Manhattan Lockdown

CHAPTER SIX

THERE WERE ALREADY thirty patients in the emergency room at Mount Sinai when Gabriel Hauser arrived. Men, women, and children lay on stretchers or on blankets on the floors in the hallways. With shades drawn, the emergency room’s cubicles were filled to capacity with the most seriously wounded. He rushed through the ER toward the locker room where doctors changed from civilian clothes to white or blue scrubs, the baggy uniforms of their trade. He saw five of the dead lined on the floor against a wall. Three of them were uncovered. Except for the fact that they were in the torn remnants of the casual clothes of Sunday tourists-the thick-soled walking shoes favored by Europeans, Abercrombie & Fitch safari pants and t-shirts with names and slogans stenciled on them-the bodies were identical to the torn bodies of the dead soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan: ripped faces, torsos with livid holes, legs cut to the exposed bones.

In the locker room, Gabriel swiftly shed the clothes he’d put on four hours earlier for his Sunday walk with Oliver. He had managed to call Cameron Kennedy Dewar, his partner, to ask him to retrieve Oliver and take him home. He told Cam to stay away from the area around the museum where rumors still swept that more explosives were planted somewhere in the vicinity.

The clothes he had worn were as bloody as the clothes of the wounded he had treated on the horrific steps. He dropped them to the floor in front of his locker as he put on the immaculate scrubs. His pants were unusually heavy: the thick bracelet he’d removed from his first, badly injured patient was still in his left pocket. Gabriel remembered that the wounded man hadn’t carried a wallet. He put his own wallet, a comb, the keys to the apartment, and the bracelet he’d removed from the first wounded person he treated into the roomy pockets of his scrubs. And then he trotted back to the nearby emergency room.

More wounded had arrived in the ER in the five minutes Gabriel needed to change and wash his hands and face. The level and intensity of noise had escalated with the new arrivals. Doctors and nurses were shouting in the din of the cries and moans of the injured. He grabbed the arm of a male nurse who leaned against the nurse’s station as if catching his breath, and tugged him toward an injured woman who was in the stretcher closest to him. The ER was now so completely overwhelmed that it was no longer possible to give priority to the more severely injured. It was a random choice. Everyone looked grievously wounded.

In three hours he treated at least thirty people. This was an endurance contest, his body fed on adrenaline, his mind tempered by experience and good judgment. He had spent hundreds of hours in war treating the injured, but there had been only one three-hour period when he was confronted with as many injured as this.

Just as he was finally preparing to take a break outside in the crisp afternoon air of Central Park across Fifth Avenue from the hospital, he turned to one more patient. It was the man he’d first treated on the museum’s steps. The birthmark that spanned the area below his left eye to the edge of his beard made him instantly recognizable. There was, too, something else about the face. Fleetingly, Gabriel thought the face had the vaguely familiar features of a man he had seen in the grainy cell phone picture he had intended to use to meet a man he believed was named Silas Nasar, an Afghan. Gabriel had been so engrossed by other injured people that he hadn’t once thought about this man. Now it was as though he had come across a person from his long-ago past. And Gabriel was relieved: if the man was still held in the emergency room and had not yet been taken to an operating room or a better-equipped unit elsewhere in the hospital then his injuries were less serious than they had seemed when Gabriel cared for him on the museum steps.

“How do you feel?” Gabriel touched the hand into which the IV needle had been inserted.

The man’s lips were still parched. His black eyes were focused on Gabriel. He whispered in clear English, “Pain, the pain is awful.”

“We’ll give you more painkillers.”

“And water, please.”

Gabriel remembered that he’d placed water from a random plastic bottle to this man’s lips hours earlier. He took a cup of water with a straw from a nearby tray and placed the straw between the man’s lips. He sucked greedily.

Finally Gabriel asked, “Do you remember me?”

The intense eyes kept their focus on Gabriel. Although the man didn’t speak, Gabriel had a sense that somewhere in that pool of pain there was recognition. Gabriel gripped the man’s right hand, trying to give reassurance, comfort. He took the heavy bracelet out of his pocket and gently fastened it to the man’s right wrist. He had never imagined that he would be able to return it.

The patients who had arrived with no names, no wallets, no handbags, no knapsacks, and no passports were identified by numbers and letters written in magic markers on their foreheads. Someone had handwritten Patient X52 on the dark man’s forehead.

“You’ll be all right,” Gabriel said. “I promise.”

Patient X52 squeezed Gabriel’s hand powerfully. Gabriel, who was not certain he knew Patient X52’s name, didn’t erase the magic marker lettering and replace it with the words Silas Nasar.