Dark Heart (DARC Ops Book 3) (21 page)

“
S
urely you understand
,” said Clarence, his voice and face full of overwhelming disdain as he collapsed into his oversized leather office chair. “You get it, don’t you?”

“We’re very quickly approaching the procedure,” said Jackson, checking the time again on his oversized tactical wristwatch.

“You get that a member of my staff, and a man I’ve known for over twenty years, has just been fucking murdered?”

“I do. And I’m terribly—”

“Then you’re completely insane, if you expect everything to be business as usual.
Insane
.”

“I’m not expecting—”

“But you are,” cried Clarence, his nostrils flaring. “If you think that surgery is the only thing, or even the most important thing, on my mind right now.”

For the last two excruciatingly long minutes, Jasper sat quietly as Jackson attempted to explain the importance of Clarence staying in maximal contact at all times with the DARC team. He had gone radio silent for an hour after Dr. Wahl had been discovered. An hour too long, according to Jackson. He was maybe being a little too difficult on the beleaguered hospital director.

“We’re sorry for your loss,” Jasper said quietly.

He and Jackson had been summoned to an emergency meeting way up at his opulent, glass-walled corner office. The views looked outward over Washington Circle, and beyond, over the sparkling traffic of New Hampshire Boulevard. Jasper preferred to stick to those views, at least anything that was not inside the office, especially the look on Clarence Mitchell’s face.

“I’m about ready to pull the plug on this whole thing. I swear to God I am. You can just tell the prince, that rude, ungrateful piece of shit, that he can take a fucking hike. Go somewhere else. And you can follow him! Go to Walter Reed. Anywhere. Riyadh. I don’t care. Just take him and all this bullshit somewhere else.”

Jasper kept his eyes on the traffic, and then up higher, to a sky marred with variously dispersed contrails. He would like to have been on one of those planes hours ago, before things at the hospital got so ugly. By now he’d be long gone. But he’d also be turning his back on Jackson and the DARC team, and the prince. On Fiona.

There would be a funeral for her sister, yes. Some sad times. A time to comfort her, to be at her side. Or however far or near she’d like him to be. Details like that were still so unclear. Where they were on the gradient, the relationship scale—or more importantly, what
they were—was so enticingly mysterious. And so full of potential. If he could survive the day, that was.

“It’ll be smooth sailing from here on out,” said Jackson.

“Well, by fuck it better be. How could it not? Are they gonna come after me
next?!”

“Clarence,” Jasper said. “We’ve got the hospital on virtual lockdown. We have our men, as well as the Saudi guards. The cybersecurity vulnerabilities have been addressed.”

“They have? Definitely?” Clarence stared into him intently.

“Yes,” said Jasper, who took a quick look at Jackson. “Right?”

“Then why do we still have power outages?”

Jasper didn’t take his gaze off the DARC Ops leader.

Jackson, ever the diplomat, folded his hands together in his lap. “Your power system, and even your cyber defenses, are broken down into a multi-tiered layering system.”

“What the hell does that mean?”

Jackson opened his briefcase and pulled out a large tablet.

Clarence frowned. “You’re gonna leave it to your computer to tell me?”

When the device powered on and a 3D map of the hospital appeared, and after Clarence’s loud sigh, Jackson began the explanation by pointing to the different colors of each sector. “They’re separated by priority level, by how important they are to the hospital’s functioning. So for example, the power outage you mentioned, that’s only affecting the bottom tier, and so not really affecting you at all.”

“Why is that?”

“Because you don’t need lights in the old morgue,” said Jackson. “There’s no construction company today, and so it’s just sitting there.”

“Sitting there in the dark,” said Clarence.

“Of course. Who needs to see anything down there?”

“So, it’s like a pressure valve. The morgue and other non-essential—”

“We’re not even at that point yet,” Jackson said. “We’ve got so many other dead zones before we even get to non-essential. And we’ll never get to essential. Unless someone sets off an EMP device.”

Clarence looked as tired as ever, slumping an elbow onto his desk, and then his chin onto the fist it held up.

“You still with us, Clarence?” asked Jasper.

He didn’t answer.

“Can you tough it out for us?”

He finally nodded, his chin moving up and down and over the knuckles of his fist.

“Good, because we’re moving forward with the surgery as soon as we wrap up here.”

“Then let’s wrap up,” said Clarence, easing off his desk and back into that comfy chair of his. “I just want this over with.”

Jasper appreciated the sentiment. And he was sure everyone else in the hospital felt the same way.

