by Gary Starta
“Promise me you’ll talk to me about things that worry or confuse you. It’s O.K. to admit you feel lost or frustrated or just plain mad at the world. You can’t turn your back on conflict anymore because it doesn’t go away; it only festers into something you don’t understand and can’t face.
“If you can do that for me and for yourself, I promise to tell you and show you every single day of my life, without jokes or wisecracks, that I love you and need you and your strength every bit as much as you need mine. I promise to talk to you before I do anything that might seem rash to you.
“I was selfish and insensitive, and I’m sorry. I don’t ever want to make you worry about me. And Carter? I’ll try to curb the sarcasm, but don’t expect miracles right away. It’s my only protection. I mean, it was. Now you are. Deal?”
“Deal.” When she buried her face in his shoulder, he looked up and gave silent thanks to Buddha for bringing her into his life and keeping her there.
Desperate for a tissue, she used the bottom half of her sweater to wipe her nose. “Let’s get back to the car. I’m freezing.”
***
Once they reached the safety of their car, he remembered a few urgent questions that were on his mind when he woke from the dead. “Jill, where’s Fischetti?”
“He rode to the hospital in the ambulance with a thug he shot in the knee. The other one was killed in the blast. We thought you were dead, Carter, but he still stood in front of us, willing to die so that I could take you home and bring that animal into custody for interrogation. The ones we really wanted - the other two - they got away. I’m sorry.”
He clenched his jaw so tightly she could see the muscles twitch.
***
Admiral’s Row was deserted. Carter gunned the motor and blasted the heater as high as it would go. He had loads of other questions for her, but first he wanted to look for the extra wool knit blanket they kept in the back. “Hey, I found the afghan… and Monty! Hey, Monty!!”
Curled up in a ball under the afghan like a comfy cat, Monty yawned and sat up slowly, groaning but beaming at the two of them like a teenager who jumped off the roof and lived to tell the story. “You want to know how I got away? Don’t bother asking. I’ll tell you. I took a running leap right through a solid plate of lead-paned stained glass on the second floor! That’s right! I jumped out a closed window. Who’s the man?! Who’s the man?!”
Carter answered for them both. “You’re the man, Monty. Thanks. And congratulations! Boy, are we glad to see you!”
The two men pumped their arms up and down in a hearty handshake. Monty used his left hand because his right arm was broken and torn out of the socket. They grinned at each other like two idiots.
“I’m rather pleased to see you, too! I never thought I’d say this, but thank God I have plenty of padding in all the wrong places.”
Monty was almost unrecognizable. Carter expected as much, and Seacrest had heard the whole ordeal over the car speaker. She got out to retrieve her medical bag from the trunk and then scooted into the back seat of the car. She began looking him over from head to foot starting with the cuts all over his hands and forearms. “The blood makes it look worse than it is. The lacerations are only in the places that were unprotected when you hit the glass.” She cleaned and bandaged the deep cuts. “A few of these will need stitches. I’m more concerned about your broken arm. It needs to be set right away. It has to be put back into the socket, Monty, and it’s going to hurt. On three, O.K.?”
He nodded.
“One…” She jerked his shoulder back into place before he knew it was coming, and he was eternally grateful.
Monty wore the face of a boxer who’d gone thirteen rounds before winning the decision. He also looked like a mountain of raw hamburger meat. “Monty! Your face is a bloody, black and blue stump and you sit there grinning! You had the time of your life, didn’t you?”
Monty and Carter glanced at each other and then back at her. They shrugged in unison. He smiled sheepishly and nodded, revealing a few pulpy spots where there should have been teeth.
Seacrest sighed and shook her head. “Oh, well, never mind. The most important thing now is to make sure you don’t have a concussion or a cracked skull. Even so, we’ll have to watch for signs of swelling of the brain and any cognitive damage caused by landing on the one part of you with no padding at all. Honestly!”
Monty looked splendiferous. He’d gone so terribly long without the care and attention only a woman could provide that he fairly bathed in the warmth of the scolding she gave him and thoroughly enjoyed every moment of her motherly ministrations.
Seacrest was right. He was having the time of his life. He looked strong and proud, and somehow, a little younger. Arleen could rest in peace, now.
“Carter, put the pedal to the metal and head for New York Presbyterian on William Street. It’s one of the best emergency facilities in the country, and it’s only a few minutes from here. Take the Brooklyn Bridge.”
Some habits die hard, I guess. I’ll try to be a little less commanding tomorrow.
***
One day later…
Carter went to the hospital to check on Monty and the enforcer. The as yet unidentified man had a shattered knee cap and wouldn’t be going anywhere soon, but he’d recover enough to face trial.
Montgomery was in pretty bad shape. He’d been kept up all night and monitored for a concussion. His adrenaline level returned to normal a few hours after they got him there, so his body was finally registering the unimaginable pain of missing teeth torn out by the roots, broken bones, and a head that felt like an anvil had been dropped on it.
“Do you want me to call a nurse for you, Monty? You look like you’ve been run over and dragged for ten blocks. Sorry, buddy. Maybe they can give you something for the pain.”
