Free Flashback by Michael Palmer Page B

cleared at the moment the right headlight of hisautomobile made contact with the guardrail. The Chevy, now traveling at nearly ninety miles an hour, tore through the protective steel as if it were cardboard, crossed a narrow stretch of grass and gravel, and then hurtled over the edge of the gorge.
    Strapped to his seat, Andy O’Meara watched the emerald trees flash past. In the fourth second of his fall, he realized what was happening. In the fifth, the Chevy shattered on the jagged rocks below and exploded.

6
    The cafeteria of Ultramed-Davis, like most of the facility, had been renovated in an airy and modern, though quite predictable, style. The interior featured a large, well-provisioned salad bar, and a wall of sliding glass doors opened onto a neat flagstone terrace with a half-dozen cement tables and benches.
    Pleasantly exhausted from his three-hour cervical disc case, Zack sat at the only table partially shaded by an overhanging tree and watched as Guy Beaulieu maneuvered toward him through the lunchtime crowd.
    During the summer Zack had spent as an extern at the then Davis Regional Hospital, Beaulieu had been extremely busy with his practice and with his duties as president of the medical staff. Still, the man always seemed to have enough time to stop and teach, or to reassure a frightened patient, or to console a bereaved family.
    And from that summer on, the surgeons blend of skill and compassion had remained something of a role model for Zack.
    “So,” Beaulieu said as he set down his tray and slid onto the stone bench opposite Zack, “thank you for agreeing to dine with me.”
    “Nonsense,” Zack replied. “I’ve been looking forward to seeing you ever since I got back to town. How is your wife doing? And Marie?”
    “Clothilde, bless her heart, is as good as can be expected, considering the filthy stories she has had to contend with these past two years. And as for Marie, as you may have heard, she grew weary waiting for you to propose and went ahead and married a writer—a poet of all things—from Quebec.”
    Zack smiled. He and Marie Beaulieu had been friends from their earliest days in grammar school, but had never been sweethearts in any sense of the word. “Knowing Marie, I’m sure he’s very special,” he said.
    “You are correct. If she could not have you, then this man, Luc, is one I would have chosen for her. In an age when mostyoung people seem to care for nothing but themselves, he is quite unique—consumed by the need to make a difference. He works for a village newspaper and crusades against all manner of social injustice while he waits for the world to discover his poems.”
    “Kids?”
    “They have two children, and I don’t know how on earth they manage to feed them. But manage they do.”
    “And they’re happy,” Zack said.
    “Yes. Poor and crusading, but happy, and as in love—more so, perhaps—than on the day they were married.”
    Zack held his hands apart. “
C‘est tout ce que conte, nest ce pas?”
    Beaulieu’s smile was bittersweet.
    “Yes,” he said. “That
is
all that matters.” He paused a beat for transition. “So, your old friend Guy Beaulieu is a little short of allies in this place.”
    “So it sounds,” Zack said, picking absently at his salad.
    Beaulieu leaned forward, his eyes and his voice conspiratorial. “There is much going on here that is not right, Zachary,” he whispered, “Some of what is happening is simply wrong. Some of it is evil.”
    Zack glanced about at the newly constructed west wing, at the helipad, at the clusters of nurses and doctors enjoying their noontime breaks on the terrace and inside the cafeteria.
    “You’ll understand, I hope, if I say that I see little evidence of that around me. Could you be more specific?”
    “Your father spoke to you, yes?”
    “Briefly.”
    “So you know about the lies.”
    “I know something of the rumors, if that’s what you mean.”
    Beaulieu leaned even closer. “Zachary, I beg