A Midwinter Nightmare Chapter 2 (of 8)
Sep. 8th, 2010 12:41 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
readingrat Act 1, Scene 2
Quince: Is all our company here?
Bottom: You were best to call them generally, man by man, according to the scrip.
[A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act 1 Scene 2]
“This,” said Alan Quincy, flinging open a nondescript door in the basement of PPTH, “is the heart of the security department.” The head of security beamed with pride at the windowless, darkened room not much larger than a janitor’s closet. It was also deep and narrow, one long wall covered with monitors showing various locations in the hospital. On a swivel chair in front of the screens an acne-ridden freckled red-head who didn’t look old enough to drive, let alone hold down a paid job, swung around in alarm, trying in one swift movement to swing his feet off the desk and hide the magazine on his lap.
“Jeesh, Piccolo, are you old enough to read stuff like that?” Quincy barked, his mouth crinkling in distaste. The red-head blushed and tried to thrust the magazine under a pile of others on the desk, knocking over a Styrofoam cup of coffee in the process. Quincy and his companion both lunged for it, but Quincy was hampered by a girth that matched his impressive height, whereas his companion, though considerably shorter, but wiry and agile, caught the cup successfully before it hit the floor.
“Thanks, man!” Quincy wheezed. He rounded on the boy, whose face was now as red as his hair. “Piccolo, you’re a clumsy idiot! Here, say hello to Mr. Douglas. He’s supervising our security arrangements for tomorrow.”
“Call me Lucas,” his companion corrected, his eyes flickering appraisingly over the boy. “And I’m not supervising them really, I’m just lending a hand here and there as a friend, y’know.”
“If you say so,” Quincy said doubtfully, but his face relaxed. “This useless good-for-nothing is Piccolo. I’ve assigned him to the lobby to control IDs and search bags.”
Intrigued that someone with so obvious an Anglo-Irish ancestry sported an Italian name, Lucas leaned forward to give his badge a glance. ‘Francis Pickering’. Wonderful – he’d have to learn not only the names, but also the nicknames of the security staff.
“Wow, do I get a gun?” Piccolo asked.
“No,” Quincy said firmly. “You don’t know how to handle firearms, so you don’t get a gun.”
“What do I do if I ... ” “Why doesn’t he know how to ... ” Piccolo and Lucas said at the same time.
Quincy held up his hand to silence Piccolo, lifting one eyebrow at Lucas to give him leave to continue.
“Why doesn’t he know how to shoot?” Lucas repeated.
“He’s just a stand-in,” Quincy explained. “Normally he’s in ... in maintenance.”
“Air-conditioning maintenance’,” Piccolo elucidated.
“Okay, I need a complete staff list, please, including stand-ins and whatever, because the personnel department only gave me a list of the regular security staff. When do I meet everyone else?” Lucas asked.
“The others will be along to meet you in a moment. We’ll have about ten minutes before they have to go back to their duties.”
Ten minutes? Brilliant! “We need to do a couple of run-throughs.”
Quincy’s expression showed little enlightenment. “Run-throughs?”
“Yeah, we sort of go through the senator’s schedule step-for-step, see where she goes, check whether she’s always within sight of a security official, where she’s likely to be at risk, whether she’s always on one of the monitors. But I need the rest of the staff for that.”
“Uh,” said Quincy. “I guess we could do those at ten pm when they come off their shift. They’ll be royally pissed, though.”
So will I, thought Lucas, if I have to spend half the night here. He put ‘phone the babysitter’ on his mental to-do list. A movement on one of the monitors caught his eye, so he sidled over to the wall examining each screen closely.
“Here, the one in the lobby – we might want to change the angle a bit, get some more of the entrance into the picture. Let’s see, that’s the clinic, here are the elevators on the first floor, ... what’s that? ... Okay. The senator’s giving a speech in the auditorium. Have we got a camera there? No? ... Doesn’t matter, I’ll fix that.”
He jotted down some notes on a pad ere he returned his attention to the remaining monitors. Pausing before one of the lower screens he chewed his lip, deep in thought.
“Cafeteria,” Piccolo supplied helpfully.
“Yeah, I can see that,” Lucas answered irritably, his mask of innocuous amiability slipping slightly. “Say, how long do you keep the tapes?”
