The Diamond Dust on Dragonfly Wings: A Jeffry Claxton Mystery Novel

by Michael Yudov

“Permission to stand at attention, sir?”

  George looked back at me, and I nodded agreement.

  “Granted.”

  Casey was up on his feet in a flash.

  “Sir!”

  I looked at George. He smiled and shook his head. So he thought Casey was clean. Then he probably was.

  “Captain Casey, do you think you understand the situation we have on our hands right now?”

  “Yes, sir!”

  “Then explain it to me in ten words or less.”

  He gulped a time or two, then dove right in. Credit where it’s due, and all that. He was as edgy as a teenager on his first date, but he went for it anyway.

  “Wilson’s ‘turned’, and we’re gonna be hit any minute! Sir!”

  The ‘sir’ had been an afterthought, but it made ten words exactly. Not bad at all. He looked like he wanted in on it so bad that he was going to just break down and sob if I didn’t give him a job to do. Lord knew I needed the manpower. I was going to have to depend on George’s professional analysis, and my own instincts. Casey was ‘cleared’. That was that. We had to push on.

  “Okay, Casey. You’re in.

  Captain Westwood!”

  Once again Evie was standing there by the time I turned around.

  “Sir!”

  “At ease, Captain.”

  She barely let up. Her tension level was pretty damn high right now, and pulling a gun on her friend and team-mate was most likely to blame for that. She had what it takes, though. I had needed someone from their camp on my side, and she had come through.

  “I am hereby granting you a field promotion, from Captain, to full Major. You are now second in command of the military personnel for this mission. This will not change until I say so, or I am killed, in which case you will be in charge of the mission. You will no longer take commands from any civilians, anywhere, and certainly not from anyone who isn’t on the team.”

  The look of shock on her face was par for the course. Field promotions came hard, and you never expected them when they happened. It’s just the nature of the beast.

  “Thank you, sir. I won’t let you down.”

  “Never mind me, Major. It’s the mission that can’t be let down. If I get taken out in any way, it’s up to you. When Ronnie comes around, it’ll still take a day for her to get back to anything like normal, and in the meantime, you will be responsible for your team members actions. This might be extended, if my dealings with the Colonel don’t go the way I would like them to. She will not be breaking any mission directives again. Is that understood?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Fine. Is she coming to, yet?”

  “Just starting to when I left, sir.”

  “Okay, I’ll check on her. Take Casey with you and get ready for an attack on our way out of here. He’s cleared. We want to be on the move in fifteen or twenty minutes, tops. Best fire power. Got it?”

  “Yes, sir!”

  “And pass on the word of your promotion to Loretta.”

  I gave Casey the ‘Commander’s Eye’, and turned back to Evie.

  “Dismissed.”

  She grabbed Casey by the arm and literally dragged him out of the kitchen at a run. Well, now she was a Major, and nobody could take it away without having a damn good reason for demoting her. I couldn’t see that happening anytime soon. One thing about promotions in the forces, you never forgot them, or who it was that had promoted you. When it was a field promotion you certainly never forgot. Now Evie would remember me for the rest of her life. The trick was to make that long and useful. Right now, I wasn’t sure who was going to be here tomorrow and who wasn’t.

  Which brought me back to Wilson, and Ronnie. I looked across the room to where Wilson was propped against the cabinets below the kitchen sink. I’d start with him.

  “George, get the adrenaline from Littlefox and then give me a hand with this piece of trash.”

  “Yes, sir!”

  He got up smiling, and then froze when he looked at me. I wasn’t smiling.

  My voice sounded ominous to me, so it would have been just as heavy, or more so, to George, as I came back at him.

  “Not funny, old pal. If we break down the chain of command now, we won’t get out of this alive. You got us into this, now you’re just going to have to get used to me being in charge for a change. I want you to understand that what you’ve done is to let the Genie out of the bottle. This is the kind of thing that you can’t bail out on. Even if we all wanted you to. The other side has a programme, and we’re in it. The show goes on. If we fluff our lines, we die. Wish we were back home yet?”

