DESPITE AN UNFINISHED agenda in their official talks, the German Chancellor had graciously proposed a raincheck on the dinner he knew had been elaborately set up in the State Dining Room. President Foster, though grateful for his old friend’s consideration, declined to postpone, concerned that Kurt’s voters might read it as yet another American snub, even though this time there was a perfectly understandable reason.
But as soon as was decent, Bobby pushed his chair back to stand. For an awkward moment his guests shuffled, unsure of whether to rise as well, but he motioned for them to be still. He put on one of his famous smiles and walked over to the stone mantel, to George Healy’s famous portrait of President Lincoln. Below the great man’s contemplative chin-on-hand, eyes-to-the-distance pose, Foster stood tall, and his own eyes glimmered with grace. He was in his element and nodded to the First Lady, reminding her what a thrill it still was for them both to be here.
He fingered the inscription carved into the mantelpiece. “John Adams,” he said, “wrote this on his second night in the White House… ‘I pray Heaven to Bestow the Best of Blessings on This House and on All that shall hereafter Inhabit it. May none but honest and Wise Men ever rule under this roof.’ And tonight, a most difficult one for us, we are blessed to have as our guest an honest and wise man who rules under a different roof but who is always welcome under this one.”
Before the Chancellor could push his chair back to respond, one of the President’s aides entered the room and whispered into Foster’s ear.
ISABEL was hooked up to every relevant medical device the hospital possessed and no one dared ask her about health insurance.
Tubes snaked into and out of her in more places than polite company would like to know. The nurse glanced up from the chart to the cardiac monitor. She’d previously given Isabel a short bolus of five cc. per pound of 5-percent dextrose in normal saline and was now administering two-and-a-half cc. per hour as a continuous infusion. She was pleased, still, to see no arrhythmias.
A sweet wintergreen bouquet of birch oil overpowered the antiseptic hospital odour. Coldly known in the trade as methyl salicylate, the nurse had swabbed it over Isabel’s skin as a vasodilator to enlarge her surface blood vessels. It was a strong fragrance even for this ER nurse, but for Isabel it didn’t exist. All she could smell was humidified and warmed oxygen, which the ventilator clamped over her nose and mouth was pumping steadily into her at 40.5°C.
The nurse clicked an oximeter onto the tip of one of Isabel’s fingers. This was a tiny but miraculous device: by shining onto the fingertip a small light beam of a very specific wavelength, it measured the absorption spectrum and estimated the oxygen saturation in her skin’s surface blood vessels.
Dr Cisco was withholding surgery until he was completely satisfied that she wasn’t hypothermic. Sticking to standard practice, the nurse was pumping Isabel intravenously with steady quantities of heated fluid. She checked a few more of the lines on the chart. She also checked the CVP line stuck into the large central vein in Isabel’s neck, connected to a fluid status monitor by a dark pulsing red tube. Given the liquids Isabel was taking, she also needed a urinary bladder catheter and, to monitor her outputs and thus her internal temperature, Isabel’s was connected to a thermistor, a heat sensor.
The nurse slipped the thermometer from under Isabel’s arm. She checked her watch and, happy the patient had been stable for thirty minutes, she poked her head out into the corridor and saw the orderly crouched against the wall reading a copy of the Manifold Tribune. “It’s time,” she called and, together, they sheeted up the gurney to wheel their VIP to surgery.
OUTSIDE the White House, the silence of the night whooped to a roar as the long rotor blades of the President’s helicopter levitated its payload to join up with the decoy choppers already hovering above. Tonight Marine One was the VH-60, a modified Blackhawk with medical evacuation facilities on board.
The President’s immediate destination was Andrews Air Force Base where, with no time to lose, Air Force One was being primed for take-off.
The media that usually got herded in on the President’s trips were nowhere to be seen. When they woke up and discovered what they’d missed, especially if it leaked that he’d flown off in the VH-60, they’d be grizzling about more than a skipped flight.
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