by D S Kane
At first, she couldn’t feel anything through the drug-induced haze of her mind except for a mouthful of cloth of some kind. As the haze began to lift, she felt growing panic mixed with throbbing pain. Her mouth was full of surgical padding. Both breathing and swallowing were difficult. Her eyes popped fully open. She tried to get up but hadn’t the strength to move her limbs.
Ann saw. She jabbed Lee’s arm. “It’s mom! She’s waking. Lee, look. Look!” Ann pointed at Cassie and Lee turned.
“Rahhgh?” Cassie tried again, eyes wide in terror. More slowly, deliberately, a muffled voice that didn’t sound anything like hers, she asked, “Where?”
“You’re in a hospital, sweetie.” Lee took her hand. Ann moved closer and took her other hand. With a deep sense of relief, Cassie’s eyes fell shut as unconsciousness claimed her once again.
Greenfield called the President. He was put on hold for several minutes until the voice of the squirrel-faced old man said, “Gil? Whatcha want?”
“Mr. President, please call me back using your Encryption-Lok. I’ll wait for your call.”
And wait he did. Two hours later, Greenfield’s secretary buzzed him. “Who is it, Margaret?”
“Sir, it’s Deep Thought,” she said, using Secret Service’s code name for the President.
Greenfield switched to the encrypted line. “Mr. President, Sashakovich is alive, I know where she is right now. But we may not have to take her out.”
“Why not?”
“According to the news, she’s dead. Not sure yet, but I believe she’s been treated for a head shot at the New England Deaconess Hospital. That Arab, Achmed Houmaz, shot her just before he died in the gunfight where she was killed.”
“You sure about this?”
“Uh, not sure as yet. The story is still developing. If she is dead, well, Merry Christmas, Mr. President.”
The President chuckled. “That’s good. Well, keep me up to date on this one, Gil.”
“I will. Good afternoon, sir.” And Greenfield hung up.
Ann paced the room where Cassie lay connected to machines. She thought, I lost my real mom, and now I almost lost my best mom. I’m not taking any chances. I gotta be here with her, every second until she can come home. Have to watch over her until she’s okay again.
Ann pulled one of the two visitor’s chairs near the bed and settled into it. And, there she remained, while visitors came and went. She got up to shake their hands—William Wing, Avram Shimmel, Adam Mahee—but hours passed before she left the chair, and that was only to use the bathroom in their hospital suite.
Lee rose from the other chair. “Come on, sweetie, let’s go get a bite to eat.”
“No, daddy. I’m not moving. You can go. Bring me food. I’m staying right here.”
Lee cocked his head. “You sure?”
“Yeah. Here until she’s able to leave. What are you bringing me to eat?”
He scratched his head. “Uh, well, I can bring you Chinese or a submarine sandwich. Which would you prefer?”
“A sub. Pastrami, Swiss, mustard. But if they can’t do that, anything will work. And a diet drink. And thanks.” She walked behind the chair and popped open Lee’s satchel as he exited the room. She faced away and rummaged through it. She found what she was looking for: the 9mm Beretta that Cassie had with her when she came to get Ann in the tunnels. She dropped it in the patch pocket of her pants. Just in case.
She turned back and climbed into one of the large visitor’s chairs.
When Lee returned, he had two huge wrapped sub sandwiches and handed them both to Ann. Each was almost a foot long. “Choose one. I get the one you don’t want. One is cappicola and spiced salami, the other is pastrami and corned beef.”
She sniffed both and then pulled a bit of the meat from between each sandwich to sample. “Daddy, there’s way too much of these for just a dinner. I’ll take the spicy one.” She took a large bite and chewed for what seemed eternity to her. “As mom would say, yum. Where’d you get these, daddy?”
“There’s a sub shop on Commonwealth Avenue across the street from Boston University. One of the nurses told me these are the best subs on the planet.”
She smiled at him. Put down her sandwich and moved closer. Hugged him and more tears formed in her eyes. “Daddy, what will we do if she doesn’t make it?”
“Cassie’s a tough cookie. Think good thoughts and talk to her while she’s out. She can hear you, you know.”
