Evasion

by Mark Leslie

  He took a deep breath, did the final twist and, with all of his might, pulled his left arm in and shoved it quickly into the same side his right arm was in. At the same time, he tucked, twisted, and pulled his legs in, then immediately thrust his legs back out on the opposite direction with all of his might.

  His legs pushed through the horizontal section on the far side, a bizarre feeling to have them meet no resistance after the previous several seconds of intense pressure against the metal sides of the air shaft. A split second later, his hip connected with the bottom of the horizontal section digging into his hip. His arms started to slip as the downward momentum wanted, desperately, to pull him naturally down.

  He jammed his elbows against the sides of the shaft and prevented himself from falling.

  He hung there, his body planking across the section of vertical shaft, and let out a deep breath.

  Then, after a few seconds, he managed to get the tip of his shoe against one of the tiny ridges that connected the sections of the shaft and push his upper body further into the one side. Scrambling with his feet and slowly pulling himself forward with sweaty, slick fingers, he managed to get to a point where his body weight was enough overtop the horizontal section that there was no chance of him being pulled down the vertical section of shaft.

  Secure and safe, at least from the fall, he let out another deep breath and rested there, giggling the way John McClane did immediately after surviving a pretty precarious situation in that classic adventure movie. “Eat your heart out, McClane,” Scott chuckled in a half sigh, half laugh. “Yippie Kaye Yay!”

  Chapter Sixteen

  Four-and-a-Half Years Earlier

  Dr. Citino, the surgeon who had performed the nephrectomy on Scott’s father was a difficult man to find any information on, despite all of the manners by which Scott had access to the average person’s lives using online databases.

  He’d spent hours searching through and hacking various university and hospital databases in order to see what he could find out about the man, but at virtually every stop he made along the digital journey, there was little new or fresh evidence in place.

  It was almost, if Scott were to speculate wildly, as if somebody had gone in, within a single system, and entered a basic single paragraph worth of information about the man – like cribbed notes from a Wikipedia entry, the information about Citino that appeared on various websites and in informational databases was almost the exact same word for word.

  Citino grew up in a small town in Eastern Ontario, went to Arnprior High School, attended the undergraduate medical program at the University of Ottawa, then moved to Laurentian University where he received his MD. He was single, never married, had no children, and, apart from becoming a surgeon was unremarkable in virtually every possible way. There were only a handful of pictures of him as a student at both institutions as well as in his roll on the staff at the University hospital in Sudbury, where he was an attending physician with a specialty in surgery. There were a few high school pictures of him, but he hadn’t been a member of any clubs and thus, apart from a few class photos of him through the years, there were no other images of him from high school.

  The man drove a late eighties Ford Taurus, never had a single speeding ticket, parking ticket or accident claim on his vehicle. His criminal record, like his driving record, was untarnished and completely clean. He had a locked Facebook profile – although it was not at all hard for Scott to gain access to his full wall – with a simple photo (one of his staff pictures from his intern days at Laurentian hospital), a handful of friends and less than a dozen updates. Similarly, he had an old neglected and poorly established MySpace page with the same photo and a couple of lines of text about him. The only new information there was a line expressing his enjoyment of honkytonk and new country music.

  Digging deeper into Citino’s medical records on staff, Scott had been able to compile some of the stats on his surgeries. They were, like his driving and criminal records, unblemished in any way – but, like the rest of his life, they were also not at all remarkable in any way either.

  Scott had spent several weeks combing through the various records, medical charts and reports in which Citino was named in any way, whether it had been as his time as a full-fledged surgeon or whether it had anything to do with his time as a medical intern or even med student.

  About the only interesting thing Scott had found was, back before medical school, when Citino was an undergrad at the University of Ottawa, he had spent a co-op term on the fourth floor of the Royal Ottawa Mental Health Centre where he had worked as part of the team that had treated Wendel Schmidt, a CSIS agent during his stay at the hospital following a mental breakdown he had incurred.

  Scott found himself reading more about Schmidt and his exemplary record as a field intelligence agent, working on special projects and high tech espionage, rather than following up on Citino himself. Time and again, he caught himself following links to information and profile details about Schmidt, and, only after half an hour of falling down another rabbit hole, realized he had gone on a tangent and was reading about the agent’s work and experiences, speculation about the top secret program he had been working on which caused the breakdown, instead of going back to look at Citino.

  What does it say about a man’s intrigue and presence in society when one of the most interesting things you can say about him has nothing to do with him, and everything to do with a particular patient he treated – or, in the case of Citino, he wasn’t even the lead physician, but rather an intern charged with doing some of the menial tasks and examinations.

