by Gray Gardner
“Baylor?” she heard him ask, voice changed from anger to concern. “I need a medic in here!”
He reached down and took her pulse as she slumped to the side and passed out.
She didn’t dream about sinking on the ferry this time. That nightmare was still haunting her and even changing, becoming scarier, but it came with slightly less frequency. She did have many inappropriate dreams about Connor, and when she finally awoke in the CIA’s underground medical center, she wondered if the last dream was real or not.
Not, of course, but as she tried to roll over on her other side she found she was restricted. Looking down, a tan, muscular arm was draped over her. She grinned and closed her eyes at the soothing sound and warmth of Connor sleeping next to her.
“Did you do inappropriate things to me while I was passed out?” she asked, voice very scratchy. She noticed her throat really hurt.
She felt him jerk awake and gently turn her over so that he could look down at her.
“Jesus, Baylor, you really scared us,” he sighed, looking her up and down with sleepy eyes before breaking a half grin for her. “We had to take your clothes off this time.”
“Aw, man,” she sighed, looking under the white blanket at her polka dot gown.
“We also had to shove a tube down your throat just to get you breathing again,” he said, rubbing her leg. “I was out of my mind.”
“Did you yell at them?” she asked, giving him a half smile. Please say yes.
“Any inkling of purity those spooks may have had left in their warped little brains I stole with the vulgarity I used when I found out what happened,” he said, kissing her forehead. “They knew what would happen after watching the incident on the base. I told them when we got here that you would have to be eased into it. And what did they do? They sent a fake shrink in to shake you down.”
“That guy wasn’t a real doctor?” she asked, trying to sit up. “What the hell? Just call me Doc? Ha!”
“Just sit back,” Connor said, fighting her as she thrashed around.
“I don’t want to do this anymore,” she said, finally stopping her struggling and flopping her head back.
“I know,” he sighed, leaning down and kissing her forehead again.
“But I have to, don’t I?” She sighed, turning her eyes back to him. They needed her, she knew that. And they had information to hold over her, too. She was theirs.
“Anything within reason you have to do.”
“And beyond reason?”
“That’s where I come in,” he grinned. He tried not to let his concern show as he wiped a strand of hair away from her pale face. All he wanted to do was protect her. He’d never felt this strongly about anyone. It was an incredible feeling.
“Fake Doc made me read my last journal entry aloud,” she sighed, after a long silence.
He cleared his throat and replied, “I know. I’ve read it.”
“Pretty sick, huh?”
“That’s not what I got from it at all,” he said, sounding surprised at her remark.
“What do you mean?” Did he read the last line or did he really believe that killing and torturing the terrorists wasn’t ruthless in the least?
“How can you even ask that?” he said, looking in her eyes. “You saved those four kids. Don’t you realize you’re the hero in this story?”
She shook her head and looked away from him. That’s not what everyone thought. That’s certainly not what she thought. “I don’t feel like a hero.”
“But you see why, don’t you?” he asked, turning her head back so she could see how serious he was. “Survivor’s guilt. I see it constantly. You can’t figure why so many people died but you were spared.”
Sometimes he could just read her like a book. She nodded and closed her eyes, letting him wrap his big arms around her and comfort her. It had been something she’d asked herself ever since that very day. Why did she make it? It didn’t take him long to figure her out. She really liked that about him.
“Connor,” Payne greeted, bursting in on their moment unapologetically. “Eubanks needs you in forum room two.”
That couldn’t be ignored. He’d been there just as long as Burton, and when they briskly took her away after entering the underground facility, he’d started his training with Eubanks’ team. Mostly devices and computer programs, he’d learned a lot. Most importantly, he’d learned to come when Eubanks called.
“Right,” Connor sighed, kissing Burton’s forehead one last time and pushing off of the bed. “You’re doing great, Baylor.” He winked at her before he walked into the hallway and Payne shut the door.
“So it’s not an act,” Payne said, flipping through a green folder and leaning back on the arm of a chair.
