by Shawn Jones
As they went into the trailer that was serving as a command center, Cort cut to the question he had. “Ben, you don’t call me for this stuff. I don’t get involved until someone else decides what we’re gonna do about it. Why am I here?”
Ben had been dreading this part. He pulled a bottle of Grey Goose vodka from his bag and filled two plastic cups with it. Handing one to Addison, Natsumo downed his own. He waited a moment and then he started. “Cort, one of the terrorists we found with the President is, or was supposed to be dead. Now he really is. It was Malak Hasim, the Pakistani.”
“Couldn’t be, Ben. When I took him, I brought you back what was left to verify it.” Cort responded.
“Are you sure he was dead? The preliminary DNA just came back, it’s him.”
“Take me to him. Now.” Cort swallowed his vodka and walked to the door of the trailer.
They made their way through the debris to a car that was surrounded by thirty Secret Service agents. All but one of them, a woman, had submachine guns visible. The woman walked toward them as they approached. Caroline Petty was the ranking agent here, but Cort noted that she was not part of the Detail, as the President’s security team was known. Why is she here? I guess all the Detail guys were killed too. He thought to himself.
“Hey Cort,” Petty reached out and took Addison’s hand, “sorry to see you again this way. I thought you took care of this guy.” She said as she led them into the remains of the car. Nothing here had been moved, and as little as possible had been disturbed. A photographer had already taken over a thousand photos of the interior and exterior of what was left of the car.
Cort was shocked. From the horror of the scene, as well as the thought that he might have failed, and that failure may have caused this. “So did I, Caroline.” He climbed into the car and found the body that Petty pointed out to him. Ben could hear the sigh of relief as Addison turned to him after just a precursory examination of the body. “Ben, remember how I brought you the prints that time?” He asked.
“Yeah, you brought back most of the guy’s hand, why?”
“Look,” Cort pointed at the body. It still had both hands. “If your DNA tests really matched, our boy Hasim had a twin. You confirmed the prints. That would explain why he was able to be two places at once so often.”
Both Petty and Natsumo were relieved. No one had to say what one alternative had been. It would take some time to verify, but these three people were all very happy, considering the circumstances. As he and Natsumo left the agent to her grim duty, Cort decided to look around the debris before leaving the site for a while.
As he walked through the debris, Cort saw something that made his blood run cold. At that point, Cortland Addison began to realize that his holiday was ruined, regardless of where he spent it, or who he was with. This investigation had just become all too personal.
He was walking through an area that the rescue workers had just begun to sift through. He was looking through some rubble that thus far had gone untouched. The woman’s arm caught his eye. She was buried under what had to be several thousand pounds of stone and concrete. There was no chance she was alive. It was doubtful they would find anyone in this area alive. There was simply too much damage. Too much metal came through this area to allow the structure to survive, and when the structure came down, it came down on several hundred people who were coming and going, or maybe meeting someone who was coming or going. No doubt many of them were simply indigent people who had nowhere else to be, so they had settled onto a bench, like countless thousands of their counterparts across the country. The investigators would still try to identify them, the mourners would still look at the bodies and wonder if they had belonged to their loved ones, and at least for the duration of this horrible section of time, the homeless victims of this tragedy would once again be seen by the rest of society as human victims.
The woman’s arm sticking up through the rubble was stiff from the cold, and would soon be stiff due to rigor mortis, if it wasn’t already. Addison just didn’t know how long it took that sign of death to set in. He supposed it had to be no more than a few hours. How long had it been since the accident? No, how long had it been since the incident? This was no accident. Five hours, maybe six? Yeah, the body had to have begun to stiffen by now. So it was more than just the cold. The hand still held a bag from Starbuck’s. As he approached her, he noticed the perfectly manicured hand. She had probably had her nails done just this morning. She was expecting a relative from Nebraska. In any case, he couldn’t be abstract about this woman, nor could he treat her like a piece of evidence. After all, Cort noticed as he looked at her hand, she was wearing his own mother’s wedding ring.
In 1993, when Donita Addison had died, four people had been at her side. She was in a coma, and a week earlier her family had made the decision to stop feeding her. There was no chance of a recovery, and she was already too weak to survive another surgery. One that shouldn’t have been necessary.
The surgeon should have removed her entire lung to begin with. Instead, he did a lobectomy. He only removed the part of her right lung which had been taken by cancer. He didn’t think about the scar tissue around the incision. Scar tissue doesn’t heal the way normal tissue does. In many cases, it doesn’t heal at all. In this case, he was dealing with a woman who was fighting her second battle with cancer, and the previous fight had left her lung scarred. The radiation that had defeated the cancer in her breast five years before had also destroyed a large amount of lung tissue. Then when the scar tissue had formed its own lump the cancer was no longer in her breast, it was in her lung. As the tissue had tried to heal, Donita’s ninety-eight pound frame simply was not strong enough to keep the changes from mutating into their own malignant cluster of cells.
