Tobi inched over to Troy as his hand went slack and his pistol fell to the carpet. She put a hand on his groin, while looking for a pulse at his wrist. The bullet wound was just below his main femoral artery. She reached into the closet and grabbed a dress with long, thin sleeves. “I never wear dresses, anyway,” she said, as she hacked off a sleeve with the knife and tied it tightly over the wound, a couple of centimeters from his groin. He looked pale, and Tobi realized she was utterly terrified of losing him. “Stay with me, Troy, hang on,” she said softly, but he did not respond. Somewhere a child screamed and a couple of dogs barked. The room tilted and the world became surreal.
***
Jacquart crouched behind the door of the car. Both police officers were dead in the front seat, a bullet neatly to each one’s temple. Logan had gone around back. She heard the shot from the roof and saw a man crouching below the window. As she aimed carefully, a child screamed. Several dogs barked and Jacquart motioned to the neighbors to get back. She flashed her badge and showed her gun, pointing it up to the sky. The spectators moved away but in that second, her back was to the gunman on the roof. She felt a whiz past her left ear and ducked instinctively.
There was another shot that came from the back of the house. Logan or another intruder? She looked up at the roof again but there was no one on it now. The window was blown open, so she had to believe the assassin had moved into the house. Either that or he had jumped down when she wasn’t looking, but he would have had to have been quick.
***
Tobi thought she had been swift tying off the makeshift tourniquet, but as she turned around, there was a man in the room, leveling a gun at her. She looked at Troy’s revolver, inches away, but the man snarled at her.
“Move and I shoot. You first, him second.”
The accent was thick, but she understood perfectly.
“Kick it over here,” the man said.
Tobi looked at Troy. He was barely conscious. The blood flow had slowed down, but he was pale. Her finger strayed back to his radial artery to check his pulse, which was rapid and thready. Then she let go of Troy and leaned back on her hands so she could use her toe to push the gun away. As she did, she felt the knife behind her. She was practically sitting on it.
“You are my ticket out of here,” the Russian said. “Get up and come to the window, so I can show them your face.”
Tobi’s head was suddenly never clearer. He was four feet in front of her. She calculated that from her position on the floor, she would not have the time or opportunity to stand up to get the knife to his chest, and a stab wound in the abdomen might not prevent him from shooting her anyway. But there were other options.
In an instant, a plethora of movie scenes ran through her head. The victim stabs once and runs, but the perp doesn’t die, just runs after her even madder than before. She wasn’t going to make that mistake. She had to make it count.
She pretended to steady herself with her hand behind her, swaying a little to make it look like she was overwhelmed. She gripped the knife solidly, and as she slowly rose to her feet, she knelt forward. Swiftly, she brought the knife up and jammed the point into his scrotum. He howled like a beast, and doubled over, his head coming down within a few inches of her own, but astonishingly, he did not drop the gun. He was wearing thick blue jeans, and she realized that no matter her conviction, she had hesitated. He started to straighten up, his face like an enraged demon’s.
Everything seemed to be in slow motion. Tobi saw his right hand, still holding the gun, coming up in front of his chest and abdomen as he struggled to straighten up. His left hand was over his groin, and the gun was now a foot from her face. With her left forearm, she knocked outward at the hand holding the gun, as she brought up her right and buried the knife in his carotid artery. The gun went off as he slumped to the ground, an expression of disbelief and torment on his face.
It took her a moment to realize she was alive. The bullet had blown through the wall, not her face. She looked around her and saw blood everywhere. She wasn’t squeamish, but this was different. She gagged from the smell, and then started to shake.
I just killed a man, she thought. I just killed a human being.
She stood there for a moment in shock, but a moan from Troy brought her back to reality. She looked out the window and saw Agent Jacquart standing below her in the street. Tobi tried twice to call to the agent, but no sound would come out of her mouth. She knelt down next to Troy, but she couldn’t speak his name. She shook him gently when the door crashed off its hinges and Agent Logan stood in the frame, his pistol scanning the room.
