Kealey shifted to the man’s left, repeated what he had said.
“I’m Jose Colon, a doctor.” He snickered mirthlessly. “Good thing those SOBs attacked a medical dinner.”
Allison shuffled to his left. “You need to get it treated.”
“I will,” Colon said. “People who are bleeding go first.”
Allison offered him a strained approximation of a smile, while Kealey looked at his patient. Her eyes were shut, her blouse was shredded, and her arms and chest were a patchwork of slashes and puncture wounds. The side of her head was matted with blood from a long gash that ran from behind her ear to the top of her head. Colon was treating that now with bottled water and dabbing it with a piece of Julie’s blouse. There was a bloody length of material tied tight below her knee; two long, ragged wooden boards bracketed the leg.
The last two fingers of the woman’s left hand were gone. Colon had tied off the wound with another piece of blouse. It was saturated with blood, but the stain did not appear to be increasing.
“Mild concussion?” Allison asked, kneeling at the top of Julie’s head.
“I think so,” Colon said. “Are you a doctor?”
“Psychiatrist,” she replied.
“I gave her a GCS before I started on the leg,” he said. “She’s at two.”
“The Glasgow Coma Scale registers neural activity,” Allison explained to Kealey as she watched the doctor clean the wound. Two means reacts to painful stimuli and makes sounds.”
“That’s good?” he asked.
“Better than a one,” she replied.
“I treated the hand and leg first because of the bleeding. She’s got a compound fracture, but her vitals seem stable.”
Allison reached around and carefully lifted Julie’s wrist, feeling for a pulse. After a moment she laid it down. “Strong, all things considered.” She said to Kealey, “Obviously, you can’t know about internal injuries.”
“But we do need to find out,” Colon said. “I just wanted to stabilize her before they take her away. Can’t do much for this without suturing.”
“Look, I can finish here,” Allison told him. “Please go and get yourself seen to.”
Colon leaned back on his heels and nodded. With a final glance at his handiwork, he rose silently, like a wraith.
“Thank you,” Allison said after him.
He did not appear to have heard.
“I’m going to have to stitch this up,” Allison said. “See what you can get from the medics.”
“Give me a minute,” Kealey said, climbing awkwardly to his feet. His muscles were cramped and tired. The rest of him wasn’t too hot, either.
Allison waited, cleaning the wound as best she could. She used the tips of her fingernails to pluck splinters of glass from Julie’s flesh; they appeared to be the remnants of a faceted crystal goblet from someone’s table. It took some doing to work them out; they’d hit with force that was sufficient to penetrate, but not pierce, her skull. Fresh blood pumped from the wound as she pulled them free. Allison applied gentle pressure to the cuts as best she could, laying a ribbon of blouse fabric across them and placing her thumb across it.
A minute or so later, Kealey returned with the pack she’d seen an FBI man remove from his vest. The large white print on its black outer fabric read FIELD TRAUMA.
“I need an antiseptic and a fresh dressing, Ryan,” she said in a quiet voice.
Kealey crouched beside her. He unzipped the case, reached in, and produced a dressing roll and a packet labeled CELOX.
“I don’t see any thread, just-”
“What you’ve got there will work for now,” she interrupted. “Tear open the hemostatic packet.”
Kealey pulled off the top and handed it to Allison, who applied the granulated agent to the wound after carefully brushing away Julie’s hair. Hair that had been so carefully done earlier that day at the hotel salon. That was the last time they’d spoken. Julie had been anxious but excited about the way things were coming together…
The Celox had the effect of cauterizing the cuts without heat. As soon as the bleeding stopped, Allison pressed the gauze to the wound. It was self-adhesive and large enough to cover nearly the entire side of Julie’s head.
“It’ll do for now,” Allison said.
She looked up, and Kealey followed her gaze. O’Neill was standing behind him with two men and a collapsible gurney.
“We’ve been ordered to medevac her to GW,” she said.
“I’m coming with her,” Allison said.
“Yes, ma’am,” O’Neill replied. “In fact, we’ve just received instructions to that effect.” She regarded Kealey. “You too, sir.”
“I’m a civilian-”
“The president has requested it personally,” O’Neill replied. She grinned. “I was instructed to say that when you said what you did.”
Kealey grinned back. It felt good to smile, even at something stupid. “I’ve got a car in the garage here-”
“It will be taken care of,” O’Neill replied.
While they were talking, the gurney had been assembled and Julie carefully lifted onto it. Kealey excused himself to have a few words with Colin, who had made his way to the hall, and ten minutes later they were on board an FBI chopper, an intravenous saline drip in Julie’s arm, and a transfusion bag feeding blood into the other from a separate line. Although she’d experienced no respiratory difficulties at any point, oxygen was being provided through a breather as a routine precaution. The techs had gone through the checklist of vital signs and had determined her to be in serious but stable condition.
As the helicopter rose smoothly into the night, Kealey looked back at the spotlit disaster zone that had once been the Baltimore Convention Center. Smoke was still curling from several areas as firefighters pumped water into sections from which personnel had been evacuated. Crowds of locals and tourists were gathered beyond the extensive police barricades, and Kealey could see the reds of braking lights, and the glare of headlights, as traffic was backed up for miles.
The ripples of disaster, he thought. Whether the disaster was natural or man-made, the impact came in waves, short term and longer term, keeping people physically and psychologically destabilized. The effect on the individual and on society was aggressively exponential, far surpassing the destructive force of the event itself.
Kealey sat back in the fold-down seat, let his head lean back against the gently vibrating headrest. There was nothing he could do about the big picture. His job had always been to focus on the triggers. Even now, his forensic soul was sifting through the rubble. As Allison looked down at the men who were redressing Julie’s leg, he shut his eyes and replayed everything he knew.
The hostiles had been composed of Eastern European and Middle Eastern personnel. Probably the bombers as well. These were suicide attacks, from the look of it. Kealey had noticed what appeared to be the remnants of a body near the scorched epicenter of the ballroom blast. The dark blast radius and destructive swath suggested the attack had come near the entrance, not near the podium. Someone was hanging to the rear, probably near the open bar, where a suitcase or shopping bag could have been concealed.
How many people were involved? he wondered. The entire event had consisted of two waves of coordinated attacks: three bombings followed by the hostage taking. There were at least three bombers, multiple hostage takers, and who knew how many people in support roles, individuals who had not been apprehended.
It was big-at least the size of the September 11 attacks. How did something of that magnitude, with so many moving parts, get past the many watchful eyes of United States intelligence?
He didn’t want to contemplate the logical answer. It was one of those worst-case scenarios that had always troubled his bosses at the Company.
What had scared them most was not the foreign jihadists or the homegrown terrorists, but what they had come to refer to as the Fort Hood scenario, named after the attack that killed twelve and injured twenty-nine in November 2009, when an army psychiatrist turned a. 357 Magnum and an FN Five-seveN semiautomatic on his fellow soldiers.