Authors: Michael Palmer
“But you just told us there wasn’t any backup,” Nick said.
“I told you there wasn’t
supposed
to be any backup. Well, with Fred Johnson being so self-righteous about Noreen, and at the same time being so wrong, I guess I forgot to put in the paperwork to shut down our little disaster recovery operation.”
“You mean…”
“Yup. Fred Johnson assumed, as did everybody else, that we stopped sending DVDs to Noreen. But as with most things, the pompous jackass was wrong. Buried in that massive budget of his is one tiny line item that he wouldn’t find unless he went through the whole thing ten times with a fine-tooth comb. You see, I changed the name of Noreen’s company but I never canceled her contract with us.”
“Saul, let me buy you another milk,” Jillian said.
Better Safe Than Sorry Electronic Storage, Noreen Siliski’s data backup and recovery business, was located in an isolated three-story brick business center on the outskirts of Sutton, Virginia. It was ten in the morning when Nick pulled into the nearly deserted parking lot. Rush hour traffic away from the city had been intense, although he suspected it was not unusually so. Nick had the entire day free. Junie would be working the RV with one of his backups, a seventy-year-old retired professor of medicine from Georgetown-a brilliant, caring woman, who was beloved by the patients and utterly devoted to the evening each week she spent on the roads with Helping Hands.
The drive across the river and south was made in virtual silence. Mollender, sitting in back with his hands folded tightly in his lap, stared out the window of Nick’s 1995 Cutlass Cierra. In the front, Nick and Jillian were each engrossed in the same gnawing question: Would the recording of Aleem Syed Mohammad’s ill-fated surgery shed any light at all on the strange one-way ambulance trip of Umberto from the Singh Center to Shelby Stone, or on Belle’s subsequent murder three years later?
“Just pull in there a couple of spaces left of the Dumpster,” Mollender said, breaking the prolonged silence. “The chute is coming out of Noreen’s office on the third floor. She’s always remodeling.”
“You got it,” Nick said, easing into the spot.
Down on the seat, where the Mole could not see, Jillian squeezed Nick’s hand. Then they followed Mollender into a rather stark, tiled lobby and up two flights of stairs.
At that instant, a gunshot rang out from within Noreen’s office, then several more in rapid succession.
Nick pounded once on the door and grasped the knob. The door flew open.
The woman’s outer office, which was about the size of a two-car garage, had been stripped down to the studs. On a stepladder at the center of the room, wielding a hefty cordless nail gun, was Noreen Siliski.
“This is what one can do when there is almost no human traffic,” Noreen said, making no mention of Nick’s rather sensational entrance as she stepped down to the floor and shook hands heartily with the new arrivals. “Business was good when I petitioned the owner to add storage space. When he finally approved the changes, business was bad. But I love building things so I’m doing it anyway.”
Half the office was covered by bedsheets, sprinkled with a fine misting of sawdust. The smell of freshly cut wood hung pleasantly in the air. In the center of the main room next to the ladder was a wooden rolling workbench, underneath and on top of which were an assortment of tools, including a circular saw and cordless drill.
Noreen Siliski was a pleasant-looking brunette, slightly on the muscular side, with her dark hair pulled back in a sizeable ponytail. Nick sensed that her jeans and white denim work shirt might be the central elements of her wardrobe.
“It’s wonderful that you’re doing this all yourself, Noreen,” Jillian said.
“It’s sort of learn as you go, but I’ve always been able to handle most tools.”
Finally, Mollender stepped forward.
“I like what you’re doing here, Noreen,” he said, seeming somewhat cowed.
“That’s nice of you to say, Saul.”
“So you have the recording?” Jillian asked, anxious to break the negative vibes she sensed were building between the two.
“I believe I do. Saul told me the date. I digitize and archive all the video files he sends me, so it was easy to find. I burned it to DVD so we can watch it here in the office. Can you pull the shades over there?”
Noreen went to the back room and quickly returned, struggling some to push a steel AV cart over the threshold and into a free corner of the room, in front of a quartet of folding chairs. On the top of the cart was a forty-inch HD television set with a DVD player on the shelf beneath it. As the door she came through began closing, Nick caught a glimpse of the work space that lay behind it-one with a raised floor, similar to the call center at Don Reese’s precinct headquarters, and racks that he figured were used to house her computer equipment.
