Face Off

by Robert Stanek

  She discovered too late Blake’s words were a recruitment tool for those of a certain ideology, a certain mentality, because by then she was swallowed whole by the cause. The cause of mankind. And nothing else mattered any longer. An added benefit was that her unshakeable certainty of it all put the darkness behind her. Behind her where it belonged.

  Peyton smiled as she thought about their first meeting. Owen plied her with drinks and smiles—neither of which were needed. She’d recruited herself to the cause. His words and thoughts over countless published papers were enough. Everything that followed was simply the cross and dots in her signature already pressed to the page.

  “Come home with me,” he said after their dinner, desert, and drinks.

  She went willingly, not because she wanted what was to come, but because she was curious. Curious to see if the man himself could possibly live up to what she built up in her head. It wasn’t while they were screwing in his tiny one-bedroom apartment a block from the University of Chicago downtown campus that he told her the truth about everything. That came later while she lay there listening to him speak quietly in the dark.

  “Thank you for tonight,” she told him. “You’re everything I hoped you would be.”

  “You’re more woman that I ever thought I could possibly handle,” he said back. “I’ve never met anyone like you.”

  In that moment, she became the woman who was more than possible for him, losing her fears and trepidations and forgetting what had been done to her, focusing instead on what she would do and what they would accomplish together.

  “I’m yours,” she told him.

  “I know,” he said with a smile. She didn’t see the smile, but she heard it in his voice.

  Love wasn’t what she expected when she pursued him, but it was what she found.

  Just as she was about to slip into the hall behind the escorts, she pulled back, her eyes going wide. She thought she’d finished the other on the Kearsarge, but clearly hadn’t. The other’s presence changed everything.

  Chapter 6

  Mediterranean Sea

  Morning, Wednesday, 20 June

  Gunshots. There was a moment of silence as the gravity of the situation settled in. Edie pulled Scott back from the door, her heart racing. “I’m not letting you go out there. Not like this.”

  She pointed to the showers. “Through there.”

  On the far wall of the men’s showers was a locked door and from an earlier visit to the women’s bathroom she knew where it lead. She forced her way through, pulling Scott with her into the women’s showers and out into the women’s bathroom. The women’s bathroom emptied out into a hall that ran parallel to the hall they’d entered the men’s bathroom from. She turned left, instead of right, going into the main wing.

  Just as they opened the door to the second floor stairwell, a shot rang out, striking the cross-wired safety glass in the door. She glanced back, saw a ghost. Then she pushed Scott through.

  “Not down, up,” she said, as he moved in the wrong direction.

  The Saint Vincent De Paul Residence was a massive structure of brick and stone, with four floors in the main wing and three elsewhere. Not only were the executive offices up, so were the security offices.

  By the time, they reached the third floor landing, she heard heavy footfalls behind them, the occasional clink of a handgun against the metal rail. At the fourth floor landing, she pulled him through a door and into a hall, turning right toward security. “Armed gunman in the building,” she shouted in English as she pointed back down the hall. Then in Italian, she added, “Affrettatevi, affrettatevi!” Hurry, hurry!

  The swish of the door alerted her to what was coming. A shot rang out, narrowly missing as she pulled Scott to the floor.

  “Madonna ta' Mount Philermos,” one of the guards exclaimed, rushing into the hall, pistol drawn.

  Another still inside the security office called out an alert over the intercom system. Scott heard it over the loud speakers. “Attenzjoni, attenzjoni. Intruż armati...” Attention, attention. Armed intruder in the building. There was more, but Scott knew so little Maltese everything else was a jumble. Something about a lockdown instead of an evacuation.

  The security office emptied out. Edie caught the door before it could close and lock behind the officers. “Inside,” she told Scott. When he stepped in, she pulled him down and out of sight behind the waist-high wall, peering out through the security glass that ran to the ceiling above the wall. Then she pulled out a knife and watched his eyes flash at the sight of its steel. She knew he wasn’t himself, wasn’t thinking straight.

