by Robin Cook
“Somehow the widow and she got together. Lucinda Benfatti called back a little while ago to reemphasize that she, too, doesn’t want her husband’s body touched until her sons get here Friday. As you know from last night she’d already said that, but both of us thought the chances were good that she’d change her mind today when I spoke with her. No deal. In fact, she mentioned Jennifer’s forensic pathologist friends coming, and that she’d asked Jennifer if her friends could look at her husband’s case as well. If the media get wind of this, they might jump on it.”
Rajish slammed his palm down on his desk. Several of the letters waiting to be read swooped off into the air. “This woman is a scourge spreading her stubbornness to others. I worry this situation is rapidly growing beyond our capability to keep it under wraps. Most people who are grieving are too emotionally paralyzed to cause trouble. What is wrong with this Hernandez girl?”
“She’s self-willed, as I mentioned,” Kashmira agreed.
“Is she spiritual?”
“I haven’t any idea. She’s not said anything to make me think one way or the other. Why do you ask?”
“I was just thinking that if she were spiritual, we could tempt her with her grandmother’s body.”
“How so?”
“Offer to have it cremated at the world-famous burning ghats of Varanasi and the ashes placed in the Ganges.”
“But that is a privilege reserved for Hindus.”
Rajish made a gesture as if swatting a fly. “Some extra consideration for the Brahmin of the Ghats of Jalore would solve that issue. Perhaps Ms. Hernandez could be tempted. It could be touted as an extra favor to the departed. We could offer it to Mrs. Benfatti as well.”
“I’m not optimistic,” Kashmira said. “Neither strikes me as particularly religious, and being cremated in Varanasi only has true meaning for Hindus. Yet I’ll give it a try. The Hernandez girl herself admitted she might think differently after she’d gotten some sleep. She is exhausted and suffering jet lag. Maybe such a bribe would push her over the edge.”
“We must get these bodies out of that cafeteria cooler,” Rajish emphasized. “Especially with the hospital currently under observation by the International Joint Commission. We can’t afford to fail for such an incidental violation. Meanwhile, I will give Ramesh Srivastava a call back and report we are having a particularly difficult time with the Hernandez woman.”
“I have tried my best with her, I assure you. I’ve been very direct. More so than with any other next of kin.”
“I know you have. The problem is we have limited resources. That’s not the situation with someone like Ramesh Srivastava. He has the weight of the entire Indian bureaucracy behind him. If he so desired, he could even keep the two forensic friends of Ms. Hernandez out of the country.”
“I’ll keep you informed of any changes,” Kashmira said, as she turned to go.
“Please do,” Rajish said, with a brief wave. He used his intercom to ask his secretary to get Mr. Ramesh Srivastava on the line. He wasn’t looking forward to it. He knew how powerful Srivastava was and how he could get Rajish fired with a snap of his fingers.
Chapter 16
OCTOBER 17, 2007
WEDNESDAY, 3:15 P.M.
NEW DELHI, INDIA
It had not been a good day for Ramesh Srivastava. Starting the moment he got into his office in the morning, the deputy secretary of state for health had called to tell him that the secretary of state for health was furious about the second CNN International segment being aired concerning India’s nascent medical tourism industry. Then the calls had never stopped. They came from half a dozen joint secretaries of the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, the president of the Indian Healthcare Federation, and even the secretary of state for tourism, all reminding him that he happened to be presiding over the department of medical tourism when it was experiencing the most negative international PR that it had ever experienced. All the callers also reminded him that they had the power to end his career if he didn’t do something and do it fast. The problem was, he didn’t know what to do. He’d tried to figure out how CNN International was getting the tips, but without success.
“A Mr. Rajish Bhurgava is online at this moment,” Ramesh’s secretary said as Ramesh came through his office door, returning from his three-hour lunch. Ramesh dashed into his inner office and snatched the receiver off the hook. “Have you found the leak?” he demanded straight off.
“Just a moment,” Rajish’s secretary said. “I’ll put Mr. Bhurgava on.”
Ramesh silently cursed as he flopped down in his desk chair. He was a large balding man with watery eyes and deep scars on his cheekbones from adolescent acne. He tapped his fat, impatient fingers on his desk. As soon as Rajish Bhurgava came on the line, Ramesh blurted out the question again and with equal emotion.
“We haven’t,” Rajish admitted. “I’ve spoken yet again at length with the chief of the medical staff. We still believe the most likely culprit is one of the academic doctors who also have admitting privileges here for their relatively few private patients. We know some of them are rabidly against the government’s granting us the incentives and tax breaks it has at the expense of adequately funding the control of communicable diseases in rural areas. What he’s doing now is trying to see if any of the most outspoken ones were here in the hospital both Monday night and last night.”
“What does he say about the deaths themselves?” Ramesh grumbled. “Two in two nights is intolerable. What are you people doing wrong? With CNN beaconing these fatalities around the world seven or eight times a day, you have essentially negated six months of our ad campaign, especially in America, our biggest target.”
“I asked him the same question. He’s entirely baffled. Neither patient had warning symptoms or signs, either from their home doctors or during our admitting tests.”
