The Atlantis Prophecy

32

WHEN THE U.S. CAPITOL POLICE burst into the processing room on the main level of the Jefferson Building, Sergeant Wanda Randolph found three bodies on the floor: Max Seavers, a security guard with bloody hair matted across his face, and a third man with a bullet hole in his shaved head-obviously the perpetrator who detonated the explosives.

A few minutes later, outside the researchers entrance on 2nd Street, she watched the coroner zip up the corpse of the stranger when Officer Carter, one of her R.A.T.'S., walked up.

"So who is he?" she asked.

"They're telling me his name is Dr. Conrad Yeats," Carter reported. "But I couldn't run the security feeds through the facial recognition software to confirm, because somebody up there pulled them."

Wanda could feel her blood begin to boil. "Did they make that secret tunnel in the subbasement disappear, too?"

"No, but there's a detachment of Marines down there now."

"Marines?"

"Sealed the tunnel off and won't let us in."

She looked on as two emergency technicians used backboards to immobilize an unconscious Max Seavers before placing him on a stretcher and securing him in the ambulance for transport to George Washington University Hospital.

"This is our turf, Carter, not theirs."

"Sure, and you can bring that up with the president next time you lunch with him," Carter said. "Meanwhile, what do we do?"

The EMTs moved the big stretcher with Seavers to the side and put the folding one with the security guard on the bench seat next to him in the back of the ambulance. An attending paramedic was on hand to check his wound.

"That guard is our only chance of finding out what really happened in the processing room," she said. "I'll see what I can get out of him before he goes into surgery. You keep working the DOD detail. They can sweep the tunnel clean but they can't seal it off forever."

The ambulance was getting ready to go. The first EMT had gone behind the wheel and the second one was about to close the doors in the back.

Wanda sprinted up before the doors shut and flashed her card from the ERMET. "I'm a certified EMT-2 and need to talk to the security guard if he comes to," she said to the attending EMT. "What's his status?"

"Looks like he's lost a lot of blood, but I couldn't find the entry wound. I was going to clean him up some more on the way over and start a transfusion."

"And Dr. Seavers?"

"Lost a finger and consciousness. Possible concussion from a nasty blow to the back of the head."

"I'll handle it. You stay in touch with the ER up front with the driver," she said as the EMT closed the doors on her.

The ambulance shot out down 2nd to Pennsylvania with its lights full on and siren blaring. Wanda, seated on an uncomfortable, foam-padded vinyl seat with one hand on a stainless steel grab handle, looked down at the guard.

He lay on a fold-out stretcher, held with three straps and a white blanket. She adjusted the light blue pillow behind his head.

The guard stirred and she held his hand. His hair was matted with blood.

"He shot me," he groaned, eyes still closed.

"I know," she told him. "His name was Conrad Yeats. But you killed him. They just zipped up his body and sent him to the morgue."

"No, him."

He lifted his finger and pointed to Max Seavers in the other gurney, who was just beginning to stir with consciousness.

"Max Seavers?"

The guard nodded and seemed to pass out again by the time the ambulance pulled up to the emergency entrance on 23rd Street. The ER at George Washington University Hospital, just blocks from downtown D.C.'s monuments and government complexes, was a Level 1 Trauma Center. It was where President Ronald Reagan was rushed after being shot in 1981, the year Wanda was born, and it was where she herself had been sent on more than one occasion for smoke inhalation and suspected carbon monoxide poisoning from the subterranean tunnels she frequently explored beneath the city.

A reception team was waiting to transfer the guard and Seavers to the ER. The security guard was carried in first while Wanda helped the hospital paramedics roll a moaning Max Seavers into the ER.

Seavers seemed to be regaining strength quickly, and Wanda bent her ear to listen to what he was trying to say. Then she noticed his bloody finger stump pointing to the empty gurney inside the ER.

"Don't worry," she told him. "The guard made it out alive, too. Probably in surgery already."

Seavers's eyes widened and he bolted upright, startling her and the attending ER technician. He angrily pulled the IV drip out of his forearm and looked around.

"You stupid bitch," he said to her, his eyes on fire. "That was Yeats in the ambulance. He pulled a switch!"

She ran out of the ER and saw a discarded, bloody uniform stuffed into a trash bin. The security guard from the Library of Congress was gone.