by Joseph Nagle
The collision caused a collective gasp from nearly everyone in the rows behind him. Fortunately, the man with whom Michael suddenly became intimate had an abdomen that any corpulent Texan could be proud to carry.
If one is to fall on top of another be sure that it is into the distended belly of a rather happily fed man.
The sudden thought of a smiling, happy Buddha uttering such insightfulness didn’t do much to shed the forthcoming embarrassment; if it hadn’t been for the sudden and excruciating pain screaming down his side, Michael may have cared more for his impending disposition.
In the face of danger, Michael has learned on numerous occasions that time does indeed slow down. With the help of adrenaline, all senses become hyper aware. Such a phenomenon offers recourse in less than desirable situations, and has served to help Michael on a number of missions.
While falling, Michael could see the large abdomen rushing toward him; this is where his fortune ended.
The bottom two buttons were unfastened, perhaps to give the man’s girth more room to expand, leaving the lower part of the man’s shirt open and baring an overly hairy naval that looked as if its hair had been parted down the middle. The worst part was that Michael could actually see little droplets of sweat beaded up and suspended on the hairs.
Just moments later, the sensation of his face planting nose down into the man’s belly was followed by the nearly convulsive reaction by his gag-reflex. The smell was acrid and wafted through his nostrils. The pungent taste of the sweaty, fat, and hair infested stomach was coupled with the sensation of a sticky wetness on the man’s sudoriferous abdomen. All of it permeated the barrier offered by Michael’s lips, which was completely ineffective at protecting Michael’s tongue.
Michael swallowed the inevitable regurgitating side-effects, thankful that he didn’t vomit in the man’s lap, and attempted to right himself, but found that the awkward position he was now in, coupled with the currents of pain flowing through his lower extremities, made lifting himself difficult.
This must have been obvious; he felt the hands of the man from the middle seat reach under his arms and swiftly extricate him from his unenviable location.
The man raised Michael to his feet; another wave of pain rushed through Michael. This time the pain was not isolated to just one side but screamed through his entire body. Michael doubled over and nearly fell to his knees. If it hadn’t been for the man from the middle seat who still had a firm hold of him, Michael would have fallen again. Instead, he vomited into the aisle, and a bit went down the front of his shirt.
“Let me help you to the bathroom buddy, you need it more than me,” said the man.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Cherry Creek
Denver, Colorado
Dr. Sonia Sterling, MD had just arrived home from the hospital; the shift had been long and ended with one of her most difficult patients’ mother being led away in handcuffs, and the little girl taken into the protective custody of Child Protective Services.
Her patient, a young girl, was barely eight-years old, and had been brought in for her twelfth visit over the past three months. The first visit was seemingly standard: vomiting, fever, diarrhea, and a sore throat. Sonia had run the standard tests on the girl and prescribed antibiotics for what appeared to be a case of strep throat. She had sent the mother off with instructions to finish the antibiotic regimen, and to keep her daughter well hydrated and rested.
During the following three months, the mother returned, at first only about once every other week, but then had escalated the frequency of her visits. This had been the third time this week that she showed up unannounced.
Her daughter’s strep throat had never really been cured, and the little girl displayed other maladies that soon became difficult to explain.
The lab work had initially come back negative for strep throat, or for any infection. Initially, Sonia had no reason for large-scale concern given that the throat symptoms were seemingly minor. Often overprotective parents filled her waiting room with snot nosed, sniffling, coughing, and crying kids that had picked up every childhood bug and virus imaginable. However, Sonia’s lack of concern had been short lived.
On her visits, the mother often conversed with relative ease about medical topics and treatments, and ranted about how she always knew that she could have made a good doctor. Something about the way she let on nagged at Sonia. It hadn’t been until the second set of lab results that connected the mother’s preoccupation with medicine and her daughter’s problems. Sonia had spent the past few nights scouring her medical texts to connect the lab results with the mother’s preoccupations. Finally, she had found it, which led to Sonia’s diagnosis, not just of the daughter, but of the mother as well.
“Sodium dichlorisocyanurate,” the lab results had said. The compound is often found in pool cleaners, but when Sonia learned that the family didn’t have a pool and that the daughter does not swim she dug a little further. What she found was that the compound was an active ingredient in Comet, a household cleaner.
The mother had been feeding her daughter the abrasive cleanser; she was slowly poisoning her daughter to death.
Sonia diagnosed the mother with Munchausen’s by Proxy, a Fabricated or Induced Illness (FII) where, in this case, the mother purposely injures her child. On today’s visit – and what would be her final visit – the child had been close to death. Gaunt, lethargic, and eyes more shallow than Sonia had remembered, the little girl’s blood pressure was dangerously low. The child’s skin was pasty and gray and she was coughing bloody sputum. In the back of her throat, Sonia could see newly formed, open wounds burned from the ingestion of the cleanser.
Hospital Security was in Sonia’s office only moments after she depressed a hidden alarm. The paper work and requisite questions by the police and protective services had consumed much of her afternoon, time that she had planned to spend away from the hospital and preparing for Michael.
