Chapter Forty-Two
Forty-Two
One after another, Lee hurriedly tried the key cards; none worked, so then he began scanning the badges, hoping one of them had been coded to let the woman into the MRI control room.
The third badge did the trick. A red light to the left of the door turned green right above the keypad and sensor, and Todd pulled the door open.
The room had an operator’s control desk, with a large window in front of it, and above it was an illuminated sign that he didn’t bother to read.
To the right of the control desk, directly in front of the two brothers at the Zone 3 door, was another door that was marked Danger—Zone 4: Scan Room.
Both men ducked down so they couldn’t be seen through the window, but before they did, they’d looked inside and saw their target being moved, legs first, into the machine by the technician, who operated a lever on the side of the scanner that controlled the patient table motor.
Behind her was a computer, and soft fluorescent lights glowed from the ceiling above her.
Todd leaned over to Lee. “When she opens the door to come back in here, you hold your gun on her, and I’ll go in and slit his throat.”
Lee nodded. “I like it.”
—
Zack wasn’t claustrophobic, but he didn’t love being shoved into a little metal tube.
Over his career he’d probably had close to a dozen MRIs, either at the VA, at some far-flung military base, or, more recently, at private facilities like this when he worked for the CIA.
The good news about today, and the MRI he’d received a month and half earlier at Ramstein, was he’d gone in feetfirst, and his head and much of his torso didn’t have to go into the tube for the procedure.
It was his leg that was being imaged, after all, so at least he’d not have his head in there for the half hour to forty-five minutes it would take for the scan.
Zack had made some small talk with the attractive technician, and then she’d given him headphones to wear, because MRI machines are notoriously loud when they’re scanning.
She asked him what type of music he liked, he’d told her whatever her favorite was, was his new favorite, and she rolled her eyes playfully before telling him how much she loved Taylor Swift.
Zack had heard the name; he had a feeling he should have said Chris Stapleton or somebody more to his taste, but he just smiled while she turned on some sugary pop music.
She headed out the door back to the control room; he couldn’t see her because he was on his back, facing up, staring at a fluorescent light and the outside rim of the scanner, with a red emergency button on it.
He knew he’d be hearing the technician’s voice over the music in a few seconds, letting him know the procedure was about to begin.
He indulgently listened to Taylor Swift but wasn’t paying close attention; he was mostly thinking about Stacy, or Andie, and how much he was going to miss stopping by her bakery for coffee in the mornings.
It had been a minute; Taylor was singing something about being young and reckless, Zack couldn’t really relate so much to the young part, but the tune was catchy nonetheless.
Then, while focusing on the fluorescent lighting above him, he saw something suddenly flash by, right over his face, missing it by not more than a foot.
The item flew towards the machine, an impossibly loud bang followed, and Zack quickly threw off his headphones.
Sitting up, he looked down and saw a fixed-blade knife stuck to the inside wall of the MRI machine, right above his knee. A wooden hilt had shattered and bits of it lay across Zack’s legs.
And then he saw the blood.
Blood grew on his gown, six inches above his left knee. The wound there didn’t even hurt yet, but he knew the pain would come soon enough.
He looked at the knife and saw it was the kind often used for hunting or even self-defense, and not some piece of medical equipment.
Quickly he struggled to shimmy the lower portion of his body out of the machine. A gunshot cracked behind him right as he rolled off the table and down to the floor to the far side of the patient table, and only then did he truly understand he was under attack.
There was only the one shot, and just as he chanced a look over the table to see where his attack was coming from, he saw a black semiautomatic pistol fly across the room, slam into the side of the MRI tube, then bounce around the inside, like a wild bird in a cage, fighting to get out.
After a few loud strikes the polymer grip of the weapon shattered, the magazine exploded, and cartridges bounced all around, whipping this way and that.
Zack went flat on the floor now, still unsure how badly he’d been hurt, feeling only the effects of fresh adrenaline.
Chancing another quick look back over the table, he saw the technician in the operator’s window; she was being held at gunpoint by a man with a surgical mask, and the man stared at him through the operator’s window from inside the control room.
