Fire with Fire: Chapter Twelve

MENTOR

    Downing feigned intense interest in the cognac. “I’m sure you had a host of suitable volunteers already standing in line to become Riordan’s full-time guardian angel.”

    “Well, strictly speaking, we do have one ‘volunteer’ — but not standing in line. In fact, standing is something our volunteer hasn’t done for a very long time.”

    Downing frowned. “I’m sure that’s quite witty, but I have no idea what you mean.”

    Half of Nolan’s face was hidden behind his raised glass: “Our ‘volunteer’ is another long-duration sleeper.”

    “You can’t be serious.”

    “Think about it, Richard. Another sleeper will be in the same boat as Riordan. If we choose a person with the right temperament and attitude, the two of them will probably become close as a result of their common experience — and losses.”

    Downing had to nod. “Yes, if we create the right kind of bonding events, the odds are good that they’d develop a strong affinity for each other.” He lifted his snifter. “I must say, it’s an inspired bit of madness, Nolan. It might even work. So tell me about our ‘volunteer’: who is he?”

    “It’s not ‘he,’ Richard; it’s ‘she’ –”

CALYPSO

    The first thing she was aware of was nausea and the overpowering smell of chemicals: sharp, artificial, astringent. And the smell was not just around her; it was coming from her, too.

    Hard on the heels of that realization came the sense of cold: deep, numbing, down-to-the-bone cold. And she was tired, so tired.

    Hours of repetitive drill worked even though her mind refused to. Altered senses, deep cold, drowsiness: onset of hypothermia. I’m freezing, blacking out. Gotta move.

    And then she was wide awake, as though someone had slapped her with an electric cattle prod — but the source of her sudden alertness seemed to be the hypodermic that was now sliding stiffly out of her left forearm. That was when she heard the oddly brief klaxon — two shrills and then off — and opened her eyes.

    She was in a bed — a hospital? No, there was a panel above her, hinged like the lid of a tanning bed or a –

    Coffin? She sat up quickly, looking around. A surge of nausea almost knocked her back down, blurred her vision. All she could see were angular shapes in the darkness of this large room in which she had awakened. Shapes in the darkness –

    Shapes and voices in the darkness. Cold and wet. Sudden light in the eyes. Then gone. More voices, most American, some British, a few translating rapidly into — what was it? Spanish? Portuguese?

    The light came back. And sound. “Captain? Captain?” The light was so bright. Seemed so far and so close all at the same time.

    “Nonresponsive. I say we triage and move on.”

    “Excuse me, Major, but that’s my CO. You are not ‘triaging’ her.”

    Shapes with shoulders, with hides of brown and green mottling, swam above her and between eddies of light and dark.

    “Corporal, I’m in charge here –”

    “Doctor, you are in charge here. But this assault rifle has a special veto power, if you get my drift.”

    The voices stopped. No, no; bring the nice voices back.

    “Son, I know about her — she’s a good officer, but we can’t save her. Look.”

    She felt waves with fingers move her body, roll her to the left. There was pressure — unpleasant — behind her.

    “Christ.”

    – then the tide of fingers receded, lowering her, and she was flat and level and comfortable again.

    “She won’t make it through surgery. And how long ago did she get hit?”

    “About forty minutes now.”

    “Evacced how long ago?”

    “Twelve, maybe fifteen minutes.”

    “Okay, then here’s the rest of the bad news: she’s been in her shredded MOPP for at least twenty-five minutes. And those weren’t all fragmentation devices you waded through. There were chemical rounds mixed in. Viral agent; that’s all we know so far, but I don’t like what I’m seeing around the wounds. If it had been anything other than the liver –”

    “Doc, what about the cold cells?”

    “I haven’t…we…How do you know –?”

    “Major, I know you’re really a civilian, but understand: this is the army. There’s no way to keep a secret in the field.”

    The voices stopped, but she could tell they would start soon again.

    “Okay, she’s as good a first candidate as any. She signed the release?”

