by JJ Aughe
Having explained her reasoning, Agent Winfrey continued with the orientation. “The window and door sensors, though they are very sensitive, will only pick up abnormal vibrations, not conversations. As for the common rooms and hall, except for the communal restroom, there is one difference. Though I generally keep them turned off, there is a microphone and speaker in one corner of each room. It is a safety feature that I, or the duty person at the time, can use to communicate with anyone in those rooms if there is ever a need. I want to warn you of one thing, though. The cameras in every room are set to go to infrared night-vision mode any time there is insufficient light in a room. So I would advise you to always be properly dressed before you go from one room to another.”
“Now,” she said as she pulled two sets of photos from a pigeonhole of her desk and handed each a set. “Since you will be here for an indeterminate time you will need to know who the security personnel are. Other than myself,” she continued, indicating to each photo in turn, “these four men, Mace Strickland, Calder Bealour, who prefers to be called Cal, Willis Allen and Tom Tailor are the only other security personnel. Carefully study these photos so you will recognize these men as they rotate through on their rounds. Their quarters, and mine, are located in the basement. Here, I should also add that because the five of us live here permanently it is standing policy that our quarters are off-limits to ‘guests’.”
“Another policy, she continued, “you should be aware of is that unless someone volunteers to prepare a meal for everyone, everybody fixes their own. As for your own meals, the refrigerator and freezer are well stocked. In the pantry situated between them you will find a variety of canned fruits, veggies and an assortment of boxed and packaged staples.” Giving them each a sympathetic glance, she rapidly finished. “For your entertainment there is an assortment of DVD’s in the cabinet by the television. If you are into reading there are also a variety of recent best-seller novels and various other books and current issue magazines for your enjoyment.”
“I guess that is about everything. So if you don’t have any questions, I need to get back to the monitors.”
Chapter 8: Haunting Sins
The horrific events of the day heavy on her mind Jessie went to her room to be alone with her thoughts. As she took her shower she reflected on her feelings for Bailey. Just how, she asked herself, could this happen? I am totally in love with a man I have known for less than a month!
In my supposedly so perfect world I have never felt this way about any man. I know I have been attracted to a few men but I always soon discovered that, just like Gerald, each had ulterior motives for dating me. It always seemed the men I would be attracted to had one thing foremost in their minds. My body! Then, of course, there was my money and the power my position in the business world would give them.
But Bailey? He is an altogether different story! There has been none of the underlying thoughts in my mind that he might be conning me, trying to further his own purposes. No. What has happened between us has been so sudden, so spontaneous! So profound and so, so magical!
Jessie’s thoughts continued as she toweled off and dressed in the outfits that Dennis had told her were in her room. I am positive Bailey sincerely cares for me, not my body, my position, status or my money! His reaction at the lake when I ran to him after the bomb exploded proved he cares for me. He couldn’t have been acting a part when he kissed me! That had been real! And the excitement I felt by that first, world-altering kiss was euphoric! The wonderful sensations I felt throughout my body when he crushed me to his solid chest and kissed me was a feeling I have never in my life felt or even thought existed. And nothing has been the same since.
Jessie felt renewed after her shower and a change of clothes. The evening news was on TV as she entered the living room but Bailey immediately muted the sound, stood and crossed the room to her. Taking her softly into his arms he lightly brushed a kiss across her lips. “Miss me?” she smiled against his lips.
In response, he deepened the kiss. “Jessie. Jessie,” he breathed as he lovingly wrapped his arms around her, absolutely melding her body to his. Moving his head back he looked her square in the eyes. “Do you remember what I told Dennis about marrying you? I was serious, Jessie. I am not sure how it happened, but I love you more than I thought I would ever love anyone. When this is over, if you are still willing, I am going to marry you. I can’t see a life without you.”
Was there something he wasn’t saying? Pulling back in his arms, Jessie searched his eyes. “I love you too, Bailey. But I can’t help but feel you’re not telling me something. I hear it in your voice. See it in your manner. It is something important too. What is it?”
Without saying anything Bailey released her, backed away, took her hand and led her to the couch. When they were seated close together he kissed her again, this time with more vigor and possessiveness.
“I love you, Jessie,” he again declared as he broke the kiss. Then he kissed her again, lightly this time. Leaning back, he rested his head against the back of the couch. He knew he had to tell her about his past. He couldn’t keep his secret from her any longer. But how would she respond? Would she be repelled? Did she love him enough that she would understand? Well, he resolved. There is only one way to find out.
Before he could turn back to her Jessie grabbed him by both shoulders, turned him so he faced her and pulled him close. “Bailey,” she demanded, her lips within inches of his. “I know there is something eating at you! I can see it in your eyes and your expression! Please tell me what it is!”
Resigned to seeing repulsion and rejection in the eyes of the only woman he had ever loved, he shook her hands from his shoulders, quickly standing. Pacing back and forth in front of her he began to relate the devastating events that ended his military career.
