The Diamond Dust on Dragonfly Wings: A Jeffry Claxton Mystery Novel

by Michael Yudov

  “I’m talking about the Colonel. She seems to be in rough shape. I don’t know what he gave her, but her blood pressure is way down, her body temperature has dropped one point five degrees, and I’m getting erratic response from her pupil dilation checks. She’s right out there in la-la land. The problem is that I don’t know if it will wear off, or if it was meant to… to… ah, terminate her. I need help, Jeffry.”

  “Help you shall have, Loretta.”

  I walked over to Therese and held out my hand. Without hesitation, she placed the Glock back in my hands, doing it just the way she had seen me do it, grip first.

  “Merci, mon chéri.”

  “Pas de problème.”

  I slipped it into my waist holster and turned to George, who was hovering close to me.

  “George, undo Casey, and grill him. Take him in the kitchen first. I want to know if he knows about all of this. If he knows, I want to know what he knows.”

  “Right. Consider it done.”

  I‘d given him something useful to do, and something he was good at as well. If Casey were in on this, George would find out. After all, he was a professional homicide cop. He knew a few tricks in the interrogation business.

  He went over to Casey, and grabbed him by the feet, dragging him off backwards into the kitchen. Rough and ready style. That usually impressed on your target that it wasn’t personal, just business. That was the scary part, when it changed to ‘business’.

  “Therese, go upstairs and get ready to go. We’re leaving very soon. Take Collette with you. When you’re ready come right down, don’t wait for instructions. Go.”

  “Oui, mon chéri.”

  Up she stood, the robe falling back into place, covering those lovely legs. Collette stood as well, not letting go of Therese’s hand. That was Okay for now. She was in a kind of shock, I was sure, and needed something to focus on. Therese had been handy, and that seemed to be fine with Collette. As long as she wasn’t hysterical, I was happy. They both padded away, headed for the stairs. I headed straight for Ronnie’s room.

  The pool of blood had spread out somewhat, and started to congeal. The cleanup would be messy, but it wasn’t going to be my team that did it. We were out of here as soon as Ronnie was brought around. If Ronnie could be brought around. That’s what I needed to know, and the only way to know was to find the drug Wilson had given her. Another question that rose unbidden to mind was why now? Why had he tipped his hand now, when he’d been so successful at deceiving us all along?

  Maybe Ronnie had that answer, but she wasn’t talking right now. If there was anything I could do about it, she would be, soon.

  I stepped as carefully over the blood as I could, but I still was leaving partial footprints edged in red everywhere I went. Maybe we would have to do some cleaning before we left. A quick search of the room turned up all sorts of interesting things, a few of which I would be happy to discuss with Ronnie, but first things first. There was an empty syringe on the bed, with the cap off the needle, lying next to the notebook PC.

  The PC was set up for a comms link that looked like it was still active. The pc-card modem was attached to a digital cellular phone lying next to the card slot. He had been on the Web, and looking to send an e-mail, outbound to the enemy no doubt. I quickly memorized the destination URL, or address, and shut down the link. Carry on. I needed the drug vial. There had to be one somewhere.

  The syringe was obviously the method of delivery for the drug, but the drug bottle wasn’t here. Maybe he had come across the hall from his room with the syringe already loaded. I picked it up carefully and recapped the needle, before slipping it into my shirt pocket and leaving the room.

  Across the hall, I tested the handle of Wilson’s room, and it was locked. Naturally. I lashed out in an explosion of fury with my right foot, and hit the door with my heel, centred right on the lock. My full weight was behind the kick and the door slammed open with a loud crash and bang, as it hit the wall inside.

  This room was downright utilitarian compared to the others. It was more like an army barracks room than anything else. Just the essentials, plus gear. There were bags of gear at the foot of the bed, on the chair next to the dresser, and below the windowsill.

  I attacked the search with a vengeance, and in a few minutes, I had turned up a drug vial. It had been carefully placed in a small sock drawer in the dresser.

