Need You Now

by James Grippando

  B arber’s mind was on anything but charity, but he was stuck hosting a table for ten at a black-tie gala for yet another organization that had conferred “philanthropist of the year” honors on his wife and his checkbook. Vanessa lived for these events, and it annoyed her to no end when he checked his BlackBerry in the middle of one of her stories. But he might well blow his brains out if, yet again, he had to hear about Todd, “the world’s most fabiola-amazing decorator,” who had raced across Midtown, loaded up Vanessa’s Range Rover, and rescued $11,000 worth of ice sculptures that had been mistakenly delivered to the Waldorf instead of the Pierre.

  Barber froze. Finally, the message he’d been waiting for: “Mr. W. will take your call now.” It was from the office of the national security advisor. He rose quickly, angry for many reasons, not the least of which was the fact that an intellectual inferior like Brett Woods had the power to make him jump.

  “Excuse me, everyone,” he said to his table guests, loud enough to be heard over a twenty-piece band that was playing Gershwin.

  Vanessa shot him a death ray. She hadn’t even gotten to the part where a sudden stop on Fifth Avenue had broken a swan’s neck, but “clever Todd” had just told everyone it was a stuffed turkey.

  “My apologies, but this may take a while,” said Barber.

  “The White House calling again, Joe?” his tennis buddy asked with a smile.

  Barber forced a little laughter. “No, those days are over.”

  “Please hurry back,” his wife said flatly.

  Barber walked quickly through the ballroom, weaving between banquet tables, avoiding eye contact with anyone who might grab him by the sleeve and corner him for a networking opportunity. He exited to the hotel’s mezzanine level, at the end of a long row of carved oak doors, leaving the buzz of the band and the crowd behind him. A staff member directed him down the hall to a vacant room, where he could make a call in private. It was a cozy, windowless business suite with a conference table, a fireplace, and a brass chandelier. He tipped her a twenty, closed the door, and dialed Brett Woods.

  “I’ve been trying to reach you for three hours,” said Barber. “Did they not tell you it was urgent?”

  “I was in a meeting with Clark,” he said, meaning the CIA director. “More trouble with Operation BAQ. The collateral damage is much broader than we thought.”

  The innocent investors were collateral damage. “I thought all of Cushman’s investors had been accounted for.”

  “Different kind of collateral damage. It seems that our intelligence on the terrorist connections of some of our targets was faulty.”

  “Meaning what?”

  “A number of the ‘suspected’ terrorist funders that were pulled into the Ponzi scheme had nothing to do with terrorism.”

  Barber leaned against the marble mantel, not quite believing his ears. “The whole justification for Operation Bankrupt al-Qaeda was that these investors were financing terrorism. Are you telling me that we targeted a bunch of rich Arabs with no terrorist connections?”

  “To some extent, yes.”

  “Damn it! I should never have listened to you in the first place. I conceived this as a Treasury operation-but, noooo , you had to bring in the CIA. Thanks to your stroke of genius, we have a rogue CIA agent named Mongoose putting the screws to us. And now, to top it all off, you’re telling me that the CIA didn’t even have the intelligence right.”

  “I didn’t say none of the investors had links to terrorism. But it now appears that many were, well, like I said: collateral damage.”

  “You assured me that the CIA had nailed down the terrorist-financing connection. I would never have given the green light otherwise.”

  “That’s bullshit, Joe. Now that we got bin Laden, everybody wants to forget how desperate the administration was to strike a deathblow against al-Qaeda.”

  “I wasn’t desperate. I wanted to get this right.”

  “You knew this was an ambiguous situation. That’s the reason I recommended that we go to the CIA instead of the Justice Department. Justice couldn’t simply freeze their accounts under the Patriot Act-we suspected they were terrorist financers, but we couldn’t prove it.”

  Barber took a seat at the conference table, nearly collapsing into the leather chair. “The fallout from this will be unbelievable.”

  “Only if it gets out,” said Woods.

