“It was when I was undercover,” Emily said. “You remember when I told you about that?”
“I do,” Simon said.
“I did that for two years,” Emily explained. “I’d only been an FBI agent for a few years, and most of that was spent in Wisconsin.”
“Wisconsin can be cold,” he said.
Emily nodded and allowed a small smile. “I’m from Minnesota, so, not a big deal. I worked fraud cases. It was mostly office work. I spent almost no time in the field. That was why they chose me for the undercover assignment. I was a nobody.”
That might have been a consideration, Simon knew. But it wasn’t a truth. Not concerning Emily LaGrange. She was not a ‘nobody’ to him, and never would be.
“I was placed with a business in Georgia that allowed me access to a drug cartel,” she continued. “They were based in Mexico but had a U.S. operation run by a man named Louis Hayward. He was a…just a vile human being. Anyway, I made the right moves at this job, and I started getting sent to run packages for Louis. Then I graduated to providing security for larger shipments. After eighteen months I was close to his inner circle. Extremely close. But to complete my assignment, I had to get so close that I would be able to testify to witnessing him directly inspect and order the shipment of narcotics. Then we could take him down, along with the entire stateside operation that the cartel used.”
“Did you get close?”
Simon’s question was simple, but it was also at the crux of the moment which had defined Emily from that day until now. “I would have.”
“What happened?”
‘Pull the trigger!’
“I had to prove myself,” Emily said. She shifted on the couch, a sensation spreading over her, as if the memory was seeping out from within, taking her back to not only remember, but to feel. “There were two people in a room at the back of this warehouse. A man and a woman. They were on their knees, their hands and feet bound. The woman was crying. Louis took me to see them. One of his thugs was guarding them. It didn’t take me long to realize what was about to happen.”
Emily paused, her gaze fixed on Simon as she steeled herself. For all the bursts of memory which had plagued her for months, she’d never let herself recall, never allowed herself to experience those few minutes in full. Until now.
“Before he said a word to me, Louis took a gun from his belt and shot the woman in the forehead,” Emily said. “He handed me the gun and said it was my turn. That I had to prove myself. Prove my loyalty by executing a snitch.”
It was not a world Simon had ever imagined. Not until a week ago would he have even been able to process such a thing as Emily was attempting to describe. His affliction had been both prison and shield, shackling and protecting him all at once.
“I had the gun in my hand,” Emily said, looking at her own empty hand as she raised it from where it lay on her lap. “And Louis told me to hurry up and do it. I pointed it at the man on his knees. He was begging for his life, and Louis was yelling at me to pull the trigger, and his thug was just itching to shoot the guy and me, and…and…”
She was there with him, in front of him, her raw memories spilling out, so it didn’t take Simon any breadth of deductive reasoning to know what Emily LaGrange had chosen to do.
“I shot the thug, and I was going to take Louis down,” she said. “I was going to hold him at gunpoint and call in the ready team that was always just five minutes away. They could arrest him, and then I’d be done with it. But Louis wasn’t going to let that happen. He had a backup gun. I knew he would, but I thought he’d be taken by such surprise when I announced I was FBI that he’d just give up.”
“He didn’t,” Simon said. “He reached for the other gun.”
Emily nodded. “And I shot him.”
She sat back in the overly soft couch, palms rubbing against the front of her jeans, hard, as if she was trying to wipe some stain from them.
“Killing him made my entire undercover assignment pointless,” she said. “The Justice Department wanted to put pressure on Louis once he was in custody to give up information about the cartel. That was the goal of everything—gain leverage against him. With him dead…”
“They blamed you,” Simon said.
“Everyone blamed me,” she said. “Even I did for a while.”
“You couldn’t execute someone,” Simon told her.
“No, I couldn’t,” Emily agreed. “But the consensus was, the consensus is, that I let the situation get out of hand. And the truth is, I’m not sure if that’s an inaccurate assessment. I was so deep into the assignment that I was…disconnected. I was feeling like I had two sets of enemies—the people I was trying to bust, and the people who sent me to bust them.”
“Your farm,” Simon said. “You wanted to escape.”
“I wanted the option,” Emily corrected him. “The idea of escape, escape from it all, was powerful. Sometimes that idea, of just walking away, was what allowed me to press on. I only stayed because I knew I could leave. Leave everything.”
She drew a breath and let her head flop back on the couch for a moment, then straightened and looked to Simon. “Like it or not, your savior is damaged goods.”
“That doesn’t change the fact that you’re my savior,” he said. “And I know it’s different than what you faced, but I’ve killed to save someone, too. Two people. You and Art.”
Emily smiled and nodded. Simon Lynch had done just that, once as the person he was, and then as the person he’d become.
“Did you realize you were strong enough to do what you had to?” she asked him.
“Did you?”
Again, Emily smiled. The exchange, as one sided as it was, had been cathartic. She’d told the story in excruciating detail so many times, to suits and shrinks, but never to an outsider. Never to one who just listened without an agenda. She doubted that just having done that had exorcised her demons fully, but it might be a start, and she could settle for that.