  There was just the one vial, half empty. Nothing else. Except a cell phone the same brand and model as Ronnie’s. Maybe all of the team had phones just like Ronnie’s and I’d never noticed before. Maybe Wilson had been given this phone by Ronnie herself. Why keep it in your sock drawer, though? I picked it up. Dual NAMM’s and party line cell phones came to mind. I’d ask her, that’s all. When she came around. If she came around.

  The drug vial had held about ten good pain-killer level doses of morphine. It was almost half gone, so it was no wonder that Ronnie was ‘out of it’. He’d give her enough to stun a horse. This had to be from the medical kit, and if I could verify that it had been there, and full, at any recent time, then I’d be fairly satisfied that the problem was exactly that, and nothing more.

  No secret solutions here. To put Ronnie in the state she was in now would require only about two doses of the kind that you would normally administer for serious pain control. The good news was that she would be Okay. If the dose had been too high, she would have just turned blue and stopped functioning within five minutes of the injection. That wasn’t the case, so she was drugged alright, but not with a deadly dose of something exotic. Unless he had mixed it with something. In which case, we’d have to watch for her heart’s reaction. Most people can’t physically handle what a drug ‘combination’ overdose will do to your system. You can die easily when you start messing with combinations. Deadly ‘cocktails’ of contrarily acting narcotics and psycho-reactives. I would have to assess that in her the best I could.

  I was now in charge of the mission, because Ronnie wasn’t in any condition to be leading anything except a tour of cloud nine. As long as that’s all it was, some straight morphine, then we’d be Okay. I could even bring her out of it with a shot of adrenaline. A significant one. But I’d have to be sure that she wasn’t given a ‘cocktail’ first.

  Adrenaline, on top of a rogue agent’s unknown combination of incapacitants and/or so-called ‘truth serums’, for example, was begging for trouble. Heart failure for one, with a bitter aftertaste in the back of your throat that could last as long as the memory of a mistake, for another.

  In this case I had to decide if that was what was going down. I didn’t think so, and I would probably move ahead based on that judgement. She looked like she’d been hit with a double dose of plain old-fashioned ‘velvet hammer’, morphine, and I was buying it just like that.

  Yeah, I knew what that felt like, what that looked like. When our guys in the Service got to training, they really trained. You learned quickly that to survive, you had to be in control at all times, which meant that you had to win to live. That’s a motivator, let me tell you. And the stuff that happened when you lost control of the scenario, well, it wasn’t pretty, and it certainly wasn’t for the faint-of-heart.

  The rest of his room yielded nothing of importance, nothing that would tell us where he went ‘round the bend, or why. The most personal item in the room turned out to be his family photo. The wife and kids, standing in the garden of their home, maybe, on a lovely summer day. His wife was a nice-looking woman, and his two kids were about five or six years old. The little guys were wearing their baseball uniforms. T-Ball hard cases. They looked so normal it would have been hard to imagine them attached to Wilson, the ‘secret agent’.

  Everything else was either regulation, or absent. I took the vial of morphine and headed back to the living room. Ronnie was still lolling her head around, but now she was sort of coming in and out of focus. That was a good sign. I put the vial down next to the couch and laid out my thoughts on the subject to Loretta. She caught
on pretty quickly, and dropped into a pensive mode, re-reading the notes she’d been making since sitting down at Ronnie’s side. We checked the med-kit, which was next to the couch right now, but had been sitting in the kitchen cupboard until Littlefox had grabbed it. There was a vial of morphine in the kit, but right next to it was the holder for another one that wasn’t there.

  “Do you recall seeing two vials of morphine in here at any time recently, Loretta?”

  “Yes, in fact I’m the one tasked to keep the med-kit up to snuff. I checked it just yesterday and both vials were there.”

  “Thank you. Hmm.”

  I carefully compared the vials. They were both from the same manufacturer, and they both had the same lot number. Bless the F.D.A. boys. This was the vial from the kit, no question.