  “That’s why my call was so urgent. Mandretti is on his deathbed. He summoned his son because he has something to tell him.”

  “He might just want to say good-bye.”

  “Or he wants to be at peace before he dies. My guess is that his son will come out of the meeting believing the same BS that his father believes-that the government forced him to confess.”

  “Is Mandretti’s son with him now?”

  “They’re in the hospital room together, but my sources tell me that Mandretti is not conscious.”

  “What are the chances that he will regain consciousness?”

  “I don’t know. But I don’t want to take the risk.”

  Woods did not respond, and Barber sensed the need to address his apparent reservations. “Don’t get sanctimonious on me, Brett. We’re talking about a little acceleration for a terminally ill man who has a matter of hours to live. A man who, by the way, is clearly talking out of school about his role in Operation BAQ.”

  “What are you proposing?”

  “I’ve already sent Mongoose.”

  “What do you mean you sent him? You can’t send a rogue agent to do anything.”

  “I had no choice. If he thinks we’re taking out Mandretti without his involvement, he’ll smell a rat. I’m living under a standing threat from Mongoose: If I double-cross him, the decrypted version of my memorandum outlining Operation BAQ will go viral over the Internet.”

  “You said taking Evan Hunt’s computer would eliminate that threat.”

  “I said reduce, not eliminate.”

  “A civilian casualty is a high price to pay for threat reduction.”

  “Nobody expected a ninety-eight-pound weakling to fight to the death over his computer.”

  Woods was silent, but an aura of acquiescence came over the phone. “Where is Mongoose now?”

  “In Boston, one block away from the hospital,” said Barber. “Got him there by helicopter but had to put him on hold. I need you to pull a few strings to get him inside the room.”

  “What’s the plan?”

  “Mandretti is receiving a variety of potent medications intravenously. Mongoose will simply make an adjustment to the IV, and Mandretti won’t be talking.”

  Woods considered it. “You said the son is there. Can you trust Mongoose to confine his mission to the old man?”

  Barber didn’t respond right away. “That’s impossible for me to answer.”

  “I want to know what you think.”

  “Here’s what I think,” said Barber. “If Mandretti wakes up and talks to his son, I can guarantee you that Mongoose won’t confine his mission to the old man. Mongoose wants his money.”

  Woods seemed to appreciate the conundrum. “All right. Let me make a phone call.”

  “Call me right back.”

  “Yeah,” said Woods. “Give me five minutes.”

  56

  I couldn’t believe I was in the same room with my father.

  I’d been standing at his bed rail for several minutes, unable to move, watching him sleep. I wasn’t sure what to do.

  Do I lean over and give him a kiss?

  Do I touch his hand?

  Do I even know him anymore?

  The room was quiet and dimly lit. It felt more like a hospice than a hospital, which had made the first thirty seconds even more painful. The last time I’d seen him, my father had been a handsome man in his prime. The image of him sharply dressed, not a hair out of place, ready to take my mother out on a Saturday night was firm in my memory. Even after I’d learned he was sick, my mind had never allowed me to conjure up what my
father would look like when he was dead. Now, it wasn’t much of a stretch to picture someone pulling the sheet up over his face.

  That initial shock faded sooner than I would have guessed. I began to see little signs that reminded me of how full of life he’d once been. I laid my hand on his head, covering the baldness from his treatment, imagining him with jet black hair. That alone helped. I smiled at the sight of the scar that was still on his forehead. It had happened during our reenactment of the seventh game of the World Series. Connie had been at the plate. I was pitching. Dad was the unlucky catcher who’d learned the hard way that Connie threw her bat.

  “Any signs of coming around?” asked Dr. Kern as she entered the room.

  “Still sleeping,” I said.

  “You can try to wake him, if you like. But as I said, he’s likely to be quite confused if you do.”

  “I’ll wait,” I said. “This quiet time is giving me a chance to adjust.”

  She went to the IV. “Let me just shut this thing off. I had him down to twenty-five milligrams, but that doesn’t seem to be doing the trick.”

  “I don’t want him to wake up in pain,” I said.