    “Must have. Bitched no end to get us all to sign ours.”

    “Okay. But, son –”

    “Yes, Major?”

    “You do know you’re never going to see her again?”

    “Yes, sir. But it’s not about whether I see her again, is it?”

    “No, I guess not.”

    “You take good care of her.”

    “The best.”

    The best best best feeling was the warm blackness that came next. All warm and all black black black…

    The room was not entirely black: but then this room was not that room — or had that been a tent?

    No time to think about it now. Something was wrong in this new room: only dim red emergency lights, nobody around. Just a row-and-column array of long, dark boxes, most of which had small red and green lights of their own. Her eyes adjusting to the darkness, she looked over the edge of her bed/coffin: it confirmed her first impression. She was in some high-tech equivalent of a tanning cell. Except it was clearly not a tanning cell: an IV line tugged at her bicep, another at the inside of her thigh — and she was catheterized.

    Okay, some form of medical life support. A phalanx of similar cells stretched away before her, into the dark, all closed. Definitely not a hospital; more like some kind of — her mind flailed for an appropriate term — a parking garage for sarcophagi. But it didn’t look like long-term parking: the cells were all on wheels — heavy-duty hospital gurneys — and if they had once been in a neat checkerboard arrangement, they were somewhat scattered now. There were gaps in the grid — whole rectangles were missing — and her own might have previously occupied one of those gaps, for she was not a part of the checkerboard pattern. Her cell was near the room’s one open door, pushed close to the wall, where a cluster of cables and hoses ran from sockets directly into the side of her cell.

    She became aware of a growing ache at the midpoint of the right side of her back, then of distant noises: faint chaotic cries, stifled by fainter stutterings — automatic weapons with sound suppressors. Okay, that clinches it: time to leave.

MENTOR

    Downing wasn’t sure whether he was mostly indignant or stunned. “Nolan, just how are we going to get a woman to furnish long-term, twenty-four/seven undercover security coverage for Riordan? Have her become his personal valet?”

    Nolan twirled the compupad stylus slowly between his fingers. “No, his partner.”

    For a long moment, Downing did not comprehend. Then: “You’re not serious.”

    “I am — dead serious.”

    “Nolan, this is immoral — compelling people to become intimate.”

    Nolan put down his glass. “Rich, you and I have given orders that got other people — innocents as well as enemies — killed. Quite frankly, I have far greater moral qualms over those decisions than this one.”

    “We had no choice in those cases; it was — either overtly or covertly — war.”

    “We don’t have any choice in this case, either. No one else fits the bill — or do you think Riordan will tolerate us assigning him an overt, round-the-clock bodyguard?”

    Downing didn’t bother to answer with the obvious “no.” “So we protect him by procuring a romantic involvement with a woman who also happens to be — unbeknownst to him — his guardian angel. But what if they fail to find each other — erm…’compelling’?”

    “Then we’ll invent a love potion. Hell, Rich; I don’t know. But here’s what I think will happen: we take two healthy, attractive, intelligent people who have — according to the Psych folks — compatible personality profiles. We put them together, and they share a commonality that almost no one else in the entire world can boast: they are time travelers. They have made a one-way trip into the future and are now orphans here: no family, no children, no circle of friends, nothing. All they’ve got is each other.”

    Downing nodded, thinking. “If we could add an intense, shared crisis of some kind, that intimacy might easily become romantic, sexual. But once they get over — well, ‘needing’ — each other, what then?”

    Nolan sighed. “Then nature will take whatever course it’s determined to take. But by then, with any luck, Riordan won’t need round-the-clock protection anymore.”

    “And what of the woman? What becomes of her?”

    “She will have had a relatively gentle — and well-funded — reintroduction into the world.”

    Downing sighed. “So should we be optimistic when we assign her a code name?”

    Nolan frowned. “What do you mean?”

