“I don’t know that. The day clinic handled more patients. But yes, I think so. It was a different clientele altogether. Lots of limos and drivers.”
“I’m going to ask you to do something for us, Ms. Wall. Can you generate a list of the types of procedures performed at your clinic? The District Arson squad has recovered some records from the fire, but they’re badly damaged. Can you do that?”
“Arson squad? So this fire was deliberately set?”
“Well, they haven’t called it yet,” he said. She was definitely upset now. Fair enough. She’d lost friends and coworkers in that fire. “But that’s all I can tell you right now. Officially, the investigation’s ongoing.”
“So why are you here, Special Agent?” she asked suddenly, cocking her head to one side.
“Um, I thought I explained that the—”
“No, I mean, why are you here? You said Secret Service. What did our clinic have to do with protecting the president?”
Swamp sat back in his chair and sipped some coffee, which was getting cold. Gary White was studying his own notes now, fully aware of Swamp’s discomfort. Swamp decided that the truth wouldn’t hurt.
“Okay, Ms. Wall,” he said. “As I’m sure you’re aware, there’s a war on. The D.C. Arson squad removed a lot of evidentiary debris from that clinic. The patients’ records, at least the paper ones, made better debris than evidence, but there were some indications that your clinic was performing changes in physical identity. As you might imagine, that’s an activity of interest to the Department of Homeland Security these days.”
“Is that illegal?” she asked. He could see her forearms moving slightly beneath the edge of the table. Was she wringing her hands? Her tone of voice was still very carefully neutral. A pulse was now visible in the veins of her throat, something that hadn’t been there before. She was definitely on edge.
“Changing one’s physical appearance wouldn’t be illegal per se. Using that new physical identity to commit fraud or other crimes would be illegal. And if a resident alien gets his or her physical identity changed, that moves into the realm of ‘interesting,’ depending on who that person is. Within the context of our intelligence efforts against the terror networks, that is.”
She appeared perplexed. He decided to elaborate. “We’re not working for the presidential protective detail right now, Ms. Wall,” he said. “In fact, I’m actually a retired Secret Service agent, called back to active duty within the office of Special Investigations of the Department of Homeland Security.”
“Retired?”
“Quick source of trained and experienced manpower, Ms. Wall. This is a people-intensive war we’re in.”
“Well,” she said. “I’m not sure I can help you. I mean, I could list procedures, but I can’t tie procedures to individual patients. That’s what you want, isn’t it?”
Definitely a good brain under there, Swamp thought as he nodded. She knows what this is about.
She hiked her chair closer to the table. “The problem is, we all worked different nights, and with different patients.”
“And you don’t remember any of them as unique, or special?”
“I wouldn’t tell a patient this, Mr. Morgan, but as surgical assistants, we didn’t see these patients as people. I mean, by the time they got into the OR, they were medium mummies scheduled for one of a hundred different ‘plasty’ procedures. By the time I saw them, they had become just part of a surgical procedure, requiring specific knowledge on our part, standard sets of instruments, specific draping, lights, anesthesia.”
“Do you remember a sex-change operation—say in the past year?”
Her eyebrows rose, but she nodded. “One partial SRS, yes.”
“SRS?”
“Sexual-reassignment surgery. That’s really specialized stuff. This one was a male to female mammopexy, with prosthesis implantation. It was interesting because the patient wanted to be able to, um, inflate them, as it were.”
“Inflate them? As in breasts on demand?”
“I guess. Instead of straight implants, he had his breast tissue loosened, the musculature rearranged, and specially adapted saline sacs implanted. He could then use a pump syringe, attached to a tiny stoma in his nipples, to pump them up with saline solution.”
Swamp shook his head in amazement.
“Yeah,” she said. “I use the word guy advisedly. Straight for his day job. TS-TV for his night games? Who knows, huh?”
Swamp smiled, but he didn’t say what he was thinking, which was that any man who wanted to be a woman didn’t know much about the “joys” of female physiology. “I can’t imagine,” he said truthfully. Then he got to the question he’d come there to ask. “Tell me, Ms. Wall, do people under anesthesia ever talk? Like people who talk in their sleep?”
She frowned, and appeared to choose her words carefully. “Ye-e-s, people sometimes do that, Mr. Morgan. But it’s usually not intelligible. More like a bunch of slurred words. Gibberish, interspersed occasionally with moments of perfect clarity. It often sounds like a word-association game. Although most surgical patients just burble like a baby.”
“Ever hear anything interesting?”
She laughed. “Yeah, once. A guy goes, ‘Ow, that fucking hurts.’ Now that got everybody’s attention.”
Both Swamp and Gary White laughed out loud. “What did you do?”
“Got a new anesthesia tech. But if you’re asking if people admit to killing their wives, no. Besides, the patient usually had a mask over his mouth and nose and one or more tubes hanging out of the sides of his mouth. Not conducive to speech.”
That makes sense, Swamp thought. “You said earlier that the docs would dictate the procedure into a taping machine. Would that machine be able to pick up anything the patient said?”
