Under the Knife(46)

“Sure.”

Rita. Naked in an OR.

Impossible.

He did his best to concentrate on Bogart’s biopsy.

It wasn’t easy.





SEBASTIAN


It was remarkable, Sebastian observed, how easy it was to walk unchallenged into the operating room of a major university hospital, in a major U.S. city.

Embarrassing, really.

You couldn’t board a commercial airliner these days without a goddamn body-cavity search, but you could write down a name in black Sharpie on an adhesive paper name tag (or, better yet, use a printer, which is what Sebastian had done), slap it on your chest, claim to work for some surgical device manufacturer (any of the big ones that had contracts with the hospital would do), and stroll right the hell in, unchallenged, thank you very much.

After changing into a suit and tie he’d stowed above a ceiling tile in a little-used men’s room, Sebastian had slipped unnoticed into a group of about twenty observers gathering near an entrance to the construction area at the end of a long corridor on the third floor. All the commotion, with the handing out of hard hats and review of safety rules, had provided perfect cover.

He’d had a brief, tense moment when the harried hospital public-relations team organizing the tour—a caffeinated pair consisting of a pretty, dark-haired, dark-skinned young woman in a formfitting blue dress and an even prettier, blond-haired young man sporting a grey skinny suit with red skinny tie—had realized the number in the tour group was higher than what they’d been expecting. Several people, including him and a woman who identified herself as a reporter for the Wall Street Journal, were not on the list.

Anxious to stay on schedule, the flustered pair had ignored the discrepancy and scrambled to procure more hats. Shit, they hadn’t even bothered to write down his fake name. With a vacant smile, the pretty PR man had thrust a hard hat and Turner Hospital promotional brochure into Sebastian’s hands and shooed him through a door (normally locked, Sebastian knew), which opened onto a bridge that led into the heart of the construction site. When construction was complete, the bridge would (Sebastian also knew) be one of the main thoroughfares connecting Turner with the new wing.

The top of the bridge was covered, but its sides were not; and now, as the tour group strolled across it, a strong, salt-tinged breeze blew in from the ocean. It ruffled his hair, fluffing it like a blow-dryer, and blew his tie over his shoulder.

He noticed that the precise blond hair of the PR guy, who was walking in front of him, remained in perfect lockdown, not a strand out of place, and his tie remained safely ensconced under the buttoned-down coat of his wrinkle-free suit. Suddenly self-conscious, Sebastian ran his fingers through his hair and carefully repositioned his tie underneath his suit coat before securing it with a button.

A trio of men behind him were having a lively discussion about liver transplants. Visiting surgeons, probably. Another alias he’d considered for today was that of a surgeon, visiting from another hospital. He might have been able to pull it off, he thought. Back in the day, he’d done double duty as his unit’s corpsman, so he had some solid working knowledge of medicine—one of the skills that had landed him this job with Finney.

His medical abilities were the real deal. He’d hit the books hard during training, when he’d been selected as a corpsman. But it was the combat experiences that had honed them, sharpening them to the point he felt comfortable doing most anything short of major surgery. Some of the medical procedures he’d performed by himself, without support, in shit holes all over the world, had terrified him. But he’d had no choice. Shit happened.

Oh Jesus this one time: a kid (kids, they’d all been kids) shot to pieces, fucking pieces, the flesh of his neck and head torn away; alive but unconscious, goddamn blood everywhere; and from somewhere in the middle of the mound of raw hamburger that had a few seconds earlier been the kid’s face (Gary, his name was Gary, and he was from Indiana, and the guys had called him Gary Indiana, like the song in that old corny musical), he’d sucked air through what had remained of his mouth.

It had become clear, fast, that Gary Indiana was suffocating. The pipe leading to his lungs—the trachea—was collapsing, clogging with blood and thick, pink chunks of God-knew-what. The evac helicopter had been ten minutes away; Gary Indiana had maybe a quarter of that left to live.

So Sebastian had made a decision, and he’d done what he’d never done before, or since: he’d slipped a plastic breathing tube into what was left of Gary Indiana’s trachea to prop it open and maintain the precious flow of oxygen until help arrived. He’d done it right there, out in the open, in a desert in the middle of fucking nowhere.

But he’d done it right.

Goddamn, but that had been one scary experience: his hands shaking, fumbling at the sterile packaging of the plastic tube; Gary’s wet, rasping breaths driving him to distraction. He’d managed it, somehow, and positioned the tube correctly, and kept him alive until the helicopter had arrived.

He’d never found out what had happened to Gary Indiana: if he’d made it in the end and, if so, what he looked like now. Sebastian didn’t like to think about that, tried not to imagine him on a respirator in a VA-hospital chronic-care ward.

As confident as he was, Sebastian also knew his limitations, and doubted he could bluff his way through an extended conversation with a surgeon. No, too risky.