After the meeting abruptly ended, it was time to focus on putting out another fire. Rather, put it to sleep. The easiest move would be to get Prince Saif into anesthesia as quickly as possible and get on with things. No more questions. No objections. Maybe slip him some sedatives even earlier just to speed up the process.

“I wish we could put the rest of his handlers under, too,” said Jackson, grinning in the elevator. “We could pump some sleeping gas into their room.”

Jasper couldn’t find the humor in it. He was too busy worrying about what could come next. “We should have men posted at all ventilation access points,” he said flatly.

“We’ve already got that covered,” said Jackson.

“We do?”

Jackson just smiled.

“And we really need to get power back on in those bottom-tier areas,” said Jasper as he squeezed out of the elevator door before Jackson. “They shouldn’t have even been affected in the first place.”

Jackson caught up to his pace, walking alongside in a crowded hall. “Their electrical grid is incredibly stressed right now. But it’s more of an internal problem than at outside attack. Can you believe that? The place is in shambles.”

“I’ve never been to a hospital, an American hospital, that’s in such bad shape.”

“They’re broke,” said Jackson. “That construction site downstairs, the old morgue, they haven’t worked on that in months.”

Jackson fell back behind Jasper in single file as the hallway grew increasingly congested. There were patients lying in beds in the hallway, their gurneys parked like train cars alongside the wall.

“Look at this,” Jasper said, stopping at the bed of old man whose withered gray hand kept grappling at the tubes of an IV drip. His blanket had fallen to the floor, revealing a pair of hairless bare legs that glistened under the harsh, antiseptic hallway lights.

“They’re overbooked,” said Jackson, collecting the blanket from the floor. He laid it over the confused patient while Jasper held the mans hands away from the IV.

When they continued walking, Jasper tried consciously to not look at the patients parked to the side, to not think about what they needed, or didn’t need. What he needed was to reach the prince’s room by the end of the day. “Any word on those security cameras?”

“No,” said Jackson.

“No word, or no cameras?”

“No cameras. They were malfunctioning.”

Jasper could only laugh at this point.

“But they’re fixed now.”

“You did some research into this place before taking this on, right?”

“Yeah,” said Jackson. “I checked it out.”

“So were the cameras hacked?”

Jackson gnawed on his bottom lip. “We’re not sure yet. But if they were, it won’t happen again.”

It sounded like Jackson’s crew had been kept busy today. Baling water, patchwork, all the last-minute alterations. Trying not to let this crumbling mess of a hospital implode under its own weight. Was there even a need for hackers?

“We’re working on those lights, too,” Jackson said after a brief pause.

“What lights?”

“Bottom tier.”

Jasper laughed. “As long as we have lights in the operating room, I’m happy.”

“You sure that’s all you need?”

“No.”

S
he resigned
herself to just sitting there. Waiting. Breathing.

Existing.

It was still a pleasant surprise that she was alive. Alive, despite being trapped in a morgue, and in a room coated with death, the old muted odor of it still clinging to the walls much like she herself had done. She’d used the wall as a guide, clinging to it for safety like some nocturnal animal. Her excursions away from it led her to some unfortunate discoveries, like the drain in the middle of the room, and the single large weight-bearing post that led up to a large metal operating table.

But she was sure that it had been cleaned and sterilized. It had to have been. She was so certain that she gritted her teeth and ran her hand over it, hoping to find some tool that might help either defend her, or open the door. But if she’d used that same rationale of the table being clean and sterilized, then what was she looking for?

Paint cans.

They were full. Heavy. She had picked one up, swinging it gently by the wire handle, considering its effectiveness as a weapon. If the door eventually opened and her attacker entered, whoever he was, she would at least have something waiting for him. Or would she be better off opening the lid and splashing paint into his face, into his eyes? Would that blind him?

She had time to think it over.

After an hour of sitting back against the wall—or what felt like an hour—she tried her luck with the door again. She felt up along the door, searching for the handle. It jerked stiffly in her hand, moving only fractions of an inch. She shook it harder. Maybe something would move the latch if she rattled it.

Nothing moved. It all felt so rigid and fixed in place. So she just tried the obvious, gripping the handle with both hands and shaking as hard as she could, the door rattling in its frame. It stayed firmly in place. Locked. From the outside. When the rattling got too loud, she forced herself to back away in defeat.

It was better to be anonymously locked in somewhere. It was better to stay undiscovered in the dark. Alive in the dark.

