and indecision she had experienced rapidly faded into the background. As the auto rickshaw reached the bungalow’s driveway, it seemed to her that such problems were mere blips on the radar screen.
“I have to leave you here,” the driver said in Hindi, as he pulled to a halt.
“I don’t want to get out here. Take me up to the door!”
The driver’s eyes nervously flashed in the darkness as he looked back at Samira. He was clearly afraid. “But the owner of such a house will be angry, and he might call the police and the police will demand money.”
“I live here,” Samira snapped, followed by choice Internet-learned expletives. “If you don’t take me, you won’t be paid.”
“I chose not to be paid. The police will demand ten times as much.”
With a few more appropriate words, Samira climbed from the three-wheeled scooter, and without looking back started hiking down the drive. In the background she heard a burst of equivalent profanity before the auto rickshaw noisily powered off into the night. As she walked, Samira mulled over how she was going to describe her experience taking care of the American. It didn’t take her but a moment to decide to leave out the minor concerns and concentrate on the success: Mr. Benfatti had been taken care of. That was the important thing. She surely wasn’t going to complain like Veena had.
Entering the house, she found everyone, all four officers and all eleven other nurses, in the formal living room watching an old DVD called
“Well?” Cal questioned. Samira was enjoying teasing the group. She’d taken an apple and sat down as if to watch the movie without providing a report.
“Well what?” Samira questioned, extending the ploy.
“Don’t make us beg!” Durell threatened.
“Oh, you must mean what happened to Mr. Benfatti.”
“Samira,” Durell playfully warned.
“Everything went fine, exactly as you all suggested it would, but then again, I didn’t expect anything different.”
“You weren’t scared?” Raj asked. “Veena said she was scared.” Raj was the only male nurse. Despite his bodybuilder appearance, his voice was soft, almost feminine.
“Not in the slightest,” Samira said, although while she spoke she remembered how she’d felt when Benfatti was gripping her arm hard enough to hinder the blood flow.
“Raj has volunteered for tomorrow night,” Cal explained. “He’s got a perfect patient scheduled for surgery in the morning.”
Samira turned to him. He was a handsome man. In the evenings he wore his tie shirts a size too small to emphasize his impressive physique. “Don’t worry. You’ll do fine,” Samira assured him. “The succinylcholine works literally in seconds.”
“Veena said her patient’s face twitched all over the place,” Raj commented with a concerned expression. “She said it was horrid.”
“There were some fasciculations, but they were over practically before they began.”
“Veena said her patient turned purple.”
“That did happen, but you shouldn’t be standing around admiring your handiwork.”
Some of the nurses laughed. Cal, Petra, and Santana stayed serious.
“What about Benfatti’s computerized medical record?” Santana asked. Since Samira hadn’t yet mentioned it, Santana was afraid she’d forgotten. She needed the history to make the story more personal for TV.
By leaning back against the couch and straightening her body out, Samira was able to reach into her pocket and pull out the USB storage device, similar to the one Veena had provided Cal with the evening before. She then flipped it in Santana’s direction.
Santana snatched the storage device out of the air like a hockey goalie, hefted it as if she could tell whether or not it contained the data, then stood up. “I want to get this story filed with CNN. I’ve already given them a teaser about it, and they are waiting anxiously. My contact assures me it’s going right out on the air.” While the people who had been sitting next to her on the couch raised their legs, Santana worked her way from behind the coffee table and started for her office.
“I do have one suggestion,” Samira offered after Santana had departed. “I think we should get our own succinylcholine. Sneaking into the OR is the weakest link in the plan. It’s the only place in the hospital where we don’t belong, and if any of us were to be discovered, there would be no way for us to explain.”
“How easy would it be for us to get the drug?” Durell asked.
“With money, it’s easy to get any drug in India,” Samira said.
“It sounds like a no-brainer to me,” Petra said to Cal.
Cal nodded in agreement and looked over at Durell. “See what you can do!”
“No problem,” Durell said.
Cal couldn’t have been more pleased. The new strategy was working, and everyone was on board, even offering suggestions. He couldn’t help thinking that starting the scheme with Veena had been brilliant, despite the suicide scare. Just a few days before, he’d been afraid to talk with Raymond Housman, but now Cal couldn’t wait. Nurses International was beginning to pay off, which he couldn’t have been more pleased about, even if it wasn’t in the way he’d expected. But who cared, Cal thought. It was the results that counted, not the method.
“Hey, who wants to see more of the movie?” Cal called out, waving the remote above his head.
Chapter 9
OCTOBER 16, 2007
TUESDAY, 11:02 P.M.
NEW DELHI, INDIA
The wheels of the wide-body jet hit hard as they touched down on the tarmac of the Indira Gandhi International Airport and jolted Jennifer awake. She’d been awakened twenty minutes earlier by one of the cabin attendants to raise the back of her seat as the plane had started its initial descent, but she’d fallen back asleep. The cruel irony was that during most of the final leg, she’d not been able to sleep until the last hour.
Pressing her nose against the window, Jennifer tried to appreciate her first images of India. She could see little more than the runway lights streaking by as the powerful engines reversed. What surprised her was what looked like fog obscuring the view toward the terminal. All she could see were hazy, individually illuminated airplane tails rising up out of a general gloom. The terminal itself was a mere smudge of light. Raising her eyes, she saw a nearly full moon in the apex of a dark gray sky with no stars.
Jennifer started arranging her things. Lucky for her, the neighboring seat had been vacant, and she’d taken full advantage with the surgery book, the India guidebook, and the novel she’d brought for the flight—or, more accurately, the three flights. Her itinerary required two stops, which she’d actually appreciated as an opportunity to stretch her legs and walk, but only one change of aircraft.
By the time the big plane had nosed into the gate, and the seat-belt sign had gone off, Jennifer had her carry-on items packed away in her roll-on but then had to wait while others closer to the exit slowly filed out. Everyone looked as she felt: exhausted, yet having landed in a strange and exotic country, she could feel herself enjoying a second, or maybe a third or fourth, wind. Despite the fact that she was coming to deal with her beloved grandmother’s death, she couldn’t help but feel a certain excitement as well as nervousness.
The flights themselves, although remarkably long, had been endurable. And contrary to her initial worry that their duration might give her too much free time to obsess about the loss of her closest friend, it seemed to have been the opposite. To some degree, the forced solitary time had allowed her to come to terms with the loss by tapping into one of the lessons she’d learned from studying medicine: that death was very much a part of life, and
