“Yeah, sure boss. Good thing we got here when we did, or maybe you would’ve robbed him yourself. Now how about gettin’ out of the way so we can save this man’s life?” Santos said, getting down on his knees to get to work. He closed his eyes, crossed himself, then opened his box and grabbed his stethoscope.
The cop stood up abruptly. “Okay, wise ass, but don’t forget there’s gonna be an investigation here and we need every piece of evidence—wallet, papers, anything—just like I said.”
He paused and looked back down at the victim on the ground. “I think this one’s gonna’ be needing a priest, not a medic. Pretty bad hit and run.” The words trailed off as the cop stepped back out of the way and started walking across the street.
Santos carefully rolled the victim on his back and set him on top of the backboard. His face was swollen, bloody and bruised, but not beyond recognition.
“Dios mio, Rosey. It’s Geoff Davis!”
“What?” Rosey Ceravolo placed her stethoscope to the patient’s carotid artery. She raised her hand to Santos to keep quiet so she could listen carefully for any sounds. “Got a pulse! It’s a bit thready, but it’s there.”
With precision and speed, she cut open Geoff’s blood-soaked t-shirt with her bandage scissors, then placed the stethoscope on his chest. “Respirations shallow, but regular. Both lungs inflated. I think he’ll make it, at least to the ER.” She looked up at Santos. “What’d you say?”
“I said this is Geoff Davis, Doctor Geoff Davis, Chief Neurosurgery Resident at the Trauma Center!”
“What?” she asked in disbelief.
“You heard me right, Ceravolo.”
“Shit,” said Ceravolo in disgust. “Ain’t fair.”
“No, it ain’t.” Santos quickly inflated the blood pressure cuff. “BP 80/30. Looks like he’s lost a fair amount of blood here,” Santos said, gingerly checking Geoff’s head. Bad head injury, real bad. Damn.”
Santos pried the lids open and checked his pupils. They were almost pinpoint, but reactive.
“That crazy son-of-a-bitch drivin’ that car must have been going ninety miles an hour! Had to be on drugs or somethin’, man!”
Santos shot a glance at Ceravolo. “Whoever hit him knew what they were doin’. Look at those skid marks over there. They overlap and go in both directions.” He nodded towards the pavement as he wrapped Geoff’s head with gauze. “That driver kept at him, back and forth, back and forth. He was aimin’ for him.”
“The cop didn’t say anything like that. What makes you such an expert?”
“I know a hit when I see one, Ceravolo. This was a hit, not a hit and run. Same thing happened to my little brother. Drug dealer finished him off. A hit. Skid marks looked just like that.”
She paused as she ripped off a piece of tape with her teeth. For a moment she was speechless. He had never told her that before. “How come our cop friend over there didn’t say anything like that?”
They looked up briefly, glanced over at the tall, pock-marked plainclothes cop, who was awkwardly looking through the low hedges and flowers in the center island of the traffic circle across the way.
“Looks like our friend over there has more interest in finding what he’s lookin’ for than skid marks, Rosita.”
“Yeah, well, maybe you’re right. So what if this was no ordinary hit and run. Especially now that you tell me who this is. Maybe it had somethin’ to do with the attempted murder of that lady doc at the hospital. Maybe it was revenge or somethin’, you know what I mean, like the papers are sayin’?” She looked up at Santos. “You think he did it?”
Santos threw her a scornful glance. “No more than I think my own mama did it! No fuckin’ way! It ain’t in him to kill someone, especially the way they tried to kill that lady doc. Forget it.”
“Hey, just askin’, Santos. You know him as well as anyone, just thought I’d ask.”
“Let’s move him. Ready on three.”
They hoisted him up onto the stretcher. As they did so, something fell to the ground. Santos picked up the manila envelope and examined it, puzzled.
“What the fuck is that?”
“What the fuck does it look like, Ceravolo?”
