Nike's Wings

by Valerie Douglas

  Even so, she wouldn’t take any chances. She drove and kept driving until she found road signs. City signs. A big city. Her heart lifted.

  Home. Soon.

  A little after noon of the next day she walked toward the American Embassy. The soldiers on guard looked at her in shock and concern. Not surprising considering the blood on her. One hurried over, his hair graying, his face and eyes kind.

  “Can I help you?”

  “My name is Callie Martin,” she said, her voice still rusty with disuse, “I was kidnapped by Ocho Santiago a little more than a year ago...?”

  For the first time she began to believe it might be over.

  She burst into tears.

  In his camp in the jungle Ocho Santiago stood with one of his men before him. Fury did not even begin to describe his rage.

  One, the only one to return.

  Jorge was dead, as was one of the others, as a result of a shootout while trying to escape the Senator’s guards and the policia. Another had been caught. Caught! The rest had disappeared.

  And Jorge, one of his best lieutenants, was dead.

  Killed by the little chica, by the gringo girl. All this time she’d been fooling him. He’d underestimated her.

  Someday she would pay for this. There were those who would know, who would learn of this humiliation and they would laugh at him. She would be punished for this.

  Somehow, someday, he would find her again and she would pay.

  If he ever saw her again, he would kill her, but she would be a long time dying. A very long time.

  Chapter Six

  It was dark and Ty’s unit was taking their places around the house. Shaking his head he went over the information one more time, frowning. It didn’t make sense and it didn’t add up. The man was a pediatrician, by all accounts a good one. His only fault seemed to be a bad choice in charities, although he also donated to the Red Crescent - the equivalent of the Red Cross in Muslim countries.

  The man had a tangential relationship to people with contacts in groups the U.S. government designated terrorist organizations. Some of those groups were peace organizations. Some just claimed to be. The man’s name was similar to that of a known terrorist, but there was no proof he was the man in question. His wasn’t an uncommon name in this part of the world.

  Ty didn’t like it. He didn’t have a good feeling about any of it. The evidence they had was hardly good enough evidence for habeas corpus in the U.S.

  He looked at Buck, who shrugged helplessly.

  He knew Buck didn’t feel quite the same way about it as he did. Buck’s Texas upbringing tended more toward the shoot first and ask questions later mindset. Ty could see that even Buck was uncomfortable.

  “Not your call, Connor,” one if the agents said to him softly. “You found him. It’s up to us now. We’ll find out the truth.”

  “And how will you do that?” Ty asked, knowing what he’d heard through the grapevine.

  Secret bases. Torture. The debate as to what actually constituted torture was still on-going among the intelligence community, to Ty’s astonishment.

  The agent looked at him steadily. “It’s probably better if you don’t know.”

  Above them, the sky grew lighter and it became easier for Ty to see faces.

  They’d decided this was the optimal time and location to take the man down with the fewest number of witnesses around to ask questions. An idea that bothered him as well.

  The good doctor had rounds at the hospital at six AM. Few people would be awake at that hour.

  Unsuspecting, the man stepped out of the door of his home while his wife stood at the door watching, and then he walked toward his car.

  The door to the house closed.

  No sooner had the door closed than everyone was in motion, surrounding the man and taking him down.

  From inside the house they heard a cry, far too late, as a child or the wife looked out the window to see the man go down.

  The doctor barely had time enough to cry out. Weapons were pressed again his head as he was pinned to the ground and bound. He was hustled into a waiting vehicle. They were gone even as the wife ran out the front door, screaming her husband’s name.

  Watching from the tarmac of a secluded part of the airport with Buck at his side, Ty stood by as they bundled the man onto a plane and the plane took off. It didn’t turn east, toward the U.S. It turned north.

  No one would tell him where they were taking the man. The only thing that Ty was certain of was that it wasn’t the U.S. Not yet at least.

  He’d heard stories; stories that made his gut churn.

  Extraordinary renditions, they called them. Renditions had been done as early as the Reagan era, to kidnap known terrorists for trial. Clinton had made it law, but it had taken the current administration to take it to a new level. Kidnapping those suspected of terrorism, without trial, with only the thinnest of evidence, and torturing them for information.

  Ty had gone to college shooting for a law degree with a minor in international affairs. Even so he hadn’t quite known where he was going when the CIA had recruited him. At the time it had seemed exciting and for a while he’d felt he was doing something useful. Going into the covert side had fed his sense of adventure, but he’d started out in law. As an agent of the U.S. government, he’d sworn to uphold and defend the Constitution, a document he knew by heart.

  He’d wanted to do something that mattered, something that made a difference. For a while, it had.

  So much of this just seemed wrong, though. He wanted to defend his country, but this wasn’t the way to do it. It seemed as if everyone was panicking. Individual freedoms were eroding. What was it Franklin said? That those willing to give up rights to gain security found neither?

  The Constitution was supposed to be an example to the rest of the world of the way a nation should be run. This wasn’t the kind of example he wanted to set. Was this how he wanted the rest of the world to see his country? Kidnapping a man from his home under cover of darkness, hustling him into a vehicle with little evidence against him to take him who knew where with no hearing, no trial? He couldn’t support this.

