Bad Intent

by Jordan Cole

  He saw Liz Farber’s face. Her eyes were closed, and she was in distress. Riley felt unease, then terror. He tried to look away, but he was noncorporeal. He had no body, no eyes to avert, no head to turn. The image faded and the darkness swallowed him again.

  Some of the faces he didn’t recognize. Strange men, leering down at him. Bystanders in the distance, bobbing and swaying. Riley figured he was dead. Maybe on the next plane, beings had faces and nothing else. As likely as anything, he supposed.

  Don’t be stupid, he thought. You’re thinking something, so you can’t be dead.

  He wasn’t sure where this authoritative voice had come from, or if he agreed with it. But it sounded confident, so he lent it some credence.

  Gradually, other forms began to appear. A white flat space above him. A glassy square on the periphery of his vision that might have been a window. And then voices, male and female, starting and stopping with no real certain frequency. Sometimes the forms slipped away into other visions. A convoy in a sweltering desert. A long car ride to nowhere. A sergeant barking orders, men standing at attention.

  Riley tried to cry out, but couldn’t.

  The next thing he knew, he was back on Earth. Lying on something soft. Tubes down his throat, an IV in his arm. He gasped and shook and writhed. Things went black. When he woke again, the tubes in his throat were gone. He was surrounded by a warm fuzzy feeling, like he was floating on top of a cloud. Agatha was there, sitting beside him, leaning over with a warm smile. Her red roots showing even more now. She held his hand. He was glad to see her.

  “I’m in the hospital?” he asked. His throat hurt, and the words came out softly, but it was speech, enunciated clearly.

  “Yup,” Agatha said. Gestured around her. He saw it all now; the monitors and IV stand to his left, the reclining bed, his chart on the wall. “UVA hospital. You’re doing well. Made it through a couple of surgeries okay.”

  “What about Throop? And Hennessey?”

  “They’re both fine. They’ve been in and out, checking on you.”

  Riley strained. He saw Whitehall’s eyes, filling with blood. Then a wide expanse of emptiness. Agatha saw him trying to remember.

  “Relax,” she said. “It’s only been a couple of days. You didn’t just wake up from a 20-year coma.”

  “That’s a relief.” He felt energized, upon seeing Agatha. Like he was ready to jump out of bed and celebrate, if only his body would cooperate. She must have sensed this too, because she squeezed his hand in a calming way.

  “Relax,” she said again. “You’ve still got some healing to do. I’m going to get the doctor. I’m sure she wants to talk to you.”

  Agatha left the room, and Riley felt an inexplicable, sickening fear that she would never return. But she did, a few minutes later, along with a tall blond woman wearing a white coat. She stared down at Riley, looking pleased.

  “Mr. Riley,” she said. “I’m Rebecca Stanton. I oversaw your surgery after you were brought into the ER. You’ve made remarkable improvement. You were in pretty bad shape when they brought you in. Your heart stopped a number of times on the operating table.”

  Riley made a sound somewhere between an impressed huh and an irritated grunt. Not sure how to respond to the fact that he’d been brought back from the dead.

  “Any permanent damage?” It was all he could think to say.

  “Obviously nothing is for certain, but your cognitive ability seems to be normal. You had quite the checklist of injuries. Eight stab wounds, a ruptured spleen, a perforated kidney, a ruptured testicle, concussion, missing teeth. Extreme blood loss. You are tough. Most people who lose that amount of blood do not survive.”

  Riley shot a sideways glance at Agatha.

  “What’s that about a testicle rupture?”

  “Your testicle will be fine, Mr. Riley. But the spleen had to go. The kidney should make it. With luck you’ll have no real lasting effects. A lot of scarring, some tendon damage maybe. Considering the extent of your injuries, fairly remarkable, I’d say.”

  Dr. Stanton stood over him, checking his IV, resting a hand casually against her chin. Regarding him clinically. He felt a giddy updraft of happiness.

  “Is that morphine I’m experiencing?” he asked, a smile creeping across his face. Dr. Stanton raised her eyebrows.

