by Bob Mayer
“Roger,” Neeley said as she twirled a finger on her free hand at the officer in charge. He sent a crew chief running toward the Nighthawk waiting nearby. Seeing him coming, the crew was already cranking up the engine. “Has anyone been able to at least determine what Burns’s real name was before he joined the Nightstalkers?”
“Ms. Jones did remember that,” Hannah replied. “Joseph Schmidt. Beyond that, not much. He came out of Delta Force and we’re running down all the former members of that team who have ‘disappeared.’ Unfortunately, there are quite a few and some have been disappeared so well, they never existed as far as we can tell. The Nightstalkers are very efficient about that.”
“Okay. Schmidt.”
“Be careful,” Hannah said. “And make sure you secure the remains. We’ll want to ship it to Area 51 for the Archives.”
“Roger.” Neeley waited, listening to the static from the encryption.
Finally Hannah spoke. “Good luck.”
The line went dead.
Neeley closed her eyes. She thought back to Vermont, to burying Gant, to the rest of that winter alone in the bitter cold, barely feeding the fire enough to survive.
You came into this world alone; you leave it alone.
Neeley went back into the TOC.
“He’s stopped,” the specialist reported. He pointed at the screen. “I ran it. It’s a care facility. Elysian Fields.”
Neeley considered this misdirection.
“Maybe he’s visiting family?” someone suggested.
The problem, Neeley knew, was that there was no way she could check further on Burns’s background. Like some other covert units, once someone became a member of the Nightstalkers, their past disappeared. They were gone from the face of the Earth, every record of their existence wiped clean. It was a two-edged sword, because if they went rogue, it was that much more difficult to track down someone who didn’t exist. Neeley had run into the problem numerous times in the past.
Hannah had a point and this development backed it. If Burns ditched the Prius, they’d lose the advantage of the LoJack. Neeley shouldered her field pack and ran for the Nighthawk. They were airborne and racing southeast at max speed.
She opened up her laptop and contacted the IT expert for the Cellar, directing him to hack into the database for Elysian Fields. She scanned the list of patients. Fifth one down was a Peter Schmidt. Father? Brother? Neeley checked deeper. Peter Schmidt was seventy-two years old. Diagnosis, advanced Parkinson’s. In a coma. So, most likely father.
Sentimentality was a weakness. One Neeley had found useful in the past to track down rogues. She wondered what it would be like to care so much about someone that even though Burns had to know they were after him, he still took the time to break Protocol to visit his father.
Startled by a sudden memory, Neeley’s head snapped up. She closed her eyes, trying to remember the conversation so many years ago she’d had with Hannah, about the death of Hannah’s parents, a huge force in shaping her into what she was now.
Hannah’s parents had died in a car crash. But it wasn’t that simple. Hannah had pieced it all together from memory and told Neeley the story while they were on the run, being chased by a rogue Cellar agent, while at the same time being part of Nero’s grand plan to find his successor. The manner of her parents’ deaths was a large piece of what put Hannah on Nero’s radar.
Hannah had been six years old. Her father had been picked up by the local sheriff for public drunkenness, apparently not a rare event. Her mother took her daughter to pick him up from the station, shoving her in the backseat. Neeley smiled grimly, thinking of Dr. Golden and her recurring theme: childhood trauma. She wondered if Hannah had ever told Golden this story of her own trauma.
Doubtful.
On the way home, Hannah made the mistake of speaking, of asking. There were many times when asking any question was not good. Her father had turned around and slapped Hannah so hard he bounced her head off the side window. Then he’d slumped back and passed out.
Hannah had remembered that her mother started talking, but in such a low voice, and her head hurt so much she couldn’t remember or tell Neeley what her mother had said. Hannah had fallen asleep in the backseat and woke up only when she heard the train.
She’d remembered few details, just the blinding light of the on-coming train and her mother reaching back to her and grabbing her hand and asking for forgiveness.
Then the train had hit.
The newspaper article about the “miracle” child who survived such a horrific accident must have piqued Nero’s interest deep inside his cave underneath the NSA. Such an odd and touching story. What fertile psychological ground. Who knew what could blossom in a person’s psyche from such an event?
It was a story Hannah had only told once as an adult: to Neeley. Not even to her husband, who had also betrayed her. Then Neeley realized why she was remembering Hannah’s story. What was key about it. It was the final thing Hannah had said to her at the end of that story in the French restaurant in Strasbourg as they got up to leave: “Because I know betrayal too. But I know something you don’t. Sometimes betrayal is the only love left. Remember that.”
Neeley’s eyes flickered open as the crew chief tapped her on the shoulder. “Six minutes out!”
Neeley wondered what role Burns’s father had had in his life to cause him to deviate from whatever his plan was to visit him. To make himself vulnerable to visit someone in a coma. What was the point? He wasn’t the same man who had raised Burns. He was the husk of a person who couldn’t see or hear.
