The accidental joe, p.26
The Accidental Joe, page 26
Glinka dove for Espy’s pistol. Espy jumped on him, and they wrestled for it on the blacktop. A round fired, muffled by flesh. Espy struggled to his feet over the Russian, who was moaning and clutching some nasty blood flow from his gut.
Dazed from the airbag, Nova staggered out the driver’s side, shaking the beehive in her head. I got up from the deck, rushing to help her. I was rounding the rear of the Volvo as Thorvald Grepp, pale as death, blood filling his mouth, slid the banger down by its strap to point the muzzle at Nova.
I ran to pull her away. Before I reached her, two shots spanked the air. One hit Thorvald’s chest. The next one split his nose. He dropped the shotgun, dead before his head bounced twice on the hood. Nova heard my footsteps and spun, ready to shoot my snubbie again, but tipped it skyward when she saw it was me.
Harrison called weakly from across the lot. “Nova, behind!” The wounded PPO was down but alive. Twenty yards away Espy had his 9mm up and was taking aim at her back.
The DSA got off one shot, a miss that punctured the Volvo. He started to draw a bead on her for a second try. She whirled around and fired. She missed. I made a snap choice and lunged into his line of fire to shield her and tackle him. Espy pulled the trigger.
When his slug hit me, I lost footing on one side and stumbled forward. My momentum sent me colliding into Espy, knocking him down on his back. I started to pass out. His body was pinned under my dead weight, but he wrestled his pistol free as Nova rushed up with her snub-nose. Espy held the muzzle to my temple. “Drop it.” Nova hesitated, assessing the odds of a clean shot with the short barrel. “Drop it, or I swear he’s—”
The paring knife had traveled the globe with me. Tokyo, Havana, Buenos Aires, Nairobi, Mumbai. That afternoon, I had almost left it in the Táboris’s pantry. This time my Murray Carter traveled from the sheath in my jeans pocket into the soft flesh under Gregg Espy’s jaw. It sunk into his neck point first. Only three and a half inches, but this chef had knife skills. A slice and a wiggle were all it took to sever his carotid artery. Like a page ripped from training day.
Nova kicked the gun out of Espy’s limp hand and cradled me. I could tell I was putting out a lot of blood. She pressed her fingers hard to my wound. “Help’s coming, I texted before.” I tried to smile, but I knew it was weak. My eyes fluttered. The idling outboard motor kicked into gear. She turned toward the dock. Someone was booking it out to sea on the exfiltration boat.
“Who?” Damn, my voice was thready…
“Ringstad.”
“Get him.”
“No.” She undid my belt and applied more pressure to my wound. “You hear that? Listen.” Sirens approached. “Help’s coming. Hold on…Pike?”
The last thing I saw before I blacked out was the flicker of emergency lights in Cammie’s tears.
forty-three
Still in blackness, but no longer total. More like I was trapped in smoke from an oil fire. Light wanted in.
I made out distant chirps. Not birds, though. Too much cadence. Machines. Definitely monitoring equipment. Either I was waking up or God’s gotcha is that when we die, we don’t go to heaven or hell but a hospital.
The beeps sounded comforting after the random echoes that haunted the blur of my past however many hours. Or days. I don’t remember a lot of what happened. I remember a chopper ride. Then a twilight landing at Princess Grace Hospital in Monaco. Weirdly, I admired the view as we descended. I was fading in and out then. My eyes had been heavy, but I forced them open, and I watched overhead ceiling lights tick by while medics sprinted my gurney to urgence. Doctors’ voices mixed with psychedelic nightmares about getting chased, tortured, beaten, and shot. Not nightmares at all, as it turns out, but real. You know that because you, dear reader, stayed with me. You heard it all, and the telling kept me going. You were better than company. Having you here helped me survive, and I love you for that. I hope you’ll stick around when I open my eyes. This could get interesting.
“You’re back.” A chair scraped. Cammie Nova smiled down at me through a mist. Her face was haggard; its skin bruised and chafed where it had met the airbag. She wore a butterfly bandage above one eye. To me, I was looking at a meadow of sunflowers.
“Think I’d leave without you?”
Cammie laughed but covered her mouth to hide the quiver of emotion. She wrapped cool fingers around my hand. “Are you in much pain?”
“Can’t tell. I haven’t been this high since my Willie Nelson two-parter.”
“So, this is you? You nearly take the last freight and come back doing stand-up?”
“Making up for lost time.” I looked around for a clock or a calendar. “Speaking of, how long has it been?”
“Yesterday.” A man’s voice. I worked to angle my head to see him. He moved closer to ease my strain. I’d seen this guy before. Cobwebs cleared. I remembered. He was Farrel, the man who tailed Nova to the wine bar in Arles. The guy Espy told me was an enemy agent. Farrel stood tall. He had a boxer’s build. Maybe he knew he was an intimidating presence, especially looming over a hospital bed, because he took a step back and smiled. “Welcome back to the hangry globe, Chef Pike.”
“This is my colleague, Reed Coleman.” Nova said colleague, but her bearing telegraphed deference.
“Reed’s good,” he said. Instead of shaking, Coleman chinned a greeting. “By way of introduction, I’m with counterintel. I liaise with the Office of the Inspector General. That’s a fancy way of saying I investigate the bad apples in various intelligence agencies for the OIG. I know you’ve been through the mill, but I need to hear about your interactions with DSA Espy.” Then he corrected. “Ex-DSA.”
I replayed the knife going in, easy as coring a Jersey tomato. I caught Cammie sending me the go-ahead sign. “Yeah, sure. However I can help.”
