Fixer Redux

by Gene Doucette

  “And she has to kill Corrigan,” Maggie said.

  There was a pause as everyone worked through that.

  “Well, it’s a theory,” Justin said.

  “Does this mean the mayor’s office isn’t a target any longer?” Cindy asked.

  Justin sighed loudly.

  “It’s just a theory,” he said. “Pulling the protective details seems like a poor idea right now. But it does give me an idea. Maggie, how is Corrigan doing?”

  “He’s well enough to want to get out of the hospital,” she said. “Which we’re taking as a good sign. He stood and walked on his own yesterday. Just to the bathroom, but it was a start.”

  “His being alive isn’t a secret any longer. Not if the one person we were trying to keep that information from already knows otherwise. If she’s going to go after him, maybe we can take steps to make sure we’re there when it happens.”

  18

  Dr. Warren: I’m saying if you look at everything that’s happened in this city over the past month…if you look at it, and don’t even consider aliens, you’re fooling yourself.

  * * *

  Dick Jackson: And when you say aliens, you’re not talking about illegal immigration, correct?

  * * *

  Dr. Warren: That’s correct, that is not what I’m talking about.

  —Transcript, from the ‘Late night with Dick Jackson’ radio show

  “You want me to accept a what?”

  The room they’d put Corrigan in was on a floor that was officially under renovation, in a wing of the hospital that wasn’t typically used for people recovering from gunshot wounds. Not that Mass General had a section specifically intended for the use of gunshot victims, but if they did, it wouldn’t be anywhere near the maternity ward that was one floor down.

  The reason they had him there, he was told, was to hide his continued existence from the woman responsible for that gunshot. Since she was supposed to think he was dead, it followed that the rest of the world did as well.

  For all these reasons, Corrigan assumed he’d misheard his girlfriend.

  “A medal,” she said. “For bravery or something. I’m pretty sure the mayor has a few commendations lying around. One of those.”

  Maggie was sitting in a chair that had been exclusively occupied—up until this point—by Monica Devereaux, despite Corrigan’s many attempts to get her to go away.

  It had been nice having someone to talk to, at first, especially once it became clear that Maggie’s appearances in the ward would be extremely occasional, as long as there was a killer out there. Monica had a lot of questions, and he didn’t have anything better to do. Her probing helped him recall the details that had landed him in the hospital in the first place, and that made her pretty useful.

  But she wouldn’t go away. Even when Corrigan lapsed into silence on a regular basis, and stopped answering questions with enthusiasm, she continued to sit in the chair and tap away on her laptop.

  It turned out the fan site she created in his honor had exploded…or gone viral, or something like that…at a time when she couldn’t do much more than basic maintenance to keep it running. She desperately wanted to tell everyone what it was like to be rescued a second time by the same guy, but Boston Police asked her nicely (in a way that sounded like an order, even though they couldn’t make it an actual order) not to do that. To her credit, she kept quiet, although he got the sense that she was compensating for silence in that part of her life, by filling up all the silence in Corrigan’s life.

  Her silence wasn’t having the expected effect. Basically, everyone contributing to her website now assumed that since Monica had dropped out of sight, both she and Corrigan were alive, and further, had run off together.

  Or something. One afternoon, she went through seven entirely different ridiculous theories, and read ten thousand words of a piece of fan fiction about their entirely imaginary life on the run. Then she laughed at how wrong they all were, and said, “I should write a book or something!” in an offhand way that strongly suggested she was doing exactly that.

  It all made him about ten times happier to see Maggie than he would have been otherwise.

  “I don’t want to tell the FBI how to do things,” he said, to Maggie, “but it seems to me this is the sort of thing this Sheila woman is going to hear about.”

  “Yeah, that’s the plan.”

  “You’re using me as bait?”

  “Yep. What do you think?”

  “I think I liked being in a coma.”

  “You don’t have to do it,” she said.

  “It was nice and quiet there.”

  “Corrigan, I mean it. You don’t have to do it.”

  He adjusted himself in the bed. It wasn’t the worst thing in the world, having a bed he could turn into a chair with a couple of buttons. His butt was numb, more or less all the time, and he felt a profound need to stretch his legs every half hour or so, but it was still nice. Also, a week ago, he couldn’t sit up or move much at all without some pretty intense pain. Even a slight shift like the one he’d just accomplished would have been accompanied by the sensation that his midsection was being torn open.

  He could stand now, and walk. He just had to ignore the feeling of his skin tugging at the stitches, and convince himself his insides were not about to spill out, despite how it felt.

  He was not in any shape to defend himself properly, but he could walk across a stage okay. But if everything Maggie had just told him about the woman they were after was true, if they did this he wouldn’t be walking off that stage again.

  “Give me the details, so I can tell you how many ways it’s a terrible idea,” he said.

  “We haven’t worked out all of the details yet. But, we’ll stage it someplace where we can control the situation. She isn’t bulletproof, right?”

  “She may as well be, if she knows where the bullets are going to hit her.”

  “You did. Bernard still shot you.”