Neeley was split between envying Burns and despising him for his weakness. The chopper was descending and she tapped on her screen, shifting to GPS mode. She’d designated a landing zone out of hearing distance from the home. An unmarked car, keys in, was waiting there for her. Neeley did one last check of her gear, making sure she had a round in the chamber of her pistol and that her various other weapons were accessible.
She was ready.
The chopper touched down next to railroad tracks. Neeley hopped off and the chopper popped back up into the sky and moved away to await her call for extraction. Neeley got in the car and drove, checking the GPS.
It didn’t take long to get to Elysian Fields. There were only a dozen cars in the parking lot, the Prius one of them. Neeley walked in the front and flipped open her badge to the person on duty behind the desk and then flipped it shut.
“Schmidt?”
The old black woman in a starched white nurse’s uniform behind the desk didn’t even blink. “Might I see that badge again? Long enough so I can read it, miss?” Her name tag read Washington.
“Certainly, Nurse Washington.” Neeley bit back her frustration. There was always someone who had to do it by the rules. Neeley opened her badge and held it out. What this old woman didn’t know was that the people who made the rules also had the power to break them. She remembered Gant’s three rules of rule-breaking:
Know the rule.
Have a good reason for breaking the rule.
Accept the consequences of breaking the rule.
And if this woman didn’t let her pass, Neeley was quite prepared to break more than just some rules.
Nurse Washington nodded. “Room one-one-six, Special Agent Curtis.”
“Thank you,” Neeley said. As she walked away, she saw Washington writing something down. More rule-following. Probably calling the local field office to confirm her identity. Which would, of course, confirm it, because Special Agent Curtis, out of Washington Headquarters, was indeed in their database.
As soon as she was around the corner from the busybody, Neeley drew her pistol and screwed on the suppressor.
There was a slender window allowing someone to peer into room 116 and Neeley angled up to it. Burns was standing next to a chair, facing a bed in which an old man lay. The old ma
n was hooked up to various machines and his eyes were closed. Burns had his back to the door.
Another violation of Protocol.
He leaned forward and ran a hand tenderly over the old man’s brow, avoiding the breathing tube. Even in the hallway, Neeley could hear the rhythmic thump of the ventilator. Burns sat back down and reached into his long coat. Neeley brought the pistol up, estimating how much firing through the glass would affect the trajectory of the bullet.
But Burns had a book in his hand. A well-worn book that he opened. He began reading from it, his voice low, hard to understand. Gently, Neeley grasped the lever to open the door. There was no click and she edged the door open. No squeak on hinges.
She could hear the words now. Burns was reading in German and it took her a moment to access that rusty part of her brain that had learned German while living in Berlin. Burns was reading from Siddhartha in the original language.
She brought the pistol up, aiming at the base of his skull.
But she didn’t pull the trigger, instead listening to the rhythm of the words. She’d forgotten the harsh lyricism of the original language. She took a step closer.
It was jarring when Burns switched to English and abandoned the words of the book. “I knew you would come.”
He shut the book but didn’t turn.
Neeley pressed the muzzle of the suppressor against the base of his skull. A violation of Protocol as she was negating the gun’s standoff capability by getting within arm’s reach. A slight shock ran through the gun and tingled her hand. She sensed, more than felt, the shock rush through her body, then there was nothing.
“I was also drawn to this place,” Burns said. “Can you feel it?”
“Feel what?” Getting in a discussion with a Sanction: definitely a violation not only of Protocol but also of Gant’s rules. And just plain stupid. Neeley felt it all unraveling, every rule, every Protocol, every piece of common sense.
“The regrets,” Burns said. He nodded toward the old man. “He regrets he spent more time at work than he needed to, trying to get that position he never got, getting that extra percentage of pension that his wife did not get to enjoy. So he never really knew his children, even his wife. And then it was gone all so soon. It’s a deep pool that rests over this entire place. Regret.”
“What do you regret?” Neeley said. “Going rogue?”
“Am I rogue now?” Burns asked. “And I can feel your regrets.”
The lights in the room flickered and then went out. At the same time, the ventilator stopped.
Down the hallway alerts were going off as other life-sustaining machines ground to a halt. In the distance, Neeley could hear a generator coughing, trying futilely to come to life and restore power. Voices were shouting as nurses responded to the emergencies.
“Is he your father?” Neeley asked, taking a step back, regaining her standoff distance.
“No.” Burns stood and turned. His face didn’t shock Neeley. She’d seen the images and worse in battle. “I did a search en route for someone like this. Amazing that there are so many Schmidts. Sort of like there are so many Smiths in English. This was convenient.” He glanced over this shoulder at the old man who was now struggling to breathe. “I have no clue who he is. He might well be a distant relative. But then we all are related, aren’t we? Some say a good percentage of the population is related to Genghis Khan. Apparently he liked to spread his seed as he conquered the world.”
Neeley’s finger was on the trigger, but she was hesitating.
Violating Protocol.
“My father,” Burns said, as if searching for a memory. “He was a weak man. But my grandfather. He was a very special man.”
“You didn’t follow in his footsteps,” Neeley said.
