office door, returning from his three-hour lunch. Ramesh dashed into his inner office and snatched the receiver off the hook. “Have you found the leak?” he demanded straight off.
“Just a moment,” Rajish’s secretary said. “I’ll put Mr. Bhurgava on.”
Ramesh silently cursed as he flopped down in his desk chair. He was a large balding man with watery eyes and deep scars on his cheekbones from adolescent acne. He tapped his fat, impatient fingers on his desk. As soon as Rajish Bhurgava came on the line, Ramesh blurted out the question again and with equal emotion.
“We haven’t,” Rajish admitted. “I’ve spoken yet again at length with the chief of the medical staff. We still believe the most likely culprit is one of the academic doctors who also have admitting privileges here for their relatively few private patients. We know some of them are rabidly against the government’s granting us the incentives and tax breaks it has at the expense of adequately funding the control of communicable diseases in rural areas. What he’s doing now is trying to see if any of the most outspoken ones were here in the hospital both Monday night and last night.”
“What does he say about the deaths themselves?” Ramesh grumbled. “Two in two nights is intolerable. What are you people doing wrong? With CNN beaconing these fatalities around the world seven or eight times a day, you have essentially negated six months of our ad campaign, especially in America, our biggest target.”
“I asked him the same question. He’s entirely baffled. Neither patient had warning symptoms or signs, either from their home doctors or during our admitting tests.”
“Did they have cardiograms here preoperatively?”
“Yes, of course they had cardiograms, and both arrived with clean reports from American cardiologists. Our chief of the medical staff said that even in retrospect there would have been no way to predict what happened. Both surgeries and postoperative courses were without incident.”
“What about the problem with the Hernandez girl? Has that at least been taken care of?”
“I’m afraid not,” Rajish admitted. “She’s not decided on the disposition of the body, and she now has begun talking about possibly wanting an autopsy done.”
“Why?”
“We’re not entirely certain other than her belief that her grandmother’s heart was in fine shape.”
“I don’t want an autopsy,” Ramesh stated categorically. “There’s no way it could help us. If the autopsy were to be clean, they wouldn’t use it to exonerate us because there’s no story, and if the autopsy shows pathology we should have known about, they would crucify us. No, there is to be no autopsy.”
“To complicate things, Ms. Hernandez has apparently contacted a former client of the deceased, and she and her husband, both of whom are forensic pathologists, are on their way and will be in Delhi on Friday.”
“Good grief,” Ramesh said. “Well, if they make formal application for an autopsy, make sure it is taken by one of the magistrates we are accustomed to dealing with.”
“I’ll do my best,” Rajish said. “But perhaps with your connections you might question whether we want them here at all.”
“I would need more warning. Otherwise, they get stopped only at the airport, and that, in and of itself, could cause a media problem if it gets associated with the already notorious private hospital deaths reported by CNN. A free media is such a bore, and they love these gossipy-type stories.”
“There’s one other way that the Hernandez girl is causing mischief. She had seemingly sought out the Benfatti woman this morning and convinced her to delay giving us permission to dispose properly of her husband’s body in the same way she is denying us access to her grandmother’s.”
“No!” Ramesh exclaimed with disbelief.
“I’m afraid so. I’m beginning to think as I hear from my case manager that she is deliberately trying to cause trouble. I’m even beginning to believe she’s starting to become paranoid and hold us accountable, as if we have caused this tragedy deliberately.”
“That’s it, then,” Ramesh said. “We cannot let this go on.”
“Is there something you can do, sir?” Rajish asked hopefully.
“Perhaps,” Ramesh said. “We cannot sit passively and let this woman have free rein until her paranoia is somehow satisfied.”
“I couldn’t agree more.”
“Keep me informed of any and all developments,” Ramesh said.
“Absolutely,” Rajish answered.
Ramesh hung up the receiver and turned to the keyboard at his workstation. Going into his address book, he found the mobile number of Inspector Naresh Prasad of the New Delhi police, who headed up the small, clandestine Industrial Security Unit. Picking the phone receiver back up, he placed the call. Since the men hadn’t spoken in almost six months, they traded some personal information before Ramesh got around to the reason for the call. “We here at the department of medical tourism have a problem that needs your expertise.”
“I’m listening,” Naresh said.
“Is this a good time to talk?”
“It doesn’t get much better.”
“There is a young woman named Jennifer Hernandez, whose grandmother passed away Monday night at the Queen Victoria Hospital of an unfortunate heart attack. Somehow CNN got ahold of the story and put it on the air as a way of questioning our record of safety.”
“That’s not good.”
“That is an understatement,” Ramesh said. He then went on to tell Naresh the entire problem, including the details of the second death. He then enumerated all the things that Jennifer had done and was doing to make herself persona non grata. “This affair is beginning to have a serious deleterious effect on our medical tourism ad campaign, which could then impact our ability to meet our goals. I don’t know if you have been kept completely up to date, but we have upped our estimates such that Indian medical tourism is to be a two-point-two-billion-dollar- a-year industry by 2010.”
Naresh whistled into his phone. He was duly impressed. “I hadn’t heard those figures. Are you people aiming to catch IT? The information technology people are going to be envious, as they believe they have become the hereditary kings of foreign exchange.”
“Unfortunately, this current problem could seriously impact our goal,” Ramesh said, ignoring Naresh’s question. “We need help.”
“That’s what we’re here for. What can we do?”
“There’s two parts. One part for your unit in general and one part for you in particular. Concerning your unit, we need an investigation to uncover who is supplying CNN International with confidential information. The CEO of Queen Victoria and his chief of the medical staff believe it to be a radical academic M.D. who also has admitting privileges. How many there are at the Victoria I don’t know, but I want them investigated now. I want to know who this person is.”
“That can easily be arranged. I will put my best men on it. What is my part?”
“The girl, Jennifer Hernandez. I want her taken care of. It shouldn’t be difficult. She’s staying at the Amal.”
“Why not call up one of your equals in immigration. Have her picked up and deported. Problem over!”
“My sense is that she is feisty, stubborn, and resourceful. If immigration picks her up, I’d worry that she’d make a fuss, and if the media associates her case with the death reported by CNN, there could be an even bigger story about a governmental cover-up. That could make everything decidedly worse.”
“Good point. What exactly do you mean ‘taken care of’? Let’s be specific.”
“I leave that to your well-earned reputation for creativity. I want her to stop being a potential thorn in our side. However you can accomplish that, I’m content. Actually, it’s better if I don’t know. Then if I’m asked at a later date, as one who was interested in her behavior, I don’t have to lie.”
“What if I can assure you she means no harm and her current apparent threat is bogus?”
“That would be satisfactory, of course. Particularly if your team can provide us with the physician mole. I need to attack this problem from both ends.”
“Can I assume my compensation will be the usual?”
“Let’s say comparable. Check things out. Follow her. Remember, we don’t want her to become the news, and we surely don’t want her to be any kind of martyr. As for the compensation, it should depend on degree of difficulty. You and I go back a ways. We can trust each other.”