  “You’re on a drip, yes. We’ll be easing down the dosage. Your pain should be subsiding in the coming days.”

  “I don’t feel any pain.”

  “That’s good.”

  “Thank you, doctor.”

  “You’re very welcome,” she said. “I’ll be in to look at you tomorrow. Very nice to see you awake and cognizant.”

  She gave him a curt nod and left. Other things to do, other patients to attend to. Agatha turned back to him, smiling wryly.

  “She’s one of the best,” Agatha said. “Bedside manner notwithstanding.”

  “What about the police?” Riley asked. “I mean...have the Feds been in? Did anyone talk to you?”

  Agatha turned her gaze away.

  “They talked to us,” she said. “They’ll come talk to you, soon. They were waiting for you to wake up.”

  “Who’s they?”

  She shook her head.

  “I’m not sure. Seems like they’re trying to disavow all knowledge. But we’re in the clear. They’re not going to haul you away. I can promise you that.”

  She seemed confident about it, at least. No wavering on her face. She also looked tired. Like she’d been awake for some time. And here he was, sleeping through it all, while everyone else worried about him. He felt strangely guilty.

  “What happened?” he asked. “After I was out of the picture. How’d you get me to the hospital?”

  “Throop commandeered one of the Jeeps. Drove to the hospital at about a hundred miles an hour while Hennessey and I tried to keep you together. Barely managed to find our way. But I wasn’t about to let you die. Not after everything that happened.”

  “You’re all right,” Riley said, and then the morphine kicked in again and his vision swam and Agatha sank away from him.

  ***

  It was the next day. Or maybe the day after. Agatha was gone. She said she’d be back. That she had some things to attend to. Legal and business obligations to work out. Riley understood. She wasn’t his wife. Or his mother. Couldn’t be at his bedside at all hours. He was an adult, after all. He could take care of himself.

  In her place was a man in a suit. Riley didn’t recognize him. Average height, white, with dark brown hair. Maybe fifty years old. The way he closed the door indicated he wasn’t just a well-wisher passing by. Riley had reclined his bed into a loose-L shape and sat with his back against a wall of pillows. The TV above playing a daytime game show. The man reached up and switched it off. Looked down at Riley with a neutral expression on his face.

  “Clay Riley the third,” he said. Like he had seen the name recently and often in a litany of official reports and documents. Like he was matching the man in the hospital bed to the mental image he had in his head. “My name is Richard LeMarche.”

  “What do you want?” Riley asked.

  “Well first off, on behalf of the United States government, we’d like to thank you for your efforts. Unofficially.”

  Riley snorted.

  “Is that right? What are you, State Department? Bureau? Homeland Security?”

  The man named LeMarche gave a soft shrug.

  “To be honest, it’s irrelevant. I’m high enough that I could claim to be from any one of them, and it wouldn’t make much difference to you.”

  “You got an ID?”

  “Do we really need to do that song and dance?”

  Riley considered. His morphine drip had been lowered significantly and he wasn’t in the most jovial of moods.

  “Whatever,” he said. “Just give me your spiel and let’s get this over with.”

  “Good,” LeMarche said. Still hovering over Riley’s bedside like a surveillance dron
e. “As you know, terrorism is very much back in vogue here in the states. Hot button issue. If it got out that a one-star general and his special ops cronies were working with jihadis on American soil, it wouldn’t exactly go over well, to say the least.”

  Riley didn’t respond.

  “The powers that be knew about Frazier’s money problems for a long time,” LeMarche continued, unabated by Riley’s silence. “One reason he was mustered out. But we got complacent. Figured that once he was out of the service, he was no longer a problem. We were unaware he’d hooked up with Jody Whitehall, an ex-major who spoke fluent Arabic and made his bones doing assassinations along the Syrian/Turkish border for a few years. Establishing trust with his Middle Eastern employers.”

  “Jody,” Riley said softly. Not sure whether to laugh or cry.

  “Mm hmm. We also found mid-six figures in an off-shore account belonging to one Special Agent Ralph Metzer. Our guess is Frazier and Whitehall needed him to run interference once Andrew Fletcher got scooped up by the Feds. Someone on the inside to torpedo the case so he wouldn’t talk. The rest of them special forces discharges and washouts. No one who’ll be missed.”