“One week,” Quincy answered. “There’s some sort of board directive saying we can’t keep them any longer.”
“And then you do what, delete them?” Lucas probed.
“No, just recycle them. We use them again.” Since Lucas seemed genuinely interested Quincy expanded on the topic. “See, we’ve got the tapes in this box here. When a tape is full, our man takes another tape from the bottom of the box and puts the full one on top. We’ve got just over one week’s supply of tapes, so it works out exactly right.”
One week. Then he was safe. Not that there was a great danger of anyone finding ...
“I always take a tape from the top of the box,” Piccolo interjected, looking surprised at Quincy’s explanation. “Didn’t no one tell me that I was to take it from the bottom.”
Lucas stared at him with a sinking feeling. The cafeteria camera was aimed straight at the table he’d been sitting at when he’d tripped House four weeks ago, so there must have been a recording of the incident. If all security employees were as dumb as this ginger-headed specimen, then that tape could still be in existence somewhere in the depths of that box.
Quincy, sensing his unrest though ignorant of its cause, said bracingly, “How about we take new tapes for the senator’s visit and store them separately?”
“Sure, good idea,” Lucas agreed, though he couldn’t have cared less.
The door opened and three men in khaki security uniforms trooped in.
“Ah, my men,” Quincy intoned, indulging himself in a round of back-slapping and shoulder-patting. “This is Rob, that’s Tom and that’s our Leo.”
“I’m Lucas Douglas, PI. I’m helping out over here tomorrow, just keeping an eye on this and that. Can we take a look at the schedule and talk about everyone’s tasks?”
“Right,” Quincy said importantly, “I’ll tell everyone where they are positioned and what their tasks are.” He drew crumpled piece of paper from his back pocket and smoothed it out on the table. “Tom, back entrance. If people come to the back entrance to get inside, you tell them very politely that we’ve got an important visitor, apologize for the inconvenience ...”
“Let no one in and send them to the main entrance,” Lucas interrupted. Ten minutes to prime everyone was cutting it tight. If Quincy took this long to explain simple tasks, how long would a run-through take? He saw the look on Quincy’s face. “Sorry, didn’t mean to, y’know, interrupt you, but that was the plan, right? Send everyone round to the main entrance to have their identities checked.”
“Yeah, well,” Quincy muttered. “Piccolo, Leo, main entrance in the lobby. You’ll get a list of the people who’re allowed inside the hospital tomorrow, so you ask for everyone’s IDs and cross-check if they are allowed to enter.”
“And if they’re not on the list?”
“Then you ask them to leave again,” Lucas explained with what he felt was angelic patience.
“Politely!” Quincy added.
“What happens if someone wants to visit a patient?” Piccolo asked.
“There’ve been flyers informing patients and their families, asking them to put their names down on this list. Either they have done so or ... ,” Quincy shrugged.
“Some won’t know or will have forgotten to do so,” Piccolo surmised. “Oh boy-o, there are going to be some majorly pissed-off folks in that lobby tomorrow.” Leo, a nondescript individual, nodded mutely.
“Oh no, not many. Well, maybe some. Okay, quite a few,” Lucas conceded.
“So what do we do with them?” Leo’s voice was a squeak.
“Roar at them?” Lucas suggested sarcastically. Leo looked as though he was about to faint.
Brilliant staffing for the main entrance: a boy who shouldn’t handle a gun and a wuss who couldn’t. Not that there were many alternatives: Tom, a thin shaky individual, didn’t look any tougher than Leo, while Rob seemed as thick as a wall. Lucas had assumed until now that Lisa had hired and kept House because she’d nourished a hidden passion for him, but he conceded that he might have been mistaken on that count. It must be some sort of masochist or martyr complex that made her hire the inept, the incompetent and the insufferable, believing she could bring their hidden light out from under the bushel of prejudice so as to turn the world into a brighter, cheerier place.
“Look, I can join you in the lobby and sorta help a bit to calm people down, soothe ruffled tempers, and so on,” he suggested. The lobby was a neuralgic point that needed the closest monitoring.
“Actually,” Quincy said, “I had you down for the clinic.”
