to look at Justin’s parents, but the ambulance was set up with a series of mirrors to allow the driver to see into the rear and so it was easy for Jacob, in the passenger seat, to make use of them. They did not interfere with the paramedics or Dr. DuBois, nor did they touch their son—the doctors at the hospital must have told them how fragile his condition was right now.
They murmured to each other, he thought before he saw that their lips moved at the same time. They were praying, their gazes fixed on their son, and he thought it was more a way to give one another comfort than to comfort themselves. For a moment, he could only envy them. When he had been in the hospital the previous week, he had been alone.
To give them privacy, he looked away and watched the shops slide past. It was after midnight and only a few were open—a couple of bars and a café or two. There weren’t many cars on the road, either.
Which was why the one behind them caught his attention before too long. He craned his neck to look in the side mirror and frowned. It was a nondescript vehicle and he couldn’t see much about it.
The senator must have noticed his interest because he looked out the back windows. They were one-way so nothing on the inside of the ambulance would be visible, and that allowed Tad Williams to stand and put his face close to the glass.
There was a flash, which Jacob thought might have been the car behind them going over a tiny bump, but the senator drew back from the window sharply.
“That was a camera,” he said.
“Do you want me to get away from them?” the driver asked. He looked at the hospital bed.
Jacob didn’t want to make this decision. He knew what could go wrong and he wasn’t ready to have that on his conscience. Rather than respond, he turned to wait for Justin’s parents, who shared a single look.
“Step on it,” the senator said. He sat hastily and swallowed hard.
The young engineer leaned back in his seat as the ambulance accelerated and the lights and sirens activated. Ahead of them, the few cars on the road pulled over sharply but the pursuing car didn’t waver. It seemed to speed up as well. His heart pounded. Amber’s throwaway threat about being offed by Big Pharma had been funny when she’d said it. They all knew she’d meant their careers might be stopped dead in the water and their company might be sunk.
But right now, with a car following an ambulance and people taking pictures of a boy in a coma, that idea had begun to seem far more literal.
“Get away from them,” Jacob said in an undertone. “I don’t like this.”
“I don’t like it, either.” The driver increased his speed. “Come on, come on—”
The light he muttered to turned green at the last second and the ambulance rocketed through the intersection and made a slight turn at the end to merge onto a highway on-ramp. The car, which had increased speed, couldn’t turn in time and went past with a screech of tires.
On the highway, the driver turned the lights and sirens off, took the immediate exit, and traversed the four-leaf clover in a tight, controlled turn that made Jacob clutch his armrest.
Behind them, an explosion of beeping erupted and paramedics began to call to one another. Jacob unbuckled his seatbelt and scrambled around, holding onto the seats to balance himself.
“What’s going on?”
“The equipment’s gone haywire,” one of them said distractedly. She shoved past Jacob. “Move.”
The young engineer stood aside, his gaze fixed on Justin’s parents. Their faces had gone gray.
“Don’t worry,” DuBois said and swung into action. He snatched a pair of scissors from one of the paramedics and made a single, practiced cut down the front of Justin’s gown. The monitors were wildly erratic with respiration and heart rate off the charts, and Jacob clutched the back of the seats in consternation.
If Justin was truly deteriorating in condition, it brought all kinds of ramifications.
“Aha,” the doctor said with satisfaction. He yanked a patch off Justin’s chest and replaced it, wiggled one of the wires at its connection point, and held a button on one of the machines down. “You, turn that off.” He gestured at a large set of machines but the paramedic seemed to know exactly what he meant.
A moment later, the set of beeps and whistles settled