The Patrick Bowers Files - 05 - The Queen

by Steven James

  Focus.

  Hand, foot. Hand, foot. Stem your way.

  Go!

  A wire of pain stretched from my ankle up through my leg whenever I put pressure on it, but I did my best to ignore it. I had to.

  Hands out. Move. Smear your feet.

  There was no turning back, no down-climbing.

  I scrambled upward.

  What are you going to tell Margaret?

  I didn’t have an answer. I climbed.

  Without breaking my rhythm, I tilted my head back and aimed the flashlight’s beam upward.

  Still nine or ten meters to go.

  A third of the shaft.

  The planes are in the air, but the missile will—

  But why would the Iranians shoot down the missile?

  Think, Pat. Think!

  Bribes? Lifting sanctions? A few billion dollars in aid? Allowing them to develop their own nukes? None of that seemed like enough to convince Iran’s president to rescue a country he’d said was a fake regime that must be wiped off the map.

  No, not the president . . .

  My calves were burning, and I noticed my left leg twitching.

  Hurry!

  If not bribes, then what?

  Five meters to the top, but I could see that the cement slab they’d told me about still rested on its stout metal arms, still covered the top of the shaft.

  Come on, get that thing out of the way.

  I climbed, thought of Iran, of politics, of weapons, of reasons . . .

  The Supreme Leader of Iran. He has more pull than the president; he’s the one who appoints the highest ranking members of the armed forces—anything like this would go through him, not the president.

  Three meters to the top—

  Breathe, just breathe.

  But rescue Jews? Why? How would they save face in the Muslim world if—

  I heard the rough movement of machinery, and, tipping my flashlight up, I saw the great arms moving, lowering the concrete platform, tilting it toward the side of the shaft.

  Yes!

  But then, too late, I realized I’d miscalculated.

  I was too close. The slab was going to hit me as it swung down.

  One choice.

  One chance.

  Gritting my teeth, I eased up on the pressure from my legs and hands, letting myself slide down, my palms scraping along the rough concrete, leaving a trail of blood behind.

  Two meters.

  Three.

  I jammed my feet out and levered out my hands to arrest my descent. The platform crossed where my head had been only a moment earlier, and I waited, legs shaking, barely able to hold my weight, until it was out of the way.

  The top of the shaft was clear.

  Fighting the pain in my shredded palms and struggling against my fatigued muscles, I stemmed up the rest of the way and grabbed the lip of the building’s floor, the blood on my hands making it slippery, hard to hold on—

  For a moment that seemed to last forever I hung over the emptiness, trying to firm up my grip, to gather my strength, and while I did, I heard the roar of snowmobiles approaching the building.

  Crying out from the effort, I heaved myself up, mantled out of the shaft, and collapsed onto the floor of the maintenance building.

  Arms shaking from exhaustion and adrenaline, palms bloodied from the climb, I was barely able to speed-dial Margaret’s number.

  “They won’t do it!” she exclaimed. “They—”

  “Here’s what Nielson needs to do. Now!” I gave her my instructions.

  Man, I hoped this worked.

  Prayed it would.

  It’ll work. It has to—

  The snowmobiles stopped just outside the door.

  Margaret ended the call so she could speak with Secretary of State Nielson, and I looked at my watch. We had only two, maybe three minutes before final descent.

  Someone was turning the door handle.

  Still lying on the freezing cement, I took aim with my Glock, tried to hold it steady in my torn, trembling hands as the door burst open and a cluster of flashlight beams blinded me.

  “Stand down,” I yelled. “I’m an FBI—”

  “Pat, it’s me!” Antón Torres shouted.

  “Antón.” Yes, good! I lowered my gun. “You’re just in time.”

  “For what?”

  “There are people down there who might try to blow up the base.”

  I wiped the blood from my hands and surfed to the DoD’s Routine Orbital Satellite Database, punched in my federal ID number, and searched for the live satellite feed of the SLBM’s contrail. “And we need to see if this missile can be stopped.”

