Page 7 of Every Last One
“Thanks.” She walked past them and right up to the lieutenant. One of his hands was on a hip, while the other had a death grip on a to-go cup. “Lieutenant Kreiger?”
“That’s me.” His posture tensed, becoming defensive like a caged lion bracing to attack. “And I take it you’re our FBI negotiators?”
“What gave it away?” Brice teased while pointing at his vest, but the lieutenant didn’t look amused.
He took a slow draw from his coffee cup.
She hadn’t expected the red carpet to be rolled out, but some professional courtesy would have been appreciated. “Special Agent Sandra Vos,” she said, extending her hand, to offset the lieutenant’s lack of a cordial greeting.
He left her hand hanging there. “And you?” Kreiger swiveled his head toward Brice.
“Special Agent Brice Sutton.”
“Well, welcome to the circle of hell. The hospital is in complete lockdown. No way in, no way out. I’ve had officers block off a three-block radius, and we estimate approximately eleven hundred people inside between patients, staff, and visitors.”
The life of every last one rests on my shoulders…“That’s a lot of people.”
“It’s a big hospital. Eight floors.”
“Does the hospital have an emergency protocol in place with the MPD?” Sandra asked, knowing that many large facilities set this up to prepare for worst-case scenarios.
“It was in progress but not yet finalized.”
“I assume the hospital has security, though…” Sandra was curious how things had escalated to complete lockdown.
“Standard hospital security has one guy posted at every door and one guy watching camera feeds all day. We haven’t heard from any of them.”
“They must not have looked suspicious until it was too late.” That was all Sandra could think of to explain the silence.
Kreiger continued as if she hadn’t spoken. “A woman called nine-one-one from inside and reported a woman with a gun. She got as far as that before she was cut off. We have no idea what floor she was calling from.”
“There’s at least two, then,” Sandra said. “We were told there was a man with a gun on the fourth.” She based that on Elwood’s summary of Maddox’s call with his mother.
Kreiger gave her a tight smile. “Then you know about Jordon Maddox, not that I’m surprised. It is why you’re here.”
Sandra wasn’t walking into the trap.
“Hmph. Well…” Kreiger narrowed his eyes, drank the rest of his coffee, and tossed the cup on the ground.
Did he just…Olivia would have had a conniption fit if she were here. If he didn’t pick up his trash when they left the area,Sandra would. “I assume that the nine-one-one operator tracked the call. Do we have a name? We could find out the floor that way.”
“No dice. Been down that road. The woman works for the Snack Co. and would have been filling the vending machines inside. There’s no way to know which floor she was on when she made the call.”
The dead ends keep coming…“What caused the dropped calls? Do we know?”
“Oh, yeah, we know. A scanner detected a Wi-Fi jammer which is affecting cell phones inside the hospital. Thankfully, it has a relatively limited range. It only reaches out about fifty feet around the structure. As you probably know, there’s no way of knocking out a jammer remotely. Hands must be put on the device. It either needs to be destroyed or turned off. But that’s not all. The hospital’s phone and internet system has been knocked out too. I don’t know all the technical ins and outs on that. Just that neither would be affected by this jammer apparently. All of it is hard-wired, from what I understand. Hopefully we can get more information once the hospital’s emergency director arrives.”
“Well, often large institutions use a VoIP, or Voice over Internet Protocol, which routes and carries calls over the internet,” Sandra said. “Usually when one goes down, they both do. Whether the plug was pulled or a virus was uploaded, both would require the person to have access to the hospital’s mainframe.”
“Then we could be looking at an inside job. Well, this Luis Rigby should be here soon. That’s the emergency director,” Kreiger added when she must have looked confused. “Thankfully, he was off today. From what I understand he’s going to see if the service provider for the phone system can reactivate it remotely.”
In the meantime, no means of communication presented a challenge. How to talk down the situation without a means of doing so? But she’d been in this position before and got creative. “With at least two armed persons inside, it’s likely they are communicating somehow. Possibly using walkie-talkies.”
“Uh-huh, and Gibson, that’s our intelligence officer, has a scanner running for radio frequencies. It’s programmed to overlook activity on police radios, but if any others activate, he automatically gets ears on the conversation. From there, he’ll use a triangulation scanner to pinpoint the source of communication.”
As for the scanner Gibson was using, she was familiar with the technology. It wasn’t without an Achilles’ heel, though. Radio frequencies needed to be in use to detect them. That meant they were dependent on when the perps inside wanted to chat with each other. But the first time they did, they’d have a way in.
“And what about the security video?” If they could get their hands on that, they might be able to identify their gunmen.
