by Chris Mooney
"The terrorist attack." The nurse shook her head, a frown on her mouth, and sighed.
"What happened to those poor people in those explosions if they catch this guy Angel Eyes they should hang him from a tree and let people throw rocks at him, stone him to death like they did in the Bible.
That's what I think."
"Angel Eyes?"
"That's what the newspapers and TV are calling the guy who did the bombings. He's the leader of some sort of terrorist group."
The nurse's words tumbled inside his head. He stared at her for a moment, not quite sure what to say. Questions lined up like dominoes in his head.
Conway pushed it away. He would deal with that later, but right now, all he cared about was the answer to one question. He formed the words, hope swelling inside him hoping that Bouchard had been wrong about Pasha.
"Survivors," he said.
"A few. Not many. Some of them came here."
"Her name…" Conway had to swallow, start again.
"Her name is Pasha Romanov. Is she here?"
No change in expression on the nurse's face. Please God, let Bouchard be wrong and let her be here.
"Let me go check. Is there anything else you need?"
Yes. I need you to hit the rewind button and let me go back three days in time. Can you do that?
"Newspapers," he said.
"All three days?"
Conway nodded.
"Let me see what I can do," she said and patted his arm. Then she reached over and grabbed a remote from the nightstand and placed it near his hand.
"In case you want to watch some TV. Give me a few minutes, and I'll be back with your papers." The nurse smiled.
"You're doing fine, you know. That scar on your forehead will fade in no time. You're lucky to be alive, Mr. Conway."
The helpful and eager smile back in place, she turned and left the room. Conway stared up at the ceiling tiles that glowed red and gold from the evening's sunlight as the word lucky tumbled through his head.
He tried to focus on the world beyond the door, tried to listen to the scatter of shoes across the floor and the bits of conversation, anything to keep his mind occupied.
It's possible she's alive. Maybe she wasn't inside one of the vans.
Maybe she was injured, maybe she was unconscious somewhere in the lot, and they found her and brought her in and she's here and she's fine.
He was looking out the window, watching the sunset, when the door opened.
It wasn't the nurse. The person who stood in the doorway was a small, thin man with chipmunk cheeks shadowed with permanent stubble. He wore a starched white shirt and pale blue jeans, his black cowboy boots pushing his height up to maybe five-five. A large paper cup of coffee was in one hand; the other held several newspapers. Conway's eyes were locked on the badge draped across the man's belt, near the gun holster.
"Detective Lenny Rombardo, Austin police," the man said.
"You and I need to talk."
Detective Rombardo walked over to the bed with a Marlboro man swagger and tossed the newspapers on Conway's lap. He slid a chair over, sat down, and crossed his legs. His black hair glistened with gel and stuck up on his scalp like porcupine needles.
It wasn't supposed to go down this way. Phase one of the operation was supposed to be completed, the IWAC team moving onto the second and final phase: identifying Angel Eyes and his group. Dixon would be brought into the IWAC fold not that unusual a move, given his technical skills. Conway should have been lying in his bed back in the condo and thinking about where he was going to go on vacation, maybe do the Caribbean thing with Pasha down in the Cayman Islands.
But it hadn't worked out like that. There would be no phase two of the operation because it had gone FUBAR. Dixon was gone, the IWAC unit had been killed, and Pasha… he tried to wipe the thought away and was left with a sharp and throbbing pain like a dagger of ice melting against his heart.
"How's the back of your noodle?" Rombardo asked.
"Fine." The word came out in a dry wheeze.
"You took quite a spill in the lab, cracked the back of your noggin against the floor and then that tile bonked off your forehead and cracked your skull open." Rombardo blew out a long stream of air as he shook his head.
"You're one lucky son of a bitch."
He knows I was inside the lab. Yes, of course he does, that's ivhy he's here. Conway looked back out the window. It was too soon for this.
He needed some time to prepare his story, the one that would throw Rombardo and his boys off the scent and away from the IWAC group.
"You remember much?" Rombardo asked.
