Far From Ordinary

by M James Murray

  He swallowed hard, looking at the dead body and then back again to the blonde, mustachioed stranger.

  “I don’t understand. You managed to drag him all over the complex by yourself yesterday.” Dick jerked a thumb back towards the dead man on the couch. “Why do you need help tonight?”

  Adrian sighed once again.

  “My boy, I sustained an injury last night which is regrettably hampering my movements,” he said, pulling down his shirt collar to display a bandaged shoulder. “Indeed, I can manage without you in carrying Alfred’s body, but it would be awkward and unwieldy for me.

  Furthermore, it is for your own protection. I do not believe that we have seen the last of your friends from last night.”

  Dick considered all of this for a moment. Given a choice between the dangerous strangers and this charming man, he would pick Adrian any day of the week.

  Dick could feel that Adrian was in a rush, although he wasn’t tapping his foot on the ground as a lesser man would. He looked at the corpulent body on the couch still half covered in shit, then back again at the blonde stranger, Adrian Vandervoort.

  “I will help you,” he said, his voice cracking. Dick wondered if he’d just made the biggest mistake of his life.

  “Smashing,” said the blonde stranger. Dick could hear notes of relief in his voice. “Now, grab his legs. We need to move quickly.”

  Chapter Ten

  “Dick, my boy, I’ve parked a vehicle around the back. Are you able to carry him that far?” Adrian was doing the majority of the heavy lifting while Dick struggled with his portion.

  It felt as though the fat man’s legs weighed more than Dick did. His arms burned and he felt a lightness in his head.

  “He… couldn’t have… eaten… less… Cheetos?” Dick said.

  “He could have. Indeed, he should have,” remarked Vandervoort. “The circumstances of Alfred’s demise point squarely in his eating habits.”

  Dick remarked to himself that his newfound companion wasn’t even a tad winded despite dragging a large man through a rather extensive and winding sewage treatment plant. He looked at Adrian enviously, regretting every time he had passed up going to the gym in favor of doing absolutely nothing in his apartment.

  “He died of a heart attack?” Dick asked, remembering his old aunt Gladys who had passed away suddenly from a heart condition brought on by years of copious eating and mild alcoholism. His Mama had always said that Aunt Gladys had died because of her famous gravy soup.

  “I do not believe so,” Vandervoort motioned him toward the passenger side door, “Lord Alfred Gunter Katzmann succumbed to poison.”

  “He was poisoned?” Dick exclaimed, “who was he?”

  “That is not a story for this moment in time,” Vandervoort said. There was a brief moment of silence. “Hurry up and do up your seatbelt!”

  “I never wear my seatbelt,” Dick said. He was rarely in cars at all, his primary method of transportation was Houston’s less than ideal transit system.

  Adrian looked at him exasperated.

  “Well, I’m not driving until you put on your seatbelt! You could be a danger not only to yourself but the people around you should we get into a motorcar incident.”

  “Just drive!” Dick said. For someone who claimed to be in such a hurry, he really did seem to be a stickler for the rules.

  Adrian glowered at him for a quick moment before putting the car into drive. He pulled the white van around in an expert three-point turn and pulled away.

  “Blimey!” Adrian swore.

  “What!” Dick looked around in excitement.

  “Just get down!” Adrian said while grabbing Dick’s head and pushing him downward. He caught a glimpse of a black Lincoln town car idling in the parking lot.

  Dick took a second to put two and two together. Browne and Nieminen were waiting for them. Clearly, they hadn’t believed any of Dick’s story. They must have arrived shortly after Dick with the intention of staking out the building for any suspicious activity.

  It was remarkable how calm Vandervoort looked as he pulled out of the parking lot. He smoothed his blonde mustache and adopted a bored expression on his face as he slowly drove by the parked town car.

  He’d seen that move a lot of times before in spy movies, to try and confuse the enemy into thinking that this vehicle was unimportant. Dick racked his brain. As far as he could remember, it never worked.

  “Okay, I think we foiled them. Come on, old chap! Up you go. Please put your seatbelt on.” At the moment that Vandervoort finished speaking, however, there were bright headlights behind them.

  They didn’t buy it.

  Adrian suddenly hit the gas pedal and swung out of the parking lot, the tail end of the vehicle fishtailing as he turned. The town car roared in pursuit behind them.

  “Blast it!” Adrian swore as he swerved around a car. “Will you not put your god damned seatbelt on?” Dick figured that it was a good idea to do so now.

  The town car kissed the bumper of the van jolting both Dick and Adrian forward.

  “We’re not going to outrun them, my boy!” Adrian shouted.

  “Don’t do anything drastic!” Dick felt very afraid; the van was in danger of falling onto its side with each sharp turn Adrian made.

