Beneath the Wake: A Dr. Zol Szabo Medical Mystery

By Ross Pennie

The eagerly anticipated fourth medical thriller in the award-winning series

Epidemic investigator Dr. Zol Szabo hopes an extended cruise on the Indian Ocean with his girlfriend and his son will salve the wounds of the rough times they’ve been weathering at home. As they set sail coddled in unaccustomed luxury on the Coral Dynasty, things below deck are a little less sunny for the ship’s physician. Dr. Noah Ferguson reckons that bandaging the wounds of the crew’s seedy missteps is just part of a job that comes with a fair share of loneliness, but he’s increasingly frustrated that the most rewarding aspect of his practice must remain unspoken. When a mysterious microbe cuts a lethal swath through the crew’s quarters, Noah enlists a reluctant Zol, who must put his vacation on hold to investigate the illness before it consumes everyone on board. As the body count climbs, it becomes apparent that everybody carries a secret in international waters. Miles from land, the captain makes the rules, and anything inconvenient gets tossed overboard to disappear beneath the wake.

• Language: English
• Publisher: ECW Press
• Release date: May 9, 2017
• ISBN: 9781773050201

Book preview

Copyright

CHAPTER 1

Noah Ferguson had no illusions about his profession. He knew it was mostly booze, carelessness, and anonymous sex that kept him in his job. And the sailor standing opposite him in the infirmary’s harsh light epitomized that triumvirate in good measure.

Noah aimed his attention at the bandage wrapped around the man’s right forearm. Though it was smudged with some sort of dark greasy substance, it was basically intact. Not too much blood had seeped through overnight, which meant the seventeen sutures he’d put in yesterday might be doing their job. He pulled out a chair. Okay, Tony. Have a seat. And let’s see what that souvenir from the fine city of Perth looks like today.

The man blinked at his injured limb. His lids widened with apprehension as sheepishness tightened his lips.

Noah shrugged out of his suit jacket and took a fresh surgical gown from a cupboard. He slipped the thing over his white shirt, favourite batik tie, and freshly pressed trousers. He lifted a pair of sterile gloves from a drawer and pulled them on.

At about this time yesterday afternoon, just as the ship was about to quit Australia’s west coast, Tony had shown up with a bloodied towel wrapped around his forearm. A few minutes’ detailed inspection revealed the slash was more show than substance. Tony’s hand was intact, and despite all the blood, no arteries were severed. No tendons either. The laceration had limited itself more or less to the skin on the underside of the forearm. A defensive wound. Inflicted, no doubt, by a shattered beer bottle in the hand of an irate husband. Noah pictured a miner arriving home unexpectedly from the region’s iron pits or gold fields.

Today, as he unwrapped the bandage, Noah asked, What brand of beer was it? Foster’s or Four-X?

Tony wiped the sweat from his forehead with his good hand. Sorry, Doc. The curtains, they were closed. Too dark to tell. Filipinos didn’t do irony or sarcasm. Their specialties were humility and graciousness, too often performed to their disadvantage.

He hadn’t needed to check Tony’s chart for his tetanus-shot status. The sailor was a regular here at the infirmary, and Noah knew his stories by heart. How his brain and good manners had helped him escape the slums along Manila’s filthy Pasig River. But Tony was still single, something of an oddity among the ship’s Asian crew, most of whom claimed to have spouses or romantic partners back home.

No matter how many onshore brawls Tony got tangled in, or how many times Noah had to stitch him up, neither Captain Mario nor the cruise line’s owner, Aslan Aksoy, would ever send Tony packing. A fix-anything guy like Tony Castillo was a valuable asset to a five-star operation like Coral Cruises. Out of seemingly nothing, the man could repair anything on a vessel, from the stovetops in the galleys to the autoclave in the infirmary. At sea, and at rinky-dink ports from Suva to Banjul, Alofi to Lüderitz, replacement parts were impossible to come by. A mechanical virtuoso like Tony — who was always sober and obliging aboard the ship — was worth his weight in a thousand onshore skirmishes with angry husbands. The odd thing was, he had no imagination. He was hopeless at constructing anything new or coming up with inventive modifications to make something work better. He was strictly a repairman.

The only thing that could get Tony booted off the ship before you could say Imelda Marcos’s outlandish shoe collection would be a positive result on the obligatory annual HIV test. With the high-spirited partner swapping shoreside and below decks, the company couldn’t afford to be seen as a breeding ground for AIDS. Not with 150 upper-deck suites coddling political conservatives and industrial magnates. Noah prayed that Tony devoted as much attention to protecting his dick as he did to maintaining the mechanical innards of the Coral Dynasty.

