“Would there had been no cause for any of it.”
“Indeed.” Marquez ushered him inside. “Our coalition government is bound together by a fragile thread. If news of why you’ve come leaks out before I can meet with old rivals whose differences were just lately reconciled …”
“That thread might well begin to fray even before you are sworn into office. I understand.” The man placed his canvas bag on a low table beside the doorway. Though the committee of doctors and hospital officials had entered the room with him, he noted that his police escort
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had stayed respectfully out of earshot in the hall. “Please, tell me of his condition.”
Marque”z did not reply immediately. An attorney by background, he possessed an automatic verbal restraint that had served him well since his entry into politics. His manner formally polite, his frame as tapered as his dark gray suit, he nodded his chin at one of the doctors.
“As the one in charge of this case, Dr. Alvarez, it is perhaps best that you address such questions,” he said.
The doctor looked from Marquez to the uniformed man.
“The presidente is semiconscious and on a ventilator,” he said. “I hope you will forgive any impropriety, but let me be direct in my advice: Omit whatever rites you can, for time is short.”
The visitor kept his eyes on the doctor for two or three seconds. Then he nodded silently. What more was there to say?
He unbuttoned the officer’s blouse he’d been given to conceal his black clerical shirt, shrugged it off, and draped it neatly over the back of a chair. His other vestments were in the satchel with the articles he would require for the sacrament. He opened the bag and began arranging them on the table.
“Un momenta, Padre Martin. Par favor.”
He glanced over his shoulder at the doctor.
“Yes?”
“It pains me to interfere. But we have safety practices regarding apparel. Protective clothing must be worn in fee ward.”
“Such as?”
“Latex gloves and a gown are standard. As is a filtration mask.”
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Tom Clancy’s Power Plays
Martin raised his eyebrows. “Has the presidente’s illness shown itself to be communicable?”
“The presidente’s illness is still undiagnosed.”
“That was not my question.”
Alvarez exchanged a glance with him.
“No additional cases of infection have been reported,” he said. “To my knowledge.”
“Then I will follow the directives of the church. And, God willing, leave here with my good health.”
The doctor’s hand went up in a forestalling gesture. But it was the troubled look in his eyes that gave Martin pause.
“Listen to me, please,” he said. “I have witnessed much suffering in my years of medical practice, but when I go home to my family, it is pushed from my mind. That is how I cope-or always have in the past.” He hesitated. “The affliction that has taken hold of Pres- idente Colon is a mystery. Ten days ago he was admitted for examination after complaining of symptoms associated with the common flu. Aches and pains in his joints. Some feverishness. Mild gastronomic discomfort. But there is nothing common about his illness. What I have watched it do to his body, its rapid acceleration… I cannot escape the thoughts and images. They will often come upon me suddenly as I put my arms around my wife or look into the faces of my two young sons. And when it does, I am afraid for them. / am afraid.”
Martin looked at the doctor steadily, appreciating his frankness. It had seemed a difficult thing for him to step from behind his wall of clinical detachment. But Martin had not changed his mind.
“Our callings revolve around mysteries of a different nature, my friend,” he said after a few seconds. “You
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must come to terms with yours, and I with mine. As each of us deems fitting and necessary.”
They were quiet for a while, Alvarez’s eyes shifting to one of the administrators. Martin watched him get an almost imperceptible nod. Then the doctor turned back to him and sighed.
“Very well,” he said resignedly. “I will bring you to the ward.”
The president-elect’s room was segregated from the rest of the intensive care ward and guarded by more FELCN troopers. Alvarez led Father Martin quickly through the security check and then down a long hall to its door.
As they reached it, Martin thought he heard noises from inside. The rasp of something scuffing against fabric, followed by a series of unrhythmical thumps. He waited beside the doctor, listening, and heard the sounds again.
He gave Alvarez a questioning look.
“The spasms can be violent,” Alvarez explained. His voice was muffled by the particulate mask covering the lower half of his face. “We’ve applied restraints to prevent his injury or the interruption of life support.”
He reached for the door handle, but Martin lightly touched his wrist to stop him.
“Wait,” he said. “I need a moment.”
He moved in front of Alvarez, conferred the ritual blessing upon the entryway, and, because there was no one to respond, gave answer in his own quiet voice.
“May peace reign over this place. ”
“It will enter by this route.”
His prayer completed, Martin pushed open the door himself. His missal and a neatly folded white stole were
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Tom Clancy’s Power Plays
tucked under the crook of his arm. A burse hung from a cord around his neck, its front embroidered with a large red crucifix. Strapped over his right shoulder was the canvas bag holding his candles, holy water, and a communion cloth, the latter brought in the event Colon proved able to receive the Host.
Martin entered the room. Inside, oxygen hissed through soft rubber tubes snaking from the artificial ventilation unit into the patient’s nostrils, then down behind his tongue into the pharynx. A female nurse stood at the foot of the bed, a clipboard in her gloved hands. A bouffant cap, mask, and isolation gown hid all her features except her eyes, which were visible through a pair of clear goggles. They were large, brown, pretty, and full of the same profound distress Alvarez had confided in the anteroom.
Martin looked at her for a second, then turned to the man he had come to see.
He was either unconscious or asleep, the lesions on his eyelids, cheeks, and lips showing in angry contrast to his waxen pallor. His blankets had been turned down to free his bare right arm for the intravenous drip lines. Patched with a scarlet rash, it was all taut skin and knobby bone, reminding Martin in an awful way of the mummified llama fetuses at the Mercado del Hechiceria. Three fingers of each hand were enclosed in open-mesh tubes to the second knuckle, the tubes connected to a strap looped around the bed frame. The blemishes on his wrists were dark and cuff-shaped.
‘The finger restraints have been effective in reducing his skin trauma,” said Dr. Alvarez, standing behind Martin. “Any pressure causes blood to well up through the pores. We call it pinpoint bleeding. You can see the
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bruising that resulted from our use of conventional restraints earlier on.”
Martin’s eyes were still on the bracelets of discolored skin around Colon’s wrists.
“Yes,” he said. “I can see.”
A stand beside the bed had been cleared in advance of his arrival, and he stepped over to it now, donning his stole, taking the candles out of his satchel. Checking that they were secure in their holders, he mounted the candles on the stand and lighted them with a match. From his burse he extracted the pyx containing the wafer and put it on the bed stand in front of the candles. He covered this with the communion cloth and genuflected.
Rising from his knees, Martin reached into the satchel for the holy water, went around to the foot of the bed, and sprinkled the dying man according to the points of the cross-once to the front, once to the left, once to the right. His lips moving in prayer as they had in the police car, he performed further consecrations of the room with his sprinkler, extending it toward the walls and floor around him. At last he turned and shook droplets of holy water over the nurse and Dr. Alvarez.
He was walking back around to the bed stand when Colon went into another convulsion. All at once, his lips peeled back from his gums in a kind of rictus. The muscles of his neck and jaw began to quiver. A gargling sound escaped his mouth, his chest heaving and straining, the hiss of the ventilator growing louder as his demand for oxygen increased. He arched off the mattress, his right knee springing up to mound the blanket, his foot thrashing from side to side like a captured animal.
Martin gripped his missal closer to his chest and turned to Alvarez.