“You doubted me?” she asked, voice still scratchy as she turned her eyes from the door to him. Connor had a little bounce to his step. Maybe he actually liked it there. She carefully considered giving the CIA a chance. If Connor could do it, she could, too.
Maybe fate had brought her here. Maybe her past kept looming because she was supposed to use it for… well, for lack of a better word, good.
“We thought the problem was more manageable than it appears to be,” he stammered, closing the folder. “But, no matter. We’re going to work through it so that we can make our deadline.”
Burton frowned and leaned up on her elbows. She didn’t want to push anything. “And what if my fear absolving doesn’t meet your deadline?”
“It has to,” he nodded, standing up and backing out of the room. “We’re putting you into play in two weeks.”
Her mouth dropped open as she tried to think of anything to say as he quickly left. Nothing came to mind, though, and she was left with terrifying thoughts alone in her room.
Connor briskly walked to the large forum with auditorium seating and found some gentlemen in suits chatting on the small stage at the bottom of the dark red carpeted stairs.
“Connor!” Eubanks called, motioning for him to come down.
He approached but immediately paused when he saw who Eubanks was chatting with.
“Captain,” Agent Ferguson greeted, holding out his hand.
Connor shook his head as he stared, but finally shook the smug hand. “Ferguson.”
“This is not how you imagined you’d spend your Sunday, I’m sure,” Ferguson said, clearing his throat. “But Eubanks and I feel it is necessary that you have all of the information before we propel you into a deep undercover operation.”
“I’ve familiarized myself with my upcoming duties.”
“Yes yes,” Ferguson said, holding up his hand. “But do you know Baylor’s entire story?”
Connor eyed Eubanks and then turned back to the British agent. “I thought I knew enough.”
“Very well then,” Ferguson nodded, snapping his thin laptop shut and disconnecting it from a projector hook-up.
“Wait wait wait,” Connor quickly said, eying the computer. He couldn’t deny his curiosity. And there were visual aids. “What do you have on there?”
“Shall I show you?” he asked, holding it up.
Connor somehow felt it would be a betrayal to Burton to go prying into her past, but what he had learned so far was so fascinating and he was so curious that he couldn’t say no. Maybe it would help.
“So, there’s more to it than what’s in her journal?”
Eubanks and Ferguson both chuckled. Ferguson connected the laptop and hit a button to dim the lights.
“You’ve barely scratched the surface, dear Captain.”
Connor slowly stepped back and sat in a red plush seat, waiting anxiously for whatever they had to say. How could there possibly be more?
A toddler with pigtails and a red pea coat flashed up in the screen behind Ferguson. She looked jubilant as the picture captured her skipping between 2 pairs of adult legs on a leaf covered sidewalk.
“Leon Trotsky was assassinated in Mexico in 1940. His descendants were then tracked down and attempts on thei
r lives were made. They were, after all, threats to both sides. They were defectors of the Stalinist movement and propagators of the Communist movement. His 2 sons in Moscow were saved by the secret police there, only to be killed in custody by a double agent. His daughter who had moved to New York City was tortured and killed by a personal body guard she had trusted, of course his other daughter was in London whom you know as Aunt Nina, who was not on their radar at the time, and David Burton was saved several times by us, the CIA. We red flagged him, set up traces and bugged his house and office, he happily collaborated with us to save his family, and that’s how we were able to save this little girl you see here.”
Ferguson zoomed out and the picture blurred into the top right corner of a front page news article, with the headline, ‘Baby Baylor Reunited with Parents After Three Days Missing.’ Connor rubbed his whiskers as he stared intently at the article. She’d been a target her entire life. Maybe the two of them had ended up at the CIA for a reason.
“We quickly moved the Burtons to a DC suburb after this little kidnapping incident so that we could keep a better eye on them. David Burton was always suspicious, but it allowed us to keep his family safe as well as track his movement. We were all certain he was out of the communist business by this time.”
Connor felt a lump in his throat when the next picture appeared. It was the headstones of David and Catherine Burton. Ferguson continued.
