Michael Palmer - The Last Surgeon

“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.”

Nick wrote “Maryland” next to Landrew’s name.

Mollender continued.

“Kimberly Fox is dead too, assuming she’s the same Kimberly Fox on the board here. She was killed near her family’s home in Utah. Skiing accident, it says here. Broke her neck. No details. No mention that she worked at Shelby Stone, but it does say she was a nurse.”

“She could have moved,” Jillian said. “Nurses, especially younger ones, are constantly changing hospitals. Like Belle.”

“Mass murder, one by one,” Nick muttered.

“Oh, no, I’ve got another hit,” Noreen said shortly. Her voice quaked with a raw mix of fear and anxiety. “Cassandra Browning-Leavitt. Killed here in D.C. Shot from the woods while she was jogging along Rock Creek. No witnesses. Believed to be a random event. No suspects.”

“I remember Cassandra now,” Jillian said. “She was still working at Shelby Stone when she was killed. They sent a notice around after it happened warning people to be careful. That was a while ago. Maybe back in February.”

For a minute, two, nobody could speak. Nick felt a band tightening around his chest.

“Washington. Chicago. New York. North Carolina. Utah. Maryland. Somebody is killing these people and doing it in such a way that it doesn’t appear to be murder,” Nick said, “or at least not deliberate murder, and certainly not serial murder.”

“I knew it,” Jillian said viciously. “I told them. I told them all she’d never kill herself.”

“With these deaths so spread out across the country,” Mollender said, “who would think to link them?”

“We would, that’s who,” Nick answered. Then he drew a line through the names of those they had confirmed dead, including Belle. “That leaves us four people we haven’t accounted for yet. Roger Pendleton, the perfusionist; Yasmin Dasari, the surgical resident; Yu Jiang, who was a medical student at the time; and Saul’s video editor, Annette Furst.”

Noreen nodded. She kept her gaze fixed to her computer screen, her fingers sweeping across her keyboard, while her computer mouse remained in a state of constant motion, expecting to find death notices posted online for at least three. Mollender continued his search for other victims as well.

“I’m not getting anything on Dasari or Jiang. But I logged in to our intranet at Shelby Stone,” Mollender said. “Pendleton is listed as still being an employee. I have an address for him. Phone number too. According to this, he lives in Alexandria, Virginia.”

“Let’s hope that’s true,” Nick said.

“What, that he’s in Alexandria?”

“No. That he lives.”

“There are three possible reasons Pendleton’s not answering his phone,” Nick told Jillian. “Either he’s not at home, he’s busy, or he’s already dead.”

Jillian grimaced at the notion.

“Why are they doing this after so many years, Nick? It’s pure evil. Could a branch of our government really be responsible?”

“I wish I knew. I really do. Maybe people from Mohammad’s terrorist organization are finally exacting revenge for his death. Even though we know he wasn’t the one who died that day, maybe they don’t.”

“It’s a thought, but terrorists usually go out of their way to take credit for acts of vengeance like this, and we haven’t heard a word.”

“Six people dead.”

“At least.”

Nick gripped the steering wheel with white-knuckle force, frustrated that so many answers still eluded them. Before they left her office, Noreen had handed Nick two leather cases, each containing a copy of the operation that she had burned to DVD. Now, Jillian held them in her lap, a reminder, she said, that Umberto and Belle were with them on this journey until the end.

The traffic was moderately heavy, and Nick estimated they were still ten minutes away from Roger Pendleton’s address in Alexandria. The Mole had volunteered to stay behind with a still-shaken Noreen, and to continue searching for information about the surgical resident and the medical student, neither of whom had proven that easy to find.