The Sisterhood - Michael Palmer [133]
She slipped out of the office and locked the door. The janitor would not be in until sometime the following morning. Less than twenty-four hours. If she wished to salvage The Sisterhood, she had only that long to plan, to prepare, to act. Questions, one after another, raced through her mind. Was it worth the price of another life? Could she do it? Was there an explanation that would hold up? At that moment the answers were not at all apparent.
CHAPTER XXIII
Using the bannister for leverage, David vaulted down the stairs from North Two to North One. Pulses of adrenaline muffled the screams from his ankle. He exploded through the doorway to the central corridor, scattering a trio of horrified nuns.
The main lobby was in its usual midday chaos. David weaved and bumped his way across it like a halfback in open field, leaving two men sprawled and cursing in his wake.
“Hang on, baby, please hang on,” he gasped, scrambling up the stairs in the South Wing. Even two at a time they seemed endless, doubling back on themselves between each landing. “Fight the bitch. Fight her fucking poison. Please …”
His feet grew leaden. His legs gave way between the third and fourth floors, then again as he stumbled onto Four South.
The corridor was empty except for one aide struggling to tie an old man safely in his wheelchair. In the seconds she spent staring at the apparition limping toward her, the patient, a stroke victim, squirmed free and fell heavily to the floor. The aide, sensing the emergency, waved him past. “Go on,” she urged. “Clarence does this all the time.”
David nodded and raced to the nurses’ station. “Code Ninety-nine Room Four twelve,” he panted. “Call it and get me some help. Code Ninety-nine Room Four twelve.”
The astonished ward secretary froze for a moment, then grabbed the phone.
For David the scene in Room 412 was the rerun of a horrible dream. The dim light, the bubbling oxygen, the intravenous setup, the motionless body. He flicked on the lights and raced to the bed. Christine, lying serenely on her back, was the dusky color of death. Through the hallway speaker the page operator began calling with uncharacteristic urgency, “Code Ninety-nine, Four South … Code Ninety-nine, Four South …”
For a second, two, his fingers worked their way over Christine’s neck, searching for a carotid artery pulse. He felt it. The faint, rhythmic tap of life against the pad of his first and second fingers. His own pulse or hers? At that moment, as if in answer to his uncertainty, Christine took a breath—a single, shallow, wonderful whisper of a breath. With the first sound, the first minute rise of her chest, David was in motion. He clamped the intravenous tubing shut, then bent over and gave two deep mouth-to-mouth breaths.
Before he had finished, a nurse burst into the room, pulling the emergency cart behind her. Over the minutes that followed, the two of them, surgeon and nurse, functioned as one. The young woman was a marvel—a controlled whirlwind, providing a needed drug or instrument almost before the words were out of his mouth.
Confronting an unknown poison, David’s approach was shotgun: a fresh intravenous solution opened wide to dilute the toxin and support Christine’s blood pressure; an oral airway and several breaths from an Ambu bag to maintain ventilation; bicarbonate to counteract lactic acid buildup.
Christine’s color darkened even more. He risked a few seconds away from the breathing bag and lifted her eyelids. Her pupils were tiny black dots, nearly lost in the brown rings that constricted them—the pinpoint pupils of a narcotic overdose. God, let it be morphine, David thought. Let it be something reversible like morphine. He ordered naloxone, the highly effective antidote for all narcotic drugs. Within seconds the nurse had injected it.
A few more breaths and David stopped again. This time to recheck Christine’s carotid pulse. With a deep sinking sensation he realized there was none.
“Slip a board under her, please,” he said, lifting Christine’s shoulders free from the bed. “You’ll have