Hearts Under Siege

by Natalie J. Damschroder

  “Not my problem.”

  Molly sank into the surprisingly soft pillow and fell asleep immediately. The first few hours were probably restful. She didn’t remember by the time she woke to early morning sunlight filling the room. But in the last however-long, right before she’d awakened, her brain had been working overtime.

  The house was still quiet, so she took a brief shower, dressed, and headed out in her car before anyone else emerged. Donna’s to-do list would wait. Molly had dreamed all morning about Christopher’s accident, of the little bit that had been told to the family. It nagged at her. She didn’t know why, because nothing in itself stood out as odd. Chris may or may not have had an accident, or been killed by someone else, or gotten caught up in something that had nothing to do with him. It could be anything, and SIEGE was going to reveal nothing to family members who had no clue about Chris’s secret life.

  They probably wouldn’t reveal it to her, either, but she had to try. In the years she’d been a conduit she’d made some quiet, solid connections. She’d never made an error with anything that passed through her hands, had been constantly available, insisted on training beyond what they usually gave to staff at her level, and therefore gained a lot of respect. Add that she’d never demanded anything of SIEGE, only gave to the organization, and they kind of owed her.

  That was one way to look at it, anyway.

  She pulled into a Starbucks and, after buying coffees doctored to everyone’s individual tastes and all the croissants in the case, she got back into her car and called headquarters. Wherever that was.

  “Dixson.” Her handler’s mellow, smooth voice came across as cautious. Molly smirked. He knew why she was calling.

  “Byrnes. Protocol ten.”

  “Standard.”

  Molly keyed in a code on her cell phone designed to scramble her signal so no one could intercept and hear what she and Dixson said to each other. He was doing the same on his end, and once she heard the triple-click that told her it was engaged, she relaxed.

  “Checking in,” she told him, though that was the least important reason for her call. “I retrieved Brady Fitzpatrick. We’re in Connecticut now. I don’t know when I can reopen the shop—”

  “Don’t worry, Byrnes, you’re on bereavement leave. We’re using other conduits while you’re away. A local is checking on your shop periodically while you’re gone. Just pass-bys,” he assured her when her protectiveness spiked. He knew her well, and she had to smile.

  “Thanks, Dix. That makes things easier.”

  “How are you holding up?”

  Molly let her head drop back against the headrest and stared up the visor while she fought the tears and raw throat that welled at his sincere concern. No one had asked her that. No one. They’d assumed they knew how she felt, been aware of her fatigue, and shared their grief with her, but it was different to have someone actually ask.

  She swallowed a few times, then croaked, “I’m doing okay. You know. It’s…hard,” she finished lamely. Of course it was hard. She cleared her throat. “What do you need from me?”

  “Well, we hate to ask you to work…”

  “Sure you do.” It was easier to talk now. She sat up and checked her surroundings. “You want me to handle the exchange of the intel Brady brought back.”

  “Actually, that’s exactly what we want you to do.” He sounded proud. “Are you okay with that?”

  “Of course. But I’d like to do it differently.” She braced, hoping he’d go for this. “I want to bring it in myself.”

  To his credit, Dixson didn’t hesitate. “Why?”

  “Because I need to talk to someone about Christopher.”

  Dixson sighed. “That’s not a good idea, Molly.”

  The need to know more, the sense that something wasn’t right, grew more powerful. “Why not?”

  “You’re not family.”

  She made a deprecating noise. “I know more than the family does already. Come on, Dixson.” Her heart began to pound. “Let me come in. Let me talk to someone, get more than the vague, meaningless official statement. Something. This isn’t the usual casualty,” she pointed out, striving to balance logic and emotion. “His brother and I both belong to SIEGE.”

  She bit back more argument and left it there for Dixson to roll around. He took four breaths before heaving a sigh. “All right. I’ll text you the address in New York. But don’t expect a lot of answers,” he cautioned. “It’s not up to me, what you get told.”

