The agent scampered like a scared freshman.
I was still staring at the shoes. Who the hell would be walking around back here? The shoes looked brand new, not a bum’s.
McMurtrie had turned to the two Boston cops. “Would you mind securing the fire door, up the alley? No one in or out until we get this cleared away.” He barely gestured toward the body.
The cops nodded. They were both young and looked scared.
Then McMurtrie fixed me with a gunmetal stare. “You’d better go back inside the way you came out. Make sure the press people stay in there to the end of the President’s speech. Do not let any of them out here.”
“How can I keep…”
He laid a stubby finger against my chest. It felt as if it weighed half a ton. “I don’t care how you do it. Just do it. Then meet us at the Mass General cryonics facility after the speech. Alone. No reporters.”
He was dead serious. And the man under the blanket was dead. My brain began to whirl. It couldn’t be an assassination attempt. One well-shod character staggers into an alley to have a heart attack and McMurtrie acts as if we’re being invaded by Martians.
But I didn’t argue. I went back to the fire door, a couple of steps behind the two cops. Maybe McMurtrie was just overreacting. Or maybe, crafty son of a bitch that he was, he was using this accident as an opportunity to test his troops’ capabilities.
Sure, that’s it. A practice run, courtesy of a wino whose time ran out. I was about to smile when the rest of my brain asked,Then why’s he bringing Dr. Klienerman up from Washington? And what’s he want the Massachusetts General Hospital’s cryonics facility for? He’s going to dip the wino in liquid nitrogen and make a frozen popsicle out of him?
One look at the faces of those two Boston patrolmen drove all the levity out of me. They were scared. Not from finding a wino in an alley. Not from brushing against the President’s security team. Something was in their eyes that I hadn’t seen since the San Fernando quake—these guys were terrified of something that went beyond human control.
They had reached the fire door a few paces ahead of me and turned to stand guard. I stopped when they looked at me. One of them had his electric prod in his gloved hands. The other had hooked his thumb around the butt of his revolver.
“Uh… McMurtrie told me to go back inside,” I mumbled. Somehow I felt guilty in their eyes.
“Yeah, we heard him.” That’s all either one of them said. One of them opened the fire door and I stepped back inside the Hall.
I was shaking. And not entirely from the cold.
The President’s speech was almost over as I took my seat.
“What happened?” Ryan whispered to me. “You look awful.”
I tried giving him a fierce glance. “Just cold. I’m okay”
“What’s going on?”
“Nothing,” I lied. “McMurtrie wanted to check the arrangements for the President’s ride back to Logan. Wanted to know if I had planned a Q and A session after the speech.”
Ryan looked a bit puzzled, but he apparently accepted that. I felt lucky that he was a local reporter and not one of the Washington corps, who know that we never have a question period following a speech. Especially when The Man’s already given a press conference the same day.
Halliday wound up his speech, the audience cheered mightily, and the usual round of hand-shaking started up on stage. The Hall emptied slowly, although most of the reporters raced for the nearest exits to get back to their offices and file their stories. The few who tried to take an alley exit were turned back, grumbling.
Ryan didn’t leave, though.
“Don’t you have a deadline to meet?” I asked him as we walked slowly toward the back of the Hall, following the emptying throng.
He paced alongside me, stubborn faced and tweedy. “I’m doing the color piece for the afternoon edition. Got plenty of time. I was wondering… Johnny thought it might be fun to do an interview with you.”
“Me?”
“Sure.” He waved an arm in the air. “Local man makes good. What it’s like to work in the White House. The inside story of the most popular President since Roosevelt… that kind of stuff.”
“Not now,” I said. “I’ve got to join the rest of the staff and get back to Washington. No time for an interview.”
“Too bad.”
I didn’t like the look on his face: more curious than disappointed. Or maybe I was projecting.
“Look,” I said. “Why don’t we do the interview by phone. Give me a call early next week and we’ll set up a time. Okay?”
He nodded without smiling. “Sure.”
Ryan offered me a ride to the airport, once we got outside to the windy, cold street. I told him I was going to ride in one of the staff limousines; it was all set up. He took it with an air of dubious graciousness, shook my hand, and jogged off through the shadows to the parking lot. I watched the wind pluck at his coat.
There was one cab left in front of Faneuil Hall, and I felt damned lucky to get it. I ducked inside, glad to be out of the wind.
“Mass General,” I told the cabbie.
“Ya know how t’get there?” he asked from the other side of his bulletproof shield.
“Damned right I do!” I snapped. Boston cabbies have sent their kids to Harvard on the meter readings of their excursions. The city is small, but no two streets connect in any logical way. You could spend two hours circling your destination if you didn’t know where it was.
I gave the cabbie detailed instructions on how to get there. His only response was a grumbling, “Awright, awright,” as he snapped the meter flag down and put the taxi in gear.
Any large hospital is a maze of haphazard corridors, buildings joined together in an unplanned sprawl of growth, cloying smells of medicine and fear and pain. It makes me nervous just to visit a sick friend.
I finally found the cryonics unit, where they freeze clinically dead people who have enough insurance and the proper papers to be held in cold storage until some brilliant medical genius figures out a way to cure what they “died” from. It looked more like something out of NASA than a hospital facility. Lots of stainless steel, metal desks, and computer consoles lining the walls. Everything painted white, like a clean-room facility. Fluorescent panels in the ceiling overhead cast a glareless, shadowless light that somehow made me edgy, nervous. One whole wall of the main room was a long window. At first glance I thought it was an operating “theater” on the other side.
McMurtrie was sitting at one of the desks, out-bulking it and looking grimly ominous. A covey of green-smocked hospital people worked at the other desks. The computer was humming to itself, lights flickering on its readout console as if it were telling itself a good joke. McMurtrie’s agents were standing around, looking uneasy and suspicious.
As I stepped in, I realized that McMurtrie was talking to someone on the picture-phone. The tiny screen on the desk top showed a middle-aged man who looked rather rumpled and unhappy.
“I’m very sorry to have to bother you at this hour, Dr. Klienerman,” McMurtrie was rumbling in a tone as close to politeness as I’ve ever heard from him. “If you agree to freezing the body we can transport it back to Walter Reed and have it ready for your examination in the morning.”
Klienerman said something, but I didn’t hear it. My eye had caught the scene inside the cryonics “theater.”
A long stainless-steel cylinder was lying on its side, like a section of gleaming sewer pipe. All around it were blue-painted tanks of liquid nitrogen, with lines leading from them into the cylinder. The hose lines were caked with frost, and steamy white vapor was eddying out of the cylinder’s open end. It looked cold in there; colder than Dante’s frozen hell.