Marker

by Robin Cook

  Jazz stood up and headed for the inclined plane to do her sit-ups. She didn’t know where Chet had gone and was glad to be away from his lecherous gaze. She hated Ivy League types, and Chet had certainly been one of those. She could recognize them a mile away. They strutted around with their fancy degrees and didn’t know crap. The fact that Chet entertained even for a minute the idea that she’d want to have a drink with him was a slap in the face.

  After another quick glance at the clock to be sure she had enough time, Jazz did her hundred sit-ups, making sure her breathing was in sync. The only problem with the health-club scene—or so she had convinced herself without explaining why she liked to wear her suggestive outfit—was that she had to put up with men like Chet on a daily basis. Most of them said they wanted to buy her a drink, but she knew that wasn’t what they wanted. They wanted sex, like all men. Back when she was in high school and even middle school, she probably would have been willing to give Chet a run for his money by slipping him some Ecstasy and then taking advantage of him. But that was back when she considered sex a sport, when it gave her a sense of power, and when it drove her parents crazy. Now she didn’t need it anymore. In fact, it was a big pain in the ass with all the nonsense that had to go along with it. It was a waste of time, especially since it was far easier and quicker to take care of herself when she was in the mood.

  Finishing her sit-ups, Jazz got to her feet and looked at herself in the mirror. She straightened to the full extent of her lean, muscled, five-foot-ten stature. She liked what she saw, particularly the definition of her arms and legs. She was in better shape than she was after naval boot camp, when the idea of exercise had first been introduced to her.

  With her towel in one hand, she stooped down to pick up her water bottle. There was only a little left, and she polished it off. Then she started for the locker room. As she walked, she could see most of the men’s eyes slyly following her. She was careful to avoid any eye contact and kept an expression of disdain on her face, which was easy, considering that was how she felt. She also caught a glimpse of Mr. Ivy League talking to the birdbrain who’d processed her paperwork when she joined the club a month earlier. Blond Mr. Polo now had his hands on his hips and a sad, hangdog expression on his face. Jazz had to suppress a smile when she thought about him bragging to her that he was a doctor, as if it was going to impress her! Jazz knew too many doctors, and they were all jerks.

  She tossed the empty water bottle in the container by the door before heading out of the weight room. When she passed the main reception desk, she saw that it was almost nine-forty, meaning she’d better fire her afterburners and get a move on, since she liked to have the option of getting to work early if she lucked out and got another assignment. There had been a bit of a lull before the previous night’s mission, which she was hoping would be the start of a whole new series. But she couldn’t complain about the lull because, overall, she was lucky indeed. Sometimes she wondered how they had found her, but she didn’t dwell on it. It was about time that things were starting to work out, considering all her effort, especially her so-called formal schooling after she got out of the military. Having to go to that community college with all those retards in order to go from corpsman to RN had been the biggest trial of her life.

  Just inside the locker-room door was a table with a large tub of iced soft drinks. Jazz helped herself to a Coke, popped the tab, and took a satisfying swig. Next to the tub was a clipboard with a little sign requesting that she write her name and indicate what she’d taken so that her account could be charged. As she took another pull from the can and headed off to the VIP section, where she had her own assigned locker, she wondered what kind of fool would actually write their name down, but then again, she knew that a fool was born every minute.

  A shower was a quick affair for Jazz. After lathering up, including a shampoo, she liked to stand for a few minutes with her eyes closed and allow the water to drum on her head and run down the crevices of her well-tuned body. Closing her eyes had the added benefit of shielding her from having to look at the other women, some of whom had butts the size of small countries, with skin that resembled the surface of the moon. Jazz couldn’t believe they had such little self-respect to allow themselves to get to such a pathetic state.

  After the shower, her cropped coif needed only a short stint with the hairdryer. When she’d been young, she’d agonized over her hair, but being in the military had cured her. It had also cured her of a long-standing hang-up about cosmetics. Now all she used was a little lipstick, and that was more to keep her lips from drying out than anything else.