  While Sean barreled his pickup through the drifts forming on the road, Tessa sat with Amber in the backseat, trying to keep her awake.

  “We’ll be there soon,” Sean told them. “Hang in there.”

  Tessa closed her eyes and asked for divine intervention.

  Even if God was angry at her for what she’d done, even if he couldn’t forgive her for the thrill she’d felt when she took that man’s life last year, maybe he could find enough mercy on this hellish night to give Amber a second chance.

  97

  I found the satellite image.

  One of the SWAT guys handed me his jacket and I slipped it on, sat up. Stared at the screen.

  With the satellite’s magnification, the missile’s contrail was clearly visible streaking over the Persian Gulf, and I waited for the SLBM to break apart, crack, fail, fall, die, but it did not.

  No, it did not.

  Over the next minute or so Torres’s men quickly and expertly set up their anchors and lowered the ropes they’d brought with them to rappel into the base, and while they did, I gave them the rundown on the base schematics, the number of terrorists, the status of casualties and known injuries, the location of the TATP detonator in the control room, but most of my attention was on the phone’s screen, on the contrail, on the missile that was not being blown out of the sky.

  Come on.

  Time ticked by. The missile streaked toward Jerusalem. I prayed for the bride, for the queen, for the people of God in that holy city. But the missile did not stop its fatal trajectory.

  One by one the SWAT guys rappelled into the shaft while Torres and I silently watched the images on the phone.

  “Come on,” I whispered. “Come—”

  And then, all at once it appeared: a thin red streak, faint and barely visible, cutting across the corner of the screen. It contacted the missile for two seconds, three—maybe four—then veered away again and was gone.

  Just that. Nothing more.

  No. That’s not enough time!

  But yet it was.

  Without any dramatic explosion or pyrotechnic display, the SLBM ruptured, its fractured pieces fell toward Earth, and the contrail misted to a vaporous end.

  And it was over. It’d worked. Iran had done it, but—

  Hopefully, Israel hasn’t already responded.

  Hopefully—

  I felt Torres’s hand on my shoulder. “You did good, bro. I’m gonna go get those people out of there.”

  “Chekov is in the control room.” I thought I might have already told him this a minute ago, but everything was sort of a blur. “Be careful with him, Antón. He won’t think twice about killing your whole team or blowing the base if he needs to in order to get away.”

  “Right.” He handed me his gloves and wool hat. “Stay warm. I’ll see you in a bit.”

  Then Torres lowered himself into the shaft and I was alone in the chilled, empty maintenance building, catching my breath, decompressing, trying to keep from shivering from the rush of adrenaline, the frigid air, my wasted, quivering muscles.

  Figuring that cable news would be as up-to-the-minute as the government, I surfed to CNN’s website. Then I pulled on Torres’s hat, wriggled my hands painfully into his gloves.

  On my cell’s screen, a reporter announced that, “According to our sources the missile is
no longer in flight. We are waiting to confirm that—yes . . .” He spoke for a few moments about the SLBM’s destruction, then finally mentioned that Israel had not fired retaliatory missiles, that “at this time it appears a cataclysmic crisis in the Middle East has been narrowly averted by the strident efforts of Secretary of State Nielson and an unlikely ally in the Supreme Leader of Iran . . .”

  I was breathing out a deep sigh of relief when I noticed that I had a voicemail from Tessa. The icon flashed highest priority.

  A tap at the screen, then I heard her words, frantic, desperate: “Patrick! It’s Amber. She overdosed. She’s unconscious. I need you! We’re going to the hospital!”

  What? Overdosed!

  The message was from eight minutes ago.

  I tried Tessa’s number. No reply.

  I dialed Amber’s cell, their landline, Sean’s bait shop—nothing.

  Pushing myself to my feet, I hollered down the shaft to Torres, “Tell Lien-hua I’ll be at the hospital. Amber’s in trouble!”

  He acknowledged that he’d heard me.

  Legs still uncertain from the climb, I clambered out the door toward the snowmobiles that Torres and his team had left outside the building.

