“She got all that from an imaginary friend?” asked Jonathan.
“It wasn’t just a friend, it was her dead brother,” bristled Mary. “Seven year olds shouldn’t do things like that.”
“So we have a little psychic on our hand.”
“I can’t wait until you see it.”
Jonathan entered the living room and plopped down on his favorite recliner, slouching as the impact of his shattered life continued to rattle through his system. He sat in the same place in the deafening silence in a mixture of depression and rage for about 30 minutes staring at a wall, never removing his sunglasses. It was 4 p.m. and streams of light from the late summer sun shone brightly through the westerly windows. Mary came in with a glass of iced tea. She sat across the room and said, “Listen Jon, we’ll get through this, we’ll figure something out. You have a lot of qualifications and I have a good job. We’ve got our savings, and three years of severance is pretty good. Maybe I’ll take a leave of absence and the 3 of us can just go away for a while, take a vacation and try to forget who we are. Maybe we can figure out a way to erase this past year and start over.”
Jonathan sat up and looked over at her, “You’re right! We are going to have to leave, at least me. For there ever to be a chance of having peace again, I have to find these animals and make them pay and the only way I know how to do that is to disappear!”
“You’re not going anywhere without me!” she snapped back.
“I may have to, at least for a little while. It’s the only way we’ll ever be able to start over again.”
Mary was startled by his comment, but was distracted before she could explore it further. Carly came down the hallway rubbing her eyes with one hand and holding Bruiser in the other. She was dressed in pink flannel pajamas covered with bunnies. Her feet made a funny noise as she scuffed her way on the hardwood floors. She hesitated when she saw the back of her father’s head in the chair, but when her mother nodded, she ran as fast as she could and jumped into his lap.
“Daddy!”
Jonathan spun around.
“Hi pumpkin.”
“Daddy! I missed you! Where did you go? You didn’t call me. Me and Bruiser were so worried about you. Daddy, I missed you so much.”
“And I missed you.”
“Bruiser said that you were coming home today, but I didn’t believe him.”
Mary rolled her eyes.
“And I take it that Bruiser is feeling better,” answered Jonathan carefully grabbing the bear and looking him over. Bruiser was coming apart at the seams. One of his arms was attached by only a few threads and he had lost his other eye.
Mary read his mind, “She won’t let go of him long enough for me to sew him up.”
“Bruiser’s fine,” answered Carly grabbing him back, not so gently.
She giggled and then cocked her head looking at her daddy as if something was wrong. “Bruiser wants to know why you’re wearing sunglasses in the house? He says it’s rude.” And then he could see that a mischievous thought was working its way through her head, but before he could figure out what it was, she reached up, grabbed his glasses and pulled them off. Her demeanor changed when she saw the burns and the sores around his eyes. First she let out a half-scream, but then looked away and collected herself.
“Daddy, did someone hurt you?” she asked.
“Yes sweetie, but I’ll be okay.”
She put her head down and said, “I’m sorry, Daddy.”
“What are you sorry for pumpkin?”
“That I was too far away.” She gently reached her little fingers towards his sores as if by lightly touching them she could heal them. Her eyes focused on the wounds and her touch was as gentle as a feather.
Jonathan was paralyzed by her tenderness and sat still absorbing the empathy.
Mary wasn’t quite as understanding.
“Jesus Christ, what did they do to you?” She screamed startling both Carly and Jonathan. She sprang from the couch and pulled Carly off him and then sat on the arm of the recliner and examined his eyes. She was aghast when she saw the blistering effects of the nitrogen on his eyelids and lashes.
Carly started to cry, partly because she was startled, but mostly because she hadn’t finished her procedure.
Mary saw that she was upset, “You need to let Mommy look,” snapped Mary. “Go play with your bear!
Carly stuck out her lower lip and retreated to the kitchen table where she began mumbling something about her mother’s meanness to Bruiser.
“It’s all part of their procedure,” said Jonathan to Mary.
“What, to torture people? You didn’t do anything! Those God Damn Sons of Bitches!”
“Please Mary, the language,” he said rolling his eyes towards Carly.
Mary continued, “Oh my God! I thought this only happened in third world nations. What kind of animals were you working for?”
“Mary calm down,” he answered, glancing again towards Carly as a signal that she might get her upset.
Jonathan continued in a matter-of-fact voice. “Mary, you know all this stuff. It happens everywhere. It’s how they get information. The CIA invented most of the worst techniques.”
“But this is the 21st century in the United States of America! You are a federal employee, a US citizen! Jonathan you worked for those bastards your whole life and this is how they reward you!”
“We all lost our rights after 9/11 with anything regarding terror.”
“But what does that have to do with you? You’re not a terrorist!”
“In this day and age, everyone is guilty, until proven innocent.”
“Look at what they’ve done to you. I’ll tell you who the terrorist is!”
“Mary, don’t talk like that!”
“Jonathan, look in the God Damn mirror and have a good look at what your civilized government has done to you.”
“It’s your government too,” answered Jonathan.
“Unfortunately, you’re right,” said Mary.