“You think you know what you don’t know,” Burns said, his eyes beginning to flicker in color. “But I know what you know.”
“Why?” she asked.
“Why did I draw you in?” Burns asked.
Neeley’s finger began to pull on the trigger but then Burns’s face rippled, as if the structure underneath were alive. The skin smoothed out, then shifted, and—
“Gant?” Neeley knew it wasn’t Gant. It couldn’t be. He was dead. But that’s who she was looking at. Her finger left the trigger.
Gant’s eyes began to glow, a slight golden tint easily visible in the darkened room. “The same reason you are here with that gun. Trying to do what we believe is the right thing.”
The voice wasn’t Gant’s and her finger went back on the trigger, pulling, but the light leaping from those eyes was faster, hitting her in the chest and knocking her back. The gun fired, but the aim was off, the bullet thudding into the ceiling as Neeley fell backward.
She had a protective vest on, but she hadn’t been shot. Whatever it was that had hit her wrapped tight around her heart and squeezed. She felt pain like she’d never experienced before, an elephant sitting on her chest. Someone was leaning over her. Gant’s face dissolved, back to Burns’s scarred one. Then everything went black.
Burns didn’t even look back at the old man, whose chest was no longer rising and falling. He tucked the book into his coat, knelt next to Neeley, and removed the car keys and the radio and the cell phone from her pocket. He stood, stepped over Neeley, and walked out of the room.
As he did so, the power came back on.
He went into the parking lot. Her car was easy to find. Burns keyed the radio and spoke in an excited voice: “Hello? Hello? This woman has been hurt! She needs help.”
As he waited, he walked around the car, head cocked as if listening, and then reached under the right front wheel panel and grabbed the tracker. He removed it and stomped on it. He heard a helicopter inbound.
The Nighthawk came racing in just above the tree line when the golden light flashed from Burns’s eyes and hit it, shutting everything on board down.
The pilots never had a chance to react; they were too low. The helicopter hit like a rock, tumbling, ripping apart, blades churning, breaking, flying through the air, and then the chopper exploded.
Burns got in the car and drove off.
Back inside the facility, Nurse Washington threw open the door to room 116. She immediately saw that the old man in the bed was dead; she’d seen a lot of dead old people from the doorway of rooms in this place and she knew dead.
The woman, the FBI special agent, confirmed as legitimate by the local field office, wasn’t breathing either. But she was fresh dead. Nurse Washington had seen that enough also.
Washington yelled, a voice that carried throughout the entire facility. “Crash cart to one-one-six!” She knelt next to Neeley. “Knew that man was a servant of the devil the minute he came through the door. And knew you were trouble, too, the moment you walked in. And I still don’t believe you are what you say you are.”
Then she began to perform CPR.
Iris Watkins was five feet tall if she really stretched and dripping wet didn’t break three figures on the scale. And she had twenty pounds of baby in a halter on her chest and two kids under five fighting her for control of the grocery cart. She tried to grab some 2 percent milk without banging the baby’s head into the cooler door when one of those grandmother types stopped her and started going on about how cute the kids were. And then, of course: “My! What a big baby for such a teeny little thing like you.”
Why don’t you hand me some milk or hold the door for me? Iris thought. As if she didn’t hear that all the time. Of course, they’d never seen the father, and he hadn’t been a tiny little thing. He hadn’t even been a normal thing. He’d been huge, thus the large baby, but that also probably contributed to him being such a large target and getting hit fourteen times covering his team’s withdrawal in Afghanistan last year.
But he’d kept firing, up until the last bullet hit him just under the left eye.
Watki
ns had asked for every single detail from the SEAL teammates who’d accompanied the body back to the States. She had to know and it gave her comfort to understand he’d died fighting, doing what he was trained to, and he died on the battlefield, not in a medevac or in surgery.
It was the way a warrior should die and her husband had been a warrior. He’d died like the Viking he was, weapon in hand, fighting until he gave his last breath.
One of the girls had wandered off and grabbed a box of no-you-can’t-have-that cereal loaded with sugar, as if she wasn’t hyper enough, and the other was now clinging to Watkins’s leg complaining about something, voice working its way up to a squall.
Iris forced a smile to her lips for the old woman, who was doing nothing but getting in the way. She thought how pleasant menopause must be and imagined herself one day shopping all alone without the usual quiz questions: How old, how much does he weigh, he doesn’t have your eyes so it must be the father, what does his dad do? The innocent questions, some of which could cause a stab of pain so hard in her chest she thought she’d just collapse into the empty void that was there.
What she held on to was mirroring his courage, in the more subtle, but sometimes even more challenging field of negotiating everyday life, being a war widow in a country that barely remembered it was at war and taking care of their three children.
Then she heard, buried deep in her purse, the ringtone that she could never ignore. She grabbed for the phone, swinging the baby accidently into the cart handle, which brought a shriek. Watkins ignored even that in the call of duty and pulled the phone out as the old woman huffed and puffed away, talking about these young mothers these days.