Chapter 12 - Phantom on the Sixth Floor
|
At five-forty-five on Saturday morning, before the first grey light of dawn touched the Chicago River, an unmarked white medical laundry van rolled down the subterranean loading ramp of Northwestern Memorial Hospital.
Inside the back of the van, surrounded by stainless-steel linen carts, Nora held tightly to Leo’s hand while Julian and four of his most trusted soldiers sat across from them in gray hospital maintenance uniforms.
The transfer went off like clockwork. By six-fifteen, Leo was safely settled into an unnumbered, high-security VIP recovery suite on the twelfth floor—a restricted wing reserved for visiting foreign dignitaries and federal judges, sealed behind bulletproof glass and guarded by Dario and six armed men in scrubs. As the portable dialysis machine began its quiet, rhythmic hum beside Leo’s bed, color slowly returned to the boy’s cheeks.
"Stay here with him, Nora," Julian murmured by the door of the twelfth-floor room, dressed in a sharp dark overcoat over a Kevlar vest. "Lock the interior deadbolt. By nine o’clock, this will be over."
Nora caught the lapel of his coat before he could step out into the corridor. Her fingers trembled slightly against the fine wool.
"Camila knows how you think, Julian," she whispered urgently. "You were engaged to her for a year. What if she doesn't send hired guns to the sixth floor? What if she knows you’ll be waiting in the security office watching the sixth-floor cameras?"
Julian looked down at her upturned face, his thumb brushing across her knuckles where they gripped his lapel. "Then let her come look for me. I’ve been waiting one hundred and seven days to look her in the eye."
He pressed a brief, hard kiss to her knuckles and stepped out into the hallway, head bound for the sixth-floor trap.
For forty minutes, Nora sat beside Leo’s bed while her brother slept peacefully under the hum of the dialysis filter, watching the silent clock on the wall tick toward 8:00 AM—the scheduled admission time on the sixth floor.
At 7:50 AM, the hospital’s internal intercom chimed softly across the building: "Code Silver, East Atrium. Code Silver, Sixth Floor."
Nora stood up, her heart hammering against her ribs as she stepped over to the small frosted observation window in the door to check on the two guards Dario had left outside Leo’s room.
She peered through the wire-reinforced glass—and froze.
The two guards in blue scrubs were slumped silently on the polished linoleum floor against the hallway wall, small red tranquilizer darts protruding from the sides of their necks.
And walking calmly down the empty twelfth-floor corridor toward Leo’s door was a tall, stunningly beautiful woman with platinum-blonde hair swept into a French twist, wearing a tailored white doctor’s lab coat over red silk stilettos, flanked by two massive men carrying suppressed Heckler & Koch MP7s.
Camila Morelli hadn't taken the bait on the sixth floor.
The Code Silver downstairs was a diversion she had triggered herself to draw Julian and Dario’s main team away from the executive wing—because someone inside Dr. Shaw’s staff had tipped her off about the portable dialysis machine requisitioned for the twelfth floor!
Nora spun around. The dialysis machine was thirty minutes away from finishing Leo’s cycle; he was tethered to the wall unit by arterial lines. They couldn't run.
She looked at the heavy steel crash cart by the bathroom door, then at the two unconscious guards outside the glass—no, she couldn't open the door without the gunmen shooting her on sight.
May you like
Wait. The VIP suite had an adjoining scrub-prep room with a secondary service door leading directly into the central biohazard waste stairwell!
Working with silent, frantic speed, Nora clicked the dialysis machine onto internal thirty-minute battery backup, unplugged the heavy power cord from the wall, released the wheel brakes on Leo’s hospital gurney, and rolled the entire bed and machine together into the adjoining scrub room just as the electronic lock on the main suite door hissed under a cloning bypass tool.
