They landed in Istanbul. She never found out who made that decision, or how.
She stayed on the floor with him for the rest of the flight with a cushion under his head and her fingers on his radial pulse, and he did not speak again except once, when he asked her name, and she gave it, and he repeated it back — Zara Demir — like a man putting something into a pocket.
On the ground the doors opened and the medical team came on, and something about them was wrong.
She had done this handover a hundred times. There is a rhythm to it: paramedics with their bags and their radio, the ambulance crew's particular boredom, the questions in a fixed order. These men came up the aisle in three, in dark coats, and the one in front knelt and looked at the patient's face before he looked at anything else about him.
"What did you give him?" he asked her. In Turkish. Not looking up.
"Adrenaline. One milligram. Two shocks. Eleven minutes down."
"Eleven." He said it to himself.
"He needs a cath lab. He needs one now, not in an hour. If somebody is about to drive him to a private hospital across the city because it looks better, somebody is going to kill him doing it."
The man looked at her then, and she had the distinct and unpleasant sense of being weighed.
"Nobody is going to kill him," he said.
They took him off first, before the doors opened for anyone else, on a stretcher that had come from somewhere it should not have been possible to bring a stretcher from. Through the window Zara watched two black cars come across the apron to the foot of the airstairs, which aircraft do not have, on a jet bridge stand, and which the airport authority does not allow.
A woman with a clipboard took Zara's name, her hospital, her registration number, and her phone number, and thanked her four times.
Nobody told her his name.