The Sleeper

by Christopher Dickey

  The pistol exploded, flying out of the tattooed-man’s hand, sliding across the floor, and taking some of his fingers with it. He looked at me like I’d done this, too stunned even to cry out in pain.

  A fraction of a second later, there was a quick series of shots and metal pinging noises and the gas canister inside the little room exploded. Shrapnel blasted into the guts and faces of the two Salafis still in there. A thick fog of chlorine billowed out through the door. I grabbed for the garbage bag, my eyes closed, my breath held, pushing Miriam’s face into my sweat-damp blue-jean jacket. My right hand felt the mask, the straps. I put it on and cleared it with an explosion of breath. I inhaled. The air was clean. There was another canister in the bag about the size of a Coke can—one of the emergency hoods from the waterworks. Miriam was struggling, desperate and terrified in my arms. I shook out the plastic smoke hood and put it over her face, then pulled the drawstring tight around her neck. For a second the plastic smothered her, sticking to her nose and lips, stopping her screaming breath, and she wrenched in my grip, but a second later the little can filled the bag with air. Now she could breathe, too. But she wouldn’t and couldn’t calm down.

  There were other shots, other sounds like exploding tanks of gas. From every corner of the building came the strangled shouts of the gunmen in the thickening cloud. Bursts of gunshots cut through the air, making starlight patterns in the aluminum roof.

  I hit the concrete floor with Miriam hugged close. Someone was choking screams right in front of me and making a strange thudding noise against the floor. Still I couldn’t see him. Then the barbed-wire tattoo on his bare arm loomed through the chlorine mist. His body twisted and writhed like a snake run over on the road. He beat his head against the floor, trying to smash the pain out of it. His eyes rolled back, his mouth foamed pink with his dissolving lungs and his blown-apart hand oozed red bubbles as the chlorine mixed with blood to make hydrochloric acid in his bare veins.

  “There is justice,” I said.

  Somewhere the mobile phone rang, but I had dropped it when I was fumbling with the mask, and there was no way I could look for it now.

  I figured everyone had headed for the hole in the plywood. Maybe some made it. Maybe they were waiting outside. With Miriam in my arms I didn’t want to take that risk, but she was using up the oxygen in her emergency hood real fast. I had to get her out of the poison cloud. Chlorine is heavy. If I could climb into the scaffolding on the walls, I might be able to get above it. My throat and nose were burning and I was coughing from the little bit of gas I inhaled before I got the mask on. Miriam was still struggling, mucus running down her face, tears pouring from her eyes. I had to keep her arms pinned so she wouldn’t rip off her hood, holding her tight. So tight.

  The scaffolding was right in front of me. I climbed toward clearer air, balancing and grabbing handholds, and about fifteen feet up looked down on the poison like it was mist in a mountain valley. My eyes were used to the shadows now. I could see all the way across the inside of the building. On the top level of the scaffolding near the door somebody was moving. A small figure. A slip of a thing. Betsy. It had to be Betsy. She wore a gas mask and she was prone. Beside her was a high-powered hunting rifle with a telescopic scope, but she had the Ruger shouldered. She was watching for movement in the gas billowing below. She didn’t see Miriam and me. Then a tiny tremor shook the scaffolding under my feet. Somebody else was up here.

  “Miriam, Sugar, I’m going to put you down. Please, please, don’t take this bag off your face. Please, Sugar. Just stay here. Please.”

  Her eyes were wide and red, her jaw clenched and her body rigid as she looked at the masked monster in front of her, her father.

  I swung up onto the next level of scaffolding, the one just below the roof and in that second saw the Mexican sniper leveling his rifle at Betsy. He was wiping his eyes, trying to focus through his scope, but he was in control of his body. He was steady. He’d have her in a second.

  Sirens wailed outside.