A second man stood at the open door; he was apparently the one who’d lost both his gun and his knife in the last few seconds. Now he screamed at the woman to turn the magnet off.
Apparently Zack knew something this would-be assassin did not.
An MRI machine’s magnet could not be turned on and off with a press of a button.
It remained on—Zack had noticed numerous warning signs to this effect in the control room—but apparently the idiots trying to kill him right now weren’t big readers.
The man who held a gun to the technician now shouted, “Turn it off!” over the PA system that broadcast into the room.
Zack looked at the machine, saw the red emergency button close to where he crouched, but he knew the button just stopped the scan; it didn’t remove the magnetic charge from the massive device.
“You can’t turn it off!” the woman shouted back at the man holding the gun to her head.
She tried explaining to the man that MRI machines’ magnetic fields are always generating, and this particular machine was a powerful 3 Tesla model, so any magnetic metal in the room, even at the open door, would come sailing towards the scanner at high speed.
Zack knew that the room he was in now was encased in copper shielding, and the window itself contained a fine copper screen, and the glass would be more than thick enough to stop any bullets fired from the men’s pistols.
There were metal tools, instruments, and other items here in this room, but they were all made of material that would not be attracted to the magnet.
The open door with the unarmed man at it was twenty-five feet from him; he began running for it, immediately felt the sting of a long cut on his leg, felt blood running down his shin, but he just ran faster, his blue gown flailing with the motion.
The man at the door held it open, but when he saw the man nearing him, he shut it.
An open toolbox sat on a table next to a computer monitor.
Zack assumed the tools were made of titanium or some other non-ferromagnetic metal, and he grabbed a wrench from the box, kicked open the door from the inside using the emergency handle, then threw the instrument overhanded, hitting the unarmed baldheaded man with the mask in the chin at ten feet.
The man fell back into the room by the door to Zone 2.
The armed man by the control booth spun in Zack’s direction and aimed at him, but Zack made it back into the door of the scan room before the man holding the tech could get a shot off.
Over the speakers in the scan room, Zack heard the man with the gun shout at him again. “Come out, or I shoot this bitch!”
Zack chose another weapon. It was a long screwdriver, and again, it was titanium, so it was not pulled into the machine like the knife or the gun.
He turned and ran back towards the MRI machine.
He said, “Unless your bosses are paying you to shoot an MRI technician, you aren’t going to achieve anything by killing her. You’re going to have to come in here.”
“I’ll fucking do it! I’ll—”
“I don’t even know her, asshole.”
Zack used the screwdriver to try to pry the knife off the MRI scanner, but it wouldn’t budge. Giving up, he turned to head back to the door, and he saw a trail of bloody footprints.
Shit.
He looked through the window and saw the armed man hit the technician over the head with his pistol.
Tossing the gun on the control panel table, he turned away for a moment, and when he turned back, the masked attacker himself held a titanium hammer in his hand.
His comrade had stood back up; his face was bloody where Zack had hit it, but he wasn’t down for the count.
He armed himself with the titanium wrench Zack had thrown at him, and the two men rushed to the door.
Their plan, Zack realized, was to burst in, two on one, and try to beat him to death.
A blaring siren went off in the medical center now; Zack didn’t know if the woman was still conscious on the floor and had reached a button, or if just the noise of the shooting and the screaming fight in the MRI suite had caused someone else to raise the alarm, but Zack ran towards the door himself, meeting the attackers just after they came in.
The first man was wearing thick rubber snow boots, and he slipped on Zack’s blood and fell onto his back, and Zack leapt over him, swinging at the uninjured man carrying the hammer.
Blows were exchanged; both men managed to control the weapons in the other man’s hands, but they butted heads, sent knees toward groins, threw shoulders into each other’s chests right there in the doorway.
It was an ugly, bloody brawl between Zack and this skinhead with tattoos on his neck. Zack got the man’s medical mask pushed up over his eyes for a moment, then knocked him down to the floor, back over the threshold and into the scan room.