Page 126 of The House of Cross

The officer did not respond, closed her eyes.

“I have to intubate her now,” Foley said, and we left the room.

CHAPTER 104

BREE SAW US ANDwaved us over to the nurses’ station where Elena Walters had pulled up footage of the hall from less than fifteen minutes before.

“It’s her,” Bree said. “She comes from the waiting room, and you get a better look at her face. But this is what you want to see.”

Walters hit Play. Katrina White, knapsack on, back to the camera, walked to Officers Kenerson and Hodgson, leaned toward them, then reached out, extending the hose from the pack. The camera shook, then steadied; the two guards slumped in their chairs and the Sparrow went into Justice Mayweather’s room.

The hospital room went totally dark a moment later. The Sparrow left the room, mask still on, walking back toward the nurses’ station, the hose and the strange little device at the endof it dangling from the pack harness. She swung around Nurse Walters and headed toward the waiting room and the elevators.

Then the security guard from the front desk came up to us with an iPad and showed us a video of White leaving the hospital and heading west on foot at almost the same time we’d arrived, which put her a good twenty minutes ahead of us.

Mahoney got a call, listened, then said, “Form a second perimeter at fifteen blocks and again at eighteen blocks, including the bridges out of the District. If she’s on foot, she’s probably still carrying the knapsack. If she’s in a vehicle, it’s probably with her. Consider whatever the hell is in it to be lethal. I repeat, lethal. But I want her captured, not killed. Do you understand me? Captured.” He hung up and looked at us. “Now we have to get lucky and spot her before she gets away.”

I said, “Unless she’s not looking to get away.”

“How’s that?” Mahoney said.

“I’m trying to think like M. As long as she’s at large, you have to figure he’ll want to keep her going. How was it he put it back in the mine, Bree?”

“Maximum impact,” Bree said, nodding.

“So, you think she has another target?” Ned said.

“That’s my bet,” I said.

“Mine too,” Bree said. “It’s like you said, Alex, one opening on the court gives Winter power but two openings allows her to change the course of history.”

Mahoney checked his watch. “Twenty-three past four now, and—”

“Mr. Mahoney?”

Dr. Foley had come up behind us.

“I’m sorry to interrupt,” she said. “But there is something about the symptoms the officers exhibited. It makes me think ofHavana syndrome—you know, where all our diplomats there got sick all of a sudden? Dizzy. Slurred speech and blurred vision. Nausea. Fainting spells. And that reminded me I recently saw a patient exhibiting very similar symptoms. I hadn’t put it all together before.”

I said, “Who was the patient?”

She looked anxious and upset. “Justice Blevins. I was the first doctor to see her after she collapsed in her office.”

CHAPTER 105

MARGARET BLEVINS WOKE UPto her husband’s raspy snoring at ten minutes to five; she reached over and turned off the alarm on her cell phone before it could sound. She didn’t want to wake Phillip, who had stayed late at one of the inauguration balls and, judging by his snoring, had drunk a little too much wine.

Well,Blevins thought as she went to her walk-in closet, closed the door, and began to put on her running clothes.He rarely drinks, doesn’t fool around, and he is the best of men. Let him snore to his heart’s content.

Besides, beyond a little muscle stiffness from yesterday’s run, she felt better than she had in weeks, certainly since before Christmas.

The Supreme Court justice put on her sports bra and paused, looking at the shorts she usually wore in the basement gym andat the cold-weather leggings she wore to run outside. Usually, she alternated weight days and running days to give her security detail a break every other day, and she’d run yesterday, so she wasn’t planning on running today.

But the morning before had been so spectacular, clear and cold, and there’d been something about the dawn and the brilliance of the winter sun in the woods and the frosted birch trees near the end of her usual loop. The justice had carried that sense of wonder into the day, watching as the new president took the oath of office, forty feet from history.

The memory made Blevins’s skin tingle and she shivered as she found herself wanting to regain that sense of wonder. Besides, until yesterday morning she’d been cooped up in the hospital and at home.

It would do her good to get more fresh air, and her doctor had told her it was important to be outside early in the day, no sunglasses, especially in winter to help keep her vitamin D levels up. And there really was no need to call and wait for someone from her security team to join her. That could take forty minutes. Maybe more.

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