  Next came the green scrubs, over which she pulled on a medium-length white coat with a stethoscope crammed in the side pocket. The breast pocket boasted a collection of pens, pencils, and other nursing paraphernalia.

  “Are you an ER nurse?” a voice asked.

  Jazz looked around. One of the large-ass women was sitting on the bench in front of her locker, swaddled in her towel like a sausage. Jazz debated whether or not to ignore her. Generally, Jazz stayed above the usual locker-room drivel, preferring to be expeditious about showering. Yet the stereotyping, which the comment implied, begged for a retort.

  “No, I’m a neurosurgeon,” Jazz said. She took her oversized, olive-drab military coat from her locker and pulled it on. It had pockets as deep as gold mines. The contents of the pockets bumped up against her thighs, particularly on the right.

  “A neurosurgeon!” the woman marveled with a look of disbelief. “No kidding!”

  “No kidding,” Jazz echoed with a tone that did not invite any more conversation. She stuck her sweaty bodysuit in her gym bag, then closed and locked her locker. Although she did not look at the woman who’d spoken to her, she sensed that the woman was watching her. Jazz didn’t care if the woman believed her or not. It didn’t matter.

  Without the exchange of another word, Jazz struck off through the locker room and out into the main corridor. After she pushed the down button of the elevator, she stuck her hand into the overcoat’s right pocket and fondled her favorite possession, a subcompact nine-millimeter Glock. Its molded composite handgrip gave her a reassuring feeling of power, while awakening recurrent fantasies of being accosted by lowlifes like Mr. Ivy League in the parking garage. It would all happen so fast that the guy’s head would spin. One minute he’d be making some inane comment, the next he’d be looking down the barrel of the gun’s suppressor. Jazz had made the effort to outfit the gun with a silencer because another ongoing fantasy was to take out one of her nursing supervisors.

  Jazz sighed. For her whole life, she’d been saddled with the albatross of incompetent authority personnel. It had started in high school. She could remember as if it were yesterday the time she’d been called into the guidance counselor’s office. The dork had said he was mystified because she’d tested off the charts for intelligence but was doing so poorly. What was the cause?

  “Duhhh!” Jazz voiced out loud as she recalled the incident. The guy was so slow mentally that he couldn’t comprehend that nine-tenths of all the teachers were from the same shallow end of the gene pool that he was from. It was a waste of time going to high school. He’d warned her that she wouldn’t get to go to college if she kept doing what she was doing. Well, she didn’t care. She knew that the only real way out of the cesspool of her life was the military.

  The trouble was that the military wasn’t a whole lot better. It was okay at first, because she had a lot of ground to make up, getting into shape and all. Aptitude tests had supposedly pointed her in the direction of becoming a hospital corpsman, which was a joke, since she always lied on those stupid tests. But she played along; becoming a corpsman sounded fine, especially the idea of being on her own. Eventually, she opted for being an independent duty corpsman with the marines. But when she eventually got assigned, things started to go downhill. Some of the officers she had to deal with were half-wits, especially over in Kuwait, when her squadron infiltrated the Kuwait salient
in February 1991. She had gotten a kick out of shooting Iraqis until her commanding officer took her rifle away as if she was not supposed to have any fun. He told her to restrict her activities to the health needs of the real men. It had been embarrassing.

  Things came to a head in San Diego almost a year later. The same cretin of an officer came into a bar where she and some of the regular grunts were tossing back a few beers. He got sloshed and grabbed a feel when Jazz wasn’t looking. As if that wasn’t bad enough, he called her “a freaking dyke” when she spurned an offer to drive out to the tip of Point Loma with him to get laid. That had been the last straw, and Jazz had shot him in the leg with her sidearm. She hadn’t been aiming for the leg, but he still got the appropriate message. Of course, that had been the end of her military career, but by then she didn’t care. She’d had enough.