Ann nodded and ate more of her sandwich.
At eight o’clock the nurses announced the end of evening visiting hours and Lee left the hospital. But he agreed to let Ann stay overnight with Cassie in the hospital room and signed a piece of paper noting his permission for the head nurse.
Mother and daughter were alone now. Ann said, “I know you can hear me, mom. I don’t know when it happened. But sometime a while ago I realized I love you. And Lee, too. He’s not such a jerk. I was wrong. Please, get well. I need you, mom.” She cried, and watched as Cassie thrashed slightly in the bed.
As the hours passed, Ann helped the nurses remove and replace Cassie’s catheter, bathed her, and spoke to her as if she was conscious. “Lee brought me this sandwich. It’s okay, but when you’re better, I want to go with you to one of your favorite restaurants. To celebrate. So, you have to get better. Please, mom. Please.”
Cassie woke near midnight. Ann could tell she was weak but hungry, and obviously aware of her surroundings and what had happened to her.
Ann called the nurse. “Please bring my mom some food.”
The nurse nodded, returning with chicken broth and cherry Jell-o. Ann fed Cassie soup through a straw, but there was no way for her to open her mouth and eat the Jell-o.
Ann asked the nurse, “Can you remove her IV line?”
The answer was certainly not.
While Cassie slept, Ann scanned the directory of Cassie’s cell phone, looking for an ebook she could read to her sleeping mother, but they were all thrillers, filled with things more gruesome than what they’d just been though.
She found one that was suitable, a collection of Shakespeare sonnets and read aloud from it to Cassie, until, as the hour neared midnight, she turned off the cell and curled up in the large padded guest chair. She turned the chair away from the door to the hall, to face the bed where she could watch Cassie.
As she slept, whenever a nurse made noise or the bodyguards whispered in the hallway, Ann woke up instantly, more upset than tired, her fingers gripping the Beretta hidden within her cargo pants pocket.
She dreamed about attacks on Cassie from the now dead zombie patriots, dreamed that she alone kept the rotting zombie killers from murdering Cassie.
She felt tired from the events of the day, and lay completely still and silent while she attempted sleep, ignoring the bodyguards and mercs posted outside the door. She drifted in and out of dreams, to one about her real mother, taking a heroin fix while Ann and her brother Joshua sat in the opposite corner of the room, watching her die. She next dreamt that Cassie and Lee were both murdered by terrorists and she was forced to return to the tunnels.
She woke with a start and considered what had happened over the months since Cassie had come to rescue her from the tunnels. It was a series of miracles and disasters, a roller coaster ride. Things in her life had changed, and so had her vision of the world. She sat in the chair and prayed. “God, if you really do exist, don’t let my new mom die. She doesn’t deserve it. Neither do I. And poor, Lee, he loves her so much. Don’t let her leave this world with us still on it.” And with that, she dropped back into sleep.
She dreamed about being in a dark cave, and someone very old and ethereal asked her to have a seat. But there was nowhere to sit. She sat anyway, and there was suddenly a chair under her. The old person spoke in a whisper that sounded like grains of sand blown in a wind. “By now you know everything you do brings with it consequences. Nothing you do happens in a vacuum. Consider every action and choose well. Your life depend
s on it. When you are ready to believe you have a soul, your soul depends on how you behave.”
The chair disappeared and she fell into another dream where her choices were objects she could choose. Ann picked one up and examined it. Then picked up another. The objects kept disappearing and changing their shape and color.
Behind the glass slot within the fire door staircase entrance, Stepponi could see Cassie’s room, thirty feet further down the hall from the nurses’ station. He watched Sashakovich on the bed, hooked to monitoring machines, an intravenous line stuck in her left elbow. She’s alive, dammit. He saw the back of the two guest chairs. She looked to be alone. He thought for a second about the bounty on her head. But the contract was claimed as fulfilled. What would happen if he sent in her severed head now?
He broke into a supply cabinet and stole a surgeon’s saw and a scalpel. Then he waited until the nurse left her station to dispense the midnight meds. As the nurse entered one of the six-bed wards, he left his hiding place in the doorway and moved silently closer to Cassie’s room.