“We were completely thrown when this happened. This is actually when I was brought onto the Burton case as a rookie,” Ferguson said, clearing his throat as he remembered. “They were gassed, early morning, supposed to look like an accident…and Baylor was supposed to be there, but as you know, she was at her school trying to redeem herself and bring her grades home to her father so he wouldn’t spank her anymore.”
“Yeah, but who did it?” Connor asked, leaning forward. Did she even know?
Ferguson glanced at Eubanks, who nodded, then turned back to Connor in the darkness of the slide show.
“They’re from the Kremlin.”
“They’re Russian government?” Connor boomed, leaping out of his seat. He couldn’t believe it had been allowed to happen. Who knew about it? What was done about it?
“Just, listen,” Ferguson said, holding up his hands. “You of all people should know nothing is that simple, Captain.”
“The Russian government murdered that poor girl’s parents and it’s suddenly too complicated?”
“Captain,” Ferguson patiently said, crossing his arms.
Connor took a couple of deep breaths and sat back down.
“Just like in our government, just like in every government, there are some people who radically believe things should be different, the way they used to be…this group had us all fooled,” Ferguson sighed, shaking his head.
“How so?” Connor suspiciously asked.
“They were Russian diplomats. They had access to nearly everything.”
“The Cold War had barely ended!” Connor shouted, not believing what he was hearing.
“Yes, but it had in fact ended!” Ferguson yelled, loosening his tie and shaking his head. “We had no reason believe that Soviet sympathizers were any part of the new government.”
“You’re Intelligence!” Connor hollered, standing and throwing up his hands. Imbeciles!
“Just sit down, captain,” Eubanks suggested. “And please continue, Ferguson.”
Connor huffed as he sat, seriously studying Ferguson. Ferguson took off his suit jacket and clicked on his computer to an image of a wrecked interior of Burton’s house.
“While the outcome of that attack was utterly unfortunate, we learned a lot about this radical group as we studied the home and what they left behind. They were clean, but not clean enough. Notice the drawers and closets turned out, furniture turned on its side…”
“They were looking for something,” Connor uttered, as numbered evidence flashed in front of him.
“Precisely,” Ferguson nodded. “At first we thought they were looking for Baylor, but we then realized that they hadn’t gone into her room. That’s where they messed up. They assumed she was dead.”
“What were they looking for?”
“We hadn’t a clue,” Ferguson shrugged, clicking through pictures of a devastated high school girl standing beside a headstone, all alone. “We listened in on all of her police interviews and once we realized that she knew absolutely nothing, we turned back to the evidence.”
“Fingerprints?”
“DNA,” Ferguson grinned, stopping the picture progression on a photograph of a group of about fifteen men and women, armed to the teeth. “It was a while back, after all. The technology was slow but it was there. By the time that we discovered it was this group, who called themselves the Red Patriots of the People, Baylor had already moved to London with Aunt Nina. We just… we didn’t believe it was Baylor they were after. We notified Scotland Yard and MI6 but it was just a non-priority. They had to be after something else. We were so certain. Then November 7th rolled around and she and the RPP were briefly forgotten in the chaos.”
Ferguson clicked to the wreckage of the ferry floating in scattered pieces in the Channel. Connor shook his head as more pictures of bodies and destruction flashed in front of his eyes. He remembered that day, and exactly what he was doing when he heard and saw it on the news. It was horrible. It was Great Britain’s September 11. How had she survived?
“You’re wondering how she survived?” Ferguson grinned, stopping on a diagram of the ferry. He highlighted five separate spots. “With the explosives the RPP used, and the three locations they detonated, a person could only survive if situated in these exact positions. Positions where only a child would be on a ferry on a rainy November day.”
“Wait,” Connor began, looking at the floor with his head in his hands. “Then you know. You all know who was responsible for November 7th and you haven’t told the public?”
“Calm down, Captain,” Ferguson ordered through his teeth. “We did it to save your girlfriend’s ass.”
