Trinity

Another deputy came for him a few hours later and walked him down a marble hallway to the courtroom, and then he was pushed through heavy oak doors into the courtroom.

And there he was. His nemesis.

J. Alan Wentworth III, the federal prosecutor ramrodding his case through the system. Wentworth was short, fat, baldheaded and bespectacled -- a paragon of every modern virtue imaginable. He was playing the game, alright. Throwing aces every time, and always with an extra up his sleeve. He was asking the court to consider the death penalty, or at the very least life without parole, because if they didn't come down hard on physicians like him then law enforcement would never get a handle on the problem...

The problem with your thesis, Mr. J. Alan Wentworth III, is that law enforcement is in on the scam at every fucking level, from cops on the beat to the guards in the jails; all of them feeding at the cartel's trough -- but there was no way Harwell would be allowed to say this in open court. This simple truth was so readily apparent even a dime-bag dealer could figure it out: pay anyone enough and they'll look the other way, and every fucking time, too...but Wentworth had a quota to meet, a conviction rate to maintain, and that more than anything else was dictating the outcome this afternoon. Harwell was just a mid-level executive in a thriving international manufacturing and distribution operation, but instead of working for one of the big pharmaceutical outfits he'd chosen to work for the cartels. Too bad anti-trust laws didn't apply, because the irony on display in the courtroom was a little too rich.

Harwell wasn't exactly surprised when, a half hour later and due to the aggravating circumstances of his crimes, he was sentenced to life in prison at ADMAX Florence, the notorious and justifiably dreaded super-max facility in central Colorado. When asked by the court if he had anything to say prior to final sentencing he declined to speak, and so was simply escorted from the courtroom straight to the elevator -- this time by a nattily dressed US Marshall -- and then out to a shiny new Ford Explorer waiting just for him.

Harwell was driven to the basement parking garage at a nearby office building and led inside a basement level office, and then right into a restroom -- where the handcuffs and shackles were removed. Not at all sure what was happening now, the marshal handed Harwell a gym bag and the keys to the Ford, then the cop turned around and walked out of the restroom, and he left Harwell standing there -- almost in a state of shock. Not knowing what else to do, he opened the gym bag and found an envelope, two changes of clothes and some toiletries, as well as a new pair of Adidas running shoes. He opened the envelope and found an airline ticket, cash, credit cards and a French passport.

"Quintana," he muttered to himself with a smile, then he changed into the street clothes and dumped the orange jumpsuit in a dumpster on his way back to the Explorer. The NAV system was already programed for the airport and he put on a ball cap and sunglasses the cop had left on the driver's seat and he drove straight to the airport. Once there he parked the car in the long term lot and went into the terminal. He checked the envelope and found a boarding pass so went right up to the TSA security checkpoint and then out to his gate, where he waited for an AeroMexico flight to Mexico City. His assigned seat, he realized, was in the business class section, and he suddenly felt as if he was inside a particularly warm and fuzzy dream.

When his flight was called he halfway expected a dozen DEA agents to come crawling out of the woodwork...but no, nothing happened, and by that point Harwell thought his life was getting positively surreal. He walked out the Jetway and boarded the 737Max and a flight attendant brought him an ice cold Bohemia and a slice of lime, and he did his best to ignore the people boarding the flight because he just knew that at any moment he was going to wake up and this was all going to turn out to be a really nasty trick of the mind.

But no, the main door was about to close -- when, apparently, one more person ran into the cabin, and Harwell watched as Quintana boarded and came to the seat next to his own.

"Mind if I sit here?" the number three man in the Sinaloa Cartel asked.

"No, please," Harwell said, then he watched as Quintana put two small carry-ons in the overhead bin.

Then Quintana sat and took the offered Bohemia from the flight attendant, and Harwell watched as the main door was pivoted into the closed and locked position, and he looked out the window as the Boeing was pushed back from the gate. When he could stand it no longer, he turned to Quintana and smiled.

"Did you have a nice visit?" he asked the capo.

"Yes. And you?"

"I'd have to say, all in all, that it was an interesting trip."

"Perhaps someday we'll have time to sit over dinner and talk about your experiences."