“Help,” Tobi squeaked. “Help him.” Troy was barely conscious.
“There’s an ambulance coming. What can I do?” Logan asked.
“Hold pressure here,” Tobi croaked. Her voice started to come back slowly. “I have a proper tourniquet in the other room.” She jumped up, quickly rinsed the Russian’s blood off her hands so as not to give any possible diseases to Troy, and came back in ten seconds with gauze and a tourniquet. She applied pressure with the gauze and cut away his jeans with a pair of scissors from her desk, reapplying a tourniquet over the gauze for much tighter control of the bleeding.
Two EMTs came upstairs and Tobi shouted out orders. “He needs oxygen and IV fluids, normal saline, open it up all the way—he’s lost a lot of volume!”
Logan took her gently and pulled her away. “Let them work.”
“I’m going in the ambulance with him.”
The paramedic looked at her sternly. “There’s not a lot of room back there, ma’am, you’ll be in the way.”
“I’m a doctor!” Tobi practically screamed.
“You will be in the way,” he said firmly. “We are trained for this; we need you to trust us.” He was already inserting an IV, while his partner had oxygen running and was attaching leads to Troy’s chest to get a rhythm strip and check his heart.
Logan took her arm. “Come on, wash up, and I’ll take you to the hospital.”
She stepped back, watching as if in a dream. Some disconnected part of herself noted the loss of her throw rug and couch.
Troy was not conscious, but they took him out on the stretcher with his blood pressure stabilized at 80/55, which Tobi considered miraculous. With Agent Logan’s prodding, she cleaned up and changed clothes. She found Pantelaymin hiding under her bed.
“Thank God you’re okay, baby.” She petted the cat quickly before closing her off in the bedroom and going downstairs. Panni had food and water and a litter box in the master bathroom; the last thing she wanted was PanniKat wandering around the house while the police were all over it, and maybe running outside. They found Molly Baker paralyzed in the living room, still crouching behind the sofa.
“I saw him through the patio door, but he ignored me. I—I don’t know why. I thought for sure he’d kill me.” Molly was shaking, and her face was drained. “I––Is there anything I can do to help?” she stuttered.
Tobi almost dismissed her out of anger but thought again. “You can have B. Healthy pay for all the damage to my house. And Troy’s medical bills. You can pay all of Troy’s out-of-pocket medical bills.”
Molly nodded slowly. Her eyes were dilated, her face was white, and her lips had barely moved when she spoke.
As Logan escorted Tobi outside, they were joined by Agent Jacquart. The ambulance was already screaming its siren as it headed up the block. An older man with blood on his face sat cuffed in a squad car and stared at her.
“Who is that?” Tobi asked.
“Mannfort Tzenkov. We got him,” Jacquart said.
Chapter 68
Tobi paced back and forth in the surgical waiting room. The vascular surgeon had just been in to tell her everything was going to be fine. Troy’s superficial femoral artery had been nicked, but Tobi’s tourniquet had been effective, and the artery had just been repaired
. The resident was just throwing in some skin stitches to close up. Troy was going to have to take it really easy for a while, but he was going to make it.
She felt enormous relief, but she still could not sit still. Thankfully, Agent Jacquart had given up trying to talk to her and was sitting on a nearby chair until Tobi’s friends got there. Tobi toyed with calling Ben. She was sure he would drop everything and come running out, and there was really nothing for him to do. Mostly, she just wasn’t ready to have the conversation about Troy. She was exhausted, and everything had worked out, anyway; she wasn’t even injured. She didn’t count her shoulder injury, it seemed like nothing by comparison to Troy. She justified her evasion by thinking generally about how little time there was in a medical student’s schedule. He was doing a rotation in interventional cardiology this month, and she didn’t want him to miss out.
