The Ambler Warning Read online

  Several weeks ago, however, everything had changed for him. It was nothing objective, nothing physical, nothing observable. Yet the plain fact was that he had reached someone, and that would make all the difference. More precisely, she would. She already had begun to. She was a young psychiatric nurse, and her name was Laurel Holland. And—it was as simple as this—she was on his side.

  A few minutes later, the orderly arrived with his lead-footed patient at a large semicircular area of Ward 4W called the lounge. Lounge: neither the noun nor the verb was necessarily appropriate. More accurate was its technical designation: surveillance atrium. On one end was some rudimentary exercise equipment and a bookshelf with a fifteen-year-old edition of the World Book encyclopedia. On the other was the dispensary: a long counter, a slat-like sliding window of wire-mesh glass, and, visible through it, a shelf of white plastic bottles with pastel-colored labels. As Ambler had come to learn, the contents of those bottles could be as incapacitating as manacles of steel. They produced torpor without peace, sluggishness without serenity.

  But the institution’s concern was not peace so much as pacification. Half a dozen orderlies had gathered in the area this morning. It was not unusual: only for the orderlies did the designation lounge make sense. The ward had been designed for a dozen patients; it served a population of one. As a result, the area became, informally, a sort of rest-and-recreation center for orderlies who worked in more demanding wards. Their tendency to congregate here, in turn, increased the security in this one.

  As Ambler turned and nodded at a pair of orderlies seated at a low foam-cushioned bench, he allowed a slow rivulet of drool to roll down his chin; the gaze he turned toward them was unfocused and hazy. He had already registered the presence of six orderlies as well as the attending psychiatrist and—Ambler’s one lifeline—the psychiatric nurse.

  “Candy time,” one of the orderlies said; the others snickered.

  Ambler made his way slowly to the dispensary, where the auburn-haired nurse was waiting with his morning’s pills. An imperceptible flicker—a fleeting glance, a fractional head nod—passed between them.

  He had learned her name by accident; she’d spilled a cup of water on herself, and the fabric that was supposed to conceal her acetate nameplate became wet and translucent. Laurel Holland: the letters were ghosted beneath the fabric tab. He’d said her name aloud in a low voice; she seemed flustered yet somehow not displeased. With that, something was sparked between them. He studied her face, her posture, her voice, her manner. She was in her thirties, he figured, with hazel eyes flecked with green and a lithe frame. Smarter and prettier than she realized.

  Conversations between them were murmured and brief, nothing that would attract notice from the surveillance systems. But a great deal was conveyed even through an exchange of glances and hovering smiles. As far as the system was concerned, he was Patient No. 5312. But by now, he knew that he was much more than a number to her.

  He had cultivated her sympathy over the past six weeks not by acting—she would have been on to that, sooner rather than later—but by allowing himself to respond to her as she was, in a way that encouraged her to do the same. She recognized something about him—recognized his sanity.

  Knowing this had bolstered his faith in himself, and his determination to escape. “I don’t want to die in this place,” he had murmured to her one morning. She made no reply, but her stricken look told him all he needed to know.

  “Your meds,” she had said brightly, the next morning, placing three pills on his palm that looked slightly different from the usual dulling neuroleptics. Tylenol, she mouthed. Clinical protocol required him to swallow the tablets under her direct supervision and open his mouth afterward to show that he had not secreted them anywhere. He did so, and within an hour he had proof that she had told him the truth. He was lighter on his feet, lighter, too, in spirit. Within a few days, he began to feel brighter eyed, more buoyant—more himself. He had to make an effort to appear medicated, to feign the heavy-gaited Compazine shuffle that the orderlies were accustomed to.

  The Parrish Island Psychiatric Facility was a maximum-security center, well equipped with latest-generation technology. Yet no technology ever invented was wholly immune to the human factor. Now, with her body shielding her movements from the camera, she slipped her key card into the elastic waistband of his white-cotton uniform.