“Did they have cardiograms here preoperatively?”
“Yes, of course they had cardiograms, and both arrived with clean reports from American cardiologists. Our chief of the medical staff said that even in retrospect there would have been no way to predict what happened. Both surgeries and postoperative courses were without incident.”
“What about the problem with the Hernandez girl? Has that at least been taken care of?”
“I’m afraid not,” Rajish admitted. “She’s not decided on the disposition of the body, and she now has begun talking about possibly wanting an autopsy done.”
“Why?”
“We’re not entirely certain other than her belief that her grandmother’s heart was in fine shape.”
“I don’t want an autopsy,” Ramesh stated categorically. “There’s no way it could help us. If the autopsy were to be clean, they wouldn’t use it to exonerate us because there’s no story, and if the autopsy shows pathology we should have known about, they would crucify us. No, there is to be no autopsy.”
“To complicate things, Ms. Hernandez has apparently contacted a former client of the deceased, and she and her husband, both of whom are forensic pathologists, are on their way and will be in Delhi on Friday.”
“Good grief,” Ramesh said. “Well, if they make formal application for an autopsy, make sure it is taken by one of the magistrates we are accustomed to dealing with.”
“I’ll do my best,” Rajish said. “But perhaps with your connections you might question whether we want them here at all.”
“I would need more warning. Otherwise, they get stopped only at the airport, and that, in and of itself, could cause a media problem if it gets associated with the already notorious private hospital deaths reported by CNN. A free media is such a bore, and they love these gossipy-type stories.”
“There’s one other way that the Hernandez girl is causing mischief. She had seemingly sought out the Benfatti woman this morning and convinced her to delay giving us permission to dispose properly of her husband’s body in the same way she is denying us access to her grandmother’s.”
“No!” Ramesh
exclaimed with disbelief.
“I’m afraid so. I’m beginning to think as I hear from my case manager that she is deliberately trying to cause trouble. I’m even beginning to believe she’s starting to become paranoid and hold us accountable, as if we have caused this tragedy deliberately.”
“That’s it, then,” Ramesh said. “We cannot let this go on.”
“Is there something you can do, sir?” Rajish asked hopefully.
“Perhaps,” Ramesh said. “We cannot sit passively and let this woman have free rein until her paranoia is somehow satisfied.”
“I couldn’t agree more.”
“Keep me informed of any and all developments,” Ramesh said.
“Absolutely,” Rajish answered.
Ramesh hung up the receiver and turned to the keyboard at his workstation. Going into his address book, he found the mobile number of Inspector Naresh Prasad of the New Delhi police, who headed up the small, clandestine Industrial Security Unit. Picking the phone receiver back up, he placed the call. Since the men hadn’t spoken in almost six months, they traded some personal information before Ramesh got around to the reason for the call. “We here at the department of medical tourism have a problem that needs your expertise.”
“I’m listening,” Naresh said.
“Is this a good time to talk?”
“It doesn’t get much better.”
“There is a young woman named Jennifer Hernandez, whose grandmother passed away Monday night at the Queen Victoria Hospital of an unfortunate heart attack. Somehow CNN got ahold of the story and put it on the air as a way of questioning our record of safety.”
“That’s not good.”
“That is an understatement,” Ramesh said. He then went on to tell Naresh the entire problem, including the details of the second death. He then enumerated all the things that Jennifer had done and was doing to make herself persona non grata. “This affair is beginning to have a serious deleterious effect on our medical tourism ad campaign, which could then impact our ability to meet our goals. I don’t know if you have been kept completely up to date, but we have upped our estimates such that Indian medical tourism is to be a two-point-two-billion-dollar-a-year industry by 2010.”
Naresh whistled into his phone. He was duly impressed. “I hadn’t heard those figures. Are you people aiming to catch IT? The information technology people are going to be envious, as they believe they have become the hereditary kings of foreign exchange.”
“Unfortunately, this current problem could seriously impact our goal,” Ramesh said, ignoring Naresh’s question. “We need help.”
“That’s what we’re here for. What can we do?”
“There’s two parts. One part for your unit in general and one part for you in particular. Concerning your unit, we need an investigation to uncover who is supplying CNN International with confidential information. The CEO of Queen Victoria and his chief of the medical staff believe it to be a radical academic M.D. who also has admitting privileges. How many there are at the Victoria I don’t know, but I want them investigated now. I want to know who this person is.”
“That can easily be arranged. I will put my best men on it. What is my part?”
“The girl, Jennifer Hernandez. I want her taken care of. It shouldn’t be difficult. She’s staying at the Amal.”
“Why not call up one of your equals in immigration. Have her picked up and deported. Problem over!”
“My sense is that she is feisty, stubborn, and resourceful. If immigration picks her up, I’d worry that she’d make a fuss, and if the media associates her case with the death reported by CNN, there could be an even bigger story about a governmental cover-up. That could make everything decidedly worse.”
“Good point. What exactly do you mean ‘taken care of’? Let’s be specific.”
