Chapter 22 #2
At six-thirty-four, he reached the radiology access door on the second floor and stopped. The corridor was clear. The evacuation had pulled everyone west, toward the main stairwells and the rally points in the parking lot. East wing was empty.
He put his back against the wall beside the door and waited.
His earpiece crackled. Harper’s voice, low and flat.
“Creighton is in the administrator’s office. She went there at six-twenty-eight, two minutes before the alarm. She’s not evacuating.”
Graham processed that. Creighton skipping the safety drill meant she either knew it was routine or she had something in that office she didn’t want to leave unattended.
“Eyes on her,” he said.
“Already there. She’s on the phone. Can’t get audio through the wall, but she’s pacing. That’s not routine.”
Six-thirty-seven. Five minutes to the second-phase all-clear.
Caleb’s voice came through the earpiece. “Thompson confirms east wing evacuation complete. Your corridor is clear.”
“Copy.”
“Maren reported to her floor at six-nineteen. Visible on the unit until six-thirty-one. Paula confirmed her presence during the initial count. She’s in the stairwell now.”
In the stairwell. Moving toward the supply corridor. Moving toward the four minutes that would either give them the evidence to dismantle a trafficking pipeline or put her in a room with a filing cabinet and no cover story that would survive scrutiny.
He pressed his palm flat against the wall behind him and steadied his breathing.
Six-thirty-eight.
He stood in the corridor with his back to the wall and his right hand at his hip and listened to the building.
The fire alarm cycled — three bursts, continuous tone, three bursts.
The intercom voice repeated its evacuation message every forty seconds.
Somewhere on the third floor a wheelchair caster squeaked.
A door closed. A man’s voice called out a name Graham didn’t catch.
Six-thirty-nine.
“Graham,” Harper said. “Creighton just hung up the phone. She’s standing in the middle of her office. She’s not moving.”
“But she’s not leaving.”
“Not yet.”
Six-forty.
Maren’s window in the records office was sixteen minutes. They’d planned for fourteen. She had four of them left. Two were already gone.
Six-forty-one.
He counted the seconds in his head the way he’d counted them in Khost, in Sebring, in every operation that had come down to a person on the wrong side of a door and another person waiting on the right side.
Sixty seconds was a long time when you weren’t the one moving. Sixty seconds was a small lifetime.
Six-forty-two.
“Graham.” Harper again. “Creighton just walked out of her office. She’s in the corridor. East wing.”
Everything in him went very still.
“Which direction.”
“Your direction. She’s walking toward the records room. She’s thirty seconds out.”
Maren was in that records room.
“Talk to me, Harper. I need a reason for her to turn around.”
“Working on it.”
Twenty seconds.
He pushed off the wall and started walking.
Not toward the records room — that would put two of his team in a corridor where they couldn’t both walk away clean.
Toward the stairwell at the far end of the east wing, the one Maren was supposed to come out of, the one he’d told her was thirty-seven seconds from his position.
Fifteen seconds.
“Harper.”
“I’ve got it. Page the night supervisor. Code Yellow at the loading dock. Creighton has to respond to a Code Yellow because her name’s on the response protocol. She’ll have to leave the east wing.”
“Do it.”
Ten seconds.
The intercom cut through the alarm cycle. ‘Code Yellow, loading dock, Code Yellow, receiving level. All available supervisory staff respond.’
Five seconds.
“She’s turning around,” Harper said.
Three. Two.
“She’s heading for the elevators. She’s leaving east wing.”
Graham stopped walking. He put his hand against the cinderblock wall of the stairwell and pressed the palm flat and let his weight rest against it for a beat.
Then he straightened up and waited for the door at the end of the corridor to open.
* * *
She came through the stairwell door at six forty-seven.
Same scrubs. Same low knot. Same lanyard. Her right hand was tucked at her waist with the burner phone palmed against her thigh, the way she’d practiced it on Sunday at her dining table while he sat across from her and ran her through the sequence one more time, and one more time after that.
She didn’t run. She walked the corridor at the same unhurried pace she’d walked through the lobby an hour earlier. She was a nurse in scrubs who had gotten turned around during a safety drill and was walking back to her unit. Anyone who saw her would see exactly that.
She passed him without looking at him.
As she went by, her right thumb came off the phone for the briefest fraction of a second and made a small gesture against the seam of her scrub pants — a quick three-tap, the all-clear sign they’d worked out together. ‘Got it. Got out. Coming through.’
Three taps. Three weeks of work. The shadow log pulled to a federal server before the drill was half over.
Forty-seven photographs of the paper originals on top of it.
A username and a password folded against the inside of a chest pocket.
Eighteen months of a notebook buried in soil. The four numbers.
Graham didn’t turn his head to watch her go. He stayed where he was, leaning on the cinderblock wall with the alarm still cycling and the intercom still calling for response staff to the loading dock, and he let his eyes close for one second.
Just one.
Then he opened them and pushed off the wall and walked toward the rally point in the east parking lot the way a hospital volunteer was supposed to walk during a safety drill — unhurried, visible, doing exactly what the protocol said he should be doing.
“Caleb,” he said into the earpiece.
“Here.”
“We’ve got it.”
Caleb didn’t say copy. He didn’t say confirmed. He didn’t say anything for a long second.
Then he said, “Okay.”
Just that. ‘Okay.’
Graham walked out the front doors of the hospital into the morning sun.