  “I’m hearing there could be a Code Twelve this morning,” she murmured. The code referred to a major medical emergency, requiring a patient’s evacuation to an offsite medical center. Laurel Holland did not explain how she knew, but he could guess: the likeliest scenario was that a patient had been complaining of chest pains—early warning signs of a more serious cardiac event. They would be monitoring the situation, knowing that if there were further signs of sudden arrhythmia, the patient would have to be removed to an ICU on the mainland. Ambler remembered one previous Code Twelve—an older patient had suffered a hemorrhagic stroke—and recalled the security procedures that had been followed. As formidable as they were, they represented an irregularity: an irregularity he might be able to exploit.

  “Listen,” she whispered. “And be ready to act.”

  Two hours later—hours of glazed silence and immobility on Ambler’s part—an electronic chime sounded, followed by an electronic voice: Code Twelve, Ward Two East. The prerecorded voice was of the sort heard in airport shuttle trains and modernized subway cars, unsettlingly pleasant. At once, the orderlies were on their feet. Must be that old guy, in 2E. His second MI, right? Most of them left for the second-floor ward. Both the chime and the message repeated at frequent intervals.

  An elderly heart-attack victim, then, just as one would have predicted. Ambler felt a hand on his shoulder. The same thickset orderly who had been at his door earlier in the morning.

  “Standard procedure,” the man said. “Patients return to their room during all emergency protocols.”

  “What’s going on?” Ambler asked, thick tongued and dull.

  “Nothing you need to worry about. You’ll be safe and sound in your room.” Translation: lockdown. “Now come with me.”

  Long minutes later, the two men were in front of Ambler’s room. The orderly presented his card to the reader, a gray plastic device mounted at waist level near the door, and the hatch-style door slid open.

  “In you go,” the thickset Midwesterner said.

  “Need help to . . .” Ambler took a few steps toward the threshold and then turned back to the orderly, gesturing helplessly toward the porcelain commode.

  “Oh hell,” the orderly said, his nostrils flared in disgust, and followed Ambler into the room.

  You only get one go. No mistakes.

  As the orderly came over to him, Ambler stooped, keeping his legs slightly bent at the knees, as if he were starting to crumple. Suddenly he shot upward, ramming the man’s jaw with his head. Panic and bewilderment showed in the orderly’s face as the jarring force of impact was absorbed: the shuffling, narcotized inmate had turned into a whirlwind of activity—what had happened? Moments later, the orderly fell heavily to the vinyl-tiled floor, and Ambler was on him, going through his pockets.

  No mistakes. He could not afford even one.

  He collected the chip card and the ID badge and then swiftly changed into the man’s dove-gray shirt and trousers. The fit was approximate but not absurd: it could withstand a casual glance. He quickly rolled the trouser cuffs up and inside, invisibly shortening the in-seam. The waist of the trousers rode over the stun belt: he would have given almost anything to be rid of it, but this was physically impossible in the time he had. All he could do was cinch in the uniform’s gray fabric belt and hope the black nylon mesh of the REACT device remained concealed.

  Holding the orderly’s chip card to the internal card reader, he opened the door to his room and glanced out. There was nobody in the hallway just now. All nonessential staff had been dispatched to the scene of the medical emergency.

  Woul
d the hatch close automatically? He couldn’t afford to be wrong. Stepping into the hallway, Ambler held the card to the outside reader. After a couple of clicks, the door slid shut.

  Now he raced a few yards to the wide push-bar-equipped door at the end of the hallway. One of the four-point Electrolatch doors. Locked, of course. He presented the same key card he had just used, heard a few clicks as a lock motor turned over. Then nothing. It remained locked.

  This wasn’t a passageway authorized for orderlies.

  He realized why Laurel Holland had given him her chip card: the doorway had to open onto the same corridor by which the dispensary was stocked.

  He tried her key card.

  This time the door opened.

