Douglas Preston - Gideon’s Sword

“Tell me, please,” said Gideon, “how is he?”

“I’m afraid I’m not authorized to release any information on that, Mr. Crew.”

“I need to see him. I’ve got to see him.”

“He can’t see anyone right now,” said Yveline, a little more firmly. “Trust me, the doctors are doing all they can.” She paused, and added a line that never failed to comfort: “Mount Sinai is one of the finest hospitals in the world.”

“At least tell me how he is.”

“I’m sorry, sir, but hospital rules won’t allow me to release medical information to anyone but family.”

The man stared. “But…what does that mean, family?”

“A relative with identification or a spouse.”

“Yes, but…you see, Mark and I…we’re…partners. Life partners.” Even under his bloody, dirty face, she could see him blushing at this intimate detail.

Yveline laid down the clipboard. “I understand. But I can only release information to a relative or legal spouse.”

“Legal? For God’s sake, you know perfectly well same-sex marriage is against the law in New York!”

“I’m so sorry, sir. The rules are the rules.”

“Is he dead?” The man’s voice suddenly became loud, very loud.

She looked at him, faintly alarmed. “Sir, please calm down.”

“Is that why you won’t tell me? Oh my God, is he dead? ” He was shouting now.

“I need a piece of paper, some proof of your relationship…” Her voice trailed off. This had happened several times before: conflicts over gay and lesbian hospital visitation rights. The whole issue was under endless policy review — leaving it to people like her to run the gauntlet with the public. It wasn’t fair.

“Who carries around a wad of official documents?” The man began to cry. “We just got in from China!” He swiped the shock of hair out of his face, his eyes bloodshot, his lips trembling.

“I know you’re upset, sir, but we can’t give out medical information to someone claiming to be a domestic partner without some sort of proof.”

“Proof?” Gideon held out his bloody hands, his voice climbing into a shriek. “There’s your proof! Look at it! His blood on my hands! I’m the one who dragged him from the car!”

Yveline couldn’t even find the words to respond. The whole room was listening. Even the three-hundred-pound woman had stopped crying.

“I need to know !” And with this last wail, his knees buckled and the man collapsed on the floor.

Yveline pressed the emergency intercom, summoning the triage head nurse. The crowd stared at the man on the floor, but his collapse had been more emotional than medical and she saw he was already reviving. He rose to his knees, hyperventilating, and some members of the crowd rushed over to help him up.

“Help him to a seat,” said Yveline. “The nurse is on her way.” More people in the group responded, helping the man to a seat against the wall. He fell heavily into it, covering his face and sobbing loudly.

“Come on, lady,” said a woman. “What’s the harm in telling him how his friend is?”

A murmur of agreement rose from the crowd. Gideon Crew rocked in the chair, his face in his hands.

“He’s dead,” he said. “I know it. He’s dead.”

Yveline ignored the people and went back to her clipboard. It was a damn shame the rules forced her to be this way. But she was determined not to show vacillation or weakness.

“Why don’t you just tell him how his friend is?” persisted the woman.

“Ma’am,” said Yveline, “I don’t make the rules. Medical information is private.”

A harried nurse arrived. “Where’s the patient?”

“He’s upset — collapsed.” Yveline indicated the man.

The nurse went over, suddenly putting on a smooth voice. “Hello, my name’s Rose. What’s the problem?”

The man choked up. “He’s dead and they won’t tell me.”

“Who?”

“My life partner. In the ER. But they won’t tell me anything because I don’t have a piece of paper.”

“You’re in a long-term domestic partnership?”

A nod. “Five years. He’s everything to me. He doesn’t have any family here.” He looked up suddenly, beseechingly. “Please don’t let him die alone!”

“May I?” The nurse took the man’s pulse, slapped a cuff on him and took his blood pressure. “You’re okay. Just upset. Just slow down your breathing and let me talk to the admitting staff.”

The man nodded, struggling to get his gasping under control.

The nurse stepped over to Yveline. “Look, let’s just authorize him as a domestic partner. Okay? I’ll take full responsibility.”

“Thank you.” The nurse left while Yveline called up the electronic file, read the latest update. “Mr. Crew?”

He leapt up and came over.

“Your friend is critically injured but alive and is stabilizing,” she said in a low voice. “Now if you’ll come up and sign this form, I’ll authorize you as his domestic partner.”

“Thank God!” he cried. “He’s alive, thanks be to God!”

The waiting room broke into applause.

Gideon Crew looked around at the room he had booked at the Howard Johnson Motor Lodge on Eighth Avenue. It was surprisingly decent, well appointed, not a trace of blue and orange to be seen. Best of all, it had an iPod dock. He slipped out his iPod, pondered the problem at hand, dialed in Bill Evans’s Blue in Green , and docked it. The bittersweet chords of “The Two Lonely People” filled the room. He gulped the last of his quintuple espresso and tossed the cup into the trash.

For several minutes, he sat motionless in the chair by the small desk, allowing the moody, introspective music to wash over him, willing himself to relax muscle by muscle, letting the events of the day sort themselves out in his mind. Just fifteen hours earlier, he’d been fishing for trout in Chihuahueños Creek. Now here he was, sitting in a Manhattan hotel room, with twenty thousand dollars in his pocket, a death sentence on his head, and a strange man’s blood on his hands.

He stood up, shrugged out of his shirt, and walked into the bathroom to wash his hands and arms. Then he stepped out and put on a fresh shirt. Covering the bed with plastic garbage bags, he carefully spread out Wu’s clothes, which had been cut off in the emergency room and already gone into the medical-waste stream. He’d had a devil of a time retrieving them. A heartwarming Christmas story about a broken promise, a Hong Kong tailor, and a lost puppy had finally done the trick — but just barely.

After the clothes were carefully arranged, Gideon laid out the contents of Wu’s wallet, the spare change from his pockets, passport, rollerball, and an old-fashioned safety razor in a plastic case, no blade, which he had found in Wu’s suit coat pocket. That was all. No cell phone, no BlackBerry, no calculator, no flash drive.

As he worked, dawn broke over the city, the hotel windows shifting from gray to yellow, the city waking up with car horns and traffic.

When everything was laid out in geometric precision, he looked it over, finger pensively placed on his lower lip. If the man was carrying the plans for a new kind of weapon, it was not at all obvious where they were—​​if he had even been carrying them on his person. Clearly, the list of numbers Wu had gasped out to him at the accident scene couldn’t be the complete set of plans—​such plans, even in highly compressed form, would take up a significant amount of data. They would have to be stored digitally, which meant he was looking for a microchip; a magnetic or bubble memory device; a holographic image stored on some medium; or perhaps a laser-read storage device such as a CD or DVD.