The Emissary

by Patricia Cori

  “I told him you were headed out to the hospital, but I fell asleep early, so I didn’t know where you are—which is the truth. How’s Jamie?”

  “We couldn’t see her. But they say she’s stable—we’ll know more tomorrow. Sam and I just came by for a few brews, chillin’ out.”

  “Please call Mat right away and get him off my back.”

  “No sweat, I’ll call now. What about the crew—where is everybody?”

  “As far as I know, they’re all nice and warm at home. Brady and I are out here, holding guard. There’s a big storm comin’ in.”

  Jimbo hesitated, thinking on his feet, making his game plan as he went along. “All right, here’s what’s doing. I want you to call them little darlins back to the ship, and keep that private. Repeat: private, between us. Got it?”

  “You kiddin’, Captain? They’ll shoot me! What gives?”

  “I don’t have time to explain a whole lot. Just say we have an emergency—tell them the storm’s coming in and I’ve called them back to duty.”

  “How about in the morning?”

  “How about … like, yesterday? I need them on that ship, Bobby. And get that Lady ready to sail.”

  “You want to go back out, in storm conditions? Sorry, sir, forgive me, but how long have you guys been drinking over there?”

  “I won’t take offense to that, Bobbo. But yes, we may have to take her out. This is the real thing—just tell them we’re still in emergency mode.” He looked back at Sam. “Call Doc first.”

  “Got it.”

  “And if Mat calls again, you tell him you conveyed the message. I’m calling him now, as soon as we hang up.”

  “Okay, Captain.”

  Jimbo slipped a tip to the bartender, and then walked past Sam to the pay phone. Faking a drunk, he called Mat’s number. “Hey boss! Word’s out you’re looking for me. What’s up?”

  Mat was dressed now, pacing the room. “What’s up with me? How the hell could you leave me hanging, with everything that’s happened? I thought you were on my team!”

  “Whoa, what are you talking about? Did you get my message?”

  “I got it. Too late.”

  “Too late for what?” Jimbo burped, theatrically, into the phone.

  “Too late to know about it before my boss did. How did that make me look?”

  “Hey, I’ve had a pretty full plate here, but hell—I sent that to you in real time, Mat. Anyway, it’s all okay now. Everything’s under control.”

  “Update me first on Jamie H.”

  “Fortunately, she’s all right. Bad accident, man. She was just hanging off the side of the ship, with all those whales. It was one freak situation. We had about a hundred whales all around us at one point, closed in on the ship.”

  “Right, we can talk about that later. What about Jamie?”

  “We got there too late—no visitors allowed. She’s in the ICU. Strict rules and all that. Liz told Sam that Jamie had been sedated and to come back in the morning, after the doctor makes his rounds. Phew! What a scare. Blood all over the place.”

  “You should have reported back to me.”

  “I’m sorry, boss. I figured you’d read between the lines—I had a whole lot of stuff to deal with. You never called, either. And then well, hell, we’re tired. It’s been a damn rough time out there.”

  “You don’t need to be drinking in the middle of all this, Jimmy.”

  “I beg to differ. I never needed a drink more in my life!”

  “Stop drinking. That’s an order.”

  “You got it, boss. I was just about to go grab a hotel room, get away from everything for the night, and jump into a nice hot shower. I’ll check on Jamie in the morning.” He looked out the window—rain was coming down in buckets. “Hoowee—it is pouring out here.”

  “Don’t worry about Jamie—we’re in direct contact with the hospital. You make sure the ship is safe.”

  So there it was. Mat was definitely in on ‘the lie.’ Whatever doubt Jimbo still clung to was ripped from the bitt. Then Mat said, “Where’s Sam? I imagine his daddy is going to be asking for a status report once he hears about the storm brewing out there.”

  “He’s out looking for Liz. She told him she was going to a hotel for the night, so he went in to town to look for her—in the middle of this crazy storm.” Jimbo put his finger to his lips, signaling Sam not to make himself heard. “They seem to have a hot thing goin’ on, those two—I know it’s against company policy and all but, hell, you can’t really blame the kid. I mean, they sure knew how to pick a pretty young thing out there in London, eh, man?”

