Under the Knife(47)

Speaking of surgeons: Dr. Chase Montgomery was at the front of the group, walking slowly backward, bragging about the new state-of-the-art operating rooms in the new wing.

What an asshole. Sebastian had Montgomery pegged from the get-go: the kind of leader who peddled his garbage about team or higher purpose or whatever in order to promote himself. Grade-A-prime bullshit.

They reached the end of the bridge, and Montgomery led them into the skeleton of the new hospital. Sebastian looked around, admiring its size and complexity. It was going to make one hell of a nice hospital, someday—especially if Montgomery and the bullshit promotional packet were to be believed. Not so much a hospital as a five-star hotel.

Right now, though, it was still a construction site: exposed wiring and plumbing elements, half-completed walls, and piles of raw materials—wood, wallboard, stacks of pipes, sheets of glass, bundles of steel rods, clusters of paint cans—all stacked in corners and hallways. The innards of a large building laid bare.

The smell of plaster and fresh paint lingered in his nostrils, and the air resounded with hammering, sawing, and shouting, some in English, some in Spanish. Lots of welding, too, and the group intermittently had to wind its way around cascades of sparks. The workmen didn’t so much as look twice at them; maybe they were used to well-dressed gawkers tramping through every day.

Montgomery explained that the new hospital was being built in stages, which was why some sections were already encased in glass and cement, while others remained windowless and open to the air. Sebastian spied workers covering the exposed sections with large blue tarps.

“Preparing for the big storm tonight,” Montgomery explained, gesturing to two workers as they unfurled, like a sail, a large blue tarp over an empty window and secured its corners with ropes and buckets of gravel. “We have a lot of materials in here we need to shelter from the wind and rain. Supposed to be a really big one. It’ll be nice to finally get some rain. We need it here in California. Drought, you know.”

Montgomery then led them into the new operating-room area, not far from the bridge they’d just crossed. He took them into one of the larger operating rooms (at least three times the size of Sebastian’s entire apartment), and the group listened politely as he pointed out its features. Sebastian observed that the operating rooms had come along faster than most of the other sections. All twenty were more or less complete, each forming its own cavernous, enclosed space with four walls and a ceiling, sheltered from the elements and placed well away from the open, windowless sections. No blue tarps needed here.

Sebastian’s practiced eye noted how the interiors of the new operating rooms were hidden not only from other areas of the construction zone but also from Turner, the adjacent buildings, and the nearby street. Without the construction workers around, some serious shit could go down in here without anyone’s suspecting it—even Turner employees, or the security guards who kept watch over the construction site.

This didn’t matter to him, or to Finney, but what the hell, it was impossible for Sebastian to turn off the professional side of his brain; so he made a mental note of it, anyway, just in case.

These features jibed with the blueprints Sebastian had acquired and memorized, and with the reconnaissance surveys he’d undertaken of Turner, both at night and during the day. He and Finney’s plans didn’t involve the construction site, but always best to be prepared.

Security, he’d noticed, focused on preventing theft of construction materials and was pretty decent but by no means insurmountable. A twelve-foot-high chain-link fence, covered with green-vinyl screens, surrounded the perimeter. At night, exterior floodlights spaced at intervals along the perimeter transformed these sections of fence into pools of day; more lamps strung throughout the building’s infrastructure did much the same for the interior.

Competent and well trained, the nighttime guards concentrated mostly on the single gate in the fence, which was where most of the cameras were directed. But they also intermittently walked the entire perimeter at random times.

All this made perfect sense, since if someone intended to jack the valuable crap lying around, like building materials and power tools, the perimeter gate and the fence (under, through, or over) were the only ways in or out.

Except for one other place.

The bridge to Turner Hospital, across which the group had just walked.

Not a viable option for your run-of-the-mill thief with, say, an armful of stolen plumbing fixtures. But, in a pinch, a feasible route for him to access the new wing.

Again: didn’t matter, but what the hell, options were options. He couldn’t turn that part of his mind off, the one always considering tactical possibilities.

Montgomery droned on, fielding the occasional question. Blank smiles affixed to their bland faces, the PR team maintained silent vigil, flanking him, one on each side, like sentries plucked from a fashion-magazine spread. Sebastian checked his watch and scanned the other members of the tour, among them the chancellor of the university, the dean of the medical school, and the chief medical officer. Big shots. The others he didn’t know.

The Wall Street Journal chick—who, like him, hadn’t been on the original guest list—seemed to him one of those eternally pissed-off types, her expression frozen in disdain, one half of her lip elevated in a lazy semisneer. He liked that in a woman: Something about the whole attitude thing appealed to him. Clad in a conservative grey skirt and white blouse, gliding along on fashionable shoes, she projected boredom and disinterest.