  “No problem,” she said lightly, adrenaline gushing through her system and making her want to jump and yell. She curbed the urge for at least the semblance of calm. “Thanks, Dix.”

  “Don’t thank me.” He grumbled something uncomplimentary and hung up.

  Molly grinned at the phone, but it faded under the returning weight of grief and obligation. Getting a meeting guaranteed her nothing, but her expectations weren’t high. She just wanted an opportunity.

  Her phone beeped. She checked the text and found a time—four o’clock that afternoon, surprisingly soon—and an address in New Rochelle, New York, only about half an hour away from the Fitzpatricks. She’d thought he meant New York City, but it probably made more sense to house the headquarters of a non-government spy agency off the beaten path.

  It was nearly eight, and the others were probably up and moving around by now. She started the car and headed back to the house, her body growing heavier with every mile. Oh, well. At least Donna’s to-do list would keep her busy and make her feel useful.

  …

  Brady woke with a start, adrenaline drenching his system when he didn’t immediately know where he was. The light in the small room was dim. Blue wallpaper with tiny white flowers, one window with dark-blue drapes pulled closed, blocking out the sunlight. Someone in bed with him…

  His first thought was Molly, but his second called him an idiot. The woman he could barely see, her back to him, a blanket draped over her, was blond. Jessica. Of course. He stifled a yawn with his right wrist while checking his left for the time. Eight twenty-seven. Had to be morning, since there was some light filtering past the edges of the curtains. They’d slept all night, and judging by her position, Jessica hadn’t moved at all. Hadn’t—

  He lurched upward and swung over to check her pulse and breathing. Both were normal, thank God. Unlike his. He eased off the bed and hurried out of the room before his racehorse panting woke her. His thundering heart had calmed by the time he reached the kitchen. A good thing, since Molly stood there unloading croissants from a white bag onto a plate. Five Starbucks go-cups stood lined up along the counter.

  “You’re awesome,” he assured her, checking the marks on the cups to find his grande café Americano. “How do you remember this stuff after—” Wincing, he sipped to keep his big mouth occupied.

  “After so much time?” she finished for him. “It’s easy when you’re so fucking predictable.”

  “I am not!” he defended automatically, but had to concede when she looked pointedly at the cup. “Okay, about some things I am.” He shifted uncomfortably when her eyes flicked for a nanosecond toward the back bedroom.

  “How’s Jessica?” She plopped a croissant on a paper towel, grabbed her cup, and sat down at the table in the breakfast nook.

  He snagged his own pastry and joined her, part of him acknowledging how good this felt. Natural. “She seems to have slept well. Other than that…I don’t know. She’s…” He shrugged, but Molly nodded.

  “What’s the plan for today?” He couldn’t stand more sitting around and wallowing.

  “Your mother gave us a list. She’s a little bugged about how long it’s taking to get his body back here, so we have to check on that. Jessica needs to go home, go through the mail, pack a new bag. She needs to refill her prenatal vitamins, too—she’s only got one left.” She rattled off half a dozen other things, without even stopping to think about it.

  “I can take Jess over to the house, get her prescription.” He tore
a piece off his croissant and put it in his mouth, chewing slowly, waiting. He could barely stand the weight of Molly’s reaction, but when he finally dared to lift his eyes to hers, she wasn’t looking at him.

  “Fine. I’ll make phone calls. Your parents started the funeral arrangements—Jessica hasn’t been able to handle it. But I think your mother would have wanted to do it, anyway, so it works out. I’ll drop the intel you brought back at a nearby conduit.” She shrugged. “And we need to write an obituary.”

  Guilt filled him. She was taking over, doing his job. He knew she was doing it because she loved them, and she alone had the strength to pull them through, but she was his friend, and he hadn’t been a very good one in return for a long time. Then, to top it off…

  “Moll.”

  She froze, narrowing her eyes at him. “What?”

  “We have to talk about the other night.”