  Mat chuckled, relieved that he had nothing to worry about with Jimbo. “Listen, crazy man, lay off the sauce and get your ass back on board. I’ll need you tomorrow morning.”

  “Yes, sir. Does that mean I can’t get laid tonight?”

  “Sorry, Jimbo, it’ll have to wait. And turn that damned phone on!”

  “Will do, once I find it …” He hung up with Mat, but not before grumbling, loud enough for Mat to hear, “Now where in the hell did I put that thing?”

  Mat laughed, feeling the tension roll off him. He decided to go for a quick run and grab a bite to eat in preparation for a sleepless night.

  Jimbo hung up the phone, stunned for a minute. The man he’d served for almost forty years, the man he trusted with his life, was working black ops for the Agency. Jamie was right. It had all been a lie; he was being used. He wondered how far back it went that Mat signed up for the dark agenda. For how long had he been lying about the mission?

  Jimbo walked past a couple of rough-looking, burly fishermen, whom he heard talking about the storm, worried. Jimbo had been so absorbed in thought, he had barely paid attention to the news. They looked up at the TV, over the bar. Breaking news flashed across the screen: CNN was reporting a huge earthquake, right off the coast of San Francisco—9.3 on the Richter scale!

  Jimbo raced over to the table, where Sam was glued to the screen, which read Tsunami warnings are in place for the entire West Coast of North America. “We have got to get out of here,” Jimbo said.

  He downed his beer, then he and Sam bolted for the door. The rain was teeming down around them, like nothing either one of them had ever seen, and they were soaked through in a flash. They heard the crackling sound of lightning, but they couldn’t see any—it sounded more like a hot, sizzling wire. Jimbo looked up to make sure there wasn’t a high-tension wire dangling somewhere, but there was only rain—buckets and buckets of rain. And the sea was rough, and rising. “Holy shit, man,” he said, shivering, “let’s go back inside and call a cab.”

  No sooner had he said the words, than a cab pulled up and they jumped in. Jimbo gave the driver an address and he drove off, through a veritable flash flood, taking pains not to lose control of the car. He pulled up in front of an old apartment building, not that far from the pier. Jimbo handed the driver a twenty-dollar bill and told him to leave the meter running.

  “Hey man, I’m going off duty. I can’t drive on these streets—this is insane.”

  Jimbo pulled out another twenty for the driver. “Ten minutes—don’t leave.”

  Jimbo and Sam got out of the car and ran up to the doorway, the rain coming down in sheets. The lights were out. Jimbo pounded on the door and his part-time girlfriend answered. She had a cigarette in one hand and a candle in the other. A heavyset, sexy-looking woman, she was just what Sam would have imagined would be Jimbo’s type.

  “Well, welcome home, stranger. Nice of you to pop in for a visit before I go floating away in the monsoon.”

  “Hey, baby. This here’s Sam. Sam, Lorna.” They stepped into the dry porch.

  “You are soaking wet, boys! Hang your coats out here and we’ll see what we can do to warm you up. I’ve got a fire burning, but the electricity’s out.”

  They hung up their coats, but still were soaking wet, and cold.

  “We’ve got about ten minutes—and we’re out of here,” Jimbo said, g
ruffly.

  “Yeah, well, come on in and run right back out, why don’t ya’?”

  They walked up close to the fireplace.

  “You heard about the earthquake?” Jimbo asked, rubbing his hands together before the fire.

  “Earthquake? I didn’t feel any earthquake, but I’m cut off here. The whole street is blacked out.”

  “Huge earthquake in San Francisco—tsunami warnings out for the whole coast.”

  “Good lord! That is not good news.”

  Jimbo walked into the next room, like he clearly knew the place. “I need some clean, dry clothes and then I have to go. You know the drill.”

  “I do indeed. Can I get you some hot coffee, Sam?” She had a kettle sitting next to the fire.

  Jimbo poked his head out. “Make that for two, mama, and then get your boots on—you’re going to have to move out.”

  Sam was shivering, sitting in his soaked clothes. The hot coffee felt good. Jimbo came out, bare-chested. “Here you go, man, these ought to fit you all right.” He handed Sam a T-shirt, a heavy sweat suit, and a dry pair of socks.

