Blown by Francine Mathews Read Free Book Online Page B

staff—but the FBI had already reviewed the personnel files and clearances of everybody employed by the vice president, from the moment she’d been kidnapped two weeks before. They’d found nothing suspicious. All five of Payne’s employees looked clean as a whistle.
    Ricin is composed of two hemagglutinins and two toxins, RCL III and RCL IV; these are dimers roughly 66,000 daltons in molecular weight . . . the B chain of polypeptides binds to cell surface glycoproteins . . . the A chain acts on the ribosomal subunit . . . inhibits protein synthesis . . . leads to cell death. Basic structure is similar to botulinum toxin, cholera toxin, diphtheria toxin, tetanus toxin . . .
    In other words, he thought savagely, you rot out your guts and then you die.
    “Tom?”
    He glanced toward the door. Steve Price, the Post reporter, flashing his badge at the conference room guard. “You missed the show,” Tom said.
    “No choice. I got a call from George Enfield.”
    “The Speaker?”
    “His wife’s dying of ricin poisoning.”
    “Jesus,” Tom muttered.
    Price swung toward him, an athletic figure in a plaid shirt and down vest. He looked like a war correspondent: craggy face, unkempt hair, and functional clothes, hot on the trail of a major story. The Front was down there somewhere on the street.
    “Dana remembered a guy at Hains Point,” he told Tom. “Handing out water. It tallies with the letter.”
    “What’d she tell you?”
    “I taped it.” He lifted his recorder tantalizingly in the air. “She asked me to get it to people who could use it. I figured that meant you.”
     
    Sibley Hospital sits off Massachusetts Avenue, in a section of Washington known as Spring Valley, where the homes and the trees are a century old and antiques stores vie for commerce with gourmet food shops. Unlike most urban hospitals, Sibley, the preserve of the well-heeled and the genteel, is usually immune to violence. Tonight, however, Tom Shephard was forced to abandon his rental car three blocks from the emergency room entrance. A thicket of vehicles cut off access: private cars, television vans, and three ambulances desperately fighting to reach the main doors. It was four minutes past midnight, and busy as noon.
    “This is all because of the marathon?” demanded the forensic artist standing beside him. “Fuck.”
    Casey Marlowe had his IdentiKit under his arm. It was a baseline collection of facial features he could plug into a suspect sketch and refine as his witness suggested. If, Tom thought, the witness was still alive. They shouldered their way through the throng of people at the hospital doors.
    Tom forced himself to look into the victims’ faces: this red-haired woman, no more than thirty, whose brow was blistered with sweat and whose eyelids were closing, supported by a man who was lover or brother or husband—his mouth twisted with anxiety and fear. This kid of nineteen, in a Georgetown University sweatshirt, whose mother was struggling to keep him upright as he staggered forward. The couple who were helping each other walk to the door. The guy in his sixties who’d sunk down with his back against the hospital’s outer wall. He was vomiting blood.
    At least sixty people stood on the chilly pavement in front of Sibley, and more filled the waiting room beyond the doors.
    “The hospital is closed!” a voice rang out at the head of the line. Tom craned to find the source—a figure in blue scrubs, squat and grim-faced, who leaned through the half-open door. “The emergency room is full.”
    A groan went up from the crowd. “Who ever heard of a hospital closing ?” one voice shouted furiously. “My daughter’s been poisoned! She needs an IV feed, not a cot in a gym, God damn it!”
    “City fire regulations prevent us accepting even one more patient,” the man in scrubs said brutally. “I repeat, the hospital is closed . If you require medical care, and you ran the Marine Corps Marathon today, we suggest you report