  He found himself in a narrow service corridor, dimly lit by a strip of low-wattage fluorescents. He looked right, taking in the wheeled linen cart at the other end of the corridor, and crept toward it. It was obvious that the janitors hadn’t visited the area yet today. There were cigarette butts on the floor, and cellophane wrappers, and then his shoe encountered something flat and metal: an empty can of Red Bull that someone had stomped on. Responding to an indistinct intuition, Ambler stuck it in his back pocket.

  How much time did he have? More concretely, how long before the orderly’s disappearance would be noted? Within a few minutes, the Code Twelve would be concluded and someone would be sent to retrieve Ambler from his room. He had to get out of the building as fast as possible.

  His fingertips brushed against something projecting from the wall. He had found it: the metal lid of the laundry chute. He climbed inside, holding on to the entrance ledge with both hands and feeling around him with his legs. He had worried that the chute might be too small; it fact, it was too large, and there was no side-mounted scuttle ladder, as he’d dared hope. Instead, the chute was lined with smooth sheet steel. To stop from falling, he had to press against opposite sides of the chute with both his hands and his sneaker-clad feet.

  He slowly lowered himself down the chute, repositioning each of his limbs in strenuous sequence; the muscular strain imposed was terrific and, before long, terrifically painful. Rest was not an option; muscles had to be exerted at all times, or else he would plunge, in what seemed to be a straight drop.

  It seemed as if hours had passed by the time he had scuttle-rappelled to the bottom, though he knew the elapsed time was closer to two minutes. His muscles were shuddering, spasming in agony, even as he pushed through bags of soiled laundry, nearly gagging at the fetor of human sweat and excrement. He felt as if he were digging himself out of a grave, clawing, wriggling, forcing himself through a resistant substance. Every fiber of his musculature was screaming for rest, yet there was no time for rest.

  He finally pushed his way onto a hard cement floor, and he was—where?—in a hot, low-ceilinged basement space, loud with the rumble and din of laundry machines. He craned his head. At the end of a long row of white-enameled industrial washers, two workers were loading a machine.

  He stood up and stepped across the aisle of laundry machines, forcing discipline upon his quivering muscles: if he was seen, his steps had to be confident. Once he was out of the sight line of the laundry workers, he stood beside a row of wheeled canvas laundry carts and assessed his location.

  He knew that medical evacuations were conducted using a high-speed boat and that the boat would be landing shortly, if it had not already arrived. Right now the heart-attack victim was being strapped onto a gurney. If Ambler’s plans had any chance of succeeding, he could afford no delays.

  He had to get himself on that boat.

  Which meant finding his way onto the loading dock. I don’t want to die in this place: he wasn’t just playing on Laurel Holland’s sympathies when he said it. He had spoken the truth, perhaps the most urgent truth he knew.

  “Hey,” a voice called out. “What the fuck are you doing here?”

  The petty authority of a midlevel ward attendant, someone whose life consisted of taking shit from his bosses, and giving it to those he bossed.

  Ambler forced an easygoing smile as he turned toward a small bald man with a cottage-cheese complexion and eyes that seemed to swivel like a surveillance camera.

  “Take it easy, dude,” Ambler said. “I swear I wasn’t smoking.”

  “This is a joke to you?” The supervisor walked over to him. He glanced at the badge on Ambler’s shirt. “How’s your Spanish? Because I can have you busted down to ground maintenance, you—” He suddenly broke off, having realized that the face on the ID badge was not that of the man in the uniform. “Holy shit,” he breathed.

  Then he did something curious: he moved about twenty feet away and unhooked a device from his belt. It was the radio transmitter that activated the stun belt.

  No! Ambler couldn’t let it happen. If the belt was activated, he would be struck down by a tidal wave of pain and left twitching and spasming on the floor. All his plans would be for nothing. He would die in there. A nameless captive, pawn of forces he would never understand. As if of their own accord, Ambler’s hands reached for the flattened soda can in his back pocket, his subconscious mind operating a split second before his conscious one.