"I just woke up a few minutes ago and my head's a fog. Can we do this later? Maybe tomorrow morning."
Rombardo grinned.
"Relax, I'm on your team," he said.
"My team?"
"I know what went down." Rombardo sipped his coffee and waited for Conway to say something. When he didn't, Rombardo said, "The school.
Dixon. What went down in the attic. I know all of it, Steve. Don't worry about the police. I already made the call to your boss. You're protected."
My boss? Does he mean Bouchard? Is he alive? Conway didn't say anything.
"Sorry, my mistake." Rombardo reached inside his shirt pocket and removed a thin black device the size of a pack of playing cards. A green light blinked steadily.
"It's amazing to me that the CIA can make a jamming unit this small.
Then again, I'm still mystified as to how a copying machine works, so I'm easy to impress." He slid the device back inside his pocket.
"Don't worry, we already checked your room and your condo for bugs.
It's clean. But after what went down, it doesn't hurt to be extra careful." Rombardo sipped some more of his coffee, his body relaxed, his legs crossed.
"We've got you and the perimeter covered. We can talk. It's safe."
Conway remembered Pasha saying something about having a contact inside the Austin police department in case IWAC ever ran into trouble, but Pasha had never mentioned a specific name. Was Rombardo the real deal?
Possible. What was equally possible was that Rombardo was one of Angel Eyes's men sent here on a fact-finding mission. Conway wasn't about to say anything until he talked with Bouchard.
If Bouchard's still alive. Conway wasn't about to ask Rombardo.
"By the look on your face I take it Pasha never mentioned my name to you," Rombardo said.
"No. Where is she?"
Rombardo shifted in his chair, and Conway felt the last lingering threads of hope vanish.
"I'm sorry, Steve."
Conway's eyes jumped up to the ceiling. Lightning quick he slammed the door shut on his thoughts and emotions and would keep them shut until he was alone, away from this guy Rombardo.
"Look. I know this isn't easy for you. I know you just woke up and have no idea about what's gone down and that you're probably feeling a lot of things right now, so let me give you the lowdown on what we know," Rombardo said and then plunged right into it.
"The surveillance was blown. That means we have someone working on the inside. That's right, a mole, another real Aldrich Ames special, only this one's got to be close to Bouchard, someone who knows about the group and its activities. Ray told you about this guy McFadden, right?"
Conway didn't say anything.
"Granted, I don't have the inside scoop the CIA is trying to keep the damage under wraps but what I can tell you is that this asshole McFadden has, for the past twenty years, been giving up secrets to the Russians," Rombardo said.
"This guy forked over all this info on our intelligence systems and sold all this high-tech stuff that was worth millions."
Just like Angel Eyes, Conway thought.
"Worse, the prick fingered Soviet double agents. Fucking blew major operations we had going on," Rombardo said. He shook his head and sighed.
"This thing's going to be a real pisser to figure out."
Conway looke
d back at Rombardo.
"Now let me give you the rest of it the reason why I'm here," Rombardo said.
"The fire gutted the entire fourth floor. They were lucky to get you out when they did. Praxis is shut down indefinitely. The press doesn't know you were inside the lab, and they don't know that you were at the skydiving school they don't know any of it, and they won't because my job is to keep them off the scent. Fortunately, Dixon charged his jump. We wiped the charge off the database, and changed the owner of your Saab to some bogus name out of Dallas. There's no way to connect either you or Dixon back to the school which, incidentally, burned to the ground. But the press knows about the bomb threat, and they're connecting it back to the bombings at the airport.
They're blaming in on Angel Eyes."
"Angel Eyes," Conway said.
"That's right, the press is using that name," Rombardo said.
"I don't know how they found out about the name, but the story's gone national. They're calling it a terrorist attack. This story… it's taking on a life of its own. You know how it is. The problem is that we're not equipped to deal with this. Technically, we don't even exist."
"Where's Dixon?"
"Disappeared like the rest of them. And before you ask, yes, we checked. His body hasn't turned up. As for the suit… well, that's gone too."
