And there, taking pride of place on the table beside the bed, was Dec’s good luck charm that Cait had brought in for him. His beloved, well-worn black cap with the name of his father’s yacht—Fig Jam—embroidered in slightly faded red stitching on the front. He wore it everywhere. Except on the day of the explosion.
He’d changed hats for a new Nike one he had bought in Rome.
“Dec, we’re here for you,” said G in almost dulcet tones, echoing Jools’s and Cait’s thoughts.
The three of them walked quietly to the side of the bed—G and Jools to the left, Cait to the right. The first thing that caught Cait’s eye was the peaceful look on her brother’s face.
How strange, she thought. After all you’ve just been through.
And a five-day stubble that was sprouting from his chin. Not wanting to spoil the energy of the moment, Cait mirrored her mother’s actions and gently placed her hand on top of Dec’s forearm. The three of them were all holding back, as if they were afraid of disturbing him.
Pop! Pop! Pop!
A series of faint crackles dragged all eyes in the room toward Cait. Like a bolt of static electricity, a shock jumped from Dec’s skin, shooting over to her hand and running through her body as if she was wired into her brother.
Jools immediately looked over and tuned in knowingly.
Yes Cait, you felt it. Jools was communicating telepathically with her daughter, projecting her own thoughts into Cait’s head.
That’s your brother’s energy latching on to yours. Let it flow!
G looked on in amazement. He was used to Jools coming out of left field with her metaphysical invocations, but it was Cait who never ceased to surprise him. Ever since he had nursed and counseled her through the aftereffects of her violent kidnapping some eighteen-odd months ago, she seemed to be developing Otherworld powers almost at an exponential rate. It was as if a gentle healing breeze had whooshed through Cait’s mind after her trauma, blowing away all the pain and terrifying memories, replacing them with an insight that was far beyond his mortal comprehension.
All G could do was keep Cait centered and positive while she reinvented herself.
“Hi Dec, it’s me,” said Cait in a soft voice, trying to sound upbeat, secretly praying for a response.
Dec’s eyelids quivered, then briefly opened, his pinpoint black pupils staring blankly up at the ceiling before snapping closed again.
“He’s waking, Cait,” said Syzchowski, who had been observing from the wings, not wanting to interrupt the family’s time with their son.
“He’ll be foggy, but he may well be aware that you’re here. Speak to him. Be normal, say anything. He needs you guys now to pull him out of his coma.”
A silence invaded the room, the regular clicking of the monitors dominating the space in a jumbled cacophony of blips and beeps, sounding like an out-of-tune experimental orchestra.
“Hey Dec, I brought your favorite hat with me from Palermo,” said G, trying to keep the concern out of his voice. “It’s by your bed, mate.”
“Yeah little bro, time for you to turn the corner,” pitched Cait. “It’s getting boring just being with Mum and Dad. Need you around for some comic relief.”
Dec’s fingers on both hands twitched slightly . . . five . . . six . . . seven times.
Jools was still transferring her energy to Dec, acting as a conduit as she used her Reiki skills to help balance and settle his body.
“Dec’s aware of us being here,” said Jools. “But he’s fighting something. There’s a blockage that I can’t get past.”
Dec slowly moved his legs, as if he was trying to stretch them out.
A look of shock and distress suddenly dominated Jools’s face.
“Commander, quick. It’s not right,” said Jools, raising her head up to get his attention. “I think Dec’s about to go into cardiac arrest.”
Syzchowski glanced over at Jools with a placating look.
She’s just upset. Totally understandable, considering the circumstances, he thought to himself, basically ignoring her warning.
Beep . . . . . . beep . . . . beep . . . beep . . beep.
The heart monitor machine blipped quicker and quicker. Then the alarm screamed a high-pitched continuous warning monotone.
Beeeeeeeeep . . .
Dec’s heart was fibrillating.
His blood pressure plummeted dangerously, the numbers rapidly dropping, his heart rate simultaneously spiraling threateningly out of control.