  Terry heard two explosions, felt the building rumble.

  It must have worked. The missile must have hit Jerusalem and now Abdul’s men were here!

  He waited, but no Al Qaeda militants came in to save him.

  Instead, without warning, his door flew open and two CIA agents charged into the room, one shooting Terry’s gun from his hand, the other kicking him in the face, dazing him.

  Then they were both on him, pinning him down.

  Riley, who was pale and breathless on the floor nearby, gasped that he needed help. “In a minute, buddy,” one of the agents said. Then he leaned close to Terry, his breath stale and sausagey, his tone smug. “Your two buddies blew ’emselves into paradise right outside the door.” He pressed his knee against the GSW tunneling through Terry’s hand. White light blistered apart inside his head and he clenched his teeth, but he couldn’t keep from crying out in pain. “Didn’t account for American engineering, though. This place is built to withstand a lot more ’an that.”

  Trying to fight off the pain, Terry rolled his head to the side and saw a woman whom he didn’t recognize enter the room. She wore a white coat and carried a medical kit and a large syringe.

  Terry tried to wrestle free, but his legs were useless and he could barely move his arms or torso beneath the merciless grip of the two agents holding him down.

  The woman knelt beside him. “Looks like you’ve been given a transfer order, Mr. Manoji.”

  Then, the man who’d ground his knee against Terry’s wounded hand grabbed his head and forced the left side of Terry’s face to the floor. Out of the corner of his eye Terry could see the woman positioning the needle against his neck.

  “This comes to you compliments of FBI Director Wellington and CIA Director O’Dell,” she said. “Don’t worry. It’s a transfer to a much better place.”

  And as Terry Manoji screamed, the woman in the white coat depressed the plunger of the syringe.

  98

  Tessa sat beside Amber’s bed.

  Her stepaunt was unconscious, on oxygen, a nasogastric tube inserted through her nose. The doctors had worked hard at emptying the drugs from her system, but she hadn’t responded well.

  Sean pulled the other chair to the bedside, took Amber’s hand in one of his and with the other brushed a strand of hair from her eyes.

  For the moment it was just the three of them in the room.

  Tessa put out of her mind the unthinkable possibility that Amber wasn’t going to make it. Her stepaunt was going to be okay. She was definitely going to be okay.

  Yes, yes she was.

  Having forgotten her phone at Amber’s house, Tessa tried calling Patrick from the room phone, but he didn’t answer. Neither did Lien-hua.

  Scrolling through her mental database of names, of numbers, she tried Agent Jake Vanderveld’s cell number and managed to reach him at the Schoenberg Inn, where he was searching for a snowmobile to get to someplace in the national forest. Tessa tried to tell him about Amber, but he cut her off and proudly announced that Patrick had just helped save the lives of a million people.

  What is he talking about? Is he even being serious?

  “Um . . .” What do you say to that? “Awesome.” Yes, she was curious about what he’d said, but for the moment she stuck with the news of Amber’s overdose, got through the summary.

  “If Pat’s in the base,” Agent Vanderveld said, “he’s out of cell contact. I’m not sure I can get him the message until I get there. Do you need me to come to the hospital?”

  “I’m sure he’ll fill you in later. Just, when you find him, tell him to get here as soon as he can, okay? How did he save a million people?”

  “We’ll explain it all later. I’ll get him the message. I hope Amber is going to be all right.”

  “Yeah, me too.”

  Don’t worry, she will.

  As Tessa was hanging up, a nurse soundlessly came into the room to check on Amber, but evidently there’d been no change. A few moments later, she left after encouraging Sean and Tessa to hang in there: “Don’t worry. Everything’s going to be fine.” But she didn’t make eye contact with either of them, and the half smile she offered wasn’t very convincing.

  After they were alone with Amber again, Tessa and Sean sat quietly in the throbbing, ticking silence of the room. Between them, Amber breathed in the machine-fed oxygen.

  And did not wake up.