“The clinic?” Lucas asked with foreboding. “The clinic is closed, isn’t it? ... It isn’t? ... Right, it isn’t. Yeah, obviously it isn’t – how can Dr Cuddy show it off unless it’s open? That sort of makes your list of admissible people superfluous, doesn’t it?”
“Huh?”
“How,” Lucas said slowly and distinctly, “are you going to control who’s coming in if the clinic is open and any Tom, Dick and terrorist can come in for free treatment?”
“Ah, hadn’t thought of that.”
There was an awkward silence.
“Okay, I’ll think of something. Let’s just continue,” Lucas finally said.
Quincy looked relieved. “Right. Rob, you’ll be monitoring the screens in here. You’ll inform me at once if you see anything suspicious.”
“Right, boss. Watch the screens, call you if ... how do I know what’s suspicious?”
“Maybe I should be here while Rob takes a post that requires his muscle,” Lucas said, thinking of the cafeteria surveillance tape that still needed to be found. A few hours in here would suffice to let him know whether it still existed.
“Naw, that would be wasting your talents,” Quincy argued. “Rob is best off here, out of the bustle.” He gave Lucas a significant glance – if the others were intellectually one-eyed, Rob was practically blind.
Lucas shrugged. He’d be sure to find a few spare minutes in between to search the boxes of tapes.
Quincy looked down at his list once more. “It says the senator’s bringing her own bodyguards, so I figure we don’t have to dog her non-stop.”
“Her own bodyguards?” Tom piped up. “What’s the deal with the lady? I never even heard of her – always thought our senator is called Loudenburger or something.”
Quincy looked enquiringly at Lucas.
“She’s from Colorado, actually,” Lucas filled in. “Here’s a picture of her so you know who you’re supposed to be protecting.”
The others crowded round him to take a look at the picture of an attractive blonde woman in her early forties. Piccolo whistled.
“Some floozie,” he muttered.
“That floozie,” Lucas told him, “might well be your next president. Okay, I’m going to go fix up those extra cameras. We meet at ten pm sharp for our run-throughs!”
Bottom: We will meet, and there we may rehearse most obscenely and courageously. Take pains, be perfect, adieu.
[A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act 1 Scene 2]
Quince: Is all our company here?
Bottom: You were best to call them generally, man by man, according to the scrip.
[A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act 1 Scene 2]
“This,” said Alan Quincy, flinging open a nondescript door in the basement of PPTH, “is the heart of the security department.” The head of security beamed with pride at the windowless, darkened room not much larger than a janitor’s closet. It was also deep and narrow, one long wall covered with monitors showing various locations in the hospital. On a swivel chair in front of the screens an acne-ridden freckled red-head who didn’t look old enough to drive, let alone hold down a paid job, swung around in alarm, trying in one swift movement to swing his feet off the desk and hide the magazine on his lap.
“Jeesh, Piccolo, are you old enough to read stuff like that?” Quincy barked, his mouth crinkling in distaste. The red-head blushed and tried to thrust the magazine under a pile of others on the desk, knocking over a Styrofoam cup of coffee in the process. Quincy and his companion both lunged for it, but Quincy was hampered by a girth that matched his impressive height, whereas his companion, though considerably shorter, but wiry and agile, caught the cup successfully before it hit the floor.
“Thanks, man!” Quincy wheezed. He rounded on the boy, whose face was now as red as his hair. “Piccolo, you’re a clumsy idiot! Here, say hello to Mr. Douglas. He’s supervising our security arrangements for tomorrow.”
“Call me Lucas,” his companion corrected, his eyes flickering appraisingly over the boy. “And I’m not supervising them really, I’m just lending a hand here and there as a friend, y’know.”
“If you say so,” Quincy said doubtfully, but his face relaxed. “This useless good-for-nothing is Piccolo. I’ve assigned him to the lobby to control IDs and search bags.”
Intrigued that someone with so obvious an Anglo-Irish ancestry sported an Italian name, Lucas leaned forward to give his badge a glance. ‘Francis Pickering’. Wonderful – he’d have to learn not only the names, but also the nicknames of the security staff.
“Wow, do I get a gun?” Piccolo asked.
“No,” Quincy said firmly. “You don’t know how to handle firearms, so you don’t get a gun.”
