Effective immediately, p.13
Effective Immediately, page 13
part #3 of The Agency Files Series
This time, she knelt beside the car and worked on starting it from a better angle. It sputtered to life immediately. Gun drawn, she raced to the bathroom. Locked. At least he had the presence of mind to do that. I don’t think I remembered to tell him. Stupid me. “Let’s get outta here before police or sheriffs arrive.”
“Is it safe?”
“Ernie, now!” She heard shuffling and the water came on. “Ernie!”
“I was trapped in the nastiest space you can imagine. I’m washing my hands and arms. Period.”
And if I had a real gun, I’d shoot you outta there! We’ve got to go!
The door opened. “Let’s get out of here.” He grabbed her arm as she led him to the car. “I’ll have you know, I fell twice and almost walked past the building. Had to backtrack. This is—whoa, was that a bike?”
Claire glanced over her shoulder. “Yeah, and a moving biker.” She jerked open his door and pushed Ernie in. “We’ve gotta—oh man, here come more.”
As she jumped into the car, Claire whacked her head on the frame. Light exploded in her eyes, so driving half-blind, she shot across the parking lot and down the road, away from the Interstate. “I hope this is the right decision.”
“Where’re we supposed to go?”
“I don’t know. We were deciding when I saw the guys and Mark said to go. I suspect Marty’s in the air now.”
“And he’ll find us? How?”
The dots looked like they were growing closer, so Claire ignored Ernie and forced the car to its maximum speed, terrified that some idiot car would dash out in front of her. They passed a farm—the little drive hardly registering until it was too late—and sped past fields that would be perfect for Marty if he made it in time.
The bikers looked farther back now. As she whizzed toward an intersection, she called out, “If you pray, pray. I’m not stopping at the intersection. I don’t see anything but…”
Claire could have sworn she heard Ernie whimper. Her eyes widened as she saw the double arrows on a sign ahead. “Road ends. Hang on!” Tires squealed as she tried to come to a stop that wouldn’t get them killed. The sign rushed toward them despite her best efforts, and Claire chose to try a sharp turn rather than attempt a full stop. The car bounced over the shoulder, barely missing a ditch, fishtailed as she swung back onto the dirt road, and shot forward again once her foot reconnected with the accelerator. “Whew!”
“Are we alive?”
“Yeah… but we’re getting out of this car now!”
The road veered almost immediately right, and Claire took it. They bounced over the rutted dirt road and came to a stop behind a couple of trees. “Get out!”
“I swear, that’s all you guys say! ‘Stay in!’ ‘Get out!’ It’s crazy.”
Ignoring the man’s terrified ramblings, Claire grabbed his arm and pulled him into the trees, stumbling over roots as she went. “Just stay with me. Keep quiet. I hear them coming.”
“How can they know where we are?”
“Well, besides the fact that they’ve got some way to track you? I’d say the cloud of dirt we just raised is like a smoke signal. ‘Come get us! We’re right here!’”
“Aren’t there any houses around here?”
Claire tried to climb a tree but failed. “Keep going. We have to hide somehow. I’m just not sure where yet. And yeah, there’re houses. Do you want to have innocent people killed because we want to use their phone?”
“How come you don’t have backup phones? I always keep a spare—”
Dread, followed by panic, chased her into a near frenzied state. “Do you have one now?”
“Well, no. You told me to ditch it.” She could have sworn Ernie muttered, “Now I wish I hadn’t,” under his breath.
“Good. They can be tracked. Anything can be tracked. We just have to figure out what they’ve got on you. Earring?” She glanced at his ears. “Gotta belly ring or something in places I don’t wanna know?”
“Not on your life.”
The rising revulsion quelled. “Good. Well, unless you swallowed something or somehow you got a chip embedded in you, I don’t know what to think.”
They reached a creek, and Claire dragged Ernie through it. He complained about soggy jeans, squishy shoes, and leaving footprints behind. That stopped her. She searched for something to break up the tracks, but every attempt was obvious. “Just keep going. We’ve got to. I should have thought of that before I took you over the water.”
