Damage assessment is critical, but there’s no time. The bellman has called over a pair of his fellow bag handlers; because of the availability of the luggage cart, the three install Knox on its platform like a trio of doting aunts. A group of Turks forms around the injured Westerner, and one rough-faced man has the audacity to stab Knox’s shin painfully with a probing finger. The bellman slaps out, pushes away the curious offender.
His head swimming, Knox has a memory of his brother, Tommy, pulling him along an uncooperative sidewalk in their Radio Flyer wagon. It’s a painfully vivid and present image, so overwhelming that for a moment he’s transported back to Hamtramck beneath the clattering leaves of seasonal maples, shedding their leaves for fall in a sound eerily reminiscent of the plane trees that rattle overhead. The sound stitches with that of a siren blaring, and Knox realizes he’s lost more than a few seconds.
“Police!” Knox hears a new voice enter the mix. Besim is coming in for another pass.
Knox grabs the sleeve of the bellhop that rescued him — Furkan, his name badge reads — and pulls him down. “No badge! Not police. He is who hurt me!”
Furkan’s head snaps up in Besim’s direction; the bellhop comes around the moving luggage rack with alacrity and gets up in Besim’s grille, demanding to see his identification—
An instant later, Furkan sinks bonelessly to the sidewalk, a limp pool of flesh and fabric. The man’s collapse is so immediate and frightening that his fellow workers attack Besim as a unified tag team, driving him back into a parked car in a resoundingly aggressive move that pins and punishes Besim while simultaneously searching him. The Taser that dropped Furkan clacks to the concrete, followed by Besim’s cell phone, which breaks into pieces. A black leather wallet falls. It is snatched up and opened.
Besim steals it back in a flash and makes the two men pay for their insolence, the first with a sprained knee, the second, a stunned solar plexus. Besim bends for the phone, but Knox is off the cart. He kicks the phone beneath the parked car. Besim levels him, shoving Knox onto his back; Knox’s head strikes the concrete. Besim empties Knox’s pockets like a pickpocket, transferring the contents to his own. Throws open the Scottevest and flattens the nylon mesh lining to inspect the contents. Is given pause by the closeness of the approaching siren. Leaving Knox’s passport and money clip on the sidewalk, Besim keeps the rest as he slips away, blends into the growing crowd and disappears.
Knox rolls to Furkan, who is coming awake. Knox stretches for the cell phone, pockets it as the wounded bellmen cuss in English, still trying to help Knox. Any one of them might be a candidate for the ambulance as it pulls up, but it’s Knox who’s tended to, his shins dressed with bandages before he’s loaded into the back of the step van.
Furkan was down for less than a minute. He’s groggy but on his feet and trying to help the paramedics, one of whom is a woman wearing a white lab coat and low black heels.
“Thank you!” Knox calls out to Furkan. The young man rubs his forehead; he’ll be nursing a powerful headache. He manages a slight nod.
The ambulance’s rear doors close with a bang.
Wheeled into emergency on an ambulance gurney, Knox slips undetected past a man who could easily be an agent waiting outside. Knox averts his face — currently obscured by an oxygen mask — while celebrating his decision to complicate his means of arrival. It looks like it’s paid off.
In the distance, he spots a group of male nurses smoking cigarettes, their backs pressed up against the building’s façade. Any of the staff could belong to the same team as the man watching the emergency room doors. Knox is battling a small army.
Installed in an examination area sectioned off by a drape, Knox goes to work, painfully stripping down to his bare torso and pulling on the hospital gown left for him. He checks his phone — nothing from Victoria. Considers switching out SIM chips, but fears his original chip can be traced. Can’t afford the delay of being put into the medical system.
He peers out and spots a line of wheelchairs on the far side of a chaotic, crowded nurse’s station. Bundles the heavy windbreaker and his shirt into a football beneath his left arm. His chest wound chooses this moment to be a violent offender; he stifles his own complaint, burying the pain. Whenever possible, hide out in the open. Knox approaches the nurse’s station and stands, waiting for attention.
When no one pays him any, he takes a business card from an acrylic stand and moves on, down the hall toward the restroom, passing the line of wheelchairs. Uses the facilities. Takes a seat in one of the chairs and, placing the bundle on his lap, wheels his way past the nurse’s station and along the corridor. When the elevator doors open on the eleventh floor a few minutes later, there’s an unexplained empty wheelchair in the elevator car, looking lost and forlorn.
True to her word, a text arrives from Victoria. She’s in position to call Akram. Knox, head down, wears the patient frock, carries the windbreaker bundle under his arm. He limps slowly down the hall — doesn’t have to fake it — ears pricked for the strains of “Brown Sugar,” Akram Okle’s ringtone for Victoria’s phone.
The next people to grab him will find his pockets empty. He will be tortured, possibly to death, for the location of the business card Mashe Okle passed him. A card he no longer has. Referring such people to other agents will only infuriate them and intensify the level of questioning. His presence here, then, has little to do with benevolence: it’s a matter of self-preservation. Survival of the fittest. Knox has an angle to play, a way to avoid a fatwa and turn the agents back onto Mashe.
But he must get face time with Mashe, and he must make sure any agents wanting him see that he does. Without personal contact, his plan goes bust.
Victoria, fueled by greed, walked into the snare. Her association with Knox and her history with Akram may put her at risk, something Knox wants to avoid. He’s counting on Akram’s incoming calls being monitored and traced. She is on their radar — electronically tracked. He believes she has led agents back to the hospital. They have observed her entering. Knox’s exchange of texts with her has confirmed his presence here and has hopefully focused attention on the cardiac ward; with any luck, they are monitoring the cardiac ward using the hospital security cameras. Possibly there’s a doctor or nurse working with them.
Despite the wall stickers advising all persons in the hospital to turn off cell phones, Knox hears the opening riff of “Brown Sugar” from down the hall. He’s still too far away to pinpoint the exact room — but he’s moving closer. He pushes his agonized legs faster, finally raising his chin and daring to show his face to the security cameras.
Knox stops abruptly.
From the end of the hall, David Dulwich looks back at him.
50
John!” Grace calls out, just loudly enough to be heard. The cardiac ward’s corridor stretches out before her. David Dulwich steps closer to John, which explains why John doesn’t turn his head.
She has to assume he can hear her. “It is GPS. The device was modified to contain GPS!”
Now he does look her way, shoots her an expression of shock, disbelief and victimization. John thinks she has betrayed him.
“GPS,” she says again.
From the moment she saw the man observing from outside the electronics shop, she knew: it was virtually impossible he’d followed her; beyond any possibility of coincidence that he might be surveilling a random electronics repair shop. No, he had followed the device she’d stolen. Thus, the only possible explanation: the device contained a GPS chip.
She now believes Dulwich’s claim that his client did not intend to kill Mashe Okle, but only follow him. Whether such surveillance would result in his death was beyond her ability to determine, but she could make assumptions, as John was now doing. She stands less than a meter from both men.