TWO SUDDEN!: A Pair of Cole Sudden C.I.A. Thrillers
Page 34
“I think we ruined the party,” Sudden said.
A man wearing a security guard uniform held up a hand.
“Get out of our way,” Sudden shouted.
“Where are you going? What’s happened?”
“I don’t know. We found a guard tied up and there was an explosion. We managed to get this woman out. I think it might be radiation poisoning.”
“You should not leave.”
“She may die unless we get her to the hospital. She is a world-famous journalist. Do you want the responsibility?”
Rebecca let out a prolonged moan. That did it. The man stepped aside and they put her in the ambulance. Sudden turned to the Mossad agent.
“Are you fit to drive?”
“Yes.”
“Good. Hit the siren and let’s get the hell out of here.”
Rebecca soon joined them in the front as the ambulance, siren wailing, sped out of the CERN complex, passing police cars and real ambulances racing in the other direction.
“World-famous journalist?” she said.
“The moan was good,” Sudden said. “A little over the top, I thought. But perfect timing.”
What really happened back there?” the driver asked.
Sudden looked at Rebecca and smiled.
“Two aliens transported to another galaxy,” he said, “and a C.I.A. agent exploded.”
The driver snorted in disgust.
“OK. I get it. You can’t tell me.”
***
They reached the rendezvous point 45 minutes later, a small and well-lighted soccer field on the outskirts of La Rixouse. After a hurried conversation and some cell phone calls, it was decided that the Mossad-chartered helicopter would take Sudden and Rebecca to Paris.
Sudden shook the hand of the ambulance driver.
“Thanks for everything. What will you do now?”
“Drive back the way I came. Thanks to the havoc you two wreaked at CERN no one will notice another ambulance heading into Geneva tonight.”
EPILOGUE
Paris — Two Days later
“Well, I’m glad to see that you two don’t look any worse for wear,” Nigel Buss said as he strolled into the small bistro on Boulevard Haussmann and sat down across from Sudden and Rebecca. “You’d never guess that you blew up half of Switzerland.”
“Not hardly,” Sudden said. “The damage was limited to a small portion of the tunnel at the collider.”
Buss laughed.
“The Swiss take their machinery very seriously. It’s why their clocks are so accurate. Both they and the French are acting like a nuclear bomb went off. The Hadron Collider will be out of business for months. Apparently what didn’t melt wound up facing the wrong way, or something. They were pretty vague, although that isn’t stopping them from demanding compensation for the damage. From us, of course.”
“From the agency?”
A waiter came over.
“Puis-je vous aider?”
Both Sudden and Rebecca were drinking wine. Buss pointed at their glasses.
“Anthères verre, s'il vous plaît, et une autre carafe de vin.”
They all waited while the waiter brought another glass and the wine. They waited until he left and then all raised a glass. After drinking, Buss made an appreciative sound.
“Isn’t it amazing that the house wine out of a carafe at just about any French bistro is better than most wines you can buy back home in a bottle? Anyway, to answer your question, no, the agency doesn’t have to pony up. When I said ‘us’, I meant the American taxpayer, also known as the world’s biggest ATM machine. We cut a deal with Homeland. They are floating a story that what happened at CERN was the result of terrorism and would have been more catastrophic but for the courage of a dedicated C.I.A. agent who will get a posthumous citation and a star on the wall at Langley.”
“Yunner.”
Nigel smiled.
“Yup. Quite the hero, our Brin Yunner. He apparently went into the tunnel to disarm the bomb the terrorists planted but was too late. He was killed in the blast, or whatever it was. I know it’s a bullshit story, but it’s the best they could come up with on short notice. By the way, just what did happen to him?”
Rebecca shivered.
“He got too close to the vortex. He was rearranged.”
“Rearranged? What the hell does that mean?’
“It means that his atoms were distorted,” Sudden said. “He was turned inside out and then put back together again, but rather haphazardly. He was splashed all over the tunnel walls, looking like a huge Picasso mural. Eyes, ears, nose, limbs, all in the wrong places.”
“It wasn’t a very good look for him,” Soul said.
“Jesus,” Buss said, drinking more wine. “No wonder the Swiss had so much DNA to work with. That’s why there was no way the agency could hide the fact he was there. Well, you weren’t his biggest fan, Cole. I guess you won’t lose too much sleep over what happened to him.”
“It will be some time before I forget how he wound up,” Sudden said. “And I wouldn’t wish that on anyone, even Yunner. Besides, I would have called it even after what I did to him in Langley.”
He explained the restroom incident. They both looked at him.
“Jesus, Cole,” Rebecca said, shaking her head.
