by Seeley James
Outside, Tania threw punches at a flattened Arrianne. They were fighting for control of the weapon. Tania must have tackled Arrianne just as she pulled the trigger, which saved Nema’s life.
Tania won the rifle and slammed the butt into Arrianne’s forehead. Excessive but effective. Her words came over the comm. “Done being nice to assholes like you.”
With my attention off him, Chuck-uh-Humbert rolled his chair back and opened the desk drawer. He pulled a pistol out just as my attention came back to him.
The counter read 47.
“I hate all of you bitches.” Chuck-uh-Humbert pulled the trigger.
The bullet hit Nema square in the chest. She staggered back a step, looking at the hole in her shirt, shocked and surprised. Blood poured out. She fell on her back.
I pressed my rifle to his temple. “Put it down.”
He looked at me, put the pistol under his chin, and blew his brains out.
Miguel rushed up behind me and grabbed the suicide vest and pulled it off me as I dropped to Nema on the floor. He gently set it aside. Together we checked Nema’s vital signs. The bullet hadn’t hit her heart directly, but the blood pumping out told us it punctured an artery. She had minutes left.
Bianca’s voice on the comm. “We’re contacting Air Evac units. We’ll have a chopper there shortly.”
Miguel and I had enough battlefield experience to know that wouldn’t save her. But we kept it to ourselves.
“Nema,” I said gingerly. “You want to spare the young girls. I know you do.”
Her eyes fluttered. She tried to sit up. Miguel lifted her shoulders. The dying always want to see the wound for themselves. She put her fingers in the flowing blood. “Tell them not to hurt the girls.”
Blood flowed down her chest and onto the floor where it pooled around her butt.
“I’ll tell them. How do I contact them?”
Her eyes glazed and rolled back in her head.
“Nema.” I patted her cheek. “How do I reach them to tell them not to shoot the girls?”
She sighed a long and tired sigh. As she inhaled, we could hear fluids filling her lungs.
I shook her. I looked at Miguel then around the room for something like smelling salts that might bring her back. All I saw was the computer screen.
The counter read 24.
“One, nine, six …” Nema’s voice was soft. “Three.”
“You can do it, Nema. You can save their lives. What’s the rest?”
“Zero, eight, twenty-three, L …” She coughed up blood and inhaled with a ghastly noise. “Tell my mother … fuck you.”
Bianca on the comm. “Eighteen characters. You’re halfway.”
“I’ll tell her, Nema,” I said. “I’ll tell her what I think of her too. What comes after L?”
“I then N and … C.” She shivered. “It’s cold. So cold.”
Her body spasmed violently, bile oozed out of her mouth. Her death throes. She went still. Miguel felt her neck and shook his head.
“Is that enough to work with, Bianca?” I asked. “Cuz, that’s all we’re going to get.”
“No.” She sighed.
I looked up at the computer.
The counter read 17.
Bianca continued. “But it’s a start. My team’s working on it. I hope it means something more than random numbers and letters.” With the phone still to her mouth, she shouted at her team. “We can do this. We have to do this.”
Mercury tapped my shoulder. She been a whole lot craftier than you realize, homie. August 23rd, 1963, Lincoln Memorial, remember what happened?
I said, Damn it, if you know the answer, just tell me!
Mercury said, Not how it works. Think about that date. Famous people. People with dreams. Your little racist chose the one password none of her minions of morons would guess.
“Holy shit, Bianca.” I gathered my thoughts. “Martin Luther King gave a speech at the Lincoln Memorial on August 23rd, 1963. His ‘I Have a Dream’ speech. The last letters fill that in.”
Her team began shouting in the background. Someone said, “That’s gotta be it. Try it.”
Bianca said, “Jacob, we can’t do it remotely. You need to type it in. Try 19630823LincolnMem. And try it with caps and no caps.”
Miguel beat me to the chair. He was the better typist. I leaned over his shoulder.
He tried it with caps. He tried with all lower case. He tried with one of each. Nothing.
“What else you got?” I asked Bianca.
“Try 19630823LincIDream.”
Miguel tried it. Nothing.
An exasperated gasp went through her team on the other end. She said, “We’re thinking.”
The counter read 4.
Miguel looked at me. “I know what it is.”
He typed in 19630823LincolnMLK.
The app opened up.
“That’s it!” Bianca yelled. “We’ll take it from here. Get out!”
We took off in a dead run. Through the front door. Up the driveway and across the paved road. Miguel picked me up and tossed me into the drainage ditch on the far side. He dove in behind me.
The explosion blew the mailbox over my head. Again. The shock wave pounded every square inch of my body. Again. The fireball lit up the surrounding trees. Heat singed my back. Smoke filled my lungs. Pieces of clapboard and shingles and structural beams and plumbing flew over my head. It was becoming routine.
Miguel grabbed my arms, hauled me to standing. We took off running again as the bigger objects began falling from the sky and landing around us like mortar shells.