  “Well, what would you suggest then?” Adrian retorted. “Here.” He threw Dick the small silver gun which the British man kept holstered by his side.

  “What do you want me to do with this?”

  “I think that it’s due for a proper cleaning so please just shoot the damned car.”

  Dick didn’t feel right about this at all. But Adrian was screaming obscenities at him, so he rolled down the window and shot the gun a few times.

  “That was good, but it would be even better if you’d hit the bloody car that’s ramming us!” Dick had left a few bullet holes in an unfortunately parked car on the side of the road.

  “Don’t yell at me! I don’t do good when people yell at me,” Dick said.

  Just then, there was a noise like tearing aluminum foil with a bang.

  “They’re shooting at us

  “Stay calm! And hold on!” Adrian took a sharp turn to the left. But he rounded the corner too violently – Dick slid sharply in his seat and hit his head on the chassis between the doors of the van. Everything exploded into stars in his vision.

  “I… ashume manamana,” Dick said, forgetting how to speak for a moment.

  “What’s that about mushrooms?” Adrian yelled. Dick could feel blood gushing from a cut on his forehead. Adrian looked over in concern.

  “Oh bloody hell,” Adrian said. “Give me that!”

  “Wha?”

  “The gun. In your hand. Now!”

  Dick looked down. He did indeed have a gun in his hand. “When did I get this?” He passed it to Adrian’s outstretched hand.

  “Good, now hold this for a moment.” Dick grabbed hold of the wheel, as Adrian twisted his body around and shot a few times at the pursuing town car. A tremendous crash followed the high pitched whine of burnout as the vehicle swerved off the road and into a bus shelter.

  “Oh my Lord!” Dick said, looking back. There was glass everywhere. The car wouldn’t be pursuing them any longer.

  Adrian turned down sidestreets, staying off the freeway.

  “They’d be able to find us easily if we took the Southwest Freeway,” he explained. In Houston, there were a ton of city cameras on the freeways taking pictures of each vehicle which drove through, ostensibly for toll purposes.

  They served the dual purpose of letting the city of Houston to know who was driving where at what time, as well.

  They rode in silence, Adrian looking to the left and the right to identify any other pursuers. Dick blinked a few times, trying to clear the fuzziness from his mind.

  He felt sleepy, like when he stayed up too late binging cheesy action flicks.

  “Are they… dead?” Dick asked. He thought of Sarah Nieminen’s pretty eyes and shuddered. H
e didn’t want to know the answer.

  “It is difficult to say, my boy. They won’t be maintaining the pursuit today, that is for certain.”

  “Is it over?” Adrian looked over at Dick for a long while.

  “Let’s talk about this a little bit later. Put some pressure on that wound; you’re getting blood all over the interior!”

  Adrian employed a winding route filled with a lot of unnecessary turns. It was, he explained, so he could see if there were any pursuers on their trail. He indeed didn’t leave anything to chance, even getting out at one point and swapping his license plate with a parked car on the side of the road.

  Adrian Vandervoort and Dick Mitey had successfully escaped.

  “Now, my boy, the difficult part begins.”

  Dick wondered what he meant by that, but his head hurt, and there was blood dripping down his fingers. He decided that it was a question for another day.

  Chapter Eleven

  Sarah Nieminen sat up in her hospital bed and grimaced.

  Everything hurt, but there weren’t any serious injuries as far as she could tell. Beside her, hooked intravenously to her arm was a saline drip. A machine whirred to life beside her and took her blood pressure for the umpteenth time. She glanced over at the reading. 140 over 81.

  She felt fine for having been in a severe car crash. A few aches – some new, some old. Nothing she couldn’t handle with some stretching and some naproxen.

  Around her, the hospital room was white. Sterile. She hadn’t even been around long enough for anyone to bring by balloons or flowers or a card. It all made her want to scream.

  She’d been brought to Houston Methodist Willowbrook hospital in the middle of the night by ambulance beside her partner Connor Browne.

  It had been hell, plain and simple. She’d looked over in the ambulance and seen him, bleeding from multiple lacerations, his arm sticking out the wrong direction.

  He hadn’t been conscious.

  “That’s not fair, is it,” she said to herself. She’d been driving, after all. If anyone should have been beaten up like that, it should have been her. Connor was the strong one, too. To see him in such a weakened state like that was too much for her to bear.

  They’d gotten her a private room, at least. Her insurance had made sure of that. Hospitals were always so impersonal. Nurses would scurry around now and then to check on her and record her vital signs, but they hadn’t answered any of her questions.

  “When can I get out of here?”

  “How’s Connor doing?”

  Finally, a doctor came in wearing his stark white medical coat. He’d been more helpful, if only marginally so.

  He told her that she should count herself lucky. There weren’t any significant injuries to her person. Still, he wanted to keep her for observation for a bit longer, just in case.

