Double Down

by Jameson Patterson

  “No,” Littlefield shouted, knowing that each yard was taking him farther from his prize. “Go back!”

  The American swung his weapon and pressed down with a barrel hot enough to brand a perfect O onto the skin of Littlefield’s left cheek.

  “Shut the fuck up,” he said.

  Littlefield shut up as they reversed farther and farther away, the hovel and its inhabitants lost to the dust.

  SEVENTEEN

  Okay, so reality had never exactly been Kirby Chance’s thing.

  Seriously, who hit thirty-three with only the part-time gig as a pretend sick person on their resume? Someone who’d become way too skilled at dodging reality, someone who’d lived if not off the grid—she wasn’t rugged enough for that—then certainly off the page, out there in the margins, dodging the responsibilities and demands of so-called real life.

  Which, of course, was why she’d bobbed so effortlessly into the wake of the gray-haired man, and had so willingly done his bidding, where a more centered, a more solid, substantial, more grounded person, would have fled that diner lickety-split and hightailed it down Hollywood Boulevard like the Hillside Strangler was on her heels.

  And it was why she’d agreed to come out here to this warzone to impersonate a dead woman, the whole wild notion making a weird kind of sense to her.

  Until that gun had been put to her head.

  Kneeling on the sand, her fragile sense of reality blown to a gazillion pulsating little pixels, hearing the metal-on-metal rasp as the gunman had cocked the thing, she had, for the first time, understood the fragile nature of being.

  Understood it just as it was all about to come to a splatty, messy end.

  Then the gunman had fired.

  But not at her.

  Fired at the men in the truck, some kind of twisty plot reversal that she sure as hell had not seen coming. She’d been left a quivering little meat sack that had to be half-carried to the SUV where she had been so whacked out that she’d fallen asleep behind the gray-haired man and the old foreign-looking person who wore the aura of imminent death.

  But before Kirby had fallen asleep she’d had a revelation: it was high time she got her shit—whatever that shit was, exactly—together.

  ASAP, pronto, like yesterday, girlfriend.

  And then, click, darkness as her overloaded brain had hit the snooze button.

  And now this.

  More from unreality’s highlights reel.

  Sitting in the SUV watching something that was akin to a bizarre reshoot of what they’d done only hours before.

  Look-alike mud house.

  Look-alike invasion.

  Okay, the men doing the invading didn’t resemble the lean, scruffy guys who’d faked the Catherine Finch rescue. No, these men were bizarrely huge. Massive guts hanging over belted jeans, thighs rubbing together and ass-cracks like ditches on proud display as they jogged and crouched and bobbed toward the little house, spraying it with fire.

  And there was no playacting. This was all too real.

  When one of the men died, keeling over fatly, sprawled on his back, blood geysering from his mouth, it was like a blimp plummeting earthward.

  Kirby put her hands to her ears as a big gun opened up at another old truck that had appeared out of nowhere before reversing away in a cloud of dust.

  Two men tried to escape the house and bullets danced them to their death in the sand.

  Suddenly it was all over.

  Quiet.

  Kirby could hear the sound of the old man’s breath and the sobbing of the wounded.

  Dust settled. Blood spread into the dirt from the scattered corpses.

  Then the door of the house flew open and a muscle-bound monster emerged, a woman slung over his shoulder.

  He trundled toward the SUV, pulled open the door beside Kirby and dumped the woman inside, her head falling into her lap.

  Despite the filth and the bandages Kirby saw that the unconscious woman was Catherine Finch and, alashazam, her fingernail grip on reality was torn lose and everything went south again.

  EIGHTEEN

  The Mitsubishi’s GPS said they had crossed the border, and as Town drove over the rocky plateau he scanned the horizon for dust trails that would indicate the presence of Turkish military patrols.

  He heard a moan and checked the rearview, seeing Kirby Chance cradling Catherine Finch’s head, a saline IV bag feeding into the unconscious woman’s hand.