As we ran, Miguel said, “You gotta stop pushing things to the last second.”
CHAPTER 55
I waited in Ms. Sabel’s spare McLaren with the top down on a sunny spring day in Washington, DC. She loaned it to me for the special occasion and wished me luck. Miguel texted me a picture showing off his new threads in front of The Kooples, Paris. He looked tres chic.
Jenny strolled out of the therapist’s office building at a slow and unsteady pace. It looked as if she were having second thoughts about getting in the car. She stopped and looked around, took a deep breath, put her head down, then walked straight to me. We exchanged heys. She didn’t want to talk. I’d been told to expect that.
We drove down Wisconsin Avenue in silence for several blocks. Traffic stopped and started. We caught every light red.
Mercury squeezed into the tiny space between our seatbacks and the engine compartment. You were right from the beginning, dawg. Something went wrong with your girlfriend.
I said, Adding “girl” to the front implies something that might not exist anymore.
Mercury said, Uncertainty sucks, don’t it?
I said, You can say that again.
Mercury said, Imagine how your un-worshipped god feels. Who saved you from, not one, but two suicide vests?
I said, That’s what I want to know.
We stopped at a light.
“You wanted to meet my old friends,” Jenny said. “She said it was a good idea. I mean for me, not necessarily you. Or with you. Or because you asked. I’m sorry. I’m not making sense.”
“Your therapist said it was good for you to reconnect with old friends. I get that.”
We drove a couple more blocks toward the restaurant where she’d booked our lunch reservation.
“She told me to expect mood swings.” Jenny folded her hands in her lap. “You noticed that, I’m sure.”
Mercury said, What is she talking about, dawg? She had wild and crazy sex with you then dumped you in the morning. Is that what she means by a mood swing?
I said, No need to analyze it. Remember when Thompkins got separated from the unit during a mortar attack and ended up outside the wire for twenty-four hours? He had some mood swings after that.
Mercury said, You mean the poster-boy for PTSD, the guy who tried to gut you? Yeah, I remember that nut job. Whatever happened to him?
I said, Turned into a vegan Buddhis
t and works for Veterans for Peace.
“You’re not saying anything.” Jenny twisted in the seat to look me over.
“I’m fairly immune to mood swings. They’re pretty common in war zones.”
“I can imagine.” She looked at the shops as we inched closer to the center of Bethesda. She went quiet again.
I tried to remember all the bullet points from the many sites I’d visited to learn about how to be supportive. Patience came up a lot. So did reinforcement. And a few other things men generally suck at.
“Would you rather not talk about it?” she asked with an edge.
“I’m trying to listen. The experts recommend listening.”
“OK.”
Mercury said, Oh boy. This is worse than my marriage counseling.
I said, You went to marriage counseling?
Mercury said, I thought so. After I escorted the nymph Lara to the underworld, where one thing led to another, my wife insisted we go to counseling. Mars claimed he was a certified therapist, but he had other plans. I caught the two of them “counseling” one day.
I said, Ouch.
“Would you rather I talk?” I asked. Dangerous an idea as it was, I wanted her to stay engaged. No one helped Nema deal with her trauma and she fell off the ledge into a sea of hatred. Nema choose her path. I didn’t want Jenny near that precipice.
She thought about it. “Tell me what you think of our relationship.”
I took a deep breath. “When we first met, you were thirsty. After a year in prison, I figured it made sense, even if it felt rushed and one-dimensional. I’m not going to pretend I didn’t like it. I figured the rest of the relationship would fall into place.”
“You didn’t care about the rest of the relationship; all you cared about was the sex.”
“Believe it or not, I care about intimacy.”
“That’s what I said.” Her voice rose. “You got all you wanted—without any baggage.”
“That’s not fair.” I squeezed the steering wheel tight enough to break it. “Sex is just one facet of intimacy. Intimacy is about sharing the truth. Tell me something true.” Suddenly, I felt like I’d said something wrong. I added, “When you’re ready.”
She crossed her arms and turned as far away from me as she could in the exotic car. Which wasn’t very far.
We went forward, one car length at a time, for two blocks before she spoke again. “Well. OK. Here’s something true. I went into therapy today, expecting to hate it. That’s why I invited you to pick me up for lunch. I expected to come out of there in a bad mood and be able to break things off cleanly with a rational explanation. Only there was a problem. I liked the session. She recommended doing things to get my life back to normal. Like reconnecting with my old friends. Facing the whispers and the rumors and the press and forging ahead with life as it is. The things she said were a lot like the things you said. She made me realize you understand the problem. So, I, um …”
She took my hand off the shifter and held it in both of hers.
“It’s not the same, but there are parallels between rape and the trauma of war.”
We inched along for another block. She didn’t let go of my hand.
“I’m not famous,” she said. “But my father is. And Mom being the vice president makes things worse. That means anyone around me is going to have reporters and paparazzi shoving cameras and microphones in their face. They’ll be asked questions about dating a convicted killer. I can’t ask anyone to go through that. It makes intimacy impossible.”