  “Where can I change?” Sam asked, awkwardly.

  “Don’t you worry about a thing, honey. You’ve got nothin’ I haven’t seen before.” She poured a cup of coffee for Jimbo, and walked into the next room, leaving Sam the privacy to get undressed. When she came back in, she said, “What’s happening this time? It’s always something with that man, I swear to god.”

  Jimbo called out from the other room. “Did you not hear me, woman? There’s a tsunami watch out. Now get your boots on, girl. You’re movin’ out.”

  “And just where am I supposed to go?” she shouted back at him.

  “You’re going to higher ground.” He walked out dressed in slacks and a shirt and tie—not exactly storm gear. Both Lorna and Sam were surprised. He opened a closet in the living room and threw a full-length raincoat across the back of the couch. Then he fumbled around, reaching up to a shelf at the top of the closet, from where he pulled down a shoebox containing two guns and ammunition. He loaded them both and stuck one under his belt; the other he tossed to Sam, who looked horrified.

  “I don’t want to have anything to do with any gun,” Sam said.

  “Let’s hope we don’t need to use them.”

  “I don’t know anything about firing any gun, Jimbo.”

  Lorna was alarmed. “Now wait one minute. What have you gone and gotten yourself into, James?”

  “You know better than to ask questions you don’t want to hear the answers to. Now get yourself dressed up warm and grab what you can, ’cuz you are leaving for higher ground—and we can’t be sure the place will still be here when this is over.”

  Lorna became frazzled. This was no drill. “You can’t just blow in here and blow out with those things, and not tell me what’s happening. I can’t take this shit, Jimmy.”

  He took the keys from the rack, signaling Sam to get up and get ready to go. “I need the car. Now I want you to listen good. There’s a tsunami coming, it’s more than likely. I’ve got a driver out there, waiting for you. Here’s a hundred bucks,” he said, pressing the bill into her hand. “Tell him to drive as far away from shore as possible, as high up as you can climb—into the mountains. You hear me? You need to move fast, girl. He is not gonna wait for you to think it over.”

  “Can’t you take me with you?”

  “It’s too dangerous. You hear? I know what I’m talking about. Now get yourself together and get out. I have to go. We don’t have time to talk it through.” He touched her cheek, tenderness they rarely shared. Something about it scared her, a sense they were parting for the last time—a final goodbye.

  He got into his trench coat. Sam took a dry parka from the coat rack, and off they went, leaving Lorna standing in the middle of the dark room, panicked. She thought about what she could take with her—what mattered most—then grabbed a few framed pictures off the wall and stuffed them into her purse. She poured the coffee on the fire, dowsing the flames, even though there was no way that apartment was going to burn. From the bedroom, she took a few dry clothes from the chest of drawers and stuffed them into a grocery bag, and then she scrambled for her rain boots and coat.

  With no time to figure out what possibly was going to happen next, or where she was going to go when she got to the top of the hill, she ran out from her dark, empty apartment to the taxi, to escape to the mountains inland.

  15

  Rescue

  Jimbo took the wheel. The tumultuous rain crashed down all around them so hard that keeping the car on the road was nearly impossible. He couldn’t even see out the windshield much more than a few feet in front of him. “Why the hell does everything have to happen all at once?” he said, trying to wipe the humidity off the inside of the window. Sam switched on the heater, which, in Lorna’s beat-up old car, was about as helpful as using an eyedropper’s worth of hot water to defrost a freezer.

  He stayed on the main roads, driving as fast as he could, but the floodwaters down by the waterfront were already as high as the car’s fender. Finally, as they climbed out of the area and approached the Psychiatric Facility, the streets were easier to navigate, and he was able to push it. “Let’s hope we’re not too late,” he said, as they drove up to the empty parking lot. He cut the lights as soon as they turned into the driveway, and crawled in, enveloped in the dark rain of the storm.

  Jimbo turned to Sam. He could see the fear in his eyes, but he knew the kid would come through for him. “You’re gonna follow me in, exactly three minutes after I enter that door. Have the gun ready and cover my back. That’s all you have to do.” He reached into the trench coat pocket and pulled out a knitted ski mask. “And wear this—we don’t want your old man or anybody else to know you were anywhere near this thing.”