  Taking no chances that he would miss anything, Scott dug deep on all of the patients and surgeries Citino had performed – he only realized what he’d been hoping to find when nothing came up. He’d been expecting and hoping, perhaps, to find a pattern of carelessness or previous errors and mistakes in surgery. He’d been hoping he could find some sort of evidence that would prove Citino had a history of errors, a history of botched surgeries, a history perhaps, even, of medical malpractice suits held against him – anything that would allow Scott the opportunity to prove his negligence and hold him responsible, legally, for his father’s death.

  But there was nothing there. No errors, no malpractice suits in which he was the main attending surgeon, no skeletons in any of the closets.

  The man’s credit history was pretty straight-line and standard. He’d had student loans and paid them off in a timely fashion, particularly considering the incredible costs he had incurred going to medical school. But his payments were always on time, as were his credit card statement payments. He made the occasional car repair or furniture or appliance purchase on his VISA, and either paid the entire balance the day the statement came in or, with larger purchases, made the regular monthly payment plus additional funds in order to bring the balance down more quickly. But he never held a balance for more than six months, and, for the most part, kept a zero balance on his single credit card.

  Pretty much the only interesting financial transaction that Scott could find had to do with the small house on Ramsey Lake that Citino owned. He’d bought it a few years after becoming a surgeon, at about the time his loans were pretty close to being paid off. He’d made the small five percent down-payment required and paid the bank in rapid bi-weekly payments. Once every six months he would make an additional lump sum payment on the mortgage – and that’s where Scott became confused. The money had come from a savings account Citino had set up, an account towards which he regularly deposited ten percent of each of his paychecks.

  But, when Scott looking into the history of that savings account, he found there were additional funds trickling in to the account from an outside source. Getting to the source had been challenging, but Scott found they were coming from an offshore account in the name of an Alexander Citino, the surgeon’s uncle on his father’s side. According to medical records, Alexander Citino had died three decades earlier, and, childless, had bequeathed his
accumulated wealth to his one nephew, Maurice.

  When Scott dug back deep enough, he saw that, throughout Citino’s school and medical career, the funds had been steadily coming in. Nothing spectacular, but enough to make a small positive difference.

  What was strange was that, after a decade and a half of the same monthly fund – Two hundred and fifty dollars – being deposited into Citino’s account, at about the time the surgeon had purchased his house, the funds changed such that every second month two thousand and five hundred dollars was being deposited instead of two hundred and fifty.

  Scott couldn’t figure out why or how the deposit pattern had suddenly changed, but, recognizing this matter likely had nothing to do with Citino’s competency as a physician or surgeon, he let the matter go.

  He didn’t just look into Citino’s life. He spent several weeks uncovering as much information as he could about the surgery itself, the surgery’s history, how often incidents like his father’s had occurred, who the manufacturer of the clips were, what surgery’s they were used on, as well as a host of other medical instruments and supplies that the same company produced.

  There was nothing that came up in his research that suggested to him a pattern he could use to lay the blame for his father’s death on the manufacturer.

  He’d been about to look back into Citino’s uncle, to determine where the money had come from, when an article in the Ottawa Citizen popped up mentioning the surgeon.

  Sudbury Surgeon Presumed Dead In Horrific Accident

  Dr. Maurice Citino, a Sudbury region surgeon who grew up in the Ottawa valley and attended University of Ottawa, was driving along the Rocliffe Parkway early Sunday morning when his vehicle lost control, crashed through the guardrails and plunged into the Ottawa River.

  Emergency crews were called from a nearby residents reported the sounds of screeching tires and the crash. The resident, who asked not to be named, said that he was just letting his dog back in from the back yard, when he heard the noise.

  “At first I thought it was teens racing,” the resident said, explaining that teens often used the parkway as a race zone, trying to recreate scenes out of The Fast & The Furious. “Because I heard the roaring engines and screeching tires. But then I heard the crash. I let the dog in, closed the door and ran through the house to the front door to see what was going on.

  “At first I couldn’t see nothing,” the resident continued. “The parkway was empty and there were no cars in sight at all. I thought I might see a car up against the rails, which isn’t all that uncommon around that hairpin turn. But then, when the clouds shifted and the moonlight shone through, I could see the broken guard rail. That’s when I knew.”

  The resident reported that this was the third time he had seen an accident like this in the five years he has lived in the home.

  “Sure, there are a lot of cars that hit the rail. Maybe one every second week. But only three so far have broken through. He was driving real fast. That I could hear before the crash.”

  Ottawa Fire & Rescue were the first to arrive, and they deployed a team to descend the cliff, looking for survivors. “Sometimes cars get lodged in the trees on the side of the cliff,” Lieutenant Mike Lazarius explained. “But there was nothing lodged in any of the foliage that we could see with our flashlights, so we started to make our way down.”

  The car wasn’t found until almost two hours later, just as the sun was coming up. Lazarius and his team located the car completely submerged about half a kilometer downstream from the crash site. The car was empty. No survivors, nor any victims.