  “He can’t get more than six hundred milligrams every twenty-four hours anyway. We’re there.” She walked around to the side of the bed and made the adjustment.

  “If there’s anything you need, let me know.”

  I thanked her, and she left the room. Then I looked at my father, reached through the railing, and touched his hand. His breathing was steady, but quiet.

  “If there’s anything you need, let me know,” I said.

  57

  T he whirring blades of a Sikorsky S-76B blew puffs of snow across the heliport as the BOS corporate helicopter touched down in Boston. Touchdown was delayed more than thirty minutes due to weather. Mongoose hurried into the terminal and retrieved a detailed voice mail message from Barber. It laid out the plan.

  As instructed, Mongoose took a taxi to Lemuel Shattuck Hospital and went to the food court on the ground floor, an enclosed mall-like area that was completely separate from the prison unit. He sat away from the crowd, alone at a table outside a sandwich shop that had already closed for the evening. From there, it was a classic case of “hurry up and wait.” The package arrived twenty minutes later. The courier didn’t introduce himself, but Mongoose recognized an operator from a private military firm when he saw one. He’d dealt with dozens of them when he was with the CIA. He assumed that Barber had hired the same private firm to pay Evan Hunt a visit while Mongoose was in Ciudad del Este; Hunt’s job had “contract” written all over it. Mongoose took the package, no questions asked, and went into the men’s room.

  Three minutes later, he emerged wearing hospital scrubs and a photo-identification badge that bore the name Henry Bozan, Nurse Anesthetist.

  A nurse? Really?

  As he passed a doughnut shop, he checked his reflection in the plate glass window. He hadn’t liked the plan from the beginning but, seeing himself in nursing scrubs, he really didn’t like it.

  You are a disgraceful waste of talent.

  Those words, buried in his memory, were suddenly burning in his brain. It was the blunt answer he’d gotten after confronting his platoon leader and demanding to know why he wasn’t recommended for advancement to SEAL Team Six, the elite of the elite. Raw talent had never been an issue. He’d been one of many incredible young athletes, all former high-school and college stars in their own right, who’d entered basic underwater demolition/SEAL training in California. Six months of intense training-everything from two-mile ocean swims and “drown proofing” in frigid water to four-mile timed runs in soft sand and mountain endurance runs wearing forty-pound rucksacks-had whittled down the field of 250 candidates. Mongoose had emerged as one of nineteen who’d actually finished. But his platoon leader had never liked him-or maybe he’d just seen through him. It was often said that men who survived the rigors of training to become SEALs possessed much more than physical strength. Under any adversity, even in unbearable pain, they had the depth of character to put aside their own pain and fear to help a struggling buddy. There were always one or two who lacked that commitment to higher purpose, a few who managed to beat the odds in service of their own ego. A SEAL, however, was no tenured professor. The bad fits were inevitably rerouted, forced to stand aside as their former platoon performed “kill or capture” missions in the “sea, air, and land” war on terrorism, from the elimination of Iranian-trained snipers at the bottom of the pyramid to the takeout of bin Laden at the top. For Mongoose, the bitter irony was that his reroute to the Treasury Department’s financial war on terrorism had led him to the end of the road-a bullet to his spine, disabled by chronic pain.

  He was the expendable pawn in Joe Barber’s Operation BAQ.

  “Excuse me, which way is the nurses’ lounge?”

  Mongoose turned to see a blue-haired senior citizen staring at him, a hospital volunteer.

  “Hell if I know, lady.”

  He continued around the corner and found an alcove beyond the elevators. Barber’s voice mail message had told him not to call, but he didn’t care. He dialed the private number.

  “I’m not in a place where I can talk,” Barber said.

  Mongoose heard the crowd noise in the background, could even hear a band playing “Stardust.” “You’ve got two minutes to call me back,” he said, then put away his phone and waited.