Tobi had scrubbed her face and hands up to above her elbows, completely disgusted by the Russian man’s blood on her. Not that blood made her particularly squeamish, but she had killed this man and by washing off his blood, she had tried to wash off the guilt. Kazimir Nyelko. That’s what they’d said his name was. Some distracted part of her brain wondered if one was supposed to say Kaddish over an assassin.
Rabbi Lilly came through the door with Chloe, Reggie, and Lynn close behind. “Tobi! We heard! Is Troy okay?”
“Rabbi!” Tears gushed from Tobi’s eyes. “Yes, thank God! He just got out of surgery.”
Rabbi Lilly came over and hugged her.
“Ugh, I’m covered in blood, don’t touch me,” Tobi said. Lilly looked at her, puzzled. Tobi had completely forgotten she had changed her clothes, as encouraged by Agent Logan.
Reggie, Lynn, and Chloe also gathered around her, but she shook even more than before.
“Rabbi. I killed him … I killed him with my hiking knife. It was horrible.”
“Tobi, it’s okay. Hello? He was trying to kill you,” Reggie said.
“I know,” Tobi squeaked. “But still—”
Not that she wouldn’t have done exactly the same thing if she had to do it over, but taking a life weighed on her heavily. For a fleeting second, she wished Judaism had a confession box like Catholicism. Or that it was Yom Kippur tomorrow, so she could repent in some formal way. That was not their custom, though, and she had never felt any need for an intermediary before. She had always taken her afflictions and her joy directly to God. That’s how Jews had done things these last two thousand years, since the ancient priestly order had been mostly abolished, and it had always been enough—better than having a go-between. Clergy was always available for counsel and interpretation of Law, but they did not have the power to pardon.
Judaism emphasized the importance of community prayer, requiring a minyan, or ten people for a formal service, but there were always a few minutes for silent prayer. And for tremendously turbulent emotions, Tobi would sit by a tree or a candle or stare at the moon, and clear her mind of everything but her hunger for the sense of God. She would stay like that until she felt the boundaries of her soul dissolve and she could, for a fleeting instant, become one with something monumentally greater than herself. In those moments, there was only a kind of energy that communicated so much more than words could ever impart. And with it, would come a feeling of healing, of meaningful but indescribable emotion, that could tear away the irrelevancies of her life, and made her feel whole.
“I’m supposed to save lives, not take them,” Tobi said quietly.
“Well, you did,” Chloe said firmly. “You saved yourself and you saved Troy.”
Rabbi Lilly came and sat beside her. “Your rabbi says you did well. The Ten Commandments say, ‘Thou shalt not murder.’ They do not say ‘thou shalt not kill.’ In fact, the Talmud tells us that ‘if someone is coming to kill you, rise up early and kill them first.’ Self-defense is absolutely sanctioned in the Torah.”
“Dr. Lister? He’s awake and in recovery. You can see him now.” The resident let the door fall shut again.
Chapter 69
Agents Logan and Jacquart were tying up their paperwork at the police precinct, where they had been given an office to work from.
“Amazing,” Logan said. “If we follow the money, there are seventeen congressman and the former FBI director who have succumbed to extortion rather than come forward, and there are dozens who invested in Kordec stock for a piece of the pie. The trail so far designates senators from twenty-one different states and has exposed investments from multiple Fortune 500 companies. And that’s just in this country. I wonder if these shareholders knew what these guys were doing and just didn’t care or if they only looked at the dividends. You’d think they would investigate their funds better.”
Jacquart shook her head. “Well, be sure we will be investigating all of them now. I feel like there used to be some things that were sacred, like, just making a buck wasn’t a good enough reason to do absolutely anything. What ever happened to personal integrity and honor? Does no one value those things anymore?”
“At my church, they say it’s almost the Apocalypse. Sodom and Gomorrah are here and now,” Logan said.
“I had no idea you were such an evangelist, Logan. I don’t go in much for apocalyptic predictions, but from a strictly historical perspective, I agree. Every great civilization has its decline. In so many ways, it looks like we’re living the Fall of the American Empire right about now.”
