by BJ Knights
Kevin jumped at the jarring sound the door made when she opened it again and kept the pistol pointing at him.
“How’d you know we were here?” Samantha asked accusingly.
Kevin barely mumbled the words out and gave her the name of the personnel aid that helped them move in. Samantha lowered her weapon and tucked it back under her shirt, but left the door chained.
“What do you want?” she asked.
“I was hoping to go over a few things left to you in accordance with your husband’s will,” Kevin responded.
Samantha shook her head. “That was done months ago,” she said.
Kevin nodded his head. “Yes, perhaps his personal will, but I’m here in regards to what he left you with his PamTech properties,” he explained.
She looked the man over and after a slight pause she closed the door, un-hooked the chain, and opened the door to let him in.
Kevin bowed gratefully and stepped inside. He took off his jacket as she guided him past the kitchen, where Annie still sat chewing on her breakfast, into the living room where she sat on the couch and he plopped himself onto a chair across from her.
“First off,” Kevin began, “I must say I’m very sorry for your loss, Mrs. Kearny.” He said it as though she hadn’t just pulled a gun on him less than sixty seconds ago. “Now,” he continued, “in regards to the will your husband left with us, I have a few documents here that he was very adamant you should have if something should happen to him.” Kevin rummaged through his brief case and then pulled out a thin manila folder. He smiled as he handed it over to Samantha.
When she opened the file she saw that it was just pages and pages of code. Samantha shook her head as she thumbed through it. “No, there must be some mistake.”
Kevin looked surprised. “No mistake, Mrs. Kearny. That document was left for you and your eyes only,” he said.
She glanced up at him like he was crazy. “This is nothing but code for programmers. I can’t read this,” Samantha said trying to figure it out.
Kevin acted as if this was some problem he was supposed to solve. “I’m very sorry, Mrs. Kearny, but my instructions were to simply deliver the document to you. I’m not well versed in programming code either, so I would be just as lost as you if I attempted to read that.” He gathered his things and popped up out of his chair and headed towards the door.
Samantha followed him. “Was there anything else? Anything that went along with whatever this is?” asked Samantha.
Kevin turned around and adjusted the back of his collar before reaching for the door handle. “I’m afraid not, Mrs. Kearny. Best of luck to you and your daughter. Goodbye.” And with that he was out the door.
Samantha was left standing in the doorway with the files hanging limply in her hand. Lines of zeros and ones dotted across pages that she had no idea how to decipher or understand. She set them down on the coffee table in the living room and walked back into her room.
The magazine from the gun slid out and a single bullet popped up as she cleared the chamber. Samantha placed the gun and bullets back into the lockbox and then hid it back in the drawer under her socks.
When she walked back out into the living room she saw Annie picking up the pieces of paper she’d left on the coffee table. “Careful with that, sweetheart,” Samantha said as she walked back over to the kitchen and started scraping the residue from the plates into the garbage.
“Daddy left this for us?” Annie asked.
The plate crashed and broke in the sink as the sound of her daughter’s voice rang through her ears. She spun around and watched as Annie sat fixated on the papers in her hands. She rushed over to her daughter smiling. “Yes, he did,” Samantha replied as she held her daughter’s face gently in both of her hands. Her eyes started to water.
“Why?” Annie asked as she finally looked up from the paper at her mother.
Samantha’s hands moved from Annie’s face through her hair and then fell back into her lap, as she stayed knelt on the floor. “I don’t know, hunny,” she replied.
Tigs jumped up on the couch next to Annie and climbed in her lap. The cat started to purr as Annie ran her small hands down Tigs’ back. “I miss him,” Annie said. She threw her little arms around the cat and squeezed.
Samantha jumped up beside her on the couch and engulfed the two of them in her arms. Her cheek rested on top of her daughter’s head as she rocked her slowly back and forth.
“Me too, baby. Me too,” said Samantha.
Chapter IV
Jim stared at the clock on the wall as its hands crawled forward. He’d been staring at it for the past fifteen minutes while the therapist in the chair across the room drummed his fingers on his notepad nervously.
“Is there anything you wanted to talk about, Jim?” asked the therapist.
Jim leaned forward and clasped his hands together as he rested his elbows on his legs and looked down at his boots.
The therapist tried to think of a starting point. Any attempt to get Jim to open up resulted in Jim retreating further into himself. “General Locke thinks that it’s best to-“
“Locke doesn’t know shit,” Jim said cutting him off.
The therapist let out a sigh and leaned back into his chair and placed the notepad on the ground next to him. “Jim, what you went through was an incredibly traumatic experience. It’s something you should talk about.”
Jim shook his head. “I did five combat tours for the Navy when I was enlisted,” he said. “Five,” he reiterated, “I never came back with any sort of PTSD, or mental issues. I was fine then. I’m fine now.”