She walked blindly, slowly, brushing around and past the operating table, to a long metal countertop that ran the length of the far wall. Above the bench were metal cupboards. Empty cupboards. She tried them all, swinging open the doors, feeling inside, and then leaving the doors open while she moved on to the next set. When she ran out of cupboards to check, she lowered her hands back down to the countertop, feeling all the way across its empty, dusty surface, until her hand bumped over a rubbery mat, and then knocked into some piece of plastic. A computer mouse. And then another, much larger piece of plastic, a keyboard, her hand dragging across, fingertips softly thudding over the keys. And then it was back to the blank metal countertop. And then a wall. Another wall. It was as good as any to turn her back against and slide down to the ground. It didn’t quite matter where she was, so long as it wasn’t on top of the operating table—or any other in the near future.

She’d done enough blind searching, enough wandering and hoping. There was enough dirt and whatever other disgusting remnants caked on her hands. She rubbed them together in the dark, feeling the dusty, oily grime, hoping to at least shed some before resorting to wiping it onto her pants.

It took six wipes across her pants before she was satisfied enough to just sit there and wait. Just waiting. Not even thinking. She didn’t bother thinking about how, if there weren’t some attacker out there, she could find something heavy to bang against the door. She’d already made enough noise with the door rattling. If she were sure he wasn’t still out there, she could scream at the top of her lungs. Maybe scream down the floor drain, something loud enough to motivate a rat to go scurrying for help like some carrier pigeon. A smart, helpful rat. It could do its best Lassie impression, finding Jasper, and then playing charades until Jasper could respond with, “What? Fiona’s stuck in Autopsy Room 5 down at the morgue?”

Fiona forced herself to stop thinking about rats. There were a lot of things she was trying to ignore, but as she sat there on the floor in the dark, rats were suddenly at the top of her list.

What if one tried scurrying behind her along the wall and got tangled up in her shirt?

Fuck . . .

What if one really did find Jasper and tell him exactly where she was? And then he’d come and bust down the door, grab her off the floor, and haul her straight into a hot shower somewhere.

A shower.

He could help her clean up the grime. He could help with everything.

* * *

T
he lights flickered
on and off.

She wasn’t sure if that was part of the dream.

Then came the sounds, the rattling and buzzing. More flicking of the lights until they stayed on in a single, solid glare. The florescent ceiling panels illuminating every inch of what was once so mysterious and elusive, an empty autopsy room. It revealed the true dimensions, the architecture, everything accounted for. The operating table, the long countertop with the open cupboard doors. And the computer. She wasn’t brave enough to push open the door and see if anyone was still on the other side, but perhaps she could get help another way.

She stood and pushed off the wall, walking quickly toward an old desktop computer. A big white monitor was stacked on top of a horizontal computer case. There was a keyboard, a mouse, and a whole mess of wires. It took her a few minutes to attach everything correctly, especially finding the wall outlet for the ethernet cable. She let the machine boot up while she continued her search.

So what was she going to do?

Send an email?

If she could log into the hospital website, there was a customer relations live chat available. She could open that, get a receptionist on the line, and go from there.

She thought over the words she would use, how she’d describe the situation, what room she was in. A gross fucking autopsy room.

“Listen, I’m in this fucking room. And there’s this fucking guy . . .”

Slow down . . .

And did she really need to curse so much?

Right when Fiona had it all figured out, a bunch of words flashed onto the computer screen. It looked like . . .

Fuck
!

It looked like gibberish. A command-line interface she’d never used before.

There was a blinking cursor. And a question.

She relaxed slightly, seeing that it was just a login screen. She’d used one every day at the nurses’ station. It was a different interface, but she could always just try her usual login and password.

Fiona typed in her name and then pressed the tab key to move the cursor to the password box, where she typed in 7
cherrycola7
.

She pressed enter.

The screen blinked away for a millisecond, only to return with another text-filled screen.

It might not be as simple as she had thought, starting a chat, sending an email. Anything. She was probably better off down the drain pipe with her rescue rat.

She scrolled through her options, most of it still sounding like gibberish, when she came upon another login screen. This time it was for something called Environment. Temperature controls for the morgue. And then she remembered something Jasper had told her about their cybersecurity efforts, and how access points were being live monitored.

So if she could pretend she was a hacker . . .

That was giving herself too much credit.

But if she could at least keep failing the login process with wrong passwords, it might at least raise some red flags upstairs.

What else was there to do?

Fiona mashed the keys and failed the login as many times as she could, over and over again until her fingers started cramping. Almost sinking to the floor in tears, she forced her fingers to move again, typing out one last word.