The Last Surgeon

by Michael Palmer

  “For this guy, no doubt, fixing him was a massive undertaking. From these reports it looks as though he went through several multi-step reconstructive events, totaling about thirty operations.”

  “That’s not the only total that was massive,” Jillian said. “Take a gander at the bill this case generated.”

  Nick looked at where she was pointing and whistled.

  “Half a million dollars for this work alone. No wonder Shelby Stone formed a partnership with these guys. Even if the patient defaults on their share of the bill, the insurance company owes a hefty six-figure payday for Singh, and a percentage of that goes to the mother hospital.”

  “Well, that does explain how Paresh Singh can afford that marble fountain.”

  “If they’re so well known for this type of work, I wonder how many shotgun injuries they reconstruct in a year?” Nick asked.

  “I can tell you,” Jillian said. “I’ll just look it up by that ICD code.”

  Jillian entered the numbers, keeping the scan limited to the twelve months beginning the approximate date Umberto disappeared.

  “Keywords shotgun . . . and . . . face . . . and there you are.”

  Four seconds after she hit the Enter key, twenty records were identified.

  “Amazing,” Nick commented. “Maybe that’s what the J. Geils Band meant when they named their album Blow Your Face Out.”

  “Who’s the J. Geils Band?” Reggie asked. “If I ain’t heard of them, they must be old.”

  “With you, anything that wasn’t recorded last month is old.”

  “Twenty cases in that one hospital doesn’t surprise me very much,” Jillian said. “Between fifty and fifty-five percent of all suicides are caused by guns, but there are over fifteen hundred attempted suicides in the U.S. alone each day.”

  “That’s an incredible number,” Junie said.

  “Sad, but true,” Jillian said.

  Nick thought through the math.

  “So, if Paresh Singh is world renowned for his ability to reconstruct faces after a shotgun blast,” he said, “it’s not inconceivable there could be at least a hundred such cases in the U.S. each year—probably more worldwide.”

  “One-fifth of them sent to the best of the best makes sense to me.”

  “Let’s look at these twenty,” Nick said, “but we’d better move quickly. Sooner or later someone’s going to catch on to the breach.”

  Behind them, Reggie kept touching his face, as though trying to visualize how the gunshot wounds Nick described could actually be survivable.

  The first five files they reviewed were grisly but also well documented. The skill of Paresh Singh was undeniable, although the residual facial damage in each case was still fairly striking. Nothing in those files jumped out at them as being out of the ordinary. Something troubled Nick about the sixth case, though, a patient named Edwin Scott Price from Plano, Texas.

  The majority of suicide attempts with a firearm were males, thirty to fifty years old. Edwin Price was forty-five. But although he fit the profile, there was a feeling Nick could not shake while he was scanning the X-ray images, photos, and CT scans attached to Price’s file. Something about the record was familiar—not possible given that the electronic chart was one he’d never seen before, and the patient one he’d never heard of. The echoing concern nagged at him.

  Why?

  Nick was about to abandon the CT scans and move on when Reggie leaned over and exclaimed in his ear. “Dang! That dude is just as messed up as the first poor sucker we saw.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I don’t know. I’m good at figuring out patterns, and those pieces of bone look almost exactly like that first guy you showed me.”

  “That’s it!” Nick exclaimed.

  “That’s what?” Jillian asked.

  “Why I’ve been feeling like Price’s record was familiar. Let’s go back to that twenty-eight-year-old Caucasian male we looked at first.”

  “Giuseppe Renzulli?”

  “That’s the one.”

  Jillian pulled up Renzulli’s file.

  “Can we see both side by side?”

  She opened a new window and soon had the two patients’ three-dimensional CT scans displayed next to each other.

  “Well, I’ll be . . .” Junie’s voice trailed off.

  “They’re identical,” Jillian said.

  “Told you,” Reggie boasted.

  Nick studied both pictures intently, his brow knit.

  “I’m not a statistician,” he said. “But I’m willing to bet the RV that two identical bone fragment dispersals from a shotgun blast to the face is a statistical impossibility.”

  “Are the procedures done on the men the same?” Junie asked.

  “Doesn’t look like it to me,” Nick said. “Renzulli had some pretty significant complications that Paresh attributed to his anesthesia and local infection.”

  “There’s something else we’re missing,” Jillian said. “I can feel it.”

  Nick went back through Price’s and Renzulli’s notes and films. The only thing in common between the two records was the CT scan.

  “Didn’t you just say that these procedures cost hundreds of thousands of dollars in hospital billing?” Junie asked.

  Nick’s focus was locked on trolling through Price’s file, such that he almost missed the question.

  “Yeah,” he said absently. “Why?”

  “Well, take a look here,” Junie said, tapping her finger on the screen.

  “Hey! Fingers off the monitor,” Reggie scolded.

  “Well, I’ll be . . .” Nick had to blink to make sure he was reading it right. “Jillian, as a joint venture with Shelby Stone, doesn’t that mean Singh operates his medical practice himself, but combines his purchases and billing for supplies with Stone?” Nick asked.

  “I think so. That way he gets the benefit of Stone’s purchase power. He probably sends Stone a percentage of his collections for the procedures he performs.”

