With all the force she could manage, Natalie swung the blade up from her hip and swiped it viciously across Berenger's throat. Instantly, the opening of his severed trachea appeared where his larynx had been. A moment later, bright crimson arterial blood began spewing from a laceration through his carotid artery, splattering Natalie, and coating the floor.
Unable to speak, pawing futilely at his neck, the man called Socrates, one of the founders of the Guardians of the Republic, lurched backward and fell heavily, awash in the rapidly ebbing essence of his being. His last moments were spent staring up at Natalie in silent, absolute, wide-eyed disbelief.
'Come, Dr. Berenger!' al-Rabia cried from the OR next door. 'The prince's heart has stopped! Come quickly!'
Natalie stripped off her gown and raced in to help, but she knew that unless the dysfunctional muscle that had caused the prince's heart failure could be replaced, there was nothing that drugs or cardiac compressions could do.
'Oh, dear Allah!' al-Rabia kept muttering. 'Dear Allah, help us!'
Natalie continued performing CPR, but the cardiac monitor remained absolutely discouraging. She considered trying, with the help of the pump technician, to hook him up to the bypass machine, but her knowledge and surgical skill stopped well short of that. Al-Rabia, clearly a gifted physician, tried several shocks from the defibrillator, even though he knew that his master's problem was not fibrillation — a potentially reversible lethal rhythm — but rather, complete cardiac standstill — a virtually untreatable flat line. There really was no hope.
The minister, al-Thani, was standing just outside the doorway, only a few feet from Berenger's blood-soaked body. His eyes were narrowed and grim, his arms folded tightly across his chest. Clearly, he knew that the fate of his prince had been sealed.
Natalie, following al-Rabia's orders to the best of her ability, was waiting for him to stop the resuscitation, but the man desperately kept at it. Suddenly, one of the helicopter pilots appeared by al-Thani, trying at first to speak in Portuguese, than resorting to badly broken English.
'Lord. Two cars on road. Stopped. People on face on ground. Men, women with guns around them.'
Ben!
The impassive minister actually sighed. Then he rattled off an order in Arabic to the physician, turned, and left.
Moments later the resuscitation on the prince was over.
Al-Rabia, his eyes glistening, looked dismally over at Natalie and shook his head.
'Allah will care for him,' he said, 'but he was such a good man, and would have made a wonderful ruler for our people.'
'I'm very sorry,' she replied. 'For what it's worth, I think you did an excellent job. He had a heart infection that could not be treated.'
'Maybe someday there will be such a treatment.'
'Maybe someday,' she echoed.
'Natalie, that is your name?'
'Natalie Reyes, yes.'
'Well, Natalie Reyes, it means nothing now, but I want you to know that we were told the donor of the heart to our prince was brain-dead. Until we arrived here, that is what we believed. With Dr. Berenger in charge, matters simply got out of hand.'
'I appreciate your telling me. Dr. Berenger and his organization were corrupted by their own egos and greed. They could not stand to be told by people they considered beneath them how to use their incredible skills.'
'I understand. If the minister will allow me to leave the prince like this, perhaps with the anesthesiologist watching over him, I wish to come in and help you suture that poor woman's chest.'
'I would like that, Dr. al-Rabia,' Natalie said. 'I would like that very much.'
The two, Arab physician and American medical student, returned to the OR, where Sandy Macfarlane lay peacefully beneath the surgical drapes, being breathed for by a ventilator, and kept asleep by carefully metered anesthetic gas. The incision down her chest to the surface of her sternum was oozing blood, but certainly not enough to be a threat. Natalie electrically cauterized the largest of the bleeding vessels, then, with al-Rabia holding the skin edges together, she settled in and meticulously sewed the incision back together.
As she worked, Natalie flashed back to the Metropolitan Hospital emergency room just hours before Berenger would arbitrarily remove her as a Guardian for being suspended from medical school. Standing nearby was the nurse, Beverly Richardson, and on the table before her was the boy, Darren Jones, the last person she had sutured…until now.
Beneath her mask, Natalie smiled.
CHAPTER 41
You are lazy and mean to cheat us out of a whole chapter, which is a very important part of the story.
With the anesthesiologist left behind to bring Sandy Macfarlane V w back to consciousness, Natalie headed excitedly to the dining room. The minister, al-Thani, was there, but all of the soldiers, save one, were gone.
'May I go out?' she anxiously asked al-Rabia. 'There is someone out there — a friend. I need to make sure he doesn't get hurt.'
'Is he the one who held up the arrival of the surgeon and all the others'
'I believe so.'
Al-Rabia shook his head in utter frustration and wordlessly checked with the minister, who clearly understood Natalie's request.
'Yes, yes, go ahead,' he said. 'They will not be hurt.'
Before Natalie could leave, Ben and Father Francisco, hands in the air, entered the dining room, followed by three Arab soldiers and the man Natalie felt certain was Berenger's second surgeon.
Al-Thani barked out a brief order, and the soldiers lowered their weapons, then backed away.
'Where's Berenger?' the surgeon asked.
Al-Rabia pointed with his thumb.
'In the hallway,' he said, not bothering to explain any further.
Natalie raced across and threw her arms around Ben, knocking him backward a step.
'Nice place you run here,' he said, gesturing about the room. His gaze stopped at Luis's bullet-riddled corpse. 'Oh, no.'
'He was a warrior right to the end,' Natalie said. 'He always seemed ready to die. Before he was killed he did what was needed to bring this place down.'
'Maybe his sister will be able to rest in peace.'
'I couldn't believe it when the helicopter pilot said that someone had stopped the nurses and surgeon and had them lying on the ground. I just knew it was you. After Berenger told me that Father Francisco was on their payroll, I felt sick at having sent you to him for help. What happened?'
'Believe it or not,' Francisco answered, 'until Mr. Callahan, here, convinced me otherwise, I had no idea the donors who had come through the hospital had all been kidnapped. He told me the story of this professor from Chicago, and a farm boy from Idaho. He made the analogy between forcing the poor and downtrodden into prostitution and slavery, and forcing them to sell their body parts or, in this case, to give them away.'
'Nat, Father Francisco, here, really came through when it counted. It took him just a few minutes to round up ten of the toughest men — and women — I have ever seen. We were fortunate to arrive at the hospital road just as the cars did. That man over there is a surgeon. He started bossing us around and telling us how important it was for them to get to the hospital. Next thing they knew, they were on the ground. Then, these soldiers came out of the trees, and all of a sudden we were on the ground, too.'