After Burney had been captured, tortured for days and brutally murdered, Bailey couldn’t climb back into the cockpit without reliving the events of those horrible days. He began to dread being in the air and possibly having to go through something similar ever again. His fellow pilots noticed his reluctance to fly and, though they realized he was going through a terrible time, few wanted to fly with him as their wingman. Bailey realized the other pilot’s feelings toward him but, for weeks, wrapped up in his own grief and despair, he didn’t care. Until one afternoon while on a search and destroy mission he again had a flash back to that fateful day and almost caused a mid-air collision with his wingman’s plane. That near collision woke him up to the fact that he was putting the other pilots at risk. As soon as he landed he went straight to his commander, explained what was happening every time he went into the air and asked to be reassigned. Since his tour of duty was ending in a few weeks, instead of transferring Bailey, his commander understood and made arrangements for Bailey’s early, honorable discharge from the Navy.
Driven by a sense of duty to his dead friend, Bailey was determined to find some way to avenge Burney’s death. He soon got his chance.
Bailey rented a townhouse in Washington D. C. and cast about for some type of work. He had banked almost all of his pay while in the Navy so he didn’t really need a job, but he was restless. One afternoon as he was thinking of returning to Seattle his phone rang. The caller identified himself as an executive of a security company and wanted to talk to Bailey about a position he had open. As it turned out the caller wasn’t just some executive. He was Blaine Waterford, owner and CEO of Waterford Security Agency, one of the main Government contractors for security in the Persian Gulf. Bailey had heard of him, and when the man handed him the company business card he almost got up and walked away. The man saw Bailey’s intention and grabbed his arm to keep him sitting at the table. He quickly explained that he was aware of Bailey’s recent discharge and offered him a six-figure sum of money to go back to the Mid-East to fight the Taliban and al-Quida on his own terms.
Realizing this was the opportunity he had hoped for, Bailey didn’t even hesitate. He accepted.
After six
weeks of intensive training at a facility in northern Africa he found himself back in Afghanistan as a supposedly humanitarian contractor by day. By night he secretly led clandestine raids on suspected Taliban or al Qaida strongholds. Over a period of ten months many members of those two terrorist organizations were killed or captured. But there had been innocent victims too. Victims that had been in the wrong place at the wrong time. Bailey understood that kind of thing happened in war.
What he didn’t understand was the atrocious loss of life during his last mission.
That incident occurred on a night when he and five comrades went on a mission to eliminate a reported Taliban threat in a small village. When they arrived at the village they found there were four guards patrolling the perimeter. Three of Bailey’s men simultaneously silently killed three of the ‘guards’. The fourth ‘guard’ was Bailey’s responsibility.
He grabbed the guard from behind, stabbing him in the chest. As his victim fell to the ground the man’s turban came off revealing shiny black tresses and Bailey realized the guard he had just stabbed was a woman.
Though her wound was fatal, the woman was still alive. Before she died she told Bailey that Abdul Almed was the Taliban leader who had captured the village a few days before. She said that just a few hours before the sun set that day Almed had his men separate the older girls and young women and sent them away with some of his men as guards. He then forced everyone else into their huts where he had them bound and gagged. His remaining men then booby-trapped every hut with explosives.
When Bailey promised to deactivate the explosives the dying woman insisted that in each hut the families were tied back to back to the explosives and the explosives were inter-connected. They would all be triggered at the same time if anyone tried to enter even one of the huts. Her last words as she was fading into oblivion were that there was nothing Bailey or his men could do to save the villagers.
When the woman died Bailey immediately informed his men of the trap and ordered them out of the village.
Unbeknownst to Bailey, one of his operatives refused to believe there was no way to save the people of the village and went back on his own to try. In his honorable, but foolish, endeavor he tripped one of the booby traps and the village became an instant inferno, killing himself, everyone in the cluster of homes and two more of Bailey’s men. Devastated by the horrific loss of innocent lives, Bailey resigned his position and headed back home to Seattle.
Jessie said nothing as she listened to Bailey’s narration of his past. She watched as his facial features changed from the face of the man she loved to someone who had been to hell and wished he had never returned. When he finished she could see the horror and the shame of what had happened in that village a world away written anew on his face.
There was something else written there too. She knew she was seeing the fear of rejection by the one person he could not stand to have reject him. Her intuition told her what he needed. As he paced by she stopped his pacing by gently clasping his large, work calloused right hand with both of hers. Standing so he wouldn’t be staring down at her, she leaned into him, resting her cheek against his chest. Stretching to tiptoe, she kissed his lips. Tenderly at first then, when he didn’t respond, she deepened the kiss with passion. Pulling back when he still didn’t respond she searched his eyes. Her voice broke and a tear slowly made its way down her cheek as she broke the silence.
“Bailey! Oh, Bailey! Do you think I am that shallow? That I would be repulsed by you having accidentally killed a woman who was dressed as an enemy guard? Or be sickened by the very sight of you because of something someone else took upon himself to try?”
Bailey couldn’t stand seeing the tears coursing down her lovely cheeks as they were at that moment. He put his arms around her, drew her tightly to his chest and spoke softly into her fragrant hair. “You think I don’t trust you Jessie. But I do. I could never have told you what happened over there if I didn’t. I have been a loner for so long, Jessie, that trusting someone, anyone, is always hard for me. I wasn’t sure how you would take hearing what I had done. But I have faith in you Jessie. I told you not as a test of your love, but as a way of baring of my soul.”
