Out of the Black - Lee Doty [122]
"Keep an eye on that." Rae gestured toward the screen and turned to go.
Minutes later, Rae found a private corner at the end of the hall where Alex had been taken. There was a small, uninhabited waiting area with vending machines and a few chairs. She sat with her back to the wall and used her tablet to open the interface to the security system. The surfer had given her access to the entire hospital's surveillance system. Cool.
She opened a window into Alex's room first. He had already been through the scanner, and now was on a gurney in a holding room awaiting the imaging specialist's recommendations. He was the only patient in the room.
Next, she opened a window into OR-1 where Ping was undergoing surgery. She couldn't tell how things were going. The camera showed two surgeons with their hands inside ports in a coffin-sized box. At the foot of the box, a tech monitored their progress. The soundtrack didn't help much either. When they weren't talking golf, they spoke largely in the mumbo dialect of jumbo. Sometimes Rae had trouble knowing which jargon was medical and which was golf... she understood neither.
She opened windows for each entrance to the building, looking for the arrival of more killers like those at the library. She opened another window showing the roof, just in case.
All settled in. She scanned her monitor windows with an intensity she believed the surfer would have found both impressive and mystifying. Of course, her life and that of her friends depended on her vigilance. She considered opening a commlink to the surfer to ask for the authorization to monitor the hospital's alert notifications. She decided against it; mostly not wanting to arouse any suspicion.
After perhaps five minutes, she noticed that something was wrong.
Uniformed police officers began to arrive at a disturbing rate, eight within the next ten minutes, including two plainclothes detectives. "Uh, oh." She muttered, scanning the camera portals on her tablet.
As the eleventh officer arrived, she rose to the surface of her panic long enough to open portals to all the cameras in the elevator cars. There were no officers in any of the cars. Of course, she'd have to check the camera logs to find who may have already used the elevators, but she knew that nobody had gotten off at her floor since the elevator bank was in sight to her right.
She was still scanning the elevator logs when an orderly arrived to move Alex.
Grudgingly, she suspended her tablet and went to investigate.
When she arrived at the door of the holding room, the orderly was already on the way out with Alex's gurney.
"This guy going to surgery?" Rae asked, raising a hand in greeting.
"Nope. Doctor says move him to a semiprivate. They had to send his scans to an expert in Delhi... could take a while before we hear back."
Rae tried not to show any relief, which wasn't too hard, since she was still pretty worried about the cops on the first floor.
"What's up on the first floor?" The orderly asked, looking conspiratorial.
"What'cha mean?"
"Oh, I thought you were with the badges downstairs. Heard there was some kinda ruckus down there."
R? She and the vegetables didn't qualify as a ruckus, so she hoped he was right. Rae shook her head, shrugged her shoulders. She felt downright suspicious. Time to go. "I've got to get a statement when he wakes up... where're you taking him?"
"Seventeen thirty-eight."
She nodded, "Thanks." She strode away. Time to find another private corner... maybe a closet. As she walked, she opened her tablet. Nothing exciting was happening at the level one exits, but Ping was gone.
Not waiting to find a quiet place to work, she pulled up the camera logs for OR-1 and cued through them as she walked.
"Seek medical attention, my butt!" she grumbled as she walked and worked. She had no idea what that meant, other than it was derisive- she'd heard her grandma say it once when she was six. It made her laugh. After she'd heard it said, she'd been insufferable. She had repeated it with anything she didn't like. "Clean my room? My butt!"