Michael would be home soon and Sonia wanted to be ready for him. She hated his last minute trips, but knew it was part of his job and accepted it. It was the life of a corporate finance guy.
She was always excited when he was on his way home; an hour ago she received a text message from him: “Flight on time. Be home by 8:00, LUME.” She loved how he always ended a text with “LUME”; it was his quick way of saying “Love U, ME.”
She had just enough time for a quick shower and to prepare Michael a simple dinner. Before jumping into the waiting stream of therapeutic hot water, Sonia opened a bottle of Michael’s favorite Chardonnay: Yellow Tail, a reasonably cheap Australian white wine.
Michael loved wine, and had spent some of his spare time trying to learn about vintage, flavors, and those pretentious things that make a wine good. She secretly made fun of him when he put the cork to his nose and whiffed; she had tried this once herself, but couldn’t smell anything but wet cork.
His foray into the world of wine-tasting was even more entertaining at neighborhood parties when Michael would take a glass of wine, hold it up to the light, and peer at the liquid as if certain secrets were being divulged only to him about the wines clarity, purity, and color.
He would follow the same steps: spin the liquid in the glass, tilt it to his nose, and take a deep snort followed by a taste. Always, Michael would attempt to impress with his less then level-one sommelier expertise.
“A good blend of dark cherry and tobacco, hints of cedar.”
What the hell does that mean? Why would anyone want to drink wood and tobacco? Does it taste good, that’s all she really wanted to know? To her, the “markings” of a good wine meant little.
On the other hand, a crisp martini, now that was a drink: lots of alcohol, a pretty glass with one purpose, and no pomp. She knew that some of their friends thought he was showing off when tasting a new one; however, those that knew him, that really knew him, would understand that, simply, he just enjoyed wine.
It was part of his personality, that part tha
t she really adored about him. He had a need to understand all things to their finest detail. Wine was merely an extension of this need: delicate, intricate, and defined by its heritage, year, and reaction to climate. She understood why he appreciated it, even if she, or their friends, didn’t get it.
Sonia opened the bottle of Yellow Tail chardonnay, it would “need to breath” he would say. She marveled at how his lack of pretension allowed him to call this one his favorite. The bottle was often on sale for $6.99 at the liquor store.
What she didn’t know was that the loyalty Michael displayed to all things important to him could be explained by his choice in this particular chardonnay.
Unknown to her, it was the result of one particular mission that had gone terribly wrong which gave Michael his seemingly inexplicable affinity for Yellow Tail. A double-agent of the CIA – that Michael had uncovered – had been en route to her hospital with the mission to inject Sonia with a lethal dose of a batrachotoxin, a poison derived from colorful and seemingly harmless, hopping Dendrobates.
Used by the Choco Indians of Western Colombia, the toxin from the skin of the poison dart frog has no effective antidote. For Sonia’s petite frame, the double-agent needed an amount that weighed less than a large grain of sand to kill her. It was to be retaliation against Michael; "professional discourtesy" they called it.
She had been within minutes of her life ending, but Michael had found the double agent first, and had terminated the man’s life with a chokehold so fierce he would later be told that the pressure from the strangulation, not only crushed the hyoid, but caused the double agent’s eyes to dislodge. The clean-up team had also found the man with the poisoned syringe sticking in his chest. A bit of overkill perhaps, but Michael was pissed.
Sonia had been in the hospital’s gym running on the treadmill. A patient had failed to show up for his appointment and she decided to use the time to get some exercise; it had been a fortunate twist of luck.
Michael was shaken by the event; never had his work come so close to home. After being debriefed, he had gone to the nearest bar and ordered the house chardonnay; a chilled Yellow Tail was delivered. It was the best pour of wine that he had ever tasted, even though it had been served in the wrong glass.
From that day forward, Michael always had a pour after returning home from a successful mission. Although there was no way that Sonia could know, it was a simple nostalgic reminder to Michael of the love he had waiting at home, and how close he had been to losing her.
After opening the wine, Sonia went to the third floor master bedroom of their tony Cherry Creek town home and shed her clothes. Demure and lean, at thirty-seven she looked ten years younger than her age, and still maintained a physique of which any woman would be jealous.
Years of distance running – a mutual love between them – and advanced yoga had left her with a chiseled body that still had all of the necessary feminine curves for her husband’s desires.
Catching a glimpse of her naked reflection, she would wear something additionally inviting for Michael tonight.
Sonia entered the shower and began to wash off the accumulation of hard day’s work. Wearing the lather of expensively perfumed soap, she heard the disturbing faint ring of the doorbell; Michael must have forgotten his key again.
Turning off the shower, she rushed down the three flights of stairs free from any semblance of Victorian chastity. Sonia was barely wearing the small towel that had hung nearest to the shower door - wearing much less than she should have been. She burst open the door expecting her husband on the other side.
“Michael! Get your fine backside in her and take me now you…”
She flung the door open and realized much too late that it wasn’t Michael on the other side of the door; instead, she was now facing two Denver policemen.
Dripping wet with the small towel nearly unable to cover up her exquisite nudity, a sudden wave of fear struck her. With a trace of trepidation she said, “What’s wrong? Is it my husband; what happened; what’s going on?”
