Extreme Measures (1991)

by Michael Palmer

  A week's budget just for cabfare. Laura could see that some of her perspectives were about to undergo a change. The world beyond Little Cayman clearly viewed money differently than she did.

  Even though the woman in the Communigistics personnel office had denied that Scott worked there, Laura felt certain of what he had told her. It seemed strange now, entering Scott's world without his knowing--it was like looking through his closet. She crossed the sterile foyer to the directory of offices. Communigistics was on the fourth floor. She tried to imagine her brother dressed in a suit and tie, carrying a briefcase through the brass-rimmed doors and across to the bank of elevators. The image did not fit with the easygoing, independent man who dived with her on Little Cayman, and who cared so much about natural beauty and the nature of things. It was easier to imagine Scott as a professor someplace, or perhaps a foreign correspondent.

  Communigistics International occupied the entire floor. A trim receptionist was typing behind a huge, solid-front desk with the name of the company emblazoned in gold across it.

  "I'm looking for my brother," Laura began. "I don't know what department he works in, but his name's Enders. Scott Enders."

  The woman checked her directory.

  "I'm sorry," she said, "but I don't have anyone listed here by that name."

  "And you don't know him?"

  "No, I'm afraid I don't."

  Laura fished in her purse and brought out a photograph. It was a picture the club manager had taken of Laura and her brother, dressed in wet suits, getting ready to dive the wall at Bloody Bay.

  "This is Scott," she said. "It's about five months old."

  The woman shrugged and smiled politely.

  "How long have you worked here?" Laura asked.

  "A year. Longer now."

  "And you've never seen this man?"

  "I'm sorry."

  "This is crazy. I know he works here. He ... he's on the road a lot. Perhaps--"

  She was interrupted by the phone. The receptionist answered it, transferred the call, and then turned back to her.

  "Can I help you with anything else?"

  "Yes. Can I please see your personnel director? I think her name is Bullock."

  "That's right. Anne Bullock. She's gone for the day."

  "Well, who's here?"

  "Pardon?"

  The woman glanced pointedly at the work in her typewriter.

  "Look," Laura said, wrestling to maintain her composure, "I want to see whoever is in charge here."

  "I'm sorry, that's not--"

  "Please. I've come a long way. I'm trying to be polite about all of this, but I will not leave until I've spoken to someone who might know about my brother."

  "What seems to be the problem, Alicia?"

  Startled, both women turned.

  A man, tall and balding, perhaps in his early fifties, stood ten feet away.

  "I'm looking for my brother," Laura said quickly. "His name's Scott Enders, and he works here. Only--"

  "I tried telling her that no one by that name--"

  "Please," Laura cut in. "Please let me finish. This is my brother." She handed over the photograph. "It was taken about six months ago at the club where I work."

  "And where's that?" the man said, studying the photo.

  "Little Cayman Island in the Caribbean. I'm a diving instructor at a resort there."

  "I've always wanted to dive. You must love it."

  "I do. Now, about my brother."

  "Why don't you come on down to my office, Miss ..."

  "Enders. Same name as my brother. Laura Enders."

  "Well, I'm Neil Harten," the man said. "I'm vice-president here." He extended his hand, which was large and warm. "Alicia, this woman's brother did work for us once, but I believe he left before you arrived. However," he added, looking pointedly at Laura, "he called himself Scott Shollander then, not Scott Enders. Now, if you'd like to come down to my office, I'll be happy to tell you what I know of him."

  On the way to his office, Neil Harten stopped at the locked personnel office and retrieved the file on the man he had known as Scott Shollander. He poured Laura a cup of coffee, then settled in behind his desk. His office was fairly large, but not opulent. Certificates from a number of chambers of commerce, service organizations, and business bureaus were spotted on the walls, along with framed advertisements for various Communigistics programs and equipment.