  She’ll be okay, Tessa told herself. She really will.

  Tessa hadn’t been paying much attention to Sean, but now realized his eyes were moist. She figured that if there were times when it was okay for a grown man to cry, this was one of them. But he probably doesn’t want a teenage girl watching him—

  “I’m so sorry,” he whispered to Amber. “I let you down.”

  After a short silence, Tessa said, “She loves you. She does. She felt really bad about everything.”

  He lowered his head into his hands, and ever so slightly his broad shoulders began to shake.

  Leave him with her. He needs to be alone.

  “Um, I’m gonna go grab us some Cokes.” It was pathetic, but it was all she could think of to say. “Or something. I’ll be back in a bit.”

  He nodded a quiet reply, and she eased out of the room.

  When they’d entered the hospital, Tessa had noticed some vending machines in the lobby. So now, she took the elevator down one level to the ground floor.

  It struck her that even though she’d helped Amber tonight, tried to do all she could, Amber still might not make it.

  A good deed doesn’t balance out a bad one. A kind act doesn’t make scars disappear. Everyone dies eventually. You can’t stop it, just forestall it.

  Not the right thoughts to be having.

  She left the elevator and was halfway to the lobby when she saw a sign to the hospital’s chapel. A narrow window on the door revealed that the chapel was really just a sliver of a room with subdued lighting, six folding chairs, some kneeling cushions, and a small, unvarnished wooden cross hanging up front.

  After a moment’s deliberation, Tessa slipped inside and, figuring it would be a little too weird kneeling on a cushion, took a seat on the closest chair.

  No one else was there, and the air was filled with a sterile hospitally smell but also something else, something fainter, some kind of gentle perfume, soft and floral and lingering from someone who must’ve only recently left the room.

  Words from Tessa’s mother came to her: “You need to learn to believe in grace as much as you do in pain, in forgiveness as much as you do in shame.”

  In other words, find a place where hope is real again!

  Hope. Real hope.

  “Please let Amber live.” Tessa said the words audibly to give them more weight, to help convince herself
that they were going to come true. “Give her another chance.”

  The cross at the front of the room was simple, wooden, and rough, and it made her think of the story she’d read, about the woman weeping at Jesus’s feet, the woman who knew she was a great sinner, who knew she had a ton of stuff she needed to be forgiven for.

  I want to believe, I do. Like that woman.

  Like Amber.

  Like Mom.

  Tessa’s conversations with her psychiatrist, with Patrick, with her stepaunt, about God and love and forgiveness all seemed to whirl around her: “I’m sinking into a place I can’t climb out of on my own,” she’d told her shrink . . . “When you ask someone to forgive you, you’re really asking the other person to sacrifice for the benefit of the relationship,” Amber had explained . . . “Denial isn’t the answer. Somehow forgiveness, or making amends, or some sort of penance, has to be,” Patrick had said.

  And Jesus had reassured that weeping, broken woman, “Your faith has saved you, go in peace.”

  Someone needs to sacrifice for someone else to be forgiven.

  At the house, Tessa had asked Amber which came first, love or forgiveness, but now it struck her that neither one does, that both love and forgiveness follow something else—

  “Your faith has saved you, go in peace.”

  Tessa felt a tear easing down her cheek.

  Denial is too cheap a cure.

  And so, she did not deny it. She did not deny anything. I’m sorry for the kind of person I can be, for the evil I’m capable of.

  And in the soft silence of the chapel, she heard a soul-whispered voice that seemed to somehow come from both inside her heart and also from someplace far beyond herself: “I know.”

  Will you forgive me? Please, I—

  “I already have.”

  The sailboat painting came to mind, the one that’d seemed so real to her, that had invited her to step from one eternity to another, to arrive at the other side of the canvas.

  And in that moment Tessa felt something pure wash over the part of her soul that had been dark and ruined for so long. Words came to her, just like they might’ve if she had her notebook in front of her, and the words were both a confession of her sins and an acceptance of blood-bought grace. Four simple lines: