Scorpion Scheme Read online

  "He's seizing!" a man shouted, and then someone ripped the beige curtains closed, cutting us off.

  23

  "WTF," said Tucker.

  "I know." I'd never listened to a code from behind a curtain before. Doesn't get any worse than that.

  "WT actual F," he bit out, hands fisted. He clearly wanted to punch someone.

  "You want to run down to the pharmacy for gloves so we can try to get back in there?" I'd wait outside on the infinitesimal chance that Dr. Sharif pulled me back in, since I was the one doing acute care today.

  The curtain shifted, and at least four learners left resus, including Rudy. Bad sign. Tucker crossed toward them before Rudy shook his head.

  Tucker retreated.

  "We're all persona non grata?" I reached for my phone. "Isabelle keeps saying how important we are. Maybe we should get Sarquet Industries to throw their weight around here." I pressed the phone icon, and my phone began to purr.

  "Hope," said Tucker.

  "You want Youssef? I feel like we should bring in the biggest guns from the get go, but I'm willing to use him as a plan B."

  Tucker touched my wrist as Isabelle's liquid voice poured into my ear. "Hello, darling. How are you?"

  "Hi Isabelle, not good. We've got a few issues. One of the patients can't pay, but this is a life and death situation."

  "Oh, I'm so sorry to hear that. They should speak to the billing department and work out an arrangement."

  "Isabelle." I made a conscious effort to slow down and speak clearly, since Tucker has accused me of mumbling. I couldn't mess this up. "Did you hear me? This is life and death. As we speak."

  "Yes, that's tragic. I sincerely hope they can work something out. Is everything else to your satisfaction?"

  I pulled the phone away from my ear to stare at it, as if that would force her to give me a different answer. Tucker was already on his phone too, so he couldn't help. I retreated toward the doctors' lounge. "I can't provide good medical care by withholding it from people who don't have the money."

  She sighed. "Oh my goodness, you have a beautiful heart. I'm sure so many people will be inspired by your attitude."

  Huh? After a moment, I collected myself enough to say, "We don't need an inspiring attitude. This patient needs money for medical care."

  "I find it refreshing. I really do. So … youthful."

  I exhaled on a count of four and tried again. "Isabelle, I know that Sarquet Industries has considerable financial resources. If this family can't cover the hospital bill, is it possible that your company might do it? It would be excellent publicity."

  "Darling, that's so thoughtful of you. You think so highly of Sarquet Industries. We appreciate you thinking of us, we really do."

  I shook my phone instead of screaming. Tucker didn't even look up from his own phone, and I made a superhuman effort to keep it profesh. "Isabelle, is there any chance Sarquet Industries will pay for this medical care and save someone's life?"

  "Of course I can ask, but I must warn you not to get your hopes up. After all, it's a slippery slope. There are so many people in need. We couldn't possibly look after all of them."

  My throat tightened. "If Tucker and I left, you'd have more money for charity work."

  "Dr. Sze!" For the first time, she sounded genuinely alarmed. "Please don't think that way. Your travel and accommodations are not part of—" She bit off her words.

  "Part of what?"

  "They come from a different budget. At any rate, both of you hardly cost anything. We have connections in the travel industry, and tourist numbers have decreased since 2011. It's our pleasure and our honour to welcome you."

  "Isabelle, I can't sit here as some sort of mascot. I want to make real change, or I might as well go home."

  "No, please don't, Dr. Sze! I will discuss this. Send me the patient's billing details, with his or her permission, and I'll see if I can make some sort of exception, this time and this time only. Is that clear?"

  "Yes. Thank you, Isabelle."

  "You're welcome, Dr. Sze." She hung up.

  My heart galloped as fast as the little boy's. I'd gotten what I wanted, but why? How?

  I rolled my shoulders back and turned toward resus. The little girl rushed up to me, her dark hair swinging and her small, brown face alight. "Can you come back and help my brother?"

  "Hi, sweetie. I would love to." I glanced up past her at the grandmother, who'd followed quietly in her black robes. "We need gloves and, uh, the chief of the emergency department, Dr. Sharif, has taken over his care right now. What's your brother's name?"

  "Hadi."

  "That's a great name," said Tucker, joining us and smiling down at her. "A strong name."

