Angel Face (7 page)

Jordan felt as if he’d been shaken by a cosmic hand. She might have been a quick-change artist, but he would have known her anywhere. The details of her face were so sharp he could have reached out and touched her.

He searched the hallway, opening doors and interrupting examinations. He checked the stairs and the elevators. What the hell was going on? She
had
been in the hospital. She’d been right in front of him . . . unless he was losing his mind.

Jordan was getting some curious stares, but he didn’t stop to explain. He wasn’t sure he could have. He hadn’t imagined the woman, but maybe he’d been burning holes in a picture for so long that anyone with dark hair and big eyes would have looked like her, even Teri Benson, who had both. He’d obviously overreacted, and meanwhile, he still didn’t know where the hell Benson was.

By the time he got back to the cardiac unit he’d let go of the incident and resumed his search. As it turned out,
Exam Three had a Closed For Repairs sign and the resident was nowhere to be found. This seemed to be Jordan’s day for losing women. The only thing going in his favor was the supply room across the hall. Someone had lifted his prized stethoscope that morning, the one his parents gave him in medical school. He was deeply superstitious about the relic and never used anything else for rounds.

He didn’t really believe it had been stolen. No one in the cardiac unit pulled brainless stunts like that.

Jordan was certain the stethoscope would turn up eventually, and meanwhile he could either rip one off someone’s neck or root through the hospital’s stores. The supply room door turned out to be unlocked, which struck him as odd, but he had too many other concerns weighing on his mind to think of it as anything more than a stroke of luck.

He could barely get into the room it was so jammed with medical equipment. It looked as if they’d moved most of the monitors from the leaking exam room in here while the plumbing was being fixed. He made his way around an EKG machine and pushed aside a ventilator. There were several boxes on a back corner shelf that looked promising. He could see the name of the medical supply company on them, but a bedside tray table and a defibrillator unit blocked his way.

He was clearing a path when his foot caught on something heavy.

Jordan plunged forward. There was nothing to grab but air, and he found himself down on one knee, hugging the tray table. It wasn’t until he was clear of the debris that he saw what he’d tripped over. “Jesus—”

A man’s body was wedged between the defibrillator and the EKG machine. Jordan couldn’t see his face. It was hidden by the equipment, but he was wearing the long white coat of a doctor and clutching a defibrillator paddle in one hand, almost as if he’d been using it on himself.

Jordan felt a moment of cold shock, but there wasn’t time to try and make sense of what a body was doing in the storeroom. The man’s other arm was caught beneath his trunk. Jordan lifted him enough to free his hand, but there was no pulse, not even a faint one.

The defibrillator unit was plugged into the wall, Jordan realized as he tried to move it. He yanked the cord and heaved himself against the machine, displacing it enough to see who he was dealing with. The young male doctor was a visiting surgeon from Tokyo University Hospital. Jordan had met Dr. Kensuke Inada for the first time briefly during rounds that morning.

Inada had come to California General to observe and learn about some of Jordan’s latest advances in valve repair, just as Jordan had visited the famous Tokyo hospital a few years back to pick up their innovations.

Jordan had no idea how long Inada had been on the floor, but every second counted now. He checked his eyes with a penlight, but didn’t find the dilation associated with concussion. The man didn’t appear to be breathing, so Jordan probed his airway for blockage, then performed CPR, but got no response. It was possible he’d suffered a heart attack and reached for the paddles instinctively. Sadly, they were probably the only thing that could save him now. But Jordan had to get him to the cardiac ER first, before the lack of oxygen caused irreversible brain damage.

The supply room had no intercom. Jordan shouted for help, then ran outside and called again, but the hallway was deserted except for one ambulatory patient. He gave the startled elderly woman a reassuring nod as he sprinted past her, but that was all he could do. An abandoned gurney sat in the adjoining corridor. Jordan grabbed it, and this time his shouts were heard.