“I leave that to your well-earned reputation for creativity. I want her to stop being a potential thorn in our side. However you can accomplish that, I’m content. Actually, it’s better if I don’t know. Then if I’m asked at a later date, as one who was interested in her behavior, I don’t have to lie.”
“What if I can assure you she means no harm and her current apparent threat is bogus?”
“That would be satisfactory, of course. Particularly if your team can provide us with the physician mole. I need to attack this problem from both ends.”
“Can I assume my compensation will be the usual?”
“Let’s say comparable. Check things out. Follow her. Remember, we don’t want her to become the news, and we surely don’t want her to be any kind of martyr. As for the compensation, it should depend on degree of difficulty. You and I go back a ways. We can trust each other.”
“You’ll hear from me.”
“Good.”
Ramesh disconnected the call. Toward the end of the conversation with the industrial policeman, he’d had another idea about the Hernandez problem, a possible solution that would be easier, cheaper, and probably better, as it wouldn’t involve the government. All he had to do was get someone he knew angry enough, and it so happened that the individual Ramesh had in mind was easy to get angry when the issue involved money. Ramesh was surprised he’d not thought of Shashank Malhotra earlier. After all, the man regularly paid him off and had even taken him on a memorable trip to Dubai.
“Hello, my good friend,” Shashank enthused several octaves louder than necessary. “Wonderful to hear from you. How is the family?”
Ramesh could visually imagine Shashank in his palatial office overlooking the fashionable Connaught Place. Shashank was one of India’s new-style businessmen who were into a wide variety of pursuits, some legal, some less so. Of late he’d become particularly enamored of healthcare and saw medical tourism as the path to an easy second fortune. Over the last three years he’d invested a substantial sum and was the principal stockholder in a company that, appropriately enough in relation to the current problem, owned the Queen Victoria Hospitals in Delhi, Bangalore, and Chennai, and the Aesculapian Medical Centers in Delhi, Mumbai, and Hyderabad. It was also he who had recently contributed the lion’s share of the cost of the recent ad campaign in Europe and North America touting India as a twenty-first-century healthcare destination. Shashank Malhotra was a major player.
After an appropriate amount of niceties had been exchanged, Ramesh got down to business. “The reason for my call is a problem at Queen Victoria Hospital here in Delhi. Have you been briefed?”
“I heard there was some sort of minor problem,” Shashank said warily. He had heard the change in Ramesh’s voice and was famously sensitive to the word problem, as it usually meant the necessity of spending money. And he was particularly touchy about problems associated with both the Queen Victoria Hospital group and the Aesculapian Medical Centers, as they were the newest members of his financial empire and had yet to reach profitability.
“It’s more than a minor,” Ramesh said. “And I think you should know about it. Do you have a minute?”
“Are you kidding? Certainly I want to hear it.”
Ramesh told Shashank the story pretty much the same way he’d told it to Inspector Naresh Prasad but minus the optimistic government economic predictions for medical tourism, as Shashank was already well aware of those. As Ramesh progressed, he knew Shashank was appreciating both the importance and the urgency of the situation because of the pointed questions he posed as Ramesh continued.
When Ramesh finished and fell silent, Shashank remained silent as well. Ramesh let him stew, particularly about the part of erasing most of the gain from the ad campaign.
“I think you should have told me all this a little sooner,” Shashank growled. He sounded like a completely different person. His voice was low and menacing.
“I think that everything should be fine if this young woman will make up her mind about her grandmother’s body, and then she heads home. I’m sure you know someone qualified to make those suggestions, someone whom she might listen to.”
“
Where is she staying?”
“At the Amal Palace.”
Ramesh found himself holding a dead line.
Chapter 17
OCTOBER 17, 2007
WEDNESDAY, 3:45 P.M.
NEW DELHI, INDIA
Veena glanced at her watch. Report had never seemed to take so long. She was supposed to have been off at three-thirty, and it was already a quarter to four.
“That’s it, then,” Nurse Kumar said to the evening head nurse. “Any questions?”
“I don’t believe so,” the evening head nurse said. “Thank you.”
Everyone stood. Veena made a beeline to the elevator while the others erupted in casual conversation. Samira saw her and had to hurry to catch up.
“Where are you going?” Samira questioned.
Veena didn’t answer. Her eyes darted from elevator to elevator to see which one would be arriving first.
“Veena!” Samira voiced with emotion. “Are you still not going to talk with me? I think you are carrying this too far.”
Veena ignored Samira and stepped over to the door of the arriving elevator. Samira followed.
“I know it is reasonable for you to be angry with me initially,” Samira whispered after moving behind her friend. Several of the other nurses joined them, chattering about the day’s events. “But after you’d had time to think about it, I thought you’d understand I did it for you as much as for myself and the others.”
The elevator arrived. Everyone boarded. Veena moved to the back of the car, turned, and faced forward. Samira joined her. “This silence is not fair,” Samira continued in a whisper. “Don’t you even want to know the details about last night?”
“No,” Veena replied, also in a whisper. They were the first words she’d spoken directly to Samira since Monday, when Cal had revealed to Veena that he knew about her family’s problems. The only other person in the world who knew about it was Samira, so the source was obvious.