  "You think so?" said the girl.

  "Absolutely," said Tucker. "I wish I had a name like that. My real first name is John. In English, it's also slang for a toilet."

  The little girl covered her mouth. The grandmother looked like she was trying not to laugh at their comical expressions. I willed Tucker not to tell them that it's also slang for the guys who hire prostitutes.

  "So many people are named John. It's boring. So, starting around when I was your age, I told my friends, 'I'm Tucker.' Do you think you could call me that?"

  The girl glanced at me, then back at Tucker. "But you're a doctor?"

  "Sure, you can call me Dr. Tucker if you want. What's your name?"

  "Amal," she said.

  "Oh, like the lawyer who married George Clooney!" I exclaimed.

  Tucker, Amal, and even the grandmother blinked at me.

  "Sorry, maybe George Clooney's not popular in Egypt," I said.

  "We're from Yemen, but we know about Amal Clooney. She's the barrister!" said the girl.

  "Yes, she argued on behalf of the three Al-Jazeera journalists, including the Canadian, Mohamed Fahmy," said Tucker, offering her a high five.

  Amal smacked his hand enthusiastically while I secretly wished I could Google that. How embarrassing when a kid knows more about world politics than you do.

  "You speak very good English," said Tucker, which is a phrase I heard too often from white people who assumed it was my second language.

  "My big brother taught me. We have to make money," Amal informed Tucker gravely. "My brothers can go out and work, but not me."

  "Nowadays, women work too," I said.

  Amal shook her head. "Not us."

  "We consider it work if you cook and clean and raise children too." I included the grandmother in my smile, and I thought I saw her eyes crinkle through the window of the niqab.

  "But we need money for Hadi," said Amal.

  "I agree. I'm asking our friends if they'll donate money from Canada for him," said Tucker, waving his phone.

  "Are there rules about crowdfunding for patients?" I whispered.

  He shrugged.

  Great.

  "Oh, Dr. Tucker, you think they might?" Amal jumped up and all but clapped her little hands.

  "They might. We'll try."

  Amal began explaining it to her grandmother, interrupting herself to pepper Tucker with questions.

  When she simmered down, I said, "Amal, I have some questions for your parents. There may be a company that can help pay for Hadi's treatment, but I need their permission to send them your brother's bill. Could you bring me to them?"

  Amal clapped in excitement and translated for her grandmother before taking my hand with her cool, little fingers. "Yes. Let's go. We need to help my brother. Help him against the scorpion."

  24

  "The scorpion?" I repeated, as we motored toward the nursing station. "You think he was bitten by a scorpion?"

  She nodded her head, turning her gorgeous brown eyes on me as her fingers tightened on mine. "Hadi had nightmares about them. They like dark places, you know. He used to cry and shake and say, 'Don't make me go down there!' But he had to. And now he's dead."

  "He's not dead!" I exclaimed. "At least he wasn't when we left. Let's go check on him n
ow."

  "That's true. And Amal, scorpions sting instead of biting," Tucker said, coming up behind us with the grandmother.

  Oops. I was the one who'd said bitten. I flushed and didn't realize I'd squeezed Amal's hand too hard until she squeaked and pulled it away.

  Tucker paused in front of cubicle number 5. "They use their tails instead of their mouths. They're arachnids, like spiders. Do you really think a scorpion stung him?"

  Her tiny chin nodded up and down as she fell into step with him and her grandmother instead. "His nightmare came true."

  Tucker and I exchanged a look. Muhamed had told me scorpions don't live in Cairo. What was fact vs. fancy in a seven-year-old's brain?

  "We should ask the team if it's a possibility," I murmured, as nurses bustled around us and a patient in the hall yelled.

  Tucker didn't answer. We both knew that if anyone was going to ask Dr. Sharif about scorpions, it would be him, since the chief somehow couldn't stand me. And if Tucker reported a scorpion sting based on a seven-year-old's report of a five-year-old's nightmare, we'd get laughed out of the department.

  Tucker smiled at Amal. "I'll take a look at his ankle. That's what your mom was pointing at. Then I'll ask your dad."

  I recalled that smear of blood on his miniature ankle. A scorpion sting? Or something else?

