by Jude Hardin
“Later, gator.”
“Bye.”
I hung up. A couple of minutes later, nurse Kim walked in with a cup of coffee.
“Cream and sugar?” she said.
“Black’s fine. Thanks.”
“I’d like to go over those questions with you now, if that’s all right.”
“You’re the boss,” I said.
There was a padded wooden chair by the window. Kim pulled it over to the bed and sat down facing me. She had a clipboard in one hand and a pen in the other.
“Have you ever had any surgeries?” she said.
“My wife didn’t tell you about that?”
“She said you’d had some on your left hand, but she couldn’t remember how many.”
“Six. And I had abdominal surgery when I was twelve.”
“What kind of abdominal surgery?”
“It was a repair job. My stepfather stabbed me with a steak knife. They went ahead and took my appendix out while they were at it.”
“That’s horrible,” Kim said.
“Yeah. It was kind of rough.”
“Do you think that has anything to do with your recent psychiatric problems?”
“Maybe,” I said. “What do you think?”
“I think it’s certainly possible. I’ll make sure the doctor knows about it.”
“Great.”
“OK, just a couple more things. Do you use any recreational drugs?”
“Not anymore,” I said.
“Smoke cigarettes?”
“Not anymore.”
“Do you drink alcohol?”
“Yes.”
“What type?”
“Beer. Bourbon sometimes.” Wine, tequila, vodka, scotch, rum…
“How often do you drink?” she said.
I was going to say occasionally or just socially or some other boldface lie, but before I had a chance someone knocked on the door.
“Come in,” Kim said.
A woman wearing a black pants suit and a long white lab coat walked into the room. She had a backpack on one shoulder, and a stethoscope draped around her neck. She introduced herself as Dr. Lucy Bellwinger, from the Mental Health Resource Center in Jacksonville.
But that wasn’t her real name.
I recognized her right away. It was Diana Dawkins.
We can finish this in a little while,” Kim said. “I’ll let you talk to the doctor right now.”
“All right.”
Kim got up and left the room. She took the clipboard with her.
Diana sat in the chair. “Hello, Nicholas. How are you?”
“Bellwinger?” I said. “Is that the best you could come up with?”
“I’m afraid I don’t understand.”
She sat there with her legs crossed and her hands in her lap, trying to stay in character. Having a little fun with me. Messing with my head. But I knew better. I knew it was her, and I knew she was real. It raised my level of optimism a notch. At least I wasn’t totally unzipped.
“Knock it off, Di. Boy, they really had me going for a while. I thought you were a hallucination. I guess Terry Vine was, but not you. You’re about as real as they come.”
“How do you know?” she said. “How do you know you’re not hallucinating right now?”
“The nurse saw you. She left the room when you came in.”
“How do you know you didn’t imagine that as well?”
“Fuck you,” I said. “What do you want from me?”
“We have to get you out of here. Today’s the day. We have a lot of work to do.”
“OK, so get me out of here. Your ID badge there says you’re a doctor, so just discharge me. Call Kim in here to get this IV out of my arm, and I’ll put my clothes on and be on my way.”
“I’m afraid it’s not that easy.”
“Why not?”
“Your attending physician would have to be the one to discharge you. Not a consult from MHRC. We’re going to have to sneak you out of here.”
“Why can’t I just walk out against medical advice or whatever? I’m not a prisoner, am I?”
“Actually, you are. They Baker-Acted you, which means they can hold you up to seventy-two hours for psychiatric evaluation. Didn’t your nurse explain that to you?”
“No.”
Di got up and lifted the hinged plastic cover on the foot of the bed and pressed a button. There was a small electronic beep.
“Your bed alarm was on,” she said. “I turned it off.”
She started lowering the side rails.
“Will my nurse get in trouble if I escape?”
“Yes. They’re supposed to have someone in the room with you at all times.”
“So why don’t they?”
“They were probably short on staff, so they cheated and turned your alarm on instead. It happens. It’s not supposed to, but it does. Not our problem.”
Diana walked around to the left side of the bed and switched off the IV pump. She raised the bed and started working on getting the needle out of my arm.
“Are you sure you know what you’re doing?” I said.
“It’s not rocket science, Nicholas.”
“Last time I ripped an IV out, it bled all over the place.”
“Don’t worry.”
She started picking at the edge of the surgical tape.
“Ouch!” I said. “Don’t I get a bullet to bite on or something?”
“Stop being such a baby.”
She peeled off the tape and the transparent dressing, along with half the hair on my arm. She gently dislodged the intravenous catheter, wiped the area with an alcohol swab, and then applied a Band-Aid at the insertion site.
“What if I really do have an infection,” I said. “Maybe I need that medicine.”
“I’m afraid that’s a chance we’ll have to take.”
She opened her backpack and handed me a set of green surgical scrubs and a pair of Crocs and a picture ID badge that said Ray Lipton, MD, General Surgery. I sat up and started getting dressed.
