Shock Warning

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

Celina Gomez was right where she said she would be, sitting at the reception desk in Nuclear Medicine. She had to admit it gave her a little thrill when the two plainclothes cops walked in. All she ever saw were doctors and sick people.

“Ms. Gomez? I’m Captain Francis Byrne and this is my associate, Detective Aslan Saleh. We know you’re busy, so let’s get right to it, shall we?”

Celina had the tape all queued up. “There’s something I forgot to tell you on the phone. The man clearly said that Detective Saleh had an appointment right here, in our department. You didn’t make an appointment for a stress test, did you, Detective?”

“No, ma’am, I did not,” replied Lannie.

“He said it was a matter of life and death.”

Byrne was not liking this at all. It was obviously a taunt, a dare — daring them to do something. “Let’s hear the tape,” he said.

Celina tapped the computer. The voice emerged from the speakers:

“Taubeh kon! Taubeh kon! Taubeh kon!”

“… the fuck,” said Byrne under his breath.

Lannie looked at him. The look in his eyes said it all: Got it the first time.

“Do you mind if we look around, Ms. Gomez?” asked Byrne.

“Not at all,” she replied. “But of course I will have to clear it with the administrators. And get you a tour guide…”

“We’re not here for a tour, Ms. Gomez,” said Lannie, champing at the bit. The place was dirty, he could feel it. He just didn’t want to think about how dirty it was. But it all made sense. If the terrorists had somehow managed to smuggle some kind of dirty bomb or worse onto the island, a hospital was just the place to store it — radiation hiding among radiation. And the Department of Nuclear Medicine would be the best place of all.

“You’re all set,” said Celina, hanging up the phone. “And Alonzo here will take you where you need to go.” Byrne and Lannie turned to see a tall young black man in hospital whites coming round the corner, his hand already outstretched in greeting. “Alonzo Schmidt, at your service,” he said. “Your 24/7 guide to the underworld here at Mount Sinai.”

They shook hands. “Let’s go,” said Byrne. “Walk and talk.”

“Follow me.”

They headed for the nearest elevator. It was one of those huge hospital elevators, with doors that opened on both sides, so big that it could accommodate several gurneys simultaneously, but at this moment it was empty except for the three of them.

“Have you noticed anything different, Mr. Schmidt?” asked Byrne.

“In what way? Every day at a hospital like Mount Sinai is different. Every night is different, and it doesn’t even have to be Passover.”

“You know,” said Lannie, “something that’s not where it belongs, something new that wasn’t properly checked in.”

The elevator was still descending. Hospital elevators, perhaps because they could carry so much weight, tended to move at a glacial pace. Byrne hated slow elevators; in fact, he pretty much hated all elevators. And he lived in New York City and wouldn’t live anywhere else, go figure.

“Since you gentlemen are here in the Department of Nuclear Medicine, I can only surmise that you’re talking about something… fissionable.”

“Any radiation spikes over the course of the past couple of months?” asked Byrne.

“There are always radiation spikes in a hospital, Captain,” replied Alonzo. “In our department we mostly deal in gamma rays — you know, like the kind that turned the Incredible Hulk green — and it varies from day to day. Among the isotopes we use are fluorine, krypton, gallium, indium, xenon, and iodine-123—they’re used in imaging — yttrium and iodine-131 in various types of therapy.”

Byrne had very nearly failed chemistry in high school; this sort of talk made his head ache.

At last, the elevator found its floor. They stepped out into a dark and eerie place, lit only by emergency lighting. It was a large room that contained a series of sealed cubicles, each with thick walls. “Down here we conform to all industry standards and then some,” said Alonzo. “Impermeable materials, chemical-resistant worktop surfaces, photo-cell-activated wash-up sinks. Nobody touches anything down here.”

“You sure it’s safe for us to be here without hazmat suits?” asked Lannie nervously.

“Perfectly safe,” said Alonzo. “Everything is sealed at the moment, so let’s have a look.”

Schmidt went to one of the workstations and punched up some images. “As you can see, the spectrometers are all in the normal zone. ‘Normal’ is recalculated every day, so that at any given moment it reflects the kind and volume of the work we’re doing. As I said, it’s never a constant. But it’s always ALARA.”

“Alara?” asked Lannie.

“As low as reasonably achievable.”

“But what about other forms of radiation?” said Byrne. “Do they pick that up, too?”

“Depends on what kind it is. For example—”

“You can spare us the chemistry lesson. Not going to mean anything to me or Detective Saleh here. So let’s cut to the chase.”

Alonzo stopped. “You’re talking about a suitcase nuke, aren’t you? Polonium or U-233, with a pair of neutron generators and some sort of power source, either direct electrical or a battery. First, if there are such things — and I gather that the literature is mixed — it would have to be plugged in somewhere or have a very long-lasting and reliable battery. Now, I haven’t seen anything sticking into someplace where it ought not to be, if you don’t count my brother-in-law, and second, we might—might—be able to detect a spike in neutron activity if we recalibrate for it. May take a while.”

Byrne and Lannie exchanged glances. Schmidt caught the look. “How long have we got?” he asked.

What had the caller said?

“Three days, max,” said Byrne. “Probably less now.”

“This is for real, isn’t it?” said Alonzo. “Serious, I mean.”

“You know the old saying,” replied Byrne. “Serious as a heart attack. And I bet you get a lot of those around here.”

A few minutes later they were back at ground level, shaking hands with Schmidt in the main entrance. “Thanks very much for all your help, Mr. Schmidt,” said Lannie. “I don’t have to tell you that—”

“—that it’s all completely confidential. I know the drill. And you can count on me.”

Byrne and Saleh each handed him a card. “This is where you reach us.” Byrne took out a pen and wrote something on the back of his card. “That’s my private cell number. You learn anything, you call it any time day or night. Got it?”

“Got it.”

They stepped into the street. Byrne’s car was parked in front of the hospital. In retrospect that was probably an error, since anyone with functioning eyeballs and half a brain could figure out it was a cop car. And, as luck would have it, such a person was right there.

“Captain Byrne?” The sound of a throaty female voice behind them got both Byrne’s and Lannie’s attention. As soon as he turned around, though, Byrne immediately regretted it.

She was still wearing a wig, although it was pretty damn lifelike, and she certainly was quite a dish, but Principessa Stanley was the last person in Manhattan Byrne wanted to see at this moment.

“Captain Byrne? I’m Principessa Stanley.”

Byrne started walking toward the car. He wished Lannie would learn how to close his jaw.

Principessa kept up with them as they walked. “Captain, I wonder if I might have a word with you.”

“I hate ambushes, Miss Stanley,” he said.

“I have something I think you ought to listen to.” Byrne kept moving. The car wasn’t far now. “It’s some new evidence about the terrorist incident that’s just come to light.”

Interesting, but not interesting enough to stop right at this moment.

Stanley sprinted around ahead of them and stopped. She was holding a cell phone in her hand. “Listen, Captain, I know you played a major role in stopping what those animals did to our city, and I know you got wounded doing it. Well, so did I.”

There was no way around her. Both men stopped. Byrne clicked the unlock button to signal they had urgent business elsewhere, but that was as rude as he was willing to be, under the circumstances.

“I was buried alive, Captain. He scalped me. He was probably going to rape me and he might have killed me. And while I know that he’s dead, whoever he was, I think you need to hear this. Because somebody saved my life, and I need to know who that man was.”

“How am I supposed to know that?” asked Byrne.

“I thought you might recognize his voice. Because I do. Listen.”

Even out here on the street, Byrne could tell at once that the man was speaking a foreign language — a language that, in fact, sounded remarkably like the one they had just heard on Celina Gomez’s sound capture. Not the same voice, far from the same voice, but the same—

“It’s Farsi,” said Lannie. “Again.”

Principessa turned her famous eyes on Lannie; standing next to him, Byrne could feel him melting, the soles of his shoes fusing with the pavement.

“Great. Let me play it again and perhaps you’ll be kind enough, Detective… Detective…?”

“Aslan Saleh. My friends call me Lannie.”

“Lannie.” She pressed PLAY.

“ ‘Listen, you cocksucker,’ ” Lannie translated. “ ‘I am coming for you. O my brother, this will be the last dawn you shall ever see,’ or something like that. I’m an Arab, not a Persian.”

Principessa paused the playback for a moment. “And then he ends with this,” she said, and hit the play button again. “For I am sending you to hell.”

“Do you have what you need now, Ms. Stanley?” said Byrne, pushing past her and opening the driver’s door. Reluctantly, Lannie followed, climbing in the passenger’s side. Byrne started the engine and rolled down the window.

“I know who he is, Captain,” shouted Principessa. “And I think you do, too.”

“Who’s that?” he asked. He recognized the voice, too — it was the man who’d saved him from Ben Addison, Jr. Looks like they shared a guardian angel, not that he was going to tell a reporter that. Whoever the man was, he deserved his anonymity.

“His name is Archibald Grant, and he’s a consultant for the RAND Corporation,” she shouted. “I heard him give a speech last year in New Orleans on terrorism. Please, you have to help me find him.”

The name meant nothing to Byrne, but he would check it out soon enough. “I’ll see what I can do, Ms. Stanley,” he said, and pulled into the Fifth Avenue traffic, heading back downtown. He had more pressing and urgent issues on his mind than some guy at the RAND Corp., such as whether there was likely to be a radioactive crater at the corner of Ninety-eighth and Fifth. It was highly unlikely that some pasty-faced academic could have done the things Byrne witnessed during that terrible day.

“You got that, Lannie?” he asked as they moved down Fifth. But Lannie was looking out the window at Central Park. As they passed the Metropolitan Museum, he pointed and said, “That’s where she was, isn’t it? Over there, behind the museum.”

“Did you hear a word I said, Detective?” asked Byrne.

“No, Chief.”

“The get your head out of her admittedly splendid ass and write this name down. Archibald Grant, RAND Corporation. Got that?”

“Got it, boss.”

“Sure you do.” Byrne put the flasher on; he didn’t feel like fucking around with traffic at this moment. “There’s something else you’d rather be getting and we both know what it is, don’t we?”