Tony winced as Noah pulled the last of the bandage away from the sutured wound.

Looks great, my friend. No bleeding. No infection.

The man let out a long breath of relief.

Let me see you curl your fingers into your palm. Noah checked the strength of Tony’s grip by pulling against the digits. Good. Now, straighten them.

Tony beamed shyly and dropped his gaze. He understood mechanics and could tell his hand was going to be fine. No harm done. He looked around the room, his eyes questioning. No nurses helping today, Doc?

Anya and Cornelia, still under thirty, hailed from Amsterdam. Not only competent, they were open-minded and discreet, qualities he’d recognized when he’d hired them on behalf of the cruise line three months earlier. Aboard the Coral Dynasty, discretion mattered more than almost anything else. Except, perhaps, for a steady flow of vintage champagne above stairs and draft beer below.

They’re out on a cabin call.

Actually, they were checking on a crew member who’d been wobbly on his feet with infectious mononucleosis for the past couple of days. One of his cabin mates had called to say that Jung looked worse and wasn’t talking.

Noah’s stomach tightened. It wouldn’t have happened a third time, would it? He told himself that no, the odds against it were way too high. And a good month had passed since the others.

He completed Tony’s dressing, sent him on his way, then scribbled a note in the chart, grateful not to be encumbered with the electronic medical record plaguing his onshore colleagues. You couldn’t beat the high seas for certain efficiencies like the brief handwritten note. Here in international waters, he was free to work for the direct benefit of his patients and give special attention to those on his Endangered List. He had no need to please cadres of lawmakers and petty bureaucrats pontificating from their computers in cozy offices in cities like Toronto, Louisville, and Henley-on-Thames.

But when he looked up and saw Anya’s stricken face in the doorway, he nearly had to put his head between his knees.

On the face of it, the cause of Jung Lee’s symptoms had seemed clear. Infectious mononucleosis was a rite of passage for a young man of twenty-seven. But Noah had crossed his fingers when he’d given the affable sound-and-light technician the diagnosis. Within the past six weeks, two other crew members — Peng, an apprentice in the engine room, and Wu, an assistant in the laundry — had died in their cabins just a day or two after Noah had told them they had a touch of infectious mono. He’d promised them the disease would run its course and the symptoms would resolve; they might be tired for a few weeks, but eventually they’d be as good as new. Horrified by their unexpected deaths, he’d scrutinized their bodies here in the treatment room. He’d never been trained to carry out a formal autopsy like a pathologist, so he stopped short of slicing into their body cavities. Instead, he performed head-to-toe physical examinations and recorded his findings. The corpse of Peng, the first man to die, revealed the swollen glands and enlarged spleen Noah’s fingers had felt when the mechanic had presented two days earlier at sick parade. But he found nothing else amiss. No needle tracks, no trauma, no buttery xanthelasma around the eyes to suggest a premature heart attack from high cholesterol. Noah wrote Infectious Mononucleosis on Peng’s notification-of-death form. Infectious mono was almost never fatal, but medical practice had taught him to expect the unexpected. He’d been almost certain he’d never see a similar case for the rest of his career.

The Malaysian authorities at the port of Sandakan in northeastern Borneo took Noah’s paperwork at face value, completed their own official death certificate using his diagnosis, and allowed the cruise line to ship Peng’s body home to China.

The ship’s hotel director, backed by the captain, announced to the crew that Peng had committed suicide by drug overdose. No specific drug was named, and marital problems were suggested. Such subterfuge left a bad taste in Noah’s mouth, but he understood the officers’ motivation. A crew member’s death from contagious infection would be unsettling in the cramped quarters below decks. A colleague’s suicide would be seen as a clean death without implications for the health of anyone else. Noah had kept his mouth shut and had completed the official paperwork with what he honestly considered the correct cause of Peng’s death. His conscience had been clear.