“I’ve always wanted to be a surgeon,” I said. “In fact, I’ve been thinking about taking it up as a hobby. So how do we get by the nurse’s station without anyone seeing us? They’ll recognize my face.”
She looked at her watch. “Any minute now—”
Before she finished her thought, a female voice calmly announced that there was a code blue on the orthopedics unit on the fourth floor. She repeated it three times. Code blue, four south orthopedics, initiate rapid response team…
“That means someone’s dead or dying, right?” I said.
“That’s what it means. Come on, let’s go.”
We took a left out of the doorway and headed toward the elevator bank. I looked back and saw some staff members dragging a cart loaded with resuscitation equipment down the hall and into the last room on the left.
Max Marlin’s room.
We stood there and waited for an elevator. One finally opened, and a couple of doctors stepped out and gave us hard stares before trotting toward the commotion at the end of the hall. I held the door while Diana boarded, and then I followed her in. She pushed the button for the first floor.
“Perfect timing for a code blue,” I said. “Almost as if it was orchestrated.”
“It was.”
“You killed Max Marlin?”
“I had to. He’d seen the Perry Wendell Davis credentials in the briefcase.”
“You have the briefcase?” I said.
“I took it out of your Jimmy last night.”
“My Jimmy was locked.”
I realized how irrelevant that was as soon as the words left my mouth. Diana just shook her head and grinned.
“Don’t worry,” she said. “I didn’t load your gun with blanks or anything this time.”
“How did you know Max saw what was in the briefcase?”
“His fingerprints were all over everything. The bonehead didn’t even think to use gloves. He had to undergo a criminal
background check to get his PI license, so it was easy to trace the prints.”
“So how did you do it? How did you kill him?”
“I’ll tell you later if you’re really interested. It wasn’t hard.”
The doors parted and we got out on the first floor. We walked down a couple of long hallways, made a turn to the left and a turn to the right and exited into the parking garage. We took the stairs to the second level, and I followed Diana to her car. She was driving a black Lincoln Navigator. We climbed inside and she started the engine.
“Who else saw those things in the briefcase?” she said.
“Nobody. The case was in Max’s car when he wrecked it. I went to the auto repair place and got it out of the trunk. Nobody else saw it.”
“Did Max tell your wife about it?”
“No.”
“Are you sure?”
“I’m sure.”
“Maybe he told her and she just didn’t say anything to you about it.”
“I don’t think so. I think he wrecked the car before he ever talked to her about it.”
I’d stressed the importance to Juliet of never mentioning the contents of that case, or any of the other things I’d spilled the beans about. I only hoped she took me seriously, especially now that she thought I was loony tunes. If it ever got out that Max had told her about Perry Wendell Davis, or that I had told her about the Circle, Diana would probably execute us both.
“Where are we going?” I said.
“To the safe house. I have some things I need to go over with you.”
It was almost two in the morning by the time we made it to that squalid little concrete bungalow in the middle of nowhere. Di parked the Navigator and we got out and walked inside. She switched some lights on and started a pot of coffee.
“Got anything stronger around here?” I said.
“Like what?”
“Like whiskey.”
“I need you to have a clear head, Nicholas. We have an extremely long day ahead of us.”
“Believe me, my head will be clearer if I have a drink or two.”
“What are you, a damn alcoholic or something?”
“I’m not a damn alcoholic. I just need something to steady my nerves right now.”
“There’s beer in the fridge,” she said. “That’s all I have.”
I opened the refrigerator door. There were three bottles of Anheuser-Busch Natural Light. It wasn’t going to be nearly enough, but it was better than nothing. I grabbed one and screwed the top off and chugged the entire thing. I grabbed another one and screwed the top off and sat at the table beside Di. She plugged in her laptop and got it going, and then she opened a large manila envelope and pulled out some papers.
“They found the bug you planted,” she said. “Fortunately, I got some good information before they did, and we’ve gotten some intelligence from other sources as well. The project manager, a man named Abe Swanson, and one of the engineers, a man named Gary Kramer, are the ones plotting to kill the president and frame me for the crime. I only overheard one brief conversation there at Aero-Fleck, but it was enough to get the ball rolling.”
“Did you record the conversation?”
“Of course.”
“Can I hear it?” I said.
“It’s nothing you would understand. They were speaking in Farsi.”
“Farsi. They’re Iranian?”
“No, but they have ties to a terrorist group from that region, a group called the Meyeleyon Koh. Loosely translated, it means a million mountains. That’s how many they’re willing to climb to see the downfall of the United States. In addition to the assassination, they’re planning a series of cyber attacks over the next several weeks that will completely cripple our infrastructure. There will be power outages, and municipal water supplies will run dry. No refrigeration, no fuel pumps, no working toilets. It’ll be like Hurricane Katrina, only it won’t be isolated to a single geographic area. It’ll be coast-to-coast. There will be looting and shooting and mass hysteria. It’ll be like nothing the world has ever seen before. In the months that follow, they plan to stage an actual coup on Washington. When all is said and done, there won’t be a United States of America anymore. We’ll be under the rule of an authoritarian regime.”
