by D S Kane
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 depends 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 44
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, she 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.
He smiled at her. “How are you today?”
She spoke through the wiring in her mouth, not moving her jaw. “Okay, I guess. Still obsessing about what almost happened to you and Ann. Still looking for a way out.” She knew Lee could see the obvious look of desperation on her face. She faced away and wiped her tears on the sleeve of her robe. “Maybe it would be better if I left you and Ann. I have a feeling that we’re still in danger. If I left it would be safer for you both”
Lee’s face showed his shock. “No. That isn’t a solution to anything. I’d rather die with you than live without you. Besides, we’re totally broke now. The Wailea hotel charged us everything you had left in your bank account. We had to pay to keep the Yakuza from coming after us. So, you don’t have the funds to hide away alone.”
She frowned. He’d rejected their best option. “Let’s take Swiftshadow from Washington to somewhere less corrosive. Or maybe I should just sell it to Avram. We need to leave. You know what they say: in Washington, if you want a friend, you better buy a dog.”
Lee thought about it. “But where will we go?”
Cassie pondered this. She was tiring fast now. “Let me think about it. You also.”
But Lee wasn’t finished. “After I take Ann to school, I’ll come back and drive you to the hospital. I want to be there. Look, I know how confused you are right now. It will be a while before any of this makes real sense to us. Maybe we should move away, but we can talk about it later. I think we have to do the best we can together.”
He gently reached for her and touched the bottom of her chin. And he didn’t wait for her to reply. He took her hand. “You and Ann and me; we’re a family now. We need to recognize that, at least. And you and I love each other. More than that, I know we’re in love with each other.”
Her eyes grew wide, and then narrowed to slits. What was this all about?
Lee didn’t let her have the luxury of her suspicions. He fell to his knees. She watched him produce a small black felt box from his pocket. He opened it, exposing a small silver ring with the world’s tiniest diamond at its top. “Cassandra Sashakovich, I’m hopelessly in love with you. Please be my bride. Marry me. Please.”
Her eyes popped wide open as she watched him, shocked by the obvious. She tried to speak but her lips wouldn’t move.
* * *
Lee waited patiently, knowing her so well that he could distinguish exactly what she was thinking, her entire process of contemplation. He knew that in her heart, the only private place where deliberation had no currency, she was joyous with his proposal. He waited patiently to hear and counter all the objections that her ordered sense of logic would certainly now give voice.
* * *
She moistened her lips, preparing to speak. There were so many things she wanted to say. Her thoughts and feelings were as strong as an approaching storm driven by heavy winds. Seconds passed and she looked at Lee, at the ring. A voice inside her told her not to try and sort all of it out before she answered him.
Time to feel? Time to think?
Time to choose.
Appendix A – Glossary
AFI. Intelligence branch of the Israeli Air Force
aleph. Lead kidon, the assassin leading an execution mission for the Mossad
Aman. Intelligence branch of the IDF (Israeli Military Intelligence).
asset. A civilian in a foreign country who claims to have valuable contacts or information useful to a case officer. The primary objective of most case officers is to develop in-country assets.
ayin. Tracker (surveillance) for the Moss
ad.
backstopping. Fake identification papers.
bat leveyha. Female agent for the Mossad.
better world, send to a. Euphemism for murdering an enemy agent.
blind dating. Meeting place chosen by an agent to meet his or her handler
bodel. Courier for the Mossad
BP. Israeli paramilitary Border Patrol
Bug-Lok. Also called DeathByte, the device is a nanobug that can be ingested or injected into a subject. Bug-Lok was developed by the Ness Ziona in Herzliyya on contract with Gilbert Greenfield’s intelligence service. When ingested or injected, the nanobug then finds its way to the medulla oblongata of the subject and attaches itself to the neural bundles that carry visual and auditory signals into the subject’s brain. The nanobug transmits these signals to the nearest local area network and from there onto the handler who gathers video and audio of the subject’s activities in addition to the subject’s GPS location. Bug-Lok can be fitted with a tiny concentrated ricin dose to kill the subject, activated by a remote when the handler no longer needs the subject.
burn notice. A termination notice for an official operative or an NOC; the burned spy has his or her bank accounts confiscated and identity documents redacted, and, in extreme cases, is subject to a terminate-on-sight order.
C-6. A more powerful and concentrated form of the C-4 explosive.
Chinese Secret Intelligence Services (CSIS). Chinese version of the FBI.
CHIPS. The Clearinghouse Interface Processing System, used by money-center banks to settle all outstanding transactions between them at the end of their day.
Collections Department. Intelligence Department abroad
cutout. An intermediary, usually an innocent person, either a volunteer or paid by a covert operative to deliver or retrieve something valuable such as a message or a gadget, from a covert operative or an asset.
DARPA. Defense Department’s agency for advanced research projects, charged with development of weapons systems.