She shook her head emphatically. Too emphatically? Swamp wondered. “No. The surgeon had a lip mike attached to his headgear. And he was speaking right into it, so anything the patient might have been mumbling would just have been background noise.”
She’d neatly shut off his line of questions about transcripts. He closed his notebook and stood up. “Okay. Thanks for your time this morning, Ms. Wall. We’ll let you know if we need to talk to you again. Maybe if we can determine who the patients were, we might be back to see if we can put patient and procedure together.”
“I doubt it, Mr. Morgan,” she said, also getting up. “But I’ll be glad to help out any way I can. Right now, I’m busy looking for another job.”
She walked them to the front door. “This is a nice house,” Swamp said, slipping on his coat.
“It was my parents’ home,” she said. “A little big for one person, but the price was right, you know?”
“And overlooking Rock Creek Park, too,” he said, thinking of what a house with a big yard in that location might be worth in today’s market. To his surprise, he saw a flicker of apprehension in her eyes.
“The park’s a mixed blessing, Special Agent,” she said. “Call me if you think I can help. I lost two good friends in that fire.”
Gary discreetly checked the tape recorder as they walked up the block toward Connecticut Avenue. It had done its job. “Did we get what we needed back there?” he asked.
“Maybe,” Swamp said. “I think she tried to disabuse me of the notion that anything interesting was ever revealed by people under anesthesia.”
“Did you catch what she said at the door? About losing two good friends?”
“Meaning the doctors were not friends?”
“Yes, sir. They paid these nurses double the going rate. The women had to suspect some of this shit was a little bit out there.”
They got to Connecticut and turned left down toward the Zoo Metro station. “I’m wondering if those tapes were made after an operation,” Swamp said. “You know, while the patient was still under—say in the recovery room—but starting to surface.”
“And no longer wearing the mask and tubes. That might make more sense.”
“We’d need to find the code list somewhere in all that wreckage. How much time do we have?”
“Good point. My tasking was to evaluate this as a firefly or not. You’re right. We need something a lot quicker.”
“Maybe interview her again, show her the transcript this time? She said she did admin. Go ahead and brace her up? You had a possible terrorist on the table and you changed his looks. Who the hell was it, missy?”
The tunnel to their right began to glow as the next train approached. “She could plead total ignorance about the transcripts,” Swamp countered. “Maybe one of the other nurses did that. You know, one of the dead ones. And it’s not likely those docs would have let the nurses see the code list.”
“If she did admin, she might know where the code lists were kept—that would be something the docs would have had backed up off-site, like their medical records.”
The train roared into the station, once again making conversation impossible. They boarded and rode it back downtown; meanwhile, Swamp tried to think of a way to prove the transcript, one way or the other.
“Bomb, bomb, bomb. Union Staat.” Put a bomb in the Capitol? Which was getting the security scrubbing of a lifetime in preparation for the inauguration? Besides, the Capitol was a big building. That would require a big bomb.
But after that? After all the pomp and circumstance of the inauguration, the Capitol security people would naturally relax a little, stand down the surge effort. Tactically, that speech to the joint session would be a better window to try something. Maybe the right answer here was to go back to PRU right now. Tell them to keep going full bore on inauguration preps, and then sustain that for the month between the inauguration and that first presidential speech to a joint session of Congress.
After they got by that, if some nutcase wanted to bomb Congress, he might actually do the nation a favor. Seeing Gary White looking at him, he realized he’d been smiling to himself. And that he would definitely not be explaining the reason to his new ace assistant. He wondered, not for the first time, if he’d been doing this stuff too long.
Connie desperately wanted to talk to somebody after the agents had left, but she couldn’t think of anyone except Cat Ballard. And after his pointed comments of the night before about the clinic, Cat would be less than sympathetic. She knew exactly what the problem was: Those Secret Service guys had a transcript in their hands. They couldn’t know that she was the one who’d transcribed the recovery room tapes, but they’d come to her because she was the only one of the night crew left alive.
She paced her dining room, trying to remember if there was anything in the transcripts, or any other documentation, that could prove she’d written them up. She didn’t think so. Dr. Khandoor had made it clear that he wanted only the patient’s code number on the transcripts. No other information, not the procedure or even a date. Just what the patient actually said. She’d type them up from the tapes, print one copy, and then delete the computer file. Dr. Khandoor would get the only copy. She had no idea where he’d kept them, but she’d never found any sign of them or the master code list in the clinic. All their medical records had been kept both as traditional paper records and as scanned and then encrypted computer-graphics files. Once a month she’d run a master backup routine on all the computerized records and then given the backup CD to Dr. Khandoor.
Dr. Khandoor had done the paperwork on patient work-ups. He would hand over a folder for each new patient; it contained all the forms that would apply to whatever work was going to be done. Reportedly, everyone paid cash, so she had never had to do any perambulations through the medical insurance swamp, which was a major blessing in itself. In every name blank would be that patient’s assigned code number, handwritten by Dr. Khandoor. Postsurgery, she would scan all the forms into an Adobe PDF file to create the backup. There was never a name, especially on the recovery room transcripts. She hadn’t been kidding about the patients being just part of a surgical procedure—the first time the nurses ever saw the patient was at the first procedure.
