by Cap Daniels
“Listen closely, Chase. Nothing you will learn in the coming minutes will harm you. Everything you learn will benefit you—mind, body, and soul. Are you ready to listen?”
His tone was soft but confident.
I answered, “I am,” but it sounded like someone else’s voice.
“Good. Now it’s time for you to understand what has been happening to you. When we’re finished, you will understand many things that are now mysterious to you. You will experience emotions you’ve never known, and you will be stronger. Stronger, Chase. Do you understand?”
Again, I answered without realizing I could. “Yes.”
“What you have endured, Chase—the pain of betrayal, the unimaginable heartbreak of learning truths about the woman you loved, and the sickness of trying to go on living when everything around you collapsed under the weight of the lies you were told—all of those agonies and anguishes are now the things that will strengthen you and create within you resilience unlike you’ve ever imagined possible. When you taste the hatred for what has happened to you rising in your throat, that hatred is now your reminder of what you are capable of overcoming. When you smell the sour odor of the vile and despicable actions that have been taken against you and those you love, that odor is now your will to conquer the evil that drove those who tried to crush you. Those people thought you could be defeated with betrayal, but the strength your father placed in your heart, and that you have nurtured, is now the strength that you must unleash in the preservation of what you, and your father, and his father, and so many generations have fought and died protecting. You must hammer that hatred and agony into a sword for what you know is good and worthy of protecting. Now breathe in and relax. When you exhale, the agonies that have haunted you are gone, drifting into the wind, and you are whole, and wiser, and stronger . . . stronger, Chase. Now take my hand and open your eyes slowly, and breathe.”
I opened my eyes to see Fred sitting beside me with my hand clasped firmly in his, and his eyes focused like lasers into mine. I tried to swallow, but my mouth felt like the desert. Behind him stood Penny, mouth agape in astonishment, and Clark, who was holding a bottle of water in his outstretched hand.
I took the bottle and drank as if I’d never tasted water before. I was wide-awake and aware of everything that was happening, but I couldn’t recall the last several minutes. I knew something was different. I felt better, safer, and somehow, stronger.
I smiled at Penny, but her expression never wavered. I asked, “Fred, is she okay?”
He let go of my hand and observed Penny standing there motionless.
“Oh my,” he said. “She was listening a little too closely.”
He stood, took her hand, and eased her onto the settee beside me. He then leaned in closely to her and whispered softly into her ear. I couldn’t hear what he was saying, but soon, she was breathing deeply and sleeping soundly on the cushion.
“She’ll be fine,” he said. “She got a little caught up in what was happening. That happens sometimes. It’s called incidental hypnosis. She’ll have a wonderful little nap, and the three of us can talk privately about what’s going to happen.”
I stared at Penny and wondered what Fred had told her. If I asked, he’d lie or refuse to tell me, and I was sure he’d programmed her not to tell.
I followed Fred and Clark into the main salon and refilled my water bottle. We sat around the table and Fred began.
“We’re going to meet Gunny later. I didn’t need him here for what we had to do this morning. He is the opposite of a calming force, especially for you, Chase.”
I chuckled, remembering how he’d kicked my butt on my first day at The Ranch. Whether that had been meant to terrify me or establish his prowess as a hand-to-hand combatant, it had accomplished both. He was easily over twice my age and could best most men his junior. Fred was right. I would have never relaxed with him on my boat.
Fred continued. “I know what’s going on with Victor Tornovich, or at least I know as much as anyone in the intelligence community. I know he’s not in the Kremlin, and I know there have been no communications to or from his directorate in over a week. I know what happened to you in St. Augustine, and it is my belief that it was, indeed, Tornovich who you encountered.”
He paused and sipped his Bloody Mary. “That girl is a fine bartender . . . and easily hypnotized.”
“Speaking of that,” I said, “how were you able to hypnotize me so easily?”
He laughed. “Conditioning, that’s all.”
“What do you mean, conditioning?”
