Any Minute Now (15 page)

“Yes.”

“It's a lie. The truth…” Lucy shook her head back and forth like an animal caught in a trap about to chew off its paw. “The truth…”

“Lucy—”

“The truth will kill me.”

Now Flix did lean forward, took her free hand in his, noted how damp it was with cold sweat. “
Guapa
, this is me. I could never be there for you when you were young, but I'm here now. I won't let anything happen to you. This I swear with all my heart and soul. Please tell the truth now. You must see that keeping it to yourself is what's killing you.”

Lucy stared at him with eyes swollen with tears and years of unknown heartbreak. “Maybe you're right,
Tío
. It's why I slipped into drugs, then fled the house.” All at once, her fingers gripped his with a terrible ferocity. “It was…” She choked, pulled back, and then with an enormous show of courage, pressed forward. “It was my father. Mama didn't protect me against him. She knew all about it. She
knew
and did nothing to protect me.”

“Wait a minute, your father abused you and my sister knew?”

Reacting to the shocked look on his face, she said, “She was terrified of him—and of you.”

Flix found himself reeling. “Me?”

Lucy nodded. “She was afraid of what you'd do to him if she told you.”

“Damn right. I would have—”

“And landed in the stockade? Court-martialed? Jailed for life?”

Lucy's voice sounded to him like the oracle of Tikal, her words like a chant or a prayer, as if it were coming from another plane of existence, one he could not ever have imagined until this dreadful moment. Not in
his
family. Never. “Aiii!” Flix clutched his head, which felt like it was about to explode.

“
Tío, por favor. Tío!
”

Setting aside the necklace, she pushed herself into his arms, holding him as he had wanted to hold her, comfort her, protect her. But how could you protect someone from the past? It was a task far beyond him. Still, they clung to each other like survivors of a shipwreck, which, in a very real sense, they were.

“She loved something about that shitbag, though God alone knows what it was,” she whispered in his ear.

Flix knew she was right, but that knowledge only caused the pain to burrow deeper inside him, like a worm intent on feasting off him. In a whispered voice he did not recognize, he said, “What,
guapa
? What did he do?”

“We had a basement, do you remember?”

“Marilena said no one went down there. It was too damp.”

“That's where he took me, most nights. He tied me up, but it wasn't what you think.”

Lucy was shivering; she clung to him more tightly. Out of the corner of his eye, he noticed St. Vincent start toward them. His allotted time with Lucy was up, but he wasn't having any. He shot St. Vincent such a poisonous look that the man stopped in his tracks, retreated to his former post, but not before tapping his watch face.

Lucy was still whispering in his ear. “He had a stack of magazines he got through the mail. Japanese periodicals on Shibari, ritual rope bondage. Much later, I learned it's an art form in Japan, but my father had other uses for it in mind. He'd spend hours binding me, then he'd hang me from the ceiling, sometimes upside down, other times in a lotus position, still others with my arms and legs spread-eagled. By then, he was ready to burst.” Her voice broke apart like a sheet of glass shattering. “He … was … like … a … demon—the devil himself.” Each word was driven out of her as if it was her last breath.

She hung in his arms, limp and shivering. “But that wasn't the end of it. Then he started in on the photos—hundreds of them. He posted them on a Web site, where people paid to see me … like that. They even sent in suggestions they'd pay a premium price for. Naturally, my father liked that best.”

Now St. Vincent was coming across the room, and by his grim expression and the firmness of his stride Flix knew there was nothing more he could do to hold him off.

“Time,” St. Vincent said.

Lucy either didn't hear him or did not wish to hear him; she did not want to let go of her uncle.

“Listen,
guapa
, listen to me. You rest here for a while—a short while—and then I'll be back, okay?”

She wiped her eyes and nodded against his shoulder. She gathered up the necklace, gave it back to him, but she kept the box, carefully folding the wrapping. She placed it in the box, held it between her hands like a temple offering.

“I'll keep this,” she said. “Okay?”