“Well I know what it is, Santos, but what’s it doin’ in his shorts? Funny place to keep your mail, don’t you think?”
“Doesn’t look like mail.” He held it up to the light, then shook it back and forth. Something other than papers slid around inside. “Looks like some papers, a computer disk of some kind. Couple of small plastic vials, too.”
The envelope was sealed with packing tape and had a name written in black marker on the outside, but no address, no stamps. The word “URGENT” was scribbled underneath, underlined in red. “He was probably going to deliver it himself. Maybe he was on his way there when he got hit. Probably felt it was too important to trust to the post office,” he said as they lifted the stretcher and slid their patient in the back of the ambulance.
“What are you going to do with it?” she asked as she climbed inside.
“Hand it over to Detective O’Malley, 22nd Precinct, NYPD.”
“Maybe you should just give it to that guy in the unmarked car over there. He’ll get it to him. I mean, this looks like police stuff, Santos. Evidence. You know what I mean? Maybe this is what the cop is lookin’ for in the bushes over there. We’re medics, not detectives. We’re not supposed to get involved in this kind of thing.”
Santos looked over at the detective walking back in their direction. “That jerk? No fuckin’ way, babe. I don’t know him, and I don’t trust him. If I handed this envelope over to that bozo, this O’Malley might have it by Christmas, if he was lucky. No, this one’s being hand delivered by Enrique Santos. I’ll take the heat.”
He looked up and grinned. “Besides, you never saw it.”
“Saw what?”
“Didn’t think so.” Santos slammed the back door and climbed onto the driver’s seat. “Now let’s get this man to a doctor.”
Chapter 42
“What the hell’s going on up there, Papa Bear? Have you lost control of your senses?” Bluebird was fuming, his usual controlled demeanor fallen by the wayside.
Balassi’s hand squeezed the receiver tightly, his jaw tense. “Quite the contrary, Phillip. I’ve just taken into my own hands what you and your team obviously couldn’t handle. Things are under perfect control now, let’s cut the fairy tale code names. I’ve had enough of this game.”
“You’re not paid to take anything into your own hands, Balassi! You’re paid to do research. Rather handsomely, I might add. That’s all! You should have stuck to your lab work and left the rest to us.”
“I would have if I could trust you’d have handled it, Phillip, but obviously that didn’t happen. I refuse to let thirty years of brilliant research go down the drain as a result of sheer incompetence!”
“Research you could never have done without our help, you fool. You scientists think you know everything about every fucking thing! Well, let me tell you what you’ve done. That pathologist you tried to have killed, Gibson, she was an agent working for the CIA Inspector General’s Office. The Inspector General! Do you know what that means?”
Balassi moved the receiver away from his ear as Lancaster raised his voice.
“We were watching her so closely she couldn’t change a tampon without us knowing about it. She hadn’t conveyed anything to the IG’s office, Balassi, not a goddamn thing. We were damn close to recruiting her to the project, and you had to have her sliced and diced.
“Now I have the boss looking into every crack and crevice, my asshole included, trying to find out who tried to knock her off! He’s been rattling cages like a mad gorilla, and someone’s gonna’ talk. It’s just a matter of time. The Sigma Project, your ass included, is in jeopardy, you idiot.”
Balassi moved the earpiece closer. He could hear Lancaster panting heavily on the other end, visualize his jowls quivering. He smiled to himself. “She knew more than you think, Phillip. She passed some very incriminating evidence to the one she had recruited as her courier, Dr. Geoffrey Davis. He was becoming as much a loose cannon to the project as Kapinsky was before.
Balassi thought back to what Geoff had told him about Suzanne’s background, her father, her obvious motivation. How could Lancaster not have known? “Do you know who she really—”
“I know what she did, Balassi.”
“Then you know who her father—”
“—I don’t care if her father was the goddamned pope! That Davis boy called me, and we tracked him down. We had him followed and were about to pick him up and reclaim the information when you interfered.”
“You don’t have to worry about him anymore,” Balassi said triumphantly.
