Tsai Zhan sat across from the general, between him and the door, a gray cotton golf jacket draped across his lap. His knee bounced slightly. His eyes flicked back and forth, checking every exit, as if he feared Song might try to make a run for it. He held a gardening magazine but didn’t read it. Jet lag alone was enough to make most people feel somewhat queasy, like they were coming down with a touch of something. Tsai needed only a little nudge.
All Yao had to do was walk by with a cart of coffee for the nurses’ station for Tsai to demand some tea. The political minder was accustomed to getting his way.
The nurse standing at an open laptop on the reception counter shot Yao a side-eye and nodded toward Tsai, as if to say, You’d better take care of this.
“Of course, sir,” Yao said. He gave a slight bow, awkward, like Tsai would expect an uncouth American to be — absent even the most basic etiquette. Yao looked at Song and his aide in turn. “I have tea or coffee.”
“I do not care for anything,” the general said.
The aide, terrified at being spoken to in English, gave a twitchy shake of his head.
“I would prefer tea,” Tsai snapped. He might as well have been pounding his fist on the table.
Yao pumped a cup full of hot water from the urn, and then passed it to Tsai with two sachets of tea that looked as though they had never been opened.
Now it was only a matter of time — and how much of this tea Tsai decided to drink.
The operating room was smaller than Mo had been led to believe, or, rather, crowded with more instruments that took up much of the available floor space than she’d realized. Both Dr. Ryan and Dr. Berryhill had taken off their shoes. Ryan explained that eye surgery was often compared to flying a helicopter, as the surgeon had to utilize each hand and each foot independently — focusing the microscope, manipulating the eye itself, suturing, operating the laser, the cameras — or any of the equipment necessary for such a delicate surgery. By the time both surgeons, an anesthesiologist, and two nurses crowded around the table, there was little space left in the room for Mo. The general and his wife were not offered spots in the viewing theater, leaving that room for the two armed agents who were in contact with the detail posted outside and at the nurses’ station.
Adam Yao was out there, too. By now he would have tried to give Tsai Zhan the special tea. If that hadn’t worked — if he simply hadn’t wanted tea — Yao had a couple of other plans that he’d not seen fit to share with Mo Richardson, reminding her that she was a law enforcement officer and he was, well, not.
That part of this gig was his problem. She focused on her charge, the First Lady, appropriately code-named SURGEON by the Secret Service.
Mo had never had kids, but the sight of the little girl conked out on the table, with tubes in her arm and mouth, plucked at her heartstrings. Dr. Ryan and the other surgeon used a lot of words Mo would not have normally understood, but she’d done a fair amount of reading on retinoblastoma. She was, after all, dressed to play the part of a staff member at the clinic and didn’t want to look like a complete idiot if anyone in Song’s group asked her a question. The docs threw around terms like enucleation—removing the entire eye — and photocoagulation—using lasers to blast the blood vessels that fed the tumor. There was a large monitor above, displaying the work. Half the child’s face was covered with a surgical drape. Tape affixed the breathing tube to her cheek. A thin piece of spring-wire claw held the affected eye open, unblinking, fishlike.
Standing in the corner, Mo didn’t study the monitor long enough to figure out exactly what they were up to. She hadn’t seen them cut anything, but the gaping eye itself — looking, but not seeing — was enough to give her shivers. She’d gladly take a grisly murder scene or motor vehicle accident any day over an injured child. There’d been plenty of all those before she came on board with the Service — but it was the sight of helpless kids that stuck with her, that scarred the back of her eye.
Mo tempered her flipping stomach by trying to focus on the First Lady instead of on the monitor. She’d waited outside the operating room dozens, probably hundreds, of times, and knew well the labyrinth of back halls of Dr. Ryan’s home hospital, Johns Hopkins. The Secret Service even had a small office there next to Dr. Ryan’s. But Mo had never watched her work. Her focus was so intense as to be almost Zen-like. Ryan and her partner were playing with some high-powered lasers in the middle of one of the most fragile and important parts of the human body. The eye didn’t offer a great deal of real estate to work in to begin with, and these guys were shooting lasers through the pupil. Watching the steady hands, the total concentration, gave Richardson an entirely new level of respect for her boss.
An hour into the procedure, Dr. Ryan, unrecognizable in her surgical cap and mask, glanced over her shoulder and gave Mo a thumbs-up. Mo looked up at the agents in the viewing window and repeated the gesture. She and Dr. Ryan had agreed on the prearranged signal when the surgeons were roughly twenty minutes away from finishing up. The agents returned the thumbs-up to show that they understood the message and would pass it on.
“And there you go, Adam Yao, CIA dude,” Mo whispered under her breath. “Less than half an hour. Let’s see what you got.”
She couldn’t help but wish she was outside in the waiting area during this part of the op. She’d been around Tsai for only a few moments when the general had arrived. That was plenty long to see he was a vile human being. Mo shook her head, queasy from the images on the monitor. Still, she wasn’t sure anyone deserved what this guy was getting.
Tsai was sweating profusely when Adam Yao brought a tray of donuts into the waiting area. Mrs. Song sat to the general’s right, his hand clutched in hers, leaning against him for emotional support. All her customary stoicism had been leached away by the stress of her granddaughter’s illness and the long hours of travel.
“How much longer?” Mrs. Song asked in accented English.
“I’m not sure,” Yao said. “Maybe an hour. I’m sorry I can’t be more specific.”
“What could be taking so long?” the exhausted woman asked. “If it goes longer, do you think that means they are able to save her sight?”
“The surgeons will explain everything after—” Yao said.
“Why are there two?” Tsai asked, gulping back a burp. Yao could hear his rumbling gut from ten feet away.
“Two?” Yao scratched his head. “I’m not sure what you mean.”
“Why two surgeons?” Tsai asked. “There is a limited space for four large American hands around a child’s eyeball. Surely one would be enough.”
The general huffed in disgust, blading away in his chair. Mrs. Song buried her head more deeply into her husband’s shoulder.
Tsai chuckled. “Too many cooks—” An extra-large burp worked up from his belly, as if to punish him. He pushed the glasses up on his nose and stared at his feet.
Yao shrugged. “That’s way above my pay grade, sir. I’m not even a nurse. I’m just an orderly. I help with things like — Hey, you don’t look so good.”
Tsai swayed in his chair like he was about to topple forward. Yao reached out to touch the man’s arm, but he jerked away.
“I am fine!” Tsai snapped. His twisted grimace said otherwise. The thunder in his gut grew louder. His eyes suddenly crossed. The glasses slid down again as his face twisted in pain. “The restroom!” he demanded, cradling his protesting belly.