  Sam took the mask. “What about you?”

  “Don’t you worry about Jimbo—I’m not new to this cloak-and-dagger business.” He pulled the handle of the door to get out. “Three minutes exactly, from the time I open the door. Gun out. Follow my lead.”

  He got out of the car and ran up the walkway to the facility. Sam slipped the mask on, counting down the seconds until he had to get to the door.

  A night nurse and an orderly were watching the news of the earthquake on television. San Francisco was reportedly devastated; reports were just starting to come in from local news stations in the Bay Area. All the waterfront areas were leveled; the financial district and several high-rise buildings were literally wiped off the map. It appeared the anticipated “big one” had at last hit the city. They watched, consumed by the bad news, distracted.

  Jimbo’s entry into the lobby in the middle of the night, without any notice at all, startled them. “Evening, ma’am,” he said, walking up to the counter. “We’ve got a pickup for a patient, Ms. Jamie Hastings.” The water rolled off his coat, forming a puddle at his feet.

  “A pickup at this hour—in this storm? This facility is closed for the night.”

  “Yeah, I hear that—it’s some crazy weather out there—waves washin’ over the piers down at the harbor … some streets flooding down there too.”

  The nurse looked at Jimbo suspiciously. “And you’re out in this weather, trying to transfer a patient at midnight?”

  “Yes ma’am. I don’t ask questions, I just do my job. I have orders to transfer her to Vancouver ICU immediately—something about her test results.”

  “Yeah? You have an order in writing?”

  The nurse picked up the phone. A wall of a man, the orderly stood up, menacingly. Jimbo had no choice but to pull the gun on them, making his moves and writing the script of Jamie’s rescue as he walked through his own movie.

  “That’s not such a good idea. Hang up the phone, ma’am, and you sit right down, big man. No reason anybody has to get hurt here, but I do know how to use this, and I will if I have to … so please. Don’t do anything I’m gonna have to feel bad about later.”

  Sam walked
in on cue.

  Without taking his eyes off the two of them, Jimbo instructed Sam to check the supply room off to the side of the office, and find something to tie them up with. Sam disappeared into the storage room and came out with two straitjackets, which he held up for approval. While Jimbo held the gun steady on them, Sam first tied up the orderly, then the nurse. With the gun pointed right at their heads, they knew better than to resist.

  “I appreciate you being civilized about this all. No reason anybody has to get hurt here tonight. Where is she?”

  “Down the hall, to the right, room 157.”

  “You have staff on duty?”

  “We’re the only ones left for tonight,” the nurse said.

  “Okay, good. We’re going to lock you up in this room in here—you can see how it feels to be in a cage, like these poor people are, for a little while. You make any noise, I will kill you. Push any buttons, do anything to get in my way, and I will kill you. All I want is the woman, so if you have any brains at all, you’ll just sit quiet and let me take care of my business. You got it?”

  They both nodded.

  “You don’t want to be dead for something as simple as that, I’m pretty sure.”

  Sam pushed them into the storage room and locked them in. The surveillance camera system monitors were behind the desk. Jimbo disconnected the system, hoping the nurse had been telling the truth, otherwise they were going to have company. He flipped through the medical charts until he found Jamie’s—that was going to be a big help to Doc. He handed it to Sam. “I’ll be carrying Jamie out. You keep this.”

  They stood back, waiting to see if anyone responded to the system being down, but no one came. Jimbo figured in a storm like the one they were in, nobody would have even questioned it. And then, it was late in the night and the place was empty. They moved stealthily through the main hall, making their way to Jamie’s room as fast as they could.

  There was Jamie, white as a corpse, out cold on the bed. Jimbo almost gasped at the sight of her—he thought she was surely dead by the looks of her, but when he put his fingers to her throat, he got a pulse. It was weak, but she was alive. He detached the saline drip, bundled her up as best he could in the blankets, and swept Jamie’s limp body into his arms and then over his shoulder. Sam ripped the shower curtain off the hooks to help protect her from getting drenched, and then, just as quickly as they had found their way down the dark corridors, they made their way to the exit, with Jamie in tow.