  The only weapon I had was the knife in my boot, and I couldn’t slow down to reach for it. I screamed from deep inside me but heard my voice muffled by the mask. The sniper wiped his eye again, and refocused. I tore off the mask as I ran, letting loose a yell of rage and fear that echoed under that huge metal roof like a banshee wail as I sprinted with everything in me across the top of the scaffolding. The sniper put his eye back to his scope and pulled the trigger. I made a dive for him that nearly carried both of us over the edge. He twisted and tried to break free, but now I had him pinned flat on his belly beneath me, his arms over the edge so he couldn’t push up. Now my boot knife was an easy reach. Now I brought it clean through his carotid artery. Now a gush of blood, almost black in the shadows, sprayed down into the gray-green gas.

  A thunder of guns sounded outside the back of the store, and new streams of daylight cut through the fog of chlorine as bullets blasted more holes in the plywood, holes in the sheet-metal side of the building, and holes in the roof.

  Betsy was sitting up on the scaffolding opposite me. She waved and pointed at the level below me, at Miriam. I was gasping, taking in a little more poison with every breath. Part of the sniper’s corpse beneath me started to vibrate. Then it stopped. Then it vibrated again. A telephone. A much bigger one than most people carried, almost the size of a brick. I didn’t answer it, but I took it.

  Betsy was holding her arm and it looked like a black stain covered her fingers. She leaned on her side, trying to see what was going on, but with no strength left.

  The gunfire outside ended and a splintering of wood brought an explosion of light, then through it shadows of men dressed in black, masked in rubber, armored and armed for war. I tried to shout to them, but my throat was raw with chlorine and blood. I left the corpse of the sniper where it was and struggled down to Miriam. Somebody below shouted at me with an electronic voice. But I didn’t hear. Couldn’t listen. My little girl was lying on the platform so still; still as death. Her tiny hands were next to her face. But she hadn’t taken the mask off. She did what Daddy told her. And then she quit breathing.

  Chapter 34

  Glimpses of Westfield and the sky flashed by through the window on the back of the speeding ambulance—a church steeple, a stoplight, the sign in front of the Kansas Inn, which was the last motel on the edge of town—then Westfield grew smaller, farther away, and disappeared.

  A hand over my face held down the respirator. My throat and lungs ached and I sucked every breath like it was my last. “My daughter,” I said. “My wife.”

  “They’ve gone up ahead to Ark City,” said the attendant. “Betsy and—your little girl’s name is Miriam, right?” I recognized him now as Jack Whitten, the owner of Whitten’s jewelry shop, where I’d bought Betsy her ring. He was a hard-drinking old bachelor most of the time, but he spent part of his week as a real sober, real dedicated rescue volunteer.

  “They’re alive,” I said.

  Jack hesitated for just a second. “Yes,” he said. “Yes. Don’t try to talk. They’re gonna be just fine.”

  I tried to sit up and he pushed me back down, his hand still over the respirator mask. “I heard Miriam is responding to CPR. And Betsy—Kurt, Betsy is going to be fine, but she did take a bullet in her shoulder.”

  The siren moaned around us.

  “That was a hell of a thing you all did back there,” Jack said.

  I opened my mouth, then closed it, silent and aching.

  “Who’d have thought those bastards would come to Westfield? Attacking our children! Kurt, God only knows what they’d have done with that poison gas if you hadn’t stopped them.”

  He was convinced and proud of this half-made-up story about “their” poison gas. Maybe it would do as the truth.

  “Deputy Nichols was mad as hell, I can tell you. He said Betsy warned him and then he called the FBI and that was the biggest mistake he ever made. They told him to wait until they got to the scene. Do nothing. Can you believe it? H
ell, if Nichols had kept waiting, you might still be in there.”

  I put my hand on my bare chest, feeling for the pocket of the blue jean jacket, but it wasn’t on me any more, there were just thin rubber tubes all over me.

  “What do you need?” Jack asked.

  “Phone.”

  “That’s going to have to wait.” He took his hand off my face and picked up the jacket from the bench beside him and reached into the pocket. “I haven’t seen a phone this big since I don’t know when,” he said. “ ‘Iridium.’ What kind of phone is that?”

  “Satellite.”

  “Whoa. Serious stuff. How do you turn it off? Interferes with things in an ambulance just like in an airplane.”