  “Damn it, Scott, if I wanted you dead, I’d have just left you there,” she said. “Hold still, and give me your right hand. I’m trying to help you.”

  “Looks like it,” he said sarcastically, eyeing the door.

  Edie sighed, swiveled the blade around expertly in her hand so that she was holding the point and offering him the handle. “Do the honors if you want or let me. We don’t have long if we’re going to get out of here in one piece.”

  Shots rang out. She grabbed his right wrist and started cutting. The bandages free, she showed him his hand. “The left one I can’t do anything about, this one though will be good as new as soon as I remove these.” She started popping out the surgical staples crossing his palm. “Hurts like hell, I’m sure, but hold still.”

  Scott crumbled into the wall. “What in the hell’s going on?” He flexed his hand, looking at it as if it were attached to someone else’s body. “Just anything here.” He started to pull at the bandages on his left hand. “Anything at all.”

  “Don’t,” Edie said, swatting his fingers away. “Take this already.” She flashed a pill at him, the only one she’d been able to salvage from the floor of the infirmary. “You should’ve taken this hours ago.”

  “More speed?” Scott pushed backward.

  “Scott, I’m sorry. Unfortunately, I didn’t know who could be trusted. The only person I knew I could trust was Master Chief Roberts.” She tried to explain. “It’s more complicated than you think.” She slid a cellphone across the floor to him. “Videos one and two. Should be everything you need to see.”

  Chapter 7

  Mediterranean Sea

  Morning, Wednesday, 20 June

  Scott picked up the cellphone and started playback with a touch of a finger. “Okay,” he said, watching, “Midshipman Tinsdale coming out of the bathroom.”

  “Focus, please,” Edie said. She reached out to him with the pill between her fingers. “Take this already. It’ll make everything clearer. Trust me.”

  Scott studied his right hand as he flexed it, then fixed his eyes back on Edie’s. “What is it?”

  Edie’s face lit with a half smile. She cupped a hand to his cheek. There were tears in her eyes. “You just don’t get it, do you? I’m trying to tell you,” she said. “The videos. Play the videos.”

  He restarted the video from the beginning. “Okay,” he said. “Tinsdale, bathroom. Got it.”

  “Not Tinsdale,” Edie said. “Someone with a passing resemblance, but Tinsdale herself? She was stuffed in the stall—dead.”

  Scott’s eyes flashed to hers. “Dead?”

  “Keep watching,” she said. “It’s several sequences spliced together.”

  Scott watched a view of the busy hall outside the situation rooms. When the video started fast-forwarding he thought he did something wrong but quickly realized it was the recording itself. It’d been run through some type of analysis software. Just as a woman in uniform was about to enter the bathroom, the video slowed and a facial recognition block zoomed in. It was Midshipman Tinsdale this time.

  The recording went back to fast-forward. No one came out of the bathroom, but another woman entered and the facial recognition block zoomed in on her face as well. Back to fast-forward, the other woman now in uniform came out, Tinsdale didn’t. A cut and splice—a long time gap perhaps. The same woman, watching Scott and Edie from a dist
ance. They were embracing and kissing in the hall after he’d learned she wasn’t dead as he’d presumed. He didn’t need facial recognition blocks to know this, but there they were. The angle was different though, so it was the camera at the opposite end of the hall.

  The next sequence switched back to the camera facing the other direction, showing Scott and Edie enter the hall, the other woman following after a skip and splice. She didn’t seem to know they’d slipped into the bathroom, then seeing Scott and Edie come out she followed them. The video ended.

  “She’s after you, Scott,” Edie said.

  “Or you,” he shot back.

  Edie hesitated, as if uncertain how to proceed. “Play the second one.”

  Scott jumped to the second video, pressed play. “The nurse attacked me. I saw the uniform. I knew that.”

  “Watch it again to the end this time,” Edie said. “It’s not who you think. I had to watch it several times too. She could have got me, but she swished right past me to you. The nurse just gets caught in the middle.”

