LITMIR.BIZ

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how it was going to be from now on, huh? She should have felt relieved, but she only ached with disappointment. Losing that fierce hunger that ate her up, made her soar with giddy gratification... “Meet Captain Harry Styles.”

      Giving herself a mental shake, she shook the captain’s hand. Vidal went on. “Harry is our operations manager and the best pilot on planet earth.”

      The tall blond man guffawed. “That’s right, Dr St James. And Vidal can tell no lies.”

      Nice man. A few years older than Vidal, open, with loads of positive energy. Not like the debilitating electricity Vidal generated. She liked him at once. Her smile warmed, tension seeping out of her. “Cassandra, please. Dr St James is a mouthful.”

      “With pleasure, Cassandra. Lovely name for a lovelier lady. My opinion of surgeons is fast changing.” Harry winked at Vidal.

      Some intensity entered Vidal’s blank expression as he looked at his friend, yet there wasn’t even the shadow of a smile to answer the man’s wide grin. The Vidal she’d known hadn’t been given to smiling. Come to think of it, he hadn’t smiled at her at all so far. Not even when he’d been intent on seducing her. He’d scorched her to the bone with his blatant desire, but no smiles.

      “It would have been scary if you found me lovely, Harry.” Vidal’s dry answer brought another guffaw from Harry. Vidal’s lips twisted. She couldn’t call that a smile either. “So, Cassandra, I presume you’ve met everyone?”

      She shook her head. “No. I boarded the Jet after a six-hour wait in Los Angeles airport and fell asleep the moment I hit my seat. I woke up when we landed in New York then went right back to sleep the rest of the way to Madrid. I haven’t gone over the Jet either. Just studied the schematics and leafed through my job description.”

      “That’s what mission leaders are for. We’ll go over everything in detail together, the technical matters as well as the mission specs.” Vidal turned to Harry. “How about introducing your flight crew to Cassandra now?”

      “Sure,” Harry said, and picked up the mike.

      She stopped him with a hand on his arm. “Please, no. Let me get to know them during the trip, one by one. If you line them up and fire names at me, they’ll just spill out of my other ear.”

      “Sounds like a good plan.” Harry grinned at her.

      “Realistic at least,” was Vidal’s dry rejoinder. “I’ve met only a few here, too. So, what would you advise, Harry? Should I brief everyone and lay down the ground rules now, or later after take-off?”

      “You go ahead now. It’ll be another half-hour before take-off,” Harry said.

      “Call everyone for me, then.” He turned those cool eyes on her. “After you.”

      Smiling a goodbye at Harry, she preceded Vidal out of the cockpit, almost bumping into the man entering it in her haste to move away from him. Murmuring a greeting to Sean McMahon, the co-pilot she’d already met, she almost shouted for Vidal to keep away from her. But he was away now, a few footsteps from her. Yet his aura was all around her. She finally flopped into her seat, the one she’d chosen in the third row, shaking with relief at having put a few meters between them.

      By now, Harry’s page had brought the flight’s medical volunteers and all other personnel flocking to their seats. Vidal stood in the left aisle, beside the huge screen facing the seating area.

      He started immediately. “Good morning, everyone. For those who don’t know me, my name is Vidal Santiago. I’m your mission leader and I’m what everyone likes to call a plastic surgeon. I don’t know why—I haven’t operated on any dolls yet. I prefer the label of reconstructive surgeon, but who am I to argue with common opinion?” He paused as chuckles rose, then went on. “Before I give you a quick run-through of our mission and our facilities, let me thank each and every one of you for being here today. You could have been somewhere else making money, or at least sleeping in your own beds every night.”

      He nodded to Louisa, the nurse Cassandra had spent the hours at the airport with, and she handed him a baton and nodded to a flight attendant.

      The lights dimmed and the screen lit up, turning Vidal into a towering silhouette. The sight thumped in Cassandra’s chest, making it hard to breathe, to understand a word he said.

      She tried harder, heard him saying, “I’m sorry for all the time you lost and the confusion over your roles and the mission’s schedule. The mess-up and the last-minute changes are all my fault, I’m afraid. But you have an idea about the mission and now I’m going to use this slide show to recap everything, make the transition from the theoretical to the practical and give you a clear overview of what this mission entails.”

      He unfolded the baton to its two-foot telescoping length, rapped it onto his other palm, held it there like a principal addressing his third-graders.

      “First, some boasting. No matter what other agencies tell you to the contrary, our Jet Hospital is the largest, fully equipped, self-contained airborne hospital ever built. We’re a one hundred per cent non-religious humanitarian effort and our mission is unequivocal: we’re citizens of the world and the Jet Hospital will be available to help the sick and needy of any nation.” He paused, then drawled, “Do inform me if I’m boring you to tears. My bite is worse than my bark, but, then, you’re all brave people or you wouldn’t be here in the first place. No contenders? Hmm—the kind of team I like to lead.”

      A ripple of laughter echoed. Cassandra bristled. Mostly because she found her lips twitching, too. So the man had a sense of humor. When had he grown one? Or had he had it grafted?

      “OK, after that back-patting we’ve all yet to earn, let’s get down to some hard facts. Louisa?” The first slide flicked on the screen. A cut-through diagram of the Jet Hospital. “I’ll be predictable and go from front to back. Behind the cockpit, the Jet has the crew transportation-educational center we’re currently in, which has a seating capacity of ninety. We’re below that number now, but as we land in our target countries and patients and local medical personnel join us on board, we might have to break out the folding beach chairs. I hope you brought your own.”

      Another ripple of laughter. He didn’t wait for it to die down and went on, commenting on each slide as it came up. “These are the dental, ophthalmology, ENT—ear, nose, throat—stations. Here’s the trauma-triage area, the minor surgical-examination area, the pre-operative and recovery area with fourteen hospital beds. And last, in the back, the four surgical suites. Our facilities are state of the art, with the latest technology in diagnostic equipment, laparoscopic and arthroscopic surgical equipment and a complete pharmacy.”

      “You mean we have a CT machine beneath all those covers?” Joseph Ashton, the mission’s head anesthetist, whom Cassandra had met briefly before boarding, asked.

      “Give us a break, will you, Joseph? We’ve got everything, apart from CT and MRI machines— space limitations, you understand.”

      “And how complete is the pharmacy?” a man she didn’t know asked.

      “As complete as they come.”

      Get to the important stuff, she was about to scream. She wanted this little reconnaissance over and Vidal out of her sight. And earshot.

      “Are we going to talk about the mission details?” She was aware of everyone turning to look at her. She lowered her voice, injected neutrality in it. “Up until yesterday, there hasn’t been a definite itinerary. And what about the case load and distribution of responsibilities?”

      He turned his eyes on her in the semi-darkness. Did they glow or was she hallucinating? Probably both.

      “After Casablanca we go to Muscat, Oman; Hyderabad, India; Tashkent, Uzbekistan; and Baku, Azerbaijan. As for our case load, those have been preselected by our partnering medical facilities in each of these countries, on the basis of complexity and unavailability of proper treatment options locally. So your guess is as good as mine. Among us we do have

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