Chapter 4 - The Shadow in the Parking Garage
Before Daniel could process the avalanche of confessions, a piercing alarm shrieked down the hallway.
Code Blue. Pediatric ICU. Room 402.
Daniel’s blood ran cold. Room 402 was where little Maya lay recovering from her craniotomy.
Without a word to his father, Daniel sprinted down the corridor, his boots pounding against the tile floor. He reached the pediatric intensive care unit doors just as two nurses burst out of Room 402, their faces pale with terror.
“Dr. Bennett! Thank God!” nurse Sarah gasped, grabbing his arm. “Some man—he bypassed the front desk wearing a hospital maintenance uniform! He was standing over the patient’s bed with a syringe!”
Daniel pushed past her, bursting into Room 402.
The heart monitor was flatlining, emitting a steady, ear-piercing tone. The window overlooking the hospital’s subterranean parking garage had been shattered from the inside, shards of glass sparkling across the linoleum.
At the center of the room, little Maya lay motionless, her breathing shallow, her skin turning an alarming shade of blue.
“Malconscious respiratory arrest! She’s been injected with a paralytic agent!” Daniel roared, grabbing the bag-valve-mask ventilator from the crash cart and slamming it over the child’s face, pumping oxygen with frantic, desperate strokes. “Push atropine! Charge the defibrillator to fifty joules! Now!”
For three agonizing minutes, Daniel worked with the ferocious intensity of a man fighting Death itself. He wasn't just a surgeon performing a protocol anymore; he was an uncle fighting for the last living fragment of his family.
Thump.
He delivered compressions.
Beep… beep… beep.
Slowly, agonizingly, the erratic spikes returned to the heart monitor. Maya gasped, her eyes flying open in sheer terror as natural respiration kicked back in.
Daniel collapsed against the side of the bed, his forehead slick with cold sweat, his hands shaking so violently he had to grip the metal railing to steady himself. He looked out through the shattered window of the fourth-floor room down into the dimly lit subterranean parking garage below.
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A single black sedan was screeching away from the emergency exit ramp, its tires burning rubber against the wet concrete, disappearing into the Chicago night without a license plate.
They were here. The syndicate hadn't just found Thomas and Maya; they had tracked them straight to St. Jude Memorial Hospital. And they knew Daniel was involved.
