serious.”
“Still, I think it’s high time we all went our separate ways,” Fiona said worriedly, following the apparent drunk with her own narrowed eyes. “We have what we need. There’s not much point in standing around out here in the open, risking more unwanted attention.”
Smith nodded. “Makes sense.” He turned back to Vedenskaya, patting the binder she had given him. “Look, I’ll keep you posted by private e-mail on what we learn ? “
Smith stopped in midsentence. The Russian woman was staring at him with an expression full of horror. “Elena? What is it?” he asked quickly.
“What’s wrong?”
She drew in a single deep, shuddering breath and then choked, gasping for air. Jon could see the muscles in her neck straining as she struggled to speak.
Her eyes were wide open, grotesquely bulging almost out of their sockets, but her pupils were constricted, reduced to tiny black pinpoints. Her knees sagged.
Shocked, Smith reached out.
But before he could catch her, Elena Vedenskaya collapsed, crumpling to the snow-covered pavement like a rag doll. Her arms and legs jerked wildly, flailing and twitching as she writhed, apparently gripped by a series of eerily silent convulsions.
“Call an ambulance! Now!” Smith snapped to Fiona.
“I’m on it.” She nodded crisply, pulled out her phone, and punched in 03, Moscow’s medical emergency number.
Jon dropped to his knees beside the stricken woman. The wild, frenetic spasms were fading, leaving her lying contorted on her back. He set aside the plastic binder, yanked off one of his gloves, and then laid two fingers against her neck, feeling for her pulse. It was very fast and very weak, fluttering like a broken-winged bird. Not good. He leaned forward, putting his ear to her nose and mouth. She was not breathing.
Christ, he thought bleakly. What the hell had just happened to her? A heart attack? Not likely, given what he was seeing. A stroke or seizure? Maybe.
Another, infinitely more frightening possibility flickered vaguely at the back of his mind, but he shook his head, knowing he did not have the time or the information he needed to chase down that fugitive thought. A firm diagnosis would have to wait until later. In the meantime, he had to do his best to keep her alive until the Russian paramedics could arrive.
“One of the hospitals is dispatching an emergency medical team, Colonel,” he heard Fiona Devin report over the babble of shocked voices from a rapidly gathering circle of onlookers. “But it might take five minutes or more to reach us.”
Smith nodded, frowning. Five minutes. For most medical situations, that was a good response time?very good, in fact. But under these circumstances, it might as well be an eternity.
Working fast, he stripped off his coat, bundled it up, and shoved it under the older, gray-haired woman’s shoulders, tilting her head back to help open her airway. Then he pulled her jaw forward with one thumb, shifting her tongue out of the way. He listened again. She was still not breathing. Gently, he turned her head to the side and probed the back of her throat with his fingers, searching for any obstruction, any lump of mucus or bit of food, that could be choking her. There was nothing.
Grim-faced, Smith cradled Elena Vedenskaya’s head in his arms, pinched her nose shut with his fingers, and began rapid mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, blowing hard enough to see her chest rise. Every so often, he paused and put his ear to her mouth and nose again, checking to see if the Russian woman was breathing on her own yet. But she still lay paralyzed, staring up at the sky with eyes that never blinked.
He kept working, forcing air into her lungs. Breathe, Jon willed silently.
Come on, Elena, breathe. Two or three minutes went by in a blur of frantic activity. A siren keened in the distance, drawing closer.
Under his fingertips, Vedenskaya’s pulse faded, staggered on for a few more irregular beats, and then stopped. Hell. He switched to CPR, cardiopul-monary resuscitation, alternating mouth-to-mouth breathing with short, powerful compressions on her sternum in an increasingly frantic effort to restore her breathing and restart her heart. Nothing worked.
Fiona knelt beside him. “Any good?” she asked somberly, carefully speaking in Russian.
Smith shook his head in frustration. “I think she’s gone.”
Several of the bystanders staring down at Vedenskaya overheard them and crossed themselves rapidly, from right to left in the Russian Orthodox manner.
One or two took off their hats in a show of respect for the dead woman. Others began edging away. The drama was over.
“If so, we should leave, Colonel,” Fiona suggested softly. “We really can’t afford any official complications.” She picked up the binder containing Vedenskaya’s case notes from the pavement. “Not now.”
Smith shook his head again, still continuing his CPR. Rationally, he knew that Devin was right. By now, Elena was almost certainly beyond anyone’s help. And getting embroiled in a militia investigation of her death would put them both at risk. For one thing, his John Martin cover was not designed to stand up to intense scrutiny. But he was a doctor first, before he was an intelligence agent. He had an ethical duty to aid this stricken woman. So long as he kept pushing oxygen into her lungs and doing his best to restart her stopped heart, she still had a chance, however slim.
And then, suddenly, it was too late to duck out anyway.
With its siren still wailing, a red-and-white ambulance braked to a stop along the curb. As the siren died away, the rear doors of the vehicle popped open and a slim, sallow-faced man in a rumpled white doctor’s coat jumped out with a black medical bag clutched under one arm. Two burly paramedics scrambled out in his wake.
The doctor waved Smith aside with one dismissive hand and bent down beside the body to conduct his own quick, almost cursory, examination.
Wearily, Jon stood up, brushing the snow off his knees. He looked away from Vedenskaya’s contorted corpse, fighting down a sense of failure and abiding sorrow. Patients died. It happened. But it never got any easier. It always felt like a defeat.
The sallow-faced Russian doctor felt for a pulse. Then he sat back on his heels and shrugged. “Poor woman. It’s much too late. There’s nothing I can do for her.” He nodded to the paramedics standing nearby with a portable stretcher they had pulled out of the ambulance. “Well, go ahead, boys. Get her into the ambulance. Let’s at least get her away from the prying eyes of the morbidly curious.”
The two big men nodded silently and clumsily bent down to begin preparing the body for transport.
Still shaking his head, the white-coated doctor climbed back to his feet.
He turned slowly, contemptuously surveying the small and rapidly shrinking crowd of onlookers. His gaze swung toward the two Americans. “Which of you can tell me what happened to her? A heart attack, I suppose?”
“I don’t think so,” Smith said flatly.
“Why not?”
“She collapsed quite suddenly, suffering convulsions and muscle spasms?within a second or so after experiencing what appeared to be complete respiratory failure,” Smith answered rapidly, running through the symptoms he had noted. “Her pupillary muscles also showed signs of extreme contraction. I tried mouth-to-mouth first, and then CPR when her heart stopped, but unfortunately neither technique produced any beneficial result.”
The doctor raised an eyebrow. “Cogently summarized. I gather you have medical training, Mr. ??”
“Martin. John Martin,” Smith replied stiffly, mentally kicking himself for slipping so naturally and unconsciously into medical jargon that did not fit his cover identity. Clearly, Elena Vedenskaya’s horrifying death had rattled him more than he realized. He shrugged. “No, no medical training. But I have taken a couple of first-aid courses.”
“Only first-aid courses? Really? You show remarkable aptitude.” The doctor smiled in polite disbelief. “Still, it is fortunate that you are here.”
“Oh? In what way?” Smith asked carefully.