  George sobered up really quick. He wasn’t used to me talking to him like this. Neither was I, it was hard. I loved George, because Sarah loved him, because he was my only niece’s father, because he had been my best friend unswervingly since high school, and yet I was so angry at him for doing this to us without knowing what he was triggering. I’d have to deal with that at a later date, that’s all.

  He looked a bit sheepish for a moment before he answered me.

  “Sort of.”

  He threw a glance at Wilson, and left the room. Huh, ‘Sort of’, eh? For George that was like falling to his knees and begging for forgiveness.

  I turned my attention to Wilson, who was covered with blood, and still out cold. I doubted that he would regain consciousness on his own, he needed serious medical help. That would come, if he could hold on, but I wasn’t about to call 911 anytime soon. Maybe on our way down the street, as we were leaving.

  The team came first, and the mission. Then the individual needs of the loyal team members. Wilson didn’t even have a category anymore. Not one that had any concerns for him attached to it. That was his bed. He’d made it, and now he was lying in it.

  I was going to do my best to bring him out of it long enough to answer a few questions, but there were no guarantees. He might come out of it, but it might kill him. I was going to give him a shot of adrenaline, and force his system to respond even though he was in deep shock.

  I was also sure that Enrico’s intention was to murder anyone on the outside who had been associated with this operation, when their usefulness came to an end. So, in a sense, we saved him. Of course, in his current condition, and his current status, he might argue that we did worse than kill him. If he was ever up to an argument again. Which was in doubt.

  I went over to the fridge and pulled out the ice trays, emptying them into a large mixing bowl from the cupboards. I checked the clothes line that held Wilson’s tourniquet in place and anchored him to the faucet. It was just as tight as when I’d put it on. I double checked the frisking I’d given him, and he was weaponless. I don’t know quite what I was expecting, but you never knew. When you started playing around with people’s systems like this anything could happen. And usually did.

  I could hear the sounds of retching coming faintly from the living room. Ronnie was coming around, finally. When I was finished with Wilson I’d have to see her. I wanted to have as much as possible when I did.

  She would be sick, but her mind would be working beneath all of that. She’d want to know as much as she could about how and why her supposedly number one man had switched loyalties and tried to bring death down on us all.

  I had to admit, it didn’t make much sense to me at this stage. It’s hard to go through life being one kind of person, and one day you wake up, what? With a personality transplant? A mid-life crisis? It didn’t make any sense, yet I’d seen it before. All too often. In this game, normally once is too much, but this had happened on two former occasions where I was a team member.

  Once I’d had to bring back my C.O. in a body bag. He’d been the first one killed when the mission started going down the tubes.

  I’d brought the turncoat back too, but not in a body bag, just a small satchel. I’d figured there wasn’t a need to carry all of him across the mountain pass. My C.O. had been heavy enough by himself. That had been the mission that had gotten me
promoted to Lieutenant-Colonel.

  I shook myself out of my reveries, as George came back into the kitchen.

  “The Colonel’s feeling pretty sick, man. I’ve seen better looking homicide victims on the ‘morning after’ than her.”

  “Oh, thanks for the bulletin. That’s news. I told Loretta she’d be sick as hell. As long as her mind is back on-line, we can deal with the sickness.

  Did you get the adrenaline?”

  “Sure did. Here you go.”

  George held out his hand and offered me the vial, and the syringe. I took them both and held the vial upside down, towards the light from the window. I had to get this right the first time, because there weren’t going to be any second chances. If I screwed it up, Wilson would probably die on the floor of this kitchen, right here in Paris. If I got it right, he might die anyway, but he’d talk. He was going to talk because of his outrage. I was worried more about not getting through to his logical mind, but his animal mind.

