CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Gina parked on a quiet street two blocks from the hospital. Wearing a short blond wig streaked with gray, she exited her rental car and slung the backpack over her shoulder. The night was dark, the sidewalk deserted. She heard the sizzle of car tires behind her and a chill climbed her spine. She didn’t change pace. Once the car passed, she took out her Potemkin phone. “I’m almost there.”

“Good,” he said. “We are ready.”

Hearing a murmur of voices in the background, she envisioned the cyber room with its engineers and servers and monitors. Grand Hack Station, he liked to call it. “I’m using the southeast staff entrance, ground floor. Can you tell if there is a security camera there?”

“Yes. We are watching you right now.”

“Make sure they erase footage of me entering.”

“Don’t tell me my business. Images and badge swipes will disappear.”

It wasn’t worry about Potemkin’s expertise that was gnawing at her. At the door she waved the plastic press badge that Forester’s assistant had given her over the sensor. Nothing happened. She flipped the badge over and moved it more slowly. She heard a click.

The hallway was brightly lit, and the few people she passed paid her no attention. In the locker room, she found a set of clean blue scrubs. She folded her street clothes into the pack and found a white lab jacket, which she also donned, clipping her press badge to it so that it was partly obscured by the lapel and would pass for a nurse’s if no one looked closely. And if someone should discover the deception, she would admit to being a journalist hoping to get a better look at the hospital at night from the perspective of a staff member. She would become weepy. Call Dr. Forester. He’d vouch for her.

She rode an elevator to the eighth floor and made her way to the back entrance of the step-down unit. She took out the Potemkin phone. “Now,” she said. An instant later, she heard the clang of an alarm. Through the glass doors she could see nurses and staff members racing toward room one, far to the left. She strode over to room fifteen, her heart pounding. She opened the door. He was sleeping. The room was dim. The cardiac monitor displayed steady, normal heart rhythm. If Potemkin was successful, it would stay that way no matter what happened, on a replaying loop.

Chad had been having a dream. In his dream a man with face painted red and white and horns coming out his skull hovered over him, murmuring and waving his arms as if conducting an orchestra, something rattling like a nest of rattlesnakes.

Now, he felt a stirring of air and opened his eyes. In place of the witch was a beautiful angel, her face sad. Vaguely remembering her, he smiled. “I must still be dreaming.”

After finding his clothes in a blue plastic bag in the room’s tiny closet, she removed the belt from the pants and went to the bed. The belt would be easier than fashioning something out of a sheet or the cord of a hospital gown. She injected the ketamine into his IV and within seconds he was staring straight ahead, his eyeballs twitching side to side. He was in another place. Insensate. He would never know a thing. Around his neck, she fastened the belt, then attached it to the stretcher rail. It took effort, but she managed to slide him off the bed. As he settled, the belt tightened and his face turned a darker and darker blue. And darker still. His mouth worked, but his eyes remained fixed in that zombie-like stare, widening.

When he stopped breathing, she picked up the backpack, waves of nausea cresting. Up on the cardiac monitor, all looked normal. She took the Potemkin phone and texted: set off alarms in room twenty. An instant later, bells rang out from far down the hall in the opposite direction. In a moment, her way out was clear.