“I picked you up a shirt and socks,” Emily said, taking the bag from the general store in hand and holding it out. “No luck on pants. We’ll have to get those later.”
“Thank you,” Simon said. He stood to take the few steps to get the clothes from Emily, but barely made it one before the world began to spin.
“Simon,” Emily said, reacting as he teetered to one side and fell between the beds that filled almost the entire room. “Simon!”
He heard her words, but they were stretched out and grating, as if she was screaming at him through a tunnel infested by clawing rats. She took his hand in hers, squeezing it, the other coming to rest across his brow as if checking for a fever. But he was not feverish.
“Simon, can you hear me?” Emily pressed. His eyes were open, and it seemed to her that he was looking directly into hers, but making no connection. As if he was looking past her. To something else.
Something’s wrong…
Simon felt that, but it was more than just a sensation. It was an understanding. A convergence of factors which his brain had been noting for days now. He’d begun to feel it in earnest as Emily drove them out of Kansas and he wrapped himself in the blanket. Exhaustion might have been an explanation, but not now. Not for this.
“Simon, talk to me,” Emily urged him.
“Emily…”
“I’m here.”
“Something’s wrong,” he said, giving voice to the fear he’d expressed internally already. “Something’s…”
Emily slipped her arms around his upper body and lifted, shifting his position so that he was sitting on the floor now, back against the bed for support. He struggled to keep his head upright, the muscles in his neck seeming as weak as the rest of his body.
“Where do you feel it? Where do you hurt?”
He didn’t know exactly how to answer her question. There was no pain. There was just a recognition that he was less connected to the reality around him than he had been. The world he’d been dragged into by the series of inje
ctions had started to seem fuzzy, as though he was experiencing it through a veil.
Then, as quickly as it had been drawn between him and his new reality, that vague barrier was no more. He saw Emily staring at him from where she’d sat on the floor opposite him.
“I’m…I think I’m…”
“Okay?” Emily prompted him.
But Simon shook his head. He was aware enough to recognize a difference in himself. By degrees he’d been feeling it, and now, in a shift akin to falling down a well, it was impossible to ignore, or to dismiss.
“I don’t feel the…”
“Feel the what?”
Again, he could not answer her. The word, or words, to finish his though eluded him.
What’s happening…
“Simon, talk to me,” Emily said.
“I’m trying,” he told her, then the word he’d been struggling to use came to him. “Same. I don’t feel the same.”
Emily eased back, her back against the opposite bed as a memory rose, and with it a terrible possibility.
‘His neurologic functions may depend on a maintenance injection…’
That had been Leah Poole’s warning. Simon might be free, but there was every possibility he was not free of what they’d done to him. Without a repeat of the fifty-first injection, a maintenance injection she had termed it, he could suffer certain effects. Effects which might be manifesting now before Emily’s eyes.
Okay, Em, it’s all right…
But it wasn’t all right. She knew that. She’d taken him from one horrible place and was en route to a safer place—except there was no guarantee that the Simon Lynch who deserved a life would be the one who reached that place of refuge. If she’d put more thought into the necessities of caring for Simon, not just taking him, then this might be a situation she could deal with. She might have forced General Vance or Dr. Michaels to provide her with a supply of the NB compound. That, though, would only have been possible had her original plan been the one which was seen through to completion. The appearance of the attackers at The Ranch had thrown that playbook out the window.
“Emily,” Simon said.
“It’s all right, Simon.”
He shook his head at her assurance. It wasn’t all right. He wasn’t all right.
“I want to be buried next to my parents,” he told her.
Those words, that very ordinary statement, stoked a fire suddenly inside Emily. Simon Lynch had only tasted a wisp of freedom, and already he was entertaining thoughts of his own mortality.
Like hell…
“Let’s go,” Emily said, gripping Simon under his arms. “We’re getting out of here.”
“I can stand,” he told her.
But he couldn’t. Not on his own. With assistance Emily was able to get him up and across the room and out the door. A few more steps put them at the side door of the minivan, and she helped him into the second-row bench seat. He lay there as she spread a blanket over him. A quick trip back to the nearby room gathered what they’d brought into the motel, the shotgun Simon almost used to end his life concealed in a jacket and placed in the back of the vehicle. A minute later they were gone, driving north from the tiny hamlet just a few miles from the place where the nation secured its treasure—Fort Knox.
Emily knew that a treasure had been entrusted to her, by both circumstance and design. Art Jefferson had laid the groundwork, but she was seeing it through. And now there was no longer any virtue in delaying the inevitable. She had to get Simon to the safe place that Art and Kirby had arranged. Had to get him there fast. Only then could she leave and reach out to the woman who’d warned that his condition might deteriorate.
That would be a risk. But it was a necessary risk. Leah Poole was the closest thing there was to a doctor who understood Simon and what he now faced.
“I’m going to get you help, Simon,” Emily said.
When she received no response, she glanced behind and saw him, a soft tremor seeming to roll continuously through him, his body quivering beneath the blanket. His gaze met hers, and in it she saw a mix of contrasting emotions—gratitude and fear. That combination cut Emily to her core.