“Code blue, code blue, ward C3, bed fifteen,” broadcast over the HDU public address system.
Two nurses rushed into the room, immediately checking the monitors.
“Shit!” said the first nurse to arrive. “He’s going into cardiac arrest.”
Beeeeeeeeep . . .
Dec started convulsing, his previously limp body spasming and shaking uncontrollably.
“Quick, pass me the air viva on one hundred percent oxygen and a bolus of adrenaline,” said Syzchowski urgently to the nurse closest to him.
“And someone grab the crash cart.”
Syzchowski was in charge, doing what he was trained to do: emergency trauma specialist, and his patient was arresting.
“Put the defib pads on his chest. We need to start CPR now!”
Cait, Jools and G moved back against the wall almost in unison to get out of the way of the machines being urgently wheeled into the room, a look of absolute horror on all their faces, mouths agape, eyes wide open, the color draining from their collective faces.
Medical staff were everywhere, swarming around like bees in a hive. This was life and death.
Syzchowski looked up at G, Jools and Cait and said almost gruffly to the nurse by the door, “Take them outside. They can’t be here.” He didn’t have time for pleasantries, immediately turning back to Dec.
Syzchowski then perched over Dec’s chest, forcefully delivering compressions at a rapid rate, trying to bring a stable heart rhythm back on the monitor and a sign of life.
His patient was dying.
“Well, the good news is that Dec’s stable. I’ve had him moved back to the ICU for observation for the next twenty-four hours while he comes fully out of his coma,” said Syzchowski to G, Jools and Cait.
The Lennoxes were at their second home yet again—the naval hospital—and the Commander was giving them a heads-up on Dec’s prognosis in his usual clipped military manner.
“And Jools, I don’t know how you picked up on that one, but yes, Dec went into cardiac arrest again.” Syzchowski was a man who believed science was king. He had little time for anything that was not evidence based, so Jools’s premonition that Dec was about to have a heart attack was just coincidence as far as he was concerned.
“But luckily we were able to stabilize him,” continued the Commander. “It’s rare, but it sometimes happens that the shock of waking from a deep coma can cause complications, like happened with Dec today.”
Syzchowski paused for breath, hoping that his reassurances would placate the concerns of those in front of him. Once again, G, Jools and Cait were hanging on his every word, looking for a positive to take away.
“I’ll have him moved back to the HDU when he’s fully out of his coma. Hopefully that’ll be tomorrow. So my suggestion is that you all go back to your hotel and contact me when you’re up and about in the morning. There’s nothing more you can do here today.”
“Mum, Dad, wake up,” said Cait to her parents in an urgent but quiet tone, as if she didn’t want to disturb the creatures of the night. She placed her hand on her mother’s shoulder, gently rocking her to bring her out of her sleep.
“Mmm, yeah . . .” mumbled Jools, dragging herself back to the waking reality of consciousness.
G was the first to speak. Running his hand through his tousled hair, he pushed the top sheet down and sat up, leaning on his elbow for support.
“Caitie, what’s wrong, sweetie?” A terrible, ominous sinking feeling came over him as he spoke, as if h
e was about to be thrown off a cliff and tumble toward a bottomless pit below.
“It’s Dec. I just had a terrible vision of him in the hospital. Oh, it was awful. He’s dead! He just had another heart attack.”
Cait cupped her face in her hands and a waterfall of tears let loose; tears of concern, tears of frustration, tears of mourning for another loss of a loved one in her life.
First Rishi, now Dec.
“He just came to me, crying out for help. He was floating, out of his body. The Gatekeeper’s chasing him. He wants his soul.”
“Oh my God Cait, tell me what you saw,” said Jools, a concerned note taking over her voice, hoping with all her heart that Cait had just suffered a dreadful nightmare. Nighttime terrors were in the cards and to be expected, as Dec’s injuries had weighed heavily on them all and were a constant and unwanted companion in their thoughts.
But Jools knew that Cait’s powers of insight were far superior to hers, so she couldn’t dismiss her daughter’s vision as just a bad dream. Instead she joined G, sinking into the abyss, surrounded by worry and concern, wanting to know more.
