Face Off

by Robert Stanek

  Her short-lived laugh was followed by a blank stare, as if she was seeing through him. Everything was silent for what seemed a full minute, the air between them growing heavy, as if the next thing either said or did would be the last thing they ever said or did to each other.

  A knock on the door cut through the silence. “You okay in there?”

  “It’s going to be a while. Some privacy appreciated. Not exactly easy to do in my condition,” Scott said loudly.

  “Thanks,” she whispered, turning her sad eyes to his.

  “Get on with it.” He tried to picture the nurse who attacked him, wondering if she too was Mossad, but he’d only glanced at her when he’d been talking to Peyton and later she’d attacked him from behind. “I am going to fight you.”

  “You’re going to try,” Edie said, coolly, almost casually. “You kept saying the blood wasn’t all yours, and then when we were being medivaced out, I figured it out. Someone wanted you off the Kearsarge as badly as I did.”

  Chapter 4

  Mediterranean Sea

  Morning, Wednesday, 20 June

  Adrenaline, amphetamines, sedatives and more coursed through Scott’s system, making a jumble of his thoughts while driving the fight or flight instinct that was telling him to run. “Medivaced? What are you talking about?”

  Edie suddenly straddled the chair, practically sitting in his lap and forcing Scott to pull his arms together in front of his chest. “We’re not on the Kearsarge. You were medivaced out as soon as you stabilized after your surgery.”

  If Edie wasn’t pinning him down, Scott would’ve jumped up at that moment and started screaming. He’d probably be dead before the MAs broke down the door, but the distraction might have helped even the odds. “Where are we, Edie, exactly?”

  “We’re in Luqa, Malta. St. Vincent De Paul Residence hospital,” she said, looking as astounded by the statement as he felt. “Do you remember telling Master Chief Roberts to take the Kearsarge to Malta?”

  He didn’t, not really. Much of what happened was a fog. He remembered being attacked, not much else. His thoughts spun and associated. Malta was an island nation in the middle of the Mediterranean, independent from nearby Italy and yet a place where Italian was nearly as widely spoken as the official languages of English and Maltese.

  “You’re not safe here,” Edie said.

  Scott looked around, suddenly noticing the spacious room he was standing in with its double stalls, sinks, showers and high windows. Luqa was home to Malta’s only international airport and he’d been through the airport many times. Many of the buildings in the area dated back to WW2 and the days when the British RAF operated out of nearby Luqa Barracks. The fixtures he was looking at certainly were old. “I can see that, so what are you waiting for?”

  Edie put her hands on his shoulders, each an inch from his throat. “Scott, I think the attempt on your life was sanctioned by your own government.”

  The touch of her fingers on his skin was electric, like fire. No, it was his senses that were on fire. “You’re not making any sense.” Scott thought for a moment. Academi, formerly Xe and Blackwater Worldwide, was rumored to run operations for the CIA out of Luqa. “That’s not possible.” He shook his head. “No, that’s...” He didn’t finish the thought, and he didn’t have to. The implications were chilling. Was she trying to kill him or recruit him? Was she a double agent for the CIA?

  “How else can you explain it?” Edie said, jumping up. She motioned to the door. “I don’t think we can trust them either.”

  What had she given him? What was in those pills? His heart raced along with his thoughts. “Are you going to kill me or not?”

  “What? Kill you? You think I’m going to kill you?” Edie said, her voice shrill. “What’s gotten into you? Scott, I came clean with you because I need you. That woman who attacked you, she wasn’t who you think she was, and they found a body. Well, two bodies actually—all in uniforms. It’s the excuse they used to get all non-military personal evacuated from the Kearsarge.”

  “So you’re not going to kill me?” He frowned. He eyed the surgical wraps on his hands. “Sounds like a good enough reason for me. When you don’t know who the enemy is, you get rid of all possibilities. You lock down the ship.”

