The container was a riot of cloth, bloodied or stained or merely grubby. He rummaged, careful not to tip too far forward and fall in. Sheets, towels, hospital gowns. He found a gown with only a smear of blood on it.
He rolled the garment up as tightly as he could and stuffed it under his jacket, which he zipped up. He found the upper half of a pair of scrubs but not the lower. Eventually he tugged out a white coat, unstained. It looked about the right size. This too he crammed under his jacket.
He stepped down, said over his shoulder to the smoking man, ‘There’s no chance I’ll find it in there. Don’t know what I was thinking.’
Another laugh. ‘Told you so. Hope it doesn’t get you into too much trouble, pal.’
Round the corner, on the other side of a grassy verge, Nikola sat in the car. He climbed in and unzipped his jacket.
She pulled on the white coat – it was a size too big, but that added authenticity if anything – while Calvary slipped out of his jacket and wrapped the gown across his torso, arching to tie the knot at the back. He kept the rest of his clothes on under the gown, and his boots. Rolled his sleeves up.
Calvary glanced in the wing mirror, saw a police car turning up the road running along the side of the hospital and heading towards them.
He grabbed Nikola and clamped his mouth over hers. She stiffened, startled; then he saw her eye, close up, swivel to the back window and she understood. She responded, winding her arms round his neck. Over her head Calvary saw the police car cruise past, the man in the passenger seat gazing at them, grinning and saying something.
‘They’re past now,’ Calvary managed to say, but Nikola continued a while longer. Eventually she broke away.
They cruised the perimeter of the hospital again until Calvary spotted what he was looking for and pointed. Outside another service door a carelessly scattered fleet of stretchers had been left unattended, like trolleys in a supermarket car park. One or two had blankets piled haphazardly on them.
Nikola pulled into one of the public car parking areas and while Calvary waited in the passenger seat, she trotted over to the trolleys and purloined one, together with some blankets. Back at the car they peered around. Cars were arriving and departing but everybody appeared too preoccupied with their own problems to notice a white-coated woman helping an apparently bleeding man out of a car and onto a gurney.
It was better they played it this way round, Calvary had decided. That Nikola be the doctor and he the patient. Anyone such as a security guard or policeman who might have grounds to be looking out for an intruder would notice Nikola first and unconsciously discount her as a threat; her patient would probably not warrant a second glance, as long as he didn’t ham up his performance too much.
They left both guns in the car, the Browning under the seat and the Glock in the glove compartment. He’d thought about bringing one of them in but decided the risk of discovery was too great.
Nikola pushed him at a brisk pace around to the main entrance. The automatic doors slid open with futuristic speed and they were inside. From his supine position Calvary saw the emergency room waiting area was much like the ones in hospitals of similar size in London: a few people dotted about on the seats, sleeping or muttering while supporting bleeding hands, the floor stinking of sour drink and scrubbed-away vomit, the bins overflowing with wrappers and soft-drink cans. Behind a desk a desultory pair of clerks ate and drank and listened to a radio.
Calvary muttered something hoarsely and she bent to hear. He whispered: ‘Take us into the emergency room itself. I need to get a couple of accessories.’
They proceeded into the emergency room proper, the inner sanctum which those fortunate souls who were ill or damaged or persistent enough to get past the triage nurse were privileged to penetrate. Elderly quavering wails rose from curtained cubicles, and the sound of drunken puking was interspersed with clotted expletives. At the central hub, dog-tired young women and men spoke into phones or scribbled notes.
Nikola parked the trolley beside a wall of drawers and pretended to study a notice board. Calvary snaked an arm out from under the blanket and rummaged in one of the drawers, coming away with a roll of tape and a few alcohol swabs in individual packets. He groaned, struggling to a sitting position, and Nikola put her hands on his shoulders and began to talk to him in Czech in a half-consoling, half-chiding tone. His new position allowed him to peer into the other drawers and he lifted out a cannula, a plastic bag of saline and an infusion set. These he buried beneath the blanket before slumping back.
She wheeled him out of the emergency room into a corridor that led off into the depths of the hospital, pausing near the door to allow him to lift a cheap-looking stethoscope from where it was coiled on a small steel table. Nikola draped it around her neck, and instantly her appearance was transformed: she became a doctor.
A short passage off the corridor appeared to lead to the locked door of a disused ward. Calvary said, ‘Down there.’ They had to be quick; anybody glancing down the passage would wonder what they were doing there. Motioning Nikola to keep her back to the corridor and thereby provide a degree of cover, he lifted back the blanket and began to peel open the plastic packaging of the cannula.
He attached the infusion set to the saline, ran a little of the fluid through, hung the bag on the hooked rod that protruded vertically up from one corner of the trolley. ‘Squeeze my arm,’ he said. Nikola gripped his upper arm, making the veins in the forearm bulge. He inserted the cannula, used tape to secure it. It wasn’t much, an added detail, but it would help.
Back in the corridor she stopped at a signboard indicating the directions of various wards and departments.
‘The theatres and pre- and post-operative wards are on the first floor,’ she said.
Now came the tricky part.
NINETEEN
The pain had hold of his entire body. It wasn’t the sharp burn of earlier, but a duller, less localised sensation that was aggravated whenever he moved.
Tamarkin opened his eyes to harsh lighting glaring into his face. For an instant he was back in Moscow on a training exercise, in the subterranean cells of the Lubyanka, being put through his paces while an interrogator alternately shouted and wheedled.
Then his situation snapped into focus as if a camera lens had been adjusted. He’d been shot, abdomen and leg. He was in hospital. He was alive.
He tried to lift his head. Apart from the pain the move set off, he felt the groggy, spinning nausea caused by the anaesthetic. Before his head sagged back he took in a small, low-ceilinged room. He was the only occupant, apart from a lone nurse who moved about amidst the beep and flicker of monitoring equipment. She caught his eye, smiled distractedly.
Tamarkin had a few memories of what had happened after he’d seen the muzzle flash from Calvary’s gun and felt the hammer blow to his stomach. He recalled finding himself at some point alone on the rooftop, and sliding the agonising distance towards where his gun had landed. He’d managed to kick the Makarov a good ten feet and was delighted through his pain to see the stock land near the gunman Calvary had shot. The immediate assumption would be that the pistol belonged to the dead man.
Further vague memories included shuffling backwards on his bottom until he reached the stairwell, then flopping back down it, before blackness claimed him again. Then, thirty seconds or two hours later, he couldn’t tell which, the intolerable racket of a helicopter’s rotors almost on top of him. Later, faces crowding over him as he was lifted on to some sort of bed – the operating table, he supposed.