Робин Кук - Brain

“That’s ridiculous, Philips. We knew it wasn’t you in the courtyard. We thought they’d already caught you.”

“Who’s they?” asked the bewildered Philips.

“Philips! I can’t talk about these things over the phone.”

“Just tell me what the fuck’s going on!”

The people in the coffee shop were still motionless. They were New Yorkers and accustomed to all sorts of strange happenings, but not in their local coffee shop.

Sansone was cool and detached. “Sorry, Philips. You have to come here, and you have to come now. Being out on your own you are simply complicating our problem. And you already know there are a number of innocent lives at stake.”

“Two hours,” yelled Philips. “I’m two hours away from the city.”

“All right, two hours, but not a second longer.”

There was a final click and the line was dead.

Philips panicked. In one second his indecision was swept away. He threw down a five-dollar bill and ran out on the street toward the Eighth Avenue subway.

He was going to the Medical Center. He didn’t know what he was going to do once he got there but he was going to the hospital. He had two hours and he had to have some answers. There was a chance Sansone was telling the truth. Maybe they did think that he’d been taken by some unknown force. But Philips wasn’t sure and the uncertainty terrified him. His intuition told him that Denise was now in jeopardy.

The uptown train had standing-room only, even though the rush hour peak was over, but the ride was good for Philips. It tempered his panic and allowed him time to use his essential intelligence. By the time he got off he knew how he was going to get inside the medical center and what he was going to do when he did.

Martin followed the crowd off the train to the street, and headed for his first destination: a liquor store. The clerk took one look at Martin’s disheveled appearance, bounded from behind his register and tried to hustle Philips out. He relented when Martin held up his money.

It took him just thirty seconds to pick out and pay for a pint of whiskey. Turning off Broadway onto a side street, Martin found a small alley filled with trash barrels. There he removed the top to the whiskey, took a good slug and gargled. He swallowed a small amount but spat most out onto the ground. Using the whiskey like cologne he anointed his face and neck, then slid the half-empty bottle back into his coat pocket. Stumbling past most of the trash barrels, Philips picked one toward the back. It was filled with sand probably used for the sidewalk in the winter. He dug a shallow hole and buried his wallet, putting the rest of his cash into the same pocket as the whiskey.

His next stop was a small but busy grocery store. People gave him a wide berth as he entered. It was quite crowded and Philips had to push past some customers to find an area with a clear line of sight to the checkout registers.

“Ahhh,” screamed Philips as he choked and stumbled to the floor taking a display of canned beans on special with him. He writhed as if in pain as the beans rolled in every direction. When a shopper bent down to ask if he was all right, Martin rasped, “Pain. My heart!”

The ambulance arrived in moments. Martin had an oxygen mask strapped to his face and a rhythm EKG connected to his chest during the short drive to Hobson University Medical Center. His essentially normal EKG had already been preliminarily analyzed by radio and it had been determined that no cardiac drugs were needed.

As the attendants pushed him into the ER Martin glimpsed several policemen standing on the platform, but they didn’t give him so much as a glance. He was carried down to one of the main ER rooms and transferred to a bed. One of the nurses searched his pockets for identification while the resident took another EKG. Since the tracing was normal, the cardiac team began to disperse, leaving the intern to take over.

“How’s the pain, partner?” he asked, bending over Philips.

“I need some Maalox,” Martin growled. “Sometimes when I drink cheap stuff I need Maalox.”

“Sounds good to me,” said the doctor.

Philips was given Maalox by a hardened thirty-five-year-old nurse who did everything but slap him for the pitiful shape he was in. She took a short history and Martin gave his name as Harvey Hopkins. It’d been his roommate in college. The nurse then said they’d give him a chance to relax for a few minutes to see if his chest pain came back. She pulled the curtain around his bed.

Philips waited for several minutes, then he climbed off the end of the bed. On an ER cart against the wall he found a prep razor and a small bar of soap used to clean wounds. He also got several towels, and a surgical cap and mask. So armed he peeked out of the curtains.

As usual at that time of night, the ER was a hopeless sea of confusion. The sign-in line at the front desk almost reached the entrance and ambulances were arriving at regular intervals. No one even looked at Martin as he walked down the central corridor and pushed open the gray door across from the besieged main desk. There was only one doctor in the lounge and he was engrossed in an EKG when Philips walked through to the showers.

Rapidly he showered and shaved, leaving his clothes in the corner of the room. By the sinks he found a pile of surgical scrub gear, which was the favorite apparel of the emergency room staff. He put on a shirt and pants and the surgical hat to cover his wet head. He even tied on the mask. There were many times that hospital personnel used masks outside of the OR, especially when they were suffering from a head cold.

Regarding himself in the mirror, Philips was convinced that someone would have to know him very well to recognize him. He’d not only gotten inside the hospital but he looked like he belonged. As for Harvey Hopkins, ER patients were always walking out, Philips looked at his watch. He’d used up an hour.

Charging out of the lounge, Philips crossed the ER and ran past two more policemen. He used the back stairs behind the cafeteria to reach the second floor. He wanted a radiation detector, but decided it was too dangerous to fetch the one in his office and had to search around the radiotherapy section until he found another. Then he ran back down the stairs to the main floor and hurried into the clinics building.

The elevators there were old and required operators, who had already left for the day, so Martin had to climb four flights to GYN. He had decided on the subway, sandwiched between two very unhappy businessmen, that the radiation could have been connected to GYN, but now that he had arrived, radiation detector in hand, his resolve began to falter. He had no idea what he was looking for.

Passing the main GYN waiting room, Philips turned into the smaller university clinic. It had yet to be passed over by the cleaning crew, and the area was littered with overflowing ashtrays and papers. It all looked so innocent and normal in the meager light.

Philips checked the receptionist’s desk but it was locked. Trying the two doors behind the desk he found the whole area to be secured. But the locks were simple ones, which required the key to be inserted in the doorknob itself. A plastic card from the top of the receptionist’s desk sufficed to open one. Martin went in, closed the door and turned on the lights.

He was standing in the hallway where he’d talked with Dr. Harper. There were two examining rooms to the left and the lab or utility room to the right. Martin selected the examining rooms first. Monitoring the detector very carefully he went over each room, sticking the detector into every cabinet and recess and even going over the examining tables themselves. Nothing. The place was clean. In the lab areas he did the same thing starting with the countertop cabinets, opening drawers, peering into boxes. At the end of the room he went over the large instrument cabinets. It was all negative.