“Better than okay.” He kissed her on both cheeks, then rose to his feet. A swell of great affection overcame him. He felt as if he had made a long, arduous climb with her.

She looked up at him with a tentative smile. “Come back for me,
Tío
.”

“You have my word.” He grinned. “
¡Hasta próxima, mi guapa!”

*   *   *

“Look at him,” Charlie exclaimed, paging through the surveillance photos on Whitman's mobile. “He's got the neck of a chicken!”

“Meet Ibrahim Mansour,” Whitman said. “Our new target.”

They were seated in Whitman's favorite diner, having breakfast. The place had the appearance of being from the 1930s, which was why Whitman liked it.

“The only thing missing here,” Charlie said, looking around as she handed him back his mobile across their plates of eggs and bacon, “is a juke playing ‘Begin the Beguine.'”

He met her frank gaze. “‘These Foolish Things,' more like it.”

They ate in silence for a few minutes. The waitress came and refilled their coffee cups without being summoned. Whitman was a regular. The door opened, letting in the golden late-morning sunlight along with a young couple with their arms around each other.

“There but for fate go we,” Charlie said.

Whitman strained and failed to read her inflection. She had always been something of an enigma to him. Just one of the things he loved about her, one of the things that had driven him away.

“We deploy in thirty-six hours,” he said.

His change of direction was obvious, not to mention unsurprising. She decided to go with the flow. “To take apart a soft target.”

Whitman went back to his eggs. His bacon was already gone.

*   *   *

“She's better, yes?” St. Vincent said as he walked with Flix out of the Bethesda Institute of Mary Immaculate.

There was no sign of Sister Margaret, or anyone else for that matter, out in the semicircular driveway. Just St. Vincent's SUV and an ambulance. Beyond, the staff parking lot was all but full.

“You'll take good care of her until I get back, no more drugs,” Flix said. It wasn't a question.

“That's part of our bargain.” St. Vincent stopped by the side of the SUV. “Just make sure you fulfill your end of it.”

“No need to remind me,” Flix said.

St. Vincent opened the passenger door and Flix ducked his head, about to climb in.

“Watch out!” St. Vincent said as he plunged the needle of a syringe into the side of Flix's neck.

St. Vincent caught Flix as he collapsed. His driver was already at his side. Together, they hauled Flix to the rear of the ambulance. St. Vincent slammed his hand against the double doors. They opened, revealing a pair of young men in nurses' uniforms. They took possession of Flix, transferring him to the collapsible gurney inside.

“He's all yours, Doc,” St. Vincent said when Paulus Lindstrom's pale face appeared in the doorway.

“What did you inject him with?” Lindstrom asked.

“A synthetic form of curare concocted by our Psy-Ops division.”

“What if he remembers the needle?” Lindstrom asked in a none-too-steady voice.

“If he remembers anything it'll be me shouting ‘Watch out!' When he wakes up, the nurse in his room at Walter Reed will assure him that he hit his head while getting into the SUV and suffered a mild concussion. End of story.”

“You'd better be right.”

“Doc, I'm always right. Always.” He gestured toward Flix's supine form. “You'd better get a move on. You have twenty-six hours until he's scheduled to report to Universal Security for the final team briefing prior to deployment. He needs to be mission-ready before then.”

Lindstrom glanced nervously from his patient back to St. Vincent. “As I told you, we're only beginning to move on to human trials.”

“And as I told you, I want one of those trials in the field.”

Lindstrom winced. “It's too soon.”

“We've already been through this argument. The security of Mobius may have been compromised, Doctor. It is imperative that the trials be accelerated. This is the ideal way to do that.”

“There is nothing ideal about what you are ordering me to do.” Lindstrom looked like he was about to have a stroke. “Remember the monkey that tore its face off.”

“That was a fluke.” St. Vincent's voice was calm, reassuring. “You said so yourself.”

Lindstrom licked his lips. “As long as you understand the risks. I can't be held responsible.”