“So, you waterboarded him back, in a matter of speaking,” Buss said.
“More like ‘toiletboarded’,” Sudden said, smiling.
“Why didn’t they just say Yunner was a terrorist?” Rebecca said. “A mole.”
“I suggested the mole route but was shot down. The powers that be at Langley don’t want people thinking that one of their agents is a terrorist. They have enough problems on the hill with various oversight committees. No, it seems that your two friends, Klaus Bokamper and Katarina Witte, were better candidates for that honor. Their background checks will turn up plenty of suspicious dead ends, just like any decent terrorists would have. And, of course, they immobilized that guard. Between the explosion and indications that the CERN people were harboring terrorists, I suspect they will tighten up security. Not a bad thing, really.”
“What about me and Rebecca? Plenty of people saw us leaving the collider building. And we left the guard tied up.”
“Hell. Your covers should hold. You had every reason to associate with Bokamper and Witte, and the fact that you were looking for him the night of the explosion provides both of you a pretty good alibi and a reason you might have gone to check to see if he was at the collider. The guard won’t be able to identify you. Thank God he was still blindfolded. Just lay low for a while. This will blow over once some money changes hands and the White House makes a few phone calls.”
“The White House?”
“Yes. This started at the top, and that’s where it will end. It’s not like anyone will believe the real story? I’m not sure I believe it.”
“It happened, Nigel.”
“Yeah. I know. But I’m not going to say anything, and neither will anyone else involved. Remember what Tal Ben-David said about that scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark, when the Ark of the Covenant is put in a crate and then forgotten in a huge Government warehouse? Well, we don’t even have a crate. We start telling the truth and we’ll wind up strapped down with electrodes on our heads.”
“I guess you don't want a written report.”
“Saints preserve us! It would only be used at a commitment hearing.”
The waiter returned.
“Il y aura autre chose, monsieur.”
“Juste le chèque, s'il vous plaît,” Buss responded.
“We thought we’d get something to eat, Nigel,” Sudden said. “Why don’t you join us?”
“I will, but not here. I made reservations at La Tour d'Argent. My treat.”
“It will be cheaper to fix the collider,” Rebecca Soul said, laughing.
“You two have earned it.”
***
That night, after making love in the room in the Hotel
Brittanique in Châtelet near the Louvre, Rebecca Soul sighed contentedly.
“That was wonderful, Cole.”
“I’m waiting for the ‘but’.”
“What do you mean?”
“As in, ‘but you’re no Klaus Bokamper’.”
She laughed.
“Then you could say, ‘and you’re no Katarina Witte’.”
“The sex with them was out of this world, wasn’t it?”
Rebecca punched him in the side.
“I wonder how they are doing,” Sudden mused.
“Maybe they are doing what we just did,” she said. “I hope so. I’m glad they made it. They could just as easily have killed us. We could hardly have blamed them. Everywhere they turned, there was another vivisection table.”
There was a beep from the cell phone on the night table on Sudden’s side of the bed. He picked it up and read the text message.
“I’ll be damned,” he said.
“What?”
“It’s from Cristina, my agent. She sold my next Jake Harms novel on spec. I’m a little surprised. She had her doubts about my new plot when I spoke to her yesterday.”
“Why?”
“A thriller about aliens and Nazi Germany? That’s a hard sell, even for fiction.”
“You didn’t!”
“I most certainly did. You heard Nigel. Nobody will believe any of it. What’s the Government going to do? Say that I revealed secrets about something that never happened? Besides, I’ll change things, maybe leave Hadron out of it. They have enough on their plate now, un-melting their tunnel and revamping security. Only one thing bothers me.”
“What’s that?”
“I may have trouble with the sex scenes.” Sudden leaned over and kissed her nipple. “How about a little more research? I think we should try out some of the other things they taught us.”
Rebecca laughed.
“I should have known when you had a second helping of oysters I was in for a long night. But I better not see my name in the dedication.”
THE END
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Lawrence De Maria began his career as a general interest reporter (winning an Associated Press award for his crime reporting) and eventually became a Pulitzer-nominated senior editor and financial writer The New York Times, where he wrote hundreds of stories and features, often on Page 1. After he left the Times, De Maria became an Executive Director at Forbes. Following a stint in corporate America – during which he helped uncover the $7 billion Allen Stanford Ponzi scheme and was widely quoted in the national media – he returned to journalism as Managing Editor of the Naples Sun Times, a Florida weekly, until its sale to the Scripps chain in 2007. Since then, he has been a full-time fiction writer. De Maria is on the board of directors of the Washington Independent Review of Books.