When a pair of armed bodyguards moved off in conversation, he saw his opportunity. Stepponi rushed into Cassie’s room. He thought he wouldn’t need more than a few seconds. He ran to her bed, gripped the scalpel and grabbed her head by her hair. He crouched down to make himself less visible to the guards and placed the blade against Cassie’s neck. Stepponi whispered, “Goodbye, bitch.” He pressed the sharp edge tightly against her, using his other hand tight against her chest to hold her steady. Cassie began to struggle for breath, and her hands began clawing at him as he sliced into her neck. With the nails of her fingers, she ripped flesh from his hands and he cried out, “Ouch!”
Ann’s eyes popped open and she swiftly, silently pulled the Beretta from her pocket. She flipped off the safety. Rising from the chair she assumed a shooter’s stance and sighted onto her target. “Stop or I’ll kill you right now. Get away from my mom.”
Stepponi looked up. “Where the fuck did you come from?” He saw the gun and considered his options. No little girl would keep him from completing his work. “This bitch? This bitch is your mother? Well, fuck off.” He smiled and started to draw the blade across her throat.
Ann gulped. Either she killed a human being or her mom would surely die. It was an easy decision.
She squeezed the trigger three times, sending bullets into each of Stepponi’s eye sockets, and the third one hit between his eyebrows. That last shot didn’t penetrate and rocketed back at Ann, missing her by inches and shattering the glass wall behind her with a crunch. The man’s body jumped as each shot hit him.
Ann’s hands dropped to her side, still holding the smoking gun, her mouth open wide in shock.
In seconds men and women ran in from everywhere, mercs, bodyguards, and nurses who had seen the action unfold as they raced to stop it, but too late. She pointed at Stepponi, who slowly folded and collapsed on Cassie’s face.
For a moment, everyone froze. Ann ran to her mother and pushed the assassin’s bloody corpse off her, and when he hit the floor she could see that the back of his head was missing.
She pointed to Cassie’s neck, blood pouring from a slash. “Fix her!”
Chapter Forty-Four
December 2, 7:33 a.m.
220 East Kirke Street, Chevy Chase, Maryland
Cassie lay awake in bed, sipping steaming black coffee through a straw. In the two days since Ann killed Stepponi, Shimmel took Cassie and her family back to Chevy Chase in a rental Cessna containing fifty-two mercenaries and five bodyguards. The troops stood watch over the compound. Cassie looked out the windows on either side of the room. She could see just how inadequate her perimeter security was—only ten feet between her house and the others on either side. She knew that very soon now, they’d have to move somewhere with a real security fence. Probably somewhere thousands of miles away.
Ann would have to return to Boston in a few days to clear up the problem of Stepponi’s death, and it appeared a major problem. The school was trying to decide whether or not to let her remain a student. Cassie wondered if Ann’s life would ever be close to normal. Worse, she now realized Ann and Lee would both share her fate as long as they chose to stay with her.
Thinking about all this was difficult, and caused her to cry.
Her ability to think about anything for a long stretch had been diminished. It was slowly returning, but she hadn’t any stamina. About five minutes of thought or conversation would exhaust her.
Her speech was barely recognizable and was impossible to force louder than a whisper, but at least she could speak through her wired jaw. She was scheduled for an endless series of plastic surgery procedures, starting the day after tomorrow. The surgeries—one per week on average—would last into February.
She decided that Lee and Ann would have to do whatever they thought best. It was too much for her to even consider. Both of them entered the room to check on her. Happy just to have survived, she waved her arms, and whispered, “Come to me.” She hugged Ann and Lee to her.
She barely whispered, “My biggest fear now is that this won’t ever end.” Avram Shimmel entered the room and stood in the back, flanked by William Wing.
Wing’s grin showed a string of yellow teeth. “Don’t worry. According to gawkerstalker.com, CNN, and almost everyone else on Earth, you’re now officially dead.” Wing showed Cassie the story in the Washington Post bearing the photo of her death certificate and her severed head in a box.
