Harlan Coben and Reese Witherspoon
Gone Before Goodbye
To the many military doctors and nurses who have placed themselves in peril to help save every soul they could. Thank you for your courage and compassion.
TriPoint, North Africa
I don’t hear the scream.
The nurse does. So does the anesthesiologist. I am too deep in the zone, the zone I can only enter in an operating theater, when a sternum is cracked open like this, and my hands are inside the boy’s chest.
This is my home, my office, my sanctuary. I am Zen here.
More screams. Gunfire. Helicopters. An explosion.
“Doctor?”
I hear the panic in her voice. But I don’t move. I don’t look away. My hands, the oldest medical instruments known to mankind, are inside the chest cavity, my index finger palpitating the pericardium. I am totally focused on that, only that. No music is playing. That’s weird in an operating room nowadays, I know, but I relish silence in this hallowed space, even when we’ve done heart transplants that last eight hours. It annoys my staff. They need the diversion, the entertainment, the distraction — and that’s the problem for me. I want no distractions. Both my bliss and my excellence come from that singular focus.
But the sounds invade.
Rapid gunfire. Another explosion. Louder screams.
Getting closer now.
“Doctor?” The voice is shaky now, panicked. Then, because I’m clearly not listening: “Marc?”
“Nothing we can do about it,” I say.
Which is hardly a comfort.
Trace and I arrived in Ghadames eight days ago. We flew into Diori Hamani airport, where we were met by a young woman Trace and I knew named Salima, if that is her real name, and a burly driver who never introduced himself or said a word to us. The four of us traveled northeast for two long days, sleeping in a safe house near Agadez and then tents under the stars in Bilma. We left the driver in northern Niger, traveling through the desert by night, until we met another car.
Salima and Trace have eyes for one another. I’m not surprised. Trace is the pure definition of a “playah.” Even surrounded by death... well, maybe that’s just it.
When you’re close to death, that’s when you feel your most alive.
Salima kept us moving north, straddling the border between Algeria and Libya. East of Djanet, a half dozen heavily armed militants stopped us. They were all young — teens, I would guess — and tweaking from some sort of potent narcotic. They were called the Child Army. Blood was in the air. Wide-eyed, they grabbed me first, then Trace. The young militants made me kneel.
They put a gun to the back of my skull.
I would be first to die. Trace would watch. Then it would be his turn.
I closed my eyes and pictured Maggie’s face and waited for someone to pull the trigger.
The Child Army didn’t shoot us, obviously. Salima, who speaks at least four languages fluently, fell to her knees and talked fast. I don’t know exactly what she said — Salima wouldn’t tell us — but the child soldiers moved on.
More screams. More gunfire. Closer now. I try to hurry.
I didn’t tell Maggie the truth about how risky this last mission was on so many levels, not because I thought she would worry but because of the promises we had made to one another — she would have insisted on coming.
That’s how Maggie and I are built.
You wonder what makes a hero? There’s altruism, sure. But there’s also ego and recklessness and thrill-seeking.
We don’t fear danger. We fear normalcy.
Trace, wearing a surgical mask, pokes his head in. “Marc?”
“How much time do we have?”
“They’ve burned down the north side of the camp. Dozens are already dead. Salima is moving everyone out.”
I look at the nurse and the anesthesiologist. “Go,” I tell them.
“You can’t save him,” the nurse says to me, as she pulls away. “Even if you finish in time, even if he could somehow survive the surgery, they won’t let him live.”
I don’t know who “they” are. I don’t know the justifications, the origins, the history, the factions, the tribes, the warlords, the fanatics, the extremists, the innocents. I don’t know who the good guys or the bad guys are, why these people are in this refugee camp, what side is the oppressor or what side is the oppressed. It’s not that I’m not political, but for Maggie and Trace and me, it can’t matter.
I continue to work on my patient, a fifteen-year-old boy named Izil. I hope everyone I treat is an innocent, but I doubt it. It just can’t be our job to figure out who is on what side. Our job, not to get too grandiose, is to save their lives. They say, “Kill them all and let God sort them out.” It’s close to the opposite for us — save them all and let God... You get the drift.
I’m not being “both sides” here. I’m being “no sides.”
“Everyone out,” I say. “I want the room cleared.”
“Marc,” Trace says.
Our eyes meet over the surgical masks. Trace and I have known each other a long time. We did our surgical residency together. We have provided medical aid in humanitarian crises like this one across the globe. He is one of the most gifted cardiothoracic surgeons in the world.
Trace says, “I can help you close.”
“I got it.”
“We’ll wait.”
I shake my head, but he knows.
“Leave me an ambulance,” I say. “They won’t shoot up an ambulance.”
We both know this is no longer true, not in today’s world.
We should never have come. I shouldn’t have allowed it. I should have taken care of business and said goodbye and flown home.
I should be with Maggie.
I don’t say goodbye to Trace. He doesn’t say goodbye to me.
But this will be the last time I ever see him.
Seconds later, it’s only Izil and me in the room. I hurry, stupidly thinking I can make it. I am closing the boy’s chest when the doors burst open.
Armed militants storm in. I don’t know how many. They all have that crazed look in their eyes. I have seen that look before. Too many times. I saw it just a few days ago east of Djanet.
And sometimes I see it when I look in the mirror.
I close my eyes and picture Maggie’s face and wait for someone to pull the trigger.
Chapter One
Baltimore
ONE YEAR LATER
Maggie McCabe shouldn’t have come.
“Where are you?” Marc asks.
Maggie looks down at her husband’s face on the phone screen. “I told you.”
“Johns Hopkins?”
“Yes.”
“You on the quad?”
“Yes.”
“Where we met,” he says. “Orientation week of medical school. You remember?”
“Of course I remember,” Maggie says.
“I knew you were the one the moment I saw you.”
“Don’t make me gag.”
“I’m trying to boost you up.”
“It’s not working.”
“So what are you doing?”
Maggie flashes back to her first time on campus, all dewy-eyed and fresh-faced, as they say, full of hope and optimism and vim and vigor and all that nonsense. How naive. But then again, when your world falls apart — when you had everything and even understood and appreciated that you had everything and never took any of it for granted, not for a second, knew how lucky you were, and because you were so grateful, you somehow naively expected karma to reward you, or at least leave you be — you learn in the hardest of ways that fate is fickle, that life is chaos and no one gets out unscathed, that you can have everything one moment and have it all snatched away so easily...