“Three?” she said.
“I’ll do it.” He reached for the button with his gun hand. Dahlia’s hand snaked to the light switch. Black in the elevator. The sound of scuffling feet, rasp of a holster, a grunt of pain, a curse, thrashing, a wheezing effort to breathe, the indicator lights blinking in succession in the dark elevator.
On the third floor, Officer Sullivan’s partner watched the blinking lights over the door to the elevator shaft. Three. He waited. It did not stop. Two. It stopped.
Puzzled, he pushed the “up” button, and waited while the elevator rose again. He stood before the doors. They opened.
“John? My God, John!”
Officer John Sullivan sat against the back wall of the elevator, his mouth open, his eyes wide, the hypodermic needle hanging from his neck like a banderilla.
Dahlia was running now, the long second-floor hall rocking in her vision, lights whipping overhead, past a startled orderly and around the corner into a linen room. Slipping into a light green surgical smock. Tucking her hair into a cap. Hanging the cloth mask around her neck. Down the stairs to the emergency room at the rear of the ground floor. Walking slowly now, seeing the policemen, three of them, looking around like bird dogs. Worried relatives sitting in chairs. The howls of a stabbed drunk. Victims of minor fights waiting for treatment.
A small Puerto Rican woman was sitting on a bench, sobbing into her hands. Dahlia went to her, sat down beside her, and put her arm around the plump little woman. “No tenga miedo,” Dahlia said.
The woman looked up at her, tooth gold in her nut-brown face. “Julio?”
“He’s going to be all right. Come, come with me. We’ll walk around and get some air, you’ll feel better.”
“But—”
“Shush now. Do as I say.”
She had the woman up now, standing childlike under the comforting arm with her ruined, blown-out belly and her split shoes.
“I tole him. Ten times I tole him—”
“Don’t worry now.”
Walking toward the side exit of the emergency room. A cop in front of the door. A very big man, sweating in his blue coat.
“Why he don’t come home to me? Why is this always to fight?”
“It’s all right. Would you like to say a rosary?”
The woman’s lips moved. The policeman did not move. Dahlia looked up at him.
“Officer, this lady needs some air. Could you walk her around outside for a few minutes?”
The woman’s head was bowed and her lips were moving. Belt radios were crackling across the room. The alarm would be up any second now. Dead cop.
“I can’t leave the door, lady. This way out is closed right now.”
“Could I walk her around for a few minutes? I’m afraid she’ll faint in here.”
The woman was murmuring, beads between the thick brown fingers. The policeman rubbed the back of his neck. He had a big, scarred face. The woman swayed against Dahlia.
“Uh, what’s your name?”
“Dr.Vizzini.”
“All right, Doctor.” Leaning his weight on the door. Cold air in their faces. The sidewalk and the street lit in red flashes by the squadcar lights. No running, police around.
“Take deep breaths,” Dahlia said. The woman bobbed her head. A yellow cab stopped. An intern got out. Dahlia caught the cabbie’s attention, stopped the intern.
“You’re going in, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Would you walk this lady back inside? Thanks.”
Blocks away now, on the Gowanus Parkway. Leaning back in the taxi, arching her neck back against the seat, eyes closed, she spoke to herself. “I really do care about her, you know.”
Officer John Sullivan was not a dead cop, not yet, but he was close to death. Kneeling in the elevator, ear against Sullivan’s chest, his partner could hear a confused murmuring beneath the rib cage. He pulled Sullivan around and laid him flat on the floor of the elevator. The door was trying to dose and the policeman blocked it with his boot. Emma Ryan was not a head nurse for nothing. Her liver-spotted hand slammed down the stop switch on the elevator, and she bellowed once for the trauma team. Then she was kneeling over Sullivan, gray eyes flicking up and down him and her round back rising and falling as she gave him external heart massage. The officer at Sullivan’s head gave mouth-to-mouth artificial respiration. The aide took over from the officer so that he could radio the alarm, but precious seconds had been lost.
A nurse arrived with a rolling stretcher. They lifted the heavy body onto it, Emma Ryan hoisting with surprising strength. She plucked the hypodermic from Sullivan’s neck and handed it to a nurse. The needle had stitched through the skin, leaving two red holes, like a snake bite. Part of the dose had squirted against the elevator wall after the tip of the needle exited. It had trickled down to form a tiny pool on the floor. “Get Dr. Field. Give him the hypo,” Ryan snapped to the nurse. Then to another, “Get the blood sample while we’re rolling, let’s go.”
In less than a minute, Sullivan was in a heart-lung machine in the intensive care unit, Dr. Field at his side. Armed with the results of blood test and urinalysis and with a tray of countermeasures at his elbow, Field sweated over Sullivan. He would live. They would make him live.
13
ATTEMPTING TO KILL A New York City policeman is like touching a lit cigarette to an anaconda. New York’s finest have a sudden and terrible wrath. They never stop hunting a cop killer, never forget, never forgive. A successful attempt on Kabakov—with the resultant diplomatic flap and heat from the Justice Department—might have resulted in news conferences by the mayor and the police commissioner, harangues and exhortations by Brooklyn borough command, and the full-time efforts of twenty to thirty detectives. Because a needle had been stuck in Officer John Sullivan’s neck, more than thirty thousand policemen in the five boroughs were ready to take care of business.
Kabakov, despite Rachel’s objections, left the hospital bed she had set up in her spare bedroom and went to Sullivan’s bedside at noon the following day. He was beyond rage and had throttled despair. Sullivan was strong enough to use an Identikit, and he had seen the woman, both full face and profile, in good light. Together, with the Identikit and a police artist, Kabakov, Sullivan, and the hospital security guard put together a composite picture that strongly resembled Dahlia Iyad. When the three p.m. police shift turned out, every patrolman and every detective had a copy of the composite. The early edition of the Daily News carried it on page two.
Six policemen from the Identification Division and four clerks from Immigration and Naturalization, each with a copy of the picture, pored over the Arab alien file.
The connection between the hospital incident and Kabakov was known only to head nurse Emma Ryan, the FBI agents working on the case, and the highest echelon of the New York Police Department. Emma Ryan could keep her mouth shut.
Washington did not want a terrorist scare and neither did the enforcement agencies. They did not want the media breathing down their necks in a case that could end as badly as this one. Police pointed out publicly that the hospital contained both narcotics and valuable radioactive elements, that the intruder might have been after these. This was not entirely satisfactory to the press, but in the crushing workload of New York City news coverage, newsmen can easily forget yesterday’s stories. Authorities hoped that in a few days the media’s interest would flag.
And Dahlia hoped that in a few days Lander’s anger would subside. He was enraged when he saw her likeness in the paper and knew what she had done. For a moment, she thought he would kill her. She nodded meekly when he forbade any further attempt on Kabakov. Fasil stayed in his room for two days.