Which meant, Harwell understood, now was not that time. He nodded and smiled and looked out the window as the Boeing turned onto the active runway and dashed into the evening sky.

He ate his dinner in silence and watched intently as the jetliner lined up to land in Mexico City, and just before Quintana left him there he advised that Harwell not forget his two bags in the overhead bin, and Harwell thanked his friend then watched him leave. He pulled the bags down and walked out the jet and through immigration and then found a small lounge to sit for a while.

Then he opened Quintana's parting gift.

Another envelope on top...

A ticket to Paris on Air France, departing in an hour and a half. Enough cash to live comfortably for several months. Documents to provide a completely new identity along with the academic degrees and transcripts of post-grad work to back everything up. And a note that said all his savings accounts in Mexico City were still intact, and that the DEA hadn't uncovered them.

And then there was one last note from Quintana.

'Silentium ac fides super omnia.'

There wasn't a whole lot else to say, was there? He'd never talked, never sought a plea bargain right up until the moment of his sentencing, and maybe that had come as a surprise to Quintana. Maybe that was why he'd risked it all to come up the States, to see this through to the end. To see what kind of man this Gene Harwell really was.

Maybe. Maybe not. Harwell would probably never know the answer to that one, would he? Because the second part of Quintana's message was equally clear.

We own you. And now you owe us not just your life, but your freedom, too. And we can take both if we need to.

He walked over to the First Class lounge and went inside, checked-in for the flight and saw that he was indeed flying alone. Not knowing what else to do he sat and watched jets come and go until his flight was called, then he walked out and boarded the 777 and made his way up to seat 1A.

A simply gorgeous flight attendant came by and introduced herself, offered him a glass of Champagne and a warm towel for his face, then she smiled and sashayed up to the galley. After three months behind bars the sight of such a woman was enough to leave him in puddles of wilting despair. He shook his head and tried to remember he'd been married -- once upon a long time ago.

He looked up and saw the main doors close a few minutes later and then he looked down at his hands. How long had it been? How many months since he'd last operated on a patient? How long since he'd given up on ever doing anything like that again?

How many months since he'd seen McKinnon?

How would she feel now? Would she still care about him?

Dare he even try to get in touch with her? Wouldn't the DEA be monitoring her every move? Especially now that he'd managed to flee?

The jet pushed back and taxied out to the active, then it turned onto the runway and lumbered into the sky, turning to the northeast to fly up the east coast of North America on its way from the New World to the Old. He saw Washington DC down below just after his second dinner of the evening, then New York City and Boston before the long Atlantic crossing. His seat was turned into a cozy little bed and he slept the miles away, waking up in time for a little breakfast and a mid-morning arrival in Paris.

He waited until almost everyone else had deplaned before grabbing his bags and heading out the Jetway into the terminal. He made his way to immigration and as he was now a citizen of France he walked right through the 'Nothing To Declare' line and then out to the queue of people lining up to ride into the city.

And then he felt an arm slip into his.

"Well, hello there, stranger," Patty McKinnon said, a coy little smile crossing her face. "Fancy running into you here."

"Yes, small world," he said, smiling. She leaned into him and they kissed with a ferocity that might have annoyed most of the people standing in line, but hey...this was Paris.

"How are you doing?" she asked.

"Better now. You?"

"Not bad, considering," she said, rubbing her round tummy.

He took her hand in his and closed his eyes. Not a day had passed that he hadn't dreamed of feeling her skin on his one more time and now here she was.

"I have an apartment for us near the medical school," she sighed. "We start an MSF orientation in a couple of weeks, then we're headed to Ethiopia, to a new clinic south of Gondar."

"Did Quintana help you with this?"

"Yeah, of course."

Gene Harwell smiled, but in a snap he suddenly understood his future as everything popped into focus. Quintana would never let him go, not completely. He'd have to work off his debt -- one way or another -- and in the only way he could. He'd go to Africa but as always he'd help establish new markets and new distribution networks, just as he always had. Where would it be this time? London? Berlin? Or the explosive new markets in Stockholm and Moscow? It didn't matter now, did it? -- because there wasn't such a thing as a fresh start where the cartels were concerned. The life that had chosen him valued loyalty -- and silence. Nothing more, and no less.

