Read Online Code White by Scott Britz-Cunningham - Free Book Online

drew Harry’s attention toward the exam suite as a man in a white coat and flopping tie came charging out, Tia shyly following at his heels. “What the hell’s going on?” he demanded.
    Harry brushed aside the challenge and turned to Tia first. “Ma’am, I need you to lock this lobby door from the outside and keep an eye on it until someone can come and rope it off.” Only then, after Tia had set an example by swiftly responding to his authority, did he address the man in white. “Dr. Saulter, we have a suspicious object in this lobby. You and I need to make a sweep of whatever rooms you have back there. We need to clear that section of all personnel. Immediately!”
    Nostrils flaring with indignation, Dr. Saulter turned with a rude jerk and stalked back toward the exam suite with Harry in tow. As they passed through the door, Harry stopped at a wall phone and waved Dr. Saulter on. His heart was pounding. He was trying to solve several problems at once. There were two floors above this one; below it, the ground floor and two basement levels. The whole section had to be evacuated. But how far? What was the bomb’s kill radius? What was its purpose? Don’t let your mind race like this, he warned himself. You have a protocol to deal with these situations. What does it say to do first? He forced himself to remember the bundle of numbers that had to be called. Via landline. No pagers, no cell phones, obviously. Top of the list was 911—the Chicago Police Department Bomb Squad.
    *   *   *
    The air of Operating Room Three was perfumed with incense for the ear—the unhurried echoes of stone chapels and of cloister-walks polished by the tread of centuries:
    Oculi omnium in te sperant, Domine,
    Et tu das illis escam in tempore opportuno.
    The words of the chant meant nothing to Richard Helvelius. He was a nonbeliever and not a monk. But he was convinced that the slow, patient rhythms of the music had a positive effect upon his autonomic nervous system. They regularized his heart rate and blood pressure, and gave him a feeling of standing outside of time and place—a very subjective response, admittedly, but one that helped him to concentrate his thoughts.
    He was standing back a little from the operating table, holding his bloodstained gloves upright, thinking. It was time to begin the dissection and removal of the AVM from Jamie’s brain. To minimize the chance of bleeding, he had already isolated the major vessels and injected them with fast-hardening glue made of n-butyl-cyanoacrylate. The glue should be hard now. Reaching into the small, circular operating field, he checked each of the veins by clamping it and watching to make sure that the AVM did not swell up. Okay, that one’s safe. Now place the permanent clip. Keep the clip as close to brain tissue as you can. A long stump can rupture.…
    As he worked, he encountered something soft and purplish, about the size of a walnut. Blood clot. Something was not done right the last time we were in here. There was a little bleeding afterward. Helvelius called for a suction tip and ran it back and forth over the clot, which disappeared in small, jelly-like chunks. Good! Now I have a little more working room. He used that extra room to inspect the veins along the bottom of the AVM, lifting the tumor very gently with a flat retractor blade . I don’t like those veins. Their walls are very thin. If one tears open, it’ll pull back deep into the substance of the brain, and I’ll have to dig deep to stop the bleeding.
    Helvelius worked cautiously and deliberately. By the time the CD player had changed to a new disk, he had sealed off all but one last big vein without breaking any of them. That last one he left open to keep dammed-up blood pressure from engorging the AVM. Now it was time to go after the arterial feeders. One by one, he clipped and then cut them, always taking care not to disturb the flow to any branches that fed into normal brain. These arteries were