“Surely you understand,” said Clarence, his voice and face full of overwhelming disdain as he collapsed into his oversized leather office chair. “You get it, don’t you?”

“We’re very quickly approaching the procedure,” said Jackson, checking the time again on his oversized tactical wristwatch.

“You get that a member of my staff, and a man I’ve known for over twenty years, has just been fucking murdered?”

“I do. And I’m terribly—”

“Then you’re completely insane, if you expect everything to be business as usual. Insane.”

“I’m not expecting—”

“But you are,” cried Clarence, his nostrils flaring. “If you think that surgery is the only thing, or even the most important thing, on my mind right now.”

For the last two excruciatingly long minutes, Jasper sat quietly as Jackson attempted to explain the importance of Clarence staying in maximal contact at all times with the DARC team. He had gone radio silent for an hour after Dr. Wahl had been discovered. An hour too long, according to Jackson. He was maybe being a little too difficult on the beleaguered hospital director.

“We’re sorry for your loss,” Jasper said quietly.

He and Jackson had been summoned to an emergency meeting way up at his opulent, glass-walled corner office. The views looked outward over Washington Circle, and beyond, over the sparkling traffic of New Hampshire Boulevard. Jasper preferred to stick to those views, at least anything that was not inside the office, especially the look on Clarence Mitchell’s face.

“I’m about ready to pull the plug on this whole thing. I swear to God I am. You can just tell the prince, that rude, ungrateful piece of shit, that he can take a fucking hike. Go somewhere else. And you can follow him! Go to Walter Reed. Anywhere. Riyadh. I don’t care. Just take him and all this bullshit somewhere else.”

Jasper kept his eyes on the traffic, and then up higher, to a sky marred with variously dispersed contrails. He would like to have been on one of those planes hours ago, before things at the hospital got so ugly. By now he’d be long gone. But he’d also be turning his back on Jackson and the DARC team, and the prince. On Fiona.

There would be a funeral for her sister, yes. Some sad times. A time to comfort her, to be at her side. Or however far or near she’d like him to be. Details like that were still so unclear. Where they were on the gradient, the relationship scale—or more importantly, what they were—was so enticingly mysterious. And so full of potential. If he could survive the day, that was.

“It’ll be smooth sailing from here on out,” said Jackson.

“Well, by fuck it better be. How could it not? Are they gonna come after me next?!”

“Clarence,” Jasper said. “We’ve got the hospital on virtual lockdown. We have our men, as well as the Saudi guards. The cybersecurity vulnerabilities have been addressed.”

“They have? Definitely?” Clarence stared into him intently.

“Yes,” said Jasper, who took a quick look at Jackson. “Right?”

“Then why do we still have power outages?”

Jasper didn’t take his gaze off the DARC Ops leader.

Jackson, ever the diplomat, folded his hands together in his lap. “Your power system, and even your cyber defenses, are broken down into a multi-tiered layering system.”

“What the hell does that mean?”

Jackson opened his briefcase and pulled out a large tablet.

Clarence frowned. “You’re gonna leave it to your computer to tell me?”

When the device powered on and a 3D map of the hospital appeared, and after Clarence’s loud sigh, Jackson began the explanation by pointing to the different colors of each sector. “They’re separated by priority level, by how important they are to the hospital’s functioning. So for example, the power outage you mentioned, that’s only affecting the bottom tier, and so not really affecting you at all.”

“Why is that?”

“Because you don’t need lights in the old morgue,” said Jackson. “There’s no construction company today, and so it’s just sitting there.”

“Sitting there in the dark,” said Clarence.

“Of course. Who needs to see anything down there?”

“So, it’s like a pressure valve. The morgue and other non-essential—”

“We’re not even at that point yet,” Jackson said. “We’ve got so many other dead zones before we even get to non-essential. And we’ll never get to essential. Unless someone sets off an EMP device.”

Clarence looked as tired as ever, slumping an elbow onto his desk, and then his chin onto the fist it held up.

“You still with us, Clarence?” asked Jasper.

He didn’t answer.

“Can you tough it out for us?”

He finally nodded, his chin moving up and down and over the knuckles of his fist.

“Good, because we’re moving forward with the surgery as soon as we wrap up here.”

“Then let’s wrap up,” said Clarence, easing off his desk and back into that comfy chair of his. “I just want this over with.”

Jasper appreciated the sentiment. And he was sure everyone else in the hospital felt the same way.

After the meeting abruptly ended, it was time to focus on putting out another fire. Rather, put it to sleep. The easiest move would be to get Prince Saif into anesthesia as quickly as possible and get on with things. No more questions. No objections. Maybe slip him some sedatives even earlier just to speed up the process.

“I wish we could put the rest of his handlers under, too,” said Jackson, grinning in the elevator. “We could pump some sleeping gas into their room.”

Jasper couldn’t find the humor in it. He was too busy worrying about what could come next. “We should have men posted at all ventilation access points,” he said flatly.

“We’ve already got that covered,” said Jackson.

“We do?”

Jackson just smiled.

“And we really need to get power back on in those bottom-tier areas,” said Jasper as he squeezed out of the elevator door before Jackson. “They shouldn’t have even been affected in the first place.”

Jackson caught up to his pace, walking alongside in a crowded hall. “Their electrical grid is incredibly stressed right now. But it’s more of an internal problem than at outside attack. Can you believe that? The place is in shambles.”

“I’ve never been to a hospital, an American hospital, that’s in such bad shape.”

“They’re broke,” said Jackson. “That construction site downstairs, the old morgue, they haven’t worked on that in months.”

Jackson fell back behind Jasper in single file as the hallway grew increasingly congested. There were patients lying in beds in the hallway, their gurneys parked like train cars alongside the wall.

“Look at this,” Jasper said, stopping at the bed of old man whose withered gray hand kept grappling at the tubes of an IV drip. His blanket had fallen to the floor, revealing a pair of hairless bare legs that glistened under the harsh, antiseptic hallway lights.

“They’re overbooked,” said Jackson, collecting the blanket from the floor. He laid it over the confused patient while Jasper held the mans hands away from the IV.

When they continued walking, Jasper tried consciously to not look at the patients parked to the side, to not think about what they needed, or didn’t need. What he needed was to reach the prince’s room by the end of the day. “Any word on those security cameras?”

“No,” said Jackson.

“No word, or no cameras?”

“No cameras. They were malfunctioning.”

Jasper could only laugh at this point.

“But they’re fixed now.”

“You did some research into this place before taking this on, right?”

“Yeah,” said Jackson. “I checked it out.”

“So were the cameras hacked?”

Jackson gnawed on his bottom lip. “We’re not sure yet. But if they were, it won’t happen again.”

It sounded like Jackson’s crew had been kept busy today. Baling water, patchwork, all the last-minute alterations. Trying not to let this crumbling mess of a hospital implode under its own weight. Was there even a need for hackers?

“We’re working on those lights, too,” Jackson said after a brief pause.

“What lights?”

“Bottom tier.”

Jasper laughed. “As long as we have lights in the operating room, I’m happy.”

“You sure that’s all you need?”

“No.”