by Keith Yocum
“I say we go,” Dennis said.
“Couple things to remember, so please pay attention. Try not to shoot me if we get separated, got that? I hate getting shot in the back by my own team.”
“Yes.”
“If someone has a gun in their hand, man or woman, shoot to kill. Aim for the middle of the chest. Got that?”
“Yes.”
“If, by some strange act of fate, we find Judy, do not drop your guard. Getting her out may be more difficult than us getting in to this place. Okay?”
“Got it.”
“Lastly, and I don’t mean to be maudlin, Cunningham, but if I don’t make it out, you’ll personally — do you hear me? Personally — tell my husband Phil that I love him. I just wanted to use my skills again. I think he’ll understand. Maybe he won’t, actually, but tell him anyway.”
“I don’t like you talking this way, Louise. Better yet, you stay here and let me go down. I don’t have a wife or much of a career left anyway. You stay. If I don’t come up with Judy or Voorster, just call the cops and get out of here.”
“You won’t make ten minutes down there without help,” she said. “We go together, and we go now.”
Louise put the key in the lock and turned it slowly, the old locking mechanism making a loud sound.
“Careful,” the wounded woman said from her stool. Dennis and Louise looked at the woman in alarm, but she just stared back, her eyes round and terrified.
CHAPTER 24
Voorster raced around the bed with such speed that Judy had barely moved when his snarling face and outstretched hands were in front of her.
She was not as frightened by him. She knew her chances of getting out of the building were almost zero and that she would die either by overdose or under a flurry of fists and boots.
So as Voorster lunged at her, she did something entirely instinctive, which explained why he was unprepared.
Judy lowered her head and thrust the crown of her skull into his face, catching him on the nose. The force of the collision rattled her neck, spine and ribcage, and his bulk forced the two of them back into the wall next to the bed.
She knew he was hurt.
He fell to his knees and held his face, cursing. She tried to scamper away across the bed and over the body of the small man, but Voorster grabbed her ankles and yanked them backward. Judy twisted her head sideways in anticipation of a fist, and he did not disappoint. The blow caught her on the back of the head, stunning her with a bright light and tingling down her right arm.
Let this be over soon, she thought. I fought. They won. But at least I fought. She felt another blow bounce off her left ear.
✦
The stairway was dimly lit, and Louise went first, though awkwardly on her prosthetic foot. Dennis cursed himself for involving her. Louise’s request that he speak to her surviving husband was still bouncing around his head.
There were a dozen steps down the staircase, with a room at the bottom on the left. When Louise got to the last few steps, she stopped, leaned forward and peered into the room. She turned and shook her head.
Dennis followed her, his right hand now wet with perspiration around the handle of the 9 mm.
They found themselves in an open, cozy, furnished and carpeted room with several stuffed leather chairs, a couch, large coffee table and a large flat-screen TV.
A hallway led down to what appeared to be a room on the right.
The sounds of some activity, including crying, came from the room down the hall, and Louise gestured for Dennis to follow farther behind her.
And then it happened.
From upstairs they could hear pounding on the front door. It stopped and then started again, this time very loud.
They looked at each other, then again down the hallway to see if the pounding noise had been noticed. The knocking continued and then stopped abruptly as Dennis heard a strange rhythmic pounding on the floor above him. He looked at Louise and jerked his head upward, confused by the noise coming through the floor.
“Shit,” he said. He pointed for her to continue down the hallway, turned and bounded up the steps.
✦
Judy expected a third and perhaps final blow to her listless head, but Voorster stopped and cursed wildly. She opened one of her eyes to see Voorster prying Agata’s arms from around his neck, his face dripping blood down his nostrils onto his moustache and lips.
“Damn woman,” he said, throwing Agata to the floor like she was a broom.
He turned back to Judy, and she watched in great wonder as he tried to decide which woman to beat first; the woman on the bed or the woman who had just climbed on his back and made a weak effort to stop him.
Before he could make up his mind, Judy heard a voice — a strange woman’s voice — say, “Stop! You! I said stop!”
Confused, dazed from the blows to the head, and very sore, Judy managed to arch her head upside down on the bed to see a small blond woman in the doorway holding a gun. Judy looked back at Voorster.
“Get out of here,” he said firmly. “You don’t know what you’re doing. Leave now and nothing will happen to you.”
Judy looked back at the woman with the gun.
“Get down on your knees,” the woman commanded.
“You get down on your bloody knees, you stupid bitch!”
Judy heard a sudden series of loud pops from elsewhere in the building, and then loud voices from far away.
Voorster took several steps toward the woman with the gun and yelled, “Get out of here!”
The woman fired and Voorster fell down, clutching his left leg. Judy realized the gun had a silencer. Confused and in pain, Judy lay on the bed, her head next to the shoulder of the now inert small man, and stared at the ceiling. She followed the path of her favorite ceiling crack, the one that looked like the Swan River that she remembered from geography class.