He helped McKinnon into the back of a little beige Mercedes taxi and then slipped in right beside her, and for a moment he considered turning and seeing if he could spot the people tailing them, but—why? In the end nothing really mattered, and anyone could see that.

Part II: The Soul of Perception

Once upon a time in a city by the sea there worked a physician. A surgical resident doing his time at a big university hospital, he at first glance seemed to genuinely care about people; he always had a caring smile on his face ready for the next patient, and he could always be counted on to lend a hand to anyone who needed help. Yet some people thought of the man, this physician, as something of a doormat, thinking that he simply couldn't say no to people and that, as a result, everyone lined up to take advantage of his generosity. Such people no doubt called the doctor a 'patsy' — another word for an 'easy mark' — and, who knows? Perhaps such people laughed at him behind his back, from time to time, anyway — at least when they didn't need him. Perhaps such little voices of whispered derision are little more than a sign of the times we live in, yet in a world suffocating under the weight of so many little sidelong whispers you have to step back from all the noise for a moment and ask yourself just one little question all your own. Have we forgotten that, if only occasionally, true goodness walks among us from time to time. Or is there really such a thing? Perhaps, in our haste, we have confused goodness with expedience?

+++++

Doug Tanner rubbed the corner of his right eye, trying without much success to brush away the lack of sleep from his burning eyes. He looked at his watch and noted the time: 2220 hours. He'd had, by this reckoning, an hour of sleep — in the last two days — and his mouth tasted coppery, almost cruddy; he smelled like stale coffee, dry body odor and of an after shave lotion that had given up hours ago. He was hungry, yet he could hardly stomach the idea of food; even the very idea he needed food seemed vaguely off-putting. There were times he resented his own human frailty, and this was one of those moments.

The pager in his lab-coat buzzed and he picked it out of the rubbish of gum wrappers and throat lozenges that lived there; he looked at the code on the little green display and groaned.

"Shit, not again..."

Then, from a old speaker mounted in the ceiling: "Dr Tanner, Dr Tanner, stat to ER, Trauma Two. Dr Tanner stat to Trauma Two."

"Hey, Dougie, sounds like they're playing your song again," a third year neurology resident sitting in the room said. "Go get 'em, Tiger!" she snarled.

He didn't know her name, and for some reason he didn't care, though he smiled at her on the way out the door. Then he grumbled something nine-tenths obscene under his breath and rubbed at his eyes absent-mindedly again while he from the stumbled break room. He followed the red stripe on the floor to the ER and waded into the full-blown chaos that was Trauma Two, one of two rooms set up in the ER for emergency surgery and advanced life-support. A couple of other residents had already arrived before him and were sorting out the mess under the lights.

"Ah, Tanner! Gun shot, through and through URQ and I got tamponade. Gonna need you to get a chest-tube in, pronto!"

Doug Tanner was wide-awake now. He gloved-up, moved to a tray set-up beside the patient, the terrified black kid on the table — his wide-eyes darting everywhere, bloody froth coming from his nose and running down his neck; a nurse opened the chest tube kit while Tanner gloved-up and palpated the kid's thorax, then Tanner made an incision between ribs on the kid's left side and thrust the hemostat and surgical tubing into the kids chest. Frothy blood came out the end of the tubing at first, then a steady stream of deep red fluid jetted to the floor. Then an anesthesiologist was by the boy's head and intubating the kid; a fourth year thoracic resident hovered over the boy's sternum, her scalpel poised and waiting for the go-ahead from the 'gas-passer'; another resident was swabbing the kid's sweaty, mud-caked skin with saline and Betadine. It was now or never, because there just wasn't enough time to get the kid upstairs to a fully equipped O.R.