  Town had the AC cranked up high, but the stench from Finch’s gangrenous leg filled the SUV.

  When Finch had been dumped into the car after the firefight, the driver had found a backpack of medical supplies in the rear and slung it at Kirby, before taking the wheel and peeling off with two trucks following him. The remaining vehicles, loaded with shabiha dead and wounded, had gone in search of a hospital.

  Kirby, as if waking from a dream, had opened the trauma bag and set up the IV line, feeding sips of water into the woman’s parched mouth and checking her vital signs.

  “How is she?” Town had asked.

  “She’s alive,” Kirby had said. “Just.”

  The shabiha had brought them to within a mile of an unguarded stretch of border. The concrete wall the Turks were building had not yet marched across this remote plain. It was a spot used by smugglers of both commodities and people.

  Town had stood a moment beside the SUV with Arkady and, for once, neither man could find anything to say.

  At last Arkady had stepped forward and kissed Town again on the cheeks and then turned and walked to where the trucks idled. The convoy had roared off in a spray of gravel, leaving Town and the two women to make their way to where Paul Golding waited, unaware of the cargo that was being carried to him.

  Town checked the GPS coordinates. They were close. This thing was nearly done.

  He guided the Mitsubishi to the crest of a rise and saw a sprawl of tents and containers reaching forever across an arid valley. A Syrian refugee camp.

  “I’m going to leave you down there,” he said. “There are U.N. aid workers. They’ll help you.” He flipped a wallet over the seat to Kirby. “Here’s enough money to get you home.”

  Nearly ten thousand dollars. The remains of what Golding had given him as operational funds.

  “And you?” she said.

  “There’s a town a couple miles north with some kind of a hospital. I’ll take her there.”

  Lying. There was Golding and his swarm of media who would hurl Catherine Finch into the whirlpool of the news cycle.

  Kirby found his eyes in the rearview and said, “If she survives, what’ll happen to her?”

  “She’ll be flown to Germany for medical attention.”

  “And then?”

  “Then she’ll go home.”

  “That’s not going to be easy.”

  “No, it won’t,” Town said. “She’s going to lose that leg and she’s going to find out about what happened to her husband. And even if the treason thing doesn’t stick, she’ll be tried by the media.”

  They drove on, grinding down to the sprawling camp.

  “If she lives she’ll expose what we did,” Kirby said.

  “Yes.”

  “You don’t care?”

  Town didn’t reply. They were nearing the sea of tents, people hunkered down against the wind that flapped plastic and canvas and swirled garbage high into the air. A woman wearing a burqa walked two toddlers in Mickey Mouse shirts out of the sandstorm.

  Town stopped the SUV.

  “Go,” he said.

  Kirby hesitated and then she opened the door and stepped down.

  Town drove on into the dust without looking back.

  NINETEEN

  When Kip Littlefield helped Aneta Shevchenko down from the Range Rover on Beirut’s swanky Park Avenue and slipped an arm around her slender waist, she recoiled for just a moment before she relaxed and allowed her body to be drawn to his as they walked.

  She even manufactured a smile of passable r
ealism, and flashed her teeth at him. Not terrible teeth, but once he’d organized the U.S. passports for her and her daughter and got them to D.C., he’d have his cosmetic dentist upgrade her mouth with tooth reshaping and veneers.

  A perfect smile was very important to him.

  The day before he’d had her and little Olha—the child now in the care of a nanny back at the Albergo Hotel—transported from Slavyansk via Kiev in a private jet. All their medical tests had checked out, and he’d felt he deserved some pleasure as a reward for enduring that bruising episode in Syria.

  After his captors had dumped him and his satellite phone in the middle of nowhere and rattled away with his ten million dollars, Littlefield had summoned a helicopter and hightailed it back to Jordan. He’d wanted nothing more than to leave the Levant behind and head for some gracious Mittel-European city to find a balm for his soul, but business had called.

