Code White Part 28

With Harry in the lead, they rolled the stretcher out of the men's room, making a dog-leg through the green-tiled corridors, until they came to a service elevator. Knowing Helvelius's fate, Harry worried about the elevator, but the adjacent stairwell was too narrow for carrying the stretcher upstairs. So he got into the elevator alone with Kevin, and had Tom and Ed take the stairs. The elevator opened at the ground floor onto a small lobby between the Women's Health Center and the sprawling warren of rooms and corridors that comprised the emergency room. From there it was a short run to Isolation.

Raymond Lee, Judy Wolper, and three uniformed cops were already waiting at the guard station.

"What the h.e.l.l's going on?" said an irate Lee. "I thought I told Dr. Gosling to throw your a.s.s out of this hospital."

Harry looked up at the surveillance camera, where a dangling cable told him that Judy had followed instructions. "Got a present for you," he said, tearing away the sheet with the brio of a stage magician. Instead of a bunny out of a hat there was the blinking face of Kevin O'Day. "This is our man," he said. "Not Al-Sharawi. Al-Sharawi worked for this guy."

Kevin rose up on one elbow. "I know who you are," he said to Lee. "You're FBI. Some kind of psych profiler. Born in San Gabriel, California. Went to school at Columbia, got a Ph.D. in forensic psychology at CUNY. You're divorced and have two kids. You also seem to be the brains of this pack of baboons."

Lee gave Harry a surprised look. "Who is this?"

"My name is Kevin O'Day. I'm the head of computational research. I've read your personnel file out of the FBI database in Was.h.i.+ngton, D.C. I've been watching you since you got here. And I'm someone you need to take very, very seriously."

"I'm listening," said Lee.

"I have the power to vaporize you and this entire hospital. I can do that in a second if I want to. You've found one of my devices in the utility shaft in the second sub-bas.e.m.e.nt, so you know I'm telling the truth. There are other devices as well. You will not find them, not until they make themselves known-"

"Like the elevator in Tower A."

"Precisely."

"Why did you blow the elevator?"

Kevin appeared taken aback. Perhaps it was even a shade of remorse that pa.s.sed over his face. "Consider it a declaration of my seriousness."

"Very well." Lee studied Kevin intently.

"Now, if you correctly understand the gravity of the situation, you will immediately release me and return my property. You will refrain from any further interference in my actions. If you comply, things will be resolved to everyone's satisfaction in a short time. If you refuse, you can kiss your a.s.s good-bye."

Lee turned to Harry. "What property are we talking about?"

Harry held up the flash drive.

"What's on it?"

"Probably a billion and a half bucks."

"You've got to be kidding," said Lee.

"No kidding." Harry let go of the flash drive as Lee gingerly took it between thumb and forefinger, as if it were extraordinarily fragile. "I should tell you," Harry added, "that he's got a computer controlling all the detonators, and watching everyone on the videocams. It's supposed to be some kind of highfalutin supercomputer that can push the b.u.t.tons on its own."

"You mean ... what do they call it-Odin?"

"That's the one. It's his baby."

Kevin rose up on his elbows. "Now do you understand me? Odin will not let you hold me. You are not in control. I am."

Lee scanned Kevin's face, and then turned to Harry. "Does the computer know he's in custody?"

Harry shrugged. "I don't know. But I think we have a stand-off for the moment. O'Day here can't set off the bomb without blowing up himself, and he doesn't strike me as the suicidal type. So holding him buys time for Avery's squad to disarm the bomb."

"I see," Lee said. Borrowing a key from Harry, he unlocked the handcuffs that chained Kevin to the stretcher. "Mr. O'Day, I regret that we're going to need to hold you awhile, at least until we can fully consider your case."

Kevin shook his head. "Don't listen to this yahoo. There's nothing to consider. Do you want to live, or not?"

At Lee's direction, two of the uniforms lifted Kevin off the stretcher and began walking him into the isolation room. They had just crossed the threshold when Kevin tore free, spun around, and ran straight into the third uniformed officer, who threw him to the ground with a leg sweep and an elbow lock.

"Let me go, you G.o.dd.a.m.ned fascists!" he shouted. Immediately he was swarmed by cops. After a brief struggle, he was dragged back inside the isolation room and handcuffed to the drainpipe of a stainless steel toilet. The twisted ruins of Rahman's bed were still piled against the opposite wall.

Lee ordered one of the policemen to relinquish his gun and stand guard inside the room. "Keep your eye on him, and take note of every word he says." Then, turning to Kevin, "Mr. O'Day, I'll be back in a few minutes to listen to any statement you might care to make. In the meantime, Officer Dayton here will explain to you your rights in custody."

"You'll be back, all right," said Kevin, provocatively licking his lower lip. "Make sure you bring that flash drive with you."