“Well, they’d have to be smart enough not to tear up the footprints with their bikes, and I doubt they will be. I know they won’t take them into the water, so as long as they don’t find where we crossed, we’ll be good.”
To her astonishment, just minutes later, as the bikes neared the creek, she heard the distinct whap-whap-whap of helicopter blades. “If that’s Marty, I’ll kiss him. I don’t know how far Aurora is, but Mark said he was the opposite direction from us.”
“Know where we are? Any idea at all?”
“I know we passed something about Frederick and I think there were a couple of little M towns mentioned before we got off on some number road. Like thirty something.”
“What were the last upcoming exits that you remember?”
“Um…”
“C’mon, Claire! It’s important.”
“Just Johnstown and Loveland, but they weren’t close.” She found a tree with low branches and sent Ernie up it. “Just get up there while I try to figure out if that’s Marty. It’d be stupid to flag down someone else.”
She found it hard to see without making herself visible. The helo banked and prepared to land not three hundred yards away. It lifted and set down a bit closer. She raced back to Ernie’s tree. “It’s Marty! Come back down. We’ve gotta go before they get here.”
“Go up the tree. Come down the tree. Make up your mind, Claire!”
She ignored him once more and grabbed his arm the moment his feet hit ground. They tore across the ground, weaving between trees, and then out into the field. It sounded like the Kasimirs had fired shots from behind them, but Claire didn’t hesitate. She shoved Ernie through the open door and flung herself after him. “Go!”
As she jerked the door closed and latched it, Claire said, “I have no idea how you got here, but I seriously love you.”
“She promised she’d kiss you if it was you, too,” Ernie quipped.
Claire kicked him.
Chapter Fifteen
Erika saw him enter and smiled. The assignment must be over. That was quick.
Twelve customers ahead of him meant for an excruciating wait. She mocked herself for using a word like “excruciating” to describe a five minute wait to say hello, but as the frustration dissipated the moment Keith stepped up to the counter, Erika couldn’t deny that it had fit—somewhat. “Hey, there. Your assignment was mercifully short.”
Pain—so instant it almost changed Keith’s features to a much harsher look—plastered itself over his face. “Yeah.”
“You okay?”
“No.”
Erika started to ask, when the realization of what must have happened hit her. “Oh, no. I am so sorry.”
“Gonna have a break anytime soon? Oh, and do you have an application?”
Noooooooooooooo! I can’t get into this here. Argh! “I can get you one, but you’d go nuts here. Three-sixteen, please.”
Keith shoved his hand in his pocket and pulled out a wadded five. “I didn’t order.”
“I know what you want,” Erika insisted. “Go sit down. I’ll see what I can do.” She tried to hand him his change, but he shook his head.
“For the pretty barista at the register.”
“I’ll let her know.”
It took another fifteen minutes for things to slow down enough for her to take a ten minute break. “I’ll be outside if you need me—right out front. If it gets busy, call or give me a yell.”
“Aw, go make out with your boyfriend. We’ve got this covered,” the new girl insisted.
With a name like Kiki, I shouldn’t be surprised when you say things like that. At Keith’s table, she held out her hand. “Walk with me? Talk with me?”
“Dance through your life with me?” Keith continued the song with just a hint of singing in his tone. “Do you really want me to pull a Gene Kelly?”
She sat down. “Sure. Let’s see you in action.”
Keith grabbed her hand and led her outside. “You’re good for me.”
“I try…” Erika squeezed his hand as they strolled away from the coffee shop. “So what can you tell me?”
“A woman is dead. She risked her life to expose traitors at the highest government levels, and I couldn’t keep her alive in a remote section of nowhere land.”
“And you quit.”
His jaw clenched and his fingers squeezed hers so hard she expected bruising. “I quit.”
“Wanna tell me why?”
