Don’t go…
It was a pointless wish, Simon knew. Even if he could get the words out to explain why this new FBI agent should not leave him here, with Dr. Michaels and the others, she had no power to change his situation. The man standing over them would simply make her leave, and would craft some excuse attributing his words to the disease that afflicted him.
But I’m not like that anymore…
He wasn’t. He knew that. He felt things. Understood things. If only Agent Emily LaGrange could understand…
The thought came quickly to Simon. A chance he could take. Dr. Michaels was close, but was he that close? Close enough to hear a whisper?
“Agent LaGrange, it’s time,” Michaels prodded, insistence very plain in his voice now.
Emily slid her hand from Simon’s back and began to ease away, but as she did he tightened his grip on her and tipped his head so that his own mouth was nearly pressed against her left ear.
Say it…say it…please let me say it…
“Simon, I have to—”
“Leah Poole,” he whispered, the words, the name, coming only in the thinnest, breathiest sound.
Emily hesitated for a moment, her withdrawal from him ceasing. But before Dr. Michaels took any notice of her reaction, Simon Lynch released his grip on her and settled back into his chair, downcast stare fixed blankly on the tabletop once more.
“If you would, Agent LaGrange…”
Emily looked to Michaels. He’d stepped back from the table and now stood between it and the door, one hand extended toward the exit like a doorman bidding her goodbye. She stood, following his direction, and moved to the door. The doctor opened it for her, and she stepped through, glancing behind for a final, quick look at the man she’d been sent to watch over. When her gaze found him, his face was no longer aimed at the top of the plain table. It was twisted to one side, his swimming gaze cast in her direction. Watching her go.
Watching her be taken from him.
* * *
Thirty minutes later, General Karen Vance found Warren Michaels in his office, lab coat draped over the back of a nearby chair and a bottle of whiskey open on his desk.
“It went that well,” Vance said, closing the door behind and eyeing Michaels where he sat at his desk, squat glass half empty in his grip. He looked up to her with grim, tired eyes. “Not a celebratory drink, I take it.”
“I thought we were done with the Jeffersons of the world when he ate his gun,” Michaels said. He swallowed the remainder of his drink and set the glass down, filling it again from the bottle. “She’s a crusader.”
“It’s her first visit,” Vance reminded her mercurial scientific director. “Can you imagine your reaction to what she saw in there if you had no context?”
Michaels, though, wasn’t entertaining his superior’s hypothetical. He lifted the glass and sipped slowly, pouring the calm down his throat ounce by ounce. “You weren’t there. I could feel it. It was palpable.”
“Warren…”
“Don’t Warren me, Karen,” he challenged the retired general. “I can’t deal with interference and bring Simon Lynch to a place of usefulness. I can’t. I couldn’t with Jefferson, and I can’t with this one.”
Vance said nothing for a moment. Leadership had taught her many things, one of which was the necessity to allow others to let off steam, lest some pressure build to a point of disastrous release. She’d also learned that, at the end of each and every day, true leaders stepped up. They did what was necessary to ensure the mission was a success, however menial or unpleasant the task might be.
“Fine, Warren,” Vance said. “You’re free.”
Michaels finished his drink and set the glass down, eyeing Vance with wary curiosity. “Explain.”
“I’ll handle her,” Vance said. “I handled Jefferson, so I’ll take point on Agent LaGrange.”
Michaels visibly released a breath and let his body almost collapse back into his desk chair. It wasn’t the weight of the world which had been lifted from him, but it was enough.
“Thank you,” he said.
“You have nothing impeding your work now, Warren. Which means results are expected. Imminently.”
That, too, was something she had learned as a leader—hold others accountable. Warren Michaels, esteemed scientist, had promised that his protocol would unlock the mind of Simon Lynch and make its brilliance available at will. It was time for him to deliver.
“Two days,” Vance said. “I have our next contact booked. Have him ready.”
She was gone before he had a chance to reply, or to protest. The latter he would not have done, he knew. It was as much in his interest as hers to have Simon Lynch on the clock, so to speak. The protocol was working, but that had to be proven, and there was only one way to do that.
Michaels picked up the phone on his desk and pressed a single button.
“Yes, Dr. Michaels,” Carlton answered.
“Stop the sedative regimen and begin the reversal,” Michaels ordered.
“So we’re going with the antidote?” Carlton asked. “We’re going to purge him? The side effects could—”
“I’m aware of the side effects,” Michaels said, hanging up without saying another word to the technician.
The younger man was right, but that sometimes didn’t matter. In this case, expedience was necessary. If Simon Lynch suffered some discomfort because of it, so be it. Dr. Warren Michaels had no qualms about that, nor with any treatment choice he was making.
First, do no harm…
Michaels didn’t even offer a soft laugh at the thought. He’d left that edict in the rearview mirror long ago.
Thirteen
The car, a ten-year-old Camry this time, dropped her off in downtown Salt Lake City, in the parking lot of a Mexican restaurant a mile from the airport. She’d been hustled back aboard the helicopter after being hooded, and transported, this time, to a spot less than thirty minutes from where she now stood.