Back in Harry's office, the black deadline clock read fifty-two minutes remaining. Scopes was sitting in the back, looking at one of the video monitors.

"That's the bomb squad," said Scopes. "I just came from going over the scene with Avery. They're having a h.e.l.luva time getting X-rays of the bomb. The plan now is to drill a small hole in one corner of the casing, so they can pa.s.s a fiberoptic cable and get a look from inside. They have to drill real slow, to make sure there isn't any heat or vibration. So it's gonna take awhile."

Lee pulled up a chair facing the desk and powered up his laptop. "Well, we've had some developments of our own, courtesy of Mr. Lewton."

"Oh?"

"It turns out our mastermind is one Kevin O'Day, a computer specialist for the hospital. We have him in custody now."

"Is he cooperating?"

As soon as his desktop had finished loading, Lee inserted Kevin's flash drive into a slot in the rear. "Not so far. But we don't need to wait for him. Get Judge Rosado back on the phone. We need new warrants ASAP to search O'Day's apartment and his office, including any files in his computer or data drives. Tell him it's a ticking bomb situation." He turned and gave Harry a look like a professor forced to explain something obvious. "He's got to have schematics of this bomb somewhere."

"What about Odin?" asked Harry.

Lee suddenly scowled and slammed his laptop shut. The flash drive wouldn't open without a pa.s.sword. With a flushed face, he turned back toward Scopes. "Lewton has a point. Call the Chicago office and have them send out the best computer people they have, on the double. From the cyber crimes squad, if possible. Hacker types."

Lee was about to say more, but he was interrupted by the "Foggy Mountain Breakdown."

"I thought you weren't using your cell phone," said Scopes.

"I'm not calling out on it," said Harry. "But there's no harm in receiving."

"Who is it?" asked Lee.

"It's a text page. No callback number. It just says, 'You've got mail.'" Harry sat down at his keyboard and typed his pa.s.sword. "See, there it is."

Poink! Lee and Scopes leaned together toward Harry's computer. Opening his queue, Harry saw the tag "EXTREME IMPORTANCE."

"Here it comes, boys," said Harry. "The s.h.i.+t has officially hit the fan."

Harry opened the e-mail: RESTORE IMMEDIATE COMMUNICATION WITH DIRECTOR OF COMPUTATIONAL RESEARCH. FAILURE TO COMPLY WILL RESULT IN SWIFT AND SEVERE PENALTY.

"What's the return address?" asked Lee. "Evidently O'Day has a confederate."

"Not a human," said Harry. "This is Odin."

Scopes was dubious. "The computer? Are you saying it can act by itself while we have O'Day in custody?"

"His wife says it can."

Scopes laughed. "How do we know his wife didn't send the message?"

"Because she's the one who turned O'Day in."

"Let's call its bluff," said Lee to Harry. "Type an answer: Director O'Day is in police custody in this building and will not be released. Detonation will result in the death of Director O'Day. Refrain from any unauthorized activity. a.s.sist in the disarming of explosive devices and Director O'Day will not be harmed."

"Not sure that's a good idea," said Harry. "Who knows how Odin might react?"

Lee went into professorial mode. "So-called thinking machines work by identifying the presence of key conditions, and matching these to a limited repertoire of preprogrammed responses. These are laid out by the programmer, and consequently fall entirely within the range of his own predispositions. I doubt that Mr. O'Day would have included any response that could cause his own death. Therefore, Odin, his creation, cannot choose such an action. On the other hand, the programmed response set may very well include actions designed to protect Mr. O'Day from harm. We can exploit those to our benefit."

Harry shook his head. "You sound awfully sure of yourself. From what I saw on television this morning, I'm not convinced that Odin was put together that way. Ali-Dr. O'Day, that is-thinks that Odin is not to be f.u.c.ked with. She's scared as h.e.l.l about what he might do."

"What would you suggest? Release this prisoner?"

"No."

"Give him access to the computer?"

"No."

"Then your position is to refuse the ultimatum. You can do that tacitly, by simply doing nothing, or you can choose to reply, and hope that Odin's response will reveal something about his programming and the options available to him. You don't risk anything by answering. You can't anger a computer. The risk lies in rejecting the ultimatum itself-and we're both agreed on the necessity of doing that."

"No, we're not agreed on anything. Quite frankly, I think you've got your thumb up your a.s.s, and you're likely to get us all killed. We need to bring Dr. O'Day down here, and get her take on this. She knows what we're dealing with. We don't."

"Absolutely not!" said Lee. "I don't trust her. In fact, if your holding cell weren't already occupied, I'd have her in custody already."

"What? She fingered O'Day for us. She risked her life helping to bring him in. How the h.e.l.l can you not trust her?"

