Free Angel Face by Suzanne Forster Page A

floor, but every second counted now. He checked his eyes with a penlight, but didn’t find the dilation associated with concussion. The man didn’t appear to be breathing, so Jordan probed his airway for blockage, then performed CPR, but got no response. It was possible he’d suffered a heart attack and reached for the paddles instinctively. Sadly, they were probably the only thing that could save him now. But Jordan had to get him to the cardiac ER first, before the lack of oxygen caused irreversible brain damage.
    The supply room had no intercom. Jordan shouted for help, then ran outside and called again, but the hallway was deserted except for one ambulatory patient. He gave the startled elderly woman a reassuring nod as he sprinted past her, but that was all he could do. An abandoned gurney sat in the adjoining corridor. Jordan grabbed it, and this time his shouts were heard.
    Two interns, who probably hadn’t slept more than four hours in as many days, were huddled over foam cups ofcoffee just down the hall from him. Jordan yelled at one of them to alert the trauma unit and the other to follow him back to the storage room.
    The dread that had gripped Jordan was now an icy trickle at the base of his skull, whispering constantly that something was wrong, that what he’d seen was no accident. If the defibrillator unit was wet from Exam Three, it could have shorted out, but that didn’t explain why it was plugged in. Or what a visiting doctor was doing with the equipment in a normally locked storage room.
    Jordan thought of the woman in the hallway who’d disappeared. Could she have been the one in the dossier? A videotaped image screened through his mind like a clip from Psycho . Jordan had refused to believe she could harm anyone. It didn’t matter that he’d watched her stop her father’s heart or that the CIA called her Angel Face. He couldn’t conceive of it.
    Now he was frozen with that realization. It stuck in his mind the way ice adheres to anything warm and human. He could still see her hauntingly beautiful face when he burst back into the storeroom. The breathless intern piled in after him, but both of them came to an abrupt halt.
    “What the hell?” Jordan whispered.
    There was no body on the floor. No sign of a body anywhere.
    The visiting surgeon had vanished, and the defib unit had been unplugged.

CHAPTER 6

    J ORDAN ’S office was quiet, but his head was a brass band. He hadn’t been able to sit down at his desk or concentrate on anything but what the hell had just happened. What had happened? A body had disappeared, and there was currently a search going on for Dr. Inada. It was possible the doctor had spontaneously regained consciousness and left the storage room without anyone having seen him. But Jordan had other suspicions. There’d been no heartbeat, no respiration. He was either a miracle of science, or Jordan was in worse shape than he realized.
    He stared at the phone, paralyzed by the resistance he felt. His gut told him to call 911, but there was another number in his head, and what if that was the one he should be calling first? There were questions that had to be asked, but he didn’t want to hear the answers. He didn’t even want to dial the number, because that meant he was involved, to use Penny’s word, and he didn’t like being involved in anything he couldn’t see, touch, feel, taste, or control.
    Especially control. He’d always believed that was the mark of a good surgeon. They assumed total control of their environment, and he was now mentally circling an environment that was not only outside his experience, it felt totally outside his control.
    He’d been a snow skier in his younger days, and he would never forget the feeling on a vertical slope when your center of gravity reversed, and your head became your feet. “Wipeout!” his friends had shouted while his body flipped end over end, tumbling like a rag doll’s. There was no greater loss of control, and that