The man’s name was Dr. Elias Ward, a former chief medical examiner who had disappeared three days earlier.
The countdown on his wrist continued moving.
00:16:42.
Ward explained that the men inside the ambulance were not paramedics. They worked for a private network that had secretly taken control of the city’s emergency dispatch system.
“They don’t wait for people to die,” he whispered. “They decide when it happens.”
Ward had discovered dozens of death certificates entered into the hospital database before the victims were actually dead. Judges, federal witnesses, police officers and journalists had all been transported in ambulances, declared dead and delivered to a restricted municipal morgue.
Once inside, they disappeared forever.
Ward had copied the records. Before he could expose them, he was drugged, placed inside a body bag and assigned an official time of death.
When the countdown reached zero, the morgue’s security cameras would shut down for ninety seconds. Ward and every other living “body” delivered that night would be moved into an industrial cremation chamber.
Sienna checked the ambulance’s dispatch terminal.
Four other vehicles were converging on Riverside Municipal Morgue.
She had fourteen minutes left.
Sienna secured Ward inside the ambulance and raced toward the facility. When she arrived, the exterior gates were already closing. She forced the ambulance through the narrow opening and entered the underground loading area.
Three fake orderlies were unloading black body bags.
One of the bags moved.
A guard attacked Sienna from behind, but she drove him into a metal cart and took his access card. Another tried to activate the cremation system remotely. Sienna chased him through the morgue, knocked the controller from his hand and reached the emergency shutdown button with eight seconds remaining.
The chamber stopped.
Inside the recovered body bags were three living federal witnesses who had already been declared dead.
Ward led Sienna into the medical examiner’s office, where they found hundreds of prepared death certificates stored on an encrypted computer. Each document contained a name, a future date and the signature of the person authorizing the death.
The list reached far beyond the hospital.
Members of law enforcement, judges and government officials were involved.
Then Sienna found a certificate bearing her own photograph.
Her cause of death was listed as injuries sustained in an ambulance collision.
The time was tomorrow at 12:01 a.m.
At the bottom of the document was the digital signature of the FBI official who had personally recruited her.
Ward stared at the screen.
“I tried to warn you,” he said. “My death was only tonight’s assignment.”
Sienna looked through the remaining files.
Her name was not the final entry.
It was the first name on a new list containing hundreds of people.
These were not records of deaths that had happened.
They were orders for deaths that had yet to occur.