  “Let’s get on with it,” Riley said. “The whole right side of my body feels like it’s on fire.”

  “Uh huh,” LeMarche said, dismissively. “The problem is, we’ve still got a dead detective. And two missing reporters, and your contractor buddy Henderson, my condolences by the way. And you’ve been all over the news as the main suspect. So we can’t just sweep it all under the rug entirely.”

  “What a shame.”

  “Right? We eventually decided Frazier is too high up to be involved. We’ve had to remove him from the narrative completely. He died in a car crash, nasty wreck. Disfiguring injuries. His body’s already been cremated. And as it turns out, Whitehall and the others were running a gun smuggling ring from their compound. It’ll all be razed to the ground shortly. The details don’t really matter. What matters is you’re in the clear, and there’s no mention of terrorists or training camps or any of that nonsense. Never happened.”

  Riley closed his eyes for a long moment. His head heavy against the pillow.

  “What about Ramirez? And Dallas?”

  “Got too close to the smuggling ring and paid for it. You got caught in the frame up. Mr. Henderson is going to be buried with full honors by the MPD. Pete Saccarelli and Elizabeth Farber are still missing, officially. Main suspect is one Scott Amundsen, temp worker with a violent past and a history of making threats. I’m sure they’ll find him sooner or later.”

  “You guys have got this all figured out,” Riley said. “Easy to pick up the pieces when it’s over. But none of you were worth a shit while it was going on. You sat on your asses, while a lot of people died.”

  If LeMarche felt any guilt, it didn’t register on his face. Instead, he chuckled.

  “My job is picking up the pieces, Riley. You’re lucky it’s shaking out this way. Easiest thing would have been to blame everything on you. I certainly wouldn’t have minded. But the women were adamant about your innocence. As well as Sheriff Hennessey. Compromises needed to be made, to keep them quiet.”

  “What about Fletcher? He’s still out there?”

  “We’re not worried about Fletcher,” LeMarche said. “He’s unlikely to be taken seriously. But we’ve got eyes on him. As long as he never goes within 100 feet of a mosque again, he’s free to live out his life, walking barefoot through the forest and playing in drum circles.”

  “Where does that leave me?”

  “In much the same boat.” LeMarche straightened. “You should probably end your association with Agatha Dumont, Renee Throop, and Dan Hennessey for a while. Say your goodbyes, and that’s that. You should probably also not talk about what really happened out there in the radio quiet zone. Not now, not ever. Not if you want to remain a free man.”

  “Anything else?” Riley asked, in a tone that suggested he was ready to end the conversation.

  “Not at all,” LeMarche said. “Have a speedy recovery and good day.”

  Then he left the room. Riley was not sad to see him go.

  ***

  The time had come for Riley to be discharged.

  He felt a strange melancholy, even though he was eager to leave the hospital. But it had been his home for the past three weeks. The same feelings he had when he left the service. Mixed emotions.

  Before he was to leave, he dressed himself in his room. Staring down at the tangle of scar tissue on his chest, the reddened stitch marks that now crisscrossed his body. He felt proud of them, in a way. Like he had earned every one, through trial by fire.

  Throop, Hennessey and Agatha met him in the hospital lobby. Regulations insisted he use a wheelchair for the final furlong, but he wasn’t going to do that. He walked out the doors, to the dismay of the nurses and doctors who advised him otherwise. The weather outside gray and overcast, but nonetheless beautiful. The pain in his side reduced to background noise, a low hum that he put mostly out of mind. Maybe it would always be with him. Maybe not. Not a whole lot he could do about it, either way.

  Agatha carried his extra clothes in a bag. All he had. She had also arranged to drive him home, which he appreciated. Hennessey met them with his wide country smile and gave him a great bear hug. Throop with a more reserved gesture, a friendly arm draped around his shoulder.

  “You should have seen it,” Hennessey said, boisterously. “I was blind firing like my life depended on it. Sticking my rifle out the window. And he was shooting back just inches over my head. If I’d been up there a little bit higher, I’d have been mincemeat.”