“I was there in Dec’s room, Mum. I saw him lying motionless on the bed, and the machines . . .” Cait’s chest heaved with her sobs, tears running like rivers down her cheeks.
“It was so real . . . the machines . . . they were all screeching warning signals.
“Dec flatlined, Mum. He’s dead.”
Cait fell onto her parents’ bed, heartbroken, sobbing uncontrollably, her chest heaving with each violent gasp of air. She knew what she had just seen was real time, not merely an apparition.
Her brother had passed over.
He’d left this world.
“Paul Jones? My name’s Tony O’Donnell. Sergeant Tony O’Donnell. I’m a field agent with ASIO here in Sicily. Would it be possible for a quick catch-up? We’re investigating some activity at Cara di Mineo, and I believe you may be able to help out with one of the detainees.”
Paul was in Pozzallo when O’Donnell rang, one hundred and fifteen kilometers due south of Catania, one of the main landing ports in Sicily for refugees. A fresh boatload of three hundred and fifty-four desperate souls had just arrived, half-dead and disillusioned survivors from various African nations, all with the rationale that it was better to risk life and limb in a leaky boat on the Mediterranean trying to escape to Europe than remain in their dangerous and violent homelands.
The refugees had been rescued by The Aquarius, a ship chartered by SOS Méditerranée, an aid group working closely with Doctors Without Borders. Their flimsy boat from Libya started taking on water and sinking, and Paul was determined to be in the thick of things when the desperate immigrants finally arrived and were processed. Dec was still in a life-and-death struggle in the naval hospital ICU, and Paul felt obliged to stay in Sicily until there was some positive news, hopefully that Dec was well enough to be flown back to Melbourne, so to fill in the time he kept working.
“I’ll be in Pozzallo for the next few days. Can you come down here, maybe tomorrow?” said Paul.
“That’d be great. I’m currently in Catania. How about a lunchtime catch-up? I could be there about twelve thirty,” replied O’Donnell.
“Fine by me. We can discuss things over a bite to eat.” Food and a bottle of vini rosso were never far away from Paul’s thoughts.
“There’s a really nice little trattoria about five minutes’ walk from the harbor called Portoisola Di Armenia. Has great seafood. I’ll either be down at the docks or the processing center when you arrive, both of which are close by, so it suits me. Two people having lunch together is so Italian it won’t arouse any attention. It’s on Via Antonio Vivaldi.”
“Done deal. I’ll meet you there.”
Paul had only just arrived in Pozzallo yesterday afternoon and had gone straight into a meeting with Dr. Jean Baptiste, the head of Doctors Without Borders in the area, so he hadn’t had time to have a look around. While he had been to Pozzallo before, it was never this close to a refugee landing, so after he finished his meeting with Baptiste he quickly dumped his bags at his hotel and took himself off for a recon of the waterfront.
Paul stood at the harbor entrance and was absolutely dumbfounded. Shocked, speechless. Tears welled in his eyes as he took a long, hard look around at the pain and suffering lying discarded in front of him. It was like castoffs at the end of the earth, just before the last human left a dying planet. He’d forgotten just how bad the refugee situation really was. And it appeared to be getting worse every time he visited the docks.
Countless dilapidated, broken-down craft were lined up side by side on the foreshore, unseaworthy boats that should have been condemned, but instead had been used to transport thousands of distressed and despairing souls from the coast of North Africa to Sicily, and maybe a new life.
What an absolute tragedy. So many lives lost in vain, he thought as he took in the carnage. Hope lay abandoned everywhere he cast his eyes.
How can humanity be so cruel and unkind?
And then when these flimsy craft finally reached land, the derelict vessels were just dumped side by side in haphazard rows, the intense summer sun slowly fading the Arabic-inscribed names once proudly displayed on their bow or stern, tracing them back to some nefarious port in North Africa. Paul took it all in, numbed by what confronted him: the faded life jackets hiding under the wrecks, cast-off odd shoes, dirty, torn clothing, plastic drink bottles hiding under discarded ropes and bits of tackle.
