Patient by Michael Palmer Read Free Book Online

almost universal respect from her colleagues at EMMC, and at last count was the busiest surgeon in the department, next to the bullfrog himself. And finally, she had ARTIE, which, although technically Gilbride’s, was a child she was determined to see into adulthood.
    In the interest of continuing her work, she could handle whatever Gilbride dished out, as long as he didn’t demand she compromise her beliefs too much. But the scene in Tamika’s room had represented a clear-cut escalation in the tension between them. Gilbride had never chastised her in front of a patient before, let alone so harshly.
    She took pains to maintain eye contact with the man and focused on two objectives: first, to defuse his anger before he said something irreparable, and then, to try to find out exactly why he was so steamed over what she had done. The clock over Gilbride’s left shoulder read almost six-thirty. Her chances of making it to the Cavendish Club in time for the bridge game were almost as remote as the chances of her playing well now even if she did.
    “Carl, I’m sorry,” she began, not completely certain for what she was apologizing.
    “You should be. What right did you have to tie up an entire operating room team, plus the radiologists, without clearing it with me?”
    “Bill Wellman had canceled his OR case. The team was just waiting around for their next case, and Pete Roslan—”
    “Dammit, Copeland, I’m not done talking. Why is it you always have the bullshit ready before anyone even has a shovel?”
    “Sorry.”
    “You know, I carry a beeper just like you do. You could have paged me.”
    Jessie could have enumerated the many times Gilbride had gone ballistic because she or one of the other B-listers had paged him for something less than a nuclear spill on Surgical Seven. Instead, she muttered another apology. This fire was simply going to have to burn itself out.
    “You’ve done good work in the lab,” he went on. “I have no complaints about that. But I think you tend to forget that I had started developing ARTIE before you ever came on board here. Those grants that pay for you, Skip, and all that equipment are my grants. The patents on ARTIE have my name on them. You aren’t his adopted mother, you’re his nursemaid and his tutor. If you forget that fact, you’ll be history around here. I promise you that.”
    Jessie sighed.
    “Exactly what did I do that upset you so?” she asked.
    “You brought our research out into the open, that’s what you did. How many people were there today?”
    “I still don’t—”
    “How many?”
    “I don’t know. Ten or eleven.”
    “Jesus. I’m surprised you didn’t insist on having someone from anesthesia there, too.”
    Jessie came perilously close to admitting that, in fact, a friend from that department had stopped by, and would have returned had the procedure not been terminated so abruptly. But why was Gilbride so upset about the number of observers? The chief didn’t wait for her to ask.
    “Copeland, operating with ARTIE prematurely may have jeopardized the whole project—on more than one level. There’s a race going on here—a race that ultimately could be worth hundreds of millions of dollars, to say nothing of a place in medical history. It’s damn serious business—serious enough that the police came to see me last week to question me about where I was when that fatuous womanizing Sylvan Mays got himself killed; serious enough that Terwilliger and his group at Baylor are bad-mouthing us and our work every chance they get, and may have cost us grants I’ve applied for from the NIH and the MacIntosh Foundation. I was expecting to hear from both of them weeks ago, and there hasn’t been a word. Then there’s that son of a bitch at Stanford. His robotics work may or may not be as far along as ARTIE. The way that he holds his cards so close to the vest, it’s hard to tell. They may actually be ready to go with patients. I don’t know. But I do