“You have to ask?” Keith stopped and stared at her. He released her hand, and Erika pumped blood back into her fingers. With his hands on her shoulders, and a look in his eye that told her he wanted to touch her face, hold her—anything to drive away the demons that held him captive—he said, “Don’t judge me for what you said you’d do in my place.”
“What!”
“Claire—when I didn’t know it was Claire. You said—” Keith grew even more rigid as he fought back emotion. “You said you would have quit. Well, after ‘losing’ two, I quit.”
“That’s crazy! Think of how many people you’ve saved.”
Keith gripped the rail of a wrought iron fence. Erika watched his knuckles grow white and heard the clenching of his teeth before he ground out, “I can’t deal with it—don’t want to deal with it. It stinks. I didn’t sign up for this.”
All of Erika’s attempts to be supportive and caring disintegrated in a flash of anger. “Um, yeah you did. You signed up to protect people from other people who want to kill them.”
“Well, I failed.”
“—and,” she continued, ignoring what she feared would become some half-crazed mantra if she didn’t deny it, “sometimes that means you will fail. You won’t have all the information you need, and yeah, it stinks, but it’s the job.” Erika’s voice softened a little. “You can’t win every time. No one’s that perfect. You didn’t do anything wrong. I know it. If anyone blew it, your boss did.”
She watched him stiffen and then shake his head. She found herself gasping at the pain his voice projected. “You’re right. And if I can’t trust Mark—my boss—for good intel, then I shouldn’t be working for him.”
This, Erika couldn’t deny, no matter how much she ached to. Instead, she turned the words back onto him. “That’s fine. I can understand that.” It tore at her heart to see him struggle with her words—grow defeated as they beat into his soul. “If you quit because you don’t think your job lives up to adequate standards of safety for its clients, then I agree. Quit.” Her hand brushed his cheek, almost as if it had a mind of its own. “Just don’t quit because you think you failed. You didn’t fail,” she whispered.
Keith tossed cold water over those words. “I didn’t save the client. I got her killed. That’s a fail, Erika!”
Her tenderness and compassion dissolved in a wave of impatience. “You saved me. Even when I did stupid stuff like run off in the woods where people might be lurking, you stayed with me every step. What are you thinking?”
With fists now jammed in his pockets, Keith kept walking, head down and apparently lost in his own world. “I’m thinking,” he murmured at last, “that it is one thing to break the law when you’re saving lives. But if I can’t save people’s lives, then what’s the point? It just makes me a criminal.”
“The point is that you do save people’s lives. You just can’t save everyone. You’re not god! You’re Keith Auger, flawed person—just like the rest of us. Your flaws are just a bit more palatable than say the creeps who killed your client.”
“To you maybe—not to my God.”
“I think I read something,” Erika said, smiling into his eyes. “You’re gonna love this. I think I read something about people only seeing what’s on the outside, but god knowing what’s in your heart. Doesn’t that mean that you need to make sure that your motives are right, and when your actions don’t seem to follow, god’s making his judgments on your actions based on your motives?”
His arms wrapped around her, almost as if instinctive. By the way he sucked in air, Erika suspected he was as surprised by the hug as she was. “Partly,” he whispered. “I think the verse is also reminding us that we need to keep our actions in line with Scripture, too. Because that’s all our fellow men have to go on—what we do. But He comforts us by reminding us that even when we’re misunderstood, God sees our heart—our motives—and judges the whole picture.” Keith buried his face in her crazy, spiked hair. “I needed that today. Thanks.”
“I still think your intentions matter more than your actions. You can do stuff for all the wrong reasons, you know. I mean,” she interjected quickly as Keith stepped back and started to protest. “I mean, I know what you’re saying and it makes sense, but if you have to choose between intentions and actions—”
“Did you ever read the book of James?”
“James… little book near the end? Three of ‘em?”
“No. Those are the Johns—not the Gospel of John—the epistles. Anyway, before them is a little gem of a book—James. Read chapter two sometime.” He pointed to his watch. “Your break is over. Don’t want the others to hate me. I want a job.”
“You’d go crazy!”
