Time Out (22 page)

“Establish a connection. Make them see you as a person. Help them remember that
they
are a person. Talk them down. Give them a reason out. Fight for your life.” I repeated with a sigh under my breath.

“Yes—” She eyed me for a second like she was surprised that I had actually been listening.

“Well when I said, I never saw him again—it was a lie. I think he must have trusted me,” Gwyneth suddenly whispered as she stared ahead at nothing in particular like she was remembering a distant memory.
“Because he came back to the clinic the next day.”

“He told me that he needed my help. That it was imperative that I come, but when I asked where the patient was he said that the injuries he sustained were too great for him to bring him to me. And I could tell by his desperate reaction that he was telling the truth so I agreed to go along with him.”

“I should have known something was off when he led me toward a part of the village that our guys were taking the most fire from the hostile insurgents. When we finally found the man, I knew that he was one of
them
. One of the people fighting against us,” she sighed.

“But the sight of the man gushing blood made me feel less guilty about trying to help him as best I could by applying pressure to the wound. I had bought him enough time to say goodbye to his sister and son. Until eventually the man bled out and died.” 

“I didn’t fully realize what I had just gotten myself in to,” she said regrettably. 

“I was a hopeless naive kid who believed it was her duty to save everyone she could,” Gwyneth frowned. “And because of that,” she looked down at her hands, “they began to trust me.

“In the beginning I did small stuff like giving out antibiotics to their children and for those who were suffering from A.I.D.S. But slowly,” she sighed, “it became bigger, more involved procedures like suturing gunshot wounds, and doing CPR.

“I lived with the mentality that I would
and
had been doing the same for our guys. I told myself that as a doctor I
needed
to remain unbiased. It wasn’t long until I was dividing my time up between being at the clinic and going out into the village. I guess you could say that I was a little lost,” she said wistfully.

“To make a long story short,” she exhaled heavily. “Two years later, I found myself administering dialysis to
Aarif
Kumar three times a week for kidney failure at his home in Khartoum, Sudan. One day while I was there, getting the machine ready to be hooked up, I overheard him talking in his office through the adjacent balcony. He was boasting about how he brilliantly duped U.N. Inspectors by smuggling the nuclear missiles across the border in ‘
Seft
’ trucks, which is an organization that helps the sick and impoverished, and how the only evidence left to the new locations were ‘close to his heart.’

“I knew he wore a kind of locket similar to the one in your hand,” she nodded at it. “Around his neck at all times, and I figured that’s what he had meant by ‘close to his heart.’

“I knew in that moment that I couldn’t pretend any more that this was okay when it really wasn’t. I knew that I would have to act fast and quick to make it out of there alive because it was heavily patrolled. When Kumar came into his bedroom for his usual treatment, I injected him with a lethal dose of barbiturates.”

“Used to kill people on death row,” I inserted, remembering overhearing this part from the news.

“And to euthanize terminally ill patients,” she added. “He was dead within seconds, and I now found myself in
this
situation.”

“At first I was only thinking of protecting myself, since I couldn’t just go to the cops. It’s why I came back here. I knew the protection that comes along with The Grimm Brother’s Band would buy me sometime, but the day the 02 Arena was…bombed. I knew they were really trying to destroy the only tangible evidence left that would lead our government to the nuclear site because of some stupid tweet I posted about going to the concert that night.

“They’re not retaliating because of the corrupting music; they’re retaliating because of what is in
that
locket.” When our eyes locked it made the hair on the back of my neck stand straight up. I thought of all the people who had been killed at the 02 Arena over something that fit into the palm of my hand.

“So they built that makeshift bomb out of gravel and shattered mirrors because of you?” I asked.

“
No, that
was someone else trying to send me a message. If the
real
terrorists had created that bomb and placed it underneath my seat in the center 4 section that night, I wouldn’t be alive today.”

“I don’t understand? There’s someone else who wants the microchip?” 

“How long did they torture you, Joie?” her eyes snapped up to mine. “How long did Uncle Sam give it to you?”

“Uncle Sam?”
 

“You weren’t abducted by terrorists, Joie,” she informed me. “You were abducted by the U.S. Government.”

Cocking my head back, I thought there was no way she could be telling the truth. These men had been brutal and unethical.

“
No
…they tortured me for hours,” I said taken back, completely aghast. There was no way our government put me through that horrific night.  

“Water boarding, right?” Gwyneth nodded. “Water boarding was invented by the CIA, terrorists don’t use it. There’s nothing quite like the feeling of fighting to get one more gasp of air at the same time you want to hack up the water in your lungs until you don’t know what side is up anymore.”

I shuddered at the dreadful memory until I found the words to speak again, “But I’m a U.S. citizen.”

“Yeah well—after 9/11 you lost a lot of those rights that protect you. You think I got that black eye because I’m clumsy and prone to falling?” she asked skeptically causing me to remember the shiner around her eye the day she was frantically searching for her locket. 

“They don’t have the right to kill us,’ I insisted. ‘Not when we still have something they want.”

I was stunned into silence, and could only look from Hawkins back over to her. “So if that was our government that night, then where are the real terrorists?”

“The real terrorists are the ones who killed Ted that day,” there was a hint of sadness in her voice because this was the first time Hawkins had heard any of this too. “They weren’t trying to bomb your van that day. They had confused it with mine.”

I remembered the matching silver Chevrolet van was parked next to our van that day in the parking lot, and it suddenly made sense.

“So it wasn’t Vance,” I realized.

