Gary Khalid’s hands still shook, but he was starting to feel better. He had one more hurdle to clear — an enormous hurdle, to be sure, but only one. He had to stop by his hiding place. He had decided to leave Los Angeles for good, but first he had to pick up his secret travel bag with cash and identification that would carry him through this crisis. He was smart enough not to hide the bag in his own home (but, he thought wryly, not smart enough to keep the travel bag with him at all times). The bag was, in fact, in the last place anyone would look for him.
Maybe they aren’t looking for me yet, he thought. But even so, that was the best time to run. He would go to Venezuela, where he would be out of reach of the U.S. authorities. From Venezuela, he could make his way back to Pakistan, and from there to the Northern Provinces, or maybe to Afghanistan, where the Taliban were building a truly Muslim community.
But first he had to get that bag.
Nina had volunteered to track down the doctor who’d done surgery on Father Collins. She felt the need to pursue this most morbid aspect of the case, having watched Diana Christie blow up. Nina was not a big fan of emotion, and she would have slapped anyone who suggested she needed a good cry, but she suspected there would be some sort of catharsis in confronting the actual procedure.
David Silver was the surgeon of record who had repaired Collins’s broken arm. A few phone calls had located him at his Beverly Hills office, on Camden Drive just north of Wilshire. Inside the office, she leaned over the counter where the receptionist sat, and surreptitiously showed her identification. “It’s urgent, I’m afraid,” she said softly but firmly.
“We’re already backed up by forty-five minutes,” the receptionist pleaded.
“Let’s round it out to an hour,” Nina replied, and pushed through the door to the back offices. The receptionist, flustered, guided her to Dr. Silver’s office, where she sat. The doctor himself appeared a moment later. He was young, with dark brown hair. He was also about five foot two, and he was already forming a helicopter pad on the top. He had a habit of making a wet, sucking sound at the corners of his mouth every few breaths. A catch on paper, Nina thought, but in real life, he was catch and release.
“Can I help you?” he asked, looking more than a little concerned.
Nina introduced herself and then dove right in. “I am interested in a patient of yours from several weeks ago. Samuel Collins, a priest, who had a broken arm that you set.” Nina’s voice was casual and her posture relaxed, but her right hand never strayed far from the Glock 17 at her hip under her jacket.
Dr. Silver chewed his lip. “A priest? Collins… that doesn’t ring a bell.” He pressed the intercom. Nina tensed. If there was going to be trouble, it would happen now. “Marianna, can you look up records for a Samuel Collins? Broken arm.”
He looked up. “I usually remember all my patients. Certainly recent ones, and I think I’d remember a priest, but…”
The buzzer sounded. “Dr. Silver, did you say Collins? I don’t have a Sam Collins anywhere. We don’t have a patient with that name.”
“Thank you.” He looked at Nina. “I’m sorry. I’m not sure what to say.”
Nina’s bullshit meter wasn’t going off. This guy didn’t feel like a con man, and there was nothing about his operation that raised red flags. But she wasn’t giving up yet. “Cedars-Sinai’s records indicate that Collins had surgery at that hospital almost four weeks ago, on Tuesday the twelfth. You are listed as the surgeon. Can you tell me where you were that day?”
Silver looked shocked. “Am I in trouble?”
“That depends on where you were.”
Silver’s eyes went up and to the left, which told Nina he was accessing some visually remembered memory. “The twelfth? I could check my calendar and — oh! The twelfth. That’s easy. I was at my place in Jackson Hole. We were there all week.”
Now it was Nina’s turn to look perplexed. “You can prove this? Are there witnesses?”
Silver said, “Yeah. My wife, my twin daughters, the caretaker who watches the place when we’re not around, Hank the fly fishing instructor…”
“I get it,” Nina said, standing up. “Thanks for your time.”
Jack was still pacing back and forth, deciding that he had to go over to that Unity Conference himself, when Nina called back.
“You can forget Dr. Silver. He wasn’t even in town when this operation is said to have happened. He has a ton of witnesses.”
“We have to run them down, though,” Jack said into the phone.
“Trust me,” she answered. “This is a nerdy Jewish doctor in Beverly Hills. He’s not blowing up anyone.”
Jack put her on speakerphone and addressed Jamey and Christopher Henderson. “So now we’re saying someone doctored his records and basically faked an operation. A conspiracy can only go so wide before leaks start happening, and the only leak we’ve ever found here is back in Cairo, and then Ramin. Everyone else has stayed pretty quiet. Are we now saying there’s a doctor out there who has something against the Pope, did these operations, faked records, and has flown under our radar?”
“This case is getting weirder,” Henderson said.
No one spoke for a minute, until Harry Driscoll cleared his throat. He’d been there the whole time, but he’d faded into the background, whether out of fatigue or frustration, Jack didn’t know. “Who says it has to be a doctor? I mean, a real doctor? Collins wasn’t planning on staying alive, right? So if the operation wasn’t perfect, who cares?”
“That doesn’t help much, though,” Nina said over the phone. “It widens our pool, it doesn’t narrow—”
“Start with the suspects we have,” Driscoll suggested. “Could one of them have done it?” Jack shrugged. “It’s worth a try. Jamey, can you—” “Already doing it.” She had dragged a laptop into the conference room. Henderson frowned. “No wireless networks are allowed in here.”
Jamey shrugged. “With all respect, I will absolutely follow that rule when you get more than two working computers in here. In the meantime… hmm.”
“Something?” Jack asked.
“Well. Yeah.” She looked up. “I just ran Nina’s original list of suspects against any information on medical school, medicine, etcetera. You know who graduated from medical school before moving here?”
“Who?”
“Gary Khalid.”
Gary Khalid drove up the street in a borrowed car, but he didn’t see anything unusual. If someone was watching the house, their countersurveillance skills were much better than his meager talents. It couldn’t be helped. He had to get inside his house. He cruised his neighborhood several more times, searching for he knew not what.
Though he gave the appearance of an affable, simple man, Khalid was highly intelligent. At a certain point, he realized that he was being foolish. The way the Americans worked, if they had figured out his involvement in the affair, they would have ransacked his house by now. And if they were lying in ambush, they would have pounced on him long before now.
Still, he pulled his car to the end of the block and waited. He had waited many long years to strike a blow against the Zionists and Crusaders. He could wait another hour.
Jack finished reviewing the records on Khalid’s education in Pakistan. Like so many clues, they had been right in front of him, but they’d meant nothing until he knew what to look for.