  Going from the military into the community college turned out to be like going from the frying pan into the fire. But Jazz had persevered. She’d thought that getting her RN would be her ticket, because nurses were so much in demand, and she could call the shots. Unfortunately, the eventual reality was no different from her experience in the military when it came to supervisors, forcing her to move from job to job with the vain hope that things would be better at different institutions. But they never were. Now, it didn’t matter.

  When the elevator stopped on the upper parking level, Jazz got off, pushed out of the glassed elevator lobby, and walked over to her second-favorite possession, a brand-spanking-new, shiny, black-as-onyx H2 Hummer. She ran her fingers appreciatively along the vehicle’s side, catching a view of her reflection in the windows. Except for the windshield, all the glass was tinted to the extent that it appeared to be black mirrors. Before she opened the door, she stepped back and took in the vehicle’s boxy outline and its squat, threatening stance, both of which made it look like a weapon system ready to do battle on the streets of New York City.

  Jazz climbed in, tossed her gymbag onto the passenger seat, and took her Blackberry out of her coat but left it in her lap. She started the engine. The low growl issuing from the tailpipes added to the car’s allure. She couldn’t help but smile. Getting into the car gave her a thrill like a line of coke, only better. It also reminded her how rewarding the day had been when Mr. Bob had approached her. She still didn’t know his full name, which was stupid. He’d told her it was a matter of security, which she questioned at the time, but now she felt it didn’t matter. At that first meeting, she’d seen him come at her out of the corner of her eye and thought it was just going to be another typical male come-on, but it wasn’t. He got her attention immediately by calling her “Doc JR,” which was the nickname the jarheads in her first marine squadron had given her. She’d not heard the name for several years, so she was surprised and guessed that Mr. Bob had been a marine himself. He had been waiting for her to come out of the hospital in New Jersey, where she was working on the evening three-to-eleven shift. He said he had a business proposition for her and asked if she was interested in earning extra money—a lot of extra money.

  Sensing that her ship had finally come in, Jazz accepted his invitation to join him in his H2 Hummer, which was a spitting image of her own. Before she got in the vehicle, she made sure that there wasn’t anybody else inside. She also made sure that she had her hand around the Glock nestled in her pocket. Back then, the pistol didn’t have the silencer, so it was easy to draw. If Mr. Bob did anything untoward, she would have shot him where she’d meant to shoot the marine officer. She didn’t believe in threatening. If the gun came out, it would be used.

  But she hadn’t needed to be worried. Mr. Bob was all business. They ended up at a small, smoky bar in downtown Newark, where Mr. Bob commiserated with her about her experience in the military and even apologized about her treatment and unwarranted discharge. He said that it was precisely because of her exemplary service that she was being recruited for an important mission, for which she would be compensated accordingly. Mr. Bob went on to say that they—Jazz had yet to know who “they” were—recognized her unique qualifications to provide the service they required. He then had asked if she was interested.

  Jazz laughed as she put her Hummer in reverse and backed out of the parking slot. When she thought back, it was crazy for him to be asking if she was interested before she knew exactly what she would be doing, and she told him so at the time. From then on, he stopped beating around the bush. He told her they needed people like Jazz to help eliminate doctor incompetence, which he said was rampant although hard to ferret out because of a conspiracy of silence on the part of the medical profession. That was when Jazz was convinced that she was well suited to help. She was an expert on recognizing incompetence, since there had been a wellspring of it in every institution she’d been associated with. Mr. Bob said that her job would be to communicate to him by e-mail all episodes of adverse outcomes, particularly related to anesthesia, obstetrics, and neurosurgery, but he emphasized that they weren’t choosy. They wanted everything she found. For her efforts, she would be paid two hundred dollars per case, with an added bonus of a thousand dollars for each that resulted in a malpractice suit and an extra five hundred if the judgment was for the plaintiff.

