At 10:30P.M., in the laundry of the St. Croix Regional Medical Center, the man known to his coworkers as Max Ableman turned off his boom box. It had been a good evening. Except for the interruption by the Secret Service agent, everything had been quiet. Although Thorsen had surprised him, Nightmare wasn’t greatly alarmed. In fact, there was one aspect of Thorsen’s presence and questions that pleased him. If Thorsen was nosing around the hospital, it meant he was concerned about Jorgenson as well as Jorgenson’s daughter. He was looking in two directions. His attention was divided. Nightmare knew the first rule of any successful operation was focus.
From his clothes locker, Nightmare took a roll of silver duct tape and a sealed glass cylinder fifteen inches long and five inches in diameter. He also lifted a small armload of dirty linen from a pile in front of one of the washers. He descended the stairs to the tunnel, selected a laundry cart, put the cylinder in the cart, and covered it with the soiled linen. Then he headed to the main hospital building. He rode the freight elevator to the fourth floor. The nurses in trauma ICU paid no attention to him as he went about his normal duty of collecting the laundry. He spent a few extra minutes in the room of a man who’d flatlined the night before, then he crossed to the room where Tom Jorgenson lay comatose. He had to wait less than thirty seconds before the alarm went off, signaling another cardiac arrest on the far side of the ICU. He heard the nurses call a Code Blue, and they directed their attention to the situation. He had a window of a few minutes.
He reached into the cart and drew out the glass cylinder and the duct tape. Inside the cylinder, cradled among Styrofoam pellets, was a length of one-and-a-quarter-inch PVC pipe. The pipe, capped and sealed to be airtight, contained C-4, a volatile plastic explosive. The C-4 was fitted with a detonator that could be triggered remotely. A vacuum surrounded the pipe, a precaution that would prevent the scent of the C-4 from being detected by bomb dogs. The inner surface of the glass was coated with common airplane glue. There was enough air in the sealed PVC pipe itself to allow detonation of the C-4. In addition to the destruction caused by the explosion, the glue-coated fragments of glass would be like burning shrapnel, setting the room ablaze. Nightmare intended to attach the device to the underside of the bed with the duct tape and to detonate it the next time the First Lady visited.
He knelt beside the bed and leaned close to the man who lay there.
“Do you remember yourIliad?‘The day shall come, that great avenging day, which Troy’s proud glories in the dust shall lay, when Priam’s powers and Priam’s self shall fall, and one prodigious ruin swallow all.’ Old man, that great avenging day has come. You will die and the Troy you built on your lies will crumble.” He glanced back through the door. The nurses were still occupied with the Code Blue. “But I wanted to give you something to take into the darkness with you. I wanted you to know she’sgoing to die with you. That’s why I didn’t kill you in the orchard. I knew they would bring you here, and I knew she would come.”
“Ableman, what are you doing?” The security guard filled the doorway.
Nightmare stood up and quickly tucked loose bedding into the mattress. “Straightening his bed.”
“That’s the nurses’ job,” Randy O’Meara said.
“They’re busy trying to save a life.” Nightmare dropped the bomb and tape back into the laundry cart.
“You were saying something to him,” O’Meara pressed him.
“Praying for him.”
“Didn’t sound like a prayer to me.”
Nightmare slipped past the guard and shoved his cart down the hallway. He made for the stairway.
The guard followed him. “Ableman, what did you put in that cart?”
Nightmare reached the stairway door and abandoned his cart. He hurried through the doorway into the concrete shaft of the stairwell, pressed himself against the wall, and waited.
Damn. He’d given in to weakness, to a desire to taunt his enemy, the mistake of a green recruit. And this was the result. This was always the result when you let yourself go, even for a moment. Now he would have to risk much.
When Randy O’Meara swept through in pursuit, Nightmare leaped at his back. He used the bigger man’s momentum, pushed him forward, and hooked the guard’s ankle with his foot. O’Meara didn’t even have time to call out before he tumbled down the hard, concrete steps. He lay on the next landing, groaning. Nightmare sailed down the stairs, knelt, grasped the guard’s head in the crook of his arm, and gave his neck a powerful twist. He could feel the satisfying snap of bone against his own muscle. Afterward, he quickly mounted the stairs and checked the hallway. The nurses were still working on the Code Blue patient. No one seemed to have noticed him or O’Meara. He glanced back down at the dead man. Something more had to be done to cover the deed, and Nightmare, who was no stranger to tense situations, knew exactly what that was.
chapter
twelve
Bo woke before dawn, as he sometimes did, from a dream of the days with his street family, Egg and Pearl and Otter and Freak. In the dream, they were all in the abandoned school bus, which floated on a river that was sweeping them away. Slowly, the bus was going under. Bo fought the steering wheel, but he could not make it turn toward shore. The dream was no mystery to him. He was still trying to save them. And still failing.
As a gray light crept over the orchards at Wildwood, Bo left his bed and checked in with Nick Pappas, the agent on duty in the Op Center. It had been a quiet night. Bo changed into his sweats and went for a run. He headed to the edge of the orchard along the river bluff and ran the perimeter of the Jorgenson land twice, a total distance of two miles. The grass was covered with dew, and his leather running shoes were soaked by the time he returned to the barn. He took a pair of four-ounce fingerless bag gloves and a black leather heavybag from where he kept them stored in a long bin. He hung the bag from a hook he’d installed long ago in one of the crossbeams.
Along with hay bales and orchard implements, he shared the barn with a plasma cutter, an angle grinder, a heating torch, and several half-formed iron sculptures taken from the studio of Roland Jorgenson when it was converted into the guesthouse. The dusty unfinished pieces and the equipment were among the few reminders left at Wildwood that once a famous artist had been at work there. The sculptures were wild things that gave the feel of monstrous forces barely contained. He didn’t know much about Roland Jorgenson, but there was definitely something about the man’s work that Bo found disturbing. In the bin where he kept his heavybag, Bo had come upon a portfolio containing early sketches for the sculptureGoddess. Accompanying the sketch on one of the pages was a note scribbled in what he guessed was the artist’s hand: For Kathleen. Bo was no judge of art, but he thought the sculpture, if indeed it was supposed to represent Kate Dixon, did her no justice. He’d given the portfolio to Annie Jorgenson and had no idea what had become of it.
He donned the gloves and worked the bag for half an hour before Chris Manning appeared in the doorway, sunlight at his back.
“We just got a call from the sheriff’s office. One of the security guards at the St. Croix Medical Center fell down some stairs last night and broke his neck. Fatal.”
Bo pulled off the gloves and wiped the sweat from his face with his T-shirt, which was itself soaked with sweat. “Who?”
“Guy named Randy O’Meara.”
Bo’s gut twisted hard. “Give me the details.”
Manning explained that at the change of shift, the security guard had not checked in. The other guards did a search and found O’Meara’s body on the stairs.