Two interns, who probably hadn’t slept more than four hours in as many days, were huddled over foam cups of
coffee just down the hall from him. Jordan yelled at one of them to alert the trauma unit and the other to follow him back to the storage room.

The dread that had gripped Jordan was now an icy trickle at the base of his skull, whispering constantly that something was wrong, that what he’d seen was no accident. If the defibrillator unit was wet from Exam Three, it could have shorted out, but that didn’t explain why it was plugged in. Or what a visiting doctor was doing with the equipment in a normally locked storage room.

Jordan thought of the woman in the hallway who’d disappeared. Could she have been the one in the dossier? A videotaped image screened through his mind like a clip from
Psycho
. Jordan had refused to believe she could harm anyone. It didn’t matter that he’d watched her stop her father’s heart or that the CIA called her Angel Face. He couldn’t conceive of it.

Now he was frozen with that realization. It stuck in his mind the way ice adheres to anything warm and human. He could still see her hauntingly beautiful face when he burst back into the storeroom. The breathless intern piled in after him, but both of them came to an abrupt halt.

“What the hell?” Jordan whispered.

There was no body on the floor. No sign of a body anywhere.

The visiting surgeon had vanished, and the defib unit had been unplugged.

J
ORDAN ’S
office was quiet, but his head was a brass band. He hadn’t been able to sit down at his desk or concentrate on anything but what the hell had just happened. What
had
happened? A body had disappeared, and there was currently a search going on for Dr. Inada. It was possible the doctor had spontaneously regained consciousness and left the storage room without anyone having seen him. But Jordan had other suspicions. There’d been no heartbeat, no respiration. He was either a miracle of science, or Jordan was in worse shape than he realized.

He stared at the phone, paralyzed by the resistance he felt. His gut told him to call 911, but there was another number in his head, and what if that was the one he should be calling first? There were questions that had to be asked, but he didn’t want to hear the answers. He didn’t even want to dial the number, because that meant he was
involved,
to use Penny’s word, and he didn’t like being involved in anything he couldn’t see, touch, feel, taste, or control.

Especially control. He’d always believed that was the mark of a good surgeon. They assumed total control of their environment, and he was now mentally circling an environment that was not only outside his experience, it felt
totally
outside his control.

He’d been a snow skier in his younger days, and he would never forget the feeling on a vertical slope when your center of gravity reversed, and your head became your feet. “Wipeout!” his friends had shouted while his body flipped end over end, tumbling like a rag doll’s. There was no greater loss of control, and that was the sensation in his gut now. He was looking down the precipice, and he could see a body tumbling endlessly.

If you change your mind, call this number and ask for—

Jordan picked up the phone. The number was local, and it began to ring immediately. A woman answered.

“How can I help you?” she asked in a pleasant voice.

“I was told to ask for Firestarter.”

Jordan was instantly put on hold. He wasn’t sitting at his desk now. He was standing beside it, counting intermittent beeps that pinged like sonar and were equally as ominous.

“Dr. Carpenter? What can I do for you?”

God, he sounded exactly like an insurance agent. Jordan felt a little foolish. The man seemed so accessible, Jordan couldn’t help but wonder about the brick wall that Mitch Ryder had run into. “Am I speaking to Edwin Truitt?”

“You are. Go ahead and speak freely. It’s safe.”

Easy for you to say
, Jordan thought. It didn’t feel safe at this end. It felt like someone’s idea of a sick practical joke. There was nothing he liked about the situation he found himself in, but he’d already gone this far.

“I’m calling from California General,” Jordan said. “Something just happened here that I thought you should know about. A visiting surgeon was found in a storage
room with no pulse and no respiration. There was a defib unit next to his body, and he was holding one of the paddles. I tried to revive him, but he didn’t respond.”

“You found him, right? And you were alone?”

“Yes, but there’s more. I went for help and when I got back—”

“I know what happened, Doctor.”

“What do you mean?”

“The body was gone. It wasn’t there when you got back.”

