“Twenty minutes, Doctor,” I whispered.“Have the packet ready at the nurses’ station, or I will dismantle this floor piece by piece.”
He swallowed hard, gave a single nod, and hurried toward the terminal.
I turned my back on the sterile white room and walked down the emergency stairwell, stepping out into the cold drizzle of the loading dock.I reached into my coat, pulled out a second phone—a battered, nondescript black brick wrapped in electrical tape that had sat inside an oiled steel lockbox beneath the floorboards of my greenhouse since 2004—and pressed power.
The boot sequence bypassed the public carrier networks, latching onto a private satellite uplink.
I dialed an eleven-digit string of numbers from memory.
It rang once.
“Speak,” came a raspy, dry voice on the other end.
“I need surgical intervention,” I said.“Traumatic encephalopathy, skull fractures, secondary intra-abdominal hemorrhage.
Twenty-four-year-old female, twenty weeks gestation.