  Harten, who had a weariness about his eyes and deeply etched furrows across his high brow, answered Laura's queries with practiced patience. Yes, he was certain that Scott Shollander and Scott Enders were the same person. No, he had no idea why Scott would have changed his name. No, Scott hadn't been fired--he was very good at his job. He had simply walked in one day and quit. And no, he had no idea where Scott had gone or for whom he was working.

  Laura reached into her purse and handed over a stack of postcards.

  "Here," she said. "These are the cards I've received from Scott for the past two and a half years. There are nearly seventy of them from all over the world. He missed a week once in a while, but he's never missed two that I can remember. Now, all of a sudden, I haven't heard from him since February."

  Harten flipped through the cards. Most of them contained just a line or two.

  " 'Wish you were here'... 'Hope you're okay'... 'Casablanca is more mysterious now than it ever was in Bogey's day.' Your brother isn't the newsiest writer, is he?"

  "There's nothing in any of them about changing jobs."

  Harten shrugged. "I don't know what to say. Scott was a very private person, but I guess you know that. I can give you the address we have for him in D.C, and I can ask around. But beyond that?" He held up his hands. "Where are you staying?"

  "Staying? Nowhere. I ... I just flew in and took a cab here."

  "I'll be happy to call you another cab and make reservations somewhere."

  Laura wandered over to the window. Four stories below, she saw her cabbie reading a paper behind the wheel.

  "That's okay. My ride's still here," she said. "But I will take that address."

  "Fine. Here it is. Will you be heading back to the Caribbean from D.C.?"

  "I'm not going back until I find Scott."

  "Well, then, I hope you do."

  "I will," Laura said. "I'll stop by this address right now."

  "And then?"

  "And then Boston, I guess. The last few postcards came from there."

  Harten sighed and tapped his fingertips together for a time.

  "Here," he said. "This is my home phone. I have business connections all over the country. Feel free to call me if there's anything you feel I can do to help."

  "I appreciate that; It's very kind of you. Mr. Harten, I'm going to find him."

  Neil Harten studied her face.

  "I believe you will," he said.

  Laura took the elevator back to the lobby and paused by the directory. Nothing made sense. Nothing at all. Why would Scott have used a false name? Why didn't he mention leaving Communigistics?

  She thought about the years following the death of their parents--Scott's emotional and financial support during her schooling, the cards and calls, the holidays spent together, the nonjudgmental acceptance of her decisions. Throughout those years her brother had never asked a thing of her. Now he needed her. She felt that with near certainty. He was in some sort of difficulty, and he needed her. She stepped out into the graying afternoon.

  "Take me to the city, please. This address," she told the cabbie, handing over the note Harten had printed for her.

  "You got it," he said.

  They drove out of the industrial park and onto the highway. Moments later, a dark sedan swung around the corner and followed.

  By the time his bedside alarm sounded to wake him at 5:45 A.M. Eric Najarian had already completed twenty minutes of intense calisthenics and was skimming through a medical journal as he wolfed down two glasses of orange juice and a bagel. It was rare that he ever slept past five,
and he would have reset the clock to an earlier hour had he ever thought to do so. But invariably his thoughts were otherwise occupied--usually with medicine.

  On this April morning, absorbing a significant percentage of those thoughts was the selection of the new associate director of the White Memorial Hospital emergency service. The position carried with it an associate professorship at the medical school, and it continued to be, at least according to rumor, a two-man contest between Reed Marshall and himself.

  Now, after months of interviews and speculation, the three-person search committee was scheduled to meet at four o'clock to announce its decision. If Eric was chosen, he would become the youngest faculty member to be tenured in the history of White Memorial. In over a century and a half, the youngest. For years he had worked toward rewards and acclaim that such an honor would bring. Finally, before this day was over, he would know.

  Engrossed in an article extolling the value of placing portable defibrillators in airplanes and on golf courses, he stumbled over cartons of books as he picked his way down the cluttered hallway to his bedroom. The unpacked boxes, sparse furnishings, and unhung pictures gave the impression that he had moved into the Beacon Hill apartment just that week. In reality it had been well over a year. Initially, his friends had teased him about ignoring the place. With time, they had become more concerned. Eric, however, simply didn't care.