Connor shook his head and grabbed at his short haircut. This was all so wrong. A radical soviet group was after Burton, over seven hundred people murdered during a terrorist attack, and the government knew all about it and yet kept it a secret.
“So the terrorist attack, November 7th, was all about—”
“Baylor Burton,” Ferguson nodded, clicking on the computer and bringing up a school picture of her from St Andrews. “And her Aunt Nina, of course, though she was so elderly at the time of her death she wouldn’t have been much help for the RPP.”
He clicked on several pictures of Aunt Nina’s home, neat and manicured…and huge. It really did look like a museum.
“So, this terrorist group, this group after Baylor, turned her house upside down, searching just as they did to her house in Alexandria?”
“That’s where the story gets interesting,” Ferguson sighed, clicking on a headline from a British Newspaper, indicating that there were five survivors from the attack but since they were all minors no names were released. The children had to be protected. It was an act of terrorism, after all.
“It gets more interesting than having rogue Russian diplomats chasing after a little American girl?” Connor huffed.
“Our focus was not on the survivors, but on the culpable and the deceased,” Ferguson said. “I was working in the CIA’s London branch. We were called in to help the British authorities, but not lead. No one claimed responsibility and for the life of us we couldn’t figure out why terrorists would choose to attack this particular ferry. We didn’t even glance twice at the names of the survivors.”
Connor frowned, “So, wait, you didn’t know Burton was on the ferry?”
“Didn’t even consider it until we got a call from Scotland Yard saying that their investigation indicated that a school age girl of American descent could possibly be one of the five surviving children. Agencies didn’t exactly communicate with each other like they
do now. Even internally. This was pre 9/11, you have to remember. I briefed the agents here at Langley and met up with an MI6 agent and we strong-armed our way into the investigation. They were keeping the five children in custody until the investigation was over, and refused to release names. Then they found a prominent British name on the passenger manifest. They never would have called us if Nina Bronstein wasn’t such an important person in London. Scotland Yard had to release the children to next of kin immediately and Baylor slipped out of our fingers.”
“That sounds like the biggest cluster fuck I’ve ever heard of,” Connor groaned, rubbing his head. “So, you weren’t sure if Burton was on the ferry, you weren’t sure who attacked the ferry, and you weren’t sure who was dead and who was alive? Just that Nina Bronstein was among the dead?”
“It gets better,” Ferguson grinned with humility. “We were just getting organized in the London office when we got a distress call from one of the ferry victim’s homes. It seems the detectives were investigating, looking for terrorist ties, as they’d done in all the other victim’s homes, when they discovered that this victim, though elderly and as we found out later very important, had a school age, possibly American girl living with her. We rushed over and sure enough, it was Nina Bronstein’s home, with a bedroom upstairs made up in pink for Baylor. It seems that she tried to continue her life as if nothing had happened—going to school, that sort of thing. All alone. Not afraid of what had happened to her, just sad. Not uncommon with trauma victims.”
Connor shook his head as he thought of a young Baylor living on her own in London. Parents dead, her aunt who had become her new caretaker was dead after a terrifying attack, and she was trying to live a normal life. No wonder she was so tough. She’d become an adult and decided to live her life as normally as possible, returning to her school that she hated and living in a home that was a constant reminder of her family.
Ferguson continued, a hint of guilt in his voice as he spoke.
“Unfortunately, while we were tearing through the house, looking for clues, trying to build a connection from Nina Bronstein to these terrorists, Baylor came home from school and we terrified each other. She had never met us, and when we heard rustling in the kitchen downstairs, we barged in guns blazing, as you Americans say. Well, she screamed and ran out of the back door, down the hill to the Thames, and nearly made it onto their speedboat. She’s no fool. By then she suspected that someone was after her. We chased after her down the hill, trying to identify ourselves so that she would stop. She didn’t. Who could blame her? Our MI6 liaison, Agent Dustin, caught up to her as she was literally leaping into the speed boat. His tactics, unfortunately, were a little unorthodox and as ancient as he was.”