It was an absolute disaster.
Dreams lay shattered everywhere like sad, withered flowers on a grave. It was more a war zone than a landing place. There was so much tragedy that apparently the locals couldn’t bring themselves to move anything. So the flotsam and jetsam of the humanitarian disaster in front of him was just left where it lay, on view for all to see almost as a reminder of the human suffering that had brought the owners of these discarded possessions and castoffs to Sicily’s shores.
Paul knew in that moment he had to move heaven and earth to ensure no matter what happened, these poor bastards would be given every opportunity to survive, and with luck, maybe even prosper in a new land.
“Paul Jones? I’m Tony O’Donnell.” Ice recognized Paul from the photo in his ASIO file he’d accessed last night when he was doing his background research.
“G’day, mate. Pleased to meet you,” replied Paul, his Aussie accent coming through strongly as he realized he was speaking to a fellow countryman.
O’Donnell dragged out a chair from the table Paul had positioned himself at, enabling them to have a pleasant view of the water three hundred meters away over the rooftops in front of him. But instead of the chair with a view, Ice sat with his back to the side, facing the entrance to the shaded terrace they were seated on.
Ice didn’t want any surprises. He was still too much of a soldier to give up his military training.
“Glass of red?” asked Paul, offering up the bottle of 2015 Tenuta Aglaea Etna Rosso that he had already ordered. “A particularly vibrant wine if I say so myself, grown high up on the slopes of Mount Etna. Cool-climate red with a minerality from the volcanic soils. Think you’ll enjoy it.”
Ever the bon vivant, without waiting for a reply Paul poured a generous glass for his guest.
“So, where do you want to start?” Paul inquired politely. He was always a man to avoid small talk and cut straight to the chase. Besides, he hadn’t eaten since breakfast and he was starving, so he didn’t want to get bogged down in the pleasantries of the meet and greet that would delay them from ordering.
O’Donnell picked up his glass of red, angling it toward Paul.
“Cheers, big ears,” he said, using a common Australian colloquialism that he knew Paul would understand.
Glancing over the top of his glass, Ice’s SAS training subconsciously kicked in. He quickly scanned the half-full restaurant, taking in the other diners—the three men talking with their hands at the table on the edge of the terrace, oblivio
us of the view; the couple next to them toward the middle, obviously in a long-term relationship, bickering quietly; the woman on her own at the table by the door, constantly looking up, clearly waiting for someone. All seemed normal.
Finishing his sweep of the space, O’Donnell took in the layout of what was around him: only one way in and out, no other access; toilets to the left beside the kitchen; two waiters and a person obviously in charge behind the counter by the door, calling the shots and taking the money.
Returning his attention to matters at hand, Ice looked at Paul over the neatly set table.
“Nice place. Sure smells good.” He was starting to salivate from the smell of garlic and fried seafood hanging in the air that was wafting their way from the kitchen at the back of the restaurant.
“Mmm . . . the red’s good. Like that,” O’Donnell said, a satisfied smile beaming across on his face.
“Now Paul, the car bombing in Piazza Del Duomo last week. As I mentioned to you yesterday, I’m investigating it. There’s a person of interest we believe has been linked to other bombings, and from what Cait tells me, you may be indirectly involved.”
“What, Cait Lennox? How do you know her?”
Paul was shocked at the mention of Cait’s name. Obviously he hadn’t fully thought this through.
Yes, of course! he realized. You don’t have to be Einstein to make the link.
“Paul, I haven’t told you before, but I was in the square when the bomb went off. I saw it all. You, Cait, her brother. She saved his life, you realize. Without her quick action he could have bled to death then and there.”
“What . . . you were there? You saw Dec being blown up and you didn’t do anything?” Paul was quickly cooling off on the field operative sitting across the table from him.
“First rule of working in the field. Don’t blow your cover,” replied O’Donnell.
The Cait Lennox Box Set Page 64