"She has too many ... points of intersection in this plot. Her brother. Her husband. Her phone records. This mysterious computer. There are many reasons why a coconspirator might sell out her accomplices. All I know is that she seems to stand at the exact center of this affair. I don't know why, and until I do, it'd be foolhardy to regard her as anything but an object of suspicion."

"What a crock of s.h.i.+t!" said Harry. "I didn't know they were giving out Federal badges to cretins this year."

Lee's face turned red. "Mr. Lewton, I'm permitting you to remain in this room only because you seem to know something about Kevin O'Day. Quite frankly, I don't trust you. And I don't trust this woman you're covering for."

Harry threw up his hands and kicked back his chair. "You want to send a message, you type it."

Lee scooted forward and began typing, using his two index fingers. When he was done, he hit "send" with a smart jab.

Harry watched as Lee and Scopes huddled over the screen. A minute elapsed, then two, but nothing happened.

"Checkmate," said Scopes.

"Let's not celebrate yet," said Lee. "Why don't you make those phone calls while we're waiting?"

"Already on it," said Scopes.

Forty-one minutes left on the doomsday clock. "Shouldn't you be trying to squeeze O'Day?" said Harry.

"In good time," said Lee. "If we push him too hard, it'll just feed his G.o.d complex. We're better off pretending to be a bit slow-even stupid. Once our cyber people get here, I'll resume the interrogation, with our captive genius looking on as they fumble away at the keyboard. O'Day won't be able to resist telling them off, and once he opens his mouth he won't be able to shut it. After that, he's ours. He'll beg for the chance to take the bomb apart himself, just to show us how smart he is."

Too pat, thought Harry. You don't even know this son of a b.i.t.c.h. How can you be so sure of what he'll do?

Scopes hung up the phone. "Warrants are coming by fax. The Cyber Team is on its way over with a police escort. They should be here in fifteen minutes."

"Now we're in business," said Lee. He got up to go to the fax machine, which sat on top of a lateral file cabinet. As he moved across the room, Scopes leaned forward to let him pa.s.s.

These FBI p.r.i.c.ks are hopeless, thought Harry. He needed to get to Ali, who had the only sane grasp of the situation. She had power over Kevin, too. The b.a.s.t.a.r.d was still stuck on her, and that translated into major leverage. But where was she? In the ICU? Harry turned to the row of video monitors behind his desk. Closest to him, he saw the feed from the utility shaft where the bomb squad was working. In the foreground was a man in a Kevlar helmet who was trying to drill into the metal housing of the bomb. Below him, half obscured by the glare of spotlights, a few other faces peered up-Avery among them.

Harry tapped the toggle key on the monitor until the NICU came into view. Ali was sitting behind the nurses' desk, writing in a chart binder. All he needed was an excuse to get away. "I'm going to check on the search teams," he announced.

"Are they still working?" asked Lee.

"d.a.m.ned right. And they'll keep working until I know that every ounce of C4 is accounted for."

"Go, then. When I need you for O'Day I'll put out an overhead page."

One last thing. Harry toggled a few more times until the ICU on 18C appeared. The picture was grainy and full of shadows, but he could make out his mother in the corner bed. She was awake, and even on the monitor he could see the rolling hand tremor of her Parkinson's disease. If she's awake, she must be doing better, he thought. I should check with Weiss.

Suddenly, Harry felt his chair lurch up from the floor. There was a crack like splitting timber, followed by a deafening boom and a staccato trill of shock waves that knocked Lee to the floor, and sent books and planters cras.h.i.+ng from the shelves. The room was thrown into darkness. In the distance, he heard a rumble and a chorus of terrified screams.

"No! No! No!" shouted Harry. "Oh, f.u.c.k! He's gone and done it!"

There was a strange-smelling dust in the air, and Harry could hear someone coughing beside him. "Ray! Ray!" gasped Scopes. "Are you all right?"

"My s.h.i.+n ... yeah, yeah, I'm all right. s.h.i.+t!" came the answer.

The rumble died away, followed by waves of high-frequency vibrations. Then all was still, and the fluorescent lights began to flicker back on. From the corridors outside came the whooping sound of the automatic fire alarm. There were a dozen flas.h.i.+ng red lights on the big status screen on the wall.

"Was that it?" asked Harry. "Was it the big one?"

"It was plenty big," said Scopes.

Together, Harry and Scopes lifted Lee to his feet and helped him to his chair. He had bruised his s.h.i.+n in the fall, but was otherwise unharmed.

"That came from the towers, didn't it?" asked Lee.

"Yes," said Harry, studying the status screen.

"h.e.l.l!" grumbled Lee. "G.o.dd.a.m.ned lousy h.e.l.l!"

"I've got some bad news, fellas," said Scopes. The row of monitors on the back wall had rebooted, and Scopes was peering at the farthest one, as he leaned on the countertop with his arms spread wide.