Last Surgeon (24 page)

Nick was dazed when he shut off the TV. Witnessing Umberto’s gruesome death held him spellbound, capable only of staring at his own reflection in the black television screen. He ached at the irony that Umberto’s final words had been a chilling cry for help-a cry to him.

¡Búsquenme al Doctor Nick Fury!

Get me Dr. Nick Fury.

With the man’s agonized screams echoing in his head, Nick tried to make sense of the almost inconceivable events that had occurred in the operating room three years ago. First, though, he had to begin to deal with the fact that his search was finally over. Don Reese had been right. The reason Umberto’s and Manny’s captors had not bothered issuing them new Social Security numbers was that both men were slated to die. Manny Ferris’s escape had spoiled their plan. The secret mission that was to be Umberto’s passage out of his PTSD hell had been anything but that. It had been the doorway to another, more ferocious nightmare, and ultimately the invitation to his grave.

“Umberto,” Nick murmured, feeling intense anger searing the back of his neck.

He stared at the screen as if the ghost of his friend was trapped inside it, marked for eternity by a video epitaph. Jillian placed her hand gently upon his shoulder.

“Nick, I’m so sorry.”

“What was it he said, Jill? I mean exactly.”

“Just what you would imagine-for the Spanish part, anyway. ‘Help. Help me. Get me Dr. Fury. Get me Dr. Nick Fury.’ Even though the words were jumbled in with Umberto’s screams and with the Arabic, Belle heard and understood them, although not the meaning behind them. Later on someone must have told her about the comic book character, and she set out to understand more. Belle was all about understanding-getting to the bottom of things.”

Jillian’s voice sounded distant-barely audible. Nick could not respond. He was already weighed down with guilt over Sarah’s death. Now this. Was there anything he could have done? It didn’t matter. The line between grief and guilt was often a very fine one. As long as the two didn’t paralyze his life, he thought now, there was no reason he couldn’t live with them.

Eventually, the fog enveloping his thoughts began to lift.

“Now we know,” he managed to say.

“Now we know,” Jillian echoed softly.

She wrapped her arms around him. At first, Nick thought he was trembling, but soon he realized that it was she. Jillian pulled away, her hands still on Nick’s shoulders.

“I am so sad and so damn angry,” he said.

“I know what finding Umberto alive meant to you. But you didn’t let him down. Something terrible is going on here-a secret that somebody desperately needed to keep hidden-a secret Belle paid for with her life.”

Belle.
The mention of the name jolted away what remained of Nick’s self-pity. He had to stay strong and be there for Jillian, and for himself.
Of all the perils on the road to truth
, one of his favorite Buddhist teachings read,
the truth itself could actually prove the greatest peril of all.

“Who would have done this?” Nick asked aloud. “It’s hard to believe his death was unexpected. There was no damn cardiac tumor. What we witnessed was an execution-a lethal charade that amounted to the ticket to freedom for Aleem Mohammad. I’ll bet that bastard was thousands of miles away when Umberto died.”

“A very public execution,” Mollender said. “The ultimate witness protection hoax.”

“That’s horrible,” Noreen said.

“Belle must have been unable to let matters lie,” Jillian said. “Maybe she’s the only one who heard and understood what Umberto was screaming. Maybe she said the wrong thing to the wrong person.”

“What we just saw ties Umberto to the Singh Center,” Nick said. “Poor Manny Ferris, too. Maybe Manny was the one who was supposed to be on that operating table, but something about his plastic surgery didn’t work out. They couldn’t make him look enough like Mohammad to pull off the switch.”

“Possible,” Nick said. “If he were partway through a sequence of surgeries, that would explain Manny’s appearance. Listen, I know it’s painful to watch, but we might have missed something important in the initial viewing. I need to watch the operation again and maybe again. You guys don’t have to.”

“I’m in,” Jillian said. “I’m feeling stronger than I have since Belle died.”

“Noreen?” Mollender asked.

“I don’t know what help I could be, and I’m really shaken up,” she replied, “but if the solidarity will help, I’ll try.”