“Why are they doing all this?” I said. “What’s the motivation?”
“Hatred. That’s it. They hate our way of life. They hate our president, and they hate us.”
“I understand that about the terrorist group. What was their name again?
“Meyeleyon Koh.”
“Yeah. But what about Swanson and Kramer? What’s their motivation?”
“Ah. Money, of course. Through treason, they have become very wealthy men. They don’t give a rat’s ass about what happens to our country. They have residences abroad, and they’ll be able to fly out of here before the shit hits the fan. At least that’s what they think. Actually, the Circle is taking care of them as we speak.”
I had a pretty good idea of what taking care of them meant.
“I’m still not clear on why the terrorists want to frame you for the assassination,” I said.
“The assassination is mostly a diversion. Think about it. The first presidential assassination since JFK, and the accused is a DOD employee. That’s why they placed the coded schematics in the classified documents safe at Aero-Fleck, by the way, to use as evidence against me after the assassination. Of course they had no idea that a regular old DOD inspector like me would actually be able to read the code. That’s just what they wanted the authorities to think. Anyway, the trial, my trial, will be the focus of worldwide media attention for months. While everyone’s paying attention to that, the Meyeleyon Koh will be quietly hacking away at the computers controlling our power grids. By the time we figure out what’s going on, it will be too late. That’s what the Meyeleyon Koh are counting on, and that’s one of the reasons it’s critical to stop them in their tracks. Without the diversion, they won’t be nearly as likely to succeed with their other pursuits.”
“So how are we going to stop all this from happening?” I said.
“We’re not. Not alone. As soon as I knew it was Swanson and Kramer setting all this up—and not someone from my own organization—I was able to enlist some help. I have an entire group of operatives, experts in computer security, working to thwart the cyber attack. But I’m still going to need your help to stop the assassination.”
“Why me?” I said. “It seems like the Circle’s full-time operatives would be the ones to handle such a crucial mission.”
“Don’t sell yourself short, Nicholas. You were chosen as a recruit for the Circle because of your keen insights as a detective and your dogged determination and loyalty. Those traits are hard to come by. I have an important assignment for you, but it’s nothing you can’t handle. In fact, you probably won’t have to do much of anything. We have everything covered except for one very, very unlikely motorcade route. That’s what I’m going to show you now.”
“I know I mentioned this before, but given the gravity of the situation it seems like the best course of action for the president would be to stay home. Or maybe even go to his secret bunker and ride it out from there.”
“That would be one way to approach the problem,” Diana said. “But it would be the wrong way. We can’t let the president know about any of this. If he knows, his advisors will know. Eventually, the FBI and the CIA and the Secret Service and Homeland Security will know, along with all the president’s cabinet members. Once the word gets around the campfire, there will be a leak to the media. There always is. If there’s a leak to the media, everyone in the country will know how close we came to total collapse. They’ll know what a fine thread we’re all truly dangling by on a daily basis. They’ll see how relatively simple it is to bring the entire country to its knees, and they’ll lose any faith they may have once had in our government. Just the realization of what could have happened will cause mass panic, and the terrorists will have
won indirectly. Do you remember how fearful everyone was after nine-eleven? It’ll be like that, only multiplied exponentially. So no, the president can’t just stay home.”
She thumbed through the papers and pulled out a map of north Florida. Three routes from Gainesville to Jacksonville were highlighted, one in yellow, one in green, and one in red.
“So you don’t know which route the president will be taking?” I said.
“No. The director of the Secret Service will make the decision sometime this morning, and then relay that information to the four supervisors covering the presidential detail. So, only five people on the planet will know the route ahead of time.”
“They won’t tell the president?”
“No. The president and the regular Secret Service agents won’t know until a few minutes before the motorcade leaves the University of Florida campus. There’s no way for us to obtain the information in time, so we’ll have to cover all the routes. You’ll be monitoring the one highlighted in green. Of the three routes highlighted, it’s the least likely to be taken. So, with a little luck, you won’t have to do anything.”
“How does the Meyeleyon Koh know which route they’ll be taking?” I said.
“We suspect they have a man inside, one of the Secret Service supervisors. It’s the only way they could know, unless the director himself is a traitor. I doubt that, but it’s possible. We’ll be putting the screws to everyone involved once this is over, but right now our primary objective is to take out the Meyeleyon Koh before they take out the president.”
“OK. So what do you want me to do?”
“This is where you’re going to earn that big paycheck,” she said. “Go ahead and get your last beer out of the refrigerator and have a seat. This is going to take a while.”
Diana spent the next four hours outlining, in excruciating detail, my part of the operation. By the time she finished, the sun had come up and the beer was long gone and we were on our third pot of coffee.
I was exhausted.
“Let’s go over the basics one more time,” she said.
“I need to sleep. At least an hour. My brain is fried.”
“One more time, and then I’ll let you take a nap.”