  “No, we don’t.” He’d never heard her voice so hard. She drained her cup and stood. “It didn’t happen, Brady.” Her bright blue eyes flashed at him, daring him to push. “I know what it was. We don’t need to break it down into its parts.”

  He couldn’t help but snicker at the word “parts.” Molly shook her head and laughed. “You are such a guy.”

  “I know.” He stood and reached for her, but she grabbed her paper towel, wrapped it around her cup as she moved away from him, and dropped everything in the trashcan by the back door.

  “You go take care of Jess. I’ll get started on these phone calls.” Then she was out of the room. And he’d let her go.

  It wasn’t right. He needed to apologize, to explain what had happened, but what good would it do if she already knew? And she knew. She’d always known. So maybe it was better to honor her wishes and pretend it hadn’t happened.

  Okay, then. Moving on. He took care of his own trash and prepared a croissant for Jessica, carrying it and her coffee back to her room. And despite the reason for it, despite how difficult going to their house was going to be, he couldn’t help but feel some small anticipation about spending the day with Jessica.

  …

  Molly pulled up to the gate barring the entrance to the parking lot at SIEGE HQ—or Global Information Exchange, their cover company and the name on the big sign out front—and waved her generic-looking ID badge in front of the scanner. At the beep and flash of the display, she pressed her left thumb to the print scanner. Welcome, Agent Byrnes flashed briefly before the gate lifted and she pulled into the normal-looking parking lot. Did every SIEGE location have her data, or was it only programmed in here today because she was expected?

  The five-story office building in front of her looked totally nondescript, though she bet it had bulletproof glass and a security system so advanced it wasn’t available on the open market. She parked and walked to the front doors, kind of surprised not to see anyone else around. Wouldn’t some people be ending their workdays now? The parking lot was more than three quarters full. Maybe they used a typical seven-to-three, three-to-eleven, eleven-to-seven shift schedule. That would explain why there was no turnover right now. And of course they had to have support staff here around the clock.

  She found herself absurdly excited as she approached the main entry and a huge black guy in an impeccable suit opened the door for her. She lifted her badge, he matched it to her face and nodded, and as she passed through into the lobby, she felt like a real spy.

  Oh, sure, she’d been in SIEGE for several years. But her training facility fronted as a dojo—physical training in the main building, conduit training in a secret back room. She’d never been in any other company building. How deep underground did this structure go? Alias reruns flashed in her head.

  She approached the reception desk, where a very young-looking man dressed as a regular security guard sat behind a bank of monitors.

  “Sign in, please. Name?”

  “Molly Byrnes.” When she finished signing the electronic pad, he pointed to a scanner like the ones health clubs had for key-tag membership cards. She waved her ID badge in front of it and he nodded, checking something on his computer.

  “Fourth floor.” He tipped his chin toward the elevators. Molly swallowed her disappointment and decided that asking up or down would make her look like a dork.

  Once she was on the elevator, she dropped her geek self. Time to be professional. She started thinking about what she’d say when she got upstairs. She didn’t know who she was meeting with—if they’d give her a PR person tasked with appeasing her with glib-speak and sending her on her way, or someone who actually had answers, even if they didn’t want to give them to her.

  The elevator dinged, the doors opened, and a smiling fortyish woman with a dark ponytail that matched her suit and her eyeglass frames greeted her.

  “Please come with me, Ms. Byrnes.” The woman turned without waiting for a response.

  Molly gave a mental shrug and followed, looking around at nothing interesting as they went down a basic, light-gray walled, gray-carpeted hallway lined with closed doors sporting numbers or vague department descriptions rather than occupants’ names. The woman led her into a small conference room containing a narrow cherry conference table and gray fabric chairs on wheels. They matched the carpet but were comfortable, Molly found when she sat.

  “Coffee?” the woman who had not introduced herself offered, gesturing to a cart in the back of the room.

  “No, thank you.”

