Double Crossfire

by Anthony J. Tata

  “It’s not avoiding you! It’s right here in front of your face.”

  “Go, Cass. I’ll catch you on the rebound. I can handle these rodeo clowns a few more days. I don’t know if my brain feels any better, but I’m glad we became friends. Don’t go getting yourself killed or any crazy shit like that, okay?”

  Cassie smiled. “Yeah, no crazy shit. And you stay away from the training.”

  “I’ve asked five times to be transferred to the main ward. I don’t know why they put me over here. It’s like a military barracks and basic training or something.”

  “You like the president, right?” Cassie asked.

  “Never really followed politics. I couldn’t give a rat’s ass about that kind of thing. But sure, I think he’s hilarious and a straight shooter.”

  “Ever notice how all the other women are pretty liberal? You see what they’re doing on the ranges and how they move around with almost military precision?”

  “I see some of that,” Emma said. “But avoid those stupid political discussions.”

  “Okay, girl, protect yourself. And if your mom doesn’t come get you in the next couple of days, I will.”

  Emma nodded. “I know we just met a couple of weeks ago, but growing up with three big brothers and being in a man’s world out there in Wyoming made me kind of look at you as a sister I never had.”

  They hugged. Cassie said, “I’m all that, and more. Keep that knife close.”

  “Always. Any of them sumbitches come at me, I’ll filet ’em like a trout.”

  Cassie gathered her medical cooler and walked to the door.

  “You’re going like that?” Emma asked.

  “You got a better option? If they see me in my civvies at this hour, they’ll know something’s up.”

  “I know, but once you’re out, your ass will be hanging out of that thing,” Emma said.

  Cassie looked over her shoulder and winked. “Pretty nice ass, don’t you think?”

  Emma laughed. “Hey, hey, you know neither of us rolls that way.”

  “True that.”

  Cassie put her hand on the doorknob and was about to press SPEAKER to request the door be unlocked so she could go to the dining facility.

  “Cass, just remember. Us bull riders, we’ve got a saying, ‘The last ride is never the last ride, and the end is never the end.’ Think about that if things get tough.”

  Cassie smiled softly. That was Emma’s way of sending Cassie off with a piece of herself.

  “Thanks, Emma. I’ll see you in a few days.”

  “Maybe, maybe not. Regardless, let’s plan on a rebound somewhere.”

  Cassie nodded, pressed the intercom button, and said, “Patient seventeen needs to go to dinner.”

  The door buzzed and Cassie stepped into the hallway with no intention of going to dinner.

  Fighting the effects of Dr. Perro’s injections, she willed herself forward. Thoughts of Jake served to strengthen her resolve and reinforce the mental toughness that had served her so well in Ranger school and in combat. That same mettle that had allowed her to forge ahead after the brutal murder of her parents.

  Her next mission, though, was beyond anything she thought possible. The Plan required her to escape, today, right now, this minute.

  Immediately.

  CHAPTER 4

  CASSIE WALKED IN HER HOSPITAL GOWN INTO THE DINING FACILITY, where they were allowed to bring small coolers to take food back to the room. She continued walking along the edge of the open cafeteria and slid behind an auxiliary room that led to a hallway behind the kitchen. The other patients weren’t paying attention to her because they most likely thought she was headed to the side of the kitchen where patients often bargained for extra food.

  Looking over her shoulder with unrealistic hope that Emma would be behind her—she wasn’t—Cassie leapt beyond the kitchen unseen and continued down the hallway, dodging collapsed dining tables, stacked chairs, and food tray racks. When she got to a little-used back door to Dr. Broome’s office, she heard voices.

  “Artemis teams are ready. Forty-eight hours. It’s all happening now,” Dr. Zara Perro said.

  Zara was seated in a wooden chair that faced the desk of Dr. Franklin Broome, the administrator of the Valley Trauma Center. Cassie eased forward from the dark crevice in which she hid. Through the thin vertical sliver between the closet door and its jamb, she listened to the conversation between Broome and Zara. Zara had been Cassie’s psychiatrist since her transfer from Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland, to this secluded rehabilitation compound in the Blue Ridge Mountains.