“You’ve taken an aspirin every night before bed, believing it has been helping you sleep. You’ve been falling for sleeping beauty out there because Clark filled her head full of the notion that you were smitten with her. I’ve simply provided things for your brain to do other than crave the Russian beauty who nearly ended you. I’ve convinced you that my prescription exorcised your insomniac demons, and the pretty girl got the other synapses firing to make you willing to be hypnotized. You believe I did it in a matter of seconds, but in reality, it has taken me nearly a week. You’re not easy, young Jedi.”
I didn’t like being played, but I was thankful to have people in my life willing to conduct such complex operations to pull me back from the edge. Without them, I would’ve fallen off.
In an obvious effort to get the conversation back on the track he wanted, Fred said, “So, I’m sure you plan to go after Tornovich, but that is not an option.”
“What do you mean it’s not an option? It’s the only option. We have no other choice. It’s either find him, or he’ll find me, and I’d much rather be the hunter than the hunted.”
“Precisely,” he said. “You’ve made my point. You can’t go after him. None of us has any idea where he is. We must set a trap with you as the bait, and spring that trap when the rat can’t resist the cheese.”
“So, how do we do that?” I asked.
“Oh, I have no idea. I’m a god of psychological warfare, not a tactician. That’s Gunny’s forte, but if anyone can set and spring such a trap, it’s him.”
“Do you have Anya?” I asked.
He flinched. “Oh, my, no. Why would you ask such a thing?”
“We had a visitor who believes she’s still alive and was being kept at a safe house in Virginia while she was recuperating.”
“Chase, I assure you we do not have her,” Fred said, “but I cannot say that the CIA doesn’t. We aren’t on the best terms with DDO Pennant at the moment. It seems his rising star has gone supernova and burned out. He had his eye, and allegedly his hands, on a young agent named Grace Abbott who jumped ship and never came home. You wouldn’t know anything about that, would you?”
I knew where Grace Abbott was. She was at the bottom of the Florida Straits after Anya killed her with a well-placed palm strike to the face, allegedly protecting Doctor Richter and me. But I was beginning to believe she may have been protecting only herself. Of course, I couldn’t tell Fred that story.
I ignored his question about Grace. “So, you think Pennant has Anya?”
“I honestly don’t know,” he said in a confident tone that made me believe him.
“If she’s alive and in CIA custody, I will find her. She owes me some answers . . . among other things. And I will have those answers no matter what I have to do to get them.”
The emotions surrounding the idea of seeing Anya again felt new. When I’d thought of her before that day, I’d longed to see her face and touch her hair, but all of that was gone . . . almost. I now longed to finally get the truth from her—if she were capable of telling the truth.
Would I be able to look at her without longing to hold her and feel her in my arms? Or would I want to kill her on sight?
I had no way to know.
“So, what’s next?” I asked.
Fred sat in silence, staring back at me. Jerking from his daze, he said, “Oh, next? I have no idea. I’m not an operator. You’re the operators—you and
Gunny and him.” He pointed at Clark.
“Okay, so when do we get to see Gunny?”
Fred looked at the bare spot on his arm where a watch would be. The absence of a watch didn’t deter him from staring at his wrist for several seconds before saying, “He’ll be here in four minutes, but we’ve got to do something with Miss Penny out there before he arrives. It’ll never do for her to see him. You know how he is. He’ll frighten the poor girl to death.”
“Can’t we let her sleep?” I asked.
Fred patted each of his pockets as if he were in search of his wallet. Nothing about the weird little man made sense, but he was fun to watch.
“I suppose we could,” he said, “but someone will have to wake her up.”
“Why does someone have to wake her up?”
“Well, she’s entranced, not just asleep. I put her there, and someone has to bring her back. If she wakes up on her own, she’ll be quite unpredictable.”
“Why can’t you do that?”
“I can,” he said, “but I won’t be here when Gunny comes. He makes me nervous, and I don’t need that in my life. How do you feel about waking her up, Chase?”
