He let out a dry chuckle. “You think I can help it?”
I shook his hand and thanked him for his time, then I said I wasn’t carrying an extra card, you know, it being Sunday and all. It didn’t look like it worried him in the least. I gave him my burner’s number and the office line at Federal Plaza. It was a risk, but I had to give him a working number in case he did come up with something, and it would have been odd not to give him the office number too. I hoped it wouldn’t come back and bite me in the ass.
As he was showing me out, he said, “Next time you get someone you think this was done to, get the paramedics to bring them here as fast as they can. To the cardiac care unit, not the ER.”
“Why?”
“Maybe we can help where others can’t.”
I wasn’t sure what he meant, then I remembered what Kurt/Cid/Snake had mentioned. “Someone at the office said you had some kind of Frankenstein machine?”
He chortled. “Hardly. Come, I’ll show you.”
He led me to a medical ward and onto an OR that was unoccupied, and showed me a wheeled trolley that was packed with equipment-several monitoring readouts, pumps, and all kinds of tubes running between them. It looked like a robot someone put together in their garage.
He patted it. “This is it. And it doesn’t need lightning to work.” His face barely cracked into a smile, which was probably as much as I was going to get out of him today. “It’s an ECMO. An Extra Corporeal Membrane Oxygenation. Since we’ve been using it, we’ve had twice the success rate of other hospitals in bringing people back from ‘death.’” He used air quotes on that last word.
I didn’t quite understand what that meant. I mimicked his quotes. “‘Death?’ You’re dead or you’re not, no?”
“It depends on what you mean by ‘dead.’ That’s a whole other discussion… what I can tell you is, based on my research and after talking to a lot of people who we and others have brought back after their bodies were considered ‘dead,’ when any monitor you hooked them up to showed zero life in their bodies or brains-many of them had clear recollections of those lost hours. Their consciousness was still there, even if their brains didn’t exhibit any signs of life-at least, none that we can detect. We can’t explain it, neurologically. But it’s a fact.”
I would have loved to tell him about what I’d experienced over the summer in Mexico with Alex and El Brujo and how open-minded I’d become on the subject of our souls and their ability to transcend time and live beyond our physical bodies. But now was not the time for it.
“The thing is, at some point,” he continued, “you, me, all of us-we’re all going to experience cardiac arrest. That’s ultimately the cause of death for most people. Usually, it’s because something else in the body fails, maybe from an advanced cancer, and the heart is overstretched without getting what it needs to keep pumping. But if it happens when the rest of the body has the ability to keep going, which is very common, then the minutes and hours after your heart stops are critical. And right now, I’m sad to say, in most of the hospitals out there, the way they respond in that most crucial moment hasn’t really evolved since the sixties.”
“You mean with CPR and paddles?”
“Well, yes. We use them, of course-you have to, it’s key. But it’s not enough. See, most doctors out there, they’ll do CPR for fifteen, twenty minutes tops, then they’ll stop. It’s like they’ve given up before they’ve even started. But this term, ‘clinically dead’… it’s nonsense. I don’t know what that means, medically speaking. In those situations, the decision to declare someone dead is completely arbitrary. It doesn’t reflect what we know about life, and how long after such a ‘death’ someone can be brought back. If you know what you’re doing and you have the right tools to do it.”
“How long are you talking about?”
“There’s a girl in Japan who had been declared dead for three hours. Dead. Gone. They hooked her up and spent six hours resuscitating her.” He smiled. “She’s fine. In fact, she just had a baby.” He moved closer to his prized machine. “We can work miracles with this thing. Well, maybe a combination of miracles and scientific wonders.” He pointed out the various pumps, heat exchangers and oxygenators on the trolley. “We first cool down the body drastically and very quickly, in order to slow down any damage to brain cells. You need state-of-the-art machines to monitor and maintain oxygen levels to the brain, that’s key. Then we siphon out the patient’s blood, re-oxygenate it, warm it up and filter it and pump it around again. This buys us time to fix whatever caused the problem in the first place. We’re doubling survival rates and when they come back, they’re not brain damaged.”
“Sounds like they should have them in every ER in the country,” I said.
“From your lips,” he replied.
I liked him. A lot. But I left there with a seething rage. Somehow, I was sure they’d killed Nick. Which, added to everything else, made me absolutely desperate to get my hands on these scumbags.
Forget about clearing my name-right now, it was only pure, primal revenge that was on my mind.
MONDAY
39
Cape Cod, Massachusetts
It was inching up to noon by the time I was guiding Gigi’s BMW down a winding lane, a parade of red oak trees looming over me from either side of the road like emaciated sentinels, still annoyed it had taken being a fugitive to motivate me to visit my mom and her husband for the first time in almost a year.
We’d never been as close as some mothers and sons. The combination of a career she frowned upon, my failure to find a wife-then finding one and not marrying her-plus the physical distance, meant we were only ever going to drift further apart as the years passed.
Across two decades, I’d probably spent no more than two weeks around her, and that was probably down to both of us. I guess I reminded her of my dad-like most sons, by the time I was thirty, I’d started to accumulate both physical traits and mannerisms that directly echoed his-and she reminded me of the first ten years of my life, which seemed near-perfect from my innocent perspective. Innocent till my dad blew his brains out.
I hadn’t told my mom any of what was happening, both in the present and over the past six months, since I found out about Alex. All she knew was that I had a son who was now living with us, a grandson she was desperate to meet. Not involving her in the dramas of my life suited us both, since she didn’t have to fret about things she had no way to influence, and I didn’t have to worry that she was fretting.
Half a mile down the lane stood a classic Cape Code house, perfectly symmetrical, white portico, sloped shingled roof and two dormer windows. Pastel-blue wooden slats covered the front of the house and all the windows had well-maintained, hung-back shutters. An equally well-maintained dark-green panel van with the words “Standish Tree & Landscaping Service-serving Cape Cod since 1972” stenciled in discrete letters on the side stood alongside the car port, in which sat my mom’s Volvo SUV. The van belonged to Eric, my stepdad-though I never called him that.
My mom had remarried and moved out to Cape Cod while I was an FBI rookie in Chicago, so I’d never lived with him. He still co-owned and ran his own business, though most of the work was now done by his younger brother and nephews. As so often happens, my mom had chosen someone at the opposite end of the spectrum from her first husband. While Colin Reilly was an intense, self-contained intellectual who could easily spend sixteen hours a day alone in his study, Eric Standish was easygoing and warm and was happiest in nature when he wasn’t with his extended family.