  Cassie held a syringe filled with water and crushed Ambien—the best she could do—which she figured was enough to knock out Broome or Zara, but not both. She had not expected to see Zara, whom she had an oblique profile of from her vantage. Dr. Perro, or Zara as she preferred to be called, was the one who gave them the shots that were supposed to be therapeutic for a healing brain.

  Call me Zara, Cassie. I want you more comfortable.

  Cassie was still working through the post-traumatic stress of her captivity and near-death experiences in Iran, just a few months removed. Zara had proven to be an innovative psychiatrist, prescribing her medication that seemed to help lift her from her depression.

  Broome was dressed in a white button-down shirt. He wore wire-rimmed glasses and had thinning gray hair. His suit coat hung on a wooden peg on the far wall. Pictures of Broome with famous people—presidents, senators, and actors—dotted the wall behind Zara, who was wearing navy pants and a khaki blouse with matching blazer. Cassie could still smell the onions from the kitchen some fifty yards behind her. She wondered if the slightly ajar door was allowing the odor to drift into the office.

  Typically, everyone was gone by now, save the night shift staff. Cassie’s previous scout missions revealed that Broome never worked late. The only real way out was through Broome’s keypad-controlled, high-tech metal entry leading to the parking lot. It was nearly eight p.m., darkness had fallen on this fall evening in the Blue Ridge Mountains. The light whir of helicopter blades chopped in the distance.

  “Okay. So it’s happening,” Broome said.

  A man stepped into view. Tall and gangly, dressed in a dark business suit and white dress shirt with red tie, the man said, “We appreciate your services, Franklin, but you really don’t have a need to know anything else.”

  His voice was cool, words clipped, to the point. There was no doubting what he was saying. We are done with you.

  Cassie recognized the man as Syd Wise, a career FBI agent who now held one of the most powerful positions in the country. He was responsible for all counterintelligence operations in the United States and overseas. The responsibility also came with a kit bag full of power tools for execution, such as e-mail and text message readers, cyber manipulation, and artificial-intelligence capabilities.

  “I’ve been a full partner from the beginning. I’m networked across the country. It is my reputation as a traumatic brain injury specialist—especially one that has worked with some many . . . inmates—that has attracted most of your . . . Artemis subjects. I’ve recruited and prepared your teams tapping into my contacts from psych wards, prisons, you name it. All the criteria: no family, athletic, violent felony conviction, and female. Do you know how small that population is?” Broome said. He spat the words Artemis subjects out like rancid soup. His head swung back and forth from Zara to Wise, like he was watching a tennis match.

  “Yes. I know there are about 35,000 women incarcerated for violent crimes in the U.S. About 12,000 of those are for murder and manslaughter. The remainder are violent felony offenders. Basically, we gave you a list of names. All you’ve done is house our teams,” Zara corrected. “I identified and prepared every last one of them.”

  Wise nodded at her comment. “That’s right. Anyway, I’m done here, Zara. I’ll let you finish up with Mr. Broome here. Call me after when you get the chance,” Wise said. He flick
ed some lint off his suit coat, pushed off the wall, and waved a fob in front of the card reader. The red light turned green and metallic plates retracted in circular motion. As soon as he passed through, the plates snapped shut, a diminishing circle, until the portal was locked.

  Broome watched Wise depart and then turned his attention back to Zara. “How dare you diminish my contribution in front of this Johnny-come-lately. I’ve taken risks. And I’ve been promised . . . certain things,” Broome said.

  “What things?” Zara asked. She seemed amused.

  “A cabinet position. Veterans Affairs,” Broome said.

  “Who promised you this?”

  “You did! You said Jamie Carter would reward me. The day you delivered that Army Ranger captain lady here.”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about, and Jamie Carter has nothing to do with any of this.”

  Jamie Carter? Cassie thought. My godmother? She was best friends with my deceased parents, and a former presidential candidate, too.

  Deceased. She wondered why she used that euphemism. Syrian terrorists had brutally slaughtered her parents.