Montgomery tried to turn his head toward Carter, but the room began to spin, so he gave up. Swallowing down the nausea, he grimaced. “They have me on morphine. It’s strong but it doesn’t last. I just have to wait for the next dose and then wait for it to kick in; there’s nothing I can do about it.”
“Monty, I need to talk to you about something. Are you up to it?”
“The only thing I can do is talk. Sort of. What’s on your mind?”
“I want to put you in the witness protection program as soon as you’re ready for a wheelchair. Your testimony can be done by video conference. You can hide in plain sight now without worrying about retribution. You’ll have a full-time aid and someone to watch your back from behind the scenes from now on. We owe you at least that much.”
“Why would I want to do that, Agent Carter?”
“All we caught was one bodyguard. Even if we manage to break him or find the two that got away, there’s still a network of conspirators all over the globe. We may never get them all.”
“And that means…?”
“It means you’ve done your bit for God and country. It’s time to let us take it from here. I‘ve had to face up to my own organization being dirty from top to bottom. I can’t even be sure whether Fischetti stepped up to save me or himself. Someone upstairs ordered his men to disregard his orders and shoot us all before they left the scene. Agent Deeprose would have been next. They let the Silver Man and the woman get away and would’ve hung the whole mess on your dead body if they’d been able to find you, Monty.”
Monty sat quietly for a few minutes, digesting what he’d heard and gathering his thoughts. “Agent Carter, the game’s not over. You just told me as much. I didn’t come out of hiding just to go back in. What I’m trying to say is I’m not afraid anymore, and I haven’t finished what I came here to do. I thank you for the offer, but I’m going to have to turn it down. When the trial dates finally come up, I’ll be there.”
He grabbed a hand-held mirror lying face down on his nightstand. “I can finally look at myself in the mirror again and respect what I see. Besides, operating in the shadows seems to work much better for our hero, the mysterious
Mr. X. I don’t know if he made it out of there alive, but if he lived through the blast he’s still on our side.”
“I don’t think he did, Monty. I had the area searched. If he’s still there, he’s buried under tons of marble. He was a tough old bird, wasn’t he?” The two sat in companionable silence for a while, sad to see the last of the man who gave his life to capture Silverman and to give Monty his one and only chance to escape.
“I know we can’t get them all, Agent, not right now, anyway. But I can help you make a deep crack in their foundation and hopefully live long enough to see the whole kit and caboodle die a very unnatural death. The president knows all about the Galatea Initiative and has the Burn List by now. He has their full confession on voice and video, too. Others will take it from here, and they’ll have an easier job of it once we start the ball rolling. No sir, I’m not going anywhere. I’m staying right here to see it through.”
***
Carter left the hospital with the intention of interrogating the enforcer. He was a spectacular disappointment compared to the two orchestrators he’d hoped to catch. Still, he had a plan in mind, but to pull it off he’d have to outsmart the giant.
That shouldn’t be too difficult. If he saw or heard something I can use as a bargaining chip or knows where the JASONS and Silverman are hiding, we may still be able to capture them. The main thing is, though, I have to find a way to use him to my advantage so that all of it stops right now without us having to worry who they are and where they are from one generation tom the next…
A never-ending swarm of people propelled Carter along the street. Soon, it became a sort of white noise, and his mind was free to wander.
At least the director will be spending all his future Christmases in a federal penitentiary. General Breen has a little bomb waiting on his doorstep, too. He doesn’t know it yet, but he’s going to rat out the entire Department of Defense and still walk out of court one sorry, ruined piece of shit. No sympathy, there, tough guy.
As his mind circled around evidence and witnesses, he kept coming back to the fact that forensics would play a key role in any convictions they hoped to get. He felt sure there was something he overlooked, but the harder he tried to think of what it could be, the more elusive it.
There was something important I meant to do. It had to do with evidence. Forensic evidence. Think, man, think!
***
Five minutes later, he was running, but not to the local lock-up. The enforcer could wait. He launched himself towards headquarters and burst through the lab doors just as Seacrest walked past holding test tubes containing his blood samples she hoped would prove he’d been drugged with Hyzopran almost to death.
She crashed to the floor yelling obscenities and just barely managed to prevent the test tubes from breaking. Seacrest stood up, red in the face and madder than a hornet. “What in the holy hell was that?!”
Carter winced and helped her up. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, but I have to talk to you…”
“Slow the hell down, Carter! I’m right in the middle of running a toxicology test on your blood, which I’m fairly certain will match the drug given to the three women and Michael. Whatever it is can keep for a few minutes.” She stole a sideways glance at her supervisor, who looked furious for a change. She threw Carter a look of warning.
Carter tried again. “Agent Seacrest, this can’t wait. You’ve got to process the skin underneath my nails and check Monty’s too.”
“What?! You have Silverman’s skin under your nails, and you’re just remembering it now?”
“Yes! Assuming Monty also has Silverman’s skin under his nails, we can place the same man who interrogated Monty last night at the location where I was ambushed the night before. Do you know what that means?”
