Fifth Vial by Michael Palmer

Author:Michael Palmer [Palmer, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, General, Suspense, Mystery & Detective, C429, Extratorrents, Kat
ISBN: 9780312343514
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2006-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Twenty-One

Would not he who is fitted to be a guardian, besides the spirited nature, need to have the qualities of a philosopher?

—PLATO, The Republic, Book II

“Natalie, you’re supposed to be starting back on your surgical rotation next week.”

Dean Goldenberg held up the stack of paperwork that had been generated in order to get her back on track at school.

“I know.”

“And you say that physically you think you can handle such a trip?”

“From the moment I finished making all those calls to Brazil, I’ve been spending three hours a day or more in rehab. My pulmonary function studies have improved nearly twenty-five percent since the first time they were measured after the fire. I’m even able to jog.”

“But now you want to take more time off.”

“I feel that I have to.”

Goldenberg’s office looked the same as when Natalie had been suspended from school, except that everything had changed. The people there this time, in addition to Natalie and the dean, were Doug Berenger and Terry Millwood. Veronica had offered to come along for moral support, but Natalie saw no reason for her to take time from her obstetrics rotation.

After her initial flurry of calls to various departments at Santa Teresa Hospital, Natalie had spoken to several police stations around the city of Rio. To the best that she could tell, there was a law requiring hospitals to report all gunshot wounds, and no such report had been filed on her, nor did the police themselves have a record of responding to her being shot.

First thing the next morning, she had brought her mother over for another try. The results were all the same, with one additional failure—the inability to find any Dr. Xavier Santoro on the staff of Santa Teresa’s or, in fact, in the entire city. Within an hour of her mother’s last call—this one to the Rio de Janeiro State Medical Board, where there was no record of him, either—Natalie was at the gym, dragging herself through a series of aerobic and anaerobic exercises. The next morning she called her pulmonary therapist with an apology and a request for more time—much more time.

“Terry, you have a note from Natalie’s pulmonologist?” Goldenberg asked.

“I do. Rachel French dropped it off with me because she couldn’t make it this morning.”

Millwood passed the sheet over, and the dean scanned it, nodding that the conclusions were clear.

“Natalie, you are behind on your schedule if you wish to graduate with your class,” he said. “And you, yourself, said that this whole business in Brazil is probably a misunderstanding due to language barriers and the difficulty in negotiating through a hospital system that is half a world away.”

“If I get there and discover that the hospital and the police do have records of me, I’ll be home on the next available flight. I won’t even try and find out who and where Dr. Santoro is.”

“Doug, you spoke with this Dr. Santoro?”

“Once,” Berenger replied. “According to Nat, the man said he knew who I was, although I had never heard of him.

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