  But he had, whether he liked it or not.

  It was the last assignment like this he would take, though. Next time he wanted something with more meat on it, a more demonstrable threat to his nation. Guilt nagged at him.

  Worse, that it had happened today.

  Maybe that was it. That was what ate at him.

  A lot had happened in a year. So much had changed. Not all of it had been good.

  “Ty,” Buck said, quietly.

  He looked at his friend. “We couldn’t have tried him in a court of law with the evidence we had.”

  “There must be something they know that we don’t, good buddy,” Buck said, clapping him on the shoulder, clearly wanting to believe it himself.

  Shaking his head slowly, Ty said, “I don’t think so, Buck.”

  It was too much of a piece with everything else they were doing and had been doing since 9/11 and the invasion of Afghanistan. And now they were talking about Iraq. There were rumors in the intelligence community of the questionable grounds used to support a move into Iraq and increasing evidence that much of it was bogus.

  The US media was shockingly silent about all of it, but then, those who did were accused of being unpatriotic, and endangering national security, as so many were during the drumbeat march up to invading Iraq. That’s where it all seemed to be heading.

  So much so that one small tragedy disappeared amid the confusion and noise.

  He sighed.

  It was done. He couldn’t undo it, any of it, however much he wished he could now.

  “Let’s go,” he said.

  “Come on,” Buck said, “I’ll buy you a drink.”

  Ty nodded, letting Buck drive.

  It was later that night, much later, before Ty stretched out in his hotel room, such as it was.

  He’d brought a chair up by the o
pen French doors. Now he sat in it, tilted back with his foot against the iron railing and spread the picture from his wallet out on his knee. There was just enough light to see. He ran his fingers over it.

  Her mother had started an anti-kidnapping protest group, bringing to light the incestuous relationship between drugs, kidnapping, the oil companies and some insurance agencies.

  Taking a breath, he tossed back the glass of scotch, neat, and looked out onto the gathering night.

  A year. One year. Pretty green eyes haunted him.

  Chapter Seven

  The hospital seemed alien and strange, too white, too sterile. It all seemed vaguely unreal. Cool cotton sheets covered the bed instead of plain, rough wool blankets. The sunlight was too bright after the thick filtered shade of the jungle. Callie kept raising her hand to block it. Every time someone touched her, she flinched. Even the English language sounded strange, confusing. She kept answering in Spanish, then correcting herself. Her own voice, so rarely used, sounded harsh and peculiar to her ears. It echoed off the walls.

  It was all so confusing.

  Looking in the mirror, she didn’t recognize herself now that she was clean again. Really clean again.

  The itching she’d grown accustomed to was gone. As were the blonde highlights in her hair that she’d added so long ago, and yet the strands still looked lighter against her tanned skin.

  The weight she’d lost had thinned her face a lot, down to bone. In the mirror, her eyes were watchful, wary, even to herself.

  Then there were the scars.

  Not on her face… Well, there was the thin scar of a split in her lip and the little bump in her nose thanks to Jorge…but everywhere else? From her training, from Santiago’s punishments and from fighting the rebels off. She looked at them in the mirror, craned her neck to see what they’d done to her.

  It was hard to look at those scars.

  They marked her. Branded her. Her back was a hash-work of scars from Santiago’s whippings.

  How would she go to the beach? Wear a backless dress? People would stare.

  People confused her, too.

  She didn’t know how to act around them - normal people - anymore. What did she tell them? She didn’t know.

  Her family didn’t know she’d survived. Not yet. Once she’d gotten a good look in the mirror, once she’d realized how different she was from the Callie they’d known, she’d asked that they not be told. Not yet. Not until she knew what to tell them. How to tell them.

  Officially, she’d been declared dead. Her family still thought she was. There would be questions, the inevitable questions. How could she possibly explain? How could she tell her family what she’d been through, what she’d done to survive…to escape?

  A part of her flinched at the memory of the sound of a gun going off, and the expression in Jorge’s eyes as he died.

  The doctors had run a thousand tests, treated her for parasites, for foreign diseases. Then the psychologists had taken their turn. No one understood. She couldn’t explain. She couldn’t make them understand.

  Now that she was free, though, she couldn’t find it in her to care.

  Escaping had been all she’d thought of for almost a year, longer…escaping, being free. She hadn’t thought beyond that.

  Now that she was, she suddenly didn’t know what to do next, what to feel.

  For that matter, she couldn’t seem to feel anything. She was numb, blank.

  Except for occasional spurts of anger, rage…and beneath them, the ever-present fear that had been her constant companion for most of the past year. Emotions she’d needed to survive, to keep going.

  The nurses tiptoed around her. Guards were stationed at her door after one of the nurses had startled her awake and she’d lunged for the woman before she realized where she was. If she could’ve cried, she would have, but it was almost as if she’d forgotten how.

  No one seemed to know what to do with her. Not even her. All she felt was lost. Alone.

  No one understood.

