“Aziz, you look worried. Is everything all right?”
Diverting his gaze from Cait, Aziz moved his eyes down to his dirty hands, which he was rubbing together as if kneading something between his palms.
“Miss Cait, how you know these things?”
“Aziz, I just know things. People always tell me that. Is there something you’re trying to tell me?”
“I . . . ah . . . well, the bomb. It was not right. Should not have happened.”
“Tell me about it . . .” Cait paused. Aziz knows more than he’s letting on.
“I so sorry. It was not right.”
“Tell me more, Aziz. It’s okay. You’ve got something to say to me, haven’t you?”
Aziz was becoming uncomfortable. Cait sensed that he was fighting an inner battle.
He’s almost there. I can feel it.
“Aziz, please, sit down with me,” said Cait, a touch of empathy in her voice. “It’s all right. I’d like to talk to you.”
Aziz was uncomfortable. He was a Muslim, and it was against Allah’s laws to sit alone with a single woman. Cait picked up on his dilemma and overrode the situation by calling the waiter over.
“It’s all right Aziz, I won’t bite. Now, would you like a Coke? Or a coffee? Please, just sit, it’s my treat.”
O’Donnell looked on from the distance and smiled. He’d chosen well. His new field operative was a natural. Normally he prided himself on being a good judge of character, but he had been way off the mark with Cait. Maybe that’s why Cait’s getting through to Aziz. Because she’s not what she seems, he thought to himself.
This girl’s an enigma, he realized, someone who manages to hide her true character under the guise of being an innocent, complicit and seemingly naive young girl. How wrong he was. And rue the day that other people make the same mistake.
Cait was as dangerous as a lioness in a cub’s skin.
“Miss Cait, Tariq, he not a good person. He my brother and I love him, but he do bad things.”
Aziz started fidgeting. Escaping Cait’s piercing gaze, he looked down at the table and picked up a white starched napkin and folded it in half, pressing the edges together, then running his finger along the fold.
“Yes Aziz, I’m listening. Go on.”
Silence.
“Tariq . . . he, ah . . . he dialed a number on his phone and then the bomb went off. Bang. Car blow up.”
“Ah . . .” Even though Cait had expected to hear Aziz’s words confirming Tariq’s involvement, they still hit her for a six.
“What? Tariq was the bomber?”
“Yes, Miss Cait. It was Tariq.”
To a casual observer, Aziz’s revelation slipped past Cait with as much importance as a cloud invading a summer’s day, but behind the façade Cait was shattered.
“So how can we find him? Actually, how can I find him? I need to know why he did this.” Cait could feel she was getting closer to tracking Tariq down.
“I no know where he is. Tariq has gone,” said Aziz unconvincingly, thinking to himself as he spoke, He’s my brother and he may be a bad man, but he’s family. I’ll never tell you where he is.
“Aziz, you know where your brother is. Please, don’t try and hide it from me. I can see that you know. Tariq’s a terrorist. He needs to be stopped before he does this to someone else.”
Aziz pushed his chair out from the table with a scraping noise as it slid across the patterned paving. “Sorry, I must go. I say too much. Thank you for coffee.”
Cait locked her eyes on to his and momentarily entered his psyche. “Aziz, we’ll meet again soon. You’re a part of me now. And you owe me,” she said as a parting comment, her spell-like words lingering in his head.
Aziz stared back, a confused look on his face, then turned to leave.
“I prayed to Allah for your brother,” he said as he walked away.
“Inshallah.”
(If Allah wills it.)
As Cait watched Aziz disappear out of the piazza she looked over at O’Donnell, who was sitting on the steps of Catania Cathedral, for all intents and purposes just another tourist waiting for someone. He casually glanced over at Cait and took his sunglasses off, cleaned them, then put them back on again: a prearranged signal for her to meet him in the foyer of her hotel for a debrief. He then stood up and walked down Via Giuseppe Garibaldi, ignoring Cait as he walked past her table.
