Once he got to the big entrance doors, Remo rose from his crouching walk and sauntered into the lobby as if he were delivering coffee and Danish.
A brassy-looking nurse stood behind a reception desk, making marks on a clipboard.
"Yes, sir," she asked Remo.
"What floor is Mr. Millis on, please?"
"Visiting hours are from three to five p.m.," she said
"That isn't what I asked," Remo said pleasantly.
"And visiting is restricted to immediate family."
"I didn't ask that either," Remo said.
"Are you a relative?" the nurse asked.
"Just part of the family of man," Remo said. He noticed the clipboard and reached across the desk to snatch it up.
"Give that back," the nurse snapped.
Remo found Millis' name and the room number 12-D. That meant the twelfth floor. Or did it mean D ward? "Where's the D ward?" Remo asked.
"There is no D ward," the nurse said huffily.
Remo handed her the clipboard back. "Much obliged," he said. Good. It would be a lot easier to get to the twelfth floor than to spend his night hunting everywhere for some frigging D ward.
"Guard!" the nurse yelled.
"Now you've done it," Remo said when a uniformed security guard came around the corner.
"What is it?" the guard demanded, a hand hovering near the butt of his holstered revolver.
"This man is asking questions about the patient in 12-D," she said.
"What's your problem, buddy?" the guard asked.
"No problem," Remo said breezily. "I was just leaving."
"I'll walk you out," the guard said.
"Fine. I love company," Remo said.
His hand on his weapon, the guard followed Remo into the cool evening. He was torn between calling for help on his walkie-talkie and cuffing the intruder on general principles, but the man had not really done anything wrong. He had simply asked some questions about the patient in room 12-D, which the guard knew was under twenty-four-hour watch by a team of FBI agents.
The FBI agents had snubbed the guard when he offered to help them.
"Just stick to your post, old-timer," the FBI team leader had said. They had given him no specific instructions so now he was not sure what to do with the skinny guy in black.
And then the question became academic because suddenly Remo was no longer there.
He had been standing alongside the guard and now he was not there and the guard did a 360-degree turn, saw nothing, and then moved over toward the bushes alongside the front door. All he saw were shadows but they were funny shadows, darker than most, and they seemed to be moving, and then he was sure, they were moving, but it was too late then because slowly he slipped into unconsciousness.
Remo caught the guard after he released his oxygen-blocking hold on the man's neck. He carried him as easily as if he were a child to a nearby parked car, popped the lock with a finger, and put the man behind the wheel, where he would awaken, hours later, not exactly sure what had happened to him.
By that time, Remo expected to be gone.
The face of the hospital building was sheer, without handholds, but there were windows, and Remo hopped lightly up onto a ground-floor window ledge. From there, he reached the second-floor window, and in that fashion, using the windows as rungs in a ladder that was the hospital itself, Remo started upward. To anyone watching it would have seemed easy and for Remo it was. Several of the windows he reached were open or spilling light and because his approach depended on stealth, Remo worked sideways a window or two before he could resume climbing again. It was like playing checkers against the hospital wall, with the windows as the squares and Remo as the only moving piece.
He passed the twelfth floor and on the level above, he scored the glass of a darkened window with his fingernail and pushed hard on the circle he had made.
The circle turned and Remo grabbed an edge that swung outward and pulled. Soundlessly, the ring of glass hung free in his hand and Remo flipped it off to the side like a Frisbee. It zipped across the parking lot and embedded itself in the side of a tree, the way a single straw can be driven into wood by a tornado's wind.
Remo reached an arm through the hole and silently unlocked the window. His eyes automatically adjusted to the darkness of the room as he slipped inside. It was a sickroom, not in use. There were two beds and the room reeked of the hospital smell that was ninety percent chemical disinfectant and ten percent the scent of sickness and despair.
Remo pulled a sheet from one of the beds and ripped it several times. When he was done, he pulled it over his head. It looked sort of like a hospital patient's gown, if one did not look too hard. Remo kicked off his shoes. Being barefoot might help him pass as a patient.
No one gave him a second glance in the hospital corridor and at the nearest exit, Remo found a stairwell down to the twelfth floor.
He started down, still not sure what he was going to do when he got there.
FBI Field Agent Lester Tringle never forgot the advice he had given in the FBI training academy: "Always expect trouble. Then, if it comes, you're prepared."
So even now, on this piece-of-cake detail guarding a man in a coma, Tringle was ready for trouble. He stood outside Room 12-D, cradling in his hands a short-snouted machine pistol with a complicated telescope and box arrangement on top.
Personally, Tringle had no little regard for the laser-sighted armament. He was a crack shot and felt he did not need any fancy gadgetry, but his area supervisor had insisted. The White House considered Hubert Millis' survival a high national priority-not so much because of who he was as because so many auto manufacturers had been attacked lately. It looked bad for America if one crazed gunman could pick off the heads of the country's auto industry with impunity.
Crazy stuff, thought Lester Tringle, and even crazier that the gunman had written that letter to the paper and then signed his name, Remo Williams, at a guest register at one of the shooting sites.
He did not expect him to try to storm the hospital, but if he did come, Tringle would be ready and so he had relinquished his sidearm for a machine pistol that could fire over one thousand rounds a minute along a beam of red laser light.
There was one big benefit to laser-sighted weapons when a man worked in a team as Tringle was doing tonight. It made it a lot less likely that you'd be shot by your own teammate, because the lasers made a marksman nearly infallible. You just touched the trigger lightly and the beam shot out. A red dot, no bigger than a dime and visible under day or night conditions, appeared on the target. If the red dot appeared over a man's heart, you could bet a year's salary that when you pulled the trigger all the way, the bullets went where the dot was. That meant a lot fewer innocent bystanders and other agents shot, and for Lester Tringle, who planned to live long enough to collect his pension and open a tavern in Key West, Florida, that was important. And he always conceded that the laser was especially useful with a machine gun because the wild spray of bullets from a machine weapon could do enormous damage if it went where it wasn't supposed to go.
Tringle pushed away from the wall where he was leaning when he heard a sound from down the corridor that sounded like the burp of automatic-weapon fire.
The sound died almost as soon as it started, which was strange, for even the shortest pull on the trigger of one of these machine pistols meant a full-second burst of about fifteen rounds.
"Hey, Sam," Tringle called out. "What's going on?" There was no sound from the East Wing hall. There were no elevators at that end of the building and Agent Sam Bindlestein was guarding a stairway exit. But now he wasn't answering.
Tringle pulled his walkie-talkie from under his armored vest.