“Before I met you, Jessie, I did not think I would ever find someone who would love me for who I am, someone who would not condemn me because of my past. The love and compassion I saw in your eyes as I revealed what a monster I believed I had been back then touched me deep in my heart.”
“Jessie,” he said as he pulled back to gaze into her intriguing eyes. “I know you really meant what you said today at the cavern and later down by the lake. And I just don’t think I could love you more than I do right at this moment.” As he said the last he gently lifted her chin with one finger and placed a light kiss on her trembling lips.
8:25 a. m., Sat. morning, two men sat at a corner table in an espresso coffee shop in downtown Seattle.
“Here, Ahmed,” Abed Ahanha whispered, pointing to a house at the end of a rural road on the laptop's satellite image. “This is the safe house where Homeland Security has taken the pilot and his passenger. The other woman will arrive there shortly.”
Abdul Ahmed Amusel Almed was not one a person who often showed his emotion. Now, though, the corners of his lips involuntarily lifted in a smile. Quickly replacing the smile with a scowl, he glanced at the other man. “You know this for certain, Abed?”
“Yes,” Abed confirmed. “As you know, our man at Homeland Security is well informed. He told me that Gilmore and Ms. Melano arrived there last evening. He also told me that Ms. Hough, who was taken from the hospital by ambulance just minutes before he called me, is on the way there now.”
Abdul studied the image on the screen for a few seconds then asked about the security at the safe house. Abed told him the security there was actually beyond state-of-the-art in that the head of personnel there was not only a computer wizard of the top echelon, she had studied under the tutelage of a professor who insisted his students carefully study and emulate the designs developed for Homeland Security’s surveillance media. For that reason Abed had contacted their man at the safe house and inquired about the safe house’s security. The short of it was that the safe house security would not be easy to get around.
“But it can be breached?”
With a wicked smile Abed answered, “Yes. I studied under that same professor until he retired. I know what important area of that system the H.S. could not implement because of Congressional budget cuts. Therefore, Almed, I know their Achilles Heel.” Abed went on to inform Almed that a small segment of his men were only a few miles away from the safe house and awaiting orders.
“Good! Notify the other two segments in Renton to be ready to leave immediately on our arrival. We will join the other segment and strike late this afternoon.”
Anticipation gleaming in his eyes, Almed’s voice became a snarl as he finished with, “Abed. Be sure to remind all of the men that I want Gilmore, Ms. Melano and Ms. Calahan-Hough unharmed if at all possible, everyone else there is to die!”
Chapter 9: A Betrayal
9:15 a.m. that same morning;
Bailey and security guard Mace Strickland stood in the kitchen going over the possibility of a breach in security along the rear fence when Agent Winfrey’s urgent voice over the intercom interrupted. “Red alert! Attention everyone! An unidentified vehicle is approaching the southern access of the compound!”
Agent Strickland glanced at Bailey, quickly excused himself and, as Agent Bealour hurried from the kitchen, the two exited through the main entrance. Jessie, who had been fixing sandwiches for her and Bailey, stepped through the archway from the kitchen. For the first time since arriving there a worried expression shadowed her beautiful face.
Agent Winfrey, monitoring the whole complex on the multi-screens in front of her recognized the anxious look on Jessie’s face as she stepped from the kitchen for what it was. To allay the woman’s fears she again spoke over the intercom. “Though I don’t belie
ve there is going to be any problems, Ms. Melano, it is standard procedure to call a red alert when anything out of the ordinary occurs. I wasn’t informed there would be any arrivals this morning but I believe this vehicle is one of ours. To be on the safe side, though, you and Mr. Gilmore are to wait in your room and be ready to immediately secure yourselves in the bathroom and use the entrance to the escape tunnel until I am sure there is no problem and give you the all clear.”
While they waited in her room, Jessie, seated beside him on her bed, noticed Bailey was staring out her bedroom’s dark tinted window with a solemn expression. “What?” she asked. When he didn’t respond, she placed her palms on his cheeks, turning his head so he would have to look her in the eye.
“Bailey,” she whispered. “Something is bothering you. Talk to me.”
“I’m worried, Jessie,” he whispered in reply. “Despite the assurances of Dennis and Agent Winfrey, I can’t shake the feeling that we are at risk here. That this place is not as secure as they believe it is.”
Standing, Jessie strode toward the window, stopped beside it and turned to face him. A slight quaver to her voice she asked, “You too? I keep having this feeling of impending disaster, Bailey. It gives me the creeps. Something else that bothers me about being here is all the cameras and sensors. As if she had seen my expression, agent Winfrey just spoke directly to me. Does that mean that we don’t really have any real privacy? If it does, what can we do about it?”
Bailey was instantly at her side. Taking her by the waist he pulled her close, wrapping her in his arms. “Jessie,” he whispered, “I think you know what we must do.” At her nod, he continued. “We have to get out of here.”
