Chương 11
She answered on the first half-ring. "Sloane! Where are you?"
"Rolling out of the gym parking lot," I said, my voice level, watching the side mirrors as I pulled onto the asphalt. "Tell me about the van."
"It’s an older Ford Econoline, white, no logos on the panels," Claire said, her voice shaking violently against the speaker. She was crying, but she was a triage nurse; she forced the panic down beneath clinical observation. "Commercial plates, state exempt. The driver had an ID badge clipped to his pocket from Tidewater Transport Services. That's a private sub-contractor out of Jacksonville."
"How long ago did they clear the hospital bay?"
"Eight minutes. Maybe nine," Claire said. "They took the access road behind the physical therapy annex, heading straight for the bypass. Sloane, they strapped her to a backboard. They gave her five milligrams of midazolam through her IV before they even wheeled her into the lift. She couldn't keep her eyes open. She couldn't even say my name."
"Midazolam," I repeated. Versed. A fast-acting benzodiazepine that induced retrograde amnesia and heavy sedation. Boyd’s tame magistrate hadn't just signed a transport order; he had sanctioned a chemical gag. By the time a state evaluator saw Lainey tomorrow morning, she would be slack-jawed, unresponsive, and clinically incoherent—the textbook portrait of acute psychotic delirium.
"Claire, listen to me," I said, hitting the blinker and angling the truck onto Highway 70 West. "Stay at the hospital. Don't go back to the Harkers Island cabin. Go straight to the chief of nursing's office. You pull every digital security log from the emergency room entrance between four p.m. and now. You pull the intake doctor's initial handwritten notes before Boyd’s administration friends can scrub the server. You understand?"
"What are you going to do?" Claire breathed.
"They're taking Highway 70 through the Croatan," I said. "There is no other way to get a heavy van from Morehead City to New Bern without adding forty minutes through the back swamps. I’m going to catch them before they reach the Trent River bridge."
"Sloane, if you hit a state-contracted vehicle—"
"They don't have state authority," I told her coldly. "They have a piece of paper signed by a corrupt magistrate who takes campaign cash in white envelopes. Keep your phone on."
I tapped the screen, ending the call, and pressed the pedal down to the floorboards.
The diesel turbo whistled shrill and sharp under the steel hood. The speedometer climbed past sixty, then seventy, the yellow lane markers blurring into a solid golden ribbon under the high beams.
To the left and right, the commercial sprawl of car dealerships, strip malls, and seafood shacks began to thin out, swallowed by the suffocating black wall of the Croatan National Forest. The air out here was thick and damp, heavy with the stench of peat moss, stagnant brackish canals, and loblolly pines. The road was a four-lane divided highway, flat as a carpenter's level, cut straight through sixty miles of coastal wilderness.
At this hour on a Thursday night, there were no tourists. There were only long-haul timber trucks, the occasional local pickup, and empty asphalt.
I gripped the wheel at nine and three. The knuckles of my right hand were throbbing, swollen and hot where I had driven them into Colt’s sternum. The pain was clean; it kept the edges of my focus razor-sharp.
In the Corps, we called this the transition phase. You move from the point of contact to the point of exploitation. You do not stop to evaluate your feelings about the ground you just took; you immediately isolate the enemy’s reserve forces before they can dig into prepared defensive positions.
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New Bern Creek Behavioral Health was an old colonial-style estate turned private asylum, situated on a remote peninsula off the Neuse River. It had high brick walls, electronic iron gates, and private security guards hired from Jacksonville private military firms. Once they got Lainey behind those gates, under a valid involuntary commitment hold, North Carolina General Statute 122C gave them seventy-two hours of absolute medical custody.
In seventy-two hours, a corrupt attending physician could load her bloodstream with enough neuroleptics to make her swear she fell off a skyscraper, let alone a set of stairs.