  I reached for it, then hugged it to me. My heart pounded and the monitors in the ambulance beeped like a slot-machine jackpot.

  “What the hell you doing, Kurt?”

  If he turned it off, I might not be able to turn it back on. I pushed the menu button.

  “Come on, Kurt.”

  I scrolled up and down looking for “Recent Calls.” There were six, all from the same number, 212-555-3728. I showed it to Jack. “Please write down,” I said.

  The light in the hospital room was dim and the only sound I heard at first was the faint whoosh of the oxygen machine. I tried to look at my watch, but on my wrist I read my name on a plastic band with a bar code.

  “I’m sorry, Kurt.” The voice in the chair beside me was familiar.

  “Griffin?”

  “I’m really sorry.”

  “Where’s Betsy? Where’s Miriam?”

  “I should never have let them get dragged into this.”

  “Where the fuck are they?”

  “Down the hall.”

  “I want to see them.”

  “As soon as you can walk.”

  I ripped the oxygen tube out from under my nose and stood up, bracing on the side of the bed.

  “Hold on,” said Griffin.

  The saline drip was on a rolling stand. I used it as a kind of crutch. “Let’s go,” I said.

  There were two beds in the dim room down where they had my family. Miriam was on the near one. Betsy on the far one. Both of my girls had oxygen tubes in their noses and pain and fear had drained all the color from their faces. Miriam’s open eyes stared straight at the ceiling. I wanted to kiss her and hug her, but I was afraid I’d hurt her somehow. She saw me and started thrashing in the bed. I stepped back. She froze again, looking at me in horror.

  “She’ll get better,” said Betsy.

  “You are the bravest woman in the world,” I said.

  “Woman?”

  “Life-saving Angel,” I said.

  She smiled, and then the smile faded. “Angel of Death,” she said.

  “Oh, Darlin’,” I said, trying not to unplug anything as I hugged her. “You saved so many lives today. Mine and Miriam’s, and all the thousands of people those assholes wanted to kill.”

  “We stopped a few bad guys.”

  “We sure did.”

  “But we didn’t save the world.” She looked at me, and then at Griffin.

  “We’ve done all we can do,” I said. “We’ve done all we’re going to do.”

  “Let’s end it somehow, Kurt.”

  “We will,” I said.

  I held her as tight as I could and we stayed that way for a long time that wanted to be forever.

  About halfway down the night-empty hall between my family’s hospital room and mine, I turned on Griffin and threw him against the wall. He didn’t fight back, but waited until, seconds later, I had no breath in my body and I stood before him red-faced and helpless.

  “Don’t bother killing me, Kurt. I’m leaving the Agency,” he said. “I’m AWOL right now, as far as they’re concerned.”

  “Who gives a shit which agency you work for.”

  “I’m leaving the government.”

  “Why don’t you just get out of here and leave me—leave us—alone?”

  “I’m leaving the government because I saw you betrayed, and I couldn’t do anything about it. I’m leaving because when you got back here and you were waiting—we should have watched you twenty-four/seven, just to protect you.”

  “Go on.”

  “But we didn’t. The Agency had to stand back and the FBI wouldn’t pick up. I tried to check in on you. But—”

  “You’re telling me that I was here as bait, me and my family like some rotten pieces of meat in a crab trap, and there was nobody interested enough to haul it in.”

  “Worse. Not allowed to bring you in.”

  “Reason?”

  “A jurisdiction thing. They said I couldn’t make a case for why anyone would come after you.”

  “What did you tell them?”

  “I told them you had some unfinished business with the bad guys, something about a genie in a bottle. I told them some of the bad guys had already come sniffing around here.”

  “And they said—”

  “Said it wasn’t enough to go on. And if we didn’t get it out of you at Gitmo, we weren’t going to.”

  “You should have warned me.”

  “Wasn’t allowed. That’s why I’m quitting.”

  “When was all this decided.”

  “Weeks ago. Then again yesterday, when we picked up some intel about people on their way here. Then again today, when we knew they got here. Every time, the word that came down was to leave you alone.”