A week later, he’d found himself shocked and puzzled to be faced with writing the same diagnosis on the deceased laundry worker’s form. But when he examined Wu’s corpse, the armpit lymph nodes were uncharacteristically soft, as if filled with fluid. He made a small incision with the tip of a scalpel blade and released a gush of brown pus. Anya and Cornelia recoiled at the sight of the mess spurting onto the table. Wu’s hands were severely chapped, and his forearms were crisscrossed by at least two dozen scratches. The rash on the hands could be explained by repeated exposure to water and laundry detergent, but the deep excoriations were a puzzle. Cocaine could make users so itchy they scratched themselves raw, and you could miss the underlying needle tracks if it wasn’t being snorted. Was the laundry guy injecting cocaine with dirty needles and contaminating his blood with pus-forming bacteria? Noah printed Septic Shock on Wu’s form. The Indonesians who received the body in Bali didn’t care about the specific cause of death as long as there were no signs of violence on the corpse and Noah’s form was accompanied by a personal gift. Gustave, the ship’s hotel director, spread the story that Wu had been crushed to death in the laundry by a piece of machinery he’d improperly secured during a patch of rough weather.

When his vision cleared, Noah looked at Anya. She seemed frozen to the doorway. Is Jung . . .

She nodded. For a couple of hours, at least.

CHAPTER 2

High Seas Blogger

The Coral Dynasty cruise ship, Stateroom 412

The Indian Ocean, off the coast of Western Australia

Tuesday, November 17, 5:47 p.m.

My name is Travis Andersen. If you’ve read my other blogs, you know I’m fourteen and live in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. You also know that words zoom inside my head like Chevys in a NASCAR race and almost never come out. Yep, I don’t speak. At least not through my lips. I hate charades and refuse to get sucked into making more than the occasional face or hand gesture. In school, I get straight A’s without uttering a word in class. Or between classes. Or after class, for that matter.

My mother says I used to talk a blue streak but I stopped on my first day of kindergarten. I have what my doctors call SM, selective mutism. I only verbalize when I’m alone with my mother or my best friend, Max Szabo. I used to talk to my sister, Jessica, but she turned into a witch with a capital B last summer. The day she turned sixteen. Everything I said — and I do mean everything — made her mad. Now we communicate by Instagram, Facebook, and texting. Her dirty looks aside, we enjoy a comfortable silence when we find ourselves together in the same room. I believe it’s called a détente.

If you’re still reading this, you’ve figured out that Steve Jobs is my hero for inventing the smartphone. With one of those in my hand, I’m a normal kid posting and texting my friends and potentially communicating with anyone on the planet.

Other boys my age collect movie torrent files, hockey cards, and comic books. I collect medical diagnoses and the health professionals that go with them. Take my selective mutism, for instance. My mother has dragged me to see a whole slew of doctors, counsellors, and social workers over the years, but no one can explain why I woke up one day with SM. Some say it’s from brain damage on account of the Sturge-Weber Syndrome I was born with. SWS is a fancy term for the giant birthmark — also known as a port-wine stain — that covers the right side of my face and goes partway into my brain. Max says it looks like someone tattooed the map of Norway in purple ink on my cheek and forehead. You know, all those Arctic fjords jutting in and out. I think Max is just trying to be cool because he knows my four grandparents were descended from the Vikings. Most people either can’t take their eyes off my birthmark or can’t stand to look any higher than my neck. My sister gave me the idea to wear tee-shirts with wiseass captions across the front to focus people’s attention away from my face. It actually works on mostly everyone — everyone but the worst bullies and airheads. But don’t tell Jessica. Her head is swollen enough as it is.

Oh, I forgot to say why I started this blog. I was allowed to come on this trip with Max and his dad, Dr. Zoltan Szabo, and Dr. Szabo’s new sort-of girlfriend Natasha Sharma, if I promised my mom to write home at least twice a week. And if I agreed to finish the assignments our homeroom teacher, Mrs. Leon, gave us to work on during the next six weeks. Groan. Max says his dad picked this itinerary because Perth, being near the bottom of the globe, is farther away from Ontario than anywhere else you can get to by commercial jet. Dr. Szabo swore to my mom that he wasn’t in any witness protection program and that he just needed a guaranteed rest.

Speaking of my mom, this was supposed to be a travelogue for her. And my nosy sister, I suppose. But from what I’ve heard happens on the lower decks of this ship, I figure I’ll be keeping this blog to myself and posting redacted versions of my observations for Mom and Jessica on Facebook and Instagram. (I do like that word, redacted, as in the sanitized reports the NSA, CIA, CSIS, and RCMP allow you to see on TV.) I wouldn’t want adult-content details to bend Mom out of shape and have her axe my adventure.

