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someone in the hospital, you’d think they would have known that and been more specific. So it could still be an outsider, a hoax. Maybe one of these protesters. A disgruntled patient. A kid with nothing but time on his hands. God! Why not a little respect for people who have to work for a living?
    Still, there was something about the message that made him uneasy. Something a little too businesslike for your typical wiseass kid. Harry took a swig of his coffee and got up from his desk. Hurrying toward the door, he threw on a blue blazer that hid the slim 9mm Beretta holstered under his armpit. Endocrinology was closest, just down the Pike . Start there.

 
    7:45 A.M.
    Ali O’Day backed through the swinging door of Operating Room Three, her freshly rescrubbed hands held aloft, her face covered with a blue paper surgical mask. The OR was almost back to normal. Golden-haired Kathleen Brown and her television crew had withdrawn to the family lounge, leaving a sole cameraman to shoot the video of the actual operation—footage that would be edited into a segment for that evening’s special edition of Lifeline .
    In her mind, Ali was still facing Kathleen Brown and the pitiless blinking red eye of America Today —endlessly replaying that string of flubs, which was all she could recall of her performance. Why did the right thing to say always occur to her just when it was too late to say it? The experience had left her so flustered that she could hardly think about the operation, and that upset her more than anything. I’ve got to shake this. I can’t afford to lose control, she thought as she snapped a pair of chocolate-colored surgical gloves onto her hands. I musn’t let Jamie down. She looked across the room, toward the still form of Jamie Winslow, barely visible through the drapes and trays. Stay calm, she told herself. Remember that Jamie is what this day is about .
    *   *   *
    Ali had met Jamie a few months before, when his legal guardian, Mrs. Gore, brought him to the Department of Neurosurgery. Five other neurosurgeons had written him off as hopeless, and with good reason. The tumor inside his head was a Grade V on the Spetzler-Martin scale. It was huge, it was deeply entangled with the brain’s vital blood supply, and it nestled directly against what the neurologists referred to as “eloquent cortex”—indispensable parts of the working brain. If it were taken out too abruptly, the gush of new blood into old deserts could have burst the arteries, leaving Jamie paralyzed, speechless, or even locked into an irreversible coma state. There was no question of restoring his eyesight: both sides of his visual center had long since been destroyed by the AVM.
    Every surgeon who had looked at Jamie had concluded the same thing. There was nothing to justify the awful risks of surgery. Yes, there was a big chance that the AVM could kill him some day: it might break open and bleed without warning, or it might simply keep on growing until it had crushed the life-sustaining centers in the brainstem. But that would be in the course of nature. No surgeon wanted this young boy’s death on his own hands. The Hippocratic Oath said it succinctly: “First do no harm.”
    But Jamie Winslow did not have the look of the hopeless. It was hard to give up on him. When Ali first walked into the examining room to meet him, he cocked his head, gave her a big, toothy smile, and asked her whether she had had a good time in California.
    “Yes, I just flew back from San Diego, from the Annual Meeting of the American Association of Neurological Surgeons. It’s like a weeklong school for doctors. How did you know that?”
    “You sound really sleepy. People’s voices go down at the end when they’ve been up all night flying on airplanes.”
    “Yes, I took a red-eye flight. But California?”
    “I can smell the smoke in your hair.”
    “Smoke? What do you mean?”
    “There’s some really big fires burning in Southern California