Born to Run (36 page)

“Phone… Now!” Isabel screamed.

The two nurses looked at each other and then at the orderly. The patient was delusional. Hypothermia could do that. “I’ll get the doctor.”

“A phon…” Isabel tried to repeat, but she was fading, again.

D
ESPITE AN UNFINISHED agenda in their official talks, the German Chancellor had graciously proposed a raincheck on the dinner he knew had been
elaborately set up in the State Dining Room. President Foster, though grateful for his old friend’s consideration, declined to postpone, concerned that Kurt’s voters might read it as
yet another American snub, even though this time there was a perfectly understandable reason.

But as soon as was decent, Bobby pushed his chair back to stand. For an awkward moment his guests shuffled, unsure of whether to rise as well, but he motioned for them to be still. He put on one
of his famous smiles and walked over to the stone mantel, to George Healy’s famous portrait of President Lincoln. Below the great man’s contemplative chin-on-hand, eyes-to-the-distance
pose, Foster stood tall, and his own eyes glimmered with grace. He was in his element and nodded to the First Lady, reminding her what a thrill it still was for them both to be here.

He fingered the inscription carved into the mantelpiece. “John Adams,” he said, “wrote this on his second night in the White House… ‘
I pray Heaven to Bestow the
Best of Blessings on This House and on All that shall hereafter Inhabit it. May none but honest and Wise Men ever rule under this roof.
’ And tonight, a most difficult one for us, we are
blessed to have as our guest an honest and wise man who rules under a different roof but who is always welcome under this one.”

Before the Chancellor could push his chair back to respond, one of the President’s aides entered the room and whispered into Foster’s ear.

ISABEL was hooked up to every relevant medical device the hospital possessed and no one dared ask her about health insurance.

Tubes snaked into and out of her in more places than polite company would like to know. The nurse glanced up from the chart to the cardiac monitor. She’d previously given Isabel a short
bolus of five cc. per pound of 5-percent dextrose in normal saline and was now administering two-and-a-half cc. per hour as a continuous infusion. She was pleased, still, to see no arrhythmias.

A sweet wintergreen bouquet of birch oil overpowered the antiseptic hospital odour. Coldly known in the trade as methyl salicylate, the nurse had swabbed it over Isabel’s skin as a
vasodilator to enlarge her surface blood vessels. It was a strong fragrance even for this ER nurse, but for Isabel it didn’t exist. All she could smell was humidified and warmed oxygen, which
the ventilator clamped over her nose and mouth was pumping steadily into her at 40.5°C.

The nurse clicked an oximeter onto the tip of one of Isabel’s fingers. This was a tiny but miraculous device: by shining onto the fingertip a small light beam of a very specific
wavelength, it measured the absorption spectrum and estimated the oxygen saturation in her skin’s surface blood vessels.

Dr Cisco was withholding surgery until he was completely satisfied that she wasn’t hypothermic. Sticking to standard practice, the nurse was pumping Isabel intravenously with steady
quantities of heated fluid. She checked a few more of the lines on the chart. She also checked the CVP line stuck into the large central vein in Isabel’s neck, connected to a fluid status
monitor by a dark pulsing red tube. Given the liquids Isabel was taking, she also needed a urinary bladder catheter and, to monitor her outputs and thus her internal temperature, Isabel’s was
connected to a thermistor, a heat sensor.

The nurse slipped the thermometer from under Isabel’s arm. She checked her watch and, happy the patient had been stable for thirty minutes, she poked her head out into the corridor and saw
the orderly crouched against the wall reading a copy of the
Manifold Tribune
. “It’s time,” she called and, together, they sheeted up the gurney to wheel their VIP to
surgery.

OUTSIDE the White House, the silence of the night whooped to a roar as the long rotor blades of the President’s helicopter levitated its payload to join up with the decoy
choppers already hovering above. Tonight Marine One was the VH-60, a modified Blackhawk with medical evacuation facilities on board.

The President’s immediate destination was Andrews Air Force Base where, with no time to lose, Air Force One was being primed for take-off.

The media that usually got herded in on the President’s trips were nowhere to be seen. When they woke up and discovered what they’d missed, especially if it leaked that he’d
flown off in the VH-60, they’d be grizzling about more than a skipped flight.

D
AN CARTER’S CHEEKS almost matched the red of the scarf wrapped around them. For twenty sub-freezing minutes that began at 5.30 AM, the
Manifold Tribune
reporter—also its editor and publisher—was one of the fifty or more souls who, thirsty for the story, had been bunched up outside in the dark, cross-slapping
their shoulders and stomping their feet near the cold stone hospital steps. In that throng of reporters who’d rushed here, Carter was alone in one respect: when the newswire came through, he
was the only one who’d ever heard of Manifold, let alone lived there. He’d actually come here last night—the news had flown around the town—but Tom Cisco had insisted on the
hospital enforcing a no-go zone, even for his friend Dan.

