She’d lusted to be part of CIA before they’d met in the Student Union at Fordham, and then again at the CIA recruiter’s desk, and they’d hit it off soon after that. She’d already had her Russian-language skills. She could pass for a native. She could alter her accent for any region of the country. She could feign being an instructor in poetry at Moscow State University, and she was pretty, and pretty women had an advantage over everyone else. It was the oldest of prejudices, that the attractive among us had to be good people, that the bad people had to be ugly because they did ugly things. Men were especially deferential to pretty women, other women were less so, because they envied their looks, but even they were nice by instinct. So Mary Pat could skate on a lot of things, because she was just that pretty American girl, that ditsy blonde, because blondes were universally thought to be dumb, even here in Russia, where they were not all that uncommon. The ones here were probably natural blondes, too, because the local cosmetics industry was about as advanced as it must have been in twelfth-century Hungary, and there wasn’t much Clairol Blond #100G in the local drugstores. No, the Soviet Union paid scant attention to the needs of its womenfolk, which led his mind to another question—why had the Russians stopped at only one revolution? In America there would have been hell to pay for the lack of choices in clothes and cosmetics the women had here…
The train stopped at his station. Foley made his way to the door and walked to the escalator. Halfway up, his curiosity got the better of him. He rubbed his nose as though with a case of the sniffles, and fished in his pocket for a handkerchief. He rubbed his nose with it and then shoved it in his coat pocket, which, he discovered, was empty. So what had that been all about? There was no telling. Just one more random event in a life filled with them?
But Edward Foley hadn’t been trained to think in terms of random events. He’d continue this regular schedule, and be sure to catch this same subway train every day for a week or so, just to see if there might be a repeat.
ALBERT BYRD SEEMED a competent eye cutter. He was shorter and older than Jack. He had a beard, black and showing hints of gray—like a lot of beards in England, she’d noted. And tattoos. More than she’d ever encountered before. Professor Byrd was a skilled clinician, good with his pa tients, and a very adept surgeon, liked and trusted by his nursing team—always the sign of a good doc, Cathy knew. He seemed to be a good teacher, but Cathy already knew most of what he had to teach, and knew more about lasers than he did. The argon laser here was new, but not as new as the one at Hopkins, and it would be two weeks before they even had a xenon-arc laser, for which she was Wilmer Eye Institute’s best jockey at Hopkins.
The bad news was in the physical facilities. Health care in Britain was effectively a government monopoly. Everything was free—and, like everywhere in the world, you got what you paid for. The waiting rooms were far shabbier than Cathy was used to, and she remarked on it.
“I know,” Professor Byrd said tiredly. “It’s not a priority.”
“The third case I saw this morning, Mrs. Dover, she’d been on the waiting list for eleven months—for a cataract evaluation that took me twenty minutes. My God, Albert, at home her family physician just calls my secretary and I see her in three or four days. I work hard at Hopkins, but not that hard.”
“What would you charge?”
“For that? Oh… two hundred dollars. Since I’m an assistant professor at Wilmer, I come a little higher than a new resident.” But, she didn’t add, she was a damned sight smarter than the average resident, more experienced, and a faster worker. “Mrs. Dover is going to need surgery to correct it,” she added. “Want me to do it? ”
“Complicated?” Byrd asked.
She shook her head. “Routine procedure. About ninety minutes’ work because of her age, but it doesn’t look as though there should be any complications.”
“Well, Mrs. Dover will go on the list.”
“How long?”
“It’s not an emergency procedure… nine to ten months,” Byrd figured.
“You’re kidding,” Cathy objected. “That long?”
“That’s about normal.”
“But that’s nine or ten months during which she can’t see well enough to drive a car!”
“She won’t ever see a bill,” Byrd pointed out.
“Fine. She can’t read the newspapers for the best part of a year. Albert, that’s awful!”
“It’s our national health-care system,” Byrd explained.
“I see,” Cathy said. But she didn’t really. The surgeons here were proficient enough, but they did only a bit more than half the procedures she and her colleagues did at Hopkins—and she’d never felt overworked in the Maumenee Building. Sure, you worked hard. But people needed you, and her job was to restore and improve the sight of people who required expert medical care—and to Caroline Ryan, M.D., FACS, that was a religious calling. It wasn’t that the local docs were lazy, it was just that the system allowed—nay, encouraged—them to take a very laissez-faire attitude toward their work. She’d arrived in a very new medical world, and it wasn’t all that brave.
Neither had she seen a CAT scanner. They’d essentially been invented in Britain by EMI, but some bean counter in the British government—the Home Office, they’d told her—had decided that the country only needed a few of them, and so most hospitals lost the lottery. The CAT scan had just come into being a few years before she’d entered the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, but in the ensuing decade they’d become as much a part of medicine as the stethoscope. Practically every hospital in America had one. They cost a million dollars apiece, but the patient paid for the use of the things, and they paid themselves off quickly enough. She only rarely needed one—to examine tumors around the eye, for example—but when you did, you damned well needed it right now!
And at Johns Hopkins, the floors were mopped every day.
But the people had the same needs, and she was a doc, and that, Cathy decided, was that. One of her medical school colleagues had gone to Pakistan and come back with the kind of experience in eye pathologies that you couldn’t get in a lifetime in American hospitals. Of course, he’d also come back with amoebic dysentery, which was guaranteed to lessen anyone’s enthusiasm for foreign travel. At least that wouldn’t happen here, she told herself. Unless she caught it in a doctor’s waiting room.
CHAPTER 9:
SPIRITS
THUS FAR, Ryan had not managed to catch the same train home as his wife, always managing to get home later than she did. By the time he got home, he’d be able to think about doing some work on his Halsey book. It was about 70 percent done, with all the serious research behind him. He just had to finish the writing. What people never seemed to understand was that this was the hard part; researching was just locating and recording facts. Making the facts seem to come together in a coherent story was the difficult part, because human lives were never coherent, especially a hard-drinking warrior like William Frederick Halsey, Jr. Writing a biography was more than anything else an exercise in amateur psychiatry. You seized incidents that happened in his life at randomly selected ages and education levels, but you could never know the little key memories that formed a life—the third-grade schoolyard fight, or the admonishment from his maiden aunt Helen that resonated in his mind for his entire life, because men rarely revealed such things to others. Ryan had such memories, and some of them appeared and disappeared in his consciousness at seemingly random intervals, when the message from Sister Frances Mary in Second Grade at St. Matthew’s School leaped into his memory as though he were seven years old again. A skilled biographer seemed to have the ability to simulate such things, but it sometimes came down to making things up, to applying your own personal experiences to the life of another person and that was… fiction, and history wasn’t supposed to be fiction. Neither was an article in a newspaper, but Ryan knew from his own experience that much purported “news” was made up from whole cloth. But nobody ever said that writing a biography was easy. His first book, Doomed Eagles, had been in retrospect a much easier project. Bill Halsey, Fleet Admiral, USN, had fascinated him since reading the man’s own autobiography as a boy. He’d commanded naval forces in battle, and while that had seemed exciting to a boy of ten years, it was positively frightening to a man of thirty-two, because now he understood the things that Halsey didn’t discuss in full—the unknowns, having to trust intelligence information without really knowing where it came from, how it was gathered, how it was analyzed and processed, how it was transmitted to him, and whether or not the enemy was listening in. Ryan was now in that loop, and having to wager his life on the work that he did himself was frightening as hell—rather more so, actually, to be wagering the lives of others whom he might or, more likely, might not know.