  “What are you talking about? She has everything to do with it!” Broome stood up from his chair, pushing it back against the wall toward Cassie.

  “Sit down, Franklin. We are all saying the same thing,” Zara said.

  “Actually, it doesn’t sound like it to me. I can blow the whistle on this entire thing. The training. The women. Everything,” Broome replied.

  “Actually, no, you won’t be doing that, Franklin.”

  Zara effortlessly slipped on a pair of leather gloves and removed a Walther PK380 with muzzle suppressor from her satchel.

  “What are you doing?”

  “What? You think all of the hand-to-hand–combat training, the shooting, the knives, the ropes, were what? Make-believe? Artemis is real and it starts right now.”

  She aimed the pistol at Broome’s heart and fired a double tap into the man’s chest. Broome coughed, gagged up some blood, and fell back into his chair. His head slumped sideways as if he was taking a nap as a bright crimson rose was blossoming on his shirt. Zara wrapped the pistol in a plastic ziplock bag and placed it in her satchel.

  Cassie remembered sitting in the exact chair from which Zara had just risen. She had been in a meeting with Franklin Broome, discussing her potential exit from the program. She reported the things she had seen in the rooms on her ward. Women locked in their rooms. Men coming in and having their way. Premium athletes and wounded military women—no men—all going through “therapy,” which included the handling of firearms, shooting them at ranges on the sprawling compound, hand-to-hand combat, knife work, and physical training rivaling anything she’d seen in the military.

  And then there were the daily treatments of experimental drugs intended to erase or diminish the recall of the horrifying memories each patient harbored in the recesses of her mind. They all had been kept separate, though, for the most part, save carefully matched roommates. There was no ability to truly compare notes and commiserate. It had taken Cassie a few days to realize that she was not exactly in a trauma center, but some other kind of facility with a different purpose.

  During her meeting with Broome, he had seemed disinterested, checking his phone frequently, even texting as she spoke. The smirks on his face made it obvious he wasn’t listening to her, but rather sparring with a lover or friend. During one of his texting bouts, she had continued to talk evenly as she surveyed the room, gathering intelligence as she was trained to do. The door was the only way out. It was a spiraling series of blades that opened in circular fashion. She had noticed the keypad next to the door and the lanyard around Broome’s neck. It appeared to lead to a chamber of sorts, then a door that opened to a parking lot.

  Cassie’s heart beat fast as she remembered her purpose now. To escape. She was done with the nightly wails of women locked in their rooms, the security guards taking their liberties, the mysterious drugs that amped up her and the others.

  Zara walked to the door, waved her credentials across the keypad; the inner chamber spun open, metal jaws gaping. She stepped through the portal, opened the outer door, and then walked into the parking lot.

  The doors snapped shut. Cassie moved quickly into Broome’s office. She snatched the lanyard from Broome’s neck, noticing the spatter of blood across the laminate. His head had lolled to one side, forcing her to touch his bloody forehead and lift it just enough to get the lanyard off his body. Bunching the cord in her hand, she put her back against the wall and snuck a peek into the parking lot through the window. The helicopter buzzed low over the roof of the compound, its rotor wash blowing debris in the parking lot.

  Zara was gone, moving to her next appointment.

  Artemis teams are ready.

  Cassie waved the bloody credentials across the pad. The steel doors responded by retracting inside the walls. Then, as if the metal plates had a mind of their own—artificial intelligence?—they began to rapidly retract. Sirens wailed. Outside lights snapped on brighter than a night game at a high school football stadium. Her white hospital smock flowed behind her like gossamer angel wings as she darted through the narrowing gap in the closing electronic doors.

  Clutching the needle-tipped syringe in one hand and a small medical cooler in the other, she did her best version of a baseball slide, still precisely executed as it had been during her college days as a shortstop for the University of Virginia softball team. With the feathered metal panels twisting to a close and looking like a kaleidoscope, Cassie popped upright, heard the exit snap shut behind her, pushed open the outer door, and continued running.