If what Rombardo was saying was true, that meant that Harring and his Hazard Team hadn't intercepted Angel Eyes's men. But there was no way to know not unless Conway called Bouchard.
Rombardo scratched the back of his head. His small fingers were swollen, his eyes puffy from lack of sleep.
"Look, Steve, I don't want to overwhelm you. You're tired, you need your rest. I'm here to let you know that you're protected. You're not going to take the fall."
"The fall?"
"If I wasn't on your team, the Austin police would be hauling your ass down to the station for questioning. When they brought you in, your clothes were covered in blood. I confiscated them and had them destroyed you don't want the DNA tests to come back and say that the blood on your clothes matches the blood of the charred bodies they found at the skydiving school. Same thing with the gun. Your Clock, the one you had hidden in your car, they used it to execute the people at the skydiving school. We found the gun and a bag full of wallets and money belonging to these people in the back seat of the stolen Pathfinder. Don't worry, I took care of it. You're in the clear."
Rombardo's voice and body language seemed so honest and natural that Conway wanted to believe him.
Conway said, "How did I get out of the lab?"
"A fireman picked you up off the floor."
"Picked me up off the floor," Conway repeated, and felt a cold hard truth spring to life inside his chest.
"Several witnesses saw a man with a shaved head carrying you along with a fireman to the ambulance. Fortunately for you, the lab door was left open best way to feed the flames. Another minute or so and you would have become a real crispy critter."
Conway had been glued to the floor by the rubber foam; he couldn't have been just picked up.
Rombardo was lying. He wasn't from the IWAC group and he hadn't been sent here by Bouchard. Conway felt a cold sweat break over his body.
Smiling, Rombardo said, "So, what really went down inside the lab?"
He won't kill you here, Conway thought. He'll pump you for information first and then report back to Angel Eyes. Just play it cool and make him disappear, and then get on the horn to Bouchard.
The keypad with the nurse call button was lying just inches from Conway's hand. He didn't take his eyes of Rombardo.
"Steve?"
"What?"
"What happened inside the lab?"
"I don't know," Conway said and then thought, Too quick, I should have paused.
"You must remember something."
"I just woke up. My head… it feels like a fog."
"Well, take a minute or so and think it through. This is important."
Conway took a few minutes. He thought about Jonathan King's suspicious heart attack in the middle of the night. So many chemicals existed that could mimic a heart attack and then disappear in your blood. The autopsy report would never catch it. That's what those two dicks were saying in the air, remember? Inject him behind the ear so it looks like a heart attack.
"I can't remember," Conway said.
"What's the deal?"
"The deal?"
"Yeah, why are you being so evasive?"
"I've never met you before."
"I just told you who I was."
"I don't know what you're talking about."
Rombardo's head tilted to the side, his eyes narrowing, his face quizzical. When he turned to put the coffee cup down on the tray, Conway grabbed the keypad, shoved his hand under the blanket and pressed the call button for the nurse.
Rombardo stood up, his knees cracking, and sat down on the bed next to Conway's waist.
"I think you're failing to grasp the reality of your situation here,"
Rombardo said, his tone low.
"You're supposed to be in our morgue looking like something left on the grill too long. Only you lucked out. You survived. Now what, exactly, do you think is going to happen next? You think, what, you're going to go back to sleep and when you wake up it's all going to be over? That you're going to walk out of here? Angel Eyes doesn't leave loose ends, Steve. He knows you're alive. You need me to help you. I need some answers. Now."
The door opened and the nurse walked in all bright and sunny.
"Everything okay, Mr. Conway?"
Conway didn't say anything, didn't take his eyes off Rombardo.
"Everything's fine, nurse," Rombardo said.
"Will you excuse us for a moment."
"You can stay right here," Conway said.
"Detective Rombardo is on his way out."
Rombardo took in a deep breath through his nose and sighed. Then he ran his tongue over his front teeth, making a sucking sound. He stood up.
"Nurse, do me a favor. Call the doctor and ask him to examine Mr.
