By eight A.M., thirty-seven hotel guests had died from burns and smoke inhalation, as well as nine firemen who had been trapped. Another forty firemen and more than a hundred hotel guests had been injured. The evacuation had been properly handled, but panic had taken a heavy toll. Market Street looked like a bomb had hit it, and the fire had spread to a department store next door before it was brought under control.
Stephanie didn’t make it home until two P.M. the day after the fire. Her white coat was black with ash and soot, and she looked exhausted when Andy saw her. He had watched the progress of the fire on TV all night, and Stephanie had sent him a text at two A.M. that their ER was being overrun. Every hospital in the city had been receiving victims of the fire, and even doctors not on call and from other departments had gone to help.
“How bad is it at UCSF?” Andy asked with interest, as she sat bone-tired in a chair, grateful that the boys were down for their naps. She was filthy and drained and hadn’t slept all night.
“It’s like a war.” The hotel had virtually been destroyed, gutted by the fire. “It was like the terrorist drills they’ve been describing to us, only worse. The firefighters took the hardest hit.” Firefighters had battled the blaze for fifteen hours, and many more would be on the scene in the coming days, making sure it was out, and they still didn’t know if it had been arson or not. Stephanie hoped it wasn’t, knowing that someone had set the fire intentionally would have been infinitely worse. She went to take a bath a few minutes later, and crawled into bed afterward, as Andy walked into their room and sat down on the bed. It reminded her of the dinner the night before. “How was your mom? With the fire, I would have had to go in anyway.”
“She was upset, but she understands it’s the nature of what you do. She just doesn’t understand why you have to work on holidays,” he said quietly.
“Because people get hurt even on Christmas,” Stephanie said simply. “They called in everyone last night. We even delivered two babies in the ER. We couldn’t get the women to labor and delivery in time.” But the worst of it had been the burns, and she knew that several of those patients wouldn’t survive. The firefighters had been incredibly brave.
Stephanie looked peaceful as she drifted off to sleep. The entire trauma unit and emergency room team had done a good job, and she was proud of them, and to have been a part of it.
Tom Wylie felt the same way at Alta Bates, and Bill Browning was still in the thick of it. He hadn’t had time to call Pip and Alex at midnight as he’d meant to. They were still doing triage at General, and had gotten some homeless patients too. They had been asleep in doorways too close to the fire and been injured by falling debris. At Stanford, Wendy had her hands full as well. Jeff had come in at midnight to lend a hand, but all the cardiac patients had gone to SF General and UCSF to save time, and he left fairly quickly after talking to Wendy for a few minutes.
Tom Wylie got home at three P.M. His six-year-old patient who had had surgery the night before, after the car accident, was awake and doing well. And fresh teams had come in to deal with the victims of the fire, so he had finally gone back to his apartment. It was a depressing place, and looked better at night, lit with candles, than in broad daylight, which showed the threadbare furniture and the peeling paint. He had never spent much on rent and didn’t really care about where he lived as long as the place had a comfortable king-size bed. He grabbed the remote and turned on the TV mostly out of habit. He liked hearing a voice in the apartment, and he expected to see more coverage of the fire. The DEM had done an amazing job on the scene and overseeing dispatch to the various hospitals, and were being highly praised by all. But instead of Market Street, Tom saw images of the Eiffel Tower and the Champs-Élysées in Paris. It was midnight on December 26 there, and a band that ran across the television screen read “Terrorism in Paris,” as an American reporter described a scene of carnage on the Champs-Élysées. Four major luxury stores and two movie complexes that showed mostly American films in the original version had been taken over, with moviegoers and shoppers held hostage and gunned down, including children. A suicide bomber had blown up one of the stores, and another had entered the elevator at the Eiffel Tower, intending to blow it up, but had been killed before he could detonate the belt he wore and turn himself into a human bomb.
In all, one hundred and two people had been killed, and another fifty-three injured. It was the worst attack of its kind since the November attacks four years before. It was another massive assault on people going about their business, shopping the day after Christmas, taking advantage of sales, going to movies and having dinner on the famous Champs-Élysées. The motives were political, but however they justified it, innocents had been slaughtered, even young children. The attacks had occurred at six P.M., before the stores closed in Paris, and tears rolled down Tom’s cheeks as he watched the scenes of destruction and mass murder, and the numbers of people injured as sirens screamed in the night. The ravages of the hotel fire seemed small compared to what Paris had just been through, again.
Incredible acts of heroism were described. There were videos from the cellphones of people who had been there, and sobbing interviews with the survivors. It was heartbreaking to see the effects of tragedy again, and impossible to understand. Listening to the stories, seeing the damage and loss of life, and hearing how many had died from gunfire or the detonated bombs, the only conclusion a sane person could come to was that the world had gone mad.
Chapter Three
The cleanup after the hotel fire on Market Street was massive, and firefighters combed through the rubble for days, looking for clues to how the fire started. Foul play was eventually ruled out. Faulty wiring had caused it, and the fifteen-foot Christmas trees on every floor of the hotel had fed the blaze. Within a day or two, those with minor injuries left the hospitals where they’d been admitted. Others had to stay longer, and those with severe burns had a long road ahead of them. Three more of the firefighters and two elderly hotel guests died within days of the fire, and the death toll reached a total of fifty-one, with eighty-seven more people injured to varying degrees.