This was Tanner's second year as a general surgery resident, and his third six-month rotation through the ER, and he couldn't remember ever having done anything else in his life. He could barely remember his parents anymore — they seemed like abstract constructs that had existed once upon a time in the gauzy remnants of time before the first year of med school. Girlfriends? Like...are you kidding? Who had time? There'd been a Becky so-and-so, then a waitress one night, but then there'd been Macy last summer — yet the other one night stands had come and gone so fast he couldn't even remember what any of them looked like. Because soon enough everything had fallen into the general blur of this chosen life, and like everything else in this world people soon became one more blur inside a fast-passing landscape that never seemed to stop for a rest. Everything he had once thought important, girls, cars, maybe even getting married someday — all these things belonged to a past that was so far away it wasn't even recognizable anymore. Everything he'd ever wanted to do had been wiped clean away, his memory replaced by an endless stream of drunk drivers, irate husbands and soaring cholesterol levels, and the broken bodies never stopped coming in through the out door. Life had turned into a carousel — wooden horses that never slowed down and that just couldn't stop going round and round. And he was trapped here, trapped with no way off.

But everything had to stop, didn't it? Eventually? But apparently that wasn't true, not here, because now he was on again and going round and round and nothing mattered anymore — nothing, except what happened within the confined little spaces inside this sprawling emergency department. This place was like a beast that fed on human weakness, a Darwinian jungle where only the strongest survived, and as he sutured the chest tube into place the door flew open...

And an orderly, a young kid, rushed into the trauma room: "We need someone in Five, like right now!"

The Head Resident looked up at the orderly, then at Tanner.

"I've got it," Tanner said, the room spinning round and round.

"Go!" she said, nodding as soon as they made eye contact.

"Right." Tanner walked down the hall and ducked into Trauma 5 and shuddered to a stop: "What the fuck?!" he whispered, his eyes flaring in wide-eyed astonishment. Still, he managed a brief smile of encouragement to the patient -- just because...

"He got his arm caught in this machine," one of the paramedics started explaining. "They use it to grind hamburger and sausage at the supermarket..."

Tanner looked at the mess, then at the patient, a middle-aged man who, stunningly, appeared quite calm; he was sitting up on a fire department gurney, and his right arm — almost up to the elbow — had been pulled into this large stainless steel meat-grinder, and there was one fireman holding the grinder on it's rolling base, mainly to keep the blades from cutting the rest of the man's mangled arm from his body. Paramedics had applied a tourniquet at the scene and started an IV; every time they released it on the ride-in through traffic massive blood loss resumed.

Tanner walked to the man's side, trying to smile. 'Why isn't this guy in shock?' he asked himself.

"How'ya doin', doc," the man said. He still had his white butcher's coat on. "Sorry about this."

"Can you feel anything?" Tanner said, nodding while he bent over to examine the "hamburger" that had come out the spout on the far side of the machine.

"No, not really... it hurt like a son-of-a-bitch when it was happening, but not much since."

"Nerves completely severed," Tanner mumbled. "Nurse, get me some saline, and let's get some serious light down here in the chute." Someone handed him a fresh bottle of saline and he slowly poured half of the one liter bottle over the shredded pulp; Tanner pulled the overhead lamp closer and closer, looking at the mangled mess while he took mental notes. "And start some ringers," he added, looking at the nurse by the IV tree.

"You gonna have to amputate?" the butcher asked stoically while he watched Tanner probing the pulpy mess.

But Tanner kept looking at the remnants while he poured saline over the tissue, looking for hidden structure in the muck with the metal probe in his gloved hand. Every now and then he made little clucking noises with his tongue as his head moved from side to side, but other than that he seemed completely absorbed with the problem at hand...

"Does this machine come apart? Like...maybe right about here?" Tanner asked the butcher as he pointed at the main body of the grinder.

"No, not the chute," the butcher said. "That's solid aluminum there, doc."

Tanner moved, looked down into the machine's feed chute, from the uninjured side of the man's arm. "Tell me about those blades in there? Do they reverse?"

"No, doc. The gears just turn one way." Tanner studied the machine for a moment, then he stood up:

"Nurse, call someone down in maintenance and have 'em bring up a metric socket set and some vice-grips."

"What?" the nurse said. "What did — you want...what?"

Tanner turned to the nurse. "A metric socket set and some vice grips, and maybe some WD-40."

"You want some duct tape too? Just for good measure?" she asked sarcastically.

"Wouldn't hurt," Tanner added, seriously.

"What are you gonna do, doc?" the butcher asked again. "Amputate?"