With a few interesting exceptions, most of the transcripts had been a hodgepodge of mumbles. That said, she was willing to bet which one the feds had their hands on. “Bomb, bomb, bomb.” And a bunch of German words she hadn’t understood. She remembered bringing that one to Dr. Khandoor’s attention, and he had told her he’d take care of it immediately, whatever that meant. In these uneasy times, any foreigner talking about bombs should be fed right to the nearest police precinct, as far as she was concerned. But is that what the good doctor had done? The transcripts were supposed to be insurance against trouble down the line, but she’d always wondered if he and Naziri hadn’t been making some extra money on what some of these people revealed. One congressman, whom the whole crew had recognized, had come in for a series of facial procedures. On one occasion, as he lay in the recovery room, he’d babbled into the microphone about how much he loved his pretty little boys. Connie had dutifully recorded it, while carefully blocking out any troubling thoughts of blackmail when she handed it in.
But now there were feds coming around, asking questions about patients getting identity changes, and confirming what Cat had been saying about arson. Damn it.
She’d known all along that place was on the fringes of medical ethics. Two slick Pakistani doctors, setting up an off-the-books practice in the capital? They had to have had an important sponsor. And a rich one. The money had been so-o-o good. And you just wouldn’t face it, would you, Connie? Not with that big fat paycheck. And, of course, the bonuses. The little one for the IRS, and the much better one, the cash bonus. The Secret Service used to work for the Treasury Department. As did the IRS. She just knew that guy was going to pull her tax returns. Her brokerage submitted 1099 forms, just like the clinic turned in W-2 slips. If they did one of those reality audits, they’d see right away that she had invested more income than she’d reported.
She gnawed a fingernail as she sat down at her computer and powered it up. She spied Buster’s bed in a corner of the dining room and remembered that Cat Ballard had taken the milk container.
Her stomach sank. Someone had been in her house. He’d passed up valuable stuff but taken some of her underwear. That smacked of neighborhood pervert. But what if the container did show up traces of poison? Had that been the real objective of his being in her house?
A chill went through her. Everyone else from the clinic’s night crew was dead. Who would have burned down the clinic? The day docs? For the insurance money? No way—that place had to have been a cash cow for them, too. So, a disgruntled patient? Maybe someone the docs had tried to blackmail?
Or had that fire been aimed at the crew, not the clinic? The cosmetic surgery crew, who might know too much.
“Bomb, bomb, bomb.” You know which one said that, she thought. The foreign-looking guy with the inflatable boobs, not to mention all the rest of the work. Identity changes, Special Agent? Well, yes, you might say that. Shit! Had he been the torch? The night she’d done that transcript was the night she first confessed her doubts about the clinic to Cat Ballard. No details, of course, but a deepening suspicion that she was getting in over her head with these guys. Cat had been as direct as ever: “They’re Muslims, Connie. All this terrorist shit’s being done by Muslims. Get your ass out of there. Because if one of your patients does something weird, something big and bad, the government will do one of those root-canal investigations and then they’ll grind you up. Turn you over to the grieving widows.”
But of course it hadn’t been that simple, nor that easy to cut and run. She was single and forty years old. She knew she wasn’t the marrying type and never would be. Which meant that the quality of her old age was entirely up to her. She’d worked hard her entire professional life. Sh
e’d done the additional training, gotten her master’s, and invested well. She’d been able to ride the nineties boom to the point that she just about had her screw-you money. Plus, she hadn’t been doing anything wrong. Just her job as a surgical and administrative assistant. The docs had been pulling in the big bucks, not the staff. Identity change wasn’t illegal—even that big Secret Service agent with the Neanderthal face had agreed with that. Or mostly, he had.
She nearly jumped out of her skin when the phone rang. She glanced at her caller ID box. A 998 number, which she didn’t recognize. She picked it up and said, “Hello?” She heard three coins dropping into a call box. Okay, a phone booth. Then a whispering voice said, “Everyone’s dead. Except you.” Then a click and the dial tone.
She lowered the phone back onto its cradle slowly, as if afraid of breaking it. She jumped when something moved past a side window, just out of her line of vision. She reached down for the derringer, then realized she’d only seen the bushes bending back and forth in the January wind. The house was still, the dining room a mix of shadows and light streamers from the midmorning sun. Her mind went blank, and for a moment she felt frozen in the chair.
Everyone’s dead. Except you.
English, but English with an accent. A man’s voice.
Everyone’s dead. Except me.
That certainly clarifies things.
After lunch, Swamp met with Gary White to brainstorm about their next move. They needed to put some meat on the transcript’s bones, something that would allow them to both evaluate it and sell it to PRU as evidence of a real threat.
“Okay, so we need the code list,” Swamp said. “Ideally, we want to put a name on this guy, and, again ideally, a history of what procedures he had done at that clinic.”
“If there are names,” Gary pointed out. “These docs may have run the whole thing on a code basis—no names, cash only, code only. We won’t ask, and you won’t tell us who you are. Money up front, we’ll do exactly what you want, Mr. Two-oh-oh-three-four-one.”
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