  “Those waters move pretty quickly this time of year,” Lazarius said. “If somebody was in that car and managed to get out, it was unlikely they would have been able to fight the current enough to get back to shore. They most likely would have been carried further downstream and into the rapids.” Lazarius was referring to the rapids located another hundred yards downstream from where the vehicle was found.

  The crew dragged the water and also scouted along the shore and through the trees of the cliff until mid-day on Sunday, but no bodies were found.

  While the occupants of the car could not be determined for certain, police did confirm that the vehicle was registered to Dr. Maurice Citino, a Sudbury area surgeon. Citino was registered at an academic conference at the University of Ottawa, the school he received his undergrad degree from.

  According to colleagues and the conference registration records, Citino arrived in town two nights earlier and was scheduled to do a presentation on Monday morning. But he never arrived and has not been seen since.

  Citino was assumed to be in the vehicle, as the sole occupant of the car at the time of the crash and is presumed dead. No next of kin have been identified.

  Police are asking anybody who might have been in contact with Citino on Sunday evening, or anybody who might be able to provide information helpful to their investigation to contact them at 613-555-5469.

  As the week went on, Scott found a few other articles referring to the crash, along with a follow-up series of the dangers of stunt driving, an account of the history of crashes that had taken place on the Rockcliffe Parkway over the years, and a plea, by a local residents, to install speed-calming measures on three different areas of the Parkway that were prone to similar accidents.

  Citino was only mentioned, very briefly, in a couple of follow up articles. No new information was provided, simply the fact that Citino was still missing and presumed dead and that no bodies were recovered.

  The Sudbury area paper ran a couple of short articles about the surgeon missing, with a request from the local police detachment to have anybody who might be able to assist in the search for the missing surgeon to contact them.

  Another week later, Scott found a memorial post up on the Laurentian University Hospital website. It was a simple picture, one of the three staff photos he had previously been able to find of Citino, and this one, in Scott’s opinion, being one of the less attractive pictures of the man, with a few lines of text.

  IN MEMORIUM, the article read, and then mentioned Citino had been a surgeon at the hospital for ten years, had been a graduate of Laurentian’s medical school, and did not have any family.

  The whole thing threw Scott into a depression.

  His father’s death had overwhelmed him, for sure.

  But Citino’s death, and the utter lack of any lasting legacy, seemed even harder on Scott.

  Sure, he had originally been looking at the surgeon to try to lay some sort of blame on him for his father’s death. Citinio had become a focal point, something that Scott could channel a huge degree of his anger, resentment and hatred towards. Looking into Citino’s past, trying to find something – anything – on him that could lay the groundwork for blaming him, holding him responsible for Lionel Desmond’s death, kept Scott going, gave him the forward momentum to keep going in the face of the incredible angst and pain he’d felt with his father’s loss.

  But when Citino died like that, completely unexpectedly, it had a bizarre and unique effect on him.

  Scott mused about Citino’s unremarkable life, at the fact that this fifty-eight year old surgeon, somebody who had achieved something unique, a medical degree, a life dedicated to the Hippocratic Oath, to healing others, could be gone so quickly, so easily, and with virtually nothing to show for it.

  The loss of Scott’s father happened unexpectedly and had hit Scott powerfully. But he had been so consumed with anger and wanting to blame someone, that he had allowed his pursuit of investigation to keep him going, keep him from thinking about the mortality in front of him.

  But when Citino also died, Scott had no choice but to reflect back on that, reflect on death, on the finality of it all. Sure, Lionel Desmond had his wife and his son; he had some sort of legacy, people who would remember him, and cherish him and, in the manner Scott had been doing these past weeks, fight on his behalf. But Citino had nobody – no family, no friends. He had lived a life dedicated mostl
y to his profession as a doctor, as a surgeon.

  Scott’s father had fishing, a passion that had kept him going beyond work, given him something to purse in his spare time. Citino didn’t seem to have any hobbies, any passions outside of work.

  All he had, it seemed, was work, was his job.

  And when he died, there was nothing.

  Scott couldn’t help but reflect on his own life, on his own situation, on the manner by which he had pursued the things he had gone after.

  He enjoyed the computer skills he had perfected. And he made a significant amount of money doing the black market work he had done. He had become known through hacker circles as a proficient expert, someone who could be turned to perform remarkable tasks, hack into systems that nobody else seemed capable of.

  He was, by many different measures, at the top of his field.

  But beyond his hacking skills, beyond his reputation, beyond the money he could command for the tasks, the selective manner by which he was in such high demand that he could easily turn down three out of every five jobs that came his way, what did Scott really have?

  Nothing.

  Sure, the money he made had allowed him to spend almost a full month of investigating his father’s death, of taking no jobs, not needing to answer any phone calls, any emails. He had enough money to comfortably live on while he pursued this investigation. He had enough money put away, in fact, to allow him to continue to live comfortably for at least another four months while pursuing his quest.

  But to what end?

  What did Scott really have?