  Sarah hadn’t liked that. She wondered if they would have said the same thing to her if she had been a man. She had argued her case. Unsuccessfully.

  He’d told her to be patient.

  Sarah felt impotent laying there in the hospital bed. Useless. Weak.

  She checked her phone which some kind nurse had placed beside her on the nightstand. The battery was almost dead – damn things never held a charge anymore.

  She ignored the eight missed calls and opened up her messages. There were plenty of unopened texts, but none from Connor.

  He’s fine. He’s a tough SOB after all. Just because there’s no answer doesn’t mean he’s…

  She keyed up a short message to Connor then laid back down with a slight grimace.

  I hope you’re okay. Give me a shout when you get this. Sarah considered for a moment, then sent another short message. I fucked up. I’m sorry.

  Typically she’d never have sent something like that, saying she was wrong. But it was her fault, so she needed to take responsibility.

  Sarah got the sinking feeling that the credibility she’d built up over the last decade and a half had just gone out the window. But this wasn’t a typical situation.

  If anybody should have gotten hurt, it should have been her. The single thirty-four-year-old with no family to speak of. Just Charlie, but she knew that the Jefferson’s would take him in, if necessary, in a heartbeat.

  Connor, well, he had a family. A wife and a couple of kids and parents who snowbird down in Florida every winter.

  She felt so impotent and powerless. Sarah balled up her first in frustration and hit the bed, pretending not to feel the pain shooting up her left arm.

  Sarah hesitated for a moment, then sent another text to Mohammad Al-Azhar, letting him know that she was awake. In the all-boys club of the CIA, they had forged an unlikely bond.

  They were both minorities, and they both knew it. Al-Azhar as a Muslim post 9/11 and Sarah as a woman, and they had become friends over the years.

  Sarah remembered the crash. They’d been trailing a nondescript white van. There was a high chance that Katzmann was on it. They had gotten operatives to stake out the place during the day, and to rule out the surrounding area.

  And a van without markings had come out of the sewage treatment plant. It should have been an easy maneuver – the town car was low to the ground and had a powerful V8 engine.

  But she’d messed up her chance. She hadn’t executed a PIT maneuver properly. It should have spun out the vehicle, allowed them to take the car with minimal casualties. Instead, she had kissed the bumper of the van with her town car.

  Then they had gotten aggressive.

  Even once the shots had started, she hadn’t panicked. She was, after all, a highly trained agent of the Central Intelligence Agency. But then the suspect with the blonde hair had climbed out his window with catlike agility and had shot with the accuracy of a master marksman. That should have been impossible at those speeds, but he had done it anyway.

  One to the wheel, another to the windshield. Sarah had lost control.

  It was all her fault.

  She wondered what her Daddy would have done.

  “Probably wouldn’t have even gotten so far,” she muttered under her breath. It had been years since she’d spoken with her father. He’d been a small-town sheriff in Marquette, Michigan. That is, of course, until he decided that Sarah and her mama weren’t good enough for him.

  He divorced Sarah’s mother and followed a girl not that much older than his daughter to the west coast. Sarah had been sixteen at the time.

  He’d tried reaching out at first, of course. Tried calling her a few times a week, leaving voicemails until Sarah disabled the voicemail function on her phone. He still sent letters on the important dates.

  She’d never read them, of course. She had burned the first few when they had arrived, after checking to see if there was money in them. There never was.

  Now she merely threw them out whenever they arrived.

  How had she messed up so badly?

  It wasn’t all on her, of course, but it felt that way. Rico and Walker had fucked up at the dinner party as well. From the report which she had read, there was at least one dead, aside from Katzmann.

  He had been alive as he’d stumbled out of the party, but for how much longer? Who knew, but Sarah was a realist. He was dead. They’d screwed the pooch.

  But there was still hope – an anonymous call talking about a German diplomat and the sewage treatment plant.

  Not even 3 miles away from the dinner party. They were related, of course. The two incidents had been too close together, too similar to be a coincidence.

  The night attendant, that fellow with the weird name, had acted suspiciously as well. But there hadn’t been a body. Nothing to go off. A preliminary check of the time clock at the sewage treatment plant had given Dick Mitey a near airtight alibi, as well.

  And yet she’d seen him trying to duck down and hide as the white van had pulled away from the plant.

  The blood pressure reader whirred to life again. Sarah reached over with delicate fingers and ripped the inflating ba
lloon off her arm and dropped it on the ground.

  Who was Dick Mitey? Sarah figured he was either one of the best covert agents she’d ever seen or he was utterly oblivious.

  She grimaced as she got up and walked towards the washroom carrying her saline drip. Sarah caught an image of herself in the mirror, with bruises on her face and bed head.