“What now?” Megan asked.
“We watch,” Luke said. “Caleb knows that we could’ve made it back to L.A. by now. His people are probably already in position, guarding the hospital.”
She pointed at the loading dock. “You think they’re going to just walk out the back of the hospital with your father’s mosquitoes?”
“Nobody in Security will bat an eye if a couple of lab techs acting on Caleb’s authority load a metal container onto a truck.”
There were three trucks facing out from the concrete platform. One was a large eighteen-wheeler, a food-service truck with a logo familiar to Luke. The second was a nondescript white van without markings. The third was a medium-sized transport with loud orange and blue lettering splashed on the sides — a rental.
“Trucks come in and out of there all day long,” she said. “How’re we going to know if we see theirs?”
“It’s not their truck that I’m looking for.”
“What, then?”
“Caleb’s operatives.” He watched a heavyset man climb into the cab of the food service truck. “A driver who’s more watchful than he should be, someone whose hands are never in his pockets, someone wearing a jacket in seventy-degree weather to conceal a weapon.”
“What if they don’t use the loading dock?” Megan asked. “There’re doors on every side of the building. You can’t cover every exit.”
“I don’t have to. I’m not waiting until they leave.”
If Caleb’s plan hadn’t changed, his people would enter the mosquito lab at six o’clock. Luke knew that his best chance was to destroy the mosquitoes now, before Caleb’s team descended on the laboratory. If he waited and attempted to stop them as they left the hospital, he’d face the dual challenge of a concentrated force and having to guess which of several exits they might use.
And by then, CHEGAN would have no reason to keep his father alive. If his dad was still alive, it was only because they were holding his father to use as leverage against him.
To save his father, he had to strike quickly and cut off the serpent’s head. He had to get to Fagan.
Of course, all of those concerns were moot if Caleb had moved up his timetable and already snatched a colony of mosquito larvae. Luke hoped that his father’s calculations were right and CHEGAN couldn’t risk cutting short the harvesting period.
“I just need Caleb’s sentries to show themselves. I’ll find a weakness in their defense.”
“And what if they don’t show themselves?”
Megan’s question pushed him in a direction he was already drifting. Time was on his enemy’s side, Luke reminded himself. He couldn’t wait for his adversaries to reveal themselves. He had to disturb the nest, draw out the wasps that were protecting their queen.
It was a risk, but one he had to take. He reasoned that Caleb’s need for stealth limited him to using a relatively small force. Luke had to pull them out of hiding, spread them out in a protective formation around the hospital’s perimeter, where he could spot them.
“I need a phone,” he said.
Frankie bolted for the door. “I be back.”
Luke grabbed the boy’s collar. “Where’re you going?”
“I get you phone.”
Luke considered his options, then released his hold. “Don’t get caught.”
Five minutes later Luke was starting to regret sending Frankie when the boy flew around the corner as if being chased but then quickly slowed and waddled over to their vehicle.
“Here,” the boy said as he climbed into the Bronco and handed Luke a scuffed cell phone. “I help lady with—”
“I don’t need to know.” Luke studied the buttons for a moment, then said to Megan, “Let’s hope this works.”
The intern, Chewy Nelson, walked into Room 402 to check on a young boy recovering from a bout of asthma.
“Hey, bud. What’s with all the presents?” he asked the toddler.
“It’s my burfday.”
Chewy picked up a black plastic telescope from the bed. “You know what this thing is called?” he asked.
The boy shook his head.
Chewy held the scope up to one eye and pointed it out the window. “A babe spotter.” He peered through the front window of Kolter’s, hoping to see that nurse from 3-West. As he was doing this, a small boy collided with a pair of women in front of the deli and then scrambled to help one of them retrieve the contents of her spilled purse.
“That little twerp took her cell phone,” Chewy whispered to himself. He watched the urchin cross the street, then followed the boy until he disappeared around a corner of the hospital.
Chewy bolted out the door, ran down the hall, and charged into an empty patient room along the hospital’s rear. When he found the pint-sized kleptomaniac in his scope, the kid was turning onto a side street where he eventually got into the backseat of an SUV. There were others in the vehicle. All of them were crammed into the backseat.
He adjusted the lens and the image came into focus.
“Holy shit,” he said.
The first hospital operator whom Luke spoke with didn’t flinch when he asked her to overhead page Dr. Petri Kaczynski. He left his cell phone number and asked the woman to give it to whoever responded to the page.
Twenty minutes later no one had called, so Luke dialed the hospital again. A different operator answered this time and explained that his page had not been put through because the man he was trying to reach had died several years ago. Luke explained that Kaczynski’s physician-son of the same name was very much alive and visiting the hospital. The operator agreed to put through the page.
Luke worked his left shoulder while studying the area behind them through the rearview mirror. An elderly woman led by a white poodle walked out the front door of a one-story bungalow halfway up the block. He followed her with his eyes until she disappeared around a corner at the far end of the block.
In his peripheral vision, he suddenly detected movement on the loading dock. He caught a fleeting glimpse of a man jumping from the back end of the rental truck and trotting into the hospital. Luke recognized the man’s blue hospital security uniform.
He also recognized the man’s thickly muscled physique and partially severed left ear.
60
Lieutenant Groff had mobilized the Rapid Response Unit within minutes of receiving the call from University Children’s. They had arrived ten minutes earlier and set up a command unit two blocks north of the hospital. It had taken less than seven minutes for the team to take their positions.
Groff said, “Unit One, do you have the Bronco in sight?”
A woman’s voice said, “I’m fifty yards from the suspect’s vehicle, approaching from the rear, west side of the street. No exhaust — engine’s off.”
“Any movement?”
“No visual on the inside. Rear window is too dark to see through.”
“Unit Five?” Groff asked.
“In position, southeast corner of the roof, in a direct line with the street.” A pause, then, “I can see the subject vehicle’s hood through a break in the trees, but that’s it. I have good line-of-sight if he breaks to the north, toward the hospital.”
“Unit Six?”
“Southwest corner. No visual on suspect, but I got a clear shot on the driver’s side.”
Groff chewed the inside of his cheek for a moment, then said, “All units, ready to move on my command.”
Luke’s arm twitched when the cell phone vibrated. He recognized the hospital’s prefix on the number showing in the display.
“You look good in blue, Calderon. Want me to bury you in that uniform?”
“Ready to settle up, cockroach?”