  It was impossible to remove the stun belt. But it was possible to slide the piece of flat metal underneath the belt—and that was what he did, shoving it against his skin with all his strength, hardly conscious of the way it scraped his flesh. The stun belt’s two metal contacts now rested on the conductive metal.

  “Welcome to a world of pain,” the supervisor said in a level voice as he pressed the stun-belt activator.

  From the rear of the belt Ambler heard a raspy buzzing. His body was no longer the path of least resistance between the stun prongs; the flattened metal can was. He smelled a wisp of smoke, and then the buzzing ceased.

  The belt had been shorted out.

  Ambler charged at the supervisor, swiftly overtaking him and tackling him to the floor. The man’s head slammed against the concrete, and he let out a low, concussed moan. Ambler remembered what one of the training officers at Consular Operations always insisted: that bad luck was just the flip side of good luck. There’s opportunity in every mishap. It didn’t make logical sense, but to Ambler, often enough, it made intuitive sense. Glancing at the series of initials underneath the man’s name, Ambler saw that he had inventory-management responsibilities. That meant overseeing how things entered and left the building—which meant regular use of the service entrances. The building’s actual points of egress were far more demanding even than the internal gateways: they required biometric signatures from authorized personnel. Such as the man who lay limply at Ambler’s feet. He replaced the orderly’s badge he had been wearing with that of the superintendent. Even unconscious, the man would be his ticket out.

  The steel gate at the west service exit bore a white-and-red sign that stated the policy bluntly: USE OF THIS PASSAGEWAY BY NONAUTHORIZED PERSONNEL STRICTLY PROHIBITED: ALARM WILL SOUND. There was no keyhole or card reader by the push bar. Instead, there was something far more formidable: a wall-mounted device whose simple interface consisted of a horizontal glass rectangle and a push button. It was a retinal-scan device, and it was virtually infallible. The capillaries that emerge from the optic nerve and radiate through the retina had a unique configuration in every individual. Unlike fingerprint-based readers, which worked with only sixty indices of resemblance, retinal scans involved many hundreds of them. As a result, retinal-scan devices had a false-accept rate that was essentially zero.

  Which wasn’t the same as foolproof. Say hello to your authorized personnel, Ambler thought as he put his arms beneath those of the unconscious supervisor, hoisting him before the scanner and holding his eyes open with his fingers. He pushed the button with his left elbow, and two bursts of red light came from the scanner glass. After a couple of long seconds, there was the sound of a whirring motor from inside the steel door, and it swung open. Ambler let the man drop to the floor, walked through the gate and then up a sho
rt flight of concrete steps.

  He was at a loading dock at the west side of the building, breathing unfiltered air for the first time in a very long while. The day was overcast: cold, wet, dismal. But he was outside. A giddy, silly feeling rose in him, fleetingly, clamped down by a larger anxiety. He was in greater danger than ever before. From Laurel Holland he knew about the electrified perimeter fencing. The only way out was to be officially escorted out—or to be one of the official escorts.

  He heard the distant sound of a motorboat and then, closer by, another motorized sound. An electric vehicle, like an oversize golf cart, was driving up to the south side of the building. In short order, a gurney was wheeled up to the back. The electric cart would take the patient to the boat.

  Ambler took a deep breath, strode around the building, and ran up to the vehicle, banging on the driver’s side. The driver regarded him warily.

  You’re calm; you’re bored. It’s just a job. “They told me I was supposed to stick with the heart-attack guy all the way to the medical center,” Ambler said, climbing aboard. Meaning: I’m no happier with the assignment than you are. “Newbies get all the shit jobs,” he went on. The tone was of mild complaint, the message one of apology. He folded his arms on his chest, concealing his badge and its ill-matched photo ID. “This joint’s the same as every place I ever worked.”