The jostling forward started as soon as the wash of yellowish light that had filtered through the glass front doors began flickering, telling the media that someone was once again headed up the
corridor to come out to speak to them. This time it wasn’t the nurse. Instead, the swing doors were pushed aside by the head surgeon, a distinguished, balding man with serious deep-set eyes
and an arrow-point nose that Dan Carter knew was, for Tom Cisco, too uncomfortably close to a certain former president’s. Instantly hit by the dazzling onslaught of the TV floodlights and
camera flashes, the doctor stood at the top of the steps blinking and shielding his eyes.

Dan and Tom were fishing buddies and just last night, the pair were about to hoe into the apple pie when the doctor was called in.

Dan decided to assert his local
droit du seigneur
and got in first, “Dr Cisco, is Ms Diaz stable?” he asked.

Before Cisco could give his answer, another reporter stretched her microphone forward, past several sets of frost-pink ears and asked, without a hint of intended humour, “Has the Speaker
said anything?”

The doctor peered down from the steps, trying not to squint. This was one of those moments, he thought, when it would be perfect to wear those pince-nez glasses, the ones that characters in
novels or movies always got to stare down over the top of. But his perfect eyesight meant Cisco had to do without props, other than his forearm to shield him from the floodlights that had just been
snapped on.

“Dan… Dan Carter,” said the doctor bumping up his friend’s status by using his name, “Ms Diaz is no longer critical. I’m relieved to say she is stable, and
sleeping. But…,” he held up his hand to halt the surge of interruptions, “you should know that Madam Speaker came to us in a most serious state, suffering acute hypothermia,
massive lacerations and severe blood loss after an attack by a wolf up at Potter’s Mound…” The crowd jostled in closer. “Two locals, ranger Andy Goodman and Paul Dawkins,
found her up there. They immediately stemmed her blood loss and their quick thinking saved her from frostbite and, ah, much worse. Relatively, she’s doing fine. But no, she isn’t
speaking. She’s under sedation.”

“Her family?” asked another hack, pushing up the steps and thrusting her mike into Cisco’s face.

The doctor stepped back, his face twisting at the poor manners, but he collected himself and wrenched his features into a smile, “They’re due here shortly. Perhaps you should go and
greet them at our little airport.” He prayed they would, especially this jackal!

A small pack did break off to go, but hesitated when they heard the next question, “When
will
Ms Diaz be able to speak to us?”

“That’ll be up to her, but not before this afternoon.” Cisco was being safe. He knew Isabel would be fine enough physically; she’d recovered quickly from the hypothermia
thanks to Paul Dawkins’ and the nursing staff’s efforts. His surgery, though intricate, was pretty much a patch job. While her parts of her arm and leg had been ripped to shreds, her
main problems were likely to be residual shock, lingering stings and severe throbbing, but with pain-killers he could get her hobbling about within the day, though he would not be recommending
it.

For a county doctor, Tom Cisco was hardly garrulous, Dan Carter already knew that, but the visiting journalists’ frustration was mounting. Cisco wasn’t giving much away, so they
pressed him further and further into the inconsequential, and Cisco reacted defensively, trying desperately to close it down and get back inside. But to the journalists, any personal tidbit about
Isabel was better than nothing. Cisco detested even a flicker of publicity—it was why he’d moved here fifteen years ago. Each question answered on camera was another fingernail scraping
away at his veneer of civility and as soon as decency permitted, he got himself back inside the sanctuary of his hospital, where he rushed into the men’s room to wash the sweat dripping off
his face.

CISCO drew back the curtain around Isabel’s bed to check everything ahead of the expected invasion of visitors. As well as those who’d already arrived—her
husband, a general no less, and her son and foster father—the hospital had been alerted to expect an influx of Secret Service and Administration personnel around lunchtime.

Dotted over the pale pink curtain around Isabel’s bed were representations of Vermont’s state bird, the grey-brown hermit thrush. For Tom Cisco, the chubby warbler’s haunting,
flute-like song was one of the reasons he and his wife used to relish their mountain camping summers when they were younger.

Isabel hadn’t roused from the drugs yet, but observing the monitors, Cisco thankfully saw that she seemed to be progressing well. He reached over to her side-table for a tissue to wipe the
stress off his brow but he accidentally nudged the chromium drip stand, causing it to rattle. He lunged to silence it.

Isabel’s eye creaked open. A low voice grated over her sandpaper throat, “Foster… dead…”

Cisco automatically broke into one of those patronising smiles doctors spend years perfecting along with their terrible handwriting. Confusion or even slight hallucinatory episodes were common
in cases like hers so, for added reassurance, he placed his hand softly on her good arm. “No, Madam Speaker. President Foster’s fine. It was the
Vice
-President who
died.”

She was struggling to speak, but her throat gagged and her eye glazed over.

E
D’S LEFT HAND brushed over his head. Tom Cisco couldn’t avoid a spasm of repulsion at seeing Ed’s stump for a pinkie. It was an
odd reaction for a surgeon, he knew that, and he checked himself. He watched Ed’s eyes fall on Isabel. “I know she doesn’t look great,” said the doctor, “but
don’t worry, she’ll be fine.”