And in an information vacuum, they’d default to the safest move.
Calling their boss in Madrid to check would not be a wise idea. Not at two in the morning. No one wanted to wake him up and risk his fury. Yet turning away an ambulance could be a serious misstep. What if something really was wrong with the girl and Soler really had called for an ambulance? Refusing entry to the ambulance would end not only their careers but possibly their lives, too.
Self-preservation. That’s what really makes the world go around. The mass of humanity cares about nothing so much as protecting their paychecks. I’d never forget what some cockney night watchman at a London office building once told me as he refused to admit me after hours even though I claimed I’d left my laptop at my desk. “Sorry, guv,” he’d said. “More’n my job’s worf, it is.”
Benito accelerated along a cobblestone drive lined with cypress trees. It snaked past terraced gardens and the stone columns of a cloister and then ended in a semicircle in front of the mansion. As we pulled up, the wooden front door swung open. It was a massive slab of ancient oak with dark iron escutcheons and knobs and nailheads that looked like it had been salvaged from one of Torquemada’s inquisition chambers.
“Benito,” I said.
For a few seconds he didn’t reply. I heard him swallow. I could sense his nerves. “Yes.”
“You can do this.”
“Of course I can do this. It’s just…”
“Don’t worry,” I said.
“I am not liking this at all.”
“Remember,” I said, “we always have plan B.”
“And what is this plan B?”
“I’ll let you know when the time comes.”
He groaned.
A guard emerged, dressed in navy blue slacks and a long-sleeved light blue shirt with a badge of some sort. A black nylon holster on his right hip. A pistol, I noted. Easily accessible but not quite at the ready.
He hustled out to help us. Meanwhile Benito and I raced around to the back of the ambulance, opened the doors, and pulled a gurney from its rack. We unfolded it and set it up on the cobblestones. Then we took out all the standard equipment, the heavy bags that held the meds and the airway supplies and oxygen. Heaping everything onto the gurney, as we’d rehearsed, we wheeled it, rattling and jangling, over the cobblestones, then lifted it up to the porch. The guard rushed ahead of us and held the door open. We left the gurney on the porch, as per standard protocol, and put the equipment bags on our backs.
“Where is she?” I demanded.
The guard said something in Spanish and pointed toward an immense curving marble staircase. I didn’t need Benito to translate for me. She was upstairs.
But I was surprised at his deferential tone. I heard the word “doctor,” which sounds the same in Spanish and English. Apparently the white coat and tie and the stethoscope dangling from my neck really did lend me an air of authority. It works for real doctors, after all. It didn’t seem to bother him that a doctor was lugging EMT equipment around himself. Maybe he’d never seen an ambulance team in operation. Maybe he wasn’t smart enough to spot the anomalies.
We trotted up the stairs as quickly as we could, the guard following right behind. At the top of the stairs he pointed to the left and moved ahead to guide us there. When we’d gone a few feet down the hall, I suddenly said, “The defibrillator.”
“Excuse me, Doctor?” Benito said.
“We’re going to need the defibrillator. Go on ahead without me. I’ll be right back.”
I set down my equipment bags, and Benito quickly translated for the guard. I could see him warily sizing up the situation, trying to figure out what to do. He didn’t want me walking through the house unescorted, but he also didn’t want to leave Benito up here unaccompanied. And he wasn’t going to make us lug the equipment back downstairs.
It didn’t occur to him to question why we didn’t have a cardiac defibrillator with us, nor why I’d suddenly decided we needed one.
Nor why we were willing, in a medical emergency, to keep the patient waiting while I fetched a piece of equipment we might not need. He was a guard, not an MD.
He nodded, and I raced down the staircase.
I returned in a little over two minutes. The hallway was wide and went on forever. A long antique runner, bare in places and probably priceless, slipped underfoot against the highly polished hardwood floor. He stopped at a closed door on the left, knocked once, turned the knob, and opened it. The door wasn’t locked, I was surprised to see. Maybe, with the guards and the electric fence and all, Soler wasn’t worried about Svetlana Kuzma trying to escape.
A muffled female voice from within: “Hey!”
The guard switched on an overhead light, illuminating a spacious bedroom suite. An elaborately carved four-poster bed with barley twist posts and a canopy made out of some kind of antique tapestry. A chaise longue. A mirrored vanity dressing table.
I was half expecting a dank concrete torture chamber out of the movie Hostel. Not a royal suite at Sandringham, which was what this looked like.
“La ambulancia llega,” the guard said. He was being too helpful. I’d expected him to point us upstairs and remain at his post. This was a problem I didn’t anticipate. We’d have to deal with him.
A young girl bolted upright in bed, her hand outstretched as if to shield her eyes from the light.
Svetlana.
She was wearing a white A-shirt, which in politically incorrect circles is sometimes called a “wife beater.” Her eyes were wide with fear. There was panic in her face.
We set down our equipment.
In the photos her father had e-mailed me, she was an exotic, raven-haired beauty. She could have been a supermodel. Up close and personal, she looked much younger and smaller and more fragile, though no less stunning. She didn’t appear to have been beaten or abused. That didn’t necessarily mean anything, I knew. The kind of abuse she’d probably endured wouldn’t be visible.
“Khto vi?” she gasped. “Shcho vi khochetye?”
I don’t speak Ukrainian, if that was what she was speaking. But she sounded desperate.
The guard looked from her to us, suspicion furrowing his brow. He’d just figured out that the girl didn’t seem to be in any medical distress. Benito, quick-thinking, said something to the guard in Spanish. I didn’t understand much of it, but his tone was indignant. The gist seemed to be So what the hell did you call us here for? Or How dare you waste our time! Or something along those lines.
Now the guard was arguing with Benito, and I didn’t need to know Spanish to see that he’d finally tumbled to the realization that no one had called for a doctor. As we say in Boston, light dawns over Marblehead.
He reached for his two-way radio and held it up with his thumb near the transmission button, about to call for backup.
I’d expected this, of course. Actually, I was surprised we’d gotten this far without the other guard, or guards, showing up.
While Benito was diverting the guard with his display of pique, I’d slowly come up behind him, as we’d rehearsed, and pincered his neck in the crook of my elbow, squeezing it hard between my bicep on one side and the bone of my forearm on the other. He gave a sharp yelp. I tightened the vise by grabbing my left hand with my right, compressing both carotid arteries. The good old naked rear choke, beloved of action heroes and teenage boys-but the best thing in a situation like this, and the quickest. He thrashed and shuffled his feet and took a feeble swing at my torso, but he didn’t have much strength left.
Then I stomp-kicked him at the back of his left knee. He lost his balance, fell backward toward me. In less than ten seconds, I felt him go limp, and I eased him to the floor.
The girl, meanwhile, had scrambled out of the bed and leaped to the floor. She screamed, “Dopomozhit’ meni!”