It was more like its own city. The main reception area throbbed with humanity. It reminded him in some ways of the main hall of Baghdad's Republican Palace. By the information board, he checked out a rendering of the facility and saw that there were nearly six thousand rooms-he figured probably fifteen to twenty thousand beds-spread out on twenty-eight acres of floor space.
Turning back to the mob, he scanned the cavernous lobby, hoping to get his bearings somehow. A large information booth commanded a good portion of the reception area's counter space, but Nolan was here to neutralize one of the hospital's patients. It wouldn't be a good idea to call any attention to himself. Returning to the rendering, he found a building labeled Neurology and decided to start there. Grabbing the map from its slot, he started out across the huge campus.
The snow had begun to dump more heavily by the time he reached his destination, and he stopped inside the door to shake out his jacket and stamp his feet. The lobby here wasn't nearly as crowded as the main reception lobby, but it still was far from deserted.
He was surprised to see four gurneys lined up against one of the walls, each of them featuring hanging drips and holding a draped body. The line for surgery? For a room? He didn't know and wasn't going to ask, but it struck him as out of place and terribly wrong. These guys had no doubt been wounded in the line of duty-the least the Army could do, he thought, was get them some rooms.
But he wasn't here to critique conditions at Walter Reed. The Army he knew was so fucked up in so many ways that he'd given up thinking about it. Besides that, he had been running on a mixture of adrenaline and low-level rage ever since he'd left Tara 's apartment last night, and now, suddenly, the logistics of carrying out this particular mission demanded his complete attention.
As the tide of humanity continued to flow past him in both directions, Nolan experienced a rare moment of indecision: Why did he assume that Evan Scholler would be here anyway? The front door of the building identified it as the Neurology Surgery Center, but Evan's surgery had possibly been months before, and he was now probably somewhere among these fifteen thousand beds, recovering or in rehab.
How did Nolan propose to find Evan without asking directions, and without calling attention to himself? And then, once found, how did he propose to kill him, especially if-as seemed likely if overflow gurneys here in Neurology were any indication-he was in a room with other patients?
Of course, he could eliminate them all. Collateral damage was inevitably part of the equation in any military strike. But this wasn't Iraq, where he could simply disappear without a trace. Here, potential witnesses would have to inform him of Evan's location. Staff members or nurses might be mandated to accompany him if he visited any of the patients.
Beyond that, and perhaps most significantly, Nolan had to consider that Lieutenant Evan Scholler wasn't some raghead nobody shop owner in Baghdad. If he were the victim of a murder here at Walter Reed, every aspect of Evan's life would come under the microscope, including the incident in Masbah, the scrutiny for which Nolan had thus far managed to evade. The authorities would find a reason to talk to Tara, and that would eventually, inevitably, lead back to him.
Bottom line: it was mission impossible.
Fuck that, Nolan thought. The guy is going down.
"Excuse me." A young woman in a pressed khaki uniform smiled up at him. "You look a little lost. Can I help direct you somewhere?"
Nolan's face relaxed into a smile. "I'm afraid I'm having some trouble finding a friend of mine, one of your patients."
"You're not the first person that's happened to," she said. "I've got a directory over at the reception desk that is marginally up to date, if you'd like to come follow me."
He started walking next to her. "Only marginally up to date?"
Rueful, she nodded. "I know, but we're so slammed lately, sometimes it takes the computer a while to catch up."
"That darned computer," Nolan said.
"I know. But we're trying. The good news is if he's not where the computer says he is, at least there they'll probably know where he went."
"That would be good news."
"You're being sarcastic," she said, "and I don't really blame you. But believe me, good news around here is scarce enough. You take it where you can get it." They arrived at the reception desk. "Now, your friend," she said. "What's his name?"
"Smith," Nolan said. "First initial J. We called him 'J' but he might have been Jim or John. I know," he added, with a what-can-you-do look, "it's a guy thing."
Evan Scholler stared out at the falling snow.
He had either been asleep or didn't remember when it happened, but somebody had tacked up some Christmas decorations on the wall. There was a tree and those animals that flew and pulled Santa's sled-he couldn't remember what they were called, but he was sure the name would come to him someday. Then there was Frosty the Snowman-he remembered Frosty and even the song about him, sung by that guy with the big nose. They'd also hung up by the door one of those round things made out of evergreen branches and ornaments.
It was making him crazy. He knew what objects were. He just often couldn't remember what they were called.
What he did recognize as a real memory was that he was in his third room since he'd arrived at Walter Reed. His first stop for about ten days had been the Intensive Care Unit, where he'd mostly been unconscious, and about which he had little recollection except that while he was there, he was unwilling to believe that he wasn't still in Baghdad. It didn't seem possible that he could have gone from squatting next to his Humvee in Masbah directly to the ICU here.
Of course, that wasn't what had happened. His speech and language therapist, Stephan Ray, had made his physical and mental journey a kind of a recognition game that he'd memorized as part of his therapy. His first stop after Masbah had been to a combat support hospital in Balad, which was where they took out a piece of his skull. The operation, which gave his brain room to swell, was called a craniectomy-remembering that word had been one of Evan's first major successes in therapy. When he'd gotten it right, repeating it back to Stephan the day after he'd learned it, Stephan had punched his fist in the air and predicted that he was going to recover.
What the doctors did next, still in Balad, was pretty cool. They'd taken the piece of his skull that they'd cut out and put it into a kind of a pouch they cut into his abdomen. He could still feel it in there, a little bigger than the size of a silver dollar-they were going to put it back where it belonged in his head in the next month or so, when his brain had healed sufficiently.
From Balad, they'd evidently flown him to Landstuhl in Germany, where after a quick evaluation they decided to get him here to Walter Reed.
His second room here was in Ward 58, the Neuroscience Unit. His mom and dad told him that for his first days there, the doctors more or less left him alone while the Army decided if he was eligible for benefits. He didn't understand that-eventually they had worked it out-but nevertheless he had nothing but good memories of the ward because this is where he had met Stephan. Though Evan hadn't had a clear sense of where he was or what had happened to him, in fact his therapist was there to explain things and pull him through some of the tougher, disorienting times.
Basically, what they did in those first days was play games, do flash cards and puzzles and simple math exercises. Neither Stephan nor his doctors seemed to understand exactly why, but Evan's progress was surprisingly rapid, far better than that of most of the other soldiers who were in here for head wounds. After only about a week in the ward, they moved him again to the room he currently occupied, on the fourth floor above the Pediatric ICU.