  He turned off the alarm and opened Verdi's cage. The macaw hopped out onto the bed, then swaggered over to him for a dog biscuit, which it devoured with the voraciousness of a German shepherd. The bird had been a fixture in Eric's life for nearly three years--since the day it was delivered by the uniformed chauffeur of a man whose son Eric had saved from a potentially fatal gunshot wound. It arrived with no note or instructions--no name, no age, no sex--and spent its first month in Eric's company glaring at him.

  Eric initially named the bird Hippocrates after the father of medicine. But that was before it began singing opera. From what Eric could tell, it could do snatches of a dozen or more arias--all Italian. There was no way it could be induced to sing on cue; nor, once it started, was there any nonviolent way to stop it. But sing it did, sometimes for as long as ten minutes at a stretch. And although Eric had never held any great interest in opera, he had listened to enough of it now to tell that Verdi was not very good.

  Eric waited until the macaw had headed down the hall before shoving the box of biscuits back under a sweater in his closet. Then he checked his calendar and confirmed that Marshall would be covering the E.R. that day. Eric had decided to pass the hours until the search committee meeting working in the lab with Dave Subarsky. The prospect was bittersweet. From all indications, Subarsky would be closing shop soon.

  Over the few months since he and Eric had successfully introduced their pericardial laser, the biochemist's lab, like many others at the hospital, had fallen on hard times. Two government grants he had been counting on--grants that would have been automatic in the past--had been refused. A reordering of priorities coupled with a decrease in available funds was the explanation the NIH and National Science Foundation people kept giving. But everyone in science knew what they really meant.

  Finding a cure for AIDS had become politicized, both within the scientific community and without. Pressure on the federal government had been passed on to the big government research installations, which, in turn, had responded with a demand for more authority to direct investigations, and of course for more funding. The reductions in university-centered programs such as Subarsky's had gone from cuts to hatchet jobs. A whole community of scientists were suddenly "outsiders," and for them the situation was desperate.

  The professor with whom Dave originally worked had given up basic research altogether and returned to full-time clinical practice. Subarsky had begun searching for jobs in industry. But even using the laser as bait, he had been unable to attract any decent offers.

  Today, unless some miracle had intervened over the few days since they had last spoken, Eric knew that he and his friend would begin dismantling and packing their work. Their laser project was, for both of them, a sideline. They had proven its applicability in one rather unusual medical situation. Unfortunately, "sideline" and "unusual medical situation" were not what the current Washington funding sources wanted to hear.

  In a month or two, Dave Subarsky, perhaps the brightest man Eric had ever known, would be unemployed.

  Eric sat on the edge of his bed and flipped through the classified ads in the back of the New England Journal of Medicine. There were a dozen or so from various hospitals for emergency physicians, but none for genius biochemists. If the committee chose Marshall, Eric would have no problem finding a job somewhere--probably a damn good one, too. Such options were a luxury Dave Subarsky did not have. Yet not once had Eric seen even a small crack in the man's quietly positive outlook.

  Why, he wondered, couldn't he get his own situation into perspective? Why, for weeks, had there been a persistent knot of anxiety in his chest?

  The answer to both questions, Eric knew, was the same. He would admit it to no one, and could barely admit it to himself, but he wanted this position more than he had ever wanted anything in his life: more than acceptance to college or medical school, more than the appointment to White Memorial, more than the chief residency. To his parents and much of the Armenian community in Watertown, his accomplishments and degree already made him something of a hero. But to the university people--the Ivy Leaguers who dominated most of the departments and residency slots--he was still a state school grad, good at what he did but lacking the scope, the sophistication, to make it big in their academic world.