“What do I do if I ... ” “Why doesn’t he know how to ... ” Piccolo and Lucas said at the same time.
Quincy held up his hand to silence Piccolo, lifting one eyebrow at Lucas to give him leave to continue.
“Why doesn’t he know how to shoot?” Lucas repeated.
“He’s just a stand-in,” Quincy explained. “Normally he’s in ... in maintenance.”
“Air-conditioning maintenance’,” Piccolo elucidated.
“Okay, I need a complete staff list, please, including stand-ins and whatever, because the personnel department only gave me a list of the regular security staff. When do I meet everyone else?” Lucas asked.
“The others will be along to meet you in a moment. We’ll have about ten minutes before they have to go back to their duties.”
Ten minutes? Brilliant! “We need to do a couple of run-throughs.”
Quincy’s expression showed little enlightenment. “Run-throughs?”
“Yeah, we sort of go through the senator’s schedule step-for-step, see where she goes, check whether she’s always within sight of a security official, where she’s likely to be at risk, whether she’s always on one of the monitors. But I need the rest of the staff for that.”
“Uh,” said Quincy. “I guess we could do those at ten pm when they come off their shift. They’ll be royally pissed, though.”
So will I, thought Lucas, if I have to spend half the night here. He put ‘phone the babysitter’ on his mental to-do list. A movement on one of the monitors caught his eye, so he sidled over to the wall examining each screen closely.
“Here, the one in the lobby – we might want to change the angle a bit, get some more of the entrance into the picture. Let’s see, that’s the clinic, here are the elevators on the first floor, ... what’s that? ... Okay. The senator’s giving a speech in the auditorium. Have we got a camera there? No? ... Doesn’t matter, I’ll fix that.”
He jotted down some notes on a pad ere he returned his attention to the remaining monitors. Pausing before one of the lower screens he chewed his lip, deep in thought.
“Cafeteria,” Piccolo supplied helpfully.
“Yeah, I can see that,” Lucas answered irritably, his mask of innocuous amiability slipping slightly. “Say, how long do you keep the tapes?”
“One week,” Quincy answered. “There’s some sort of board directive saying we can’t keep them any longer.”
“And then you do what, delete them?” Lucas probed.
“No, just recycle them. We use them again.” Since Lucas seemed genuinely interested Quincy expanded on the topic. “See, we’ve got the tapes in this box here. When a tape is full, our man takes another tape from the bottom of the box and puts the full one on top. We’ve got just over one week’s supply of tapes, so it works out exactly right.”
One week. Then he was safe. Not that there was a great danger of anyone finding ...
“I always take a tape from the top of the box,” Piccolo interjected, looking surprised at Quincy’s explanation. “Didn’t no one tell me that I was to take it from the bottom.”
Lucas stared at him with a sinking feeling. The cafeteria camera was aimed straight at the table he’d been sitting at when he’d tripped House four weeks ago, so there must have been a recording of the incident. If all security employees were as dumb as this ginger-headed specimen, then that tape could still be in existence somewhere in the depths of that box.
Quincy, sensing his unrest though ignorant of its cause, said bracingly, “How about we take new tapes for the senator’s visit and store them separately?”
“Sure, good idea,” Lucas agreed, though he couldn’t have cared less.
The door opened and three men in khaki security uniforms trooped in.
“Ah, my men,” Quincy intoned, indulging himself in a round of back-slapping and shoulder-patting. “This is Rob, that’s Tom and that’s our Leo.”
“I’m Lucas Douglas, PI. I’m helping out over here tomorrow, just keeping an eye on this and that. Can we take a look at the schedule and talk about everyone’s tasks?”
“Right,” Quincy said importantly, “I’ll tell everyone where they are positioned and what their tasks are.” He drew crumpled piece of paper from his back pocket and smoothed it out on the table. “Tom, back entrance. If people come to the back entrance to get inside, you tell them very politely that we’ve got an important visitor, apologize for the inconvenience ...”
“Let no one in and send them to the main entrance,” Lucas interrupted. Ten minutes to prime everyone was cutting it tight. If Quincy took this long to explain simple tasks, how long would a run-through take? He saw the look on Quincy’s face. “Sorry, didn’t mean to, y’know, interrupt you, but that was the plan, right? Send everyone round to the main entrance to have their identities checked.”