Jordan hesitated. He put people on medication when their hearts were beating this fast. “You already know about this?”

No answer. It was so quiet, Jordan could hear the beep again, and among other things it reminded him that he still hadn’t found his pager.

“You could say we knew about it, Dr. Carpenter. You could even say we did it.”

“You did what?”

“Cleaned up the scene. There was no choice.”

“What the hell does that mean?” Jordan couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “A visiting colleague could be dead, and you’re talking in movie spook lingo. What are you saying, Mr. Truitt, that you had something to do with what happened?”

“Let me be clear about two things, Doctor. First, I gave you a code name.
Use it.
Second, we didn’t make the mess. We just cleaned it up. As I said, there was
no choice.
We cannot allow her to fall into the hands of the local police or any other law enforcement agency.”

“Her?”

“Angel Face, of course.”

Suddenly Jordan was angry. He’d been about to tell the agent that he’d seen a woman who looked like Angel Face at the hospital, but that hardly seemed necessary now. “You can’t allow her to fall into the hands of the police,
but you can sit around and allow her to kill doctors?”

“If I thought it would make me look less inept, I’d say yes, I’m letting her do it. The truth is, she’s faster than we are. She even erased her own memory before we could get to her and do it for her. There’s enough secret information in that head of hers to take out a chunk of the globe’s population, but no one can get at it now, not even her.”

“What kind of numbers are you talking about?”

“That’s the worst-case scenario. The best is that no one dies a horrible death, but she brings down the current administration and some very key figures in the military-industrial-scientific complex. Neither scenario is acceptable.”

Jordan wanted to know how she could be one step ahead of the CIA. “I couldn’t have been gone from that storeroom more than five minutes,” he said. “How did you know where to find the body? How did you get there so quickly? Did you have her under surveillance?”

“We had
you
under surveillance, Doctor. I was tipped earlier today, probably by Angel Face herself, that she was going to strike again. I thought she was after you, not Dr. Inada. Obviously, that’s what she wanted me to think.”

Jordan was being followed by the CIA? He hadn’t seen any sign of it . . .
except the elderly woman with the walker.
Cold air burned the back of his neck. He was sweating as he realized that a murder had actually taken place in this hospital.

“She was here,” Jordan said, but not for the agent’s benefit, for his own. Maybe he needed to know he wasn’t protecting her in any way. “I saw her, probably moments after it happened.”

“You saw Angel Face?”

“I think so, yes. She disappeared before I could get to her.”

The agent was silent, breathing softly on the line. “That’s interesting, Dr. Carpenter, but it’s not much help to Dr. Inada.”

“What happened to him? Is he dead?”

“Yes, but it’s been taken care of. You’ll hear about his car accident on the news tonight.”

“My God,” Jordan whispered.

“Are you ready to help us now, Dr. Carpenter?”

“Dr. Carpenter!”

Jordan was vaguely aware of the clamor in the hallway outside his office. Someone was shouting his name, but the voice that tugged at him was the agent’s.

“I need an answer, Doctor.”

A candy striper opened his office door and poked her head through. “Oh, there you are! They’re waiting for you in the OR. Your patient is prepped and ready to go.”

“Dr. Carpenter?”
The agent’s tone was low, insistent.

Jordan’s gut wrenched with indecision. The man wanted an answer, and he didn’t have one. Worse, he was getting angry, and anger was heat. Surgery required icy logic, cold calculation, and total detachment.

“I’ve got an operation to perform,” he told the agent. “This is life and death. I’ll get back to you.”

“No,
this
is life and death. One of your colleagues is dead, and you could have prevented it if you’d cooperated with us.”

“I’ll get back to you.”
Jordan hung up the phone, ripped off his white coat, and flung it aside as he strode past the startled candy striper. He had little tolerance for no-win situations, and that’s where the agent had put him. They were asking him to be the bait and lure a serial killer into their trap. Put his life and his surgery schedule on hold for whatever period of time that took: days, weeks, months. Obviously, they hadn’t convinced him with the threat of his own death, so now they were trying to make him feel responsible for the death of a colleague.