“What happened on your combat tours is completely different than what you went through in Phoenix,” said the therapist.
“I’ve killed men before,” Jim replied.
“Except those men weren’t your sister’s husband,” the therapist retorted.
With that comment Jim got up and walked straight out the door, slamming it behind him. The therapist sat in his chair looking at the closed door as he rubbed his forehead in exasperation.
Sweat formed on the shirts of the men in a regiment marching across the parking lot as the hot afternoon sun beat down on them. The steady rhythm of their boots on the pavement walked in step with Jim’s own feet as he made his way past them for a Jeep parked in the back of the lot.
Coyle was leaned back in the driver’s seat with a white tank top and his shades on soaking up the rays. He cocked his head to the left when he saw Jim barreling down on him out of his peripherals. “Aren’t you supposed to be in there for another forty minutes?”
Jim stopped at the driver side door. “He let me out early for exceptional cooperation,” Jim replied.
Coyle lowered his glasses and looked up at Jim whose shadow was blocking the sun. “You know the whole rebel persona is supposed to be my thing,” Coyle said as he put his arms back behind his head to try and get comfortable.
Jim flung the door open and shoved Coyle back into the passenger seat. There was a resentful force that Jim did everything with lately. Coyle rubbed his shoulder and settled in his new seat, keeping a tense face on Jim.
As the two men rode in the jeep, Coyle kept looking over at Jim who stared straight ahead and shifted the gears of the jeep like he was going to snap the shifter in half.
“Jim,” Coyle started softly, “I don’t know what you’re going through. I don’t. Avoiding what happened won’t make it go away. Not talking about it won’t make it go away.”
“There’s nothing to make go away,” Jim said stiffly.
“No,” replied Coyle, “but it’ll start to make it have less control over you.”
Jim slammed on the breaks and Coyle flew forward.
“Shit, man!” Coyle screamed.
Jim turned on him and had his finger right in this face. “It doesn’t control me!” Jim said, his face red with rage. His breathing quickened. His knuckles turned white against the steering wheel.
Coyle rubbed his shoulder as he leaned
back into his seat. “Clearly,” he said.
Jim shook his head. Coyle placed his hand on Jim’s shoulder and squeezed. “Jim, it takes two to tango. Matt put you in a bad spot with what he did. You did what anyone would have done. Anyone,” Coyle emphasized.
Coyle let go of Jim’s shoulder and Jim nodded as he let out a sigh. “Yeah,” Jim said.
“Now,” Coyle went on, “we have thirty-eight minutes to kill before we have to go back for Locke’s new mission debriefing, so I say we grab some lunch. I’m starving.”
Jim threw the shifter back into first gear and the jeep jolted forward. “What do you feel like?” he asked.
Coyle thought about it for a second. “Do you think we can get the interrogators to convince Kate to give up her lasagna recipe?”
After lunch, which wasn’t lasagna much to Coyle’s disappointment, Jim and Coyle arrived at Locke’s office, which was busier than usual. Office personnel were running around, examining different pieces of code on their screens. Jim saw Twink and Brett outside Locke’s office waiting for him. “What’s going on?” Jim asked after he walked over to them. Both of them shrugged.
Locke came out of his office accompanied by his assistant Chris. “Gentlemen, come with me.” Locke headed further back to his private conference room and the men followed suit.
Coyle kept his eyes on one of the female petty officers who just so happened to be bending over to pick up a file she dropped. Coyle started grabbing at Twink’s arm to get him to turn around and look. Twink smacked Coyle in the back of the head and pushed him forward.
When they entered the conference room Locke handed each of them a manila folder. Chris whispered something in Locke’s ear and then left the room. “What you have in your hands is a piece of intelligence we just received from Samantha Kearny a little less than an hour ago,” Locke said.
Jim’s head popped up at the sound of her name. “How’d she get this?” he blurted out.
Locke turned on the conference room screen and a picture of the lawyer that had delivered the code to Samantha appeared. “Kevin Mears,” Locke said. “He was the one who dropped it off to her. Now, we checked his background when he called the military aid to get Samantha’s address and he turned up clean.”
“You let someone go and visit her?” Jim’s voice tensed up as he stared Locke down.
“He had a clean background with no ties to anyone we’ve apprehended and we made sure we had agents in the area if anything were to happen,” Locke replied defending himself. He turned back to the screen. “Kevin Mears was an outside hire that Matt Kearny employed to handle his affairs with PamTech, but that’s not the interesting part,” Locke continued. “What’s interesting is that PamTech never knew about Matt’s prearranged agreement with Mears’ law firm.”
“You think Matt wasn’t working for the people we’re looking for then?” Twink asked.
Locke shook his head. “No, I still believe that he had deep ties with the organization we’re hunting. I think the reason he decided to go behind the back of the organization was to help give his family leverage if something ever happened to him,” Locke said. He clicked the remote and the code that Mears had delivered popped on the screen. “This is the code that Mears delivered. Our analysts have deciphered that there is reference to chemical weapons being created, which we could safely assume will be used against us,” he explained.
