of governments in what used to be the Soviet Union.

An unsubtantiated charge against him. Solely an in-house assessment of where the Justice Department’s investigation might eventually lead. But the gravity of the news announcer’s voice had made the grave allegation sound like established fact. Guilty until proven innocent. This was the second time in seven years that Jonathan Millgate had been implicated as a go-between in a major arms scandal, and Pittman knew that if he failed to investigate this time, if he didn’t at least make an attempt to get a statement from Millgate’s people, Burt Forsyth would accuse him of reneging on his bargain to do his best for the Chronicle during the brief time remaining to it. For Burt and what Burt had done for Jeremy, Pittman forced himself to try.

14

Pittman stood on the corner across from the hospital’s Emergency entrance. It was after midnight. A drizzle intensified the April night’s chill. He buttoned his wrinkled London Fog topcoat and felt dampness even through the soles of his shoes. The drizzle created misty halos around gleaming streetlights and the brighter floodlights at the Emergency entrance. By contrast, the lights in some of the hospital rooms were weak, making Pittman feel lonely. He stared up toward what had been Jeremy’s window on the tenth floor, and that window was dark. Feeling even more lonely, he crossed the street toward the hospital.

At this hour, traffic was slight. The Emergency area was almost deserted. He heard a far-off siren. The drizzle strengthened, wetting the back of his neck. When Jeremy had been sick, Pittman had learned about the hospital in considerable detail-the locations of the various departments, the lounges that were most quiet in the middle of the night, the areas that had coffee machines, the places to get a sandwich when the main cafeteria was closed. Bringing Jeremy to the hospital for chemotherapy, he had felt uncomfortable at the main entrance and in the lobby. The cancer had made Jeremy so delicate that Pittman had a fear of someone in a crowd bumping against him. Given Jeremy’s low blood-cell counts, a bruise would have taken a considerable time to heal. In addition, Pittman had felt outraged by the stares of people in the lobby, who seemed shocked to see a skinny, bald fifteen- year-old, his face gaunt, his hairless scalp tinted blue from blood vessels close to the surface. Terribly sensitive about his son’s feelings, Pittman had chosen an alternate route, in the back, a small entrance around the corner to the left of the Emergency area. The door was used primarily by interns and nurses, and as Pittman discovered, the elevators in this section were faster, perhaps because fewer people used them.

Retracing this route created such vivid memories that he sensed Jeremy next to him as he passed a private ambulance parked outside this exit. It was gray. It had no hospital markings. But through a gap in curtains drawn across the back windows, Pittman saw a light, an oxygen unit, various medical monitors. A man wearing an attendant’s white coat was checking some equipment.

Then Pittman was beyond the ambulance, whose engine was running, although its headlights were off. He noticed a stocky man in a dark suit drop the butt of a cigarette into a puddle and come to attention, seeing Pittman. You must really have needed a cigarette, Pittman thought, to stand out here in the rain.

Nodding to the man, who didn’t nod back, Pittman reached for the doorknob and noticed that the light was out above the entrance. He stepped inside, went up four steps to an echoey concrete landing, and noticed another stocky man in a dark suit, this one leaning against the wall next to where the stairs turned upward. The man’s face had a hard expression with squinted, calculating eyes.

Pittman didn’t need the stairs; instead, he went forward, across the landing, through a door to a brightly lit hospital corridor. The pungent, acrid, too-familiar odors of food, antiseptic, and medicine assaulted him. When Pittman used to come here daily to visit Jeremy, the odors had been constantly present, on every floor, day or night. The odors had stuck to Pittman’s clothes. For several weeks after Jeremy’s death, he had smelled them on his jackets, his shirts, his pants.

The vividness of the painful memories caused by the odors distracted Pittman, making him falter in confusion. Did he really want to put himself through this? This was the first time he’d been back inside the hospital. Would the torture be worth it just to please Burt?

The elevator doors were directly across from the door through which he had entered the corridor. If he went ahead, he suspected that his impulse would be to go up to the tenth floor and what had been Jeremy’s room rather than to go to the sixth floor, where Millgate was and where Jeremy had died in intensive care.

Abruptly a movement on Pittman’s right disturbed him. A large-chested man stepped away from the wall next to the door Pittman had used. His position had prevented Pittman from noticing him when he came toward the elevators. The man wore an oversized wind-breaker.

“Can I help?” The man sounded as if he’d swallowed broken glass. “You lost? You need directions?”

“Not lost. Confused.” The man’s aggressive tone made Pittman’s body tighten. His instincts warned him not to tell the truth. “I’ve got a sick boy on the tenth floor. The nurses let me see him at night. But sometimes I can barely force myself to go up there.”

“Sick, huh? Bad?”

“Cancer.”

“Yeah, that’s bad.”

But the man obviously didn’t care, and he’d made Pittman feel so apprehensive, his stomach so fluttery, that Pittman had answered with the most innocent, believable story he could think of. He certainly wasn’t going to explain his real reason for coming to the hospital to a man whose oversized windbreaker concealed something that made a distinct, ominous bulge on the left side of his waist.

Footsteps made Pittman turn. He faced yet another solemn, stocky man, this one wearing an overcoat. The man had been standing against the wall on the opposite side of the door from where the man in the windbreaker had been standing. Neither man had rain spots on his coat. The rain had started fifteen minutes previously, so they must have been waiting in this corridor at least that long, Pittman thought. Why? Recalling the man who’d been smoking outside and the man in the stairwell, he inwardly frowned.

“Then you’d better get up and see your boy,” the second man said.

“Right.” More uneasy, Pittman reached to press the elevator’s up button when he heard a ding and the doors suddenly opened. Loud voices assaulted him.

“I won’t be responsible for this!”

“No one’s asking you to be responsible. He’s my patient now.”

The elevator compartment was crammed. A man on a gurney with an oxygen mask over his face and an intravenous tube leading into his left arm was being quickly wheeled out by two white-coated attendants. A nurse swiftly followed, holding an intravenous bottle above the patient. A thin, intense young man was arguing with an older red-faced man who had a stethoscope around his neck and a clipboard with what looked like a medical file in his hand.

“But the risk of-”

“I said he’s my responsibility.”

The young man surged from the elevator just as Pittman felt hands behind him grab his arms and pull him back out of the way. The gurney, the two attendants, the nurse, and the young man hurried past him toward the door to the stairwell. As the man with the stethoscope charged out, trying to stop them, two dark-suited, solemn, well-built men-they also had been in the elevator-veered ahead of him and formed a blockade.

“Damn it, if you don’t get out of my way-”

“Relax, doctor. Everything’s going to be fine.”

Pittman squirmed, pained by the force of the hands that gripped him from behind. Through the window in the stairwell door, he saw the man who’d been waiting on the landing dart forward to open the door. The attendants pushed the gurney through, then lifted it, hurrying with it down the stairs to the exit from the hospital. Although