  “Well, according to this, Edwin Scott Price had almost a million dollars of reconstructive work done.”

  “And? What am I missing?” Jillian asked.

  She turned around in the chair to face both the others.

  “What you’re missing and what Junie just pointed out,” Nick said, “is that none of Singh’s profits that were shared with Shelby Stone from Edwin Scott Price’s million-dollar new face came from an insurance company.”

  “That would mean Singh didn’t want Price’s insurance company to even know he was doing the work. Why would that be?”

  A devilish smile crossed Nick’s face.

  “I don’t know. But let’s give our little implanted rootkit a rest and then when Reggie tells us it’s safe, we start looking to find other identical CT scans and take a real close look at Singh’s billing practices when it comes to fixing shotgun wounds.”

  CHAPTER 31

  Franz Koller sat on one of the recently installed benches at Poplar Point and watched the moonlight dance across the Potomac. The plan was for his client to take the bench directly behind his, facing toward the woods, so they could keep their backs to one another as they talked.

  The cloak-and-dagger bullshit was cumbersome, Koller thought, but he had done business with the Agency before, and like the golfing gorilla who hit a four-hundred-yard drive and then followed it with a four-hundred-yard putt, this was the way they operated. He knew whom he was dealing with and they knew that he knew, but that made no difference to the way they did things. The only question that remained unanswered for him, and in truth he didn’t really care whether he ever knew, was the precise identity of Jericho, the individual or group within the Agency who had the resources and clout to authorize the cancelation of at least six people. And at the going rate for the master of the non-kill, that was some serious clout.

  There was a chill in the air, a bit unusual for this time of year, and Koller was glad he had opted for his heavy jacket, not only for warmth, but for conc
ealing his favorite direct-kill weapon—a Ruger bull-barrel .22 with an integrally suppressed silencer. The gun provided him with an emergency escape option, and given that this meeting breached several protocols he lived by, he considered the precaution a wise one.

  Koller wasn’t bothered by the meeting place so much as he was by the time. Late at night, in a public park, any passing patrolman worth the tin on his badge would be wise to question any bench sitter.

  I just want to ask you to be very careful, sir. Muggers like to hang out here late at night. . . .

  Koller grinned at the notion. For a time, he closed his eyes and indulged himself, imagining what it might be like to have a mugger actually approach him here. The direct kill his mind created was swift and silent—one hand up, through the flesh of the throat, and fully around the larynx. After the initial thrust, before death, his imagination allowed him to pluck the would-be assailant’s eyes out with his thumbs.

  Somewhat messy, but nicely done, he decided. Nicely done, indeed.

  Koller suspected that he was about to meet Jericho the person, or else the head of the organization calling itself by that name. He was curious why this client was so insistent on rendezvousing with him in person. A face-to-face meeting was potentially dangerous for each of them—lethal for one of them if it were Jericho’s intention to kill him. But killing him at this point—at any point for that matter—made no sense. It had to be that once again, as was the case when Jericho elected to burn down Jillian Coates’s condo, established protocol was about to be broken. Only this time, his client had wisely decided it was easier and safer to ask permission than it was to seek forgiveness.

  The killer sensed movement and sound, and slid the Ruger onto his lap. A full minute passed before he actually heard the voices of a man and woman, approaching along the walk to his left. Koller inhaled through his nose and began the process of slowing his pulse. They sounded harmless and intoxicated, but professional killers would. He followed the couple out of the corner of his eye as they emerged from a dense grove and approached along the walk from a hundred feet away. At the same time, he scanned to his right. Nothing. If the couple were good enough to fool him, it was going to be a hell of a fight.

  He buried his pistol beneath his jacket.

  “Hey, there, buddy. How’re you doing?” the man said.

  He was an absolute house, six five, two-eighty or more, and if he had anything less than a 0.2 blood alcohol level, he deserved an Oscar. The girl on his arm was petite and quiet.

  “Have a good one,” Koller said, still on red alert, but now for anyone whose presence the couple might have masked.

  “You betcha,” the bear said.

  He hiccuped, stumbled once, and then proceeded on.

  Koller holstered the Ruger and checked his watch. Always arrive late. Another unnecessary CIA gorilla shtick. In exchange for the tax-free million or more they were paying him for each kill, he’d give them five more minutes. The Jericho contract had already brought him millions. With luck this meeting would end up adding to that haul.

  From behind him, Koller heard footsteps on the grass. Two people, almost certainly men, one of them, like his previous visitor, quite large. He did not turn around, but again prepared himself for action. If they were pros, they were either clumsy pros or meant him no harm. Jericho and a bodyguard, he decided.

  The heavier footsteps stopped fifty feet away. The smaller man continued forward, then sat down on the bench with his back to Koller.

  “Thank you for meeting me like this,” the arrival said.

  That voice. Now Koller understood why his client had shown up with security.

  “It’s my pleasure. Who’s the muscle back there?”

  “How did you—?”

  “Look, you pay me what you do because I’m the best. If you have any other plans aside from a chat, you’ll soon regret that.”

