“You got a deal,” Michael said. “But first I’m going to my pad and clean up, too.”
“Good idea. I’ll meet you downstairs.”
30.
Tuesday, April 7, 6:31 P.M.
Sandra Wykoff logged out. She’d been on one of the computer terminals in the OR anesthesia office for over an hour. She was perplexed. She had no idea what to make of what she had just learned, but she felt it had to mean something — but what?
After she had left Clinical Engineering she’d been paged by Geraldine Montgomery and asked if she could do an emergency case: an open reduction of a compound fracture in a teenage boy’s forearm. She had welcomed the diversion, and the case had gone well.
During the middle of the short case, when she had been on cruise control, she’d thought more about Vandermeer, Morrison, and Davis. After the surgery, she’d gone into the Anesthesia office and logged onto the computer to go over Morrison’s and Davis’s anesthesia records with the same attention to detail that she had given to Vandermeer’s in hopes of finding any similarities above and beyond the same anesthesia machine. For more than an hour nothing had caught her attention. Then suddenly she’d seen it: all three cases had the blip, or frame offset, and, more disturbing, all had it at exactly the same time after induction!
Staring off into the middle distance, Sandra wondered if such a finding could be significant. She couldn’t help but believe it had to be on some level. Why was the anesthesia machine doing it despite the machine’s being checked after each episode? Could it be a program error despite what she had been told down in Clinical Engineering? She doubted it, as it wasn’t happening with any of the other machines. She had already checked by examining the printouts of other cases she had done using different machines. There hadn’t been any frame offsets on any of the cases she’d looked at. She’d even found a few records from machine 37. They were all clean. The frame offsets had occurred with only the three cases of delayed return of consciousness.
With sudden resolve, Sandra stood up from the desk. She hurried back to the changing room to get out of her scrubs. Once she had her clothes on, she went down to the administrative area of the hospital. What she had in mind was to see if Benton Rhodes had left for the day. If he hadn’t, she wanted to show him this new finding. But his office was empty.
For a moment Sandra debated having the hospital operator contact Dr. Rhodes. But then she had second thoughts, considering the harangue she’d endured earlier. What she didn’t know was whether her boss was aware of this time similarity. It was entirely possible, and if he was, her bothering him after hours was probably not the best idea. It was common knowledge the chief didn’t like to be disturbed at home unless absolutely necessary.
“Tomorrow is time enough,” Sandra said under her breath.
Retracing her steps back into the hospital proper, she headed for the garage. She was looking forward to getting home to unwind with a glass of wine. She still felt unnerved, guilty to a degree, and generally out of sorts from yesterday’s disaster. Would she ever completely get over it? The run-in with Dr. Rhodes hadn’t helped. Nor had Vandermeer’s continuing coma. She’d always thought that conscientiousness, meaning close attention to detail and no shortcuts, would shield her from such an experience. Obviously she had been wrong.
From the bustling first floor of the medical center, Sandra exited out into the quiet parking facility. During the hospital shift change around three in the afternoon the garage was a beehive of activity. Then between five and six there was another burst of activity, although not as intense. By six o’clock, activity fell off precipitously, only to recommence around eight, when visiting hours ended and then again around eleven, when the night staff came to replace the evening shift.
As Sandra walked to her car in the silence of the deserted garage, she was aware of the sharp clicking sound her heels made as they echoed off the concrete. It was an unsettling reminder that she was alone. She glanced around as she walked in hopes of seeing someone, but she didn’t. She had always found garages after hours to be intimidating. To rein in her imagination she forced herself to think about getting home and taking a hot bath. As she pressed her comfort access key to open her BMW’s doors, she wondered about the best way to tell Rhodes of her new finding without aggravating him. As the department head whose job it was to review all three cases, it was probably something he should have seen. If he hadn’t, she vaguely worried with his irascibility whether he might take the possible oversight personally and blame the messenger.
Sandra climbed into the driver’s seat, pulled the door closed, and reached over her shoulder for her seat belt. At the same time her right foot depressed the brake pedal in anticipation of starting the engine. It was all by reflex. She’d done it a million times. But she didn’t get the seat belt. Instead her heart leaped into her throat, as the passenger-side front door and driver’s-side rear door were both suddenly yanked open. A fraction of a second later two large men in dark business suits leaped into the car in a flurry of activity.
Sandra started to scream in shocked terror, but it never got out. A gloved hand had come around from behind and clasped itself over the lower part of her face, suppressing what would have been a piercing cry. What came out was a muffled gurgle. At the same time and by the same hand her head was roughly compressed back against the headrest. Simultaneously the man in the front passenger seat thrust a needle into her thigh and injected its contents. It was over in a second.
Unable to breathe, Sandra reached up and desperately tried to pull the hand away from her face. She couldn’t. The man was too strong. The next instant, the man beside her snatched the electronic key from her hand and started the car. A moment later the image of the parking garage through the windshield blurred and dimmed. Then her body went limp.
To Darko Lebedev’s delight he had gotten the call from Misha Zotov just before three P.M. giving him and Leonid Shubin their orders. After such a long down period with no action whatsoever, there were two new jobs to be done, and one was to be the second hit in so many days. The second was to be merely a strong warning for a female medical student to mend her ways, or at least those had been Misha’s words. Darko understood, and he couldn’t have been more pleased with both assignments. He knew Leonid would feel the same.
For the hit, the orders had been simple. The woman was to just disappear, and her car was to be taken by a driver Misha would provide out to a hospital in Colorado, where the target’s ex-husband worked. There the car was to be abandoned. As it had been explained to Darko, the idea was to focus suspicion concerning the woman’s disappearance on the former spouse and center the investigation out of state. The only other stipulation was that Misha wanted the woman to be brought drugged but alive and left with him for a few hours. He’d said he had a score to settle with the uppity bitch.
Along with the orders had come the information that Darko needed to plan both jobs. That included where Sandra Wykoff lived, the make and model of her car, and the number and location of her parking slot in the garage. He’d also been informed that she lived alone, rarely entertained, and seldom went out at night. Misha had explained that there was a lot of information available about the woman because she had been carefully vetted by security before she had been selected as one of the initial anesthesiologists in the program.
To Darko it had all sounded as if the hit would be a relatively easy task, even though, like the intimidation assignment, it had to happen immediately, that very day. It meant they had to work quickly and without the benefit of prolonged research and observation, which was the way he liked to do things. It also meant that the hit had priority.