further out of hand, turned into a crisis that damaged their relations beyond repair. Meet at Balboa Park over by that reflecting pond in the Spanish City two nights from now, neutral ground, a public place where they’d be free to talk without worrying about bugs or taps. He’d suggested they bring their guards to keep lookout, not bothering to elaborate, which would have been tactless. Obviously, guards would be a precaution against any surveillance the law enforcement community might have going on one or both of them, but the foremost reason for his suggestion was to dispel any concerns Salazar might harbor about the meet being a setup of some kind.
And that had been it. No mention of why Enrique was suddenly anxious to reverse the course toward war that he himself had set or how he planned to compensate the Salazars for their losses. This had raised Lucio’s eyebrows. Even if Enrique assumed the reason for the meet was clear and preferred getting into details about it in person at the sit-down, some stated acknowledgment that a grievous wrong had been committed had been due. And although the omission had not elicited any comment from Lucio, he’d tucked it away in a mental back pocket as he’d accepted Enrique’s proposition.
Night after next, Balboa Park, eleven o’clock sharp. You got it.
And they’d hung up.
His face lined with thought now, Lucio continued to gaze out at the satiny water beyond the strand edging the Del Mar cliffs, his hand tugging away at his Saint Joseph pendant.
He would keep his appointment at the park. Absolutely. He’d given his word that he would attend, and it would be to the mutual benefit of their families to reach a settlement and resume their activities without battling around. But that did not mean he was about to make a mark of himself. If Enrique had a razor blade in the casserole, he intended be prepared, bring along a few surprises of his own. There were still two days until the meet, two days for him to conduct some research, do whatever possible to gain some insights into what was happening inside Enrique’s camp, get the lowdown on whether he might have a hidden agenda. And it only made sense that the first step in his investigation should be to contact Mr. Lowdown himself.
Grabbing the phone off the table again, he set it on his lap, lifted the receiver, and hit the speed dial button that would put him in touch with Lathrop.
FIFTEEN
Late Monday afternoon, Roger Gordian lay asleep in his room at San Jose Mercy Hospital, having been given a series of physical examinations, blood tests, and chest X rays throughout the earlier part of the day. At four P.M. on Sunday, he had been transported to the hospital aboard an ambulance, accompanied by his daughter, Julia Gordian Ellis, after losing consciousness in the backyard of her Pescadero residence. When the emergency vehicle appeared in response to her frantic 911, Gordian had a fever of 102.7°, was suffering from dehydration, and had lost several ounces of blood from a superficial wound to his left hand inflicted by the power tool he had been using at the time of his blackout.
The medical technicians aboard the ambulance were able to control the bleeding and dress his injury on scene, and they administered oxygen and an electrolyte IV, which revived him during his transport to the hospital. Gordian was fully awake and alert upon reaching the ER, where he was joined by his wife, who had been contacted via her mobile phone by Julia while en route to Pescadero from San Jose International Airport.
At that time, Gordian’s temperature remained elevated, and he was experiencing respiratory difficulties, a painful sore throat, abdominal pains, nausea, muscle aches, and chills. An initial examination by interns on rotation led them to a preliminary diagnosis of influenza and stress due to overexertion. In spite of his repeated insistence that he was fit enough to be discharged and recover at home, the severity of his symptoms led doctors to suggest that he be admitted for routine monitoring and testing, a recommendation to which he eventually acquiesced at the strong urging of his family members.
Within an hour of his arrival at the ER, Gordian was moved to a private room on the hospital’s fifth floor. As was standard procedure for high-profile individuals, hospital security offered him the option of registering under an alias to deflect attention by ambulance- and celebrity-chasing reporters. Though he was disinclined to accept this preferential treatment, his wife and daughter prevailed upon him to reconsider and finally got him to capitulate with reminders of his past unhappiness with the media, striking a particular nerve by mentioning the outrageous factual distortions of Reynold Armitage, the financial columnist and television commentator with an unknown ax to grind who had been unduly eager to pronounce UpLink International DOA in the middle of a shareholder’s crisis the year before, and who might be expected to jump at the chance to write Roger Gordian’s premature obituary if word of his illness leaked to the press.
On Ashley’s recommendation, the door sign beside room 5C would read:
By Monday morning, Gordian’s fever had lowered to 101° and he was feeling stronger, though his breathing continued to be strained and he showed little desire for food. His standardized physician’s treatment sheet — known by the memory key ABC/DAVID to every fourth-year medical student, physician’s aid, and registered nurse — listed his condition as stable on its third line, between the
At 8:30 A.M. sharp, Ashley and Julia arrived to visit, Julia leaving at 10 o’clock to attend a meeting at the fashion design firm where she’d recently been hired as a public relations consultant, Ashley staying on until Gordian shooed her home at noon with reassurances that he was doing fine — though she made a point of reassuring him that, fine or not, he could count on seeing her again by dinnertime.
Around three in the afternoon, Gordian’s attending nurse came to take his temperature, pulse, and blood pressure readings, give him his prescribed Tylenol capsules, and scribble something on his chart. A few minutes afterward, he became groggy and let himself doze off for a while.
At four P.M., as Gordian slept on the fifth floor, a nurse on station duty two floors below briefly left her desk for the ladies’ room. The moment she did, a man in the crisp white uniform of an orderly entered the station from where he had been drifting near a supply closet, treading quietly in crepe-soled shoes.
Keeping an eye out for the nurse, he pointed-and-clicked through several menus on her computer and retrieved the bed assignment information on all patients admitted in the past twenty-four hours. He could have chosen to use any of the networked unit computers at any station in any ward in the building. This was simply a convenient opening; amid the constant movement of a busy hospital, he would have had no trouble finding others.
Seconds later, the data on the patient in room 5C appeared on the computer, minus his falsified name.
Returning to the opening screen, the man left the nurse’s station and strode along the hall until he found a small, unoccupied patients’ lounge and entered it. There he slipped a wireless phone from his pocket and placed a call on a digitally encoded line.
“He’s here,” he said into the mouthpiece.
The bottleneck elevator rose from the upper sublevel and opened to release him with a pneumatic sigh. Emerging into the corridor, he turned to the right and walked past high-security doors marked with signs for the laboratories in the connecting hallways behind them. Some displayed the universal biohazard symbol at eye level, their red-and-black trefoil pattern conspicuous against the surrounding grayness.
He carried himself lightly for a man of his muscular proportions, and this partially went to explain the dead silence of his progress down the hall. But as the fluorescent panels overhead neutralized shading and shadow with their suffused radiance, so did the thick concrete walls seem to dampen sound, flatten color, deduct from between them all except the essential and functional.