  “Okay, then.” She sat and folded her hands on the table, a practiced smile on her face, the room’s light angling off her glasses so Molly couldn’t see her eyes clearly.

  Okay, PR flack it was.

  “How can we help you today, Ms. Byrnes?” the woman asked, as if she were an attorney representing a hospital that had cut out the wrong organ.

  Molly dove in. “I want to know more about Christopher Fitzpatrick’s death.”

  The woman’s expression didn’t flicker. “Under what aegis?”

  Molly pressed her lips together to keep from gaping. Dixson had sent her to this? Never mind about that thank-you basket.

  “Under the aegis of being a very close friend of the family, who happens to also be a SIEGE…member.” She’d almost said agent, but that would have been a bad move. Ms. Flack might not have the status to know Molly’s role in SIEGE, but if she did, she’d think Molly had pretensions to something grander, when she was just using the word that had flashed on the gate scanner. And if Flack didn’t have the status to know Molly’s role, then telling her she was a conduit was also foolish. Not because Flack couldn’t be trusted, but because it made Molly look careless.

  “I’m sorry, Ms. Byrnes, we have no further information to share on the matter of Mr. Fitzpatrick’s demise. It was a regrettable situation and we understand the family’s grief…”

  Blah, blah, blah.

  It was what she’d expected, but frustration bubbled up, anyway. “Look, lose the plastic robot stuff, okay? I’m one of you. I know there’s more to Chris’s death, I know you can’t give me details. I just want to know something more than the pat lie you’ve given his widow.”

  The change in the woman was instantaneous. “I told them this wouldn’t work.” She pulled off her glasses and tossed them on the table, dropping back against the chair so hard it rocked and rolled, and rubbed her eyes. “I don’t know why they bothered.”

  Finally, something real. “Can I have your name, please?” So Molly could stop mentally calling her Flack. Sooner or later it would escape her mouth.

  “Aldus. Ramona Aldus.”

  “And you’re a facilitator,” Molly guessed, since a PR flack would never break the mask.

  “Yes. I’m in charge of family communications during Agent Fitzpatrick’s settlement.” She crossed her legs, her hands laid loosely across her lap, her eyes visible without the glasses and their glare.

  Molly relaxed. “Settlement?”

  “Yes. You know what a SIEGE member is entitled to. It’s in your contract.”

/>   Molly supposed it was, but she hadn’t given much thought to it. Not since she signed up, and not much even then, because she wasn’t going to be in the field. She considered the path she wanted her questions to take. She didn’t want to play games with Aldus, who now seemed ready at least to talk openly about Chris’s death, if not to share much. But there was always a smooth, natural way to lead from subtopic to subtopic.

  “How long will the settlement take? All the details?”

  “Well, first we must concentrate on disposition of the remains. That’s always the family’s first concern,” Aldus said.

  Molly smiled a little. “Yeah, it’s at the top of my to-do list. When can we have his body?”

  Aldus’s curved lips held a hint of sympathy. “Tomorrow. I’ll give you the location for transfer before you leave. You can have the funeral home handle pickup.”

  Molly didn’t think so, but she kept that to herself. “And is there paperwork they’ll need to complete?”

  “I’m afraid Mrs. Fitzpatrick—Agent Fitzpatrick’s wife, not mother—will have some life insurance forms to sign in order to receive the benefits. Everything else we can handle internally.”

  “Will the family be able to have an open casket?” Molly knew what this answer would be, and Aldus looked appropriately mournful.

  “I’m sorry, no. The damage was too extensive.”

  “From the car that hit him.”

  Aldus didn’t respond, which most would take as tacit agreement, but added to the puzzle Molly was trying to piece together. Great, now she had a vague idea that she had a puzzle, and one piece to put into it.

  “Where was Chris when he died? I mean, why is it taking so long to get his body? It was almost a week ago.” Her professional demeanor cracked on the last two words, which came out wavery. She swallowed hard and kept her gaze focused on Aldus, who pretended not to notice.