“You have a rental,” the driver told her through the open passenger door. He pointed to a compact Chevy parked in a nearby spot. “Your personal belongings are in the trunk. Key is on the right rear tire.”
They’d gone into her motel room in Idaho Falls and cleaned out what she’d brought, transporting it here ahead of her arrival.
“See you in two weeks,” the driver said. He stared at Emily as she leaned on the open passenger door, hunching slightly to look him in the eye. “Is there anything else?”
She didn’t answer. Didn’t offer as much as a nod or a shake of the head. She simply closed the door with force and stepped back. The driver pulled away, leaving her alone, looking at the rental they’d arranged for her. It would get her to the terminal in plenty of time for her eight o’clock flight. She’d be back in her Minneapolis apartment by two in the morning local time.
Except, Emily LaGrange wasn’t returning to Minneapolis. Not yet.
“Give me a couple crispy tacos,” Emily told the smiling older woman at the walk-up window of the eatery. “And water. That’s all.”
“You sure you don’t want to come inside?” the woman asked. “It’s warmer in the dining room.”
Emily shook her head and paid. It was cold outside, but she didn’t want the feeling of walls surrounding her. Not right then. Those claustrophobic moments while she was undercover were just memories, but they’d come rushing back now as she thought about the place where Simon Lynch was housed. It was the walls, and the lack of windows, and the certain sensation that she was being watched. Was always being watched. As Dana Perrin it had been lowlifes who’d always kept a wary gaze set upon her. But out there, with Simon…
What is that place?
She knew what she’d been told. That he was being kept there for his own protection. To treat him. To learn from him.
‘Learn from him…’
Emily thought that the way Dr. Michaels had stated that purpose was too cute by a long shot. What he couldn’t say, she suspected, was that
they studied him there. Like a lab animal with some curious defect.
But why? Because he broke a code almost twenty years ago?
No…
There was more to what was going on there than that. More to Simon Lynch, even.
“Leah Poole…”
“Excuse me?” the woman at the window asked.
Emily smiled and shook off the question. “Just mumbling to myself.”
She turned and took a few steps away from the service window as she thought on that name. And on why Simon Lynch would speak it, covertly, to her.
He didn’t want Michaels to hear him…
That was a given, Emily believed. But who was this woman? There was one possible way to find out, and Emily had decided upon doing just that under the hood on her way back from meeting Simon.
“Excuse me,” Emily said as she approached the service window again.
“It’ll be just a few minutes, mija,” the woman said, a man behind her working the grill while another wrapped orders for the customers who’d chosen to have their dinner out of the cold.
“No, I have a question,” Emily said.
The woman came to the window and rested her arms on the high counter, smiling at her customer. “Yes, what is it?”
“How long of a drive is it from here to Los Angeles?”
* * *
“Maple?” the older woman asked. “Really?”
She dropped the box of doughnuts on the picnic bench in Rock Creek Park and sat across from Lane. He reached to the box and lifted the lid. Only the creamy colored maple pastry remained.
“You ate all those?”
The wiry woman cocked her head at him and flashed a too-sweet smile. She was a marathoner, he knew, even as she approached sixty years of age. More than likely she’d given what he’d sent her to her fellow nurses at Walter Reed, saving only the single doughnut to taunt him. Lane took the offending morsel and ate half of it in two bites.
“I’m here,” the woman said, taking a seat at the picnic bench.
Lane set the remaining half of the doughnut back in the box and looked to the aging, incredibly fit nurse. He knew her name but did not use it, a habit of security he’d struggled with at one time. People had identities. Lives. Personalities. But, in serving the group and its purpose, he’d had to shift his way of thinking. The woman across from him, who’d served multiple tours overseas as an Air Force nurse before retiring to the civilian world, was a like mind. A kindred soul, even.
But she served a different purpose. An anonymous one, even. She, and others like her, would come when called—or when the proper signal was received. Lane had always thought the sending of doughnuts was an inspired choice on her part.
“I appreciate you coming,” Lane said.
“Thirty-five degrees is lovely park weather,” she said.
“I need your help,” Lane said.
“You didn’t need to tell me that,” she lightly scolded the younger man, a motherly way about her. Motherly and stern. “What is it?”
“Como es tu español?”
“My Spanish is excellent,” the woman answered. “Will I need it?”
“Very possibly,” Lane said.
It took him just ten minutes to explain what he needed. And what she would need to do to get that.
“I have a dead space waiting for you,” Lane said, holding out a slip of paper with all the particulars she would need. She took the note and slipped it in her pocket. “Spanish banks will be open by four in the morning our time.”
The woman stood. “I’ll get back to you before I head to work in the morning.”
“Thank you, Sheila.”
Sheila Reese, Captain, United States Air Force, retired, stopped before walking away, eyeing Lane with a mix of wariness and curiosity. “Has something changed?”
“Like are we loosening security protocols?” Lane asked, answering his own question with a shake of the head. “Look around.”
She did. There was no one closer than two hundred feet from them. It was midday in the park, on an autumn day that felt more wintry by the hour.