  He wandered to the window. The narrow street, three stories below, was deserted. To the north, over the tops of buildings, Cambridge was bathed in the sterile gray light of dawn. Thinking about what this day held in store was at once exciting and frightening. Of all the cities in the world, Boston was still the one most looked to in medicine. And at the epicenter of the Boston medical community was White Memorial.

  Is it wrong to want to be acknowledged as the best of the best? Armenians had always been special, had always risen to the top, to positions of influence in their societies. The Turks had known and feared that uniqueness, and over a million Armenians had been massacred on the altar of that fear. Now, seventy years later, the descendants of those victims were again being persecuted, this time by the Soviets. Is it wrong to dream?

  The phone had rung three times before the sound intruded on Eric's thoughts. He glanced at the clock radio. Six-fifteen. The call could only be trouble. His father had retired from his maintenance job after his second heart attack. His younger brother George, a dropout from high school, had already served two brief jail terms.

  "Hello?"

  "Please listen, and listen carefully, Dr. Najarian."

  The voice, probably a man's, was monotonal and distorted. A vibration machine, Eric thought--the sort held against the neck by a patient whose larynx had been removed. On one level, he felt certain the call was a prank. On another, much more primal level, he found the bizarre, emotionless tone chilling.

  "Who is this?"

  "We are Caduceus, your brothers and sisters in medicine. We care about the things you care about. We care about you."

  "Dammit, who are you?" The chill grew more intense. This was no prank.

  "In the days soon to come, we may call on you for help."

  "What kind of help?"

  "Do as we ask, and the rewards will be great--for you and for the patients you care for so well."

  "Rewards? Would you please--"

  "Our work is of the utmost importance, and we need you. We can also help you. There is a position in your emergency service. That position can be yours."

  For the first time since the phone had rung, Eric felt some lessening of his tension.

  "You're full of shit," he said. "The committee has already made its choice. They're announcing it this afternoon."

  "When w
e contact you," the voice went on, as if he had not spoken, "you may be asked to administer a certain treatment to a patient in a manner that is unfamiliar to you. Trust us, do as we ask, speak of this conversation to no one, and you will have what you wish."

  "That's nonsense. I told you, the committee has already made its--"

  The dial tone cut him short.

  The Proctor Building, a thirty-year-old, ten-story monument to the monolithic architecture of the late fifties, held most of the research labs at White Memorial. The biochemistry unit filled the eighth and ninth floors. At one time, laboratory space--especially at WMH--had been at a premium. Now, Eric noted as he wandered off the elevator and down the dimly lit corridor, several of the labs were deserted.

  It was nearly nine-thirty. Following the bizarre phone call earlier that morning, he had gone for a prolonged walk along the Charles, over the Massachusetts Avenue Bridge, and then back by the Museum of Science. Part of him still clung to the hope that the eerie call was part of some elaborate spoof. But he knew otherwise.

  Caduceus. The staff and twin serpents symbolizing medicine. He had looked up the word, hoping that some aspect of its definition might give him insight. All he had learned was that in mythology, the staff was borne by Hermes, the wing-footed messenger of the gods, patron of travelers and rogues, conductor of the dead to Hades, known for his invention and cunning. How it had come to signify the healing arts, he had not yet learned.

  Throughout the walk, just over four miles, he had played and replayed the brief conversation in his mind. It simply made no sense. Administer a treatment in a manner unfamiliar ... What sort of treatment? To what end? How could Caduceus promise him the E.R. appointment when that decision had already been made?

  He had entered the hospital through a side entrance and stopped by the speech pathology lab. The speech therapist, a bright, enthusiastic woman, was pleased to demonstrate for him the voice device, known as an artificial electrolarynx. Pressed tightly against a "sweet spot" beneath the jaw, it transmitted impulses from the mouth and worked whether its user had a functioning larynx or not. The voice it produced when Eric tried it was virtually indistinguishable from that made by the therapist. On a whim he had asked her if anyone at the hospital had borrowed such a device or shown a special interest in it. Her response had been a predictable negative.