“If you don’t want me there, tell me now. I’m on a job search, and I’m starting there if you’ll give me an application.”
She chewed her lip as she considered his words. “If I train you for this job, are you going to end up taking a better job a month later?”
The answer blurted out in a rush. “Of course not! I—absolutely would do that,” Keith finished with a grimace. “Sorry. You’re right.”
“Like you said, my break’s over. I’ll take you out to dinner tonight and we can talk more then, okay?”
“You’ll—”
Erika kissed his cheek and whispered, “I’m the gainfully employed person here. You need to save your money.” She dug her hands in her pocket and pulled out a giant ring of keys. She unclipped a second ring from it and passed it to Keith. “Can you go to my house—blue key—and find me shoes, something nicer to wear, and the poison green cosmetic bag on my bathroom counter?”
“Sure. Anything else?”
After a moment of pretending to think, she shook her head. “No… just you.”
Keith hadn’t been inside Erika’s apartment more than a minute before her landlord knocked on her door. “Erika? Are you okay? You’re home early…”
The funny man with his powder puff hair on each side of a balding head and his jolly smile nearly choked when Keith opened the door. “Hey, Mr. Moretti. Sorry to startle you.” He jiggled the key. “Erika sent me to fetch a few things for our date tonight—picking her up at work so…”
“Oh! I see. You are back then. You and your business trips. How you make a relationship work, I don’t know. Mama would have said, ‘Tony, you can travel or you can be married to me, but you can’t have both.’” He snickered. “It was always a bluff, of course. The Church wouldn’t allow a divorce. But she said something like that every time I took on extra overtime, trying to get ahead. Mama had better priorities than I did.”
Keith stepped back. “Would you like to come in? I’d love to hear more about your Maria. I always think I would have liked her.”
“Oh, she would have liked you,” Mr. Moretti agreed as he entered and sank into a chair so easily that Keith suspected he was a frequent visitor to Erika’s apartment. “She would have said, ‘Tony, that young man is a keeper. Erika should pick him now before some other girl comes along and catches his eye.’”
“I’d say the opposite—if I could.”
“Aaaah… the faith.” Mr. Moretti nodded. “I tell Erika, I say, ‘Keith is a good man—a man of faith and integrity—don’t let him get away because you are too stubborn to acknowledge your Creator.’”
“Bet that went over well.”
“She laughed at me. She said, ‘Mr. Moretti, I’m okay with the idea of a Creator. I mean, it makes as much sense as anything. And I like the idea of Jesus—I do. He seems like a cool dude.’” The old man wheezed and chortled. “Can you see Jesus’ expression when she said that? ‘Cool dude.’ Jesus! You know it must have amused Him to hear it after waiting for it all these centuries.”
Though Keith laughed and agreed, his mind remained fixated on the man’s first quote. “I’m okay with the idea of a Creator.”
“Keith? Are you okay? Is it offensive to you that I laugh at her or imagine Jesus doing something so irreverent? I always thought He must have a good sense of humor to put up with us…”
“No, no. I was just surprised—pleased too, of course—but surprised to hear she’s accepting the idea of a Creator. That’s a big leap for her.”
“I told my nephew you’d be happy to hear that. I said, ‘Gabe, that Keith is just waiting for her to believe. Once she does, I think he’ll let himself fall in love.’”
Assuming I can stop myself before it’s too late. “Well, I hope she will.”
Mr. Moretti leaned forward and clasped his hands together. “You must have faith. You look so discouraged. She’s a good girl, Erika. She’ll come around. It’s hard to overcome such a difficult childhood.”
“Difficult?”
“You don’t think a lifetime with a man who shows no emotion—feels no emotion—didn’t warp her just a little? She talks about her father as a very intelligent and scientific man. Men like that win debates before they begin.”
As the older man spoke, Keith nodded. “It would be hard to question what has been soundly defended or refuted. I see what you mean.”
Several long seconds passed before Mr. Moretti shook his head and leaned back in the chair. “But that is not what discourages you now—not really. What is it?”
