Michael Palmer - The Last Surgeon

Jillian frowned. “I’m afraid to ask when Johnson made you stop using your friend for disaster recovery.”

“Four years ago. A year before Mohammad’s operation.”

“So that’s it, then. No video. Even if we were able to find out what personnel were in the OR that day, it won’t tell us anything about what happened during the operation.”

For the first time, Jillian noted a glint in the Mole’s eyes.

“Well, all might not be as bleak as it seems, my friend,” he said. “You see, if Mohammad’s surgery was ever recorded, then there is a copy of that video nobody knows about. That’s why I asked who would want to steal it and cover their tracks by deleting it from my database log, and the real reason why I wanted to meet here. If someone’s stolen the original DVDs, I didn’t want to meet anywhere near the place.”

“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.