Code White (34 page)

Brower also looked between the doors. “Richard! Can you hear me? Richard, it’s Stephen!”

No answer came back.

Ali tried pulling one of the doors aside. “Help me! Help get it open!” she cried. Immediately half a dozen pairs of hands joined her—Brower, the soundman, several nurses, even Kathleen Brown kicked off her heels and enlisted in the attempt. Only Dutch held back, still holding his camera on his shoulder, watching through his viewfinder with the red light on.

“There’s fire!” one of the nurses screamed.

“No,” said Brower. “Not fire. It’s only dust. Smell it. Smell it. Dust, not smoke.”

Despite every effort, the doors would not budge. One by one, the helpers gave up, and finally Ali herself slumped to the ground, to resume her pounding—not desperately as before, but with concentrated fury—a protest against the doors that refused to open.

“Excuse me, Miss,” came a voice beside her. Ali turned to see a portly maintenance man wielding a small automobile jack, which he jammed into the widest part of the space between the doors. Without hesitation, he inserted the lever of the jack and began forcing it back and forth, like a rower, his small round face contorted with effort. At first there was scarcely any movement, then the doors gave way with a bang and the jack dropped to the floor inside.

At the first sight of an opening, Ali pushed her leg through the gap and prepared to climb into the elevator.

“No, Miss, it’s dangerous down there,” said the maintenance man. “Let me go down. I’ll hand him up to you.” He pulled her aside and slid sideways through the gap. His rotund belly molded itself tightly against the door as he squeezed through. There was a thud as he jumped to the floor of the elevator, followed by some scuffing as he moved about inside.

“Can you see him?” cried Ali.

“Yeah, I have him,” said the man. “He’s out cold. I’m gonna pass him up to you now.”

The scuffing became louder. Then the top of Helvelius’s head could be seen flopping through the gap, his thin gray hair white from a coating of dust.

“Oh, God! Richard!” cried Ali. Brower and the soundman gently pushed her out of the way and grabbed Helvelius by his armpits. In a moment, they had laid him out flat on the floor of the hallway. “Is he hurt, Stephen?”

Quite obviously he was. He was neither moving nor breathing. His right hand and right foot dangled loosely, as if attached only by the skin. His head had been squished flat. But oddly enough, there was scarcely any bleeding. Apart from small patches of blood around his ear and at the corner of his mouth, there was no external blood at all. In its freakish capriciousness, the high-impact blast appeared to have crushed him internally, leaving scarcely a mark on his skin.

“No pulse and no respiration,” said Brower, kneeling at his side.

Following the almost instinctive protocol of CPR, Ginnie knelt opposite Brower and began pushing with clasped hands against Helvelius’s chest. She realized immediately that something was wrong, though. Helvelius’ breastbone gave way too easily when she pushed against it, and his chest seemed to billow at the sides.

“His ribcage is flailing. Stop chest compressions,” shouted Brower. As Ginnie pulled back, Brower tore away Helvelius’s necktie and shirt and felt lightly over his chest. “He’s got bilateral rib fractures. CPR isn’t going to work. Get me the crash cart now!”

The cart came rattling up. Still kneeling on the floor, Brower tilted back Helvelius’s head, pried open his mouth, and deftly inserted the curved blade of the stainless-steel laryngoscope Ginnie handed him out of the top drawer of the cart. In a few seconds, he had inserted a plastic endotracheal tube through the laryngoscope, and pushed air through a small syringe to inflate the retaining cuff at the end of the tube. While one of the nurses attached a football-shaped bag to the tube and started squeezing it to force air into Helvelius’s lungs, Brower listened with his stethoscope to confirm that the tube was working.

He heard air rushing in and out. What he did not hear was a heartbeat.

“Give me one milligram of epinephrine in an intracardiac syringe,” he shouted. Ginnie quickly handed him a syringe with a six-inch-long needle. Brower felt along the left side of Helvelius’s breastbone, counting the ribs. When he reached the space between the fourth and fifth ribs, he firmly thrust the needle through the skin, pushing it all the way into the cavity of the left ventricle of the heart. After injecting one cc of the clear solution, he removed the needle and listened again with his stethoscope. He went on listening for about a minute, and then turned toward Ali and shook his head. “I’m sorry. I can’t raise a pulse. He’s gone.”

“No! For God’s sake, do something!”