What a strange way to die, she thought. I think someone is trying to save me. This is not Dennis. She felt the rumpled bedsheet against her cheek and nuzzled it slightly, the only comfort she could find.
✦
Dennis got to the top of the stairs just as the tall blond woman had finished hopping across the floor, her legs bound by the plastic tie. The woman had used her teeth to pull back the first door bolt and was working on the second one.
“Stop!” Dennis said.
But she didn’t stop and he weighed whether to shoot her. The second bolt clicked back unlocked and the huge door burst open, smashing the woman back and onto a small table.
Two men barreled through the front door, one large bald man and one even larger man with a blue wool knit cap on his head. Neither man carried a weapon, and they looked startled to see Dennis pointing a pistol at them from the stairwell.
One dove right and the other left.
Dennis shot twice at the man rolling to his right and was not sure whether he hit him. As he swung the gun to his left, that man had rolled behind one of the chairs next to the sedated doorman.
He heard a loud crack. The man on his right had pulled out a gun and fired several times, hitting the wall inches from Dennis’s head. He retreated several steps down the stairs, stopped, propped himself on his knees and poked his head at floor level over the threshold.
The man on the right fired again as Dennis’s face emerged. Dennis returned fire blindly as he dropped his head below the threshold. When he peered again above the threshold, the man to the right was lying face down on the floor. But the other man to his left now fired from behind the chair, and Dennis felt something slam into his shoulder and knock him backward, tossing him head over heels down the stairs. When he finished tumbling wildly, his head hit the corner of something, and he blacked out.
✦
Judy was amused by the scene in front of her. Agata had got to her feet and hid behind the woman
with the gun. The woman with the gun kept telling Voorster to get on his knees and stop rolling around, but Voorster kept cursing at the woman.
Finally, the woman with the gun stepped up to Voorster and hit him twice across his head with the butt of the pistol, momentarily quieting him.
Judy looked back at the ceiling and idly wondered where the black bag was. She would like to have an injection, and the thought was very pleasing.
Agata raced out of the room, but screamed almost immediately and returned wild eyed.
“He’s coming!” she said.
Judy didn’t see the woman with the gun move deeper into the room, but she must have because into the doorway strode a huge man with a gun. He first pointed it at Judy and then swung it around at Voorster. The popping sound made Judy flinch, and she watched the big man collapse to the cold cement floor with a terrible fleshy sound.
“Is your name Judy?” the woman with the gun said, tugging at Judy’s shoulder.
Judy nodded, but it was painful to do so.
“Please get up now. You, what’s your name?”
“Agata.”
“Agata. Help me get this woman up. We need to get out of here.”
Judy felt Agata pulling her out of bed while the woman with the gun checked the pulse of the large man on the floor.
“Come,” the woman with the gun said. “Hurry!”
As Judy made her way around the bed with assistance from Agata, she looked down at a snarling Voorster, who was bleeding profusely from both a leg wound and a broken nose. Agata continued to pull and tug Judy toward the doorway while the woman with the gun checked the hallway.
Judy stumbled over the man lying in the doorway, and noticed the gun next to him. She jerked away from Agata, picked up the gun, lurched several steps toward Voorster, shot him once in the head and dropped the gun.
“Oh, Christ,” the blond woman with the gun said, looking back into the room. “Out! Now!”
Dennis felt Louise shaking him violently, yelling inches from his nose, “Get up now! Dennis, get up. Up!”
He was confused, crawling on all fours up the stairs with Louise and several women behind him. None of them appeared to be Judy — they were so thin and haggard. There was also something wrong with his right arm, and it felt wet and sticky underneath his coat.
The late afternoon sunlight blinded him as the group made their way to the van. Dennis felt like the entire group was blind, except for Louise, who shepherded them like sheep into the back of the van. They tumbled in on top of each other and lay there rolling around like logs while Louise raced through the streets of London, talking to someone on her cell phone.
“Louise,” Dennis pleaded from the back, tumbling onto one of the women. “I don’t feel well.”
“Shut up, Dennis, you’re fine. Sit still.”
“Dennis?” a woman said in a weak, hoarse voice.
✦
She was mesmerized by how clean and soft the bedsheets were, and she nuzzled her pillow as if it were the biggest teddy bear in the world. Judy was happy, but her elation was offset by a darkness she could not control. Somewhere, lurking behind her happiness, was a feeling of anger, humiliation and shame. Her mind shuttled between the two extremes, and she had difficulty negotiating the path.
The hospital was clean, the professionals were kind and accommodating, and the medications were tolerable.
When Dennis was not there, she longed for him with a yearning that was almost painful.
But when he was there, sitting next to her and holding her hand, she felt uncomfortable and wished he would leave.