“I don’t know,” I admitted. “I suppose I can, but what if something goes wrong or if she doesn’t wake up?”
“You’ve been taught the art of hypnosis. She’s simply hypnotized in a deep trance. Bring her out slowly, and be supportive when she opens her eyes. She’ll most likely be groggy, a little disoriented, and thirsty. Within a few minutes, she’ll feel great and have no memory of the hypnosis. There’s nothing to worry about.”
He was gone as quickly as he had appeared.
21
She’s Awake
Clark watched Fred walk away then rubbed his temples. “Well, that was interesting.”
“Every encounter with Fred is interesting. So, what do you think?”
“I think we have to come up with a plan to draw Tornovich back out into the open, and either cuff or kill him.”
“Freight trains on Main Street, huh?”
“Exactly,” he said.
Clark had once described the difference in how he and I operated as surgical versus a freight train on Main Street. I struck singular targets under the cover of darkness, then disappeared, surgically removing the cancer that was the bad guy. Clark was a little different. He drove freight trains down the middle of Main Street, killing everyone who dared to step off the sidewalk. He insisted that the world needed both of us, but rarely simultaneously.
I felt the boat shift ever so slightly, and knowing Gunny was aboard, that old familiar feeling of dread came over me. I swallowed hard, hoping he wasn’t in the mood to conduct hand-to-hand combat drills.
“Clark, did you feel the boat move?”
He shook his head.
I stood and peered through the portlight. I saw the toe of one boot protruding from behind a bollard on the finger pier beside my boat. I wanted to ignore him in hopes of him going away, but that wasn’t going to happen.
I started forward to stick my head through a hatch and invite him aboard, but I never made it past my first step. Before my left foot hit the cabin sole, a strong arm encircled my neck, pulling me backward until I was cantilevered across my attacker’s hipbone, my feet barely touching the deck. I caught a glimpse of a socked foot in the reflection of the oven door as I twisted and jerked in a useless attempt to break the stranglehold. I had about fifteen seconds before my lights would go out.
I reached for a huge can of peaches sitting on the counter top and hurled it with all of my strength toward the foot of my attacker. I’d hit my target . . . bull’s-eye.
Gunny grunted as the heavy can struck the top of his unbooted foot and shoved me forward. I stumbled, drawing my pistol as I went. When I finally came to rest, I was on one knee, five feet in front of Gunny, in an excellent position to put two rounds in his chest. But I wasn’t the only one who’d drawn. He was also holding a worn, weathered, Colt 1911 in his calloused hand, with the barrel pointing straight at my right eye.
We were at an impasse. Neither of us had won or lost . . . yet. The first to pull the trigger would win, but I knew it would never get that far.
I caught a flash of something metallic racing through the air behind Gunny. The object hit him squarely in the back of the head, just below his skull near the mastoid gland, and he melted to the deck like a wilting plant. I lowered my gun when I saw the winch handle lying at his side and Penny standing outside the doorway. She had a second winch handle clenched firmly in her right hand.
“Are you okay, Chase? That man was going to kill you! And you, Clark, why the hell were you just sitting there? Weren’t you going to do anything? Who is that man and why is he trying to kill you and where did the other little guy go?”
Penny was back from the spirit world and still as animated as ever. I lifted Gunny’s 1911 from the deck, cleared it, and removed the magazine. He wasn’t bleeding, so I’d let him sleep it off on the cabin sole of my main salon.
“He wasn’t going to kill me,” I said. “He’s an instructor of sorts. He was conducting a check-on-learning to see how I would react when he took off his boots and snuck aboard my boat. I’d say, with your help, I did quite well. Thank you, Penny. How do you feel?”
“Thirsty,” she said, smacking her lips together. “And what do you mean, check-on-learning?”
I pulled a bottle of water from the cooler and invited her to sit down. Gunny’s chest rose and fell. Things were going to get ugly when he finally returned to the land of the living.