  They grew quiet, eyeing each other. An insistent knock startled them.

  “Toilet,” Edie said, her voice filled with alarm as she pulled Scott up from the chair and to the toilet.

  No sooner had Scott sat down than the door burst open. Both Master-At-Arms entered, their pistols drawn.

  Edie held out the toilet paper to Scott. “Want to wipe too?” she said, glaring at the MAs.

  “Sorry… Very sorry,” the MAs said backing out and closing the door behind them.

  “We don’t have long,” Edie said. “You need to make a decision. I don’t know what I’ve done to make you distrust me. Either trust me or don’t, but there are things you need to know.”

  Scott stood unsteadily, glancing at Edie. He thought he knew her once, but now he wasn’t so sure. “Kill me, if you’re going to. Get it over with.”

  “Whatever’s happening, I want to be a part of helping you fix it.” She put a hand on his chest. “I’m willing to forget this mistrust ever happened because you’re not yourself, but if you make me say it one more time...”

  He took a tentative step, put his back against the frame of the bathroom stall. “Okay, okay. Message received.”

  Edie told Scott about the Navy’s retaliatory attacks. How the SEAL teams survived what otherwise would have been deadly ambushes because Master Chief Roberts had listened to Scott’s protestations. “With what was lying in wait for them,” she said, finishing, “they would’ve been lost to a man, but they weren’t because of you. Not my words, the chief’s and he’s the one who got us off the Kearsarge. Not to argue in some bathroom, but to let you get out there and fix this.”

  “Chief Roberts told you this?” Scott paused, momentarily losing his train of thought. He had just remembered something about white sails and black smoke. Normally, the fishers would have been sailing southwest to go home to Tunisia, but the sails weren’t headed southwest. They were headed northwest, and the speck of black chasing them wasn’t an NSW RIB. It was the zodiac with the Kid, Lian Qu, giving chase, and maybe he had Kathy and Angel with him.

  Edie was about to respond.

  “I know why I told the chief to go to Malta,” Scott said.

  Scott heard Edie let out a soft gasp. “And?”

  He told her what he’d pieced together. Afterward, she was oddly quiet. He walked to the sink, pointed with his elbow at the faucet. “You mind?” He leaned down so she could splash cold water in his face. “The tactical map, that’s how I put it together, but I figured it out too late, didn’t I?”

  Edie dried his face with a paper towel, then backed away. “I don’t know. I mean I don’t think so.” She moved closer, breathing quickly. “I mean I think we can stop this from getting any worse. Lian’s smart. He would have settled into a lookout position, waited for backup, us or anyone who could help. Do you really think Kathy and Angel are with him?”

  Scott froze. He heard something in the hall. What the hell was that?

  “Did you hear that?” Edie whispered.

  Scott nodded and turned to the door. Rather than waiting for it to come crashing open, he decided to go out with a bang.

  Edie’s eyes opened wide. “Scott, no! Don’t!”

  Chapter 5

  Mediterranean Sea

  Morning, Wednesday, 20 June

  Hearing footsteps in the hall, she steeled herself for what was ahead. Her chest wounds had soaked through the bandages and she’d just finished putting extra wraps over the top. Her latest encounter had left her needing more stitches and she’d hastily sown those in herself using black thread and a needle from a sewing kit. She didn’t expect to see armed escorts, but the unexpected was always a part of what she did.

  Coming for you, Scott Evers.
Time to settle up.

  She was pleased to see that Scott seemed more incapacitated than she’d thought, but surprised to see the bitch was still at his side. She’d thought she’d rid herself of the girl.

  His eyes were tired, she decided, gazing at him from seclusion as he was wheeled passed. She had little doubt he was every inch the killer she knew him to be. A wounded tiger was still a tiger—and perhaps even more dangerous and deadly than a tiger that didn’t know what was coming.

  How had he known where to look?