The hospital intercom system shouted his name. “Dr. Carpenter! Please report to the OR immediately.”

Jordan broke into a run. She killed someone. The angel with eyes so big and brown they could rip your heart out. His downy innocent. His angel. She was a murdering, slaughtering killer.

T
HE
stamp-size digital recorder operated with such precision that no moving parts could be seen or heard. In fact, there were none, yet it could pick up conversations through walls, translate foreign languages, and had a battery life of days rather than hours. It could also detect whispers at twenty-five feet and analyze the voices of both callers for veracity.

Firestarter smiled and unhooked his earpiece. According to the voice analysis of his last call, he was lying and the good doctor was telling the truth. Fortunately,
he
was the one with the surveillance equipment, and his only concern was with Carpenter’s honesty. If the doctor wavered, Firestarter would know it. There was no such thing as personal privacy anymore, not even the privacy of your own thoughts. Nothing could protect you against microchips so tiny they were invisible to the naked eye and surveillance devices that could pick up a heartbeat or a brain wave at significant distances. And then there was nanotechnology, the wave of the future, with nanobots the size of human blood cells that could float the entire circulatory system and scan any part of the body in detail, including the human brain.

Surveillance was too big—or in this case, too small—to stop. And there was nothing that couldn’t be surveiled. Nothing.

He opened the middle drawer of his desk and took out a jar of old-fashioned cold cream, wondering why they called it cold. It felt warm to the touch as he scooped out
a silver dollar’s worth with his fingers and applied it in small figure eights to the ravaged side of his face. The taut skin felt as if it were on fire all over again. It was important to keep the area moist, his plastic surgeon had told him, and he didn’t like the prescription creams. They smelled bad.

He rose, whisked a tissue out of the box on the credenza, and blotted the extra cream, aware of his own reflection, gleaming in the glass of a framed lithograph on his office wall. Most people thought him grotesque. He could see the discomfort in their body language even when it didn’t show on their face. He thought it was eerie and beautiful the way his face had healed. But then he thought everything about fire was eerie and beautiful.

“What is it going to take, Doctor?” he asked the image in the glass. “What does it take to engage the
great
Jordan Carpenter?”

This was turning out to be quite a contest, but then that was half the fun. The other half was winning. It was all a game, of course. And then there were games within games, spiraling down into ever more intricate circles until nothing was real. And the best player of all was Angel Face. If the death of a colleague didn’t do it, Firestarter was sure that she would come up with something even more interesting. In fact, he had unwavering faith that she would.

T
HE
driving pain in Jordan’s chest woke him up. He was facedown on the steering wheel, unable to breathe. His rib cage was about to crack with the pressure, and his first thought was that he was having a heart attack. What else could it be? The man who put hearts back together actually had one himself. It was exploding in his chest. God had him beat in the irony department.

What the hell did he do now? He needed a doctor.

Gently, he pressed his hands against the dash and pushed, wondering if it was the last thing he would ever do. The pressure eased as soon as he sat up, and the pain followed. He could breathe easily, again. The only symptom left was a sharp tenderness on his right side. That surprised him until he noticed the position of the wheel spinner knob on his steering wheel.

He wasn’t having a heart attack. He wasn’t dying. He’d passed out from exhaustion, slumped forward, and the knob had driven itself into his chest like a fist.

The digital clock on his dash said it was three
A
.
M
. and he had a bypass scheduled for six. If he kept up this pace, he would have a heart attack or lose a patient through a stupid mistake. This couldn’t go on. He’d known that for months, but he understood it now. Facing his own mortality even for ten seconds had made him realize what he’d been doing. He’d made it his personal responsibility to save every damn patient on his waiting list, as if he were the
only
one who could. How absurd when there were other doctors—gifted surgeons—who could get the operations on their schedule more quickly than he could and probably perform them more safely.