***
Kavandor walked out of the subcommittee meeting feeling sure Kordec was going down. The trick was going to be keeping himself out of sight until they were all put away. What were the chances the Russians would know he’d had anything to do with it? They knew about his appointment to the Health and Human Services Committee, but they would not know about this subcommittee unless they specifically looked, and he hoped they would be kept pretty busy with the FBI and have little time to be thinking about him. He was a nobody to them, after all, right?
As he walked into the hallway, two men in dark suits approached him.
“Senator Blaise Kavandor? We’re with the FBI. You are under arrest for aiding and abetting murder and conspiracy to fraud. You have the right to remain silent ….”
Kavandor’s jaw dropped. He’d been so focused on the Russians, he never considered repercussions would come from his own people.
Chapter 70
Tobi stayed with Troy at the hospital until late evening and then left reluctantly. She had left Pantelaymin shell-shocked and alone in a locked room, and there was nothing more she could do for Troy tonight. Lynn and Reggie had offered their house and were meeting her outside to go get PanniKat, so Tobi walked out into the night, just as Daniel Comet called.
“How are you?” he asked. “Geez, I heard you got a knife to the shoulder, then nearly killed in your own home. And your ‘bodyguard’ landed in the OR. Are you okay? Is he okay? The bodyguard is supposed to protect you both, you know.”
“We’re both okay. He just had his femoral artery repaired, and Ellie sewed me up a couple of days ago.” Or was that yesterday? She was so disoriented about the time. “Did you find out anything you can share?”
“It looks like this has been going on all over the globe, Tobi. Obviously, richer populations are targeted, and they have someone in each venue to act as their mole. Their software is completely compatible with most EMRs, so it doesn’t show up as foreign to the system. They can rifle through charts and get lists of seriously ill patients who have hope of cures, but who know the cost of those cures could bankrupt them. They also have a separate database for public figures whose private medical information they steal, and then they blackmail those individuals with what they know. With everything digital these days, anyone with excellent computer skills can hack in and use information to create all kinds of havoc for profit.”
“How did Steve get mixed up in all this? I always thought of him as a good guy,” Tobi asked.
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br /> “Steve had started asking questions because we had alerts put on to monitor any charts that were opened by anyone other than the treating provider or the billing department, and they were going off like crazy. It was an extra HIPAA security feature and when Steve challenged the accessions, he drew Kordec’s attention. So, the Russians approached him and offered him money to look the other way. He turned them down until his son was run off the road while bicycling home. Steve got scared.”
“I heard about that. Is his son alright?”
“Broken wrist and needed plastics for a facial laceration, and a lot of bruises, both physical and psychological. They threatened that next time he’d be dead.”
“No wonder he was such an ass. I guess I can’t blame him.”
“He told me he tried to warn you by telling you his hands were tied, but he knew you felt betrayed.”
“So, what happens now?” Tobi asked.
“So, besides the FBI, we’re doing an in-house investigation, as are multiple other hospital entities across the country. The AMA has been pushing for it. And Hospitals for Health has decided to keep the majority of its shares when it merges with B. Healthy. It was going to be a fifty-fifty split, and B. Healthy was trying to convince us to take an even smaller percent interest, which would cost us less in operations’ overhead. Most systems are like that now, you know. The lion’s share of the business capital comes from entrepreneurs, so doctors maintain very little control. But this experience has scared us. Statistically, this whole scheme could have easily been overlooked, since these people were in such a high morbidity category, but on the human side, our physicians started asking questions about the deaths of their patients a couple of years ago. The scrutiny into that has definitely not been ‘cost effective,’ and B. healthy didn’t see the point. They weren’t losing any money on it, and an inquiry might have alienated those patients insured by Kordec, which in turn might have inclined those patients to stop using us, even for unrelated everyday office visits. Plus, it was a time investment to look closely into deaths that were not directly connected to the medical care. B. Healthy thought it was a waste of resources and wanted to terminate the investigation.”
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