Nick proceeded over to the wall housing three double-hung windows. The chute to the Dumpster, an absolute marvel of practical engineering, opened at the center one. The chute was constructed of large, heavy rubber trash barrels with the bottoms cut out, stacked one just inside another, and held in place by chains looped through the handles and bolted above the inside of the window. The three-story drop to the Dumpster was a modest arc rather than a straight shot, and the overall appearance of the green barrels was that of a giant caterpillar.
“Remarkable,” Nick said, calling Jillian over to see.
“How did you know how to do this?” she asked, amazed.
“How else?” Noreen replied. “The Internet. I just drop that canvas flap down over the window when I leave. It took a few trips to a few hardware and Home Depot stores to get enough barrels, but it wasn’t that expensive or that hard to build.”
Nick closed the blinds and dropped the canvas over the window opening. With the room sufficiently dark they gathered in front of the television. Nick and Jillian were both feeling too anxious to sit.
“Well, I hope this disc is holding what you’re looking for.”
“We hope so too,” Nick said.
“In that case, I think we should get on with this.” Noreen slipped the DVD into the slot and with a nod of understanding to her guests, pressed Play.
“You ready for this?” Nick asked as the screen lit up with static.
“Dunno,” Jillian said grimly. “Are you?”
“I’m not sure. We’ve come so far.”
“I can’t believe I’m going to see Belle alive.”
“Want me to stop it?” Nick asked, holding up the remote, given to him by Noreen.
“No, but I want to sit down, I think.”
Jillian inhaled deeply and took Nick’s hand in the darkness. They were six feet from the screen, about to watch a video that included the death of a patient. It also was probably going to include shots of Jillian’s younger sister, subsequently murdered in a manner that every policeman involved with the case believed was suicide.
Saul Mollender and Noreen Siliski sat next to each other, behind and to the right of the others. The tension in the room was high.
In half a minute, the static gave way to a set of standard legal notices, yellow on black, that included a summary of the HIPAA laws surrounding patient confidentiality, an outline of who was allowed to view the recording and for what purposes, and the name of the editor, Annette Furst, Department of Medical records. Finally came the hospital name, date, and operating room number. Jillian was rigid in her seat, squeezing blood from Nick’s hand.
The introductory information was in the same yellow print.
PATIENT
: Aleem Syed Mohammad
Hospital ID
: 881-83-7782-Karachi, Pakistan
Condition
: Cardiac rhabdomyoma
Procedure
: Cardiopulmonary bypass; excision of rhabdomyoma; cardiac reconstruction
Present in the Operating Room:
Surgeon
: Abigail Spielmann, M.D.
Asst. Surgeon
: Lewis Leonard, M.D.
Cardiac Surgical Resident
: Yasmin Dasari-Olan, M.D.
Anesthesiologist
: Thomas Landrew, M.D.
Perfusionist
: Roger Pendleton, CCP, Cert. ABCP
Scrub Nurse
: Kimberly Fox
Circulating Nurse
: Cassandra Browning-Leavitt
Medical Student
: Yu Jiang
Nursing Student
: Belle Coates
Nick felt the energy in Jillian’s grip increase at the sight of her sister’s name. He froze the picture.
“Do we know who Dr. Abigail Spielmann is?” he asked.
“I think she was brought in from another hospital,” the Mole replied. “Probably an expert in cardiac tumors like this one.”
“She must be big stuff if the cardiac surgical chief would allow it,” Jillian said.
Nick undid the pause.
The printing gave way to a gleaming operating room. Three cameras, according to Mollender-one of them straight down into where the patient would be placed on the now empty table; one up from the foot; and the other giving a wide-angle shot of the entire operating room. The video editor’s job, Mollender explained, was to mix the various camera angles into a cohesive and useful presentation.
The opening sequence was shot from the wide-angle camera and showed the perfusionist, wearing scrubs, a mask, and hair cover, but set back from the sterile field where the surgeons would be working. Seated behind the long heart-lung bypass machine, he looked like a concert pianist preparing for a performance. He was chatting with the scrub nurse.
“Need anything?” the perfusionist said. “Cassandra’s right outside.”
The audio and visual feeds were excellent.