  “Killing me would make quite a story. Perhaps since you’re so astute you already know who I am.”

  “I watch TV,” Koller said. “You the head of Jericho?”

  “This isn’t a quiz show. Form your own opinion about that.”

  “I’m not wearing a wire.”

  “I know that already. We scanned you ten minutes ago.”

  “The drunk and the girl. They’re good.”

  “My whole team is good. That’s why we hired you.”

  “So, let’s get down to it, then. We didn’t need to meet in person to arrange a job. You already know how that’s done.”

  “There have been some changes. What I need now is to know that I can trust you.”

  “An ironic request of somebody in my line of work, don’t you think?”

  Koller began to relax. There was no way the future vice presidential nominee, with his ticket already well ahead in all the polls, would set himself up to be killed. It also went far to explain Jericho. Before his recent selection, Lionel Ramsland had been the deputy director of the CIA.

  CHAPTER 32

  For several minutes Lionel Ramsland remained silent. He had already been chosen to join the ticket with John Greenleigh, his party’s leading presidential candidate, well in advance of the August nominating convention. Popular and respected defenders of democracy, few expected they would lose.

  “I know that we erred with that condo fire,” Ramsland said finally.

  “Do you remember what I told you about my marks?” Koller asked.

  “Refresh me.”

  “Under no circumstance are clients ever to engage, tail, touch, or even breathe near anybody associated with a mark without my authorization—and that authorization is something I would simply never grant.”

  “Okay, you’ve made yourself clear.”

  “I had materials well concealed in the place that I hadn’t had the opportunity to remove. If the police had found them, it could have gone poorly for me—and you.”

  “Our mistake.”

  “And you paid me for that mistake. So?”

  “Well, it seems Operation Jericho has a few new and unforeseen stress points. Nothing I’m that worried about, especially with you on our side. But then again, I didn’t get to where I am by being passive.”

  “You know I’m a professional and I always deliver. Customer satisfaction guaranteed or your victim back,” Koller said with a chuckle. “Maybe I should have that slogan printed on my business cards.”

  “Maybe you should.”

  “Go on, sir.”

  The man many considered more powerful and decisive than his much younger, more intellectual running mate cleared his throat. Koller noted for the first time the fatigue in his voice.

  “I love this country,” Ramsland said, “and consider myself a patriot, someone who would do anything in his power to protect her. Anything. It’s important to me that I believe you would do the same.”

  “Country love is your business, not mine.”

  “The people who have hired you in the past told me I could expect that answer from you.”

  “Then you shouldn’t have brought the subject up.”

  “As the moving force behind Jericho, I could not in good conscience address our latest concerns without meeting you face-to-face and at least asking.”

  “Detachment is a valuable asset in my work, but so is loyalty.”

  “To the country?”

  “No, Mr. Ramsland, to my clients.”

  “I see.”

  “Why don’t you cut the cloak-and-dagger bullshit and come sit next to me?”

  Ramsland did as the killer suggested and for a few pregnant moments, the two men locked gazes and sized each other up.

  “You’re not what I pictured,” Ramsland said.

  “I try to stay out of the papers. Sweet to think you were fantasizing about me, though.”

  “My sources told me that you had a—how did they put it—an eccentric sense of humor.”

  “I don’t really enjoy being talked about. Go on. I think you should get to the point.”

  �
�Ah yes, I was told about your bluntness, too. Okay, let me begin by saying that we have a responsibility, you and I. A great and important responsibility.”

  “If you say so.”

  “I can tell a lot about a man by his eyes. But yours tell me nothing.”

  “That should bring you some degree of comfort,” Koller offered. “It means I have no agenda other than the one you pay me to have.”

  “And if somebody were to pay you more money to have a different agenda?”

  The man, closing in on the end of his sixties, close to being a heartbeat from the presidency, was uninspiring. But then, to Koller, most people of stature and power were. Ramsland was a throwback to the days of détente and domino theory backroom politics—a saggy-skinned prune with puffy eyes who overfilled the blue power suit peeking out from underneath his London Fog trench.

  It amazed Koller that the balding, silver-haired fool stirred up emotions in anybody other than his mother, let alone a majority of the free world. Koller kept his eyes fixed on the man, and had a brief flash as to what he would look like with his lungs full of sarin. Still, underneath Ramsland’s doughy exterior, Koller sensed toughness, and warned himself not to lose sight of that observation. Guys who played chicken with tanks and missiles tended to have balls.

  “I might not be a patriot like yourself, but what I am is a professional. A consummate professional with my own set of laws. At the moment, you are protected under those laws. Whatever you have to say here you can say in confidence.”

  Ramsland took a deep breath and exhaled slowly.

  “Okay, Mr. Koller. I know that by torching Jillian Coates’s place we violated one of your laws and placed you in some jeopardy. But she had gone on air with some potentially damaging information, and we felt we had to act quickly.”

  “I know much more about the woman than you do, believe me. All you did was make her more determined than ever to keep investigating things. I’ve had to start following her to make certain she doesn’t make any progress.”

  “We had intended to follow her, but with what you’re costing us, and the small size of our group, we just didn’t have the resources.”