Penny swallowed half of the water from the bottle and stepped over Gunny’s supine form. “Is he alive?”
“Yeah, he’s alive, but he going to be pissed when he wakes up,” I said.
“Pissed or not, he shouldn’t be sneaking aboard your boat and drawing a gun on you. What did he expect to happen?”
I glanced at Clark, who was trying not to laugh out loud and doing a poor job of it.
“I guess he expected to overpower me and further demonstrate his superiority, but you brought that plan to a screeching halt. Nice shot, by the way.”
“Thanks. I don’t think I like him very much. Why would you need him to teach you things like that? What kind of writer are you?”
I had to make a decision at that point. I remembered how Penny had described her hatred of a lie, and how important honesty was to her, but I couldn’t tell her the truth yet.
“Sometimes I take dangerous assignments in places that aren’t particularly safe; the kinds of places where people get kidnapped or worse, and it’s important that I know how to protect myself and still get my job done. That’s where he comes in. He teaches those skills.”
I hadn’t lied, but I also hadn’t answered her question. The Penny of my first impression would’ve fallen for my wordplay, but Penny, the Baylor sociology major, wasn’t buying it.
“Hmm,” she grunted. “And I guess you go to these dangerous places . . . what was it you said? The kinds of places where people get kidnapped? So, you go to these places and you find something interesting to write about while you’re there. Sort of like a war correspondent—like Hemingway in Spain? Is that what you are? Hemingway?”
I didn’t answer.
“So, I guess that makes me Martha Gellhorn, huh? You know, Ernest’s third wife, Marty Gellhorn? After all, you’re a writer, and all writers know Hemingway.”
“No,” I insisted. “If I were Hemingway, you most certainly would not be Marty Gellhorn. You’d be Mary Welsh, the fourth and final Mrs. Hemingway—the one he never left for another woman, like he left Hadley Richardson for Pauline Pfeiffer, and like he left Pauline for Marty, then Marty for Mary Welsh. That is, if I were Hemingway, but of course I’m not. Although, you are correct. All writers know Hemingway, and as you said, I am a writer.”
She finished her bottle of water. “I think I’ll go for a walk while you revive your trainer there. I’m quite sure you don’t want me here for the conversation that fo
llows.” She kissed me on the cheek, stepped over Gunny, then walked away.
I liked her more by the minute. She wasn’t some ditzy girl, no matter how much she wanted people to believe she was.
“How the hell do you know so much about Hemingway?”
I turned to Clark. “Because I’m a writer. Now let’s get him up before Satan thinks he’s dead and starts offering him a job.”
We hefted Gunny’s body from the cabin sole and placed him on the settee. Clark broke open a packet of smelling salts and I stepped back. I wasn’t going to be in striking distance when he came out of his coma.
Gunny snorted and swatted at Clark’s hand as he came back to life. He rubbed the back of his head and squinted. “What the hell did you do to me?”
“I did what you taught me,” I said. “I had the advantage, so I closed the distance between my attacker and me and I knocked you out cold. You’re getting slow, Gunny.”
“Bullshit!” he almost yelled, then held his head and quieted himself. “You never had the advantage. I had your cocky little head right on top of my front sight. You were one trigger squeeze away from the stairway to Heaven.”
“That’s where you’re wrong,” I said calmly. “You did have my cocky little head perched precariously atop your front sight, but your gun was on safe. If you had pulled the trigger, nothing would’ve happened.”
“Bullshit,” he said again, but not quite as loud as before. “I never put my weapon on safe . . . never.”
“I know that. Neither do I, but while you had me in the headlock, I found your weapon and flipped the safety.”
“If that’s true, why didn’t you draw my weapon and shoot me?”
“I’d never do that because you know I’d never shoot you. If I’d drawn your weapon, you would’ve kept me in the headlock another few seconds until I passed out, and you would’ve declared yourself the victor and me the vanquished.”