“Robert Vance? No, why did you think that?”

“I found him on Hawkins’ bus that day.”

“What was he doing on my bus?” Hawkins joined the conversation when I realized I never got a chance to tell him about it because I went home shortly after the incident.

“I don’t know, it was weird,” I explained. “He was in your bedroom when we came up the steps. He said they were checking the bus for security type reasons—that it was protocol.”

“Weird,” Hawkins murmured.

“Yeah, I know,” I agreed, but noticed that Gwyneth had gone completely silent, like something had suddenly dawned on her.

“What is it?” I asked her.

“Nothing important,” she said dismissively. “The worst part is what happened to Ted…isn’t even as bad as it can get. You now know what happened in London,” she looked over at Hawkins.

The thought sent a sickening feeling into the pit of my stomach because I could still remember the feeling of the platforms wobbling and falling underneath my feet the night the stage collapsed. The memory of what happened must have flashed through his mind too, but it was secondary when it came to what Gwyneth was hiding.  

“Gwyneth, you have to turn yourself in,” Hawkins insisted. “You can’t let that kind of information get back into the wrong people’s hands.”

“I know,” she nodded. “I plan on doing it. I’m ready to face the consequences for my actions, but not before I say goodbye to Warren.”

“Just give me one last night with him,” she sniffed; slowly starting to break down now that she had confessed the truth for once.

“One more night,” Hawkins nodded. “And then I’ll have security escort you safely to the police.”

“Thank
you,
and I’m sorry about what happened to Ted. You don’t know how many times I wished it was me instead,” she wiped away a fresh set of tears and for a moment I felt bad for her. Hawkins could only shake his head in protest to stop himself from getting emotional too.

“And Joie, I know you may not believe this, but when I lied and told those men that you had the microchip because I couldn’t find my locket, I didn’t think they would actually believe me. I’m sorry for
everything
I put you through.”

The sentiment was genuine, and a piece of me couldn’t wrap my head around it as I found myself saying, “It’s okay.” 

Hawkins took my hand and led me off the bus after Gwyneth, but neither one of us seemed to know what to say to each other when we were alone again. Hawkins seemed more shocked than I was about what we had learned, but probably because he didn’t know what Gwyneth was capable of.

Thankfully, Riley and Lizzie were still sitting at the picnic table where I had left them when we came out the backstage door.

“Riley,” Hawkins turned to him. “Keep an eye on Joie. I got to go get the set ready.”

“Is everything okay?” Riley asked.

“No, not really,” Hawkins answered earnestly. “Just promise me you’ll watch her.”

“I promise.”

“I’m sorry, Joie,” Hawkins turned to me next. “If the fight over the locket was any indication of the kind of stuff she was putting you through, I would have insisted that she leave.”

“I knew you would have,” I assured him with a hug. “I don’t think any of us could have predicted this.”

“Gwyneth had it in her locket, didn’t she?” Lizzie spoke up.

“Yes,” I nodded solemnly.

“Well I got to go,” Hawkins thumbed over his shoulder toward the backstage door and I nodded. I knew this was a lot for him to digest at one time too.

             
“No big surprise there,” Lizzie droned once Hawkins was gone. “Gwyneth’s had it in for you since the first day she arrived.”

“No, you don’t understand,” I began to explain how things had changed since I last saw them. “This is bigger than anyone of us could have anticipated. The microchip contains coordinates and the location of nuclear missile site in Sudan, Africa.”

For a second, they could only drop their mouths in astonishment.

“Yeah—that’s what the men from the United States government who tortured me were really looking for, and what the terrorists are trying to destroy.” I decided to leave out the part about how Gwyneth killed
Aarif
Kumar because one shell shocker was enough for a day.

“I don’t understand, what do you mean?” Riley asked. “The men that tortured you aren’t terrorists?”

“No, apparently those were
our
guys. The
real
terrorists are out there…waiting.” I shuddered at just the thought.

“Well—they’re not going to get past Vance’s security,” Riley insisted.

“I doubt they’re here to protect the band,” I said as an afterthought when it suddenly dawned on me. “Robert Vance isn’t protecting the band. He’s protecting the locket. He has to be…” 

“You mean the guy who’s in charge of your investigation—”

“Is probably the same guy who had me tortured,” I finished Riley’s thought. “I had the creepiest feeling when he was questioning me too, he offered me a bottle of water of all things that night and it just didn’t feel right.”

“That’s sick,” Lizzie hissed.

“So that’s what he was looking for on Hawkins’ bus that day,” Riley reminded me. “He was looking for the locket.”

“And Gwyneth had already been interrogated by then,” I realized. “He wasn’t sent here to ‘contain’ anything but to find that microchip.”

“It would explain how he could keep all this information from the public. You guys remember how he stopped the Tribune from running that story. Who knows what you can do under the Patriot Act?”

“The real threat has never been about the fans,” I realized.

“Especially when there’s only what twenty to twenty-five thousand in the crowd,” Riley explained. “That’s nothing compared to the scope of what could happen with a microchip like that in the wrong hands.”

Now that I knew that the same men who had tortured me were the same men that took over for security for the band, I suddenly didn’t feel comfortable out in the open anymore.

“Can we go hang out with Harlow?” I asked, knowing that security was more focused on the places the public could easily access like our picnic table than the areas where the crew only worked.

“Yeah, I’m supposed to be up there anyway,” Riley checked the time on his wrist watch. “The pavilion gates will be opening soon.”