“As a matter of fact, yes,” the scrub nurse replied. “The only thing from Dr. Spielmann’s instrument list that I don’t have here is a Loc-Ness tissue stabilizer. Could you ask Cassandra to get one for me, please?”
“Will do. Have you met Spielmann?”
“She came by to see me a little while ago. She seems terrific.”
“I thought the same thing. Be right back.”
The scrub nurse was positioned just above and behind where Dr. Abigail Spielmann would be working. She was ready for the case-gloved, gowned, and masked, with intense dark eyes looking out from beneath her blue hair covering as she checked through a huge tray of instruments.
At that point there was some obvious editing-eleven minutes according to the running digital time in the upper right corner. The perfusionist was back at his post, and the circulating nurse had appeared and was helping one of the surgeons, a dark-skinned woman, it appeared, into her gloves and gown.
It felt stranger to Nick than he had expected to be viewing OR drama after so long. Between his internship, residency, fellowship in trauma surgery, private practice, and the military, he had been a surgeon for more than nine years before the explosion that took Sarah-nearly as long as he had been away from his specialty.
Suddenly, Jillian’s grasp on his hand intensified. Two people, a man and a woman, both in scrubs, mask, and hair covers, entered through the main doors and took a position against the wall, well away from the table.
“That’s her,” Jillian whispered loudly. “That’s Belle.”
Nick was able to make out a tallish, slender woman with very attractive eyes.
“If Dr. Spielmann has no objections,” the circulating nurse told Belle and the medical student, “we’ll get you up on risers so you can see more than people’s backs. Either way, the procedure will be on that screen. Have you both read up on cardiac rhabdomyomas?”
“Yes,” the students said in unison.
Nick felt Jillian stiff en at the sound of her sister’s voice.
“Great,” the circulator went on, “so you know it’s not a cancer that spreads to other parts of the body, but it arises from the inner heart muscle and just keeps growing and taking up space until cardiac function becomes severely compromised.”
There was another lengthy edit, leading to the sudden appearance at the head of the table of the anesthesiologist and, on the left side of the table, another surgeon-the first assistant, Nick assumed, actually remembering Lewis Leonard from the list of players because of a grade-school classmate in Oregon with the same name. At that moment, the main doors burst open and Aleem Syed Mohammad was wheeled in by two men in scrubs, surgical masks, and hair covers. In a short while, the infamous murderer and terrorist lying so peacefully on the stretcher was going to be dead.
Mohammad, eyes closed, probably in a pleasant swoon from his pre-op medication, had a sheet draped across his body from the midchest down. He was a swarthy, rather handsome man, with high cheekbones and narrow features, including a striking aquiline nose. Nick got a brief, clear view of him as he was transferred onto the operating table.
One of the two transport men remained in the room and was posted to Belle’s right, on the other side of the main doors. Nick recalled that such a person was not identified in the roster of those observing the procedure, and speculated that he was a security presence, probably from the CIA. He was a stocky man, of average height, and although only his eyes and throat were exposed, there was something strangely familiar about him.
The door to the scrub room opened and the principal medical player in the scene, Dr. Abigail Spielmann, backed into the room, her hands up in front of her, palms in. She was a surprisingly slight woman, with light blue eyes that sparkled with intelligence despite the distance from the camera. The hand drying and nurse-assisted gowning of the cardiac surgeon was edited out.
“Dr. Landrew,” she said to the anesthesiologist, every word tinged with authority, “anything I should know about in his pre-op examination?”
“His history and examination were done with the help of an interpreter. The patient had not received any medication that would alter his mental status, but he still seemed a little groggy.”
“Despite the grogginess, you trust his signing of the consent form?” Spielmann asked.
“I do. There were three witnesses-two nurses from his floor, and his interpreter.”
“I actually spoke with him after you did,” Spielmann said. “I have been using some tapes to learn a little Arabic. Mr. Mohammad seemed to know what I was saying, which made me very pleased. I was able to pick out a few words he said, but just a few. At the time we spoke, he seemed tired but in command of his faculties. So I agree with you, Dr. Landrew.”
“Excellent.”
“Then are we ready to get this show on the road?”
“Ready.”
“Mr. Pendleton?”
“Ready, Doctor,” said the perfusionist.
“Okay, then. We’ll put him to sleep and prep him as a team according to the method I have distributed to each of you. Those of you observing can take your places on the risers after he is asleep, prepped, and draped. Questions?”
