Jeffery Deaver - Solitude Creek

In surgical scrubs, cap and booties, Antioch March left the engineering room on the top floor of Monterey Bay Hospital, where he’d just cut the power to east wing elevator car number two. Twenty minutes earlier he’d done the same to car one, when it was empty. That drove the passengers to the second car, which guaranteed it would be packed when disaster struck.

Which it was. He was watching the video image of the interior from the camera inside. Of particular interest was the pregnant woman, whose head was tilted back and who was gasping. Her face wincing in pain. Even better was the expression of the orderly accompanying her. Panic starting to form. Exquisite.

March imagined what it was like in there. A dozen — no, more — belly to back, side to side, the air becoming denser and more useless. Hotter too. The power loss had taken out the air-conditioning unit as well.

He closed up his computer, tossed his tools into the tote bag. He left the top floor, the fifth, then headed to the basement. He didn’t have much time, he knew. The repair crews had already been summoned to fix car one and, given their location in Salinas, could be there in twenty minutes. Car two, the occupied one, would be their priority once they arrived. The hospital maintenance staff, too, would head up to the infrastructure room on the top floor and look over the system. They’d see the vandalism immediately and might rig a solution, though given the dangerous nature of a two-thousand-pound piece of machinery, they’d probably wait for the pros.

Not much time, no, but he’d choreographed this attack as skillfully as the others. After deciding, at the aborted-church-supper hall, that a hotel would make a good target he’d come up with a plan that he believed even the brilliant Kathryn Dance could not anticipate.

He had appeared to attack the nearby inn, setting fire to the Honda — he needed to dump it anyway. The police would concentrate on that, and assume the hotel was the target, while he hurried on foot to the hospital a half-mile away.

They wouldn’t consider the hospital a likely venue for an attack and wouldn’t have added extra guards, he speculated, because there wasn’t any one particular area of concentration: patients, visitors and doctors were spread out over several large buildings, which had numerous exits.

No, the charming and not unattractive Ms Kathryn Dance was clever but she’d surely miss that those oversize elevator cars in a hospital would be a perfect site for the panic game.

He now doubled-stepped down to the basement and peered out. He was in scrubs, yes, but had no ID pinned to the breast so he had to be careful. The corridor was empty. He stopped in the storeroom and collected a gallon container of a substance he’d found there earlier, on recon.

Diethyl ether.

Ether was a clear liquid, nowadays used as a solvent and cleanser mostly but years ago it was the anesthetic of choice. Famed dentist William T. G. Morton, of Boston, was the first to use inhaled ether to put patients under for medical procedures. The substance was soon praised as better than chloroform because there was a large gap between the recommended dosage and how much ether it would take to kill you; with chloroform that window of safety was much smaller.

However, ether did have one disadvantage: patients who were administered the drug occasionally caught fire. Sometimes they even exploded (he’d seen the remarkable pictures). Ether and oxygen or, even better, ether and nitrous oxide — laughing gas — could be as dangerous as dynamite.

Hence the chemical had been relegated to other uses, like here — a solvent. But March had been delighted to find some during his reconnaissance.

March now made his way to the elevator-room door. He opened it and dumped some of the liquid on the floor of the elevator shaft pit, holding his breath (ether may occasionally have blown up patients but it was a very efficient anesthetic).

He tossed a match into the puddle and it ignited explosively. The liquid was perfect since it burned hot but without any smoke; this would delay the fire department’s arrival, since no automatic alarm would be activated. Meanwhile, though, the passengers would feel the heat rising from beneath them and smell the smoke from the Honda burning at the inn. They would be convinced the hospital was on fire and that they were about to be roasted alive.

Now Dr March walked casually along the corridor, head down, and took the exit to the hospital’s parking garage.

He pictured the people in the elevator car and reflected that they were in absolutely no physical danger from what he’d done. The smoke was faint, the fire would burn itself out in ten minutes, the car’s emergency brakes would not give out and send it plummeting to the ground.

They would be completely fine.

As long as they didn’t panic.

Got to get out, got to get out...

Please, please, please, please, please.

The orderly was paralyzed with terror. Emergency lights had come on — the car was brightly lit — and it didn’t seem to be in danger of falling. But the sense of confinement had its slimy tentacles around him, choking, choking...

‘Help us!’ an older woman was crying.

Three or four people were pounding on the doors. Like ritual drums, sacrificial drums.

‘You smell that?’ somebody called. ‘Smoke.’

‘Christ. There’s a fire.’

The orderly gasped. We’re going to burn to death. But he considered this possibility in a curiously detached way. A searing, painful death was horrific but not as bad as the clutching, the confinement.

Tears filled his eyes. He hadn’t known you could cry from fear.

‘Is anybody there?’ a woman nurse, in limp green scrubs, was shouting into the intercom. There’d been no message from security through the speaker.

‘It’s hot, it’s hot!’ A woman’s voice. ‘The flames’re right under us. Help!’

‘I can’t breathe.’

‘I’ve got to get out.’

The pregnant woman was crying. ‘My baby, my baby.’

The orderly ripped his shirt open, lifted his head and tried to find some better air. But he could only fill his lungs with stinking, moist, used breath.

In the corner, a woman vomited.

‘Oh, Jesus, lady, all over me.’ The man beside her, forties, in shorts and a T-shirt, tried to leap back, getting away from the mess. But there was no place to go and the man behind him shoved back.

‘Fuck you.’

The smell overwhelmed the orderly and it was all he could do to control his own gut.

Not so lucky with the woman beside him. She, too, was sick.

Phone calls:

‘Yes, nine one one, we’re trapped in an elevator and nobody’s doing anything.’

‘We’re in a car, an elevator in the hospital. East Wing. We can’t breathe.’

Somebody shouted: ‘Don’t both call at once! Are you fucking crazy? You’ll block the circuits!’

‘What — were you born in the fifties? They can handle more than—’

Then an otherworldly scream filled the car: the biker had lost control, lost it completely. Screaming, he grabbed the shoulders of the elderly woman in front of him and boosted himself up onto the crowd.

The orderly heard a snap as the woman’s clavicle broke and she screamed and fainted. The biker didn’t even notice; he scrabbled forward atop the shoulders and necks and heads of the others and slammed into the elevator door, breaking nails as he tried to pull the panels open. He was screaming and sobbing. Tears and sweat flowed like water from a cracked pipe.

A slim African-American woman, an aide, in what used to be called candy stripers, colorful scrubs with teddy bears on them, muscled her way forward and gripped him by the collar. ‘We’ll be okay. It’ll be all right.’