Her parents and son were on their way to London, and she wondered whether she would suffer the same confusing feelings of longing and revulsion. What was happening to her? She sometimes stole a glance at the wreckage of the skin and veins on the insides of her arms and wondered idly how it had happened.
And she still longed, albeit less frequently as the days passed, for another injection.
✦
“Just tell them everything, just as you remember it,” Louise said. “Don’t embellish or withhold anything. Just tell them how I got involved and what we did. Leave it at that. If you don’t know the answer to something, just say you don’t know. The key is not to lie. Got that?”
“Yes,” Dennis said, cradling the phone to his ear. “But I can’t divulge the existence of this NSA guy. I’ve got to cover that track.”
“Why do you need to keep him out of it?”
“I promised him. And Freddie would expect me to keep him out of it.”
“Well, I never brought him up, because I don’t know anything about him officially.”
“Let’s leave it at that. Please don’t mention him.”
“Your call,” she said.
“You okay?” he asked.
“Yes, I’m fine. We certainly caused a stir around here. Getting lots of messages from colleagues. Rumors spread quickly here at Langley. And how about your shoulder?”
“That was nothing; thank God you reminded me to wear the Kevlar. Big bruise, small wound. Nothing really. And you? Everything okay at home?”
“You’re not allowed to know about my personal life,” she said.
“Is he angry?” Dennis persisted.
“That would be an understatement.”
“I’m sorry I got you involved in this thing.”
“Listen, we’ve hashed this out already. It happened. I knew exactly what I was doing. I’ll deal with consequences, and so will you. Which reminds me, how is Judy doing?”
“Much better. Guess the doctors have this withdrawal thing down pat. Still, she seems depressed at times. I’m having trouble breaking through to her.”
“I can’t believe how depraved some people are to do things like that. But as you said, she’s a strong woman. Give her time.”
“Yes, of course. She needs time.”
“When are you meeting the investigators in London?” Louise asked.
“Tomorrow. What do you think will happen?”
“Nothing will happen.”
“Nothing?” he said. “After the shootout, the deaths, the unauthorized use of agency weapons borrowed from a London safe house?”
“And the rescue of a kidnapped Australian policewoman, the smashing of a human trafficking ring and the killing of a high-value Interpol drug lord?” she added.
“Do you think those things balance out?” he asked. “They don’t in my experience.”
“They will if you tell them the truth tomorrow.”
“Even your soliloquy in the van about being shunted aside from field work because of a disability?”
Silence.
“Louise?”
“Tell them everything, like I said.”
“Should we keep these burners going?”
“Yes, for now.”
✦
“You look exhausted,” Judy said, sitting at a small table in her room. “Come sit next to me.”
Dennis sat and tugged at his beard. “They grilled me for four hours. I tried not to lose my temper, but towards the end I was just beaten down and popped off a bit. They had someone from MI5 there, a woman from London Police, two guys from operations and one from OIG who I never met before. Relentless grilling.”
“And it went all right?”
“Yes, I suppose so. You never know until some folks sit around a table somewhere in the bowels at Langley and make a decision. You’d like to think that they’ll make a rational decision, but my experience is that the outcome is pretty arbitrary depending on who’s running the meeting, who hates who, whether the Redskins won the day before, stuff like that.”
“Who are the Redskins?”
He laughed. “A football team.”
“My family will be here tomorrow. I’d like you to meet them.”
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“I told you I wanted to meet them. I can’t wait.”
“My mum was crying on the phone before they left. You’ll pardon her if she’s a little emotional. And Trevor, well, he’s seventeen, and I never know how he’s going to react to anything. And with the situation with his father and all.”
“Not to worry, everything will be fine.”
Judy reached out and put her hand over Dennis’s on the tabletop.
“They say I have to stay here another couple of weeks or so. I guess they have to treat me like any other addict. They have group therapy sessions and individual therapy sessions. It’s very overwhelming at times. I was jogging in a park in London, and the next thing you know…”
“We don’t have to talk about it, Judy.”
“Well, I need to talk about it. I realized that in our group session today. I’ve been feeling terrible at times, and confused.”
“Maybe it’s the drugs you’re taking to fight the withdrawal.”
“No, it’s the shame.”
“Shame? What shame.”
“The shame for the things I did. Bad things.”
Dennis grimaced. “Why do we need to talk about those things? You had no choice. Those were evil men.”
“But I still feel shame, like I’ve done something really awful. I think people will look at me differently now. I think you will too.”
“You’re wrong. I told you that I’m moving to Australia, and we’re going to live together. I’m not the poster child for proper relationships, but you’re the person I want to be with, and I’ll do whatever it takes to make it work.”
Judy withdrew her hand and sighed.
“I think you’ve changed towards me,” she said quietly, looking at her hands folded in her lap. “You’re not the same.”
“Please look up at me,” he said.
“No, I can’t stand those blue eyes of yours. It feels like you’re looking right through me.”