  That was a basket of snakes I’d rather not spill. If I forced his system to awaken when his mind had already shut down for the duration, there might be some violent reactions. If the animal mind awoke, but not Wilson, then we would have to subdue him again, and quick. It might also be more difficult than the first time. The animal mind is so powerful, yet we don’t even know the extent of what it controls. Mysteries and questions. Like one of my professors had always said, back in my college days, ‘If you aren’t asking questions in this life, then you’re not paying attention’.

  I pulled the cap off of the needle with my teeth, spitting it onto the floor next to me, and carefully poked it through the rubber cap of the vial, drawing off a one cc dose of adrenaline. That was about four times the normal dose, and bordered on the lethal, in Wilson’s condition. What the hell, I didn’t like him anyway. He had to talk to me, everything hinged on that.

  I’d almost forgotten about the hand. I put the needle and vial down on the counter.

  “Don’t take your eyes off of that.”

  I pointed at the syringe, and George nodded, swiveling his head to watch the needle sitting on the counter. I left the room headed down the hall. Less than ten steps brought me to my goal, Wilson’s hand. I picked it up by the thumb and dropped it into the plastic freezer bag that I’d gotten from the drawers below the sink, as I walked back to the kitchen. When I got there, the first thing I did was to put the hand into the big bowl of ice I’d prepared, then I poured some cold water into the bowl and set it on the counter.

  Maybe, you never knew, it might be of help to the surgeons. Whether or not I thought he deserved that kind of attention was moot. There were rules, and if you could, you used them. If you couldn’t, well, that made it appropriate to switch rulebooks.

  There was no putting it off. It was time. George was ready and waiting.

  “Okay, buddy. Let’s dance.”

  As I leaned over Wilson, I positioned myself for balance. Even if I was knocked around, I was ready for it, so I could react properly. But only if I was in control of my balance. I leveraged myself, using a stance that held Wilson’s legs down, but one man wasn’t enough.

  “George, hold this guy down. And don’t hold back because he looks dead, he’s not. Get on the top half of him, and hold his arm steady.”

  “I take it you’re referring to the arm with a hand still attached?”

  “Yes, I am, wise guy. Please remember not to do that in front of the troops, Okay?”

  “Right you are, Jeff.”

  I leaned over Wilson, peering closely. The pulse was there, in his neck, but man, it was faint. George was looking at me like I was nuts, and I moved fast, before I could think about it too much.

  I plunged the needle into his neck, striking the carotid artery on the first go. I pulled back just a tad on the plunger, bringing bright red blood into the syringe. I was in, and it was the right place. Arteries carry the bright red stuff, veins carry the dark. The bright had the oxygen, so it was the ‘going in’ pipe, not the ‘coming out’ one. I placed my thumb on the plunger and the adrenaline squirted into his bloodstream, headed for his brain as fast as can be done with an injection.

  Almost before I could pull the needle out, he was reacting. His body shook a few times, a shake that started at his feet, and worked its way up. It was a strong shake, nearly knocking George loose on the first one. Despite my warning, he hadn’t been expecting it to be so violent. We held on and I hoped for the best. The shakes lasted about twenty or thirty seconds, then Wilson went completely still.

  This was it. He was either awake or dead. It was impossible to tell from looking at him, because he was so pale from loss of blood. I wasn’t keen to let go of him to check his pulse just yet, but George fell for it, I could see his body starting to relax as he determined that the show was over. Premature.

  “Don’t let go just yet, pal.”

  “I think he’s gone, Jeff.”

  “Think anything you like, just don’t let go yet.”

  There was a moment of silence that seemed to descend on the three of us from somewhere, elsewhere. It surrounded us like a curtain, and then the three of us were all that was, and it was suddenly cold there. I got a chill running down my back, and I vaguely realized what this was. It was the brink. Wilson had made us focus so intensely on him that we’d been caught up in the chaos of his transition. I think we were feeling a tiny taste of what Wilson was feeling, which meant that he wasn’t dead yet…

  As I glanced at his face I could see the life in him, growing. Right now it was weak, but it was growing as I watched. This was all very weird. I spoke to George, and he was staring at Wilson too.