  He restarted the video. The camera angle didn’t help. He pressed pause when he saw the hands holding the garrote go up. The nurse had been so close to him. Her hands were up, perhaps instinctively as she saw what was coming, but the hands holding the razor wire weren’t hers. After the jumbled images he’d seen previously, there was a sequence of time-sequence slow-motion shots and stills that explained everything.

  Scott felt a spike of something as close to fear as he got. It was Peyton Jones—the civilian patient he’d been talking to before Edie called him over to the wounded marine. His eyes shifted from the phone to Edie. Her eyes though were looking through the glass and out into the hall.

  “Pistol,” Edie hissed, holding out her hand.

  Scott didn’t realize his back was pressed against a weapons cabinet until he turned his head. The cabinet was locked; he broke the glass with his elbow. As he reached in, he saw a coat of arms medallion with a white Maltese cross on a red field. The “Tuitio Fidei et Obsequium Pauperum” emblazoned beneath it. Defense of the faith and assistance to the poor.

  It was the motto of the Sovereign Military Hospitaller Order of Saint John of Jerusalem of Rhodes and of Malta. The Knights of Malta as the order was more commonly known, the world’s oldest surviving order of chivalry. How odd, he’d been reading about the order on the Times of Malta website a few days earlier. Something about an upcoming Open Day. He remembered because he thought it an odd lead story.

  “Scott, Scott,” Edie said.

  “Madonna ta’ Mount Philermos,” Scott said to himself, before picking up a pistol. Our Lady of Mount Philermos—the name for the Blessed Virgin Mary members of the order often invoked when facing fears or trouble.

  “Peyton attacking you in the infirmary instead of me kind of clears up who the target is. Don’t you think?” Edie said as she took the Italian Police Berretta from his hand. “It’s why the chief did what he did.”

  “The chief?” Still trying to come to grips with what happened, Scott scooped up a pistol for himself. “What’s he got to do with any of this?”

  “Give me,” Edie said as he tried to check the magazine and ready the first round with one hand. She took his pistol and gave him hers that she’d already readied. “Take the pill already.” She held out the little red pill. “It’ll clear your head. It’s not speed, not exactly. Got that?”

  His mind was more than clear; it was racing, associating everything his senses took in. He took the pill anyway, swallowing it with a lump of spittle. “You need to tell me what the chief did. Exactly.”

  “That’s where things go a little wrong, I think.” Edie shifted up, her eyes trying to look through the security glass without being seen. Without looking back, she pointed to the phone. “Video three.”

  “There’s another one?” He said before he swiped the phone and pushed play.

  Chapter 8

  Mediterranean Sea

  Morning, Wednesday, 20 June

  The director sat in the only forward-facing seat, with Mila on his right. Behind the pilot and co-pilot, four former Royal Marines Commandos sat two by two across from each other. The twin-engine AS365 N3+ helicopter whirred and purred as it lifted off and he watched Il Ferdinand get smaller and smaller until it was nothing but a dot in the distance. It was some time since he’d traveled by copter—the last time, in fact, was what he swore would be the final time.

  Helicopters tended to be a loud, crude means of travel, nothing like travel by luxury yacht, but this was something else. Fast, quiet, comfortable. He could even hear the sound of his own voice without shouting and that was a plus because helicopters were usually so loud passengers not only had to wear headsets to communicate but to keep the drone of the engines from deafening them.

  In truth, he hadn’t even thought about traveling by helicopter. Not many could fly from Sicily, scoop them up from the middle of the Mediterranean, and get them to Malta without having to refuel several times. The Dauphin was an exception, with a range of about 500 nautical miles and a cruise speed of 145 knots. “Almost six times faster than Il Ferdinand,” Mila said, grinning. “I told you that you wouldn’t hate this.”

  That she seemed to be reading his mind at times was one of many reasons his infatuation with her had lasted so long. Brains, beauty and personality were rare qualities, rare qualities indeed. Rarer still was a woman of such substance who could kill a man seventeen different ways with her bare hands.

