Keith Thomson - Once a spy

Simultaneously, a cardiac event monitor, the size of a kitchen television, hurtled through the air, thrown from behind Drummond by Cadaret.

“Dad!” Charlie shouted in warning.

Drummond looked to him, too late. The monitor crashed into his upper back, staggering him. Then Cadaret pounced. Other than a welt where the rock from the balustrade had struck his jaw, the killer appeared in the peak of health.

He grabbed Drummond around his rib cage and rode him down. Drummond’s head banged into the floor, costing him his hold on the gun taken from the guard. He ended up flat on his back. Cadaret sat astride him, preventing him from regaining the gun.

Drummond somehow sat up, like a jack-in-the-box, surprising Charlie. Cadaret appeared to have expected as much, but his eyes bulged with shock at what flashed in Drummond’s hand: the biggest of the hypodermic needles from the anesthesiologist’s tray. Drummond thrust it deep into Cadaret’s shoulder and hammered the plunger, flooding the killer with anesthesia.

Presumably.

Nothing happened.

Cadaret laughed. “Must be a placebo.” He pried the needle from his shoulder, tossed it aside, and snatched up the guard’s gun.

Fighting off queasiness, Charlie lunged for Isadora’s gun, prying it from her still-warm hand just as Cadaret pressed a thick muzzle into Drummond’s temple.

“Drop it!” Charlie called out, glad to have kept the tremble out of his voice. From a crouch behind the instrument cart, he fixed the side of Cadaret’s head squarely in his sights.

Cadaret didn’t flinch. Nor did he bother to look. “Whatchya got there, Charlie? Mom’s Colt?”

Charlie noted the rearing horse etched onto the grip. “That’s right.”

“Poor choice of names, in my opinion. It should’ve been Bronco or Mule, the way it kicks. My guess is, by the time you get off a decent shot, the three of us will be dead of old age.”

“Go ahead and shoot him, Charles,” Drummond said, as if growing bored. Probably he sought to calm Charlie.

Charlie suspected that the full contents of the anesthesia machine wouldn’t calm him now. The Colt’s grip was uncomfortably coarse, the heaviness of the pistol startling. He had blasted away with the gamut of weapons in virtual reality, but the only actual gun he’d ever held fired water. It was difficult just to keep the Colt steady. Although Cadaret was a mere twenty feet away, Charlie had no confidence he could hit him.

“Yeah, go ahead, Charles,” Cadaret said. “But if you do, know that even if, somehow, you get a bullet into me, I’ll put two or three easy into Papa Bear’s head, and at least one through that flimsy cart you’re squatting behind and into your red zone.”

He was articulating, practically verbatim, Charlie’s concerns.

“He’s afraid of you, Charles, or he wouldn’t be gabbing,” Drummond said. “At this distance your bullet will probably kill him before he’s able to process that you’ve pulled the trigger. At worst it will knock him well beyond the point of being able to do anything to me, except by happenstance.”

Charlie resolved to fire.

Cadaret spun at him and pressed his trigger first. At the same instant Cadaret’s eyes rolled up into his head, leaving them white. The anesthesia had kicked in.

Still the pressure of his finger against the trigger resulted in a blast from his gun.

A bullet bored into the ceiling directly above Charlie, dusting his hair with bits of soundproof tile. Cadaret crumpled to the floor.

Drummond said to Charlie, “Fine stall tactic.”

Charlie couldn’t tell whether he was kidding. Through a general daze, he replied, “Thanks, I was worried the fear I was going for wasn’t quite playing.”

Drummond hurried to his feet. “Now comes the hard part,” he said, plucking the gun from Mortimer’s corpse.

In the dressing room, Drummond burrowed through scrubs cabinets. “I worked up an escape route,” he said, as if that were something he usually did, like turning on the lights when entering a dark room. He tossed Charlie a surgical gown, cap, pants, a mask, and a pair of disposable booties.

“You want to leave disguised as doctors?”

“As it happens, it worked for me at a similar facility in Ulaanbaatar, a couple of years ago, just after the Tiananmen Square protest.”

Charlie began to put on the scrubs in the faint hope that his father’s plan was more substantive than the Marx Brothers’ plot it smacked of. Clearly a high percentage of Drummond’s mental channels were open. At issue were those that weren’t. He never said “a dozen” if he meant eleven or thirteen; only twelve. Similarly he used “a couple” exclusively for 2.000. The Tiananmen Square protest was not a couple of years ago, not by anyone’s measure; Charlie had been in grade school at the time.

As if sensing Charlie’s misgivings, Drummond added, “In Ulaanbaatar, my life came down to getting through a single door. It had granulated tungsten carbide locking bolts and eight inches of steel and Manganal hard plate-or enough to repel a tank. Opening it from outside required an eye scan, a thumbprint match, and a numeric code. But opening it from inside required only knowing how to use a push bar, which I did, and no one saw me do it. As you may have noticed, there are hardly any surveillance cameras here, and obviously the guards are elsewhere. The security in these places is geared toward keeping people out, not in. Our job is to get away without being noticed, and that’s all about camouflage.” He launched himself toward the exit. “You’ll see as we go.”

Charlie’s concerns were allayed. Until Drummond inexplicably bypassed the exit door and headed back into the operating room. Charlie stumbled after him toward the recovery room. The doctors and nurses were startled as Drummond smashed through the double doors.

“All of you come with me except your patient and you and you,” Drummond said. With Mortimer’s gun, he pointed to the anesthesiologist and a nurse-the two men closest in size to himself and Charlie.

Charlie realized that Drummond’s idea was to pose as part of an evacuating surgical team, while retaining its original number and composition. Once more he felt better about the idea’s cogency, but he wondered whether incorporating the doctors and nurses added too many variables, not least of which was their cooperation.

No sooner did the thought strike him than the surgeon instructed his team, “We’re not going anywhere.” With a bold step forward, he told Drummond, “Our first responsibility is the well-being of the patient.”

“I’m aware of that, sir,” Drummond said. “It’s my hope that the club’s security force is aware of it too. Now, please?” He indicated the door.

The surgeon stood fast.

“Sir, what’s your name?” Drummond asked.

“Rivington.”

“Dr. Rivington, I don’t want to shoot you, but I will if you don’t do exactly as I say.” Drummond waved his gun at the rest of the men and women. “That goes for every one of you.”

They all shuffled into the operating room. Following alongside Drummond, Charlie could practically see the fear rising off them.

“Now I want you to place that man on a gurney,” Drummond told them. He pointed to the unconscious Cadaret. “Put an oxygen mask on him, plus the fishing hat and the sunglasses your patient had on, and a blanket.”

Charlie didn’t entirely understand the thinking, but it wasn’t the time for Q amp; A. The doctor act would play better, he guessed, with a patient, and Cadaret was a more manageable prop than the real patient.

While the members of the medical team readied Cadaret, Drummond threaded an IV stand through the handles of the recovery room doors. If the nurse and anesthesiologist sought to thwart the escape, they would have to break down the doors.