The Sisterhood - Michael Palmer [54]
Without warning Ketchem grabbed a scalpel, extended his incision, and slashed an opening through the bottom of Cormier’s diaphragm. Reaching through the opening, he grasped the man’s heart and began rhythmically squeezing. A nurse ran for help, but everyone in the operating room already knew it was over. Ketchem pumped, then stopped and checked the monitor. Straight line. He pumped some more.
For twenty minutes he pumped, with absolutely no effect on the golden light. Finally he stopped. For more than a minute no one in the room moved. Ketchem bit down on his lower lip and peered over his mask at the body of his friend. Then two nurses took him by the arms and helped him move away from the operating table, back to the surgeons’ lounge.
Off to one side, Jacqueline Miller closed her eyes, fearing they might reflect the excited smile beneath her mask. The greatest adventure in her life was ending in triumph. Oh, Dahlia had told her where to go and what to say, but she had been the one to actually pull it off. Little Jackie Miller, ordering around one of the richest, most powerful oilmen in the world.
She tingled at the irony of it all: from girlhood in a squalid tenement to a secret meeting in Oklahoma with the president of Beecher Oil. What would Mr. Jed Beecher have said if he knew that the woman who was giving him instructions, the woman who was taking his quarter of a million dollars, the woman who was dictating his every move had just taken her first airplane flight.
Jacqueline silently cheered the good fortune that had brought Dahlia and The Garden into her life. She still knew little about either of them, but for the present she really didn’t care. When Dahlia was ready to disclose her identity, she would, and that was all there was to that. As long as the excitement and the monthly payments were there, Camellia would do what she was asked and keep her eyes and ears open for cases that might be of interest to The Garden. As for The Sisterhood of Life, they would simply have to survive without any further participation from Jackie Miller. No more free rides.
Mexico. Jamaica. Greece. Paris. Jacqueline ticked the places off in her mind. One more case like this one, and she would be able to see all of them. The prospects were dizzying.
Behind her on the narrow operating table, covered to the neck by a sheet, Senator Richard Cormier looked as he had throughout his operation. But his dreamless sleep would last forever
CHAPTER XII
“Ladies and gentlemen, if you would all find seats, we can get started and hopefully make it through this inquiry in a reasonable amount of time. ”
Like an aging movie queen, the Morris Tweedy Amphitheater of Boston Doctors Hospital had handled the inexorable pressure of passing years with grace and style. Although undeniably frayed around the edges, the cozy, domed lecture hall still held its place proudly atop the thrice-renovated West Wing. There was a time when the seventy-five steeply banked seats of “The Amphi” had accommodated nearly the entire hospital staff—nurses, physicians, and students. However, in 1929, after almost fifty years of service, it had been replaced as the hospital’s major lecture and demonstration hall by a considerably larger amphitheater constructed in the Southeast Wing basement.
Hours upon hours of heated argument on the pros and cons of demolishing the jaded siren ended abruptly in 1952 when the state legislature designated the structure an historic landmark. Her stained glass skylights, severe wooden seats, and bas-relief sculptures depicting significant events in medical history were thus preserved for new generations of eager physicians-in-training.
But, despite a century of continuous