First day at work always made Brandon uneasy. The work was the same, really, video surveillance. Everything else was different though. The equipment, the target, that god damn suit he needed to be in. House rules, everyone worked in a suit. Dale Sterling brought him to the tailor in order to get him a suit that he felt comfortable in. Uncle Sam would pay the bill. The suit indeed looked nice on him, but Brandon felt uncomfortable wearing anything else than work clothes. For him, a suit was not work appropriate, it was too eventful.
That fellow Murat Aksoy was also making Brandon feel awkward. This skinny tanned fellow with his big scary eyes barely ever blinked. Brandon wondered how anyone could trust this guy who looked like Nosferatu with hair. He understood when the first clients came in. Murat Aksoy’s clinic was not any kind of clinic. When medicine is condemning you, your kids or someone you love, usually, you just went home, read books about life after death and waited for the grim reaper. The luckiest and the richer got someone to slip them a word about Dr. Murat Aksoy.
Brandon had no clue if he was a real doctor or not. He felt the man was more like these scam artists that get busted once in a while in these investigation shows on FOX. He saw two appointments with patients so far and had yet to see what he recognized as a doctor behavior. He’d just sit behind his office with his arms cross and listen to dying people pour their hearts out in front of them, occasionally doing a strange “hun hun”, as you would imagine Sigmund Freud would’ve done. Then, he’d give them a general exam, sign some papers and disappear from the camera. Brandon was no body language specialist, but it looked to him as if he scheduled an appointment with the apparently dying patient.
The first patient of the day was a fat and short guy in a beige suit. He said is name was Frank Penner. He reminded Brandon of a car salesman. He apparently suffered from a kidney condition and the doctor gave him less than a year to live. Frank Penner was talking as if conventional medicine was a load of lies and that he considered Dr. Aksoy the only man on earth with a clue about his condition. When Penner asked the doctor: “Come on doc, do I look like a dying man to you? I’ve barely started my forties. I have a lot of more laps around the ring to do.”
To that, Aksoy only answered : “I do not think that you will die, no.”
Penner was out of the office with his paper within ten minutes. Aksoy then disappeared in a small dead angle of Brandon’s camera for many minutes and reappeared to greet his next client. At the time he wired up the doctor’s place, it didn’t seem important to him to aim a camera at the upper left corner of the room. Corners were corners, a dead end, plus, this one didn’t have any shelf in it, it was a completely naked corner. What was he doing there? Brandon thought Murat Aksoy was slightly deranged. He could understand that the law would like to take down such a danger, but why would the FBI bother? Just a raid in his clinic and everything would be over. There must’ve been more to it, but Brendan didn’t know what exactly. For the first time in a few years, he started to find his job amazing. The takeover of Viking Security by the FBI had been a blessing in disguise.
Brandon couldn’t stop watching. One after the others all the clients had something fascinating about them. They had this fierce refusal of death. They were not desperate or teary eyed, they just refused their fate, they refused that nature gave them an affliction that would put a timer on their life. They refused to live with a timer, these people all seemed to think they were making a bad dream and Murat Aksoy would be the person to wake them up.
It’s Dale Sterling that interrupted Brandon’s stream of thoughts around six PM. His day had flown by as if he was watching a CSI season boxed set. He was living the dream of everyone sitting on their couch in front of T.V, he was taking risks to change stuff. He greeted Dale Sterling with a happy grin and a handshake: “Hey Dale man! Thanks again for this wonderful opportunity, I’m having a blast here.”
“No problem Brandon, I knew you were the man for the job.” said Sterling with a grin that challenged the width of Brandon’s. “So, what have we learned?” he added.
“Oh, hell, a lot, what a wackjob that Aksoy heh?”
“That we knew Brandon, have we learned something else?” asked Sterling, more serious.
“Well, the doesn’t do a lot of medicine for a doctor.” said Brandon.
“What does he do then?”
“He just listens to people vent about their illness and hand them papers. I’m no expert on the subject, but it seems to me that he’s handing appointments or something.”
“Very possible. Most doctors have office days and surgery days. He hasn’t made any examination at all?”
“Yeah a little bit, some general stuff like a check up, but that’s all. He doesn’t even ask them to take their clothes off. He takes temperature, takes reflexes, pressure, the kind of stuff nurses do usually.”
“Anything else?” asked Sterling, visibly dissatisfied.
“Yeah well…one strange thing.”
“Strange things are always the best Brandon. We only concentrate on things that differs from the normal, the routine. What is it?”
“See…when I wired up the place, I put three cameras in Aksoy’s office. It covers ninety five percent of the field, but there is still a little dead angle in the corner.”
“So what’s in this corner?”
“Nothing”
“So what’s your point?” asked Sterling.
“He…goes there a lot.”
“Fuck…what does he do there?”
“I don’t know” said Brandon, growing restless of Sterling’s questioning drive.
“I’ll tell you what he does. He does something he doesn’t want us to know. Aksoy is a certifiable paranoid, he probably spot us and keeps it from us. That guy has the survival instinct of a cockroach.”
“So do we need another camera?” asked Brandon, ready to go wire the clinic up one more time.
“No.” answered Sterling, bluntly.
“Why?”
“Because our agents have an appointment tomorrow morning. Go take some rest I’ll tag you along for the night.”
Brandon realized he was exhausted from sitting a whole day in that crammed office with no windows and bad air. He quietly nodded, thanked Dale Sterling once again and made his way out back to his apartment. All evening, he couldn’t help but to constantly think about Murat Aksoy. What a weird character he was, Brandon never met any people like him before and would probably not meet anyone similar anytime soon.
The patients were equally haunting, how could they get around to trust someone like Murat Aksoy. The man looked like a cartoonish mad scientist and these people seemed to much against the idea of dying that they’d just blindly give money to the first spooky looking guy. Brandon knew at his age and weight that it was a question of time before he would experience severe health problems. He barely fit in the office chair he was sitting in today. He’d prefer to die though than to get touched by that guy. That or get in shape.
He went for a late evening walk as he couldn’t sleep. The elements of the day were running circles in his head. He would’ve run back to the office if he could. Sterling would like him to come back the next day well rested though and Brandon wanted to please the person who hired him, so he would quietly wait for the next day and try to sleep a little. He wondered about the agents that would show up the next day. Would he be able to tell them from the usual client of Murat Aksoy? How would they approach such an odd guy?
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