  “All alone.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Even when the shooting started, nobody was going to send in the cavalry?”

  He nodded. I opened the door to my hospital room. “None of this makes sense.” I didn’t know what to say. “I still don’t understand why.”

  “Maybe the Evil Doers were supposed to get what they came for.”

  A weight of emotion like a slab of lead pushed down on me. “I got to rest now,” I said. “But if you think you owe me something, do me one favor.”

  “What’s that?”

  I pulled the Iridium phone out of my jacket on the door. It was dead. I unfolded the little paper with the number scrawled by Jack Whitten in the ambulance. And I handed the phone and the number to Griffin.

  “Stay in the Agency,” I said. “At least for a few more weeks.”

  Ground Zero

  June 29–July 4, 2002

  Chapter 35

  The sun was just coming up and half of America lay behind me in the night. Filling-station coffee sat in my gut like battery acid and my lungs were still raw from the chlorine. My eyes in the rearview mirror were red as dawn. But I was wide awake as I headed toward the Holland Tunnel and saw the emptiness where the Twin Towers used to be. I heard my voice as if it belonged to somebody else saying, “My God,” and then again, “My God,” and I was glad for all that I had done, and what I had not done, in my life. And for what I was about to do.

  I didn’t dare think anymore that I could end this war. I wasn’t sure that anyone I loved would ever be safe. But today or tomorrow would get us closer to the end, closer to safety—a lot closer than we’d been since those two towers disappeared. That’s what I believed as my pickup inched into the tunnel under the Hudson.

  Griffin was waiting for me in Manhattan. He’d traced the satellite phone to a company registered in the Bahamas. Through the Agency databases he peeled away layer after layer of corporate fronts until he focused on a financial consultant in New York. That was as much as he would tell me on the phone. “This is really a strange one,” he said. “I think this could be the sleeper of all sleepers. We need—I need you here, and I need you now.”

  It was hard to leave Betsy and Miriam. Real hard. They were feeling better but they were still in Ark City Hospital. Folks were protecting us. The doctors. The sheriff’s office. Everybody. And we all figured it was better for them to stay there, stay safe, stay away from the reporters who came nosing around about the “gang war in Westfield” story that went out on TV.

  As
Deputy Nichols told it to the press, a bunch of criminals from Wichita tried to take over our town. They pistol-whipped Sam Perkins and tied him up and stole the chlorine—and nobody knew what they were going to use it for. Nobody was sure, either, why they took some children hostage and killed the teacher. “Crazy violent crackheads,” is what Deputy Nichols called them. “They must have thought Westfield was easy pickings, but they was wrong. All six was killed in the shoot-out.”

  The deputy didn’t count the Salafis or the men killed at Jeffers’ Rocks. He didn’t mention them at all. He didn’t have to. Bodies disappear in America these days, especially the bodies of foreigners. No one asked. No one told. So no one knew they were ever there. The FBI said it was still looking into the case, but had no comment on “what appeared to be a matter of state jurisdiction.”

  “Was this terrorism?” one of the reporters on Channel 2 asked Deputy Nichols. “They was terrorizing,” he told her. “But this wasn’t nothing to do with terrorism.” Westfield was happy to live with that story, and after a couple of days so was the rest of the country.

  I wished that it could all be secret. I wished that we could protect our people, our families, our babies without them ever needing to know. I wished my baby girl had never had to see what she saw, or feel what she felt.

  And now I was in Manhattan, where the early-morning air smelled of garbage, sick-sweet and rotten, like day-old corpses on a battlefield. Rush hour hadn’t really started yet. Eighth Avenue was wide open. By six-thirty I was at Columbus Circle and parked the truck in a lot and walked into Central Park. The roads and paths there were full of runners. It was like the city had poured all its restless flesh onto the pavement. Young men and women loped along at measured speeds, checking their watches and sucking on water bottles. Old men shuffled and bicyclers rushed by like kamikazes. Some joggers listened to rock and roll running cadences, others to the morning news. Dogs trotted beside their masters. Mothers ran behind their three-wheeled strollers, their babies braving the wind like little Red Barons.