  So that had been the beginning. Following Mr. Bob’s recommendation, she switched from evenings to nights, which was easy, because the graveyard shift was the least popular. The benefit was that during the wee hours of the morning, there was less oversight, which made roaming the floors, checking the charts, and generally catching the gossip much easier than during the day or even during the evening. Mr. Bob had had other helpful recommendations as well, which he explained came from the fund of experience they’d had over several decades. He said that Jazz was joining an extensive, elite underground.

  Jazz had flourished from the start. The clandestine nature of the operation was an added benefit; it even made going to work fun. The money was wired into an offshore account that had been set up for her by whoever “they” were. It grew rapidly, and it grew tax-free. The only problem was that in order to use the money, she had to go down to the Caribbean, a necessity that she found was hardly an imposition.

  But then, after four years and several moves to different hospitals, the last being to St. Francis in Queens, things got even better. Mr. Bob reappeared to say that as a consequence of her outstanding work, she’d been commissioned along with a very select group to be raised in rank within the underground task force. She was now going to participate in an even more important mission, for which her compensation would be greatly increased. At the same time, so would the level of secrecy. It was a highly classified operation code-named “Operation Winnow.”

  Jazz remembered that he laughed after telling her the name. He said he had nothing to do with its selection, since it reminded him of “minnow.” But his laughter quickly died off, and he again emphasized the secrecy. He said, “There are to be no ripples on the surface.” He had asked if Jazz understood. Of course she understood.

  Mr. Bob had gone on to explain that the circumstance would be the opposite of the setup with the “adverse outcomes,” which she was to continue as well. With Operation Winnow, she would receive a patient’s name by e-mail. Then, following a carefully devised protocol, which she had to follow to the letter, she would sanction the patient.

  There had been a pause at that point. At first, Jazz didn’t get his drift. She was confused by the word “sanction” until it finally dawned on her. When it did, it gave her a shiver of anticipation.

  “This protocol has been masterminded by professionals, and it is completely foolproof,” Mr. Bob had said. “There is no way it can be discovered, but you must follow it exactly as specified. Do you read me?”

  “Of course I read you,” Jazz had replied. What did he think she was, stupid?

  “Are you interested in becoming part of the team?”

  “That’s affirmative,” Jazz had said. “But you haven’t told me the compensation.”

  “Five thousa
nd a case.”

  Jazz could remember the smile that had appeared on her face. To think she would be paid five thousand dollars to do something challenging and fun was almost too good to be true. And it turned out to be better than she imagined. After the first five missions, which went off without a hitch, thanks to the protocol provided, Mr. Bob had appeared along with the Hummer.

  “It’s a token of our appreciation,” he had explained while handing Jazz the keys and the papers. “Think of it as the antithesis of the pink Cadillac given out by that cosmetic company. Enjoy it in good health!”

  Jazz exited the health club’s parking garage onto Columbus Avenue. Stopping at the first red light, she activated her Blackberry. From experience, she knew that reception was marginal inside the garage. She was rewarded with a message from Mr. Bob. With mounting excitement, she opened it. It was another name!

  “Yes!” Jazz shouted with a grimace of determination like an athlete who had just executed a perfect move. Simultaneously, she punched the air with a fist. But then she quickly reigned in her response. Her military training immediately kicked in to bring her back to a proactive calmness. Getting another name after having gotten one the evening before suggested that she was about to begin another series. Although the names came in random intervals, they tended to be grouped together. She had no idea why.

  Reaching over, Jazz put the Blackberry in the traylike indentation on the dash over the glove compartment. The motion caused her to hesitate when the light turned green. The taxicab to Jazz’s right lurched forward with the intention of cutting into Jazz’s lane to avoid a stopped taxi in his own lane. Jazz stomped on her accelerator to unleash the full power of the Hummer’s V-8. The SUV shot forward and gobbled up the lead of the taxi in short order, forcing the driver to slam on his brakes. Jazz flipped him the finger as she shot by.