Sea of Shadows eBook - Navy Thriller.com

WASHINGTON, DC
FRIDAY; 18 MAY
4:42 PM EDT
CHAPTER 31
The laminated hospital ID badge hanging from the breast pocket of his
lab coat identified him as Dr. Richard Warren. He looked like any one of
the fifty young interns and residents who frequented the wards on the third
floor of Columbia Memorial. He wore the usual stethoscope draped
around his neck, and his face had the slightly harried appearance that
seemed to mark most doctors young enough to still be scrambling for a
foothold in the world of HMO-driven medicine. But his name was not
Richard Warren, and he was not a doctor. And the two men who walked
behind him were not hospital orderlies, despite their green scrubs and
hospital IDs.
To the casual eye, all three men blended in perfectly with their
surroundings. A careful observer might have noticed that the trio moved
with the animal grace of athletes, or that their eyes swept the hallway with
the mechanical precision of radar scanners. But—thanks to the closure of
DC General, the patient load at Columbia Memorial was nearly forty
percent over rated capacity, and the third-floor staff had its hands full just
staying on top of emergencies.
The man who was not Dr. Warren stopped at the nurse’s station and
flipped through the rack of stainless steel clipboards until he found the
chart for Room 31, Bed 4. The floor nurse glanced up from her own
paperwork just long enough to register his lab coat and ID. He nodded
without speaking, and she returned to her work.
The patient’s name was Isma’il Hamid. His diagnosis was listed as
diffuse peritonitis and inflammatory bowel obstruction, secondary to
perforated appendicitis. He was on a regimen of high-dose antibiotics and,
according to his chart, was responding well to treatment.
The counterfeit doctor closed the chart and returned it to the rack. His
pair of bogus orderlies followed him down the hall toward Room 31.
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