  “Transit time, about 2 hours and 39 minutes,” the pilot said over the intercom. “Pretty close on fuel by then so no go rounds or sightseeing.”

  It was the director’s turn to grin. He didn’t plan on sightseeing. He planned on using the hours saved to get his house in order.

  “Relax or you’re going to have a coronary,” Mila said, tittering beside him in her short skirt and bikini top. When he didn’t listen, she pushed him forcefully back against the soft leather of the plush seat and kissed him full on the lips, climbing onto his lap. “Whatever, I wonder, shall we do for two whole hours.” She pushed his fingers into the soft moist place beneath her belly button. “Any ideas?”

  Before things got too hot and heavy, she jumped up and closed the thick privacy curtain between the cockpit and the passenger cabin. The leather satchels and hard cases she stepped around on her way to and from the forward area contained much of the director’s personal armory. Machine guns, grenades, and pistols mostly, but also a Mile Maker customized by TrackingPoint to his exacting personal specifications and then further modified to perfection. Having seen the precision guided firearm in live field tests, he knew his custom model was as close to the $40K off-the-shelf version as a Ferrari 458 was to a Volkswagen Jetta.

  The custom-milled steel barrel still fired .338 magnums, but the basic rounds were the only components that were stock, if the shooter used them at all and usually they didn’t, preferring rounds they poured and sculpted themselves. No other weapon in the world could shoot around corners and over hills. No other weapon could shoot at Lincoln’s eyes on a penny from a mile away and hit not once but every single time regardless of wind and weather.

  Stock models accomplished these feats using lasers, microprocessors, a Linux-based operating system and Recon Jet shooting glasses that connected to the smart scope. His one-of-a-kind custom coupled infrared, ultraviolet, and night vision with onboard radar, sonar and military-grade facial recognition software, and could be operated by radio control from a custom app on a smartphone. It meant not only could the shooter kill someone from a mile away, but the shooter could be miles away when the deed was done.

  “Mind if I go to work?” Mila said, glancing back to the other occupants of the passenger compartment. “A girl’s got to earn her keep.”

  The four commandos continued staring straight ahead, as if they hadn’t heard her say anything. It wouldn’t be the first time they’d seen Mila give him a go round or likely the last.

  “Where was I?” she said, teas
ing him with the tip of a finger pushed against his lips while coaxing his hand back to where it had been inside her.

  He could have stopped her from climbing back on top of him, but he didn’t. “Not too loud. Don’t want to distract the pilot.”

  She pushed his hand deeper inside her. “I’ll try, but no promises.” She purred and nibbled his ear. “Besides, I know you like it when I scream…”

  He knew what she was doing was as much about power as it was about anything else. He didn’t mind giving her control over him in this way and so he tried to give himself over to her. While her nimble hands worked his buckle and zipper and pants, her lips and tongue worked against his.

  “Eyes front,” she whispered. “No distractions, just me.”

  Her lethalness was something only she and he knew for a certainty and her public exhibitions were as disarming as they were alarming. Nothing like keeping a chained tiger in public view for people who thought the tiger was a fuzzy sex kitten.

  “You’re too good to me,” he said between her kisses and caresses. “Too good.”

  Chapter 9

  Mediterranean Sea

  Morning, Wednesday, 20 June

  Scott slipped out of the security office, moving low behind Edie. The hall looked empty, but neither of them were taking any chances. The extra magazines in his pockets clinked a little louder than he was comfortable with as he went to his full height.

  He heard Master Chief Robert’s voice in his head. “Scott, I don’t know who to trust. I’m trusting your man, er woman, here, because you did, and I’m trusting you because so many people seem to want to kill you, and because you saved the lives of a lot of good men today. Damned luckiest swinging dick walking, if you don’t mind me saying. If you’re seeing this things haven’t gone exactly according to plan, but they never do, do they?”