Coyle perked up and tried to follow along. “So… The bad guys are trying to use chemical warfare?” Coyle half asked, half said.
“Yes, we believe so,” Locke answered.
Brett raised his hand. “So, why are we here?” he asked. “The only one of us that can code is Twink.”
Locke clicked a button and the screen turned off and the lights came back on. He set the remote down and looked at the group, but keeping most of his focus on Jim. “We’re releasing Matt’s body back to Samantha tomorrow, so they can finally have the funeral. You will escort Matt’s remains to her. Once our analysts crack this code we think we’ll be able to figure out who’s in charge, and once we do that we’ll need Samantha to give this code to them as a gesture of good faith,” Locke said.
As soon as the words left Locke’s mouth Jim shot up out of his chair and started to protest. “Are you fucking kidding me?”
The room was dead quiet. Coyle, Brett, and Twink kept glancing around each other and then they all got up and left the room, shutting the door behind them.
Jim and Locke stood off at opposite ends of the conference room table. Jim’s fists were grinding into the wooden table top as Locke stood his ground.
“Jim, I know that you thin-“
“You have no fucking idea what I think about this,” Jim said sharply.
Locke lowered himself into the chair behind him and drummed his fingers on the conference room table. He looked older, more tired than he had before. “Jim,” Locke said, “It’s not your decision to make.”
“Like hell it’s not!” he shouted, but he knew Locke was right. Ultimately it would be Samantha’s decision to make.
“We haven’t had a solid opportunity like this in the past three months. It’s just a matter of time before whoever is behind all of this figures out where this code went and when they do they’ll be the ones to negotiate the terms,” Locke said. “Let’s get this information to them on our terms while we can still get something out of it,” Locke pleaded.
“That’s all we are to you aren’t we?” Jim said. “Just things to squeeze opportunity out of,” Jim continued as the words grew harsher. “It was the same thing when you met me at that refugee camp outside of Phoenix. You were just using me and my family for figuring out the bigger picture.”
“Everything I did was for the benefit of my country,” Locke said sternly. “Whatever qualms you have with me aren’t because you’re upset with me. It’s because of what happened with Matt.”
All of the events that had been set in motion since Phoenix were coming to a boiling point. The missions, the hallucinations, everything that plagued him was corning him, forcing him to face the obstacles in front of him.
Locke stood up and walked over to Jim and handed him the mission file. “You’re plane leaves at zero six hundred,” Locke said as he slid the file into Jim’s hand. The two men were nose to nose. “You’re dismissed,” Locke said softly.
Coyle, Brett, and Twink were down the hall waiting for him when Jim left the conference room. He handed Brett the file as he walked past him. “Get the gear ready,” Jim said, “We leave in the morning.”
When Samantha got the call that evening she wasn’t sure how to feel. She wasn’t mad, or sad. The only emotion that she really had, which she felt terrible for having it, was relief.
She immediately pushed it out of her mind. She shouldn’t feel that way. It made her a bad wife, a bad mother. She wasn’t sure how she was supposed to tell Annie, who’d finally started speaking again. Samantha decided the best course of action was to just tell her daughter what was happening. Besides, the doctors had told her that this would be good for her. They said closure was important.
Annie was moving a toy across the ground that Tigs was chasing. She was giggling as the cat ran around batting the feathery end with her paws. Samantha didn’t want to lose this again. Seeing her daughter smiling and laughing again felt to good, but she knew putting it off would only make it worse.
“Annie,” she said.
The girl looked up at her mother as the toy stopped moving and Tigs pounced on it, trapping it between her paws.
Samantha walked into the room and sat on her bed and patted the seat next to her. Annie hopped up next to her mother and she turned to face her daughter holding her both her tiny hands in hers.
“You know how much your father loved you, right?” Samantha asked.
Annie looked down for a moment and then back up to her mother with wide eyes and nodded.
“We’re going to his funeral tomorrow. Do you know what that is?” Samantha asked; her words wer
e gentle, like they were walking on cracking ice and any moment they would plunge her daughter back into the icy cold to steal her voice.
Annie nodded her head again. “Yes,” Annie said, “it’s where we get to say goodbye.”
Tears started to well up in Samantha’s eyes and some leaked out onto her cheeks. Samantha’s lips quivered as she spoke. “That’s right,” she said as her voice cracked. “We get to say goodbye.” Samantha wrapped her arms around her daughter as the tears continued to roll down her face.
Chase was going over a blueprint of a new plant opening up on the east coast with a few investors when his brother Derrick burst through the door. The look that his brother had was the same face he had when he was a boy bursting into his room Christmas morning. Chase excused himself from the investors and walked out into the hallway outside his office.