Conway's head. I think he's suffered some serious brain damage."
Rombardo removed a business card from his shirt pocket. He placed it on Conway's chest and then leaned into his ear. Conway could smell the coffee and sour milk on the detective's breath.
"Call me when you find your brain," Rombardo whispered.
"But if I were you, I wouldn't take too much time. I have it on good authority that Angel Eyes and his boys are still in town. The next time you close your eyes might be your last."
Rombardo winked, straightened up, and sauntered out of the room.
Lunch was a dry tuna salad sandwich on rye bread served on a plate with a bag of chips, the obligatory soggy pickle, and a brownie so dry it crumbled like dust in his mouth. He ate it eagerly and washed the awful taste away with a Dr. Pepper. When he was done, he read the past three editions of the local Austin paper.
The airport explosions were being called "a random act of terror" generated by what was believed to be the elusive leader of a global terrorist unit, a man who counterterrorism experts from the CIA and FBI called Angel Eyes. Sources close to the investigation revealed that the random attack was done to "wake America up to their vulnerabilities," and that the FBI and CIA were in the process of exploring a number of different leads.
The papers didn't mention any specific reason for the attack, but compared it to Oklahoma. Without any specifics on Angel Eyes, the papers and media tried to keep interest in the story alive with bold, dramatic color photos and recorded footage of the airport carnage and close-up pictures of the terrified, shocked, and crying faces of the wounded and the lost. Personal profiles of the sixteen people who died from the explosion were written. None of the people mentioned were Delburn employees.
The Praxis fire had also been front-page news, but, with no mention of the bomb call and the fake firemen and bomb technicians that had scoured through the lab, the story had died.
And no mention of Randy Scott's death.
Behind the lines of black text, Conway could see the CIA at work, using its influence and various sources and favors to plant false leads with the hope that the story would die down. And it probably would as long as no one made the connection between the Praxis fire and Angel Eyes.
The story that dominated the news was the discovery of CIA-counterterrorism-expert John McFadden who, over a twenty-year period, had launched a one-man spy war that led to the loss of priceless spy craft technology and major assets a CIA term for valuable double agents. McFadden's victim list, they believed, stretched into well over thirty. Conway read the papers and then followed the story on CNN and found it a perfect match to Rombardo's earlier words.
Conway was exhausted. He had been out cold for three days, and all he wanted to do was sleep. He fought it and kept reading the stories until his eyes started to shut. Conway tossed the newspapers on the chair where Rombardo had sat earlier. Just close your eyes and get a quick rest. Right. A quick catnap. That wasn't really sleeping. He would rest and then watch CNN again, see if they had discovered the truth. Conway closed his eyes and within minutes drifted off to a deep sleep.
In the dream he was trapped in the deepest part of the ocean; the water around him was black and as thick as paint and so cold that it chilled him to the bone. Small pairs of green eyes the size of marbles glowed in the murky water and disappeared. From somewhere in front of him he heard someone screaming, muted by the water. It was Pasha's voice. She was screaming for help. Hang on, Pasha, he thought as he swam toward her. Pasha's screams grew louder. Hang on, I'm almost there. Out of the blackness came the extended jaws of an enormous great white shark, its jagged, arrow-shaped teeth just inches from his face. Conway tried to swim away, but the jaws had already snapped around his body with a terrifying force. He was being ripped apart, about to be eaten alive, chunk by chunk.
Steve Conway did not wake from the dream. The drugs that had been placed in his food guaranteed he would stay under for several hours. He did not stir when the door to his room began to open.
The badge with the photo ID pinned to his white doctor's coat announced him as Dr. Peter Bensen, a visiting neurologist from Houston. Amon Faust wasn't prone to worry or concern the way most people are and, as a result, moved through life with a rare brand of steely confidence. If he was stopped, he could easily answer questions on neurology, and, if someone decided to investigate, a quick call to the Brazosport Memorial Hospital in Houston would verify that Dr. Bensen was indeed a member of the staff.