  It was the question she hoped to ask him as he died at her hand. Far more pressing though was her knowledge that there was little time left before the true nature of the situation revealed itself. She wondered if he even remembered their chance meetings and whether he knew he’d been an unwitting co-conspirator. He hadn’t recognized her in the infirmary, but then she’d been a brown-eyed brunette with a few too many buttons open on her blouse the first time they’d met.

  Growing up, her curvaceous figure was invariably what most men fixated on. Very few seemed to look into her eyes when she talked to them. Even if they faked it well enough to fool others, she knew what they were eyeballing and it wasn’t her face. Her face, in truth, was rather plain. That plainness though helped her blend in and become someone else whenever she needed to. An added bonus was that almost everyone expected a buxom blonde to be a few pennies short of a dollar, even though she’d been blessed with an exceptional intellect.

  Getting off the Kearsarge had been easy and all she’d really had to do was get back to the infirmary after lockdown, climb into a sickbed and wait. With all the excitement and ship-wide alerts, the rest took care of itself. The hard part was making darned sure she was going to be evacuated to the same destination as Evers.

  She doubted he’d understand when she finally faced him. She was a good chameleon. Invisible even when she was the center of attention. She’d learned that trick readily enough as an early bloomer. Boys never saw her; they saw everything about her but her.

  She’d chased her dreams of becoming someone else as a theatre major. Someone who was seen. Someone normal. She’d played Ivy in a performance of August: Osage County, Sister James in Shanley’s Doubt, but any joy she felt was fleeting, disappearing with the stage. Her true talent as an actor was learning how to transform herself to not only become like someone else but to be someone else.

  Now, she’d show them. Everyone who never saw her would soon see nothing but her. She’d done everything to ensure this.

  No one will ever forget my face again.

  Not even the doctor who diagnosed her manic tendencies, which set in deeply in her teen years, saw her, crushing her hopes of ever being seen by anyone. When she told her step-mother, she looked right through her too, only seeing impending medical bills and worrying about how much new treatments and pills were going to cost. Prescriptions for Lamictal, among others, to stabilize her moods turned into prescriptions for Zyprexa and Symbryax to combat what her psychiatrists called antisocial and antipsychotic behaviors.

  Of psychiatrists, she knew much and had seen many, going through them as rapidly as some went through boxes of Kleenex. Each time becoming a little smaller, a little less than she’d been before until there was nothing left, not one trace of the child in her who wanted to be happy.

  Finally, fed up, she jumped up from the latest couch and shouted, “I’m not going to be your guinea pig. I’m not going to be a zombie anymore!”

  Her psycho-analyst/psychiatrist ignored her outburst and told her very calmly, “No one wants you to be anything but you. There are others medications, other approaches we can try.”

  She loved how doctors always tried to include her with those little two-letter words—we or us—as if, she had any say in anything done to her or for her. “There is nothing left to try,” she told him. “There’s no fixing me. I am what I am. Isn’t that enough?”

  His sudden smile was meant to disarm her. “Of course, that’s something we can talk about. It takes us back to the crux of everything. How you wonder why nothing seems to fit. How you wonder what’s wrong with you.”

  “I’m trying to be better,” she said. “Can’t you see that? I want to fit in. I’m not a square peg in a round hole. I’m not a swan born to ducks. I’m not a problem to be solved.”

  “Very good,” he said, chuckling. “Thinking about the problem is the problem, isn’t it? It’s past time for you to look out and see the world. Look out and embrace the world as the world embraces you.”

  And she did look out and embrace the world. It became not about her problems… but the world’s problems.

  She channeled her energy not into her frustrations with herself, but her frustrations with the world. Philanthropic goals were the perfect match for everything she wanted to do to cure the ills she saw. She started volunteering, charity drives to help disabled children, walks to cure breast cancer, bell ringing to support the homeless. The sick, the tired, the hungry, the homeless, they saw her. They looked into her eyes and she looked into theirs. They were grateful, humble, sincere.