Emily stepped on the gas. I-64 was a few miles north. Once they reached it she would drive east again, four hours this time, and there, in another small town, behind an old church with a white steeple, she would take the final steps that would guide her to the safe place. The place where Simon Lynch would know some measure of freedom.
If they weren’t spotted. If they weren’t hunted down. And if the man she’d rescued made it that far at all. That hadn’t been a worry an hour before. But it was now.
* * *
Seventy-five miles east of Lexington, Kentucky, Emily’s need, and her desire, to get Simon to their ultimate destination ran into a wall of red and blue lights slowing traffic a mile ahead on the interstate.
Shit!
It wasn’t a roadblock—it was a checkpoint. State troopers and deputies were funneling vehicles through a single lane, stopping them, and, with weapons ready, searching the interiors. The trunks. Anywhere a person could hide.
Emily knew who they were looking for. As they’d started their sprint east from the motel in Laconia, Indiana, she’d turned on the car’s radio to listen to the news, hoping for more information on what had happened in Baltimore. Mixed in with the tragic national news were reports of a pair of escaped inmates, both convicted murderers, suspected of being on the run in eastern Kentucky. They were the focus of what she saw in the distance.
But a net was indiscriminate. It had the ability to catch any who ventured too close. There wouldn’t be a ‘Be On The Lookout’ broadcast on Simon, but a BOLO bearing her face on data terminals in the police vehicles ahead was a definite possibility. It was also a chance she could not take.
Emily steered right to an offramp, behind a tractor trailer heading for a truck stop. She didn’t follow it, avoiding that facility and driving away from the interstate, taking back roads until she found a dirt path that split off and wound into the woods. Just wide enough for the minivan to navigate, the trail might be used by hikers and bikers now but had clearly been carved through the forested hills as access for loggers at some point in the past.
“Where are we?”
The question was asked weakly from just behind, Simon bouncing on the short bench seat as Emily steered them along the rutted track.
“We have to stop for a while,” she told him.
She found a wide spot in the dirt road, a section of the turnout plunging deeper into the trees, and turned into it, stopping in the makeshift campsite. For a moment she just sat there after turning the engine off.
“Are you all right?” Simon asked.
Emily smiled. He was asking her as he lay there, something clearly wrong with him. She turned in her seat and looked to Simon.
“I’m doing fine,” she assured him. “How are you?”
“Cold,” he said. “Different.”
The latter descriptor he used worried her more than the former. She could do something about his discomfort. Hunching over she made her way to the back of the van’s interior and retrieved a small stuff sack, pulling a down sleeping bag from it and fluffing its insulation before laying it atop Simon, adding warmth to the blanket that already covered him.
“Better?”
He nodded.
“Why did we have to stop?”
Emily explained the situation to him. “If I knew where we were maybe that atlas in your head could get us around it.”
“Where are we going?” he asked.
She hadn’t wanted to give him too much advance information. It wasn’t that she didn’t trust him, but rather that avoiding speaking their destination out loud reduced the chance that anyone would know. Would overhear. It was a slice of paranoia left over from her time undercover, but it was prudent.
Sitting where they were, though, Emily recognized it was also pointless.
“Elk Hills in West Virginia,” she tol
d him. “It’s near—”
“It’s near Charleston, West Virginia, on the Elk River,” Simon said.
Emily wasn’t certain about the river part, but the preparation she’d conducted with Kirby Gant had pinpointed the tiny hamlet as just north of Charleston.
“That’s it.”
Simon thought for a moment. Or tried to. There was a fog that had infected his thinking, but it was odd. It was almost as if all the knowledge he’d absorbed, all the calculations and equations and formulae he’d utilized throughout his entire life, had been released and were now floating about in his head. Every puzzle he’d ever completed, every theory he’d proven or disproved, flitted about, mixing with every bit of data he’d considered, so that all that he’d known, and come to know, hung there, to be picked like ripe fruit.
No longer was his mind segmented. That was always how it had seemed to him. A drawer here held matters relating to mathematical matters. Over there were issues relating to physics. Chemistry right alongside. Geographic data right off in the back. Now, it had all been set free. As he had, to a great degree.
But in that new state of release, some knowledge, the product of his specialness, was no more. Free of its bounds, it had simply drifted away. Dissolved into the mental ether as neurons discharged. Simon recognized this as soon as he tried to expand upon the information he’d just given to Emily. There were routes to reach that spot in West Virginia to which she was taking them. Alternates to the direct one which she had been following. But none came to him right then. He could recall points on the grand map of every corner of the earth, but the lines between each had somehow been erased in his consciousness.
“Emily,” he said.
“What?”
He looked at her for a moment as she hovered over him. “I’m forgetting.”
A natural response would be to ask what he was forgetting, but she knew not to. With every passing hour, Leah Poole’s worry was manifesting toward some terrible reality.
“I can’t tell you how to get there,” Simon said.
Simon Sees (An Art Jefferson Thriller Book 5) Page 33