  “George.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Tell me what you see.”

  “The same thing you do, if you’re wondering whether or not you’ve slipped a cog.”

  “Okay, good.”

  As we were speaking the words, the image… melted… I guess is the only word I could use, and the strange feeling of isolation and all, left. Now we were just, in the kitchen with Wilson, and everyone else inhabited the same universe as us, then, there was a momentary feeling of relief. I tried to put it out of my mind, for later, but it was one of the oddest things, and it had affected George as well, the same way.

  Without any preamble, or warning, Wilson opened his eyes. More like they sprang open. He was alive all right. I wrestled my mind onto the issue at hand.

  “Good morning, Wilson. Have a nice nap?”

  The eyes blinked, but didn’t focus on me. Or anything else for that matter. He was staring into the face of something I didn’t want to know about.

  My right hand released its hold on him and flicked out like a cobra strike, smacking him on the face back-handed. His head didn’t move. He was locked up as tight as Attica after ‘lights-out’. But he was conscious. The face slowly turned to me. Then the eyes focused on me, which was what I wanted.

  He opened his mouth a few times before anything came out, and then, it was only a croak. Suddenly fully conscious, he heaved his entire body like a snake, almost shaking me off in the process. George was having a better time of it now than me at hanging on tight, and I had lectured him. Ha.

  Now, Wilson’s chest was heaving in and out as he consumed vast quantities of oxygen, trying to keep up with the change in his metabolic rate. He was spitting froth and bits of semi-dried blood half way across the kitchen. I took the edge of a blast on the side of my head, as I turned away from him the best I could. I gained strength and position in my hold on him as I literally climbed his body. We came closer together, until we were face to face. He was all tightened up again, but I think that he knew what was coming.

  George had moved out of place, as I had gained my control hold on Wilson, and now he was free for independent action again.

  “George, seal the room.”

  “Done.”

  He went around the kitchen until he was in a vantage point that gave him an open view through both the main door from t
he dining room and the hall way arch, and then he kneeled and took a position, with the snubby in his left, and the H&K in his right, covering both doors. Geez, this was really turning out to be like old times. No wonder I’d quit.

  The sweat, from the slow concentrated exertion of trying to ask Wilson one or two simple questions was pouring off of me, and the air around me had a chill to it. My shirt was soaking wet, and sticking to me like a cloth dipped in ice water.

  I refocused on Wilson. We were only inches apart, and he knew the answer that was required, and he knew that there was a question. What he didn’t know, was if I was going to carve him up into little pieces in order to get it. He didn’t know me, he didn’t know that I couldn’t do that, I had never been able to, nor had I ever wanted to, extract information from someone under threat of death. Today would probably account for the closest I’ve ever come to it, though.

  “When and where, Wilson?”

  I talked almost under my breath, and I doubt if even George could hear me. I was ready to have such a hard time with this guy that my tension level was sky-high. Then the most amazing thing happened.

  Wilson responded readily, he never even balked, he just started talking. It was repentance. He had ‘turned’ on his team mates, screwed it up, and now he was repentant. Swell. Maybe I scared him.

  Either way, he was off and running. I had to lean close to hear his voice, it was so light, almost a whisper, and I could feel the strength leaving him again, even as he spoke. But speak he did. I caught everything. At the end, he even asked for forgiveness from Ronnie. I told him about the bowl on the counter, and that I’d pass on the message, and he dropped off again, out like a light. Supposedly.

  I checked his pulse, and it was damn faint. Too faint. He certainly was ‘out like a light’. I called out to George.

  “Get Loretta, fast!”

  George didn’t even bother to speak, he just upped and was gone.

  Less than a half-minute later, Loretta came flying into the room, trailing George, who was scrambling to keep up. Apparently, Loretta moved too fast for him. Medics were like that.

  She threw herself down at our side and started doing a quick once-over. Talking to herself all the while.