    “Well, if we were being optimistic, and if we stick with your pattern of Homeric sobriquets, we should assign her the code name ‘Penelope.’”

    “And if we’re not so optimistic?”

    “‘Calypso,’ of course.”

    Nolan’s eyes seemed very tired, then he turned away. “We name her Calypso. Of course.”

CALYPSO

    She tore out the tubes and the catheter, tried vaulting the side of the cell: she half fell, half collapsed onto the floor. Damn: legs wobbly as a boiled chicken neck, everything else stiff and too cold to move or even feel things reliably. Her fingers were particularly bad: almost no strength or sensation.

    More shouting, again abruptly terminated by the weapons fire: closer now. Tactical training kicked in: since the hallway beyond the open door was as dark as this room, how were the gunmen moving, aiming? Had to be equipped with night-vision gear. That and suppressed weapons added up to covert ops or special forces. Yes, time to leave.

    But how? Frozen, weak, apparently still wounded, and lost in the dark of an unfamiliar facility, she was as good as already dead.

    But not if they couldn’t see her: that was the key tactical variable. Night vision — how could she defeat that? And then she knew.

    Using the rim of the cell to hoist herself up, she hastily inspected its exterior. Yes, as expected: hard-copy status reports clipped to its side. Would have been interesting to read them, but she had far more important plans for the paper.

    She tore off the sheets, rolled them into a long, composite taper, scanned the room for heating vents. She found one, scuttled feebly over to it, fumbled for the cover-release as the sounds came closer — which now included curt, muted exchanges she could not make out, occasionally broken by a few seconds of silence. But she knew what those exchanges were, just by the cadence of them: commo chatter on a tactical command net. Staccato-paced sitreps as the search-and-destroy team went room to room, objective to objective.

    She bloodied her fingers getting the cover off the vent, discovered the dim reddish glow she had expected to find: battery-driven electric backup heaters that would take over for a few hours in the event of general power loss. She shoved one end of the crumpled rod of papers against the heating elements, waited for several interminable seconds.

    A wisp of smoke, a glowing ember, and then a sudden yellow flare: they were burning. She crawled back to her tanning cell, holding the paper upright to extend the burn time, looked overhead: there was a smoke and heat sensor, just a foot behind her unit. She pushed the leg of the gurney: it resisted, then rolled half a meter. She locked the wheels, grabbed the edge of the cell with her free hand, took a deep breath, and pulled with her arm as she pushed with her legs.

    Her muscles were obviously reawakening, because hoisting herself into the cell was not as difficult a task as she anticipated. But evidently her nervous system was becoming more responsive as well: the ache in her back became a knot of searing pain — so sharp and sudden that her lungs froze in mid-inhale.

    Can’t yell, can’t even gasp: they’re too close. And it’s going to get worse — right now. She doubled her legs under her so that she was crouched and then stood slowly.

    She might have blacked out for an instant — from the persistent dizziness or the crushing pain, she wasn’t sure. But there was no time to wonder. As she lifted the half-burned taper up to the smoke sensor, she heard distant footfalls — the sliding, sibilant gait of trained killers advancing in a double-time leapfrog pattern along the corridor. She looked up: the taper was burning directly under the sensor. Damnit, why don’t you work? Why don’t you –

    The sudden downpour of water blinded her, soaked her, re-froze her — but it meant a fighting chance. Neither infrared nor light-amplification goggles liked precipitation much — and she had just called up a nonstop monsoon. She looked down, hesitated, daunted by the probable pain, but had no time to waste: she jumped down to the floor. She fell awkwardly, too nauseous and agonized to breathe, but she kept moving, hobbling to the door. She heard a break in the commo chatter and a muttered curse off to the left. Staying low, she tucked around the corner into the hallway, heading to the right. A 12-and-6-o’clock snap check: the corridor — what little she could see of it through the deluge of spraying water — was all clear. Clutching the sodden, flapping hospital smock close to her with one arm, she continued to the right at the fastest lope that she could sustain.