  All four of us paused in front of trauma bay #2's beige curtain.

  A gaunt man called out to us from a chair on the left. He only wore pants and sandals, so I got a good view of his ribs jutting out of his chest.

  "He looks sick," said Amal. "When you die, they weigh your heart with a feather."

  Uh oh. I'd heard of this Egyptian legend, too. "They used to believe that a long time ago," I said.

  Amal nodded. "If your heart is heavier than the feather, they throw your heart to a monster who eats it. And then you disappear!"

  "We don't believe in monsters. We believe in science and medicine to help your brother," Tucker told her. "Let me go in and talk to the other doctors. I'll see what I can find out."

  "Great. Thanks, Dr. Tucker. I'll see if other patients need help, too." I turned to Amal. "When your parents come out, I have to talk to them about the bill, okay? In case the company can help you pay."

  She beamed. "Thank you, doctors!"

  "You're welcome."

  Luckily, I'd been officially assigned to another ER doctor, not Dr. Sharif, but Dr. Kyrollos. She was female, maybe 55, stocky, and no-nonsense in a white coat and bright red lipstick. No head scarf.

  "I heard about you," Dr. Kyrollos told me, unsmiling.

  Behind her, a thin, dark male doctor laughed and added something that sounded like "sarudi."

  "Sa-Rudy?" I repeated. "You want to talk to Dr. Rudy?"

  Dr. Kyrollos's spine straightened, and she snapped at that doctor in Arabic. He turned away, irritated.

  Yet another mystery. One I couldn't solve as I picked up my next chart, a pedestrian who'd been hit by a car and had an open tib-fib fracture. Then a frail woman in severe renal failure who couldn't afford dialysis. The gaunt man in the hallway thought ghosts were talking to him.

  So I was relieved to spot Hadi an hour later, strapped to a stretcher and ready for transfer to a pediatric hospital.

  Even if Hadi still seemed unconscious.

  25

  "Hadi nearly suffocated," said Tucker that night, in our hotel. "The sand must have caved in on him."

  My guy's serious face and tone contrasted with his spiky post-shower hair, wilder than Albert Einstein's.

  I sat on on our bed and set two plastic forks on top of our Styrofoam box of day-old koshary, which balanced on the bedspread between us. "I saw the sand on him. But why was he underground?"

  "I don't know." Tucker tossed an old paperback, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, onto his bedside table before he folded his legs to sit across from me on the bed. "I asked the mom and dad a few times, in Arabic, until the rest of the team told me to leave it alone."

  "They were probably more worried about his neuro status," I agreed. "Did they end up stabilizing him?"

  "I only got a quick look at him and the monitor. He was maintaining his O2 sat with nasal prongs at the time, and his BP was stable. Then they asked me to go to the ambulatory side, so I don't know any more than you do."

  We both stared at the closed box of koshary. Neither of us had worked up an appetite yet. At the hospital, I'd barely managed to scribble down my Egyptian phone number and hand it to the grandmother before the paramedics came for Hadi.

  No one had called me. For all I knew, Isabelle would keep blowing me off, and the family could not afford pediatric ICU care.

  "What do you think of this elective so far?" I said.

  Tucker flashed a smile at me. "Definitely the weirdest. And that's saying a lot with you around"

  "Did you get any word on a scorpion, or what made the mark on his ankle?"

  Tucker picked up his fork and drummed it against his palm. "I didn't want to ask and look even more stupid."

  "Understood." I took a deep breath. This might be a good time to tell him about the Becker notes. You're not stupid. We got clues! I asked him another question first. "Hey, this is random, but does it mean anything if you add 'sa' onto someone's name? Like 'sa-hope' or 'sa-tucker'? Like in Japan, you'd say Hope-san out of respect?"

  He raised his eyebrows. "Not that I've ever heard. Why?"

  "Oh, just another niggly thing. On the acute side, a guy said 'sarudi.' I wondered if he was talking about Rudy."

  Tucker burst out laughing so hard that I held down the Styrofoam box and utensils to make sure everything didn't fall off the bed. He chortled, "Hope! Sarudi just means Saudi. As in, Saudi Arabian."

  "Well, how am I supposed to know that? Saudi is shorter than Sarudi."

