I was in Tripoli, Libya, wiping sweat off my forehead. Sitting across from me in a back room of the Bulgarian embassy was a doctor named Zdravko Georgiev. In 1999, he and his wife, a nurse, had been arrested along with four other Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian medical intern. They had been charged with bioterrorism, accused of intentionally infecting more than 400 children at a Libyan hospital with HIV. Georgiev, who had been working for a company on the other side of the country, had been released a few months earlier after having spent four years in prison, but the other medical workers, later dubbed the Tripoli Six, were waiting for death by firing squad.
It was a few days before Christmas three years ago, and it wasn’t hot—the Libyan capital is pleasant in December. I was sweating because Georgiev was describing what the Libyan police had done to him and the rest of the medics. The doctor was clearly uncomfortable recalling these events, speaking through parched lips and kneading his hands like bread dough. So I did my best to appear calm and professional; I focused on the irrelevant notes I scribbled in my spiral notebook as he described beatings, rape, electrocutions, and other tortures.
I remember standing up and suggesting that I open the window for some air. Then time stumbled, and I found myself on my back on the embassy carpet. Georgiev had pulled my knees up and tucked them under his chest. He held a stethoscope under my shirt. His face was inches from mine.
“Your heartbeat was below 40,” he said in his thick Slavic accent. “Not very good.” Georgiev was transformed. He looked decades younger suddenly, alert and alive, in his element once again.
“Good thing there was a doctor in the house,” I said, rising on one elbow.
