Chapter 2

The man who called himself John Healer didn't waste any of Albert Cosgrove's generous grant of funds. On the other hand, he didn't live like a pauper, either. His object was to have enough long-term resources to make it possible to travel freely, live comfortably, and avoid detection.

Avoiding detection included such simple but effective devices as paying cash for everything while on the road. And since John Healer was more or less constantly on the road and in possession of no fixed permanent address, it meant that he consistently paid cash.

With a modest portion of Mr. Cosgrove's money he purchased a compact camper unit, mounted securely, if not particularly esthetically, on the back of a full-sized American-built truck. The large, powerful truck wasn't new, but it wasn't old, either, and assuring its owner of reliable transportation and reasonable creature comforts ended up costing quite a lot of money.

He put most of Cosgrove's remaining money in a bank in a small city convenient to the much larger city where, through attorneys acting as discreet intermediaries, he had received the proceeds in cash.

While the money in the bank would be available to him anywhere via the use of electronic banking machines, he intended to be cautious about withdrawing funds in that manner. Most of the time, he worked with cash, carrying with him large sums to make that lifestyle possible.

The irony didn't escape him. He was uniquely in the Good Samaritan business, traveling around curing people of terrible, painful ailments, many of them threatening their victims with early death.

But John Healer had to behave much in the same way that he would have behaved had he been engaged in precisely the opposite pursuit — if he had been a serial killer, driving around murdering strangers.

All right, of course there were some major differences. He wasn't subject to arrest or imprisonment for anything he was doing — at least not for any offense beyond simple trespass.

It didn't matter. He was quite convinced that there was no way that he could accomplish anything like the same thing, were he to make himself known to people in authority.

The dangers seemed immense. First of all, there would be overwhelming public interest. And there would be pressure from all sides from people who were determined to control, exploit, or otherwise interfere with what he was doing.

Some of those people, perhaps, would be honest brokers who only wanted to maximize his contributions to the public good.

But many would not. There would be some —perhaps many — who would be determined to exploit John Healer's gift for their own financial or political gain.

And he could foresee enough of this to be deathly afraid of it. This despite recognizing that there were probably more effective and efficient ways to use his abilities.

He was acutely aware that the exploiters were out there, waiting. If he was to have anything remotely approaching a "normal" life, all of this had to be kept a closely held secret.

He well knew that there was little sympathy for this point of view from others. Mr. Cosgrove, for example - a good and decent man - had attempted to convince John Healer that his elaborate precautions were unnecessary, or at least that he was overemphasizing the drama associated with being identified.

John tried to keep an open mind, despite his own grave doubts. He had invited Cosgrove to examine the issue further. If Cosgrove could come up with a better means of shielding him from public scrutiny, while permitting him to carry out his mission, he would at least listen to his suggestions.

Healer had promised to call in from time to time, on a secure line and from undisclosed locations, to discuss this and other matters.

Quite by accident, Cosgrove — John Healer's very first financial benefactor — had turned out to be a wise and thoughtful person: a man with whom John had developed an almost-instant rapport.

John would call Cosgrove — on three occasions — over the next several months. These communications always were received with enthusiasm, with Cosgrove instantly making time for him whenever a contact was made.

John admitted to himself that he was taking enormous pleasure in these conversations. Why wouldn't he? As things stood, Albert Cosgrove had become the only person with whom he could speak frankly about his work. It became an immense source of tension-release, being able to describe to Cosgrove, at least in general terms, his experiences "on the road."

The two men never discussed the specifics of where Healer had been or what he had done, but Cosgrove knew in a general way exactly what he'd been doing, because reports were coming back to him steadily about the mysterious "mass cures" occurring in scattered locations all over the United States, Canada and Mexico.

Healer's work increasingly was being noticed. Early attention had taken the form of localized rumors about strange and wonderful mass recoveries at scattered hospitals, large and small. More recently, the story had begun to receive national and even international attention from major press organizations.

Healer had no choice but to step up his efforts to avoid any detectable pattern of behavior that would make it possible for him to be identified by authorities.

He could not, for example, simply drive from city to city, visiting hospitals and curing people everywhere he traveled. Instead he wasted considerable time (and resources) taking devious routes to his destinations and steering clear of allowing his movements to become predictable.

This made life harder and reduced the efficacy of his work. Again, Healer saw it as unavoidable.

Albert Cosgrove offered help. He suggested strategies that would increase Healer's ability to avoid detection while maximizing access to those most in need of help.