  Tucker shrugged, his shoulders still shaking. "Sorry. I guess I needed a laugh."

  Mmph. I grabbed my fork and threw open the koshary lid for something to do.

  Then I inhaled. The tomato sauce still smelled good. Ali knew what he was doing.

  "Well, even if the medicine sucks, I got a lead on identifying the guy with the cobra bag," said Tucker.

  "How on earth did you find that guy? Seems impossible in a city of 10 million people—double that if you include the suburbs."

  Tucker waggled his eyebrows and gestured at the koshary. "Ladies first."

  I winked at him and managed to balance some rice, macaroni, and lentils on my fork, but spilled them when I speared some fried onions. I shoved what I could in my mouth and said around that, "Not bad!"

  Tucker chewed and grinned. "Yeah, I think there's some vinegar in the sauce. Anyway, for the cobra guy, I posted it on Facebook and Twitter and Instagram and Reddit and Discord and anywhere else. Kevin helped too."

  "My little brother helped you from Canada?"

  "Yeah. Him, Reza, Tori, Mireille, anyone. It doesn't matter, as long as you're boosting the signal. And I had a secret weapon."

  "A billion friends?"

  "Yes! Including Rudy, Maryam and Ali. The Mombergs retweeted it. The dad's recovered part of the vision in his eye, by the way, so that's promising."

  "Phew."

  "I even asked Isabelle and Youssef, but they didn't respond."

  I grabbed my water from the bedside table and sipped it to clear a chick pea from my throat. "So basically you hit up everyone you've ever met?"

  "Exactly! Then I went through all the suggestions and narrowed it down to two." He wiped his hands on a napkin so he could show me a photo.

  I made a face. "That guy looks a bit fatter."

  "And ten years older. But this one … " He moved to the next shot.

  I sucked in my breath as I stared at the screen.

  "Looks juuuuuust right," Tucker drawled.

  I dropped my fork back into the styrofoam box we shared. "Who is he?"

  "According to LinkedIn, Mr. Abdallah Hussein is an Egyptologist and private consultant who has worked for several museums. I messaged
him."

  "Hold up. He works for museums? Like the one that they tried to bomb on Wednesday?"

  Tucker shook his head, shut the box of koshary, and got up to set it in the fridge. "His c.v. isn't up to date, so I'm not sure. In the past ten years, he's had contracts at both the Museum of Egyptian Antiquities, which is in downtown Cairo, and the new one. That's the Grand Egyptian Museum, in Giza, near the Pyramids. The one with the IED."

  "And that's the one Phillip Becker was trying to visit. So maybe the treasure is in the Grand Egyptian Museum, or the key to it is in that cobra bag."

  "That's what I think, too. Occam's Razor: it's the simplest explanation. The problem is proving any of it."

  I shook my head. "It's still amazing! So do you have any contact info for Mr. Abdallah Hussein? Maybe through his publications?" Lead authors list their e-mails.

  "Nah. His last publication was four years ago, and he wasn't the lead author. But he does have a Twitter account, @OsirisPhD." Tucker showed it to me.

  The photo definitely still looked like the same guy, although his hair was a little longer and his face fuller. However, there was a bigger problem. "This page is in Arabic."

  "Ta dah!" Tucker clicked and translated it into English.

  I scrolled through the posts. Lots of them were retweets (RT), reposting other people's articles:

  RT: 10 Plagues of Egypt. Legend or reality?

  I admired his RT'd photo of a green crystal called dioptase which had occasionally been mistaken for emeralds in ancient times. He also retweeted the occasional cat video. He posted one pic of his family. The littlest kid was maybe two.

  Occasionally, he answered people's questions, mostly in English:

  Yes, Osiris death in Nile is basis for belief that drowning in Nile is sacred.

  No, Isis was nursemaid for the sons of the king and queen of Byblos. Isis bathes younger son in fire, trying to make him immortal.

  Someone named @meinklaus replied to that one: lol #IsisFail

  I rolled my eyes. I avoided Twitter because of trolls. Still, I pointed out the obvious. "@OsirisPhD mostly talks about Egyptian history, especially Osiris and Horus." I shot Tucker a look. "Like Phillip Becker."