“Oh?”
“He’s been eliminated. One of my associates took care of it.” His thin lips formed a self-satisfied smile.
“I’m sorry to disappoint you, good doctor, but my sources tell me he’s alive and in the emergency room of your very own medical center as we speak. And the information you speak of is still not accounted for. Our man at the scene combed the area and couldn’t find a fucking thing.”
“It’s impossible, I—”
“That’s right, Balassi. Alive. You fucked up big time. So big, I have no choice. It’s really a shame I have to do this. For forty years the—”
“I, it’s, it’s impossible.”
“There’s no way out now, Balassi. I have no choice but to pull the plug like I did forty years ago. Only this time, it’s for good. As of now, the Sigma Project is shut down. Forever. Too many careers, too many lives, are at stake. You know how high up this thing goes.”
Balassi sat in stunned silence. He thought of 1962, Cameron Daniels jumping to his death, the cablegram to Dr. Schmidt, ordering him to shut down MK Ultra. “You can’t do that, Phillip.”
“There is no other way, Balassi. My advice to you is to keep a low profile. Take some time off. Pack up today and go to your house in the country for a couple of weeks.”
“You can’t—”
“It’s over. Keep clean, or I’ll bring your head in on a silver platter and serve it to the IG myself.”
A loud click, and the line went dead.
Balassi continued to hold the phone to his ear, staring off into space. He had invested his entire adult life in this project. He was the Sigma Project. No one could take it from him.
Chapter 43
“Where are those goddamned units of whole blood?” barked George Spiros, Director of the Trauma Unit. “The patient was typed and crossed over twenty minutes ago. Doesn’t the blood bank realize we have a doctor’s life on the line here?”
“They’re on the way, Dr. Spiros,” answered Jan Creighton.
Spiros was tense. Jan had known him for seventeen years and rarely had she seen him lose his cool during a trauma. After, maybe, but not during. Not since the assassination attempt on the governor had she seen him in a state like this.
“Run in both bags of normal saline full bore. Let’s get a third IV line going for the blood. Stat!” He turned to Flynn, the trauma doc, who had just tapped the peritoneal cavity with a large syringe. “How bad’s he bleeding?”
Flynn held up the syringe filled with dark blood. “Pretty badly. Probably ruptured his spleen. If we can keep up with it and maintain his blood pressure while we’re waiting on the OR, we’ll be okay.”
Beads of sweat formed on Spiros’ upper lip. His gaze darted nervously back and forth between his patient and the monitors. Geoff’s heart rate had reached 120, his blood pressure was 90/50 and dropping. Spiros knew he was hemorrhaging faster than they could replace the lost volume. It was a race against death, and it was pretty tenuous.
“Don’t breath him so fast,” he barked at the respiratory tech squeezing the black ambu bag. “Turn up the oxygen, six liters. Somebody get another blood gas!”
The tech nodded, slowed down the respiratory rate.
“Jan, what’s holding up the OR?”
“The room’s almost ready, Dr. Spiros. Anesthesia said they need about five more minutes—”
“Tell anesthesia if we have to wait five more minutes, we won’t need the OR!”
“Yes, sir.”
“Choy, how’s his neuro status?”
Karen Choy had just finished the most difficult neuro exam of her short clinical career. She had seen worse: mangled car accident victims, the cop, Smithers. But she had never had to work on someone she knew so well.
She looked at Geoff, his battered, swollen face, the raccoon-like dark circles around his swollen shut lids. She couldn’t believe it was the same living, breathing, handsome Geoff Davis she had worked with.
“Well, uh, the patient’s—Dr. Davis’—deep reflexes are intact, and he responds to pain.”
“His pupils, Choy, how are they?”
“His pupils, yes, sir. His pupils are small, about two to three millimeters. They react equally. The small pupils seem a little unusual given the extent of the head injury. Eye movements are intact, too, Dr. Spiros. That’s good, isn’t it?”