“Good work,” she whispered.
Wing shook his head. “Not mine. April O’Toole did this, so someone besides us has your back.” He smiled. “It gets better. You already know Achmed Houmaz died and Omasu Maru is dead, but, I’ve finally taken care of Phillip Watson.”
Cassie’s face brightened. “Watson? How did you find him? What did you do?”
Shimmel and Wing both smiled. Wing said, “Didn’t even have to find him. I hacked into a few computers and repaid him for everything he did to you, with interest. While you were in Boston, possibly right around the time you guys reached the pier, I had this idea. You see, once you hack into DARPA, there are a plethora of tools there for the taking. Long ago Lee showed me some of the toys while you were traveling by sub. And…”
Phillip Watson sat on the floor of the tiny cell in the Saudi prison, dressed in shredded rags that stank from his own body odors, excrement, urine, blood, and stale sweat. There were no lights in the room, no bed, no sink, no toilet. He thought, “I’ll get that bitch.” This thought was all that kept him alive.
No one told him why they kept him captive, but every few hours men would take him from his cell and torture him. They spoke a language he didn’t understand, and wouldn’t acknowledge his English replies.
He had no way of knowing that he was held in a CIA prison and that he wasn’t even in Saudi Arabia any longer. He’d been moved to Kandahar, Afghanistan, while he was unconscious, drugged at the end of one of the torture sessions. According to the CIA files that William Wing had planted, Watson was really Abu Al-Wazid, responsible for arranging Tariq Houmaz’s safety in the mountain caves of Tora Bora, Afghanistan, the previous year.
Watson’s eyes had been ripped out from his face, his nose had been shattered many times, his fingers and thumbs smashed flat. They had pulled his teeth, one by one, during interrogation sessions. Most of his toes had also been destroyed and then extracted, their flesh ripped right from his feet. His genitalia had been carved expertly away into shreds. He lay on the floor, soaking in the liquid mix of his own seeping fluids. The reek caused even the guards to wear facemasks when they visited, to keep from retching from the odor.
He sat waiting in fear for the footsteps that would signal another session with his torturers. Watson heard two guards laugh as they approached the cell he lay in.
He began to scream.
Another day passed. Cassie sat up and slowly rose off the bed. She felt a bit stronger today, the day of her first reconstructive surgery. As she dressed, s
he moved with deliberate care, taking breaks to let her breathing revert to normal. She felt major pains everywhere in her body. But the most severe of these were the pains streaking through her mouth, exploding even when she just breathed. She thought of wearing a sweater because of the chilly weather, but the thought of trying to drag anything over her head left her feeling afraid and exhausted.
Her original plan for today called for her to stop by the agency’s office to see McDougal before the surgery. She had to decide what to do with him. But she knew she didn’t have the strength to make it inside the agency building.
Cassie gave up trying to dress. She took out a fresh bandage and removed the bloody one that covered one side of her destroyed face. In the bedroom mirror she could see the gap of flesh still in her cheek. Her emergency surgery in Boston had diminished but not closed the gap. She finished changing the bandage. The anguish she felt matched the physical pain in her face. She covered her bare torso with her bathrobe and headed with measured deliberation down the stairs to the kitchen. Coffee first. Dressing in clothes would have to wait.
Lee handed her a cup and a straw. He topped it off with just enough ice to take the heat out of it, smiled, and kissed the top of her head. “Morning, sweetie.”
She tried to smile, but a bolt of pain shot through her and instead of a grin, she flinched. She held the straw, sucking gingerly at the black liquid. The trick was to get the fluid past the holes on either side of her cheek and she forced the straw deep into her mouth. As she sucked down the coffee, she wondered again if it would ever end. The memory of her most recent discussion with Shimmel and Wing replayed again in her mind. She believed that there was no truly safe place for her in the world, and no place safe for her family if they stayed with her.
She watched Lee run up the stairs to get Ann ready for school.
Cassie began to cry. To keep them safe, she knew she’d have to leave them forever. Where would she go? While she sipped from the cup, still looking for that elusive answer to her fears, Lee came back down the stairs.
