Chapter 3
They were restocking rooms and tallying money, and Tobi was checking her charts before locking the EMR. They were all exhausted, as the offices were chronically understaffed and overstressed, even if they were due for a bonus. All the B. Healthy employees’ bonuses were based on their visit volume, door-to-door times, and patient satisfaction scores, but the staff were paid less up front since they were promised a bonus every three months. A few unsatisfied “customers” could really ruin a quarterly incentive check.
Jorge told Patty about the Lenmans. “She really thought she wasn’t wanted at her son’s house for the holiday,” Jorge said. “It made me so sad.”
“I’d like to just smack that daughter-in-law,” Patty said. “That sweet old lady does not deserve that! People just don’t appreciate each other. I mean, she’s eighty-two years old, how much longer does she even have? Imagine, making her feel she’s only wanted for her soup! My grandmother passed when I was ten, and I wish she were coming for the holidays!”
“Hey, what ever happened to the woman who came in for the ‘quick strep test’ when EMS was here?” Tobi asked. “I expected a score of zero from her.”
“She left without being seen,” Patty said. “After she wrote whatever she wrote on Yelp, she said she was going to another, more ‘convenient’ urgent care, and she’d never be back. I wanted to tell her that was just fine by me, but I behaved, and said only ‘that might work out better for you tonight.’ Grrr! I hate people sometimes!”
“It’s just as well. We saw forty-eight patients as it was. We barely even got to eat,” Esther said, her stomach rumbling loudly. “What did Dr. Rufini want?”
Esther was the sweetest of them all, a soft-spoken young woman from Ecuador in her mid-twenties, who quietly managed to take care of things before Tobi even realized they needed doing. She had the work ethic of an older generation and was never found sitting down if there was work to be done.
“What does Rufini ever want?” Tobi asked. “He likes to throw his weight around and watch his bank account get padded.”
“Has he ever offered any helpful advice?” Jorge asked. “Seems like he just tells everyone what they are doing wrong. ‘Not fast enough, scores too low.’ If he were so concerned, he could have stayed a few minutes and seen a couple of patients for you. In fact, I thought he was going to do that, I saw him looking at a tablet for a while before he left. For a minute, I actually thought it was yours.”
Tobi frowned. “Why was he messing with my tablet? I knew my tablet was switched! I wasn’t sure at first, but when I reopened it, UpToDate wasn’t on the bookmarks bar. I thought he left ages before that, anyway.”
“He did, but he came back in, like he forgot something, and went to your work station, and then he was in the back checking numbers or something,” Jorge said.
Tobi furrowed her brows. “Rufini was definitely acting weird today. Whatever he was doing, he would have had to use his own login, so why didn’t he just use the tablet he left me if he wanted to look at charts, instead of switching them? The thing times out fast enough, and he doesn’t have my password, so how far could he have gotten, anyway?”
“I think you can change the tablet security to keep them from timing out so soon, if you have the authorization code,” Jorge said.
Tobi stared at him.
“Just saying.”
Tobi let it go and her shoulders slumped. “I don’t know. I’m just as happy Rufini didn’t stay, he just adds to the stress. Dr. Milton speaks up well enough for both of us about needing more help, and all it’s gotten us is more criticism. It’s not worth it.”
They all grabbed their things. “Drive carefully everyone, it’s slippery out,” Tobi said.
Chapter 4
Mannfort Tzenkov liked his life. Private jet, women when he wanted them, fine wine, and travel anywhere around the globe. Today, for example, he sat overlooking the Coral Sea on the east coast of Australia, in a little town called Port Douglas. He liked Port Douglas because it was relatively quiet, unlike the big party city of nearby Cairns, where the majority of tourists headed. Mannfort liked to keep most of the hoopla and decadence at a distance.
His IT guy had been tracking some circumspect activity that appeared to be monitoring the Project and needed to be handled. The activity had originated in this part of Queensland and was probably from a hacker. Whoever it was, they were smart, leaving few breadcrumbs and spending only seconds at a time, making them hard to trace. Mannfort’s people were just starting to close in, but a few weeks ago, the trail suddenly went cold, so Mannfort had decided to make the trip himself. He was due for a vacation, and it would set him up to be close by if anything else emerged. If the offender were less principled, Mannfort might recruit them. If not, they’d have to pay the price for their vigilante activities.