So when Ronald Schultz, MD, and his ego decided to operate on Donita Addison, he took only enough tissue from her lung to be sure and take all the cancer. He left the scar tissue he saw, certain it would heal as if she were a twenty-year old. She was not. She was a fifty-four year old woman who had smoked for almost forty years. Her lungs wouldn’t heal. The sutures would eventually become infected, and a ‘staph infection due to complications’ as a result of a prolonged battle with cancer would be listed on her death certificate as the cause of death. If Dr. Schultz would have been sober before surgery, he would have known that he had to take the whole lung if he had wanted to have any chance of saving the fifty-four year old mother of seven. Three double scotches insured Donita Addison’s death. But it was very good scotch. The best money could buy.
That day in February, while her family waited for the inevitable, a nurse’s aide came in to check on her. After checking her patient, Christy Baker, CNA, turned to the family and said, “You should probably call anyone you want to be here. Her color is wrong. I don’t think it will be much longer. Indeed, over the past hour, her color had gone from ashen to an almost jaundice hue. Her liver was shutting down. Although they tried to call all of her other children in time, Donita couldn’t wait for them.
So on February 19th, 1993, one day before her fifty-fifth birthday, Donita Pauline Addison died with four people at her side; her husband of nearly forty years, her mother, her youngest son Cortland Paul Addison, and her only daughter Sheryl. After the funeral Dub Addison gave his wife’s wedding ring to her daughter. From that moment on, Sheryl had never taken it off.
Cort Addison reached down and removed the ring from his sister’s hand. When a national guardsman marking bodies nearby tried to stop him from what appeared to be stealing from the dead, Cort Addison nearly killed the young man. Ben was completely confused about why he was helping two secret service agents pull Cort away from the young, untested warrior, but he did think that Cort had suddenly become a different man. He was right.
Cort was running through recent emails in his mind. In addition to his sister, he now knew there would be more of his family among the dead. Probably his father and brother-in-law, and possibly two aunts and an uncle who were on their
way to Denver to celebrate the holiday. It then occurred to him that his dad hated to pay for parking. He may have been waiting in a car outside the building for the rest of the family members to arrive, while Sheryl and Dan would have gone in to meet the new arrivals. Now Addison had a personal task. Ben followed Cort as he ran through the line of Marines talking into a handheld radio. He found the major who was in charge of securing the area and gave him some instructions. Soon a small squad of men was working their way through the onlookers while several others began running down the list of injured and where they had been removed to for medical treatment. Fifteen minutes later, a man was led by the major into the command trailer. Addison looked up from the pictures of Malak Hasim he had been studying. No one in the room was going to comment that for the first time since any of them had known Cort Addison there were tears in his eyes. He walked across the room and hugged his father, crying as he said, “Thank God.”
For William Addison, there was still a lot of confusion. He had been standing in the cold trying to get someone to talk to him about what was going on inside the building for the past several hours. All he had gotten so far was several long looks from armed men. Now he was in the arms of his youngest son, wondering how Cort had gotten here, and why he had the clout to be standing in a room full of soldiers and government employees in the middle of what he did already know to be a national crisis. He knew his son well enough to see in his eyes that Sheryl was gone. Then Dub too, began to cry. Ben brought them both a cup of coffee and corralled the other men out of the trailer. For at least a few minutes, Cort and his father could grieve alone.
Cort stopped Natsumo before he had closed the door. “Ben, I want Angela here now. I mean right now. I’ll call and let her know. Make it happen. In fact get me a big plane, some other family is going to have to be here too. Also, I have to leave for a while. My part is over for now. We have to go talk to my niece. Get me a hummer and a driver, now.” As Ben closed the door behind him, he was already making the phone calls that would bring more people from Tulsa to Denver. He wondered what Angela would think of flying on a military jet. Maybe he could get a Gulfstream for her. The storm did seem to be letting up.
Back in the trailer, Cort was violating a dozen national security laws by telling his father everything he knew about what was going on so far. Albeit that wasn’t very much. On the other hand, he was finally telling his dad what he did for a living. Dub Addison had just thought of his son as the owner of a successful security company back in Oklahoma. Yet again, Cort was surprising him. A few minutes later, a Marine knocked and opened the door to tell them that he was ready to take them wherever they wanted to go.
Corsica
Eight months later, Cort Addison moved east behind the long garage structure just inside the fence at 20987 Tavera. The compound had been under surveillance for two weeks, and just ten minutes before, his target had been seen at a window of the pool house, facing north. Because of heavy brush and trees surrounding the property, the compound’s security, and Perez’s love of the limelight, there was no chance of handling this problem discreetly. Addison crossed the grounds north of the pool and keyed on his weapon as he settled into the spot he had decided to use as his perch. There were three topless women in his view, two sunbathing and one in the pool. He activated the powered scope and began to scan the building in front of him.