Noreen and Mollender stood beside Nick and Jillian, forming an arc in front of the television. Then they took their seats and Nick pressed Play. Out of the corner of his eye, Nick observed Mollender take hold of Noreen’s hand as the first images of the operating room appeared. They watched the video twice through, until Jillian broke down crying and Nick felt his own eyes begin to well. Finally, Jillian excused herself from the room-to clear her thoughts, she explained. Noreen decided to go with her. Of the four of them, Mollender seemed to be the most composed, although it was clear that he too was affected.

“You okay to see it once more?” Nick asked.

“It’s easier to take if I keep telling myself it’s only a movie.”

This time, at the moment just before Umberto’s death, Nick paused the disc. Using the remote control, he advanced the video a single frame at a time, then back and forward once more.

“Umberto grabs his head here,” Nick said, tapping his finger against the television screen. “It’s as though something erupted in his brain. I haven’t actually witnessed an aneurysm bursting in someone’s head, but a rupture like that is accompanied by a sudden, massive increase in volume within the skull. The victims experience a blinding headache, which he showed signs of having, but he wasn’t vomiting from the huge increase in intracranial pressure. A seizure is typical, too, but he didn’t have one of those either. The whole thing with Umberto took no more than a couple of minutes from beginning to end. I don’t know what else it could have been besides a ruptured aneurysm, but something seems off to me.”

“Are you suggesting that someone might have done this to him?” Mollender asked, just as Jillian and Noreen returned.

“I don’t know. All I keep thinking is that the surgeon could never have been allowed to open Umberto’s heart to operate because he didn’t have anything wrong with it. No tumor. Nothing. If their plan was to have it look like Aleem Mohammad died on the table, it had to happen before his actual operation. That means someone had control of the situation the whole time.” Nick turned to Jillian. “I think Umberto was killed right there. It looks like an aneurysm, but I don’t believe it was. Someone did something to him-to his brain. Otherwise, they would have operated on his heart and found no tumor.”

“But what about the tests?”

“Tests can be faked. The surgeon could have been brought in to do the case on the basis of someone else’s MRI. The people who did this are no amateurs, and I would bet they have technology available to them that the average man or even doctor knows nothing about.”

“So, who do you think is responsible?”

Nick’s anger was pulsing through him now, driving his thoughts. Pieces of the mystery surrounding Umberto were falling into place almost too rapidly for him to integrate them.

“You mean what person is responsible,” he said. “Or what government agency with three letters beginning with a
C
, that just happened, at least according to the papers, to be pumping information from one Aleem Syed Mohammad.

“Noreen,” Nick asked, more energized perhaps than at any time since Sarah’s death, “do you have a large piece of paper and something to write with?”

She left the room, returning moments later with a flip chart and several markers. Freezing the list of those in the OR, Nick transcribed it to the flip chart in a two-column format.

Dr. Abigail Spielmann-Surgeon
:
Dr. Yasmin Dasari-Olan-Surgical Resident

Dr. Lewis Leonard-Asst.
Surgeon
:
Cassandra Browning-Leavitt-Circulating Nurse

Dr. Thomas Landrew-Anesthesiologist
:
Yu Jiang-Medical Student

Roger Pendleton-Perfusionist
:
Belle Coates-Nursing Student

Kimberly Fox-Scrub Nurse
:

“What are you doing?” Jillian asked.

“These are the people who were in the OR that day. I noticed something on that last viewing, but I need to confirm it first. Jillian, I have to play some of the video again.”

“It’s okay. I can handle it.”

He located a shot that contained a full view of the room.

“There are ten people in the OR, not counting the patient,” Nick said. “There are nine names on this chart. I noticed the tenth man when he helped wheel Umberto in. There were two of them, actually. One left, and he stayed.”

“I remember,” the Mole said. “The one who left was quite a bit taller.”

“Exactly. I thought maybe the two of them, or at least this guy, were from security. That made sense at the time. But take your eyes off of Umberto and keep them fixed on the tenth man.”

Once again, Nick had the strange feeling of having seen the heavyset man before. He appeared quite a bit in the view from the camera above the foot of the narrow table. Not once during the terrible commotion surrounding Umberto’s death did he move from his spot-not so much as an inch to get a better vantage point or to help. This time through, Nick also noticed that, unlike Belle, the medical student, the perfusionist, or the anesthesiologist, the tenth man was wearing a surgical gown. In addition, he kept his hands inside the gown throughout the grisly ordeal.