We made a turn onto a less traveled street. It was one-way. A construction crew blocked three-quarters of the single lane. We waited for a bored guy in a reflective vest to wave us through.
“What I’m trying to say is, dating me isn’t going to be easy. I’m a long-term kind of girl. I don’t have relationships of convenience. I’m not …”
She sighed.
“I knew all that before Basel-Stadt.”
“I mean …” She huffed and thought and took a deep breath before going on. “I’m giving you a way out here. You don’t have to help me. You don’t have to worry about me. My parents and my brother are doing too much of that now. We can have lunch and shake hands, walk away as friends.”
I took a long look at her. Not the supermodel type, nor bad looking, she had a different kind of beauty. The beauty that comes from determination. The kind that radiates regardless of her mood or temperament or situation.
Mercury said, That’s your cue. Get out while you can.
I said, What kind of heavenly guidance is that?
Mercury said, Now’s your chance to turn over a new leaf. Make a clean break from being the whack-job-magnet you’ve always been. You don’t see Caesars hanging around with murderers. It’s bad for business.
I said, To the Teutons and the Gauls and the Angles, the Caesars were the murderers.
Mercury said, Huh. Izzat why they never liked us?
“As long as we’re being all intimate and stuff: here’s something true.” I squeezed Jenny’s hand. “When I pulled those wires off the battery, I had no idea what would happen.”
She reared back in shock and anger and fear and incredulity.
“HEY!” The guy in the safety vest blew his whistle and waved an impatient hand. “C’mon, while we’re young already.”
I drove around the guy.
Jenny shoved my shoulder and started laughing. “You’re pulling my leg. You would never endanger me.”
We turned the last corner and pulled up to Mon Ami Gabi, the famous French bistro. Twelve people appeared out of thin air and descended on us. Cameras flashed, phones recorded, microphones popped out.
“I’m sorry, Jacob,” Jenny said. “I don’t know how they found us. I made the reservations in your name.”
The crowd swarmed toward my side of the car. A woman started asking questions, “Mr. Stearne, are you going to accept the French President’s apology? If so, what about the key to Paris?”
A guy next to her elbowed her aside. “If you had to do it all over again, would you have worn the suicide vest on behalf of the victim?”
“Are you going to accept President Williams’ invitation to the White House?”
“What about the King of Morocco’s parade in your honor?”
I turned to Jenny. “I’m down for anything you are.”
The End
TO YOU FROM SEELEY JAMES
I hope you enjoyed the story and will join my VIP Readers by signing up at SeeleyJames.com/VIP. I hold a drawing every month for things like gift certificates or naming characters in upcoming books. I also give VIPs the inside scoop on things like how certain characters were named; which Shakespeare soliloquies I plagiarized drew from; what I’m working on next, etc.
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EXCERPTS FROM SABEL SECURITY SERIES:
Element 42, Sabel Security #1
That time you stumbled onto a mass grave and mercenaries bolted from the jungle to hunt you down.
Death and Dark Money, Sabel Security #2
What if you discovered foreigners were donating to the campaigns of American politicians?
Death and the Damned, Sabel Security #3
Why would a billionaire smuggle terrorists into the country?
Death and Treason, Sabel Security #4
What if you discover foreigners plotting to assist a political campaign?
Death and Secrets, Sabel Security #5
What if DNA led you to discover your mother was the vice president—and a murderer?
Death and Vengeance, Sabel Security #6
The president declares war based on a lie. Can Jacob Stearne stop him before the world descends into chaos?
Death and
Conspiracy, Sabel Security #7
Is Jacob Stearne a terrorist or a hero? Go undercover in this all-Jacob thriller.
Death and Betrayal, Sabel Security #8 (Feb-2020)
Be sure to join the newsletter for more about this one due in early Feb-2020.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
His near-death experiences range from talking a jealous husband into putting the gun down to spinning out on an icy freeway in heavy traffic without touching anything. His resume ranges from washing dishes to global technology management. His personal life stretches from homeless at 17, adopting a 3-year-old at 19, getting married at 37, fathering his last child at 43, hiking the Grand Canyon Rim-to-Rim several times a year, and taking the occasional nap.
His writing career ranges from humble beginnings with short stories in The Battered Suitcase, to being awarded a Medallion from the Book Readers Appreciation Group. Seeley is best known for his Sabel Security series of thrillers featuring athlete and heiress Pia Sabel and her bodyguard, unhinged veteran Jacob Stearne. One of them kicks ass and the other talks to the wrong god.
His love of creativity began at an early age, growing up at Frank Lloyd Wright’s School of Architecture in Arizona and Wisconsin. He carried his imagination first into a successful career in sales and marketing, and then to his real love: fiction.
For more books featuring Pia Sabel and Jacob Stearne, visit SeeleyJames.com
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