“Tariq’s definitely here in Catania,” said Cait. They were sitting on a day lounger with a low coffee table in front, Cait sipping a green tea and O’Donnell another espresso, in the foyer of the Duomo Suites. To an outside observer the two of them were chatting away as if they were old friends.
“And Aziz knows more than he’s giving away. He clammed up as soon as I tried to find out where Tariq’s holed up. I need more time with him.”
“Cait, you didn’t push him too hard, did you?” replied O’Donnell, concerned that maybe Cait had alerted Aziz to their plan.
“Tony, pleeeease. I told you before, treat me as an equal, or I walk.”
O’Donnell looked over at Cait and raised his eyebrows with a “yeah, sorry about that” look.
“No, of course I didn’t. Aziz had no idea what path I was leading him down. But I did purposefully unsettle him a bit. And I managed to briefly get inside his head. Tariq’s located in a tumbledown house somewhere near the cemetery. I felt the spirits of the dead close to him.”
“I don’t know how you did it, Cait, but that narrows the search down a bit,” said O’Donnell with an undertone of skepticism in his voice.
“There’s more. I saw the number eight on an old wooden door. And there were words scribbled on the outside of the building. I presume graffiti. Also, the house had green shutters that were hanging loose.”
O’Donnell was amazed, one more time. But now the proof was in the pudding. He had to find this elusive address. There couldn’t be too many houses near the cemetery that fit Cait’s description.
“Tony, just to set the record straight, we have to find this address, not just you. I’ll know it when I see it.” Cait had jumped inside O’Donnell’s head for a fleeting moment and read his thoughts.
“How’d you know what I was just thinking?”
“As I said before Tony, you wouldn’t understand. Certainly not yet,” said Cait firmly. She wasn’t in the mood to have her time wasted.
“But if you want to bring this to a conclusion, you need me as much as I need you. So you better get used to it. I’m in, and we’re a team, whether you like it or not.”
O’Donnell mightn’t have Bravo Three at his side anymore, but maybe he now had someone who was equally as resourceful: Cait. And vice versa.
“I don’t want you all getting your hopes up too much, but I’ve finally got some good news,” said Commander Syzchowski to the Lennox family. He’d called a casual meeting with them to discuss Dec’s progress.
Syzchowski was strangely unsettled by the family seated around him, who were hanging on his every word as if he were a minister in church about to make a fire-and-brimstone sermon. He leaned forward from his green vinyl-covered chair, feeling his shirt stick to his back as he moved. He was perspiring, more with a clammy, nervous sweat than from the heat.
Jools and Cait tuned into each other’s thoughts, their minds on the same wavelength. Their eyes briefly locked, a concerned look of understanding passing between them. Behind the glance, they shared the same desperate plea of hope and survival. Unspoken words carried between them over the ether as they jointly processed the gravity of the moment. They were both betwixt and between worlds, willing Dec on from the Otherworld at the same time as sending out positive energy from the present around them.
G tore himself away from staring at the random brown stain on the carpeted floor directly at his feet. In his zoned-out state as his mind drifted, he had conjured up images of some other anxious person staring at the same blemish, waiting for news of their loved one who had just gone under the surgeon’s knif
e. He immediately snapped out of his daydream, Syzchowski’s positive words triggering a flood of emotions that surged through his body like flood tide.
G’s senses sharpened as the Commander’s words drifted to his ears. He gazed around and noticed how the light in the hospital waiting room had seemingly intensified, taking on a bright-light yellow hue that added an edge to the mismatched utilitarian furniture. The smell of hospital-strength antiseptic suddenly appeared out of nowhere, assaulting his senses and reminding him of his location. It was a memory that was about to be permanently etched into his olfactory senses.
Turning his point of focus back to Syzchowski, G was all ears.
“Dec appears to be healing. We’ve been progressively removing his life support over the past twelve hours and he’s maintained stability, which is a positive sign. If all goes according to expectations, we’ll remove his intubation tube from his throat later today, then if he handles that okay we’ll gradually take him out of the induced coma.”