“Yeah, well,” Quincy muttered. “Piccolo, Leo, main entrance in the lobby. You’ll get a list of the people who’re allowed inside the hospital tomorrow, so you ask for everyone’s IDs and cross-check if they are allowed to enter.”
“And if they’re not on the list?”
“Then you ask them to leave again,” Lucas explained with what he felt was angelic patience.
“Politely!” Quincy added.
“What happens if someone wants to visit a patient?” Piccolo asked.
“There’ve been flyers informing patients and their families, asking them to put their names down on this list. Either they have done so or ... ,” Quincy shrugged.
“Some won’t know or will have forgotten to do so,” Piccolo surmised. “Oh boy-o, there are going to be some majorly pissed-off folks in that lobby tomorrow.” Leo, a nondescript individual, nodded mutely.
“Oh no, not many. Well, maybe some. Okay, quite a few,” Lucas conceded.
“So what do we do with them?” Leo’s voice was a squeak.
“Roar at them?” Lucas suggested sarcastically. Leo looked as though he was about to faint.
Brilliant staffing for the main entrance: a boy who shouldn’t handle a gun and a wuss who couldn’t. Not that there were many alternatives: Tom, a thin shaky individual, didn’t look any tougher than Leo, while Rob seemed as thick as a wall. Lucas had assumed until now that Lisa had hired and kept House because she’d nourished a hidden passion for him, but he conceded that he might have been mistaken on that count. It must be some sort of masochist or martyr complex that made her hire the inept, the incompetent and the insufferable, believing she could bring their hidden light out from under the bushel of prejudice so as to turn the world into a brighter, cheerier place.
“Look, I can join you in the lobby and sorta help a bit to calm people down, soothe ruffled tempers, and so on,” he suggested. The lobby was a neuralgic point that needed the closest monitoring.
“Actually,” Quincy said, “I had you down for the clinic.”
“The clinic?” Lucas asked with foreboding. “The clinic is closed, isn’t it? ... It isn’t? ... Right, it isn’t. Yeah, obviously it isn’t – how can Dr Cuddy show it off unless it’s open? That sort of makes your list of admissible people superfluous, doesn’t it?”
“Huh?”
“How,” Lucas said slowly and distinctly, “are you going to control who’s coming in if the clinic is open and any Tom, Dick and terrorist can come in for free treatment?”
“Ah, hadn’t thought of that.”
There was an awkward silence.
“Okay, I’ll think of something. Let’s just continue,” Lucas finally said.
Quincy looked relieved. “Right. Rob, you’ll be monitoring the screens in here. You’ll inform me at once if you see anything suspicious.”
“Right, boss. Watch the screens, call you if ... how do I know what’s suspicious?”
“Maybe I should be here while Rob takes a post that requires his muscle,” Lucas said, thinking of the cafeteria surveillance tape that still needed to be found. A few hours in here would suffice to let him know whether it still existed.
“Naw, that would be wasting your talents,” Quincy argued. “Rob is best off here, out of the bustle.” He gave Lucas a significant glance – if the others were intellectually one-eyed, Rob was practically blind.
Lucas shrugged. He’d be sure to find a few spare minutes in between to search the boxes of tapes.
Quincy looked down at his list once more. “It says the senator’s bringing her own bodyguards, so I figure we don’t have to dog her non-stop.”
“Her own bodyguards?” Tom piped up. “What’s the deal with the lady? I never even heard of her – always thought our senator is called Loudenburger or something.”
Quincy looked enquiringly at Lucas.
“She’s from Colorado, actually,” Lucas filled in. “Here’s a picture of her so you know who you’re supposed to be protecting.”
The others crowded round him to take a look at the picture of an attractive blonde woman in her early forties. Piccolo whistled.
“Some floozie,” he muttered.
“That floozie,” Lucas told him, “might well be your next president. Okay, I’m going to go fix up those extra cameras. We meet at ten pm sharp for our run-throughs!”
Bottom: We will meet, and there we may rehearse most obscenely and courageously. Take pains, be perfect, adieu.
[A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act 1 Scene 2]
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Date: 2010-09-09 08:11 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-09-09 10:23 am (UTC)Thanks for commenting - it makes my day.