  She worked harder and harder, fighting for their causes, fighting against the need to sleep, eat or do anything else. She was selfless. She was bold and brash, believing she could save the world—and never listening to anyone who said otherwise.

  There are no ills that can’t be cured.

  “Help fight ebola in Africa,” they said. “Help bring the word of God to the godless,” they told her. “Help save Thai children from the sex trade.” “Help save the seas from overfishing.” Yes, yes, yes, and yes. And it was through this string of yeses she found her darkest hours. Depression that swallowed her so forcefully she suddenly saw the world for what it was, suddenly understood what its true ills were. It wasn’t oil sheiks or robber barons. It wasn’t institutionalized corruption or criminal syndicates. It wasn’t excess or poverty or hunger or disease.

  How wrong I was, she thought, I can’t save the world. There’s no saving the world. No one person can save the world.

  In the depths of mania and its euphoric rush, she knew it was the world itself that was the problem. Mankind itself.

  She shared her thoughts, her secrets with one person. One person who promptly hung himself. She’d known then that hers was a big idea that was bigger than the dreamers around her. A big idea that someone somewhere must have also had. She reached out, searching through haystacks for a needle to match her own. Her search led her to dark places and even darker thoughts until ultimately she said her final yes.

  This yes delivered her to the gates of hell. A hell of her own making. A hell where men used her and threw her away, laughing at her tears, laughing at how the big idea idealist was brought so low.

  God save me. Please, God, save me.

  But there was no God to save her or even a god to answer her.

  The next time one of them climbed onto her sweaty and smelling of piss and vomit she promised herself would be the last. And it was the last. Oh how the fat pig squealed when she bit it off after he stuffed it into her mouth.

  The other men looking on didn’t know what to do as red sprayed the putrid mattress where the pig screamed and thrashed.

  She knew what to do, however. She took his gun—the gun that had been pressed against her head moments before—and replaced their screaming holes with new ones that gushed red. Soon enough there was no more laughter, no more screams. Only death, death that she stumbled over as she fled.

  Returning to the U.S., she thought she left all that behind her, but she hadn’t. There was no dark corner she could turn, no mirror she could stare into, that she didn’t see their faces. She tried going back to school, taking a new major: criminal justice. But there was no justice. Only criminals. Criminals at all levels.

  She took up martial arts. Mastering Kyusho and Jujitsu. Kyusho’s focus on pressure points matched with Jujitsu’s use of knee strikes, elbow strikes, eye gouges, biting, chokes and throws were everything she was looking for in sel
f-defense. But it wasn’t only self-defense she was after.

  She was swallowed so forcefully when the darkness returned she thought she’d never find a way to climb out. She didn’t sleep; she rarely ate. Eventually the person staring back in the mirror was so unrecognizable she no longer saw any other faces. It was then too that she no longer saw anything hidden around dark corners.

  It was then Peyton Iris Jones was born.

  It was then too that she met him. Her conquistador, her savior, the world’s savior. Owen Blake.

  Suddenly she no longer needed to be saved or found or seen or to save, find or see anything else.

  Well, she was getting ahead of herself, wasn’t she?

  She didn’t meet Owen Blake right then. She found him through his work, through his published papers. Papers that spoke to everything she’d learned, everything she’d discovered about herself, everything she’d discovered about the world.

  The base of the tree, the root of all the world’s ills, had but one source. One source whose name was religion and whose very orthodoxy was itself a paradox. Throughout time, men murdered, raped, and pillaged in the name of their gods. They killed each other over whose god was the most true, over whose holy book was the true source of their god’s word, over whether one who would lead them had already been born and was returning or would be born some day in the future.

  She studied Blake’s work and theories, losing herself for days at a time to his predictions of catastrophe and impending collapse of world governments. Her intellect fed and satiated itself on his speculations and musings, and for the first time she saw her place so obvious, so inevitable, in the future.