  “That was different,” he said. “I could have gotten out of the way, but in all the versions where I did, the bomb went off. This is why my weakness isn’t her weakness; to me, getting shot to be the lesser of two outcomes. We don’t have anything or anyone she cares enough about to protect in the same way. On top of that, she’ll know about the trap ahead of time, just like I knew I was going to take a round in the chest.”

  “Okay. But this is the way it works, Corrigan. Step one is figuring out where she’s going to be, step two is apprehending her when she shows up. We don’t have any other strategies in our toolkit. Nobody’s ever gamed for a scenario where we have to take down a terrorist who can see the future.”

  “You’ll have to work on one,” he said. “Is her name really Sheila Corrigan? Because I don’t know what to think about that.”

  “It’s too much of a coincidence, isn’t it? We can’t get anything useful out of the name, because it’s too common, so I don’t know. But it seems legitimate.”

  The twelve-year old version of Corrigan would have thought this was the best news ever, because it meant that there was a family of people who shared not just his name, but his abilities. It was a pretty good superhero origin story. Not as good, maybe, as the lab-experiment one, or the father-from-another-planet one (although that was still on the table) but it was pretty good.

  “It’s too bad she’s a violent killer,” he said. “I mean if she’s a relative. I’d love to know more about dad’s side of the family. You know what you’re asking of me, don’t you? If she can do what I can, I may not be able to see her attack coming.”

  “You saw the bomb.”

  “That was different.”

  “How?”

  “The bomb was supposed to go off, and then it didn’t. It was the part where it didn’t go off that was an alteration of the future. If she reverses that, and the bomb that wasn’t supposed to go off in the future, does go off, I won’t see it about to happen. And she knows it.”

  “Ah,” Maggie said. “
Well, I can’t do anything about her ability to do that, but I do have something that will keep our intentions hidden from her.”

  Maggie held up a little rectangular block of metal. It looked like a surge protector. She put it on the floor, and then ran a cord from the back of it to the outlet, and plugged it in.

  “What’s that?” he asked.

  “A magic trick. Do you notice anything weird about it?”

  “Not really, no.”

  Maggie picked it up, and then disappeared.

  No, that’s not right, he thought. Her future’s gone.

  “Whoa,” he said.

  “What do you see?”

  “You turned into a ghost.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Please put that down, it’s giving me a headache.”

  She put it down, and her future popped back in.

  “Neat trick,” he said.

  “Why did you say I turned into a ghost?” she asked.

  “Remember in the bad old days, when I used to hallucinate entire people? I knew they weren’t real because they had no futures. It was like that. That comes from what Bernard was wearing, doesn’t it? I recognize the effect.”

  “Yeah.”

  “I hated it then, too. Can we make a whole bunch of them?”

  “We just have this one.”

  He laughed.

  “You’ll definitely get me killed.”

  “We can take precautions. I know it sounds like a crummy idea, but we don’t have any good ones. The only things we’re pretty sure about right now are that she wants this device back, and she wants to kill you. At least if we announce where you’re going to be, we’ll know one place where she’ll be.”

  “Except she’ll also know it’s a trap.”

  Maggie shrugged.

  “It’s what we have,” she said.

  “Hang on.”

  Something was rattling around in the back of his head: a memory of something.

  “I’m supposed to check out of here soon,” he said.

  “I know. Tonight. We’ve already worked out the details.”

  “Middle of the night, out the front door and into a police van?”

  “Yeah. Quick and clean. You’ll be exposed for only a few seconds. BPD is going to close the entrance and half the block. Wait, did someone already brief you?”

  “She was wounded, wasn’t she? Right shoulder?”

  “I really hate it when you do this, dear.”

  “She’ll be there. Tonight. I saw it happen.”

  Except for two details, the plan to move Corrigan out of the hospital at one in the morning—through a pre-cleared front plaza to a police van parked on a street that had been cordoned off an hour earlier—continued exactly as planned.

  The first change: the person pushing Corrigan to the door in a wheelchair was no longer Monica Devereaux. Instead, it was an FBI agent named Vera, who was dressed to look like Monica.

  The second: Corrigan wasn’t the one who got wheeled out. This was another FBI agent, named Carl.

  Carl was about the same height as Corrigan, but not as bulky, so they had to put a bomb vest on under his shirt, along with the flak jacket he’d already planned to wear. But he was still in Corrigan’s clothes, his hair was the right color and approximate degree of incipient baldness, and most importantly, he was showing up at the right time and place to be Corrigan. The general opinion was that he looked close enough to fool someone for a few seconds.

  They figured that was all they needed.

  Corrigan actually left the hospital two hours earlier, through one of a series of underground maintenance tunnels connecting the many buildings that made up Mass General. He—and Monica, whom he decided he was doomed to spend eternity with at this point—were taken down one such tunnel, to an indoor loading dock for the laundry service, and into an unmarked van. At that point, Monica could probably have gone home, but nobody wanted to risk her being seen on the street, by Sheila or anyone else. It seemed like a silly concern, except Sheila and Bernard had already kidnapped Monica once.