Syzchowski felt a wave of relief run through him as he delivered the encouraging words, the first positive news he had been able to pass on since Dec’s admission to the hospital five days ago. Reporting to a grieving family was so out of the ordinary for him that he felt like he was back in med school again, paving new ground. He simply wasn’t used to patient-family interaction. But Dec’s case was such an exception to the rule that Syzchowski had to remain involved.
He instinctively knew he had no other choice; it was his duty to follow this through to the end.
“How long before we can talk to him?” said Cait, jumping in over the top of Syzchowski during a pause in his prognosis of Dec’s recovery.
“Hang on, Caitie,” said G. “Let the Commander finish his report.”
“It’s all right G, I can understand how you all want to talk to him. Hopefully by this time tomorrow Dec will be emerging from his coma once he’s extubated and breathing for himself. If all goes well we’ll then transfer him from the ICU to the High Dependency Unit. You’ll be able to sit with him there.”
A mixed look of relief and urgent anticipation crossed their faces.
Dec was pulling through!
“Look, I hate to put a damper on things, but Dec’s still not out of the danger zone. Not yet at least,” warned the Commander.
“It’s now time for his body to take over. Medical science has done the best it can repairing the damage. Now Dec has to heal himself.”
Syzchowski had seen a positive prognosis head south in the blink of an eye many times before, especially when major trauma was involved. There was simply no predicting how injuries as serious as Dec’s would end up. Dying from secondary complications arising from the initial wound was still a variable that couldn’t be discounted—suffering a stroke was a distinct yet rapidly diminishing possibility as the days progressed, plus there were always unpredictable complications that could arise and unforeseeably take Dec out. Or there was even the more remote issue of a nosocomial staph infection setting in and literally eating the host alive.
It simply wasn’t emotionally fair on Cait, Jools and G to build up Dec’s chances of survival, only to see them decimated if the worst-case scenario eventuated and Dec died.
So as far as the Commander was concerned, all that could be done now was to remain positive and play the waiting game. And be pragmatic. They all had to hope that Dec’s remarkable run of luck coming back from the brink twice in the first twenty-four hours continued. Syzchowski still couldn’t believe how Dec had survived the two cardiac arrests that he’d suffered when under the knife.
“Dec should have been dead by now,” he had said to himself numerous times over the past five days.
Syzchowski was not an overly religious man, but to him it was a miracle that Dec managed to get this far, and definite evidence of a higher being looking after his flock.
“Okay, what you have to remember is that Dec has been heavily sedated for nearly five days now, so he’s not going to come around quickly,” said Commander Syzchowski to Cait, Jools and G.
They were back in yet another sterile hospital waiting room, but this time it was the area abutting the High Dependency Unit. Dec had been disconnected from life support twenty-two hours ago and his body was functioning on its own, so he had been transferred from the ICU to the HDU.
“Bringing Dec out of his coma is not like flicking on a light switch and wham, the patient’s suddenly awake. We leave that scenario for the movies. Instead, it’s more like bringing the lights on gradually by slowly turning up a dimmer switch.” Syzchowski was pleased with his analogy. It may have just popped into his head, but it did perfectly describe waking up from an induced coma.
“So what are we looking for?” said Jools, her own medical training coming to the fore. She was a complementary healthcare practitioner back in Melbourne, so she had a good understanding of all things medical.
“He may start to become slightly restless. You know, moving his extremities, twitching, his eyes may even open and close, but at the beginning it doesn’t mean that he can necessarily focus on what’s in front of him. He’s more likely to start off seeing blurred shapes and movement before he’s fully able to focus on a specific face or object,” continued Syzchowski.
“I presume that part of coming out of the coma is an activation of the sympathetic nervous system then?” asked Jools, taking Syzchowski totally by surprise with her in-depth question.
“Yes, that’s right,” said Syzchowski. “Do you have medical training, Jools?”
“As a matter of fact, I do. I have a complementary medical practice in Melbourne and Cait’s a psychologist, so we both have an understanding of what to expect.”
