Warren Murphy: Troubled Waters

"Not here?" The surprise in Remo's tone was strictly shammed.

"Unfortunately, no," said Dr. Smith. "It would have made things more convenient, I admit."

"The senator's a Navy man?"

"The next best thing. Remember that appropriations seat."

"I see."

"If you leave now, you should have ample time to catch your flight from White Plains to Bethesda."

"Marvelous."

"I trust you'll show the proper respect at Bethesda," Dr. Smith cautioned, the expression on his lemon face revealing very little trust, in fact.

"I always try to show respect for innocent victims," Remo replied. "On the other hand, if we're discussing those who abuse them for profit, financial or otherwise, well, I'd say all bets were off."

Dr. Smith seemed to take his meaning at once. He said, "Perhaps you should give Senator Armitage the benefit of the doubt."

"I already have," Remo said as he rose from his chair. Mark Howard handed him an itinerary with his flight number, which Remo wadded into his pocket.

"Please hurry," Smith said to Remo. "Miss that flight and you just might miss your opportunity to visit with the patient today."

Remo grinned at Mark Howard, who gave him a dark scowl. "I'll hurry like a bunny."

Chapter 4

Best known as a bedroom community of the nation's capital, Bethesda, Maryland-or, more properly, its Woodmont suburb-is also home to the sprawling U.S. Naval Medical Center and its equally vast alter ego, the National Institutes of Health, situated on the west side of the Rockville Pike. Between them, the two research-and-treatment facilities cover an area of several square miles, teeming with doctors, nurses, technicians, orderlies and patients.

Teeming with security, as well, from what Remo could see as he made his approach in a year-old rented Nissan. It was a nice enough car, but it was no Lamborghini Murcielago. But Remo had barely dropped off the keys and fled the car-rental desk before the small army of state troopers, traffic cops from various jurisdictions and airport security descended on the place.

"Hey you!"

"Freeze!"

"Stop right there!"

They came from all directions. They had him trapped. This guy had been witnessed flagrantly committing more traffic violations in the past forty-five minutes than most of the law-enforcement personnel on the scene could recall seeing on the worst day of their lives.

And he was going to pay. He was surrounded. There was no escape.

And yet, he had escaped. The army of badges converged on the desk and the startled car rental clerk, and found the perpetrator had vanished.

An all-points bulletin had instantly gone out up and down the East Coast for a traffic criminal whose name, according to his car rental documents, was Remo Quartermaster.

The airport search came up empty.

Arriving at the other end, Remo had decided a Nissan would be just fine and less trouble. It didn't even occur to him that the per-day rental was just a fraction of the bill for the Lambo-Genie Whatever-it-was.

The young SPs on duty at the front gate were also the type to notice a car like that. One of them examined his driver's license.

"Remo Rubble?" The guard looked at Remo as if he knew the name was a lie, just by his appearance. But he checked Remo off a list of names he carried on a shiny metal clipboard, then provided Remo with a photocopied map of the facility and traced his line of travel with a yellow highlighter pen.

The installation was laid out with the military's usual concern for detail, meaning that each intersection featured signs, and most of them directed visitors to destinations labeled with a bizarre alphabet soup of Navy acronyms. Remo imagined a group of officers penned up in a basement somewhere, being paid by the hour to concoct labels like MACVSOG and COMSINTEC. He finally decided to ignore the signs and concentrate on counting intersections, following the yellow-pen road on his map.

Somehow, he reached the hospital facility he sought. Another SP, this one young and female, waited for him in the lobby with another clipboard.

"Boy, I really feel expected," he told her as she officiously checked him off her list.

"It's our job to welcome visitors," she retorted with perfect seriousness.

"Hey, I never said welcome."

The blond SP directed Remo to a bank of elevators on the far side of the crowded lobby and instructed him to choose the seventh floor.

The Reigning Master of Sinanju and the world's most accomplished assassin did as he was told. On seven, Remo found the nurses' station located conveniently near the elevators. His clearance to visit was confirmed for the third time in fifteen minutes, another SP peering over the head nurse's shoulder as she checked her own clipboard, and a skinhead power lifter disguised as an orderly escorted Remo to a beige door labeled 725. The metal slot designed to hold a name tag was conspicuously empty. "Take it easy, 'kay?" the skinhead cautioned him. "She's been through hell."

"Sure," Remo said.

The private room contained a single bed, hospital style, with shiny rails on either side and enough peripheral attachments that it resembled the captain's chair aboard some movie space-fighter ship. A television mounted near the ceiling, in the northwest corner of the room, displayed a frantic game show with the sound turned off. The idiots on the show were bitterly banishing one of their teammates. Once upon a time, Remo recalled, game shows had been full of happier idiots who jumped up and down with hysterical joy when they correctly guessed the suggested retail price on a five-pound canister of Folgers coffee. The world, he thought, was a meaner place without Bob Barker's conspicuous presence on the boob tube.

The woman in the bed could have used some ecstatic idiocy. She could have used any sort of a pick-me-up.

He guessed that Kelly Bauer Armitage had once been beautiful, and might well be again someday. At present, though, she could have been a refugee from Iraq, the sole survivor of a tragic airline crash, perhaps a poster girl for AIDS. Her sunken cheeks revealed a model's bone structure, but she was thin and blistered from exposure to relentless tropic sunshine.

Long blond hair that had to have drawn admiring stares in better days now spread across her pillow like drab seaweed clinging to the body of a woman who has drowned. Her body, underneath the sheet, would doubtless be alluring, if and when she got herself in shape again, but at the moment she looked wasted, drained of all vitality.

"Ms. Arnutage?"

Although he tried to keep his voice down, Remo thought it came out sounding harsh, unnaturally loud inside the nearly silent room. Despite his own perception, though, the woman in the bed didn't appear to notice him or recognize her spoken name. Her green eyes-once vibrant, he imagined, but sadly faded now-were fixed on a point to the right of the silent television, seeing God knew what on the pink pastel wall.

Remo moved closer to the bed, not rushing it, making sure that he was well within the woman's range of peripheral vision. The last damn thing she needed was a strange man popping up from nowhere, at her bedside, peering down at her as if she were some kind of specimen prepared for mounting. "Kelly?"

Jumping to the point of first-name intimacy was a risk, he knew, but it appeared to break the ice. The woman turned her head to face him, frowning slightly, but at least she didn't flinch or scream. In fact, her eyes appeared to focus clearly for the first time since Remo had entered the room.

"I've told you everything I can remember," she declared.

There seemed to be no point in telling her that they had never met. As an alternative, he said, "I hoped that if we went through it again, just one more time, you might remember something else."