The sky was cerulean blue, crystal clear, and it mingled at the horizon with the peacock blue water. The lush green brush covered mountainous slopes less than a mile away and extended nearly to the white sand beach. The place was as picturesque as anywhere he’d been. He sat at a table on a deck a hundred yards from the water, with a gentle breeze caressing his face. His laptop pinged with the notification that the next payment had arrived in his account.
He smiled. The Project was brilliant. He and his partner Alexei Bereznikov had started it nearly twenty years ago, and it had progressed from targeting the powerful and desperate to the general populace, which had proved even more lucrative. Back then, it had been easier to be invisible, but writing the program was more involved. The current software was a cinch to tweak to maximize revenue. Though it should have been more discoverable with modern technology, it didn’t seem to matter. With everything already in place, no one knew any differently, mostly because they hadn’t bothered to look. Best place to hide was always in plain sight. Alexei had recently met with an untimely death, which left the management of the Project to Mannfort, along with a hundred percent of the profits.
The genius guy who created the original software even had the good graces to die all on his own, so Mannfort didn’t have to get his hands dirty on that one. Good thing, because for a little bit there, it looked like he was starting to catch on. Nerds. They never saw the big picture. He stretched his legs in the sunshine, content to enjoy the surf until IT contacted him again. He glanced over at the pub just a few yards away, and decided he wanted to try that Australian Pirate Life beer. It seemed wickedly apropos.
He locked his laptop and left it on the table. In its protective sheath, it was safe from sand and moisture, and he would be close enough not to have to worry about theft. Besides, the height of travel season was still a couple of weeks away, and this beach was close to deserted, which was exactly what he liked about it, and the locals were known for watching out for each other. With a couple of bucks in the right places, he had ensured they would look after him and his property too. Rolly, the bartender at the Ocean Breeze Bar, was one of those “places.”
The outdoor pub gave a flawless view of the water some two hundred feet away and the laptop was clearly visible on the isolated table to Mannfort’s left. Instead of taking his beer back to the hard wooden bench, he found a lounge chair at the bar to face both the water and his computer and settled into his beer and a Cuban cigar. He watched a blonde babe walking the beach, while stroking the bottle absently. The wind shifted a tad, then grew stronger, and he noticed how she stopped and lifted her head as if sniffing the air. She glanced in his direction as if she felt him staring, and then turned and started briskly back, away from the shore. Rolly motioned Mannfort to come back under the canopy, but he brushed him off. After a few minutes, the wind kicked up and started gusting, and the sky darkened ominously. He tossed the cigar and started toward his laptop. He wasn’t worried about the rain, but the laptop was lightweight, and the wind could toss it off the table. The bartender ran around the counter and nearly threw himself in fron
t of him.
“What are ye doing, mate? It’s about to lightning!” he said.
“My laptop is out there, I have to get it,” and he shoved Rolly aside.
“Suit yourself,” the bartender muttered under his breath and took shelter within the enclosed section of the pub.
Mannfort hurried along the walk, and onto the sand toward his table. He was in reasonable shape for a man in his early sixties who partook of simple pleasures, but he had an arthritic left knee, which tended to give out on him at the worst possible moments, and it slowed him down on the uneven seashore. Thunder cracked, and the sky opened up like a faucet. Mannfort was soaked in an instant, and buffeted backward by the fierce wind, but he pressed on. It took him less than a minute to get to his laptop, but it was already lying on the wet sand. It wouldn’t close properly, and he grabbed it up and ran back for shelter. The storm seemed to have come out of nowhere, but within ten minutes, the rain settled into a gentle sprinkle. Mannfort stayed at the bar under an awning, inspecting his laptop, and twenty minutes later, the clouds began to dissipate, and the whole thing was over.