“Okay, well the parasympathetic nervous system will continue to function in the background, but for Dec to emerge from his coma as the sedatives wear off, his body will need to fight to become active again.”
“Makes sense. Will Dec be cognizant of us being with him?”
“Absolutely,” said Syzchowski. “In fact, it’ll help speed up his reentry into the conscious world if he hears familiar voices around him. So by all means talk to him, yes.”
“Will he have any amnesia, or other issues with recall?” asked Cait, her psychology training at university flooding back to her in spades.
Syzchowski looked at mother and daughter and was impressed. He had passed them off as concerned family members and had made no assumptions that they had any medical knowledge.
“Yes Cait, he may well have some short-term amnesia, but this usually is only a transitory phase.”
“Yes, we studied this,” said Cait. “It’s the body’s way of protecting itself from the memory of the trauma. Except I think you’ll find that it can take significantly longer than that for the memories of the event to fully return. The mind sometimes hides trauma like this for years. He’ll need psychological counseling downstream to settle this and stop it later manifesting as PTSD.”
“Cait, I’ll leave that side of it up to you,” said Syzchowski. “My job’s to mend the body. It looks like yours is to mend the mind.
“Now, follow me and I’ll take you to see Dec.”
Flashes of Cait’s murdered lover, Rishi, laying comatose in intensive care came back to haunt her as the three of them followed a pace behind Syzchowski. He strode ahead down the wide, shiny vinyl-floored corridor, their steps softly echoing off the antique white semigloss walls as they funneled down toward the High Dependency Unit where Dec was.
There’s that same hospital smell again, thought Cait as she nervously walked down the hallway, a mixture of chlorine bleach, cleaning fluid and bulk prepared food hanging in the air rising up to greet her.
Why do hospitals always smell the same? They’re like public toilets. They always have a distinct whiff.
Jools let go of G’s hand and slipped her arm through Cait’s in a sign of motherly affection, pulling her daughter in toward her body. Cait noticed an electric tingle shoot up her arm as her mother took hold
of it.
“We’ve got to be strong, Cait. All of us have to be,” said Jools quietly, turning toward Cait as she spoke, almost whispering in her ear.
“Dec needs us and our energy. You need to invoke The Gift, Cait. We need to summon the spirits of the Otherworld to protect Dec. You and I, together. Join me, Cait.” Jools was incanting in a melodic tone as if she was weaving a spell, drawing Cait in as she joined their energies together.
Jools was a healer—a preceptor—someone who was well known at her Melbourne medical practice for her almost mystical healing abilities, and without even seeing her son she knew innately that he would need all the help he could get, from both this world and the Otherworld.
“Yes Mum, I can feel our grandmothers talking to me somewhere in the distant recesses of my head. They’re in there somewhere, whispering to me. And so is James.”
As Cait nervously walked past an empty gurney that was parked to the side against a wall, she psyched herself up for what she knew would confront her. She’d just seen it in a vision as they were walking down the corridor: Dec would be lying on a mechanical hospital bed with a chart hanging off the end, lightly covered by a scrupulously clean, pressed white sheet with “Property of Naval Hospital” stenciled in washed-out blue at an angle somewhere near the top fold. She also knew he would be wired up with tubes and lines that ran to beeping monitors with red and blue lights and small LCD screens with multicolored LEDs blipping out their message, like a Morse code signal from his body.
It would be so clinical and cold that Dec may as well be a mannequin on display. But he was alive! He’d survived the bomb blast and an operation taking over four hours to piece him back together.
Cait’s vision proved to be true in every detail. Syzchowski walked straight over to Dec’s bed and picked up the charts hanging over the end, quickly flipping through the pages. G, Jools and Cait stood a meter inside the doorway, transfixed. They all had preconceived ideas on what would await them, but seeing Dec in the flesh was still a shock. A plethora of tubes and wires were attached to his body like parasites. Two drips containing clear fluid were suspended over him, hanging off a stainless steel tree that reminded Cait of winter when the leaves had fallen and all that was left were bare branches.
The Cait Lennox Box Set Page 63
