Veil of Civility

Chapter Eleven

Seth Castellano pulled his dark blue Crown Vic under the covered entrance of the smaller of the Lynchburg area's two major medical facilities. Stepping out of the vehicle onto the concrete walkway that led to the main entrance of the multi-storied brick facility, he flashed his badge to the valet who was about to tell him not to park there. The man backed off and Castellano continued walking without a word, shrugging his tan trench coat higher on his shoulders and adjusting the collar as he walked towards a grouping of ambulances closer to the windowed entrance.

"Any of you boys bring in a man from the Cottonwood Road area about twenty minutes ago?" he asked a group of EMTs standing near their buses. His voice rang with a southern tenor and carried briefly on the mist that hung in the humid air, his accent a mixture of Louisiana creole, where he was born, and metro Washingtonian, where he'd lived and worked for over a decade.

The group of EMTs stopped talking amongst each other and regarded him for a moment, looking over his slicked brown hair and slightly rounded features before answering. "We did," a blue uniformed man with blonde hair said, motioning with his cigarette towards another uniformed man next to him.

"And what were his injuries exactly?" Castellano asked.

The EMT started to speak but thought better of it, looking at Castellano instead with a question on his face as if he wanted to say what's it to you?

Castellano withdrew the black badge wallet from inside his coat again and flipped it open. "FBI," he said. "What exactly were his injuries?"

"Lacerations to the back of the left hand and to his head above the right eye, he wasn't conscious until about the last two minutes of the ride and then he said something about his wife. We wheeled him to the Outpatient Center. They've turned it into an emergency room to handle the overflow from general."

"And what did he look like?"

"Blondish hair, a beard, kind of slim, he was wearing a blue-button down shirt and tan Dockers. He only spoke briefly but he had some kind of an accent, English maybe."

Castellano closed his badge and returned it to the inner breast pocket of his coat as he walked through the automated glass doors into the spacious, gray carpeted lobby.

"Can I help you find something?" asked a lady behind a courtesy desk just inside the door.

"Outpatient center," Castellano answered.

"Down this hallway to your left and then take a right. Go all the way to the end."

Castellano was on the move before she finished talking. As he made his way down the light blue painted hallway he considered his options. In a modern hospital where patient and medical provider privacy were as critical as the care being given, he knew there would be video cameras and other security measures. While he intended to make sure the man who had apparently been present at the scene of Abaddon Kafni's death never left the hospital alive, this wasn't a movie. He couldn't just walk into a darkened room and snuff the guy with a silenced pistol; he would have to be far more careful.

As he arrived at another automatic door with white vinyl letters identifying the ward beyond as the outpatient center, his thoughts of a stealthy entrance and exit faded. The door hissed open and he was greeted by the sight of a long white hallway filled with ambulance gurneys. Doctors and nurses rushed about wearing uneasy expressions, and patients writhed painfully in their beds, some comforted by family members and others alone, their faces terrified. He'd known the small facility had been turned into a makeshift emergency room to handle the overflow from the larger and more prepared Lynchburg General Hospital, but he hadn't expected to see so closely the destruction caused by the bomb he'd known was going to go off.

He swallowed hard and entered the ward. To his right and left lay people dressed in suits and ties, looking up and down the hallway for the people who were responsible for treating them. "Doctor, doctor!" a man called, reaching out and grabbing the edge of Castellano's coat as he walked by. "I'm in pain. You gotta give me something for this pain!"

Castellano looked the man quickly up and down. From the hastily applied bandages it was obvious that his leg had been injured, and his clothes were covered in dust and ashes, a clear sign that he had been inside the building when the blast had occurred. "I'm sorry," Castellano said, jerking his coat away from the man. "I'm not a doctor."

He moved on through the ward towards the end of the hallway, where the rear entrance to the hospital was marked by a set of automatic glass doors. Directly in front of the entrance stood a nurses' station teaming with men and women in scrubs.

"Are you looking for someone, sir?" asked a loud female voice.

Castellano looked at a blonde haired woman with a no bull expression who sat behind the desk in pink scrubs. "I'm looking for a man who was brought in here from the Cottonwood Road area with lacerations to the head and hands."

"You're going to have to be a lot more specific than that. We've admitted over fifty people in the last hour and lacerations are the flavor of the day."