“Let me have a closer look.” Mary craned her neck so that she was looking directly into his eyes. “Oh God! Your pupils are completely dilated and the tissue all around your eye is burned! And it looks like there’s some internal bleeding in the cornea. We have to take you to the hospital right now.”
Carly snapped out of her imaginary world and started to cry, “I don’t want Daddy to go to the hospital.”
“It’s okay pumpkin, Daddy’s fine. I can see okay. Mary, you need to settle down, the sores will heal; we have other things that we need to take care of first.”
Carly seemed satisfied with her father’s remark and her young mind had already shifted to a new make-believe game she was playing with Bruiser.
He turned to Mary and whispered, “Mary you have to listen to me. I need to get away from these people; it will be worse the next time.”
“Why would they bother you anymore?” she answered. “They had you and could have done anything they wanted with you.”
“They’re going to wake up to the fact that whatever I do will be interference or a bother to them. They expect me to take a graceful bow out of this and quietly accept my severance. But you know as well as I that there’s no way I can do that. We’ve been through too much.”
Mary sat back and thought about the situation. “Jonathan, I’ll go along with this, under two conditions. First, you include me in everything that you do. That means, take me where you go and let me help you. It’s my war just as much as yours. I want to look into the eyes of the person who killed my baby. And second, that you come clean with me, I mean 100% clean, on everything that you’ve been hiding from me all these years.” She folded her arms and waited for him to acknowledge her deal.
“It’s going to be dangerous.”
“I don’t care…..agreed.”
“Agreed,” answered Jonathan.
“Where do we start?”
“By getting out of here.”
“Do you have a plan, a place
to go?”
“Mary, I have one condition. You need to trust me and not interfere with what I do. I’m trained in this sort of thing, okay?” He waited for her to nod and finally she conceded.
Chapter 2
Mary moved close to Jonathan. “Come sit next to me on the couch.” She put her hand on his knee and lowered her voice so Carly couldn’t hear, “Now that I know what you were doing in there, I mean at the CIA, I have to ask you some questions, you know things that have really been bothering me. And you have just agreed to give me straight answers, right?”
“Go ahead,” answered Jonathan.
“Have you killed people?”
Jonathan was taken aback by the question, but then smiled, remembering a line from the movie True Lies, and replied in his best Austrian accent, “Only bad people.”
“Jonathan, this isn’t funny! I’m going to ask you again, Did you kill people?”
Jonathan shrugged his shoulders and then hesitated before saying, “We did whatever we had to do to defend this country. Listen to me Mary, right now it doesn’t really matter. We’re going to have a lot of time for me to fill in the details.”
“Well, it matters to me! And I need to know. I feel like I never knew you. Jonathan you owe this to me.”
“Okay, go ahead.”
“You didn’t answer my last question, so, I’m taking your refusal to answer me as a yes, I mean that you did kill people. Jonathan, I need to know how you felt afterwards.”
“Mary, will you please let this go.”
“Not until you answer me. I believe that’s the least you can do after all you’ve put me and Carly through. So, I’ll ask you again, how did you feel when you killed someone?”
Jonathan looked deeply bothered by the question but then answered, “Relieved at first, you know, that it was over and I had fulfilled my mission, but horrible after that. It just never seems to leave you.”
“What do you mean?”
“I see them, dream about them, wonder what God is thinking of me, not sure if it will cause eternal damnation, that kind of stuff.”
“Have you ever killed someone who you knew, someone that you loved?”
He hesitated, trying to sense whether she was implying that he had killed Matthew. But he could tell by her focus, she was asking about others who might have died directly by his hand.
“No, fortunately I was never put in that position.”
“Would you have killed them, if they had asked you?”
“I don’t know, Mary. Can we talk about something else?”
“You would, wouldn’t you?”
Jonathan nodded.
“What if they told you to kill me, you know, a direct order, would you do it?”
“Mary, you’re starting to freak me out with these questions. Why would you ask such a thing?”
“But would you? I just want to see how passionate you were for what you believed.”
“I can’t answer that.”
“Just say yes or no.”
“I would say no.”
“I don’t believe you, I think you would.”
“Mary, knock off the hypotheticals, okay? I’m tired and I’ve had a miserable day….can we please talk about something else?”
“I’m curious, would you ask them to have someone else do it, or would you quit the agency and try to save me?”
“Mary, this conversation is going nowhere. The agency would never ask me to kill you, so it’s not fair for you to ask me these questions.”
“I didn’t think the word fair existed in their vocabulary. Was it fair what they did to you, pouring acid or whatever the hell it was in your eyes? Was it fair that they put a clandestine group of agents above my babies? You want to know what I think; I think they could have just as easily asked you to kill me as anyone else. They would just need a reason, and it wouldn’t have to be a good one, just one that served their purposes.”
“I don’t want to talk about this anymore,” said Jonathan.
“And what else did they teach you in there?” asked Mary.