  She closed up the hospital gown and went to the window. After so long in the jungle, the world seemed strange. It was too regimented, with the neat boxes of streets. Too white, too bright, and too open, despite all the trees. There should have been more color… There were no umbers, no taupes, no terra cotta. And not enough green. As green as Virginia was, it wasn’t green enough for her. She felt exposed here, vulnerable. There was no cover.

  Behind her, she heard a knock and the door opened.

  Turning, she frowned. She didn’t know either of the men who entered.

  More doctors? More psychiatrists?

  “Hello,” the first man said. “My name is Evan Halstead.”

  Somewhat tall, with thinning brownish hair and sad hazel eyes, he wasn’t unattractive, although he had a hangdog face. His mouth was thin and tended to droop down more than up. His shoulders were the same.

  At the sight of him, she thought of something her mother used to say. Don’t make that face, or it’ll freeze that way.

  He held his hand out to her. She took it. It was warm and dry, strong.

  Shaking hands wasn’t something she’d done much of until now. It felt odd.

  “This is Victor Torrance.”

  Torrance was slightly taller than she was, balding and stocky, with a round face marked only by a thin moustache that reminded her vaguely of Hitler.

  His handshake was damp, slightly cool, like picking up a frog.

  Both of them displayed identification.

  “We’re with the C.I.A. If you feel up to it, we’d like to debrief you on what happened with Ocho Santiago. We wanted to wait until you were healthy enough to talk about it.”

  “The doctors think it might help,” Victor Torrance added.

  Uncertain, she looked at them.

  Evan Halstead moved to stand beside her at the window.

  Uncomfortable, trapped between them, Callie retreated warily to the safety of the bed, with the call button for the nurses close at hand.

  She knew she could kill either one of them or both of them and safely escape, but that was a different place, a different time, and she understood that.

  Even so, she was poised for the eventuality.

  She looked at Victor Torrance, warningly. He was too close.

  With an incline of his head, he backed off, a small smile curving his mouth. She wasn’t certain she liked that.

  Evan Halstead stood at the window, facing out into the bright sunshine, to look over the hospital complex and the tract housing beyond it.

  Neither man was truly much of a threat to her as neither bore weapons, whereas she had a dozen likely objects around the room she could use. She wasn’t frightened, precisely, just cautious. She didn’t want them to tie her down or drug her again.

  “It’s all right,” Torrance said, quietly, raising his hands to show he was no threat, giving Evan Halstead a significant look. “We just want to talk - we just want to help. What harm can it do?”

  “We might be able to help you figure out what to do next,” Evan Halstead said. “If nothing else, it might just help to talk.”

  She looked from one to the other and let out a sigh. She just wanted them to go away, but knew they wouldn’t.

  “What do you want to know?” she asked.

  Evan shrugged. “Start from the beginning. You don’t mind if we record this?”

  So many others had asked the same questions over and over again.

  With a shake of her head, Callie said, “No.”

  She started at the beginning, but she kept her secrets carefully. Those things she hadn’t shared with anyone. Memories… Places no one would touch inside her. Ever.

  With all their questions, with all the stops and starts, they’d barely scratched the surface by the time they left, but at least she could talk about it, not keep it bottled up inside her.

  The nightmare crept into her sleep.

  She was back in Santiago’s camp, trapped in the space below th
e floorboards. A part of her punishment for defying him. The space was so small and tight she could barely move, barely breathe. Dust filtered down to choke her every time someone walked across the floor.

  She awakened, screaming.

  They sedated her.

  It was hard to hide how embarrassed she was when Evan Halstead and Victor Torrance arrived to find her tied to the bed. She wanted to crawl into a hole, not that she showed it. She wanted to cry, but she buried that even deeper. Emotions were dangerous.

  Angrily, Torrance took one look, then turned and went out the door as Evan came to the bed and released her, threading the belts free of the cuffs.

  With an effort, Callie pushed back the tears, as Santiago’s voice whispered softly in the back of her mind. ‘Never let them see weakness, Chica. Emotion is weakness.’

  She looked out the window instead.

  The next morning she was moved to another facility not far away.

  It was a relief to escape the constantly watching eyes.

  Her new quarters weren’t much of a change from the hospital. The walls were cinderblock with a narrow cot or bunk attached to one. Like a prison. Nothing personal. The floor was cement. Everything was painted stark white.

  “You’re a smart girl,” Evan said. “You know it will take months, maybe even years, to recover from what was done to you. If you ever do.”

  She nodded at his comment.

  It wasn’t the physical damage he was talking about, she knew, although there had been a lot of that and she had the scars to prove it, as a reminder. It was the psychological, the emotional, damage she’d suffered.

  She was different now, something essential inside her had changed. It wasn’t simply innocence lost. She didn’t know who Callie Martin was any more.

  The girl who’d been going off to Princeton didn’t exist.

  Turning, Torrance looked at her with all apparent honesty.

  “You know you’ve changed. You’re not like other people. You’re not ‘normal’ as most people would define it,” he said, bluntly, “not any longer.”