Code White by Scott Britz-Cunningham

Author:Scott Britz-Cunningham
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Fiction / Thrillers, (¯`'•.¸//(*_*)\\¸.•'´¯)
ISBN: 0765331926
Publisher: Macmillan
Published: 2013-04-08T23:00:00+00:00

2:05 P.M.

Ali approached the isolation room as if it were the morgue. Indeed, the last time she had seen Rahman was at the ghusl, or ritual washing of her father’s corpse before his funeral. She had brought camphor, frankincense, and the traditional three pieces of white linen burial clothes. As a female, she was not supposed to go in to the body. But through the door she had seen Rahman standing in the place of honor beside her father’s head. One look at him was all it took to make her throw away thirteen centuries of tradition and rush headlong into the room.

“Unclean! Unclean!” she cried out. “This monster is not to touch the body. Father himself forbade it.” Immediately there was an uproar, for she had looked upon her father’s nakedness. Rahman’s face went pale. She saw that he was afraid—afraid of what she would do next—afraid that she would call out the name of the one he had wronged. But she could not utter it, although it was as near to her as her own. She felt paralyzed. She could neither weep nor shriek, only feel her knees buckle, her heart pound in its secret prison. The hot rage that coursed through her found no tongue. Mute seconds passed, until she was ejected at last into the arms of the women in the adjoining room. The last thing she saw was Rahman, gloating at her, as the door was shut in her face.

* * *

Ali and Harry entered the small guard-chamber in front of the isolation room. Ali lingered in the doorway, breathing deeply to calm herself, while Harry sized up the three uniformed police guards and called out to one sitting at the table looking at a magazine.

“How’s our man doing, Officer … Dayton?” he said, reading the man’s name off his badge. “Any peep out of him?”

“Naw. He’s just sitting on the bed with his eyes shut, mouthing to himself in Arabic. Something like a rosary, from the sound of it.”

“We need to have a look-see.”

“Be my guest.”

Ali shuddered as Harry took out his gun and laid it on the table. She didn’t like guns and had never thought that he might have been carrying one. As he went to the inner door and keyed the combination, she eyed him charily. What other surprises might he have in store?

The ten-by-twelve-foot isolation room was mint green—green having been chosen by the psychiatrists as the most soothing color for the desperate and the deranged. There was a small bed with an iron frame and a thin mattress wrapped in taut military style with a green woolen blanket. Rahman was lying atop the blanket, his right wrist handcuffed to the bed frame. Even from a distance, the shock of seeing him gave Ali a knot in her stomach. The face of a man who could murder a thousand people. The face of a man who wants to kill my Jamie.

Rahman did not notice Ali, who hung back, watching through the doorway.

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