It took several days for the hospitals involved to calm down, and once the people with minor injuries had been released, they were left mostly with the burn victims to be treated. By New Year’s Eve, each of the hospitals had almost returned to normal. Bill Browning and Tom Wylie were working again at SF General and Alta Bates. Wendy Jones was on call at Stanford, and Stephanie Lawrence had the night off from UCSF, much to her husband’s relief and her own. Both boys had come down with the flu the day before, and Stephanie didn’t want to leave them with a sitter, so she and Andy stayed home on New Year’s Eve. At least she wouldn’t have to go to work that night. They opened a bottle of champagne after the boys were asleep, and watched old movies in bed. Stephanie had been working hard all week, and fell asleep at ten o’clock, while Andy saw the New Year in alone.
The savage attack in Paris took longer to clean up, and the country had been scarred again by tragic losses. Candles and flowers were left in vast profusion up and down the Champs-Élysées, and particularly in front of the stores and movie houses that had been affected. More than a hundred people had been killed. There was a special memorial mass at Notre Dame, and a vigil the night before. The images of the mourners on TV were heartbreaking, as people held up signs with the names of the victims whom they knew. It was nearly impossible to conceive of acts of a political nature carried out against innocent people going about their business on a Thursday night. It was an echo of what had happened before, but this time was infinitely worse with more people killed, and not just young people this time, but children too. The youngest victim of the attack was two years old. In some cases, entire families had been slaughtered.
It made no sense to Tom as he watched the coverage. In his mind, politics never justified the murder of people who had nothing to do with the issues. He had been watching CNN all week, and
cried every time he saw an interview with someone who had survived the attack and described how the people around him had been assassinated. To Tom, it seemed like a tragedy not just for Parisians, but for humanity and the entire world. It went against everything he believed and had dedicated his life to. He had spent twenty years putting wounded bodies back together, while others wanted to destroy them. He wished there were some way to help, but France was a long way away, and there was nothing he could do. It had depressed him profoundly, and he watched the latest stories emerging from the tragedy every day.
All the perpetrators had died with their victims. The whole thing seemed like a terrible waste, and he was overwhelmed by sadness every time he thought about it. The story had certainly eclipsed the hotel fire in San Francisco, which had genuinely been a regrettable accident. There was nothing accidental about the Paris attacks. They had been carefully planned, executed with precision, and entirely intentional. It made him think of the last time he’d been in Paris, while he was in medical school. He’d gone there for a summer break with two friends and fell in love with the city, and every girl he met.
The attacks worried Bill Browning too. If it could happen in Paris, it could happen in London, and he shuddered every time he thought of his daughters being potentially at risk. He called Athena to talk about it, and told her not to let their daughters go to movie theaters or big sports events for a while. She pooh-poohed it, and said that the British were much more careful about security than the French, and uttered some gibberish that you couldn’t live in fear, and let terrorists win. And you had to go on with normal life and show them that you weren’t afraid of them. Bill vehemently disagreed with her and said it was a good time to be cautious and not do anything foolish. He reminded her of the bombing of Harrod’s, the London department store, years before, and more recent attacks. She brushed him off again and didn’t want to hear it, which left him even more anxious after he’d hung up.
Government officials in France and every European country were assuring their citizens that secret service and intelligence operatives had tightened security considerably, but other politicians said that was simply not true. They didn’t have the manpower to do that, and the public wasn’t privy to the truth. Nowadays, it was in fact impossible to keep any nation entirely safe, even the United States, although the U.S. intelligence machine seemed to have much greater resources and manpower at its disposal than most countries, and more sophisticated high-tech methods to identify potential risks. But the crazies appeared to be ruling the world these days. There were plenty of people, even in the U.S., who were disgruntled, or disturbed, or certifiably insane, or had dangerous political affiliations, or some beef with the world, and killed other people in universities, schools, restaurants, on the street, or in government facilities, and even in churches. No one was exempt or entirely safe anywhere in the world anymore. It was unsettling to think about.
Tom Wylie was subdued all week after the Paris attacks. He was startled when the head of the hospital sent him an email the following week, requesting a meeting with him. Tom had met him, but had never been called to his office before. Tom wondered if some aspect of their rescue mission the night of the fire hadn’t been carried out to the hospital director’s satisfaction. It was the only reason he could think of for being called to his office, and he had a strong suspicion that he himself was in trouble. Or maybe the director had finally gotten word of Tom’s womanizing. Or maybe some nurse had objected to his flirting and had complained. It was harmless and indiscriminate, and just a game he played to lighten the life-and-death tension of his work. It was difficult to believe that the head of the hospital hadn’t heard of that before, and didn’t know it was without malice or serious intent. Maybe he was going to issue a gentle warning, or possibly a not-so-gentle one, and a slap on the wrist. They couldn’t stop him from sleeping with nurses in his spare time, but they could tell him to behave. No one had ever complained.
