Forgoing the elevator lest she not only run into someone but be forced to converse, Veena used the stairwell to descend to the fourth floor. There she again cracked the door before gazing the length of the dimmed corridor in both directions. No one was in view, even at the nurses’ station, which was by contrast an oasis of bright light in the center of the floor. Apparently, the nurses were out in the rooms attending to their charges. Veena hoped no one would be in Maria Hernandez’s room, which was in the opposite direction. From where she was in the stairwell, it was on the right, three doors down. All she could hear were muted sounds from multiple TVs and distant beeping from the nearby monitors.

To gather her resolve, Veena let the door slip shut while she closed her eyes and leaned her head back against the concrete block of the stairwell. Step by step, she went over what she was about to do to avoid any possible errors, thinking back to how she had reached this unimaginable point in her life. Everything had fallen into place this afternoon, as she returned to the bungalow after work. She and the other eleven nurses hired by Nurses International were required to live at what sounded like a small cabin in American English but was in reality an enormous British Raj-era mansion. They lived there in luxury along with the Nurses International four-person administration. Yet coming through the front door she had felt her pulse quicken and her muscles tense just like she always did. Veena had to be constantly on guard.

As an acculturated Hindu woman, Veena recognized she had a powerful inclination to bow to male authority. When she joined Nurses International, mainly for their promised help in her goal of emigrating to America, she naturally treated Cal Morgan, the head of the organization, as she was expected to treat her own father. Unfortunately, this natural response was not without problems. As a typical thirty-two-year-old American male, Cal interpreted Veena’s culturally motivated attention and respect as a come-on, which created numerous episodes of misunderstanding. The situation was difficult for both of them and persisted because of a continued lack of communication. Veena feared compromising her chances of Nurses International giving her her freedom by helping her emigrate, and Cal feared losing her because she was their best employee and the leader among the others.

That afternoon, like all workday afternoons, once inside the mansion and despite the tension between them, Veena sought out Cal in the paneled library, which he had commandeered as his office. At the end of each shift the nurses were required to report to one of the four principals of the firm, President Cal Morgan, Vice President Petra Danderoff, Computer Head Durell Williams, or Psychologist Santana Ramos, whichever individual had hired the nurse in question. Veena had to report to Cal because she had been his hireling some two months earlier, when the company was being formed. Each day Veena and the others were tasked, in addition to their normal nursing duties, to surreptitiously download reams of patient data from the central computers of the six private hospitals where they’d been hired out and bring it back and report it to their assigned administrator. During their month of U.S. training, they had been specifically instructed in this activity. As an explanation, they had been told that one of the primary functions of Nurses International was to obtain surgical outcome data. Why the company was interested in such data had not been explained, and no one particularly cared. The complicated, clandestine effort seemed a small price to pay to be already compensated with American nurse salaries, which were ten times what their Indian coworkers were being paid, and, more important, to be given the promise of being relocated to America after six months.