pulled from the suite’s wastebasket days earlier, one she’d kept without knowing why.
“She was on the phone with Mr. Preston Wednesday night. There’s a continuity clause in the company charter. If a doctor certifies you brain-dead or you’re declared deceased before Friday morning, full operating control of Whitfield Holdings passes to Preston as interim chair, and the family trust releases a liquidity payment straight into an account Miss Vanessa controls in the Caymans.”
“How much.”
Rosa swallowed. “Forty-six million dollars.”
I lay there and let that land.
“They didn’t only cut my brake line,” I said quietly. “They bought the people around my bed.”
“Not all of them,” Rosa said. “Your attending physician, Dr. Colton — I heard him tell her the ‘dosage adjustment’ happens tonight during the two a.m. round.”
Colton. I’d funded a wing of his research lab three years ago with my own name on the
door.
Loyalty, in this city, seemed to expire faster than anything else I’d ever bought.
“What are we going to do?” Rosa asked, and for the first time her voice cracked with real fear instead of nerves. “There are two of Preston’s men rotating the elevator bank. If Dr. Colton walks in here tonight with that syringe—”
“He won’t get the chance,” I said. “Not if you help me do one thing first.”
She nodded before I even finished the sentence.
PART 3
“There’s a maintenance office in the basement,” I told her. “You have clearance for the service corridors?”
“I do.”
“Inside the engineering supervisor’s office there’s a secure landline that doesn’t run through the hospital switchboard. I want you to call a number I’m going to give you, and say four words. Nothing more.”