“He’s dead, Ali. There’s nothing anyone can do.”

“Get out of the way! I’ll do it!”

“What? What will you do?”

“Atropine … Epi … I don’t know, goddamn it! Something! Anything!”

At a nod from Brower, Ginnie took hold of Ali and pulled her away. As she did so, Brower ripped open a packet of cotton-tipped applicators, moistened one of them in his mouth, and twirled it around the inside of Helvelius’s nose. “Here! Here you are! Look at it!” he said, holding up the swab to Ali. “There’s not a speck of dust on it. Dust everywhere, but not a speck inside his nose. He hasn’t taken a breath in the past ten minutes. He’s dead, Ali.”

“To hell with you!” Ali broke away from Ginnie and opened the top drawer of the crash cart. Taking out two plastic defibrillation pads, she tore open the paper wrappers and knelt down to spread them against Helvelius’s chest—one in front and one in back, sandwiching the heart.

“You can’t defibrillate him,” said Brower. “His heart’s been without oxygen for ten minutes. It won’t beat.”

“I’ll pace him.” She stood up and plugged the leads into the same defibrillator that had just been used on Jamie. But now she turned the Mode dial from “defibrillate” to “pace,” and selected a heart rhythm of sixty beats per minute. If she could force the heart to beat, it might spread enough oxygen through Helvelius’s body to revive him. It was a long shot, but still a chance.

Brower scooted away from the body as Ali turned up the current dial. Starting at forty milliamps, she turned it slowly higher, watching for the QRS and T waves that would appear on the monitor when Helvelius’s heart had captured the pacing rhythm. But though she turned the dial as far as it would go, no amount of current could prod his heart to beat.

Still she would compel it, this stubborn heart of his. She would use every weapon she had. “Clear!” she shouted, as she switched the mode from “pace” back to “defibrillate.”

“No!” shouted Brower. “It won’t work. You know that. He’s not in a shockable rhythm.”

Her nostrils flaring, Ali ignored him and pressed the red shock button. Helvelius stiffened slightly and then relaxed. The monitor showed a flat line.

“Okay. Have you had enough?” said Brower.

“Clear!” shouted Ali again, with a defiant scowl. She twisted the defibrillator control all the way up, to 360 joules, and hit the red button sharply with her palm. For an instant, the body of Richard Helvelius seemed to come alive on the floor, and then sank back into inertness. Once again, the monitor showed no trace of a beat.

Brower got up and firmly took her hand in his. “He’s gone,” he said. “Give it up!”

“No! No, not like this!” Ali tore her hand away and kicked the crash cart, which clattered as it pivoted from the blow. Stepping away from Helvelius, away from the stunned hospital staff and Dutch’s gawking camera, she wrung her hands in front of her mouth. She struggled to hold herself together.
I’m a doctor, for God’s sake,
she thought.
Everyone’s watching. I can’t fall apart now.

Ginnie ran to her. As she felt Ginnie’s touch upon her shoulder, instead of pulling away she turned and threw her arms around the nurse’s neck, clasping her tightly. “It was my fault! It was my fault!” she whispered into Ginnie’s ear.

“No, no, Doctor. How could it be?” said Ginnie.

“I should have warned him. It’s my fault! Stupid! Stupid! Stupid! Stupid! Stupid!” Suddenly, she pushed Ginnie away and ran into the ICU. She felt an uncontrollable wave of nausea, and barely made it to a sink before her stomach erupted, ejecting a hot, bitter magma of anguish, shock, and despair through her twisted mouth. Three times she vomited, and then she stood, with her head bent so low that her hair drooped below the edge of the sink. Several minutes went by before she looked up at the sound of Brower and Ginnie returning to the ICU.

“Are you all right, Ali?” asked Brower.

Ali glared at him. Turning on the faucet, she splashed the stream of water about the sink with her hand to rinse away the vomit. Then she daubed some of the cold water on her face and wiped it off with a paper towel.

“Where—” she started to say.

“They took him to the ER,” said Brower. “Some of the nurses and the TV people went with him. I’m sorry. Really sorry. I know that you two worked very closely together.”

