After paying off the cabbie, Lou followed the signage to the Baron Building, and took one of four gleaming elevators to the seventh floor. The isolation suite was located behind a set of closed double glass doors at the end of an ominously long corridor. What he noticed immediately on exiting the elevator was the quiet. If Arbor General was a subway, this section of the hospital was the last stop on a line that headed into a very scary part of town. Not many people wanted to be around patients deemed too contagious to be cared for within the general hospital population. Lou could not believe this was where the magnificent man, who had done so much for him and for others, had been relegated.

He flashed back on the misty morning, a lifetime ago, when the two of them were stretching beside each other on the perfect emerald lawn of the lodge, getting ready to begin their second run into the mountains. As a doc in the ER, he had been forced to confront the ultimate truth countless times—life was all so fragile … so precious … so unpredictable. He had never managed to disengage himself from that reality, nor did he ever want to. But this was Cap.

Battling the fullness in his throat, Lou pressed the button on the intercom, announced himself, and was buzzed into the unit.

Waiting for him by the central nurses’ station was a lanky, high-jumper-tall man, dressed in a knee-length white lab coat with scrubs underneath. He was clean-shaven and youthful, although Lou put him at fifty. Above his Slavic cheekbones, his pale blue eyes were darting from left to right as though he were agitated by something—perhaps Lou’s presence. Above the eyes, his thin, straight hair was prematurely white.

“Dr. Ivan Puchalsky,” he introduced himself with a pronounced accent, probably Russian.

His handshake was like a mackerel on ice.

“Welcome. Dr. Lou Welcome,” Lou responded, imitating James Bond without meaning to.

“I was told you’d be here ten minutes ago,” Puchalsky said.

No How was the trip? No pleasantries whatsoever, for that matter. The irritation in the man’s voice made Lou wish he had tried even harder for the Bond.

“Thank you for being here to meet me,” he said.

“Coming from the chief of the hospital, it was a request I could not easily refuse, although I am not certain why he chose me. As I understand from Dr. Carter, you are an emergency room physician, and a friend of Mr. Duncan’s. Is that correct?”

I’m a clinical instructor in medicine at George Washington Medical School, with boards in internal medicine as well as in ER and addiction medicine, Lou wanted to counter, but didn’t. Puchalsky sounded determined to talk down to him regardless of his résumé.

“Correct,” he said instead.