Megan was thinking that it didn’t make sense.
She reached the fallback room and was hurried inside by guards and hospital staffers, Gordian’s bed wheeled ahead of her, pushed toward the attending intern who’d checked his drip bag right before the gunfire broke out. Somebody in the press of bodies dabbed her open cut with something cool and moist, slapped on a stitch bandage, put a gauze pad over it and a strip of tape to hold the dressing in place, and then left her to join the activity around the bed. Ventilator hoses were connected to pumps in the wall, waiting machines activated, the depleted IV bag unhooked, replaced with a fresh one by the attending, and still Megan was thinking it made no sense, none at all, who had the sniper been shooting at? Gordian had been out of harm’s way, she’d been out of sight, and Ashley could have been hit when she was standing in front of the window if she’d been the intended target. So why pull the trigger?
The question gnawed at her as she waited by the door with Ashley, both women standing clear of the busy professionals, watching the handful of guards that accompanied them pour back into the corridor to seal off access, watching the cluster of orderlies dissolve as they completed their tasks, all of them and filing out of the room now, leaving the intern to start the IV….
An image from moments ago suddenly came into Megan’s head, came into it in a flash. The intern. Waiting here in the room. Alone. The drip bag in his hand as Gordian was jostled through the door.
She had seen the intern a number of times over the past several days, moving about the corridor with a clipboard in hand, but never in Gordian’s room. He was not one of the regulars on his case, she was sure of that. Yet somehow he had known about the fallback, known where it was situated though that was privileged information, and moreover had been the first person inside it, giving orders to the orderlies as they entered.
She looked at him. He had moved the IV stand close to the bed, run the catheter over the safety rail, and was leaning over Gordian, about to work the needle into his wrist.
“Hold on,” she said. Stepping toward him. Her mouth dry, her heart pounding away in her chest. “What are you doing?”
The intern turned his face toward her.
“The fluid bag needs to be connected,” he said. “It won’t take a minute.”
She took another step closer to him, another, quickly crossing the room, leaving Ashley standing at the door in confusion.
“No,” she said. Shaking her head. “What are you doing
He straightened up, looked at her without any response.
His eyes boring into her eyes.
Reading them.
“Ashley,” she said. Not turning from him for an instant. “Open the door and call for help, this guy doesn’t belong in—”
His hand released the feeding tube, simply let it drop over the rail, and went under his white hospital coat. Megan couldn’t see what he was reaching for, didn’t need to see, what she had to do was stop him.
She moved in fast, bringing up her hands, ducking her head under his arms, remembering what Pete had told her in the training ring. Her fist jabbed out, aimed at the middle of his chest, her shoulder rolling behind the motion, her entire back in it, her knuckles digging between his ribs as they made solid contact.
He produced a grunt of pain and surprise, doubled over, gasping for breath, his hand appearing from inside the coat, an automatic pistol spilling from his fingers to hit the floor.
Megan heard Ashley shouting into the hallway at the top of her lungs, and a split second later heard the hurried pounding of feet behind her, and a male voice ordering the guy in the intern’s coat to stay put, telling him not to even think about reaching for the gun, and he kept hugging himself and coughing, trying to catch his breath….
And then the Sword security team came in the doorway and were all over him.
TWENTY-SIX
“… Stirring for the past hour. One of the nurses on shift noticed… about to regain consciousness. I phoned you right away.”
“I thought it would be yesterday, Elliot. I was sure. He seemed to be trying so hard.”
“It helps that you’re here. Talking to him. Bringing him along. His response to the inhibitor’s been tremendous…. You shouldn’t be discouraged if it doesn’t happen right now…”
Gordian opened his eyes. The room was very bright with sunlight. Ashley stood at his bedside, in the brightness, looking down at him. Elliot Lieberman was next to her in his white doctor’s coat.
“If what… doesn’t happen?” he asked.
Ashley looked at him, an almost startled expression on her face, and then leaned over the bed rail.
“This,” she replied into his ear. “Oh Gord, Gord, this, right here. Right now.”
He slowly raised a hand off his sheet, touched her cheek, felt its moistness.
“Knew I had an angel on my shoulder,” he said. “Didn’t know angels cry.”
She kissed his face, kissed it again, and again, and then raised her head, smiling, her fingers clasped around his, her tears flowing freely over the smile, spilling onto their joined hands, tears of gratitude for the blessing she’d been granted, tears of heartbreaking sorrow for those who had paid the ultimate price for it.
“They let us,” she said. “One day each year, they let us.”
He looked at her. “When?”
“Thanksgiving,” she said.
Tom Ricci sat alone at his kitchen table, its surface bare except for the quart bottle of Black Label he had bought at the liquor store the previous night, last sale date before the holiday, a Thanksgiving dinner he aimed to remember.
It was five o’clock in the afternoon, the window shades drawn in every room of his apartment, phone off the hook, and he was about to dive into his liquid meal, swallow down as much forbidden nectar as his belly could hold. One hundred percent malt, twelve-step program be damned.
He stared at the bottle, his hand on the table, slowly reaching across it, slipping and sliding across the table to close around that smooth, cool curvature of glass.
Ricci closed his eyes, tightly holding the bottle. In his mind’s eye he saw a scale, like the kind you saw in pictures of blindfolded Lady Justice. Nichols, Grillo, Simmons, and Rosander on one side. Roger Gordian and the rest of the planet on the other.
The whole damned planet, yes. Billions of possible victims of a germ that, in the end, because of the sacrifices of those he had led on his mission, had claimed only one good man in a small corner of Latin America.
The balance seemed to tip lopsidedly in favor of the mission having been a success… and for Ricci it would have been no less successful if he himself had perished with the men who had bled out their lives behind the gray concrete walls of Earthglow.
Ricci gripped the bottle. He could handle the losses, handle giving up the measure of blood that seemed periodically due to keep whatever was good and worthwhile about existence from falling into darkness. Harsh and unfair as he sometimes found the bill was, he’d always made his payments with a kind of bitter, uncomplaining dependability.
The problem for him now, though, was that the scale had been jiggered. Somebody had fooled with the weights, tampered with the balance, thrown the whole damned system of measurement into question.
The killer…
Ricci would never again call him by the name Wildcat, would never again lend him the dignity or power that