  The Lebanese Sunni party, the Future Movement, perpetually anxious about Shi’a-backed Hezbollah, and the madness in neighboring Syria, wanted weapons. Lots of them. Too many for Littlefield to ignore.

  So he had installed himself at the palatial Albergo, with its squawking parakeets and its atmosphere of a very posh seraglio, and sent for the woman and the child. On arrival Aneta was touchingly eager to please, and once the child had been palmed off on the nanny, allowed him to take his pleasure with her in the massive bed. She did her best to feign enjoyment—though not so well that he suspected a hidden history of professionalism. But he heard her crying softly in the bathroom afterward.

  He had no doubt that she’d get over this emotionalism, but the gentle keening disturbed him and he clicked on the TV and watched footage of a devastating hurricane in the Caribbean.

  The Catherine Finch story had been wrung dry. The woman was dead. Had been declared so in southern Turkey after she had been rescued by U.S. special forces. Or so the news media would have it—though he, of course, was in a position to dispute that.

  A rescue that was a Pyrrhic victory for the presidency, since she had succumbed to the wounds she’d suffered in the drone attack.

  The little coup Littlefield had dreamed had been denied him. But he had the elections to look forward to, after which he would entirely own an American president.

  Littlefield had fallen asleep on those thoughts and had not noticed when Aneta had returned to bed, lying as far away from him as she could without tumbling off onto the antique Heriz carpet.

  Walking with her along the Beirut street, a pair of close protection specialists shadowing them, his phone chirped and he took the call. The Lebanese defense minister could meet with him immediately.

  Littlefield pocketed the phone, pecked Aneta on the cheek, and said, “Duty calls. You shop to your heart’s content and I'll see you later. I'll leave the men with you.”

  He turned and walked back half a block to the Range Rover where another bodyguard opened the door for him. Littlefield stepped up into the rear and the bodyguard took his place beside the driver up front.

  As the car nosed out into the traffic a bomb limpeted to the underside of the vehicle was remotely detonated. The fireball destroyed the Range Rover and a score of cars nearby, shattered windows and threw passersby to the sidewalk, their flesh peppered with shards of shrapnel and broken glass.

  Kip Littlefield was torn limb-from-limb, and his headless trunk was flung fifty feet where it smashed through the window of Beirut’s only Michelin starred restaurant, landing on the table of a party of Saudi princelings who were dining on seared foie gras, porto sauce and fruit confit.

  TWENTY

  “Marry Bat! Marry Bat!”

  Kirby, still unused to her assumed name, especially when it emerged mangled and misshapen from the mouth of the Syrian doctor, took an unforgivably long time to respond.

  “Yes?” she said at last, shaking herself out of her stupor.

  It was early morning and she was still not properly awake, concentrating on unpacking the medical supplies from the backpack onto the floor of the shipping container that housed the refugee family.

  “The spoon, Marry Bat. Please, the spoon,” Dr. Farid Hamed, said, gesturing with his gloved hand as he kneeled over the boy on the mat.

  Kirby fumbled in the pack for a tablespoon and a roll of duct tape. She stood and asked the big, bearded father of the child to hold the spoon in place while she taped it to the wall. Then she removed the IV bag from the backpack and suspended it from the spoon.

  Dr. Hamed connected the line to the catheter that he had already inserted into the boy’s hand. Five years old, he had taken shrapnel in his back from the blast that had killed his little sister and destroyed their home in Aleppo, and it was starting to fester.

  The child cried out when Dr. Hamid injected him with anesthetic, and his mother soothed him. The doctor asked Kirby for the scalpel and set about making tiny incisions in the boy’s back, wiping away the welling blood, and using tweezers to remove the pieces of shrapnel.

  Kirby sat holding a stainless steel bowl, and listened to the chimes as Dr. Hamid opened the jaws of the tweezers and dropped fragment after fragment into the dish.

  It was her fourth day in the camp.