“That’s very good, Choy. A good assessment by you, even better for our patient. At least his neurons seem intact.”
Karen Choy nodded.
“And the PET scan?”
She hesitated. “Well, it wasn’t really a good study, Dr. Spiros. They, didn’t have much time because—”
“I don’t care how good it was, Doctor Choy. Just tell me what you found!”
“It was consistent with mild to moderate coma, prognosis good—”
“Blood’s here!” came a voice from the doorway. The tech carrying two bags of dark blood held them up triumphantly.
“Dr. Spiros, Dr. Pederson’s on line two,” yelled the ward clerk.
“Tell him Dr. Davis’ neuro status is stable.”
A moment passed while the message was communicated to Pederson.
“He wants you to make sure the OR knows he’s coming down himself to put an intracranial bolt in when the surgeons finish working on his belly.”
Spiros glared at the clerk. “Jesus Christ! My patient’s hanging on by a thread and Pederson’s worrying about drilling a hole to put a fucking monitor in his head? Tell him to call the OR himself. We’re busy trying to save a life here.”
“BP’s dropping, seventy over palp, pulse thready. Hang the other unit of blood, stat!” Flynn blurted out.
Then the monitor sounded its high-pitched alarm. “He’s in V-tach!” Karen Choy yelled.
Spiros rushed to the crash cart. “Give me a gram of epi!”
All eyes were on the monitor as he squirted the ampule of epinephrine through the IV line.
They watched and waited.
“No change.” He turned to Flynn. “Give me those paddles!”
“Shouldn’t we give the epi a few more seconds to work?”
“I said give me those goddamn paddles!” Spiros grabbed the paddles from Flynn and put them on Geoff’s chest. “Ready at two hundred. Stand away!”
Geoff’s body arched violently upward, then fell back on the bed board with a thud.
Jan Creighton covered her mouth with her hand.
Nothing.
“Again! Get back.”
Spiros readied the paddles again, then fired.
The monitor was eerily silent for what seemed like forever. Nothing. All eyes remained fixed on the screen. Then a blip.
“He’s in sinus rhythm!” Flynn yelled. “His heart’s stabilized!”
“Thank God,�
�� said Karen Choy.
“Dr. Spiros, the OR is ready,” said the clerk.
“It’s about fucking time. Let’s go!”
Chapter 44
The orange glow of the sun faded quickly, giving way to darkness much earlier than usual for a mid-summer night. A billowy layer of black storm clouds had rolled in late in the afternoon, and a nasty summer storm drenched the streets of New York.
Inside the protective walls of the Neurosurgical ICU at the New York Trauma Center, however, all was quiet. Two patients had been discharged to the floor earlier in the evening, and only one remained. Jill Aker, the rookie nurse on nightshift had just received report from Cathy Johannsen. The ICU was required by law to have at least two RN’s on duty, even if there was only one patient. Jill had met Geoff only once, on his first day as chief resident. She was sure he had barely noticed her, but here she was with his life in her hands. It made her more than a little nervous.
“Eight hours in surgery? Jeez,” Jill said.
“Takes a long time to do what they had to do. Ruptured spleen, lacerated liver, shattered thigh bone, fractured cheek, not to mention various lacerations that needed suturing. Oh, yeah, the head bolt—the pressure monitor.”
“Isn’t that important?”
“Depends who you ask. I think they put them in way too often around here. Supposed to be just for comatose head injury patients to monitor their level of pressure around the brain, their level of consciousness and all that, but Geoff was responsive to pain even in the ER. He hasn’t fully awaken yet, opened his eyes or said anything, but he’s definitely not in a coma. I don’t get it.” Cathy stared over in Geoff’s direction, frustration in her voice.
“Aren’t they doing a study on that? That’s probably why they all get the head bolts put in,” Jill said.
“There’s a study, all right, but he’s no guinea pig!”
The Endorphin Conspiracy Page 23