  Throop put a finger over her lips.

  “We’re not supposed to talk about that,” she said, with a hint of a smile.

  “I don’t give a good goddamn what those government spooks say. I was there, and I saw it all. I’ll give things a year or two to cool down and then I’m writing a book. You guys will all get free copies.”

  Throop turned to him.

  “You feel all right?”

  “Never better,” Riley said. “Ready for the next leg.”

  “We’ll meet up again,” Throop said. “Later. When it all blows over.”

  “We have to,” Agatha said. “We’ve been through too much.”

  “Got a surprise for you,” Hennessey said. “Waiting back at your cabin.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  “That’s right. You’ll have to see it to believe it.”

  And then it was time. They said their goodbyes, and then that was that. Hennessey and Throop stood waving in the parking lot as Riley climbed into the passenger’s seat of Agatha’s new rental car, this time, a dark Mercedes. She pulled out into the mist and the fog and then they were on the road.

  “Gloomy day,” she said. Driving cautiously over the slick streets. Balding trees on each side of them, preparing for autumn.

  “Looks good to me,” Riley said.

  The trip was punctuated by long moments of silence. Much like the first trip between them. And just like then, Riley didn’t mind. He was happy to be going somewhere, with someone he cared about, even if they didn’t have much time left together.

  “I don’t know if they told you,” she said, once they had reached the mountains where Riley’s cabin sat elevated, and started driving up the incline. “You were right about the failsafe. Only it wasn’t me.”

  Riley looked at her, puzzled.

  “No?”

  “Not exactly. It was my blog. People at Work. Pete’s other failsafes well...they failed. Frazier’s men got him before he could secure it completely. But Pete had Fletcher code one final trap. Into the data of my blog. All his research was set to go live automatically at the end of the month, regardless of whether Pete or I was alive. I guess he was just about to tell me about it when he was killed. Taped conversations, layouts of the compound, the pathways of the money. A link sent to every major newspaper and blog in the country. Everything was all there. The only wa
y to stop it would have been to delete the blog entirely. And Frazier couldn’t do it without me. That’s why they needed me.”

  Riley whistled.

  “What now? Is the blog still live?”

  She shook her head.

  “The government deleted it. All that effort, for nothing.”

  Riley turned to her.

  “Fletcher’s still out there. He knows his computers. Maybe he’s got a backup somewhere, ready to be released on a slow news day.”

  “If the Feds haven’t tracked him down, too.”

  “He’s crafty. Maybe we’ll hear from him again.”

  She smiled.

  “Maybe.”

  The last stretch of road leading to the cabin. Riley had traversed it many times in the past, but never with this feeling of loneliness. The motion detectors and video feeds and safe rooms seemed useless to him now.

  “What are you going to do next?” he asked.

  “I don’t know. I think I’m through with fact-checking. Maybe I’ll find another newspaper, go for reporting, the real thing. Or maybe I’ll focus on my blog full time. Get the word out there. What about you?”

  “No idea,” he said, honestly. “Your guess is as good as mine.”

  Then, in no time at all, they were there. Agatha pulled to a stop outside the cabin and they looked at each other. She had a look on her face, a wavering, like she was about to cry. But she didn’t. She put her arms around him and kissed him softly on the mouth.

  “Thank you,” she said. “For everything.”

  “I’ll miss you,” Riley said.

  “Me too.”

  “We’ll talk again, right?”

  She nodded.

  “Sure. But later.”

  “Yeah. Later.”

  He took his bag of clothes and got out of the car. Gave one final wave, and Agatha turned the car around on the driveway and she was gone.

  Riley turned to the cabin. Brown, to match the colors of the swaying trees around it. The sky above like one big storm cloud. He saw something red, off to the side of the cabin, partially hidden from view. He walked over, and found his Toyota waiting for him. New license plates affixed to the front and the rear, the bullet holes patched over, like they had never even been there. He smiled. Found the door unlocked and the keys in the glove compartment. Hennessey, coming through after all.