“What the hell was that?” Mannfort demanded of Rolly when the bartender finally emerged again.
“That there was a thunder shower,” he answered. “This is rainy season, mate. It happens. Only don’t want to be on the beach and get struck by lightning, if ye know what I mean. Don’t worry ’bout it, it’s over.”
“My laptop!”
The bartender looked at him more closely. Mannfort was cradling the device like a baby. “Oh, that’s bad. Water and sand. Hope you got that little Joey backed up.”
“Mostly, but not for what I did today,” he said. “The cover is resistant to sand and water, but it looks like it cracked. Is there anyone around here who can fix it? I know time is essential for these machines. I can pay for it—handsomely!” Mannfort had pulled the protector off, which had revealed a three centimeter fissure in the heavy plastic and he was wiping down the keyboard vigorously with several napkins.
“Yep—a-a-actually, nope. There was a guy who could fix anything on a computer. Hardware, software, recover your whole drive if ye needed, debug anything … but he just passed a few weeks ago. Tragic diving accident. He used to own that dive shop down the road. You might go on down there, Marcus runs it now. He might know somethin’. Walk straight down this main drag and take the fourth right. You can’t miss it.”
Mannfort walked straight over, but he was seething. He’d paid the bartender enough to guard against theft, he’d have thought he should’ve been warned about the weather too. He saw the dive shop as he came over a shallow ridge, adjacent to a dock where a twenty-foot dive boat was tethered.
A man in his early forties was inside, hitting on the blonde babe from the shore, and she was flirting timidly back at him. Her royal blue bikini fit just right over a perfect ass, crumpled on one side, and there was no tan line where there should have been. Her breasts were full and seemed to speak their own language back to the store owner, but Mannfort had little time for that now. He positioned himself boorishly between the two of them, facing the divemaster.
“Are you Marcus?”
“Depends who wants to know,” Marcus answered slowly, annoyed by the rudeness. His skin was a deep tan and his biceps flexed as he placed his elbows on the counter and turned to Mannfort. Each muscle in his forearms was clearly defined as he locked his fingers together slowly and stared at him.
“My laptop was caught in the storm. Do you know someone who can fix it? I can pay well. Very well.”
Marcus eyed Mannfort and his laptop up and down for several seconds. He rubbed is hands together and glanced at the blonde. She gave him a subtle nod. “I’ll catch you later, Marco,” she said softly, and she left the shop.
“So, you’re in a spot with your computer, are ye? I’m not the man you want. Wish I was. Robain taught me a thing or two, but no one has the brain he had. I can’t do nothing with that.”
“Where is this Robain? I’ll pay him a couple of grand, US, if he can fix this thing for me this afternoon. Cash.”
“Ah, Robain woulda done it for free. He was that kind of guy. Never did understand why he didn’t put his talent to better use, he could have been a millionaire.”
“Where can I find this guy?”
“Horrible mistake. He saved that little darling you just saw. Couple weeks ago, her brother Patrick come up from the reef screaming that Missy was caught in the coral. Robain had just finished his second dive, didn’t even get all his gear off. Hell, he had no business going back down, I think he was in dive group U? He needed to stay out at least an hour, but he was only up about ten minutes, so let’s see, he woulda been in group R. He grabbed a full tank and went right back down again. Patrick said Missy was at thirty-five feet but turned out she was at fifty and caught in some rock. Man, she must’ve been sucking air like crazy, she was on empty. Panic does that to you.”
“So, where is this Robain now?” Mannfort was losing patience. He couldn’t care less about “dive groups.” Why did Australians talk so much!
“Well, that’s what I’m tellin’ you, mate. He’s dead. He shoulda made a decompression stop, but he come up way too soon, like three, four minutes after Missy and Patrick. He was having trouble breathing and clutching his chest. Everyone thought he threw an embolus. Bends, you ever hear of the bends, mate?” Marcus was looking at Mannfort like he was an ignorant tourist. Mannfort gazed back at him with open hostility.