  She ran through the bright lights, and for the first time saw the guard towers Emma had mentioned. Were the guards alerting on her or something external? Had Jake Mahegan decided to intervene? Instinctively racing toward the dark woods, she stumbled over branches and rocks. Cassie had a vague idea of where she might be and a firm idea of where she needed to go, but there might as well have been an ocean between those two locations.

  To her distant front, spotlights buzzed alive, humming like a million volts of electricity in the sky. An exterior fence? She was feeling her way through the small copse of trees when she heard random gunfire, most likely shooting anything that might be Cassie Bagwell, patient number 17. Automatic weapons fire confirmed to Cassie that she had not been merely transferred from Walter Reed to a rehabilitation clinic in the Shenandoah Valley, but something far more nefarious.

  The terrain was rising as she slipped in her bare feet up the muddy bank toward what she hoped was a road. Did she remember a road just a couple of weeks ago when they had increased her morphine drip and she had voluntarily admitted herself into this venue? A road, a gravel driveway, mountains in every direction, tall fences with razor wire. More like a prison, she remembered thinking.

  She had been right.

  As she clutched a root and pulled herself up with a grunt, Cassie stood on freshly minted asphalt and stared at a shiny new eight-foot-tall chain-link fence with razor wire that gleamed in the dull moonlight, like small sickles, ready to reap.

  She had waited a second too long. A camera buzzed and rotated from outward looking to scanning the interior fence line, like a robot that could sense her. In the near distance, a motorcycle fired up, sounding like a chain saw at full pitch. Spotlights crisscrossed like a big sale at a used-car parking lot.

  Cassie was trapped.

  Against every instinct she had, Cassie tossed the medical cooler on the side of the road, its reflective coating obvious bait for the motorcycle-riding guard. With her back to a tree, she held the syringe in her right hand. The dim running light from the motorcycle appeared to her left, behind her. The engine’s high-pitched staccato whine was overwhelming, which was good enough to mask her movement. As the driver stopped to inspect the cooler, Cassie leapt from the tree line and covered the fifteen feet in record time, as if she was back running the bases in college.

 
She stabbed the needle beneath the driver’s helmet into his neck and then pressed her thumb on the plunger, pumping her toxic brew into his neck. It was a week’s worth of her supply that she had spirited from the pharmacy.

  The driver initially resisted and fought back, reaching behind, grasping at Cassie’s shoulder-length dirty-blond hair. Since her wounds in Iran, she had not trimmed her hair to military standards.

  Cassie used that opportunity to repeatedly stab the man in the neck, eventually striking the carotid artery, causing a small spray of blood to stream out. Her white smock looked like something from a crime scene exhibit already: mud, blood, and sweat stains everywhere. The man’s movements slowed as his artery acted like a garden hose with a pinprick puncture, blood fizzing out in a bubbly stream. The hole got bigger, the flow larger, the death quicker.

  Cassie picked up the medical cooler, removed the man’s helmet, fished for a cell phone, found one, pressed the man’s thumb against the home button, kept it alive, used his knife to sever his thumb, and stuffed the knife, thumb, and phone in the outer pocket of the cooler. Another five seconds yielded an HK VP9 Tactical pistol. She used her thumb to pop the magazine from the pistol, inspected the nine-millimeter bullets, and slapped it back into the well. Tucking the pistol into her gown pocket, she yanked off his boots, jammed her feet in them—too big, but would do—and then straddled the Yamaha 450 cc motocross bike.

  In addition to having a rifle arm from deep in the hole at shortstop, Cassie had been an amateur motocross racer in her youth on her parents’ farm in Greene County, Virginia. Often coming home bruised and battered with an orange mud stripe up the back of her shirt, she had taken her share of risks and falls. While this bike had more power than she was accustomed to, it was all pretty much the same. Handle the power before it handled you.

  Syrian terrorists had killed her father, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and her mother. Holding General Bagwell responsible for the death of a wedding party, the terrorists executed her parents in a barren cabin near an Asheville, North Carolina, mine after kidnapping them to lure Jake Mahegan into an ambush.