  When Pete Town had driven away into the sandstorm, Kirby had wandered blindly into the maze of tents and containers. She had come upon a harried-looking woman, hair blowing in her face, speaking in an Irish accent as she questioned refugees via an interpreter.

  When Kirby had approached her the Irishwoman had said, “You’re the new volunteer, then?”

  Before Kirby could deny this the woman had instructed a young Syrian man to take her to the doctor, and she’d followed him through a maze of shelters and containers until they’d come to the military-style tent that housed the makeshift clinic.

  She’d later discovered that a group of foreign medics, based here in the Turkish camp, had traveled into northern Syrian a few days before to provide emergency aid to the residents of a heavily-bombarded town, and had been killed after Russian aircraft had targeted their field hospital, so there was a desperate need for replacements.

  The doctor, busy inoculating a child, had said to her, “What is your name?”

  “Mary Beth Baumgartner,” Kirby had replied, without thinking, and just like that she was herself no more.

  “Marry Bat what can you do?”

  “Some nursing.” This, at least, was true.

  “Okay, then you will work with me.”

  And so she did. Spending the day walking miles through the camp, calling on people too sick, too incapacitated, too old, to get to the infirmary. Dr. Hamed, a stooped man in his forties with rings the color of coal under his eyes, himself a refugee—she’d heard that his wife and two children had been killed by Islamic State—was tireless, and he expected her to be too.

  She slept in a tent with three other women and started the day off with a jolt of black coffee and a cold shower. Then she worked with the doctor until it was dark and she could return to her quarters.

  Often she had just fallen down onto her mattress when she was woken again and told there were newly-arrived refugees that needed to be examined. She’d rise, grab a flashlight and go out into the dust and the wind, the beam finding the gaunt faces with the thousand-yard stares.

  The sheer deluge of need, the endless demands, left her little opportunity to think about Catherine Finch.

  Kirby knew Catherine was dead. She knew that all they had done had been folly. And she knew there was something ironic, or maybe even a little mystical, about the fact that she had impersonated a medic who had worked as an aid volunteer, and that she herself was now doing the same thing.

  But she had given up pondering this. There was no time.

  She was here, and this was real and this was now.

  The child on the mat whimpered and writhed. Without being told Kirby lifted the hypodermic of anesthetic and injected a little more into the vein in his arm. She had injected her mother thrice daily, and had a light touch.

/>   The doctor, wiping the sweat from his face on his sleeve, nodded his thanks.

  After they were done, the child being tended by his mother, his wounds salved and dressed, they went out into the blinding day. Both of them like pack horses under the bags of medical supplies that they carried.

  “You are doing well, Marry Bat. Thank you.”

  The Syrian doctor smiled at her for the first time and his face, for just a moment, was transformed into that of a much younger man. Then he strode off toward their next patient, and as Kirby Chance battled to keep up with him, it shamed her to realize that, in the midst of tragedy and suffering of such epic proportions, she was deliriously happy.

  TWENTY-ONE

  Ann Town stood in the cold in the backyard of the Park Slope house sneaking a cigarette, the icy wind tugging a speech bubble of smoke from her lips. Pete was cooking lunch in the kitchen and she positioned herself so the winter-stripped crabapple tree shielded her from his view. Then she thought fuck it and stepped away from the spidery branches and puffed out in the open.

  She’d started smoking again back in the ruined mansion in Los Angeles, finding a pack of Marlboros on the kitchen table and impulsively lighting one, realizing just how much she’d missed that warm, toasty, lung-scorching sensation.

  She trod the Marlboro dead and climbed the three steps up to the kitchen and smelled burnt food. Saw her husband’s agitation as he unhooked a clean skillet from the rail above the stove and added olive oil.

  “I torched the pancetta,” he said with a smile that didn’t quite take.

  She uncorked the bottle of Frascati he was using for the sauce, poured herself a glass and knocked it back and poured another.

  Sinatra was crooning from the boombox on the counter and Ann wished that her husband would play something a little more contemporary. Something recorded in the last thirty years, for God’s sake.