Michael Palmer - The Last Surgeon

Singh sighed, clearly still weighing his options and the risks. Finally, he stood and took Nick’s foot in both his hands. No sooner had he begun to move the leg than Nick cried out and the knee straightened.

“Bless you, Dr. Singh,” Nick gasped. “Bless you.”

“That was easier than I expected,” Singh said. “Can you stand?”

“There’s only one way to find out. Give me your arm, please. You’re a wizard.”

In moments, Nick was on his feet, testing the knee.

At that instant, the elevator chime sounded. It was everything Nick could do to keep from cheering.

“Not the knee again,” Jillian said, squeezing his hand twice to say the job was done. “Jeff, we’re going to Dr. Gavryck right now. You could have been really hurt.”

“But did you and the doctor finish? He did an incredible job unlocking this knee.”

“Thank you, Doctor,” Jillian said. “The rest of our session, I’m afraid, will have to wait. Daintry, I’ll call to reschedule.”

“That would be fine,” the woman said, still pale. “Call me as soon as you have matters straightened out.”

Jillian Collins took her husband by the arm and helped him to the door.

“Don’t count on it, Daintry,” she whispered.

“We’re in.”

To Nick, Reggie’s words were all he wanted to hear. The Singh Medical Spa and Cosmetic Surgery Center held secrets, dirty secrets. He felt certain of it. Now, thanks to Jillian, they might have the means to prove it. Much as Nick wished that Buddha’s road to the truth was just a stroll down easy street, he had long known better. There was plenty of risk and disappointment, pain, and even death along the way. But now, there was hope.

Once again, Nick, Jillian, and Junie stood behind Reggie and his well-worn swivel chair. It took the teen hacker all of five minutes to access the computer on which Jillian had installed a rootkit. She recognized the desktop configuration now displayed on Reggie’s computer monitor as belonging to Paresh Singh.

“That’s amazing,” she said.

“With the rootkit, we can access that computer from right here,” Reggie said, “same as if we were sitting in his office.”

“Won’t they see us moving the cursor around?” Nick asked.

“Stop your worrying, Dr. G. It’s a zombie computer now.”

“Oh, that makes me feel so much better. But won’t they notice their PC eating the flesh of the living?”

Reggie laughed. “That’s a good one.”

“Once in a blue moon, I’m funny,” Nick said. “But this might not be it. What the heck is a zombie computer?”

“Well, basically, it’s just a computer that’s been compromised by a hacker, but the owner isn’t aware it’s being used by anybody else. The only clue they’d have is an unfamiliar IP address appearing in their access logs, provided they even had a reason to look.”

“IP address?” Jillian asked.

“It’s like a phone number for the Internet,” Reggie explained. “It can be traced to a home computer, same as your phone number can be traced to your address, or wherever you’re calling from. That’s how I got caught the last time, if you want to know the truth. But I think I know what I did wrong.”

“Reggie!” Junie said.

“Okay, okay. Just to be safe, though, I’m using a proxy to access the machine so nobody can trace the IP address back here.”

“Oh, I feel so much better now that you’ve explained,” Nick said. “Junie, how old did you say this terror on two legs was?”

“Too old and not nearly old enough,” she answered, bringing her fist down lovingly on the teen’s head.

Jillian leaned in closer.

“So what we’re looking at now is actually Dr. Singh’s computer desktop?”

“Yup. Thanks to you, we’re in control of his machine. For the time being we can access whatever applications Singh can, using his security credentials.”

“Amazing,” she said again.

“Not really. Computers get way too much credit-usually from people who don’t know how they work. Still, you have to know what you want them to do. Do you?”

“I think so,” Jillian said. “I didn’t have time to see what application they use for their electronic medical records, but seeing how they are a joint venture with my hospital, I’ll bet they use the same software we use at work. May I?”

“Be my guest.”

Reggie bowed to Jillian and motioned her to his chair. She bowed back respectfully and took his place. A connection had formed between the two of them. Nick had noticed it before.

Jillian went straight to the applications menu.

“I feel like I’m fifteen, sneaking out of the house to see my boyfriend.”

Nick, too, felt the thrill of the illicit-the adrenaline coursing through him as they closed in on secrets they were never meant to know.

“Do you see the EMR program?” he asked.

“Yes! This is it. It’s the same application we use at Shelby Stone. Eat your heart out, Mollender.”

Having been in one of the first groups trained on the software, Jillian was easily able to navigate through the various screens and prompts.

“Okay, from here I can search records by year. I’ll start from four years ago until now, yes?”

“Beginning in April. You got it,” Nick said.

He crouched low beside her, breathing in the intoxicating scent of the woman who, without his permission, seemed to have set up permanent residence in his thoughts. Jillian worked the application effortlessly.

“Okay, so it looks like the clinic has a database of about twenty thousand patients.”

“Is that substantial?” Junie asked.

“Not for a major hospital like Shelby Stone, but for a private practice it certainly is. According to this billing summary tab, the medi-spa’s gross income last year alone was over twenty-five million.”

“I’d call that respectable,” Junie said. “Just wait until next year’s Helping Hands fund-raiser. I think Dr. Singh will enjoy getting to know me.”

“Fear the Junie,” Nick said. “Listen, guys, we’ve got to keep moving. It’s possible someone could stumble onto the strange IP number, right, Reggie?”

“Ladies and gentlemen, he can be taught.”

“You wait, Smith; the next pass I throw goes right through your chest. Jill, can you search by name?”

“Of course.”

“How about we start with Manny Ferris first.”

Jillian typed “Manuel Ferris” into the designated search box. The query returned no records. Subsequent searches using variations of his name also yielded no results. The same was true when she tried “Umberto Vasquez,” and even “Belle Coates.”

“Dead end,” she sighed.

Damn , Nick thought. Mistakes on the road to truth… Number three, not possessing a backup plan, and number four, not bringing along hiking boots.

“We had no right to think we’d hit it on the first try,” he said. “Let’s get a look at all those records.”

“Um, listen,” Reggie said, “it may be hard to detect our IP address, but it isn’t impossible. Fifteen or twenty minutes, then we can try another time.”

“Got it,” Jillian said.

She switched screens and quickly filled in the required fields to generate patient reports from four years ago. The request took only a minute to run and when it did, the system returned a list of more than five thousand entries.

“Looks like every patient that walked through the doors of the place,” Junie said. “That’s a lot of information. Forget about fifteen or twenty minutes. We could be here for days.”

Damn , Nick thought again.

The screen displayed one record per row, listed by patient name, ID number, and ICD code. The ICD code, or International Classification of Diseases, Jillian explained, was used by physicians and hospital data entry personnel to label patients’ diagnoses such that procedures could be itemized and billed appropriately.