“Mary, you’re not listening to me,” replied Jonathan. “We don’t have time for this. We need to move forward. I’m trying to tell you that we are going to have to escape from the smartest people in this country who have unlimited access to everything we do and more importantly I am going to have to try to find the murderers who killed Matthew.”
“Remember our deal, you’re not doing it without me.”
Jonathan dropped his head into his hands. “You don’t understand Mary; this is going to be extremely dangerous. I’ve been professionally trained with firearms, plastic explosives, sophisticated computer programs, disguises and every other secret procedure that you’ve only seen in the movies, but with me it has been real life. The only difference now is that in this movie people really die. You will just slow me down and make me more vulnerable.”
Mary was hurt by his words. She shook them off, “Then I will slow you down, because you are not going alone! I’ll help! Consider me to be your assistant.”
“Mary, I can’t believe I’m going to say this, but the people on the inside are savages, maybe worse than the terrorists. I’m just hoping that they’re not one and the same.”
Mary was stunned. “You don’t think….”
“I don’t know what to think,” answered Jonathan. “There was someone on the inside, maybe more than one. No one can do the things that happened without access to all of our systems and free access to the building.”
“Do you have any idea who?” asked Mary.
“We’ll put together a list of potentials and go through it.”
“Are you hungry?”
“Starving.”
“Let me fix you something to eat.”
Chapter 3
After dinner, Mary jumped from the table as if a light had gone off inside her head. “By the way you received a package yesterday. She got up and returned with a small box and an exacto knife.”
“Can I open it?” asked Carly
“No, sweetie, Daddy will open it.”
Jonathan picked up the box and looked at it from every angle to see if there was anything suspicious, who had sent it and where it was sent from. It was sent UPS ground from Albuquerque, New Mexico, from a Helicopter company called MSI, from a Mr. Garth Sonnenberg. He had never heard of the company or the man. He got out of his chair and set the box on the dining room table. Mary and Carly sat on either side of him as he sliced through the tape and fumbled through the packing until he came to the first item, six 1 gigobyte memory sticks wrapped together with a couple of strands of Scotch tape. He set them on the table. He continued digging until he found a metal base holding 3 pens, all with the MSI logo on them. He rolled one of the memory sticks around in his hand and then picked up the base to the pen stand and studied it. Carly pulled one of the pens from the base and tried to write with it on a piece of paper.
“Daddy, it doesn’t work.”
“Be careful with that sweetie,” he said taking it away from her.
“Why would someone send you a pen set?” asked Mary.
“It’s not what you think it is. It’s memory, and a whole lot more. It looks like a QX-4.”
“What’s a QX-4?” asked Mary.
“Watch this,” answered Jonathan.
Jonathan handed her the pen that Carly had been playing with. “Look close. It has a hidden camera.” He pulled the other pens from the base and laid them on the table. They all had small tripod extensions that appeared at the flick of a button which allowed them to stand. Each pen had a different function. He positioned them and then flipped a switch in the base of the stand. A green light flickered and then the light from the end of a pen projected against the wall and started the Microsoft professional setup. Another pen projected downward and displayed a keyboard. The third pen had a microphone that extended from its top. “The latest the agency has developed. It’s almost as powerful as the supercomputer they were building at Tech when w
e were there.”
Mary was dazed at the technology and didn’t answer. Finally she mumbled remembering the Virginia Tech crew, “Yeah, you, me, Bob and a whole lot of people, but that was a different generation, a whole different league, it was nothing like this.”
“Cool,” said Carly.” Can I play insane aquarium?”
“What is insane aquarium?”
“It’s an online game she plays all the time,” answered Mary.
“Not just yet sweetie.” He continued to explain to Mary. “It’s all wireless, you can use any keyboard or mouse, once it’s synchronized.” He plugged the memory into the port in the base and projected the directory on the wall. “Holy Crap! It’s all the code for the programs we were working on at Blue Herron and all my hologram programs from the agency. This stuff is a gift from God! Someone seems to know exactly what I was working on and exactly what I need to operate.”
“Who would send you this?” asked Mary.
“There’s someone who knows what’s going on here and is trying to help us and I’m guessing it’s not Garth Sonnenberg.”
Carly interrupted, “Daddy, Bruiser has a tummy ache, he hasn’t been feeling good all day, listen.” She handed her bear over to her father. Playfully, he put the bear’s belly to his ear.
Jonathan’s face flushed. He found a pad and a pencil and wrote. “We’re screwed! And I’m an idiot! They’re listening and watching us.”
Mary shrugged her shoulders as if she didn’t understand.
“Is Bruiser going to be okay?” asked Carly.
“He’s going to be fine. Daddy’s going to fix him. He just needs a very minor operation.”
Carly stuck her thumb in her mouth and watched intently as Jonathan unzipped the back of Bruiser and felt around the stuffing until he retrieved a small silver device that looked like a watch battery and placed it gently on the coffee table.
“Did Bruiser eat that?” asked Carly.
Jonathan smiled and held his finger to his mouth and gave her a gentle shhh and then whispered, “You know bears, they’ll eat about anything.”
Perspectives, An Intriguing Tale of an American Born Terrorist Page 19
