The Red Room

54

The heel of his shoe is used to eliminate the fisheye lens in the upper corner of the elevator car. Knox slams his thumb against the buttons, lights up three consecutive floors below him. After an empty stop, he’s joined by several nurses and an orderly tending to a young girl in a wheelchair. They all look at him when the elevator makes the next stop and Knox doesn’t depart. They disembark at lobby level. Knox rides to the first of three marked basement levels.

He moves quickly for the nearest exit. It’s all timing now. They can’t cover every exit, every street.

He’s comfortable with his chances. His shins feel surprisingly better; he’s found the right balance of meds. He’s through the exit and into a dark, underground parking garage before he can blink. Ducking, Knox works his way through the parked cars and light trucks, hoping to avoid closed-circuit cameras, though he doubts their existence due to the gloom.

At the exit, he stops to shed the pajama gown, pulls on his shirt, dons the windbreaker and hurries up a concrete ramp to join the crowd on a busy sidewalk. He’s all sparks and electricity, his motor red-lining. It’s a high that blows away the pain meds, sending him into a giddy mental frenzy that results from this life-threatening game of hide-and-seek.

Two intersections north, he circles the block fully and uses a variety of methods to surreptitiously check for ground surveillance. It’s a fool’s errand — a small mobile team can easily follow him without detection. But he knows the drill, and he stays with it before mixing with the crowds at the Sisli Mosque plaza where he and Grace stood only days earlier. It feels much longer ago, and Knox wonders for a moment at the outcome had they never pursued the switched FedEx package.

He pictures Mashe Okle’s forty-five-minute procedure. The man walks out of the hospital with a GPS in his chest and leads the Israeli Air Force to the location of his thorium research bunker, none the wiser about the protection he’ll be rendering. The Israelis will be able to track him for ten years, kill him at a moment’s notice.

Knox enters the Holiday Inn minutes later. Heads toward the booth by the alternate exit.

No Grace.