Our cruise ship is called the Coral Dynasty and it looks brand new. Everywhere you look you see sparkling crystals and gleaming wood. Max and I have our own stateroom that’s bigger and way nicer than my bedroom at home. Dr. Szabo’s room is one deck up from ours, and I’m not sure if Tasha — she told Max to call her that instead of Miss Sharma — has her own or is sharing with Dr. Szabo. Max doesn’t know for sure either, but we’ll find out. He’s not certain if they’ve done it yet but thinks they must have. On one night in the Sheraton Hotel in downtown Hamilton (Max saw the Visa bill), and maybe on a few of the other nights Max was sleeping over at my place.

We arrived in Western Australia the day before yesterday after three extremely long flights from Toronto. I watched four movies and three TV crime shows on my own private screen. Max says he watched ten reruns of The Big Bang Theory, but between Vancouver and Sydney he was mostly asleep with one of those nerdy eye-shade things on his face. We stayed at a hotel in Perth the first night and the next morning went to an aquarium where they let you feel the sandpaper skin of live sharks and stingrays. The tank they were in was kind of small and lame, but I’d never touched a shark before. Awesome.

Yesterday, we took a short train ride from Perth to its port, which they call Fremantle. That’s where we got on the ship — I should say we boarded — just in time for barbecued burgers on the pool deck. Actually, the pool is kind of puny and you’re not allowed to dive. Max and I are going to have to stick to our cannon balls, powering in ass first. After lunch, we had the mandatory lifeboat drill where everyone had to try on their dorky life jacket and listen to a long spiel about ship safety that started out to be boring with a capital B. Well, it was boring until the captain took the microphone and explained that at some point we’re going to be sailing into pirate-infested waters. He actually said pirates and infested. How cool is that, eh? Max and I started to high-five each other, but then one of the officers with spiky hair and a shiny forehead glared at us from across the room and started speaking into his walkie-talkie. We couldn’t hear what he was saying, but from then on we sat perfectly still until they finally let everyone go. We found out later his name is First Officer Bogdan and the three gold bars on his uniform mean he’s second in command of the ship after the captain.

We’ll be sailing all the way to Cape Town, South Africa. We’re going to have Christmas there, which will be weird because there won’t be any snow and because my mom and sister won’t be there. There’s three hundred passengers on this vessel. Most of them are the same age my grandma was when she died of old age. There’s just three of us kids: Max, me, and our new friend Jodie, who’s also fourteen.

Jodie’s really cool and seems to know everything there is to know about this ship because she’s been on it for the past two months. She’s travelling with her guardian, her aunt Audrey, who practically lives on the sea. They boarded in Oman. That’s one of the oil kingdoms in Arabia, and Aunt Audrey has a house there with lots of servants. Jodie claims that here on the Coral Dynasty stuff goes on behind the scenes that’s so epic you can hardly believe it. Like a fistfight in the crew bar between the head chef and the chief engineer. And dead bodies getting offloaded on a forklift through the cargo door or even dumped straight into the ocean. (Yeah, right. What does she take us for?) She says she goes to a girls-only boarding school in Connecticut but is on a three-month suspension for dipping. She knew right away we didn’t have a clue what she was talking about — I thought she was talking about skinny dipping — but then she explained to us aliens from planet Canada that dip is what those in the know call snuff, smokeless tobacco you stash in your mouth behind your lip. Aunt Audrey, who Jodie says knows nothing about teenagers, told her that after so many warnings from her principal, she was lucky she didn’t get permanently expelled. Or a least kicked off the school’s softball team, which would be a real downer because everybody knows she’s their fastest pitcher. According to Jodie, Aunt Audrey has the crazy idea that witnessing the struggles of kids in this poverty-stricken part of the world will knock some sense into her. I don’t know how she’s supposed to develop empathy for poor kids when she spends most of her time on board a boat that has two fancy restaurants, a pile of not-too-shabby video games you can borrow anytime for free, and a theatre that sometimes does mini versions of Cirque du Soleil. Neither Max nor I could see any tobacco stains on Jodie’s teeth, so we are suspicious that a lot of what she says is made up to impress us. She reminds us of a girl at our school who told everyone her dad was on tour with Beyoncé in her backup band when he was actually in jail for writing bad cheques.

Anyway, Jodie promised to give us the sneak tour of the lower decks where passengers aren’t allowed to go. All we have to do is ignore the CREW ONLY signs and keep our heads down and eyes open. I told Max she may be all talk and no action. We’ll just have to see.