  They were both still in the unmarked van, with Maggie, at twenty minutes before one AM, across the street from the front entrance. The van was Maggie’s command center, where all the video feeds from the area were sent, and from which all of the team communications passed. The FBI managed to rig the courtyard with cameras, which Corrigan thought was pretty remarkable given they only had a lead time of half a day to put all of this together. There were also multiple rings of police and FBI at various points around the entrance, for when Sheila showed up on one of those cameras.

  “It’s nearly time,” Maggie said.

  “This is exciting, isn’t it?” Monica said.

  This was her way of saying she was nervous. She was on a stool near the back doors, her knee bouncing up and down. Even the rhythm was annoying Corrigan.

  “You’ll be safe here, Ms. Devereaux,” Maggie said. “It’ll be over soon.”

  “Oh, I know,” she said, winking at Corrigan. Corrigan in turn glared at his girlfriend, who smiled. He was pretty sure she was enjoying this.

  Maggie looked at her watch.

  “Ten minutes, everyone,” she said into the walkie-talkie. “Anyone have eyes?”

  She got silence in response, which just meant no, nobody had seen Sheila.

  Maggie had everyone check in, then gave the all-clear to the police van. A minute later, it drove up and parked at the edge of the sidewalk.

  Two officers climbed out and began to do a slow circle around the courtyard.

  The front of the hospital was shaped like a semi-circle, with the courtyard in front of it a cement rotunda. There were tall granite columns between the curb and the middle of the plaza, to prevent anyone from driving their car directly into the front lobby. The police van was at the curb next to those columns.

  Corrigan was looking at a monitor, so he couldn’t tell if one of the two men had the device. He thought probably not, because that would tip off Sheila too early. There were at least two more officers inside the police van; one of them probably had it.

  “Does it look about right?” Maggie asked Corrigan.

  “I guess,” he said. “I saw it from inside the hospital, not from here. But it’s about right.”

  Maggie nodded, then opened the channel on her radio again.

  “It’s time. Carl, Vera, you’re up. Everyone be careful.”

  The front door to the hospital slid open.

  “I’ve got someone,” somebody on the radio said.

  “What do you have?” Maggie asked.

  “Someone running. From the north side. Bee-line. One block away.”

  “It’s not a jogger, right?” Maggie asked.

  “No ma’am, I think it’s her. Should I take a shot?”

  “Negative, let her get closer.”

  Corrigan decided it was strange, watching things on a video monitor that were unfolding just outside. When Sheila Corrigan made it within a few hundred feet of the courtyard, for example, if he’d been looking out the back of the van instead of at the screen, he would have seen her slide between two parked cars. He could have interacted with her directly, which is not something one expects to be able to do when watching something happen on television.

  But that wasn’t half as weird as what it was like to feel an explosion, an instant before seeing it transpire on the monitor.

  Sheila didn’t shoot her way into the courtyard, which was what the officers were told to expect. One of them even had on extra armor and a helmet, because he was the one who was supposed to take the bullet.

  She also didn’t get into hand-to-hand with anyone, or come up to the substitute Corrigan, speak to him, and then shoot him. (Carl didn’t have anything protecting his face, which was where Corrigan remembered her aiming, but it was believed that this would not matter, because by then they would have had her nullified.)

  But basically none of what happened in Corrigan’s future-view of this evening ended up happe
ning. Instead, Sheila got within fifty feet of the police van, threw a bomb that landed under the rear fender, and ducked behind a parked car.

  Corrigan couldn’t attest to what happened to the police van, or to Carl and Vera, or to anyone else in the courtyard, because the explosion knocked him over.

  They were lucky the whole van didn’t end up on its side. It got rocked hard enough that all of them were knocked to the floor, and some of the electronics went airborne, including a monitor. If he didn’t know any better, Corrigan would have said they’d just been wishboned by an elephant.

  They also lost power. Without the monitors, they were going to have to step outside to find out what was happening twenty feet away.

  “Corrigan, are you okay?” Maggie asked.

  His side was screaming at him. He hadn’t done anything more than jump up and down a couple of times, during therapy. It was enough to convince him he never wanted to jump up and down again. Getting dropped to the floor was a lot worse.

  “I’m super,” he said. “What happened?”

  “Nothing good.”

  He heard a shuffle of equipment from the part of the van where Maggie was sitting comfortably a few seconds ago.

  “Monica,” he called out, in the other direction. “Are you okay?”

  “Ow,” she said. “I think my arm’s broken, guys.”

  “Stay where you are,” Maggie said.

  “Yeah, no problem. Good thing we’re near a hospital, huh?”

  Corrigan heard static; Maggie had found her radio.

  “This is base,” she said. “We took a hit. Check in.”

  Silence. All they could hear outside was the wailing of car alarms.

  Then: “Hey, girl. Is the boy scout there?”

  “Who is this?” Maggie asked.

  “You know who it is. Come on, I wanna talk to him.”