Free The Mandarin Code by Steve Lewis Page A

entering the confessional, just as a piece of toast, burned beyond recognition, sprang from the toaster. It was his last piece of wholemeal, too.

CHAPTER TWELVE
    Canberra
    THE clean sheets felt pleasant against her skin, soothing and soft. The fresh linen acted as a balm for Catriona Bailey.
    For eighteen months, the Foreign Minister had lain paralysed, her world reduced to a small private hospital room, the hum-and-whirr of life-support machines as familiar as her own voice had been.
    This was her life, lungs, heartbeat. And her prison.
    Medical science had kept her alive, but every day was a battle against despair.
    The small things mattered, sustained her, like the daily change of linen.
    A stroke had robbed her of agility, and she could no longer speak. Her rare condition – locked-in syndrome – meant she was reduced to communicating through the one bodily function she could still control: her eyes.
    Bailey would have descended into madness but for the wonders of the information age that liberated her mind and unshackled her from these life-giving machines. Sanity had come from the computer that turned her eye-movements into words, and the internet that allowed her brilliant mind to wander the world.
    This had allowed her to retain her ministry. She’d become a cause c é l è bre , the disability lobby using her fame to press a weak government to keep her on the frontbench. And the Opposition, led by preening fools, had helped when it announced plans to deny her a parliamentary pair. It had been forced to retreat under a barrage of outrage, but Bailey feared the Coalition would try again.
    I must be ready.
    There was one other thing that sustained Bailey.
    Revenge.
    In the few quiet hours when she wasn’t blinking commands, or keeping up a steady stream of online banter, she was plotting the demise of the man responsible for her descent to in-patient: Martin Toohey.
    It began with his smash-and-grab plot to steal her prime ministerial crown. Although she’d been tagged the Tungsten Lady, her downfall, swift and unexpected, had been devastating.
    She was convinced her paralysis was directly linked to Toohey’s treachery.
    So the thought of revenge, of making him pay for his duplicity, sustained her. Hope, she’d learned, was a powerful elixir. With hope, miracles could happen.
    I must believe I can walk again. Talk again.
    Now, in the small hours of the Canberra morning, after finishing a discussion on Syria with her online disciples in the United States, she turned her mind to finding a cure for her condition. She scoured the internet for the latest information on anyone who had recovered from locked-in syndrome.
    The news was largely bad. The syndrome was rare, usually the result of a stroke which damaged the ventral pons at the base of the brain. It left sufferers paralysed and needing life support. Even medical journal articles admitted it was the stuff of nightmares.
    Bailey read one from the Texas Medical Association that neatly described how she felt.
    Imagine waking from a deep sleep to find yourself fully conscious but unable to move any voluntary muscles save for the muscles that control your vertical eye movements. You can see, hear, smell, taste . . . However, you are unable to speak or make any vocalizations at all. You are, in essence, locked in your own body. This scenario is not a fantasy that Rod Sterling would have written for a Twilight Zone episode but a recognized, though rare, neuropsychological syndrome.
    Enough of that.
    Bailey knew the problem all too well. What she was searching for were solutions.
    The gold standard was Kate Allatt, a forty-year-old who had almost completely recovered after two years. But Allatt was so rare as to be unique. Bailey feared she would never regain her old abilities.
    But there has been progress.
    Hours of painful therapy had seen some movement return to her hands. And as she tested the long disused muscles in her neck and back