“I’m Michael,” he told her.
“I know that,” Sheila said. “But…”
“No one is listening,” he said. “Not here. And if they are, we’re both already marked.”
She couldn’t argue with that. But why the man, her handler from Justice, had decided to break security procedures by using her name, and his, she hadn’t a clue.
Until she did.
“Something’s different about this one,” Sheila said, reading his eyes. His face. “Isn’t there?”
Lane nodded. “We’ve worked together a few times, Sheila. Not much in the recent past, but before that, we did.”
The recent past had stretched out years. All had been quiet for so long that the arrival of doughnuts at her work had, at first, seemed a joke. Clearly, it wasn’t.
“All those operations were aborted,” he told her. The meaning was clear—the risks she’d taken had been pointless.
But not to her.
“We were trying, Michael,” she said. “That’s what matters.”
“Trying won’t cut it this time,” he said. “And after this, every security procedure matters. I want you to understand that.”
His words had shifted from wistful to worrisome. She nodded. “I understand.”
“You remember how to use the setup?” Lane asked her. “You haven’t visited a dead space in a while.”
The dead space was nothing more than a room somewhere with the gadgetry she’d need to perform her function. It served only that purpose, and would be sanitized once she was gone.
“I can work with any changes,” Sheila assured him
He accepted her confidence with a nod, but she could see the concern about him. It was not her place to seek any further information on what her role in this was related to. Or what it might lead to. Ignorance wasn’t bliss, but it sometimes was necessary, however disconcerting being out of the loop might be.
“We’ll talk tomorrow,” she told him.
“I know. Good luck.”
Sheila Reese turned and walked away from Michael Lane, the man who was both stranger and friend to her. She didn’t look back, but she could feel his gaze on her.
Then, she felt it no more, and when she glanced back from the walkway to the parking lot, the man who’d summoned her was nowhere to be seen.
Fourteen
Special Agent in Charge Francine Aguirre-Welsh’s office door opened after a quick knock and her assistant, Myles, poked his head in and smiled at his boss.
“There’s an Emily LaGrange in the lobby,” Myles said.
Frankie didn’t react overtly, but her hesitance to immediately respond signaled to her assistant that some nerve had been subtly pricked.
“She’s Bureau,” Myles said.
“I know,” Frankie said, looking away from her assistant for a moment, letting her gaze play absently over her office. The space was a far cry from the cubicle she’d worked in when she was Emily LaGrange’s age. She’d come far and had worked for every wrung she’d grabbed while climbing the Bureau ladder.
“Ma’am…”
Frankie looked back to her assistant. He was a lawyer, two years out of Columbia, and was six months from entering the academy at Quantico. As a gatekeeper he’d been stellar, but this was one gate she couldn’t let him close. Not even if doing so was the smart play where her career was concerned.
“Have her come in,” Frankie said.
Myles withdrew and Frankie stood, coming around her desk and standing, facing the door. Less than a minute later it opened and Emily LaGrange was ushered it.
“Thank you, Myles,” Frankie said, and her assistant left them. Frankie fixed a less than pleased look on the younger agent. “I don’t suppose you considered that this might not be the brightest move on your part.”
Emily didn’t laugh outright, but had an instant urge to. The Los Angeles SAC was worried about security.
That her showing up for a second meeting, after seeing Simon Lynch, could add another data point to any who might be trying to locate the man. In the end, that was laughably inconsequential.
“You should be more worried about their security,” Emily said, and Frankie’s brow bore down toward the bridge of her nose. “It’s junk.”
Hyperbole. It was the currency of youth, Frankie thought. Even youthful special agents.
“Even if that’s the case, you shouldn’t be here,” Frankie said. She motioned to a chair as she moved back behind her desk. “Sit.”
They both did.
“What can I do for you, Agent LaGrange?”
Emily had thought through what she was going to say. It wouldn’t be an outright lie, but there was enough wiggle room that, by omission, one could construe dishonesty on her part. But she’d decided it had to be this way. The SAC sitting across from her might be the most trustworthy person in the world, but to Emily she was just another suit. And she’d learned how much she could trust those types since her undercover operation ended.
“I need to know more about Agent Jefferson,” Emily said.
Frankie reacted with a hint of visible, honest surprise, a brief smile flashing for an instant.
“Really? Why is that?”
“Lynch is fixated on him,” Emily said. “That’s apparent to me even after one meeting.”
She watched the SAC process what she’d told her. If there’d been any communication from the people overseeing Simon Lynch, her statement might be questioned. But Emily doubted that any channel existed between the general and the doctor and the outside world. Or with this corner of it. They didn’t embrace scrutiny, nor invite it, she sensed strongly. Her presence was an irritant, as she suspected Art Jefferson’s had been.
“How is he?” Frankie asked. She’d never met Simon Lynch, and only knew of him through classified Bureau reports, unclassified whispers, and from the limited bits Art had shared over the years as the distance between them increased, literally and personally.
“Out of it,” Emily answered, not a hint of deception necessary to voice that truth.
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