Nocturne. That was how he thought of himself then, for that was what she called him. He’d never been given a real name. His existence had never been officially recorded. His grandfather sometimes called him “boy” or “spawn,” but his mother called him Nocturne. It was the music of the night, she explained to him in one of her more lucid moments. Among the junk on the shelves in the basement, he’d found an old phonograph. It hadn’t worked when he discovered it, but he tinkered, something he had a lot of time to do, and he coaxed the turntable into motion and began to listen to the old 78s he found boxed on the shelves. His mother told him they’d belonged to his grandmother and that when she died, the old man had put them in the basement, put away all reminders of her, and that he’d buried her in the fields somewhere. Some nights when Nocturne walked with his mother, she stopped and listened for a long time. She’s crying, she would say. Do you hear her?
Yes, he would answer, although he heard only the frogs and the crickets.
They would walk in silence back to the house, to the basement, and Nocturne would put something gentle and sad on the phonograph, and they would sit on his old bed together in the dark while she wept.
At 10:30P.M., in the laundry of the St. Croix Regional Medical Center, the man known to his coworkers as Max Ableman turned off his boom box. It had been a good evening. Except for the interruption by the Secret Service agent, everything had been quiet. Although Thorsen had surprised him, Nightmare wasn’t greatly alarmed. In fact, there was one aspect of Thorsen’s presence and questions that pleased him. If Thorsen was nosing around the hospital, it meant he was concerned about Jorgenson as well as Jorgenson’s daughter. He was looking in two directions. His attention was divided. Nightmare knew the first rule of any successful operation was focus.
From his clothes locker, Nightmare took a roll of silver duct tape and a sealed glass cylinder fifteen inches long and five inches in diameter. He also lifted a small armload of dirty linen from a pile in front of one of the washers. He descended the stairs to the tunnel, selected a laundry cart, put the cylinder in the cart, and covered it with the soiled linen. Then he headed to the main hospital building. He rode the freight elevator to the fourth floor. The nurses in trauma ICU paid no attention to him as he went about his normal duty of collecting the laundry. He spent a few extra minutes in the room of a man who’d flatlined the night before, then he crossed to the room where Tom Jorgenson lay comatose. He had to wait less than thirty seconds before the alarm went off, signaling another cardiac arrest on the far side of the ICU. He heard the nurses call a Code Blue, and they directed their attention to the situation. He had a window of a few minutes.
He reached into the cart and drew out the glass cylinder and the duct tape. Inside the cylinder, cradled among Styrofoam pellets, was a length of one-and-a-quarter-inch PVC pipe. The pipe, capped and sealed to be airtight, contained C-4, a volatile plastic explosive. The C-4 was fitted with a detonator that could be triggered remotely. A vacuum surrounded the pipe, a precaution that would prevent the scent of the C-4 from being detected by bomb dogs. The inner surface of the glass was coated with common airplane glue. There was enough air in the sealed PVC pipe itself to allow detonation of the C-4. In addition to the destruction caused by the explosion, the glue-coated fragments of glass would be like burning shrapnel, setting the room ablaze. Nightmare intended to attach the device to the underside of the bed with the duct tape and to detonate it the next time the First Lady visited.
He knelt beside the bed and leaned close to the man who lay there.
“Do you remember yourIliad?‘The day shall come, that great avenging day, which Troy’s proud glories in the dust shall lay, when Priam’s powers and Priam’s self shall fall, and one prodigious ruin swallow all.’ Old man, that great avenging day has come. You will die and the Troy you built on your lies will crumble.” He glanced back through the door. The nurses were still occupied with the Code Blue. “But I wanted to give you something to take into the darkness with you. I wanted you to know she’sgoing to die with you. That’s why I didn’t kill you in the orchard. I knew they would bring you here, and I knew she would come.”
“Ableman, what are you doing?” The security guard filled the doorway.
Nightmare stood up and quickly tucked loose bedding into the mattress. “Straightening his bed.”
“That’s the nurses’ job,” Randy O’Meara said.
“They’re busy trying to save a life.” Nightmare dropped the bomb and tape back into the laundry cart.
“You were saying something to him,” O’Meara pressed him.
“Praying for him.”
“Didn’t sound like a prayer to me.”
Nightmare slipped past the guard and shoved his cart down the hallway. He made for the stairway.