As a doctor, most of her day deals with the less than desirable aspects of life. Rarely did anyone visit a doctor for something good; she was used to this. Her first reaction at the sight of two policemen at her door had been clinical, and those thoughts, mixed with the thought of her husband on a plane, had been the worst.
A hand from the officer nearest to her reached out, his face was flushed blood-red; the enormous and tall public servant lifted the towel to cover her exposed breast and said, “Ma’am, we are really sorry for the intrusion. We don’t know anything about your husband; that’s not why we are here.”
Taking control of the towel, Sonia could feel her face growing hot from the awareness of how she had just appeared to the young men. Relieved that Michael was fine, but now extremely embarrassed at her state of undress, she had no desire to remain standing there, but listened patiently as the officer continued.
“We are here because of some recent thefts in the neighborhood.”
Sonia had already retreated behind the front door attempting to hide her body and her shame as she responded to the tall policeman, “Thefts? I wasn’t aware of any.”
“Ma’am, if you don’t mind, we wanted to ask a few questions. Perhaps you could put on a robe while we wait?”
Sonia was now becoming a bit annoyed with the unwanted intrusion, but accommodatingly replied to the officers, “Yes, of course. Why don’t you wait here for a minute? I will be right back.”
Closing the door and leaving the officers outside, Sonia retreated back to the bedroom to put on something a bit more proper.
After she left, the two officers looked at each other. The officer that had spoken with Sonia said, “We couldn’t have asked for a better scenario.”
“A hot, naked woman at the door?” the other smirked.
Smiling at his partner’s retort, the first officer ordered back, “Get inside and sweep the first level, I will do the second floor. Remember to put the bugs near a source of electricity and keep quiet.”
The two officers opened the unlocked door and went inside. Quickly and quietly, they strategically placed four digital listening devices in the home; two on each level, and took care to ensure they each were placed close to an electronic household device. Unable to get to the third floor, the first two levels would have to do for now.
The bugs were small; no larger in diameter than a common pencil eraser, the bugs were also as flat as ten pages of paper. The operational life of the traditionally used small bugs is measurably finite given their size and the inability of small conventional batteries to produce power for lengthy periods of time. These ones, however, were different and have a lifespan that was theoretically infinite.
A young graduate from MIT had become convinced that there was a way to apply electro-magnetic theory to create wireless electricity. Although resonant inductive coupling had been shown to work on a small scale by other brilliant minds, it still required a second device to tunnel the wireless energy needed to power an electronic device.
The young man’s theory was that he could design internal resonant collecting mechanisms that have their own method of harnessing electro magnetic energy from the air; one that could work on its own without the need for the secondary tunneling device. His work allows the harmless low wave energy in the air to resonate perfectly with miniscule copper wires implanted in his devices and, thus, created wireless energy.
He dreamed of a world without cords, free from the annoyance of the tangled wires that were hidden behind every desk and TV in every office and home.
His theories were phenomenal and, more importantly, they were real. Originally, he had holed himself up in the apartment over his parent’s pizza shop in Pennsylvania, and was intent on revolutionizing the power industry by creating “cordless electricity.”
He wanted to go public and make billions; he had approached a number of investors for funding, but there were no takers. Everyone he had met with laughed in his face, and j
ust before slamming the door. No one believed that his theories could be put into practice. He was the butt end of the joke of everyone he had met – everyone except for the Company; they made him an offer he couldn’t refuse.
The man was able to produce small devices that did, in fact, find their source of power from the air, so long as the devices were near anything that was connected to a power source that emitted low frequency electromagnetic waves: a TV, lamp, computer, even a hair drier would do.
The commercial sector wanted TV’s, lamps, computers, and hair driers to be cordless; however, the Company saw another application. Every small electronic device, including listening devices, used by the Company now uses this man’s technology. He didn’t receive the billions he had initially dreamed of, but was compensated more than handsomely, and tax-free.
In her third-floor bedroom, Sonia put on a long-sleeved, loose button-down shirt (still flush with embarrassment, she buttoned it to the collar) and a pair of modest, but not form-fitting jeans; it was an effort to hide her shame. Believing that the officers had seen enough of her naked body, Sonia returned to her front door completely clothed, and overdressed. Opening it she was confused when the two officers weren’t there.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Flight 369
SFO to DIA
Michael stared at himself from inside of the plane’s cramped restroom; his face was a mess. One of his cheeks was littered with small scratches from the tiny shards of shrapnel that had barely hit their mark. His other cheek displayed the slightly burned path of the bullet that had grazed it. His eyes were sunken from a lack of sleep, and his face gray and shallow from the horror of the attack at Umayyad he had experienced.
“You look like shit, and now you smell like puke; how are you going to explain this to your wife?” he asked his reflection while furiously wiping the remnants of his last supper from his front side. The little paper towels that the airline stocks in the bathrooms were of very little help to his cause. Once wet, they had a lifespan of about twelve seconds; it seemed like that for every residual of vomit he cleaned from his shirt it was replaced by a piece of wet paper towel.