Max just walked in, all sweaty from the gym up on deck ten. I’ll finish this while he’s in the shower. His dad told him he’s got to use the treadmill for thirty minutes every day to be sure he gets enough exercise. That will be my time for blogging. My mom doesn’t know about treadmills on cruise ships, and Dr. Szabo is being nice about not bossing me around. He’s been a lot quieter since his father and his fiancée Colleen got killed in that car crash on the way home from his mother’s funeral. That was the summer before last, when old Mrs. Szabo finally died of her cancer. Max doesn’t talk about it, but I know it was pretty awful for him to lose two of his grandparents and his future stepmother in the same week. Max had been really excited about Colleen becoming his new mom. After funeral number three, he and I binge-watched all seven Fast and Furious movies in my basement. Max drank Pepsi straight from two-litre bottles and only got up to go pee. Now Max doesn’t want anyone to ever mention Colleen.

Tonight, we’re having dinner in the main restaurant, where even kids have to wear suits and ties, and shoes that squeeze your toes. Groan. Last night, the four of us had pizza by the pool where you can wear your normal clothes. And then we crashed early because of our jet lag. Jodie is going to show us how to find the Southern Cross tonight after dinner. You never get to see that in the sky over Canada.

I’m keeping access to this blog password protected.

CHAPTER 3

After dispatching Tony to his cabin with his freshly bandaged arm and a handful of painkillers, Noah sought the reassuring comfort of his surgical scrubs. And now he was behind his desk with the office door closed and his head in his hands.

How could he have been so wrong? Not just once, but three times. Anya’s stricken face had told it all, and now poor Jung Lee was waiting next door on a stainless steel slab. Lying in wait, was what it felt like.

He put a palm to his chest and gave himself a few more minutes before shuffling across the hall to the locker room. He stepped into his rubber boots and slipped on a gown, then donned a mask, safety goggles, and a pair of gloves. At the treatment room door, he paused for a final deep breath before pushing it open, reminding himself that the three recent deaths were an aberration. On the whole, he accomplished a lot of good things in this place, for his crew and his passengers. And provided an important special service to desperate people who had nowhere else to turn. That he was compelled to perform the special service mostly in secret and at the discretion of a sometimes capricious captain was dishearteningly degrading. But so be it.

Anya and Cornelia were standing in the middle of the too-bright room, their arms crossed under a double layer of protective gear. On the gurney beside them, under a stark white sheet, lay the technical expert who’d masterminded the nightly variety shows. The undisputed champ of geographic trivia. The friend they’d joked with in the crew bar.

Noah shook his head when Anya went to remove the sheet from the body. He couldn’t bring himself to view the entirety of Jung Lee’s corpse at one go. He’d have to manage the examination in sections and slowly work his way to the face. He caught each nurse’s eyes in turn. This was going to be as difficult for them as for him.

Let’s do this bit by bit, he told them. We’ll start with his lower limbs.

They raised the drape from the feet and folded it up as far as the thighs. Anya adjusted the overhead lamp, and the two women rolled the stiff corpse from side to side as Noah examined every square centimetre of the toes, feet, shins, knees, and thighs. A small greenish bruise on the right big toe showed it had been stubbed at least a week ago. There were patches of callused skin over the kneecaps, a testament to the hours Jung had spent on his knees adjusting his lights and audio equipment. An old white scar on the left calf told of a wound sutured by a surgeon who’d been more intent on closing a gash than producing a cosmetic result.

Next came the genitals. In death, the uncircumcised penis seemed sadly puny. The scrotum contained only one testicle, a secret Jung had likely harboured his whole life.

Pressing his fingers against the front wall of the abdomen, Noah felt the enlarged spleen he’d palpated four days earlier. Now, he felt for the liver. It was huge. And lumpy. Was this new, or had he missed such an important finding while Jung was alive? His mouth went dry and sweat pricked his neck.

The back, the buttocks, the chest wall revealed nothing abnormal. The swollen lymph nodes in the armpits were the same as he remembered them. On the right thumb was an open sore about half a

Reviews for Beneath the Wake

[amcheri-1 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Well, that wasn't nearly as enjoyable as I had hoped.

The mystery was interesting initially but I was pretty disappointed by the reveal - the actual way it was revealed and the entire cause of the outbreak. The only thing I liked less than that was the selectively mute kid, Travis, having a POV. Honestly, I can't think of a single thing that it added to the story and it broke any tension I was feeling.

I guess I wanted something a bit more gritty.

One good thing is that I never felt like I was missing anything by jumping in with the 4th book in a series. And the narrator was pretty good. I loved the Canadian accent. Made me miss talking with my Emotional Support Canadian.

Thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for a copy of the audiobook!