Her lack of bedside manner didn't surprise him. He'd been in and out of hospitals for the last twenty years during the course of his work, first as a police investigator in New Orleans and then as a field agent in the FBI before obtaining his current position. Doctors and nurses had some of the highest burn out ratios in the country and what normal people considered an emergency barely caused them to break a sweat.

Removing his badge from inside his coat and flipping it open for what seemed like the hundredth time that night, he said, "This man had a laceration above his right eye and on the back of his right hand. He was slim with blonde hair and a beard. He might've been speaking with an accent. I'll need you to check your intake forms and give me a list of the possibilities. It's very important that I speak with him."

The lady flipped through a stack of papers, but before she could answer a harried male voice from behind Castellano spoke. ""I'm afraid you're going to have to come back later, officer. We have an emergency situation here."

Castellano turned around and looked at a gray haired man in a white lab coat who moved from the edge of a gurney to the countertop at the nurses' station.

"I'm Doctor Garvinton. I'm the lead physician on the floor," the man continued. "Right now, I've got three patients to a room and another twenty in the hallway. Your interviews are going to have to wait until later."

Garvinton grabbed a stack of medical charts and began thumbing through them.

"My interviews can't wait until later, Doctor," Castellano said, his voice dripping with contempt. "In case you haven't noticed, we've all got an emergency situation. The man I'm looking for may very well be a witness to the murder of the man we believe was the target of the university bombing. If he's here, I need to speak with him right away and hopefully we can keep whoever did this from striking again."

"If he's a witness to the murder of the target then the target is already dead. No need to strike again if they were successful the first time."

Garvinton moved around Castellano and began to walk away.

"Look," Castellano said, grabbing the doctor by the shoulder and holding up his badge again. "I'm Assistant Special Agent in Charge Seth Castellano of the FBI's Richmond Counterterrorism Division and this is a matter of national security."

Garvinton looked over the edge of his wire-rimmed glasses for a moment before speaking. "The description you just gave sounds like a man we took to room six about ten minutes ago. One of my physician's assistants is with him now stitching his injuries closed, but you're going to have a lot of trouble talking to him since he's been coming in and out of consciousness. He suffered a pretty hard hit and has a concussion. I won't know the extent of his injuries until I get an x-ray tech in here to photograph him, but I can tell you he'll be held for observation at least until morning and that depends on what the x-rays show. The best I can do for you tonight is to point you towards our waiting room, where his wife is."

Castellano followed the doctor's finger with his eyes as he pointed to an open doorway to the right of the ward's entrance.

Garvinton continued. "I've just finished speaking with her. Her name is Constance McIver and the man you're asking about is Declan McIver. He's the only person here fitting the description you gave and the few words he's been able to say were accented… Irish, if I had to guess."

"Thank you, Doctor."

Garvinton nodded and quickly walked away.

Castellano took a deep breath realizing that there could be more than one witness. Why hadn't the first responders on the scene mentioned a woman? Had she been on the scene or had she arrived at the hospital upon news of her husband's injury? He walked toward the open doorway and leaned in to take a look. A slender woman with auburn colored hair sat alone on a green vinyl bench in the eight-by-ten room, a tissue in her hand.

"Mrs. McIver?" he asked gently.

She straightened herself up and sniffed away a few tears as he entered. "Yes?" she said looking up with a question on her face.

"I'm ASAC Seth Castellano with the Federal Bureau of Investigation."

He stepped fully into the room and opened his badge. She looked at it briefly and then back at him, meeting his stare with sea green eyes.

"I'm leading the investigation into the death of Abaddon Kafni—" before he could finish speaking he could tell by the look on her face that she hadn't known Kafni was dead.

"I'm sorry," he said interrupting himself. "You didn't know?"

She shook her head as she dabbed at the edges of her eyes with the shredded tissue. He waited a few moments for her to collect herself and then continued. "It was my understanding that your husband, Declan, is it?"

Constance nodded.

"It was my understanding that he was at the scene. Is that correct?"

She nodded again and said, "Yes."

"And were you with him?"

She shook her head. "Only as far as the front gate. We left the university together and when we got to the residence we found the guard at the gate dead. He sent me to call for help because we couldn't get a signal on our cell phones."

Castellano nodded. Just as they had planned, a signal jammer had been used to black out cell service for several hundred yards around the property to prevent anyone from calling for help. What they hadn't planned for was someone arriving at the property after Kafni and being able to leave to summon help. "So you weren't there when he was injured?"

She shook her head and dabbed her eyes again with the tissue.

"Why did the two of you leave the university and go to the Briton-Adams property?"