Ali marched past him and pushed through the door into the hallway. Everyone was gone. There was only a clear spot on the dusty floor to mark where Helvelius’s body had lain.
The great Dr. Richard Helvelius. Professor of Neurosurgery. Fellow of the American Academy of Sciences. Past President of the American Association of Neurological Surgeons. Twenty-six years of school and specialty training. Over ninety thousand operations performed. Two hundred and seventeen journal articles and book chapters. Over three hundred residents who had learned the art of surgery at his hand. And then—snuffed out in a single instant.

The misshapen doors of the elevator yawned before her, with the oblong gap between them resembling the introitus to the womb. She could not bear to look at them. Turning away, she looked about the hallway, until her eye caught something near the high ceiling line. It was a small security camera, pointing toward the elevator, its tiny red RECORD light barely visible. In an instant she understood everything. Moving toward the camera, she stopped just below it and looked up at it with her swollen, reddened eyes. The lens was opaque with dust.

“You smug little monster!” she cried out, her voice hoarse from the flux of stomach acid. “Did you think you could kill him with impunity? He was your better, Kevin. He was a man, not a thumbsucking little brat. He was better, do you hear? Better in
every
way. A better brain, and, God knows, a better fuck. Do you hear that? You have nothing on him! And you won’t get away with this. I won’t let you. I’m going to bring you down—you and that soulless computer of yours. As God as my witness, I’ll bring you down or die trying. You’re going to be sorry that you ever saw this day.”

3:54
P.M.

The wine-colored leather of the chair squeaked as Harry bent forward to speak to Dr. Ernest W. Gosling, the president of Fletcher Memorial. Gosling was half-deaf, but had an irritating tendency to lean far back in his chair, forcing supplicants and subordinates to lean over his desk if they wanted to be heard.

“Special Agent Scopes and one of our building engineers have made a preliminary inspection,” said Harry. “There doesn’t seem to be any large-scale structural damage. Just to that elevator and the adjacent lobby.”

“Why did this bomb go off?”

“I don’t know. It appears to have been a very small-scale charge—a couple of ounces or so of explosive, hidden behind a plate at the base of the elevator. Given the design, it was probably intended as an anti-personnel device. We aren’t excluding the possibility that Dr. Helvelius was a target. The bomber’s first text page this morning was identified as coming from Dr. Helvelius’s office. While that was certainly a ruse, it may have indicated a grudge of some kind.”

“I knew Richard very well,” said Gosling. “This medical center owes a great deal to his tireless and dedicated work. I can tell you quite frankly that I’m personally devastated.”

“Yes, sir. We all are.”

Harry sat quietly as Dr. Gosling removed his gold-framed glasses and tapped them pensively on his desk. From the oak-paneled wall behind Gosling, the founding fathers of Fletcher Hospital—Augustus Fletcher, his son Wilson Hoard Fletcher, and Dr. Lewis Pine—looked down sternly, from a triptych of portraits done in the styles of Gilbert Stuart and Copley.

Dr. Gosling replaced his glasses. “How many more bombs like this are there?” he asked. “Have the other elevators been checked?”

“They’re being re-inspected now by our engineers and some experts from the Chicago P.D. Bomb Squad. We have some idea of what to look for now, and we’ve identified two other small elevator bombs so far—one near our own Security Department, the other here in the administrative wing.”

“That’s the elevator I use.”

“Yes, sir.”

Gosling raised his bushy white eyebrows. “Am I a target?”

“Quite possibly. I believe these bombs were placed by someone who is intimately familiar with the operations of this hospital. Their purpose may be to confuse and disrupt our emergency response. Or to exact revenge.”

“Revenge? For what?”

“I don’t know. But, under the circumstances, I recommend that you and any administrators at the V.P. or Division Directorate level leave the building, separately and as quietly as possible.”

“I’ll pass your recommendation along to the executive staff. In person. For myself, however, there is no question. I intend to stay here until the crisis is resolved.”

“That could be dangerous.”

“I’m an old man, Mr. Lewton. I’m not afraid to die. My presence here could help to allay panic. Plus I might be able to lend support to your own efforts.”

“That’s admirable, but—”

Gosling cut him off. “Go on about the elevators, Mr. Lewton. I’m afraid I interrupted you.”

Harry started to repeat his warning, but Gosling leaned far back, as if to cut off discussion. “As you wish,” said Harry, after a pause. “Bomb squads are at work on the two small bombs we found. We’ve taken all the other elevators out of service until they pass rigorous inspection. But we’re going to need them back on-line soon. I’ve ordered a low-level evacuation.”