  In the past ten minutes her blood pressure had dropped a bit further, then stabilized at a low level, about 75/50 mm Hg. Her body temperature had revitalized itself, and more. Now she was running a low-grade, false fever.

  I took the mini-mag flash that Loretta had been using and crouched down to make a check on the only tell-tale sign that I felt I could count on under these circumstances. Pupil dilation.

  I turned on the flashlight and focused the beam tightly to a point. Using my hand as a shield to turn the light on and off, so to speak, I tried raising her eyelids and flashing the light right into her eyes. Both eyes were responding in the same manner right now, which was better. The dilation factor was low because she was ‘pinned’ in the vernacular of the junkie.

  Both of her pupils were shut down so tightly that the halogen beam from the mini-mag flash made hardly any impression at all. There was minimal contraction when the light was placed directly on her eyes, but there was some. That told me enough to try some of the adrenaline. If there had been a mixed reaction, or even a mild variation between eyes, or if her pupils had been fully dilated, then I would have known that he’d used a ‘cocktail’ of some sort, and then the decision would have been much more difficult, but none of those signs were present, and we had to do something. I had to do something.

  I reminded myself that this was now totally my mission. When Ronnie came out of this, and I figured she would shortly, there was going to be a change of ship’s captains, officially, and permanently. At least, until the end of the job.

  I wasn’t willing to die because of incompetence on the part of our fearless leader. Just the fact that she was fearless to start with told a lot about her naiveté. That had to stop, end of story.

  “Loretta, what’s her pulse rate right now?”

  “Fifty-six.”

  “What was it when you first checked it?”

  “Forty-nine.”

  “Has it been a slow steady rise?”

  “Yes.”

  “Fine. Give her an intravenous shot of adrenaline, double the full adult dose.”

  Loretta seemed rooted to the spot for a moment, then she turned to me with a questioning look in the eye.

  “Are you sure about this, Jeffry? What if it’s just what she doesn’t need? Then we’d be putting her at risk for nothing. Right now, she’s fairly stable. Much better than when we found her, and it’s only been fifteen minutes. In another hour, she could be able to talk.”

  I couldn’t believe my ears. There was no doubt in my mind that at any moment, some extremely serious bad guys were going to start popping out of the woodwork, and the team was almost completely vulnerable.

  Now, with this reaction from Littlefox, we were teetering on the edge of oblivion. She didn’t have clue one. I had to take a stand here.

  “Captain Westwood! Front & Centre!”

  Loretta actually flinched when I yelled. She looked confused, and I don’t believe that she knew what she had just done. These people were trained, and they were capable, but they had no experience at this ‘covert operations’ stuff at all.

  My voice carried well, as I was shouting almost hard enough to hurt myself. Fifteen seconds later, Evie was standing at attention right in front of me where I crouched next to Ronnie.

  “Present, sir!”

  “You are to witness this chastisement, Captain.”

  “Yes, sir!”

  I slowly got up out of the crouch, and stood hovering over Littlefox, who was still sitting on the couch, next to Ronnie. When I spoke this time, it was softly.

  “I think you had better stand to attention pretty damn quick, Lieutenant.”

  Littlefox looked from me to Evie and back again, confused as hell, it was obvious. Time to dispel the confusion.

  “I mean now!”

  The sound of my voice jarred even me, and the look on my face must have tipped the balance easily. Littlefox finally clicked on the fact that I was deadly serious. She jumped to her feet, nervous and still confused.

  “Evie…”

  I dropped back to a soft voice, which carries more impact as far as I’m concerned, and I cut her off. If she didn’t know when to stop talking now, she probably never would without some encouragement.

  “Lieutenant, close your mouth. We just switched to a full military operation. We are under deep cover, and we are in a dangerous situation. It is the same as being on the battlefield, under fire. Do you understand what I am saying to you?”