Seacrest put down her test tubes and stood stock still. She didn’t move a muscle. Her brain was moving faster than the speed of light, and she had to stay perfectly still to follow her own thoughts. “I …I…Yessss…YES! I DO!! It means that if you test positive for the same drug that the other four had in them, and if Monty and you can both give me viable D.N.A samples from the skin cells under your nails, if it’s still present, and if the D.N.A. in both samples match…
“Carter! You can prove the same man who drugged you, drugged the other four. We know the Silver Man’s real name now, so if there’s any way to get his D.N.A. profile to compare against the results I get from testing you and Monty and if they all match, we’ve got him! Monty knows his face. He saw him last night.
All six of you can testify to everything that happened to you, and we can back it up with hard evidence! Forensic evidence! We also have Red’s video to prove the meetings really occurred and the Burn List from Florio’s computer! If we connect the Silver Man to Hyzopran and both your abductions, we can also connect him, circumstantially, to its theft from Meese’s lab, the Collective, the Burn List, the killings, and the Galatea Initiative.
“That’s everything, Carter, everything! And with the voice and video wire, it’s not so circumstantial anymore. With testimony, we have an actual shot at this if we can find him. Hooray!!!!”
She punched the air and whooped and hollered and didn’t care what her boss thought about it. From now on, she was Queen of the lab.
Completely absorbed and at the same time incredibly excited, Seacrest swabbed the underside of his nails to collect epithelial cells. She issued orders to her boss in a very firm voice without looking up or stopping what she was doing.
“Contact New York Presbyterian Hospital and tell them we need a swab of the underside of Mr. Montgomery’s fingernails, STAT! Tell them we need it delivered to this lab for analysis as soon as humanly possible. I’m not going to lose that evidence because some overeager nurse assistant went in there to clean him up!”
The man looked thunderstruck.
She knew she’d crossed the line, but the risk of losing vital evidence was greater than her interest in stroking his ego. Besides, Fischetti always backed her up before, and she rather enjoyed the fact that her supervisor knew it. “I’m sorry, sir. I would do it myself if I wasn’t already doing two things at once. There’s no one else here to help.”
He didn’t budge.
“I said NOW!”
He’d never heard Seacrest’s “Don’t fuck with me; just do it!” tone of voice and jumped like he’d been jabbed in the rump with a long, sharp needle. He made that call so fast that Seacrest felt ashamed of herself. Well, almost.
“Carter, you haven’t been home since the morning after you were attacked, so even with a day and a half lost, I’ll should be able to find trace amounts of D.N.A. of your attacker under your nails.”
As soon as she was finished, Carter barreled out the lab doors and ran straight back to the hospital to make certain Monty’s swab was done and delivered directly into his own hands and then into hers.
***
“Ah, good to see you, Agent Carter. Thanks for visiting me here. Before you run back to the lab with the D.N.A. sample I just handed over, there’s one thing I forgot to tell you. Everything happened so fast! The thing is, Silverman may still be untouchable, even with the mounting evidence against him.”
“What? Why? I don’t understand!”
“You see, we had to beat the Russians to the moon, not to be first ones there, but because of what was already here and most likely there, too- evidence of U.F.O’s. Russia was never the threat they were made out to be. Because there was a common threat to all countries, there was no limit to what he could ask for and get. No rules to follow. No red tape. He had a limitless budget and a think tank to head up. No law could touch him and no army could stop him once they took him to Area 51.
“Of everyone who ever tried to figure out what the hell the military ferreted away out there before his time and even after, Agent Carter, he was the only one who could make sense of the flying machines, gadgets, technology, engineering and design plans, materials, even some of…them. All he had to do was walk in there, t
ake a look around, and sleep on it for a few nights. He said he could see whole machines and processes in his mind in their entirety and in 3-D. The pieces and parts just floated around and around in his head, taking themselves apart and putting themselves back together again just the way Tesla saw his inventions. And Einstein. And Steven Jobs. He didn’t have to reverse engineer most of it.
“Agent Carter, he was the one who took us from huge bulky televisions with vacuum tubes to transistors and from micro-chips to Nano-chips. We’ve taken a shortcut that’s akin to being cavemen one day and extra-terrestrials the next. There are things going on in space that he’s responsible for, and we still have no idea what they are. They need him, even if he is a sociopath.”
It was now essential that Carter find a way to stop the JASONS without having to bring anyone to trial. He had no idea how he was going to do it, but he had to have a strategy before he interrogated the enforcer.
***
Later that afternoon, Carter went to see Fischetti in his office. He still wasn’t sure he could trust the deputy director, and he wasn’t interested in hearing anything the man had to say, but Carter had something to say to him. Without facial expression of any kind, he dove into deep water, keeping his voice low and hard.
“Sir. There will be absolutely no negative spin from my team concerning this office as a result of our findings in the investigation. Internal Affairs can decide that for themselves. The media and the public will only be told that the thrill killers have been caught and prosecuted. I’m not going to pin a conspiracy on you or this agency. I only want the killings to stop, and I’ve got a means to do it.”
Fischetti opened his mouth to speak.
Carter kept talking. “It won’t be messy. No loose ends. You’ll never hear about it from anyone in this office, either, because I’m going to do it quietly…and for you.”
Fischetti’s mouth was still open when Carter left, slamming the door behind him.