Carlos Perez stood in the window of the pool house as he watched his wife and her two sisters taking in the midday sun. As he lifted his bottle of cocaine laced scotch to take another drink, he noticed a faint red sparkle dance across the glass as it touched his lips. Before his mind could register that the light wasn’t natural, an armor piercing round passed through the bullet-proof glass of the door, then his bottle, and exploded through his chin, fragmenting and ripping most of his mouth and all of his neck apart. His head completely separated from his body while his brain was still trying to understand what happened. Then his head hit the ground, his eyes seeing only the bottom of the patio door through his legs, followed by his body crumpling in front of him. As he faded away, he thought he heard his wife’s screams, but that may have been his imagination.
At two p.m., Cort Addison boarded a seaplane for the journey to Toulon, where he was booked on a flight to London eight hours later. Once in England, he would visit the Canadian consulate, where a package was waiting for him. Then on to Ontario and finally New York. At each stop, twenty minutes in a men’s room would change his identity. Until he was on US soil again, he would not turn on his cell phone, send an email, or even play a game of Ski Safari on his tablet.
New York City
Angela Addison had never told Cort she was pregnant. Nor had she told him about the miscarriage. He had enough grief. Some she could share in, but some she could not. There was no reason to add to his pain. His sister and brother in law, then his niece Jessica to the fire, and now when he got home, she would have to tell him about his dad. William Addison had died peacefully in his sleep back in Tulsa. Cort’s brothers were already at odds about everything from the estate to the funeral arrangements and Angela just wanted her husband home. She had called Ben, and knew that there was no way to reach Cort, but Ben had sent her to New York. All he told Angela was that New York was where Cort would be in thirty-six hours. What she didn’t know was that Cortland Addison would appear there after leaving behind the six identities he had used to find and kill the man responsible for the tragedy in Denver last year, and return to the US unnoticed. She had thought about waiting there in Tulsa for him, but decided she needed to get away from the family squabbles. Her mom was doing well, and her father Ted said he would take care of the pets for Angela, so she hopped on the next plane to New York and checked into the suite Ben had reserved for her husband.
Right now Angela was feeling the grief she had hidden for the last six months. So she drew a bath, lit a cigar, and poured herself a large glass of wine. She wondered about the baby. Had it been a boy or a girl? Would it have had her temper or Cort’s cold and calculating way of dealing with his anger? She would never know, and even when they finally did have a child, she knew it would not be the same one she had lost. Another glass of wine had her thinking about how they would have decorated the baby’s room. The heady smoke of the La Traviata cigar made her think about sitting around a campfire with her husband and her children. When the second bottle of wine was empty, she was crying softly into a pillow on one half of the large bed in the hotel suite. When she woke up the next morning, her head pounding and the light streaming in through the window facing the southeast, she rolled away from the glare and was comforted when she found Cort sleeping peacefully beside her. She ordered coffee from room service and asked the concierge to book two tickets back to Oklahoma as soon as possible. She woke her husband when the coffee arrived.
An hour later, Cort cancelled the flight home. “I don’t understand. Why don’t you want to go back?” she asked.
He looked at her with a sadness she recognized. Anytime Cort came home with the look, she knew it had been one of the jobs he would have bad dreams about. “Because right now I would kill them. Dad didn’t raise us that way, and I would kill them for being so greedy and disrespectful. Ange, I don’t mean I would beat them up or yell at them. I mean I would kill them.” She also recognized that he was serious. With exception of his late sister and one brother, Cort had never gotten along with his siblings. Growing up, they had picked on him incessantly until he was bigger than they were. She remembered her father in law telling her about the moment Cort’s brother LeRoy had found out he couldn’t pick on his little brother anymore. LeRoy wore a cast on his writing arm for six weeks after that lesson.
“No you wouldn’t. Because you respected your dad, and you wouldn’t disrespect him that way. Let’s go home, honey.”
“No. I understand what you are trying to do Angela, really I do. But I’m not ready to face that. I just finished a very stressful job. Dad dying is too close to that. I need to decompress.” Cor
t turned and faced her. “I will call Brandon and tell him I’m sorry but we won’t be there. He’s the executor and the others may badger him, but he won’t go against Dad’s wishes.” Putting his coffee cup down, he took her hands in his. “I know about the baby. I’m sorry I couldn’t help you grieve. I had a job to finish. Now I can. Now I will.”
Angela’s shock at his revelation gave way to tears and they finally grieved together.
Later that day Ben Natsumo called Cort and asked him to meet in another of the hotel’s rooms for his debriefing. When Cort walked in, Ben knew from the look on his friend’s face that he was leaving the organization. “I figured Angela being here was going to cost me. Am I right?”
“Yeah. I’m done.” After pouring himself a drink and sitting down across the table from Ben, Cort slid a thumb drive across the marble surface between them. “Here’s the play by play. I’m done now. You know, the only reason I pulled the trigger was because it was personal, Ben. If it hadn’t cut me personally, I don’t think I would have. I cut off the head of a group that will grow two more. It’s like the Hydra. There will always be a target. And I’m tired of being the one doing the aiming.”