There were none. The anesthesiologist adjusted his position to inject what Nick felt certain was succinylcholine to paralyze Mohammad before inserting a breathing tube into his trachea.
But at that instant, Aleem Syed Mohammad began to move.
First he stirred. Then he groaned. Then he reached both hands up and squeezed them against the sides of his head. Next he began to moan, then he cried out loudly and suddenly he screamed.
A moment later, he sat bolt upright, flailing his arms and screeching at the top of his lungs in what Nick assumed was Arabic. Instantly, everyone around the operating table seemed to be speaking and moving at once. The surgeons and the circulating nurse tried to force him back onto the table. His flailing arms caught one of the assistants on the side of the face and sent her sprawling. His IV tore from his arm. Blood instantly began oozing through the gauze that had been holding the large cannula in place.
His cries of pain grew louder still. His eyes seemed twice their natural size.
He violently snapped his head from side to side as if trying to dislodge a parasite.
Then, with his arms waving wildly, he flung himself off the table, sending the circulating nurse and a surgical assistant crashing into the heart-lung perfusion pump, which rose up on two wheels and toppled over.
The camera angle switched to the one looking from the foot of the OR bed toward the head-the only view that could show the utter chaos on the operating room floor, where three people struggled amidst the fluids from the IVs and the perfusion machine.
“
Sa’edoony, sa’edoony!
” Mohammad shouted out.
“I’m sure that’s Arabic,” Nick said. “But I don’t know what it means.”
Despite the noise and commotion, Mohammad’s words were clear.
“
Sa’edoony… ahderoo lee ed-Doctor Fury… ahderoo lee ed-Doctor Nick Fury! Sa’edoony… ¡Socorro! ¡Ayúdenme! ¡Búsquenme al Doctor Nick Fury!”
“Oh my God!” Nick exclaimed in a strained whisper. “That last bit wasn’t Arabic, it was Spanish. It’s Umberto! That’s his voice. I swear it is! He’s calling for me!”
“
Sa’edoony!…
”
Umberto’s screams echoed through the room.
The camera angle was switched to the overhead view.
Then, as suddenly as it had started, the thrashing and screaming ended. The surgical assistants stumbled to their feet and lifted the lifeless body of their patient back onto the table.
Nick felt ill as the man’s head flopped back. His face was absolutely that of Aleem Syed Mohammad.
Plastic surgery!
Nick realized.
Lots of it
.
“
Pump!
”
Abigail Spielmann ordered.
“Endotracheal tube is in.”
“No pulse,” someone called out.
“Both lungs aerating.”
“EKG is hooked up. Flat line. Absolutely flat.”
“Pupils are blown, fully dilated, and fixed on both sides.”
“Keep pumping.”
“BP zero.”
“Looks as if he blew an aneurysm in his head,” Abigail Spielmann said with seasoned calm. “A huge one, I suspect. Could I have two ccs of epi on an intracardiac needle. I think we should see what this does and then make a decision about opening his chest for manual compressions.”
“BP still zero.”
Spielmann took the long cardiac needle and drove it down beside the patient’s sternum, keeping suction on the plunger. There was an immediate jet of dark, almost black blood into the syringe. She injected the contents into the left ventricle of the heart.
“Nothing. Straight line.”
“BP zero.”
“Pupils fixed.”
“I cannot see anything to be gained by going to the final level and opening this man’s chest. Anyone feel differently?” There was only silence from the room. “Okay, then. Time of death ten thirty-one A.M. Thank you, everybody. I appreciate your efforts. I’m very sorry this happened.”
The overhead camera showed the deceased man’s face, staring sightlessly upward at the saucer lights. Nick hit Pause and held the image in the center of the screen.
“My God,” Nick said. “While they were doing all that work on Umberto’s face, they must have taught him Arabic so he would be ready for the pre-op interviews.”
“It’s just like when I heard Manny speak in Arabic. Billy Pearl said that Manny had been brainwashed. I bet the same thing was done to Umberto,” Jillian said.
“Did your sister speak Arabic?” Mollender asked.
“No. But as Nick said, the Arabic Umberto spoke was mixed in with Spanish.”
“Okay. So, did your sister speak Spanish?”
“She was almost fluent,” Jillian replied. “We both were.”