Nick’s pulse was hammering. He ran the DVD again, and then once more. His eyes remained fixed on the man. At the instant the team finished transferring Umberto from the gurney to the operating table, Nick paused the playback, backed up a few frames, and then walked it forward again, his focus intensifying with each advance.

“There!” Nick exclaimed. “Did you see it? His hands stay underneath his surgical gown while Umberto is going through whatever it was that killed him. And look at his eyes. He is like dead calm.”

“You think he has some sort of device under there?” Mollender asked. “Something that could fry Umberto’s brain or burst an artery?”

“Maybe they had implanted some sort of radio receiver in there. Poor Umberto had multiple procedures done at the Singh Center. One of them certainly could have been that.”

For a time, there was only silence as each of the other three-Mollender, Noreen, and Jillian-mulled over the awesome possibilities. Finally, Jillian spoke.

“So, why did they kill Belle?” she asked in a near whisper.

Again there was silence. Then the color drained from Nick’s face.

“Oh, God,” he breathed.

“What?”

“Belle wasn’t the only one who heard Umberto. She may not have been the only one who could understand that he was speaking Spanish in addition to his Arabic.”

“What are you suggesting?”

“We’re assuming that Belle was murdered because she said something to the wrong person. What if she wasn’t the only one who spoke up? What if it’s not just Belle they killed?”

Noreen took a few steps backward.

“I’m not sure I can handle this anymore,” she said. “Do we need to call the police?”

“I don’t know yet,” Nick said. “But I do know we need your help, Noreen. If Belle is the only one who has died, then I’m way off base. But we need to check on the rest of the people on that flip chart.”

Noreen was beginning to hyperventilate.

“Look around,” she exclaimed. “There are reasons I work with computers and not people.”

Mollender took Noreen by the hand and walked over to her desk, where she had two computers already set up and running.

“We’ll do this together,” he said. “Noreen, I’ll work off your laptop, you take the desktop. We’ll start searching each of the names on the Web and see what comes up.”

“I’m scared, Saul.”

“We need to do this. Lives may be at stake. Nick, listen, in addition to the other nine who were in the OR, maybe you should put down Annette Furst, the video editor who works for me. She’s very much alive. I saw her yesterday.”

“That might be a good sign. Maybe I’m completely off base here. Or maybe they just haven’t thought to include her. They make mistakes all the time. Cover-up is their middle name.”

“All right.”

“Okay. Start with the surgeons,” Nick directed them. “Saul, take Spielmann, and Noreen, look up what you can on Leonard.”

Noreen sat in her chair, while Mollender had to hunch over the desk to access the laptop. They both opened Web browsers and in near synchronized movements began scouring the Internet. Mollender struck first.

“Jesus!” he exclaimed. “Spielmann’s dead. She died just a couple of weeks ago in her apartment in New York, apparently from an anaphylactic reaction to a bee sting.”

“I think I just found something on Leonard,” Noreen added a few minutes later. “This is just too freaky. I think I might get sick. Leonard was riding his motorcycle when he was killed in a collision with a tractor-trailer. According to this report in the
Chicago Tribune
, the driver of the truck said it looked to him as though Leonard lost control of the bike and went into a skid across a lane and right into his path.”

“It could have been an accident,” Jillian said.

“Or somebody could have sabotaged his motorcycle,” Nick countered. “Keep going.”

Another tense minute passed. The only sound in Noreen’s office was of fingers tapping on keyboards. Nick added the location of each person’s death next to their names. Chicago. New York. North Carolina. There was no longer any doubt in the room.

Mollender was next to speak up.

“Dr. Thomas Landrew drowned,” he said grimly. “ ‘Avid sportsman and prominent anesthesiologist drowned while kayaking on the Chesapeake.’ ”

“When?” Nick asked.

“Just three weeks ago. April eighteenth. This is terrible. I actually knew about his accident. Landrew did the anesthesia on me when I had a hernia fixed a few years ago. He was a terrific guy. I just glossed right over his name.”