Adrienne, struck by the grace and economy of her husband’s movements, glanced up at the mesmerized students—and was transported back to the balcony of another operating theater the first time she had watched Kurt assume responsibility for someone’s life even as he was in full command of his own. She wished his parents could have been here, especially his father. Max would have been bursting with pride.
The hypothermia mattress signaled the gradual warming of the patient’s body. He was injected with a drug to neutralize the effects of the anti-coagulant in his bloodstream. An electric shock jolted the patient’s heart. The lifeline between human heart and heart-lung machine was about to be severed.
There seemed to be a collective holding of breath as everyone waited for normal contractions to begin. For the patient’s heart to start beating on its own.
Nothing happened.
The eyes of every doctor in the room leaped to the technician in front of the control panel.
The man looked stunned—unable to react to Brenner’s urgent commands.
Someone shouldered the technician aside. One hand whipped off dark glasses. The other shot out for the backup oxygenator, then reached for a bottle of fresh fluid to wash the lines of tubing free of blood and avoid fatal clots to the brain. Kiril Andreyev went to work, pausing only once—to exchange a glance, like a firm handshake, with Dr. Kurt Brenner.
The famous American surgeon could do nothing but massage the patient’s heart… and wait.
In less than five minutes the waiting was over, the malfunctioning heart-lung machine once again ready to take the place of the patient’s heart.
But too many valuable minutes had been lost. The operating team bent over the form on the table, going through motions everyone knew were as futile as they were routine. The patient was dead.
The amphitheater began to empty as one visiting doctor after another silently left the room. Dr. Kurt Brenner stood immobile at an operating table ringed with solemn faces, the operating team’s masks now lowered.
Galya made her way toward Kiril to console him on his valiant but unsuccessful race with the clock. He had retrieved his dark glasses and was about to put them on again.
But not before she saw that there was no redness, no trace of an infection in his left eye.
There never had been!
Her glance moved back and forth between two faces in the room—Kiril’s and Dr. Yanin’s—as she recalled Dr. Yanin’s little joke that morning at breakfast.
“So, Kiril! What are you—a modern version of the Prisoner of Zenda? Don’t try to bring literature to life by playing the King of American surgery just because you look like the man. I would hate to part with you.”
I would too, Galya thought, realizing for the first time why Kiril had looked at her in Moscow as if he’d never expected to see her again.
Kurt Brenner stared at the ceiling. He had locked himself in the bedroom of his hotel suite, not even bothering to make his excuses about missing lunch. He knew his East European colleagues understood and sympathized, having been told in advance that he invariably shut himself away on the rare occasion when a patient died while under his knife even though, like today, it wasn’t his fault.
So why this acute anxiety?
He wasn’t quite sure, but he could make an educated guess.
In recent years he’d begun to cultivate his reputation on a broader scale, making round after round of media appearances coast to coast and abroad. Being interviewed, feted, lionized—
Unbidden, the thought of a renowned publicity-loving pianist of his acquaintance came to mind. The man had admitted approaching the stage with trepidation whenever he had neglected his practicing… fearful, he’d admitted, of blowing the performance.
So when Adrienne tapped gently on the bedroom door—closed even to her—and in a voice thick with genuine sympathy told him she was going for a walk, it wasn’t her voice he clung to, but the awe in heart surgeon Dr. Mikhail Yanin’s voice earlier in the day as he turned to his colleagues and announced: “Dr. Kurt Brenner can accomplish in forty-five minutes what it takes most surgeons two hours to attempt!”
Chapter 35
Kiril chose a grouping of chairs near the hotel lobby’s only row of telephone booths to the left of the bank of elevators. As he took the end chair, Luka Rogov sank heavily into the next one. Kiril had deliberately skipped lunch because of the cafeteria just off the lobby. If Rogov got hungry enough…
He eyed the telephone booth almost wistfully. One call and he would know where he stood.
What if Stepan’s contact had moved away? What if he’d been caught?
The number Stepan had made him memorize was less than a year old, he told himself. Surely nothing could have changed in so short a time.
He leaned forward in sudden anticipation. Adrienne Brenner had just emerged from an elevator and was heading in his general direction.
But as she walked past without noticing him—intent, like everyone else in the lobby, on some urgent errand of her own—Kiril sat back again, eyes lowered in disappointment.
“Yes, Colonel.” Galya hung up the receiver, reached for her purse, and rushed down the corridor, propelled by a gust of nervousness. Keep in mind what this means for your future, she told herself.
Not that I have any choice—not anymore.
She stepped quickly into an express elevator. As soon as the door slid open, she spotted Kiril. Her first inclination was to tear across the lobby and tell him what she suspected—desperate to hear him tell her that it wasn’t true. But all she had time for was a smile and a wave as she hurried through the lobby and into the street. And not a moment too soon. Adrienne Brenner had just crossed the plaza and was about to enter a ground-floor shopping arcade.
Adrienne checked her watch. Three o’clock sharp. Sauntering past a refreshment booth, she paused to watch a woman as she arranged thick meat patties on a large iron grill.
“Would you care to sample one, Mrs. Brenner?”
She turned. “Herr Roeder! How nice to see you again.” She gestured at the tray. “I’m really not hungry.”
“Perhaps I can tempt you with a drink?” He tilted his mug so she could see the pink liquid inside. “Weisse mit schuss. Beer and raspberry juice. It’s especially popular with Berliners in the summer.”
She smiled. “I’m game—even if it is the color of bubble gum.”
They sat down at a small table. As he signaled a waitress, she saw that his hands really were enormous. Maneuvering a miniature camera had to be child’s play compared to what she’d been going through.
“How do you like it?” he asked.
“Refreshing,” she said. It really was.
“Do you have children, Mrs. Brenner? If so, might I suggest a souvenir of some kind?”
“No children. Just a couple of nephews. What did you have in mind?”
“Wooden toys from the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic.” He led her to a toy counter and picked up a wooden figure. “Look at the labor that has gone into this. See how easily you can move the tiny limbs about?”
“Looks very flexible. How is it done, with elastic?”
But he was no longer examining the toy. His eyes scanned the arcade’s long, uncrowded aisles.
“So once again, Paul Houston is poised to expose the dark side of your country’s State Department,” he said, his voice low.