  Two minutes more to consider his place in history. Rare indeed was the former SEAL and CIA agent who murdered civilians and turned against his own government. Some might put him in the category of Jeffrey MacDonald, the Green Beret who butchered his two daughters, ages five and two, after stabbing his pregnant wife thirty-seven times. Others would equate him with Robert Hanssen, the FBI counterintelligence agent who acted as a paid spy for the Soviet Union and Russia for two decades, telling the FBI after he was caught that his only motivation was the money. Mongoose saw himself as neither. It wasn’t really about the money. He hadn’t snapped under pressure. He was making idiots like Joe Barber pay for their arrogance, their narrow-mindedness, their sweeping definition of “collateral damage.”

  Some might even say he was a patriot.

  Mongoose checked the time, and his phone rang. Barber was back on the line with ten seconds to spare on his deadline.

  Mongoose pulled no punches. “I’m not going in as a nurse, completely unarmed. If I go in as a corrections officer I can at least pack a sidearm.”

  “It’s too risky to involve the Department of Corrections,” said Barber. “This way we need no one’s approval, no one’s cooperation to get you in.”

  “Are you saying that I’m going in without anyone from corrections knowing anything about this?”

  “Correct. Our techies have already hacked into the prison-unit records to add Henry Bozan to the list of approved practitioners on the pain-management team. You’ll sail through security check-in.”

  A naked undercover mission. That made things more interesting. “You could have at least made me a physician.”

  “Going in as a nurse anesthetist gives you another layer of protection. If anyone questions what you’re doing, tell them that you’re following the directions of the anesthesiologist in charge of the team. The only treating physician in the prison unit right now is a general practitioner named Alice Kern. If she has a problem with anything you’re doing, she’ll have to follow up with the anesthesiologist. You can be in and out of there by the time she gets any answers.”

  This discussion was making him all the more aware of his own chronic condition, the pain that never stopped running down the back of his leg. “All right. I’ve seen enough pain-management specialists to pull this off.”

  “Not that this is a complicated assignment. You go straight to room eight thirty-four and check on the patient. The prison unit typically uses Demerol in an IV to manage pain for cancer patients. The maximum dosage for someone his size is one hundred milligrams every two hours.
Whatever he’s getting, adjust the drip to one hundred every hour. Leave before his breathing begins to slow. By the time you’re outside the building, the patient will be in fatal cardiac arrest.”

  “What if Mandretti’s son is still in the room?”

  “It doesn’t matter. He doesn’t know who you are or what you look like. He has no reason to believe that you’re not simply there doing your job.”

  “I still don’t like going in unarmed.”

  “You can’t adjust the IV dressed as a corrections officer. If someone were to walk into the room, or if a security camera were to pick up a corrections officer messing with medication, the only way out would be a gunfight. It’s much cleaner this way. And it’s too damn late in the game to change plans.”

  Mongoose couldn’t argue, but he was naturally suspicious. “Fine,” he said, “but remember what I told you. If I don’t come out of that hospital alive-”

  “My memo goes viral. I understand.”

  “Be sure you do,” said Mongoose.

  He ended the call and crossed the food court, following the signs marked A UTHORIZED P ERSONNEL O NLY on his way toward the prison unit.

  58

  I couldn’t stop talking. I was leaning on the bed rail, my father’s hand in mine, telling him stories.

  The minutes had passed too slowly in silence, and I’d suddenly felt the need to tell him everything I’d been doing for the past fifteen years. The stories kept coming, evaporating the gloom, and it didn’t matter that he couldn’t hear me. Maybe he could, on some level. I wondered how deep and restful his sleep actually was. My poor mother had married a man who snored like a grizzly bear. This was clearly drug-induced sleep, something altogether different. Quiet. Quiet awareness, maybe. Who knew?

  I was telling him about my graduation from college when the door opened.

  “Hello, I’m from the pain-management team.”

  The man didn’t introduce himself as a physician, but he acted like one. Even after introducing myself, I still didn’t get his name. He walked around to the other side of the bed and checked the monitors. If Dr. Kern was a model of bedside manner, he was more in line with my preconceived notion of prison-unit health care.