"My husband was a friend of Dr. Kafni's. He worked security for him for a while. Declan helped get Dr. Kafni out of the building when — when it happened."

There it was. The connection he'd been afraid of. An injured gardener or some kind of other domestic help that just happened to be on the property wouldn't be so bad. Maybe they'd just been in the wrong place at the wrong time, but a trained bodyguard? It was all but certain in his mind that Declan McIver had been directly involved in the scene at the mansion. But if that was the case then why had Ruslan Baktayev and his men left him alive? What did he know? Could he identify the men who'd killed Kafni? Castellano drew in another breath as the questions and potential answers ran through his mind.

He'd been afraid that just such a mistake would happen and had tried to make sure Kafni was dead long before he ever reached the property. While Baktayev wouldn't have been happy about being unable to kill Kafni personally, as he had planned, he couldn't argue with the fact that he had been killed by a bomb originally intended only to evacuate the premises. Castellano wasn't in the business of making terrorists happy. He was in the business of making sure both he and David Kemiss were successful. Unknown to Baktayev, with the help of four hired guns, they had increased the size of the bomb in hopes of killing Kafni and had even placed the four men at the scene to ensure everything went as planned. Now, thanks to the apparent intervention of a former bodyguard nobody had known about, Baktayev's plan had gone forward and everything he and Kemiss had feared was now a fact of life.

"You said he used to work security for Kafni, but he doesn't currently?"

"No," Constance answered. "He worked for Dr. Kafni in the late nineties and for a short while after September 11th. It was before we met so I really don't know much about it. Tonight was the first time I'd met Dr. Kafni. We were supposed to meet him for dinner after the event had concluded. It's been several years since he and Declan have seen each other."

Castellano nodded. "I see."

"Agent Castellano, what happened?" Constance asked, becoming visibly upset.

He didn't know what was going through her mind exactly, but after two decades of experience interviewing witnesses to various types of crime, he had a pretty good idea. Confusion mixed with moments of clarity was common.

"Well," he said, "I don't know yet. That's what I'm trying to put together. We're only in the very early stages of our investigation."

"Declan said there was a bomb in one of the security vehicles," she said, as she sucked in a loud breath and did her best to wipe away the tears falling from her eyes.

"It was in one of the security vehicles?" Castellano asked, trying to sound surprised.

"Yes. He said he saw the vehicle burning as we ran towards our car. He said it was one of the cars that belonged to the security guards."

Castellano grimaced as each word from Constance McIver confirmed to him that her husband was indeed a threat. But how should he handle it? He crossed his arms and felt the grip of his service weapon underneath his coat. With so many witnesses around, it would be impossible for him to act.

"Mrs. McIver," a female voice said from the doorway.

Castellano turned to see a young woman in a white doctor's coat standing just inside the door.

"Yes?" Constance answered, as she stood from the bench she'd been sitting on.

"I'm Lisa Baker. I'm a physician's assistant. I've just finished with your husband and we're moving him up to an observation room in the hospital. You can see him now."

"Can I talk to him?" Castellano asked abruptly.

"No, sir," the P.A. said. "You'll have to wait."

"It's important that I speak with him if he's conscious—"

"I'm sorry, sir. It's Doctor Garvinton's orders. Mr. McIver isn't to be interviewed until his condition has been properly diagnosed."

Constance started to walk out of the room. Castellano stopped her.

"I really need to speak with your husband as soon as possible. This is my card; my cell phone is on it. I'd like you to call me as soon as he's able to speak with me."

Constance nodded. "I will."

Castellano watched as she slipped the card into the pocket of her coat and walked out of the room. Following her briefly, he stopped at the edge of the doorway and looked after her as she walked to the side of a gurney that was being wheeled into the hallway from one of the rooms. As an orderly pushed the cart towards the nursing station Castellano caught his first glimpse of the man he'd been looking for. Declan McIver was just as the EMT had described him and unlike the doctors had said, he seemed perfectly alert as he gripped his wife's hand and looked about the room.

Stepping through the automatic door that led to a covered entrance at the rear of the hospital, Castellano removed his cell phone from the pocket of his coat. The light rain that had been falling most of the evening had turned to a heavy downpour, the rain drumming against the roofs of the cars parked in the lot beside the outpatient center. He pressed his ear closer into the phone as he listened to it ringing.

"It's me," he said as David Kemiss answered. "We've definitely got a problem."