Cosgrove made some unique suggestions. For one, he suggested occasional visits to nursing homes and veterans' hospitals, instead of always going, as Healer had been doing, exclusively to public hospitals.

If John Healer laid hands on an eighty-four-year-old man living out his last days in a nursing home, the man would still be eighty-four when his benefactor left him, but he would be left as an optimally healthy elderly man, instead of perhaps a dying one.

Sometimes Healer wondered whether these random acts were, indeed, always really kindnesses. There was never the necessary time or resources available for him to investigate, for example, whether a particular person he helped would perhaps have been better off being permitted to die on schedule.

Were the old man's health care resources drying up? Was he perhaps a financial or emotional burden on his family?

John Healer didn't know and couldn't know. He knew only two things: First, that he had the ability to make that old man an optimally healthy old man. And second, he was unwilling to make judgments about whether a person should be permitted to live or die.

We were all going to die sometime. If this old bird could be given four or five more years of healthy life, well, John would just have to assume that the fellow would prefer that to the alternative.

He wasn't God, after all.

"God" was one of the reasons John Healer had developed such a runaway paranoia about keeping his identity secret. The Holy Joes out there, John knew, would be bound to associate his healing powers with religion. Their particular religion, of course.

It was clear beyond doubt: God would get the credit and John would be regarded as His agent on earth.

John didn't believe it.

His special abilities, John thought, had nothing whatever to do with any God. At least not as far as he could tell. God hadn't ever spoken to him, reached down and touched him with his mighty hand — or done anything else remotely of the sort.

The man who called himself John Healer had long been a religious skeptic, and despite having experienced this spectacular form of intervention by seemingly supernatural forces, John remained a skeptic still. If anything, discovery of his "power" had reinforced John's spiritual skepticism - however contradictory that statement might seem.

John didn't know how to "teach" anyone else how to do what he did, or whether it would ever be possible for him to do so. He didn't know whether there was some physical element associated with his newfound power to cure people. Was it something genetic? Something in his blood?

He felt guilty about the fact that he was choosing to deprive the world of the possibility of conducting scientific research that might provide answers to questions of this kind.

Obviously, if others could somehow acquire identical powers, it could be an enormous boon to humankind. Possibly, it could be a curse; but certainly John thought that it would be a boon.

Was he being selfish and shortsighted in depriving science of its opportunity to examine him? Study him? Yes, perhaps he was. He fretted over the question constantly. It bothered him more than any of the several other moral quandaries with which he was being confronted.

Still John was, after all, devoting his entire life to saving the lives of others. He had no other job, no family, or any regular human contact outside of strangers: waitresses, the odd motel clerk here and there, and his occasional telephone conversations with Albert Cosgrove.

He knew there was rich irony in it. He maintained anonymity as a means of preserving the possibility of his having a "normal" life, but the life he was leading was anything but normal.

Never mind. The remaining slender reeds of personal privacy seemed immensely important. Running his own life, John at least could partake of the small comforts available to others. He could go to the multiplex and see a movie. He could swim in a motel pool, or enjoy a solitary walk along an ocean beach.

There were no reporters or photographers trailing along behind him, making his life miserable. There were no handlers appointed by industry or government to run his life for him. He could — and did - occasionally duck into a roadside diner and enjoy a hamburger and fries in perfect peace.

Whatever else John Healer was neglecting by remaining a lone wolf, he was assuring himself of a semblance — an echo, at least - of a normal life. If that is selfish, he thought, then let them make the most of it!

For John, the hardest part of performing his quickie "cures" in hospitals was that the people who needed his help the most — those in intensive care units or emergency rooms — were also the most difficult patients to approach without detection.

For ordinary hospital patients, it normally wasn't unduly complicated to find a means of accessing their rooms and administering his healing hand in some casual manner. He employed a variety of simple disguises: Medical-looking clothing was cheap and easy to obtain, and he kept a variety of "scrubs" and nursing outfits on hand in the little camper cabin. A few minutes of walking the corridors of any hospital, or lunch in a hospital's cafeteria, would be enough to tip him off concerning appropriate official-looking attire for a particular local facility.

Security in some facilities was tight, and if after walking a few corridors John considered it excessively risky to make his rounds, he would simply leave and head for another locality. More often, however — especially in the smaller cities and towns — security was lax or nonexistent, and he could freely roam the wards, making brief contact with dozens - sometimes even hundreds - of patients.