The Sisterhood - Michael Palmer [53]
“Who?” Cormier asked.
“Camellia. See those pink and white flowers over there on the table? They came this morning with a note that just said ‘Thank you for everything. Camellia,’ ”
“Men,” Beth said scornfully. “Those pink and white flowers, as you call them, are camellias. Let me see that note.” She read it and shrugged. “That’s what it says, all right.”
“Thanks for checking,” Crisp said. “I got low marks in reading throughout law school.”
“Now, now, settle down, you two,” Cormier said. He rubbed his chin. “Camellia’s a strange enough name so that I should remember it. Camellias from Camellia, eh? …” His voice drifted off as he tried to connect the name with a person. Finally he shook his head. “Well, I guess a little memory lapse here and there is a small price to pay for the frustration I’m able to cause on The Hill with the rest of my senility. Whoever she is, she’ll just have to live without a thank-you note.”
At that moment Mrs. Fuller reappeared at the door. “I said five minutes, and it’s already more than that,” she said. “I swear, Senator, you are the most obstinate, cantankerous patient I’ve ever had.”
“Okay, okay, we’re done,” Cormier said, waving the other three out of his room. “You know, Mrs. Fuller, if you don’t sweeten up soon, you’re going to move from the sleek cruiser class into the battle-ax category.” He smiled at her and added, “But even then you’ll still be my favorite nurse. Go easy with that needle, now.”
The nurse swabbed at a place on Cormier’s left buttock and gave him the injection of preoperative medication. Fifteen minutes later, his mouth began feeling dry and a warm glow of detachment crept over him. Like the beacon from a lighthouse, the corridor ceiling lights flashed past as he was wheeled to the operating room.
* * *
Louis Ketchem was a towering, slope-shouldered veteran of more than twenty-five years as a surgeon. Over that span he had performed hundreds of gall bladder operations. None had ever gone any smoother than Senator Richard Cormier’s. The removal of the inflamed, stone-filled sac was uneventful except for the usual amount of bleeding from the adjacent liver. As he had done hundreds of times, Ketchem ordered a unit of blood to be transfused over the last half hour of the operation.
The anesthesiologist, John Singleberry, took the’ plastic bag of blood from the circulating nurse, a young woman named Jacqueline Miller. He double-checked the number on the bag before attaching it to the intravenous line. To speed the infusion, he slipped an air sleeve around the bag and pumped it up. Cormier, deeply anesthetized and receiving oxygen by a respirator, slept a dreamless sleep as the blood wound down the tubing toward his arm like a crimson serpent.
At the instant the blood slid beneath the green paper drape, Jacqueline Miller turned away. The drug she had been instructed to use, the drug she had injected into the plastic bag, was ouabain, the fastest acting and most powerful form of digitalis—a drug so rapidly cleared from the bloodstream, so difficult to find on chemical analysis, that even the massive doses she had used were virtually undetectable. Three minutes were all the ouabain required.
Without warning the cardiac monitor pattern leapt from slow and regular to totally chaotic. John Singleberry glanced at the golden light slashing up and down on the screen overhead and spent several seconds staring at it in disbelief.
“Holy shit, Louis,” Singleberry screamed. “He’s fibrillating!”
Ketchem, who had not encountered a cardiac arrest in the operating room in years, stood paralyzed, both hands still inside