  “Weeell…”

  “Lieutenant, this is a yes or no question. Restrict your answer to a simple yes or no, please. I repeat, do you understand what I am saying to you?”

  “Uh… no, sir.”

  “Fine. That would explain your direct contradiction of a superior officer’s command during battle. Now I am going to make it easy for you to comprehend. Are you ready to listen?”

  She looked like she was about to comment, but then thought the better of it. The whole time, she kept looking to Evie for guidance, and what she found was a soldier at attention, waiting on her commanding officer’s next orders. Capitulation began.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Captain. Is this building now cleared of all enemy listening devices?”

  “Yes, sir!”

  “Thank you, Captain, well done.”

  “Now, Lieutenant. I will introduce myself anew, for your personal convenience and to the detriment of the team, for we are in dire need of the one asset we cannot store or accumulate—time.

  I am your Commanding Officer. Lieutenant-Colonel Claxton, Canadian Forces, Air Division, Special Operations Central Command, reporting directly to Brigadier-General Herscheiser, President of the National Security Council of Canada. Do you accept or reject my command?”

  “Sir, I don’t know what to…”

  “Listen up, Loretta. I just gave you the chance to get in line. Take it in the next thirty seconds or suffer the consequences.”

  I dropped the hard-ass bit for a moment. Easing up on the tone and attack of my voice.

  “Loretta, I’ve dealt… with people for far less than what you just tried to do. Under the appropriate circumstances, of course, but they got dealt with none the less. The first thing that happens is that they’re left behind, like yesterday’s news. Then dropped off at home base at the first opportunity.

  Because they were taken out of the mission plan. Due to their liability, they were immediately placed under close arrest, until home base was safely reachable for the team.

  This is like a war, do you understand? In times of war, you do not question–your–commander. That is me. Lieutenant-Colonel Claxton. Last chance, and I mean last.

  Now. Do you accept or reject my command?”

  Evie was still standing at attention, because I hadn’t ordered otherwise. Littlefox looked again to Evie for support. This was getting silly.

  “Captain, draw your sidearm.”

  Evie had a .45 in her hand before I could blink. She was good, she was definitely good. That was all that Loretta needed. When her most solid friend and supporter drew a weapon to coerce her against her own tendency to reject any other command than Ronnie’s, she finally saw the light.

  “Accept, sir! With ap
ologies for not understanding, sir!”

  “Will anything like this ever happen again, soldier?”

  “No, sir! Apologies, sir!”

  “Nothing will be filed on this incident, unless I see anything repeated. If that happens, you will be presented before the courts-martial, at the soonest opportunity. If it is required, you will be tried in the field, in which case I will be the judge as well as the jury and the prosecution. Do you understand?”

  “Yes, sir!”

  “Proceed. Once you’ve given her the injection, she’ll probably come out of it quickly. She’ll be sick, and most likely vomiting. She will have the biggest headache of her life, but she will be lucid. And ‘sick but lucid’ is better than ‘high but dead’, and I’m not talking about the shot of morphine Wilson gave her. Now get a move on.”

  “Yes, sir!”

  “Call me when she comes to. Dismissed.

  At ease, Captain. You’ll monitor The Colonel’s progress over the next ten minutes and then report to me.”

  I turned and left the room, with Evie standing guard over Ronnie while Loretta worked. That had been close. I figured there was going to be a time limit playing itself out while all of this was going down, and I was afraid that we were going to get caught short before we were ready.

  As I entered the kitchen, my eye was drawn to the details of the scene unfolding at the table along the wall.

  George was sitting with his back to Wilson, and facing Casey. He had arranged a seating that left Casey with an unobstructed view of Wilson. Knowing George, that would have been intentional. Casey seemed to be holding up well under the circumstances.

  I think that the conversation in the living room had reached the kitchen, at least partially, because as soon as I walked in, Casey straightened up in his chair, doing his best to come to attention even though he was still sitting down.

  My thoughts were confirmed when I stopped at the table, behind George. Casey piped up immediately.