“They packed him up and went straight to the hyperbaric chamber in Townsville. Passed right by Cairns Hospital. Fuckin’ A! He was having a heart attack. Not the bends, no embolus, just an old fashioned, freak heart attack! He died in the hyperbaric chamber. I hear he had some heart problems back in America, but he didn’t talk much about that. I only knew he was on meds and he saw a doc down in Cairns from time to time. I think he got worse, ’cause he stopped teaching, but he still liked to do a few dives now and then for himself.”
“Damn,” Mannfort said under his breath. He didn’t care a wit about this guy Robain, he needed his laptop fixed.
“Yah, damn shame. No purer soul on this Earth. He never wanted no money, except just enough to get by. Always helping people. Like he was paying off some terrible debt only he knew about. And brilliant! I mean, easily the smartest man you ever knew. And we don’t even know who to notify. He did all this beautiful underwater photography … he was incredibly talented. I’m sure his family would want some of it, but he never talked ’bout no family if he had one. He had one friend used to come ’round now and then, also American, but we haven’t been able to reach him.
“It was like Robain just appeared here one day and spent his time doing good and enjoying the sea. I’d have said he was a monk, but he wasn’t religious or nothing. Don’t think he was Christian by birth, he used to say he didn’t think there was a God. Kinda lonely, you know? Missy feels terrible ever since. No matter what we tell her, she blames herself.”
Something was itching in the back of Mannfort’s head, and he credited his intuition to much of his success. American, genius, computer master … diver? He had come here looking for a hacker. “What was his last name?” he asked.
“Sack or Sacks, something like that. He just went by Robain. His doc would know.”
“And when did you say he showed up?”
“Geez, I dunno. 2003, 2001? Maybe 2000. It’s been a bit of time,” said Marcus.
Mannfort set his chin. “So, where can I get my laptop fixed?”
“Beats me. Maybe in Cairns, you could find someplace. Might have to go to Brisbane.” Marcus half turned and started stocking his shelf.
“Tell you what, mate. You help me fix my laptop, and I’ll help you find this Robain’s family.”
CHAPTER 5
The now-freezing rain battered the windshield and Tobi could hardly see ten feet in front of her. The
wipers were on maximum speed, which she hated, because it always made her feel like her heart was racing, and now the roads were icing up. She flipped on her fog lights and reduced her speed to fifteen miles per hour. She passed a fender bender pulled over to the side of the road, police already on the scene. The frozen rain reflected her headlights in the darkness and gave a surreal feeling to the ride. She left the radio off to concentrate better on the road, and the pinging of the ice on the car added to the sense of being completely cut off from the world. It felt like an episode of The Twilight Zone.
Imagine if you will … She played it out, hearing Rod Serling in her head:
It is the year 2019. Medical offices are so overcrowded that it can take weeks to get an appointment, even for a serious matter, causing a large percentage of illness, both critical and insignificant, to be funneled into America’s urgent care centers. These centers are exploding around the country, multiplying faster than an unchecked mouse population hiding in your walls in the springtime, and medical practices of all specialties are swiftly being gobbled up by venture capitalists. Many entrepreneurs view these urgicenters, and medicine as a whole, as a new best way to make it onto the Fortune 500. And so, what was once an essential human service is reborn as a revenue-generating commodity ….
Tobi chuckled to herself. She would go crazy without her sense of humor, but it really wasn’t funny. At her last medical school reunion, she and her former classmates had bitterly bemoaned that their profession had come to this. “Productivity” measured by volume and speed, not quality? Customer satisfaction surveys? Patients weren’t customers. If it were realistic to assume that patients knew how they should best be treated, there would be no need for doctors. Just come into the Emergency Department and dial up an appendectomy or a cardiac stent, or some antibiotic—oh, and don’t forget to check if the medicine you want is chemically related to your allergies or if it interferes with your other medications or has consequences for your current medical conditions. You heard about it on a TV commercial? Well, then, it must be your perfect cure. And then there’s the insistence: “I have bronchitis, I need an antibiotic,” when in fact, you have no cough, fever, or congestion at all, you just have chest pressure, and you need to be evaluated for a possible heart attack.
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