“If not you, Doctor, who?” St. Vincent slammed the door in Lindstrom's ashen face, and the ambulance drove off to its date with destiny.

What both Lindstrom and St. Vincent failed to notice was Lucy's face, peering out of one of the front ground-floor windows. Having asked to use the toilet, she had adroitly sidestepped Sister Margaret and all the other sisters, making her way to what was quaintly called the parlor within whose thick drawn-back drapes she stood while observing what had happened to her uncle. It was impossible to hear the conversation between the two men, but she didn't need to. She knew Flix was being taken to a place he did not want to go.

 

PART TWO

WAR

Resolute imagination is the beginning of all magical operations.

—Paracelsus

 

14

The Red Rover team, thirty thousand feet over the Atlantic, was LIM.

Any other team Universal Security Associates put in the field would have been transported via either commercial flight or small cargo transshippers. Red Rover was special, and so they were embedded in a cadre of the 26th Marine Expeditionary Unit ground combat element.

In other words, Red Rover was LIM: Lost in the Military. There was no trace of them having left the States, nor would there be. There would be no trace of them when, in approximately twelve hours, they were on the ground in Djibouti. The Horn of Africa was one of the major staging areas for Marine ops. Its forward posts were manned by members of Marine Intelligence, who worked around the clock trying to make sense of Babel, otherwise known as Middle East chaos.

The C-17 Air Force transport was loud, uncomfortable, and shook like an old man with palsy. Its interior looked like a warehouse. Men were crowded in on either side with boxes and crates lashed down with thick netting in the center area.

Flix fell asleep almost as soon as they took off. To Whitman, his wound seemed to have taken more out of him than he would have expected, going by the chart he had purloined on his first visit to Walter Reed. The rest will do him good, he thought as he turned his attention back to Charlie.

“I find it interesting that Cutler hired me,” she said, automatically adjusting the timber of her voice to compensate for the ambient noise.

“Why do you say that? You earned your way onto the team.”

“Nevertheless he clearly hated my guts.”

She and Whitman were sitting close together on utilitarian pull-down seats, and the upside of the clamor was that no one was going to overhear their conversation.

“That's a bit of an exaggeration,” Whitman said.

“Don't bullshit a bullshitter.” She cocked a thumb in Flix's direction across the fuselage from them. “Not to mention your friend Orteño there. I thought his eyes were going to bug out of his head when he saw me.” She cocked her head. “Did you for some reason give him the impression I was male?”

“I may have. I don't recall.”

Her laugh was mocking. “Please. You
recall
everything—the good, the bad, and the ugly.” She shrugged. “Anyway, I don't think Orteño approves of your choice in armorer.”

“Wait until he sees what you've brought along. And call him Flix; it'll help smooth things over.”

“Aye, aye, Captain.”

Again that mocking tone, which he chose to ignore. “I've got some news for you regarding our brief. I'm ripping it up.”

“What? Why are you telling me this now?”

“Our last brief was compromised. The target knew we were coming and was prepared.”

“A leak.”

Whitman nodded. “Most likely in NSA, but I can't rule out Universal Security. Which is why I waited until we were in the air. The security on a C-17 is tighter than a duck's ass.”

“Then Mansour is out.”

Whitman nodded again. “You're right, Ibrahim Mansour does have a chicken neck. He's also a minor player—very minor.”

“Then why have we been sent to kill him?”

“My opinion? It could have been almost anyone. Since there's a crisis brewing in Lebanon and he's in Beirut he was a logical choice. As a target, he was supposed to make sense to us.”

“But it doesn't to you.”

“It doesn't matter. I think the Mansour brief is misdirection.”

“From what?”

“Red Rover's original target: Seiran el-Habib, a very big fish in the terrorism world. Cutler told me that NSA had lost track of el-Habib, that he was no longer at the villa in Western Pakistan we were sent to. Turns out Cutler lied. El-Habib is exactly where he was.”

“Why would Cutler lie?”

“Because the NSA, who pays all our salaries, told him to.”