Tom walked into the hospital administrator’s office looking humble, which he figured was the best way to go. He was all bluster and bravado when chatting up a flock of women, but getting called into the boss’s office was no joke, and Tom looked solemn while he waited to be told what his crime had been, and what the punishment would be.
The director of the hospital rambled on for a few minutes and congratulated Tom again for his cool head and efficiency the night of the fire. Several of the people he’d helped had written letters of high praise for Tom’s extreme competence and compassion that night. They were all heartfelt, and although Tom brushed it off casually, he was very touched by people’s responses, and surprised to hear them.
He waited quietly for the director to get to the point. The director began speaking of the attacks on Paris, and then finally, twenty minutes after he had begun his deadly boring analysis of the political situation in Europe and the States, he told Tom that they had an extraordinary opportunity for him, and he hoped that Tom would be open to it. He said it had come in the form of an invitation, and Tom wasn’t sure if that was good or bad.
“An invitation to what?” Tom blurted out, unable to stand the mystery and the wait any longer. The suspense was killing him. What invitation?
“As you may know, the cities of Paris and San Francisco partnered about fifteen years ago, and became sister cities officially. And rather than wait for our fearless leaders to solve the problem of future attacks and how to prevent and deal with them, which may not be possible anyway, the Department of Emergency Management here and its French counterpart under the umbrella of the Ministry of the Interior are proposing to send over four of our best trauma doctors to share with them how we respond to mass casualty incidents here. They’re inviting four trauma doctors to France and will treat you royally for four weeks to have an information exchange. After a brief two-week hiatus, four of their emergency management doctors and officials would come here as the guests of our city, so we can show them the techniques we use. The only example of a large-scale public disaster we’ve had in San Francisco recently was the hotel fire, which was not an act of terrorism, but some of the same techniques were used to handle a large number of victims and coordinate several hospitals simultaneously.
“From all the reports I’ve seen, you did a heroic job of holding up our end that night, and I’d like to recommend you for this project, Tom. I think you’d be a great addition to the team from San Francisco, and there is always a lot to learn from pooling information. We’re not exempt from terrorist attacks here either, or from crazed gunmen taking over a public place. Also, the earthquake risk we have here forces us to face some of these issues in case of a natural disaster. I think our French counterparts have something to learn from us too. And four weeks in Paris sounds like a plum assignment to me. What do you think?” Tom was beaming as he listened, and the nature of the project began to sink in. The chance to meet French women again and spread his talents internationally sounded like a fantastic opportunity to him.
“I think I can handle it,” Tom said, smiling at him. “I think we’ll all learn a lot from each other,” particularly the French girls he was hoping to meet. The social aspects of the mission sounded even more exciting than the professional ones, now that he knew he wasn’t in trouble with the big boss.
“We expect you to represent us in a dignified manner,” the director said seriously, calling Tom to order, as though he could read his mind, so Tom wiped the lascivious smile off his face. “It’s quite an honor for the mayor to allow us to present a candidate for the assignment. From what I understand, four hospitals have been selected, and we’re very pleased to be one of them. A group of your peers seems to think you’d be the best man for the job. I understand that you have a cool head in a crisis, and with serious matters at hand, you’re a great leader and never let your partners down. You are an excellent physician and up to date on state-of-the-art techniques.” It was high praise from the administration and Tom beamed a
gain.
“Thank you, sir. I won’t let you down,” he said.
“If I thought you would, I wouldn’t be asking you to go. They want to get this project going quickly, after the recent attacks. You’ll be leaving in two weeks, and staying in Paris for a month. Will that be a problem for you?” The director didn’t know what kind of personal involvements Tom had that could stand in the way, but Tom assured him there were none.
“That works for me,” Tom said soberly. The two men shook hands before Tom left the office. Tom couldn’t believe his good fortune, to be sent to Paris on a mayor’s commission, sponsored by the Department of Emergency Management and its French counterpart. All he knew was that three other San Francisco hospitals would be represented, with a doctor from each, but he had no idea who they were.
Tom went back to the trauma unit with a grin. He couldn’t wipe the smile off his face, and he spun one of the older nurses around while she laughed in amazement, and kissed her firmly on the cheek.
“What happened to you?” she asked as he let her go.
“Six weeks from now, I’ll be spinning you around and speaking to you in French,” he said, looking delighted.
“That sounds dangerous,” she said, laughing at him.
“Definitely, for the French women I meet. Paris, here I come!” he said cryptically, as he grabbed a chart and headed for an exam room while the nurse laughed and went back to work. He was a menace, but an endearing one, and a damn good doctor, she thought as she wondered what he’d meant.
* * *
—
At San Francisco General, Bill Browning had just heard the same speech from the head of the hospital, and Bill too was grinning from ear to ear. The intended mission sounded fascinating and like a great opportunity to share techniques and information, but all he could think of was that four weeks in Paris would give him four weekends to spend with his girls. He could visit them in London, or have Athena send them to Paris. Being able to spend time with them every week for a month was the best gift anyone could have given him, and he could hardly wait!
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