A doctor knocked on his way in. He wore his white coat over camouflage fatigue pants. A nurse followed. “Mr. Pike, I’m Captain Nguyen. I took the bullet out of your hip. Mind if I see how you’re doing?” Nova and Coleman took the cue and stepped out. The doc and the nurse conferred over my vitals and checked the wound. “Incision looks good, if I do say myself. We had to wait to remove the bullet until the ER team repaired a nick in your femoral artery. That’s low survivability, but somebody gave you vital first aid on-scene.” Cammie, no doubt. “How is your pain on a ten scale?”
“Far out, man.”
“Enjoy it now. You’re going to experience a lot of discomfort when we get you up and moving.”
“Beats the alternative. Question, Captain. Not to sound narcissistic, but did they fly you into Monaco just for me?”
Nguyen and the nurse traded looks. “You’re at Landstuhl Regional Medical Center. In Germany.” The memory came back in a fogged funhouse mirror. Rising to semiconsciousness, believing I was dead, soaring heavenward and floating on air. But instead of Saint Peter, I found an angel in a surgical mask sitting beside my stretcher in the belly of a medevac jet. It wasn’t a hallucination. After they stopped my bleeding, they had airlifted me to the big US military hospital near Ramstein Air Base.
I dozed some. When I woke up, Cammie was leaning against the closet. Coleman was sitting in the guest chair smelling of residual cigar smoke. “Up for a chat?” I treated myself to an ice chip to wet my whistle and said yes. “Good. I want to know what Espy told you. About Nova, about the operation, anything.”
Between sucking ice, resting my eyes, and pressing the morphine button, I spent the next thirty minutes describing how increasingly obsessed Espy got about getting Glinka out in time. Little did I know then about his money laundering motive. “He ground on me about Nova, too. Near paranoid. Always trying to discredit her.”
“Like how?”
“Like wanting me to report to him about any contacts she made.”
“Like with me?” The counterintel man smirked. “Come on, I clocked you peeking in that bar like a wet poodle. I do this for a living.”
“Yes. He specifically asked about you. Pushy about it. I didn’t know your name, but he described you and called you Farrel.”
“You misheard. My code name is Feral.”
“Nice. Vicious, but with hints of prior domestication.”
Coleman chuckled. “Condor was already taken.” The comic relief let me refresh. My interviewer waited and let his gentle stare speak. He wanted more. He got it.
“Espy told me you were a Russian agent, doing us dirty in Ukraine. So you know, I didn’t give you up.”
“Why not?”
“Because I trust her.”
The OIG operative turned to Cammie, then grew contemplative. “SSO Nova, you may step out for this part, if you find it uncomfortable.” She crossed her arms, settling in. Coleman continued with me. “Did Espy mention anything about her former fiancé?”
“Pointedly.” I shared everything from the strange walk Espy took me on in Nice the night before the exfiltration when he quizzed me about her ex, the Russian double.
“Did he mention any communication coming out of our DIS? Sorry. Detainee Interrogation Site.”
“He said he heard rumors Cammie’s ex smuggled her a note from there and wanted to know if she told me anything about it.”
“What did you tell him?”
My gaze rolled to Cammie. If I acknowledged what she confided in me, it would mean trouble for her. I turned back to the big man. And lied. “That I didn’t know anything about it.”
Satisfied, Coleman said, “You both seem to have done the right thing here. Nova told me she honored protocol and held this back from you. And after what you’ve been through, I’m deeming you conscious enough to hear the whole story. Well…the part I’m authorized to share, anyway. You may want to press that happy button.”
Can I say I liked this guy’s style? Mainly because it wasn’t a style. Unlike Gregg Espy, who felt like an Ivy League poser from day one on the Paris bateau, Reed “Feral” Coleman played it straight. His quiet command made him trustworthy. If there was such a thing in tradecraft.
“Espy was right,” he began. “A note did get out of DIS Maryland and got passed to Nova. It wasn’t lax security. Her ex’s message got out because we wanted it to. Although this guy had no problem being a traitor to his country, he did have qualms about betraying her. His note was his make-good, sharing intel that one of our moles in Putin’s orbit was in a corrupt enterprise with one of our own. He didn’t name our turncoat, so after Nova alerted the inspector general, we narrowed a list of possibles, with Espy on top. But we needed proof. Since Nova had skin in the game, I tasked her to join Espy’s Special Activities team to spy on him for us.
“The ex-DSA must have picked up a whiff of this, which would account for his paranoia. On the one hand trying to pump you for what she was up to and, on the other, planting doubt in your head to undermine her and gain your assistance. Glad you didn’t take his bait.”
I sipped some melted ice from the cup. It made me queasy. Or maybe it was the conversation. “Well, a bullet hole in me says you got your proof.”
“For which your nation will be forever grateful.” This time I couldn’t tell if he was being droll or serious. “I may need a more formal debrief, but let’s let you catch some winks.”
“One thing first,” I said. “After all our trouble, what about Glinka?”
“What about him?”
“Did he make it?”
The counterintelligence man didn’t answer. He let his gaze arrest in the air halfway between us. But I got the message. The man who ordered the killing of Kogg and my fiancée was alive. Coleman got up and shook hands. “Don’t talk about this to anybody else. We clear?”
“I’ll delete my podcast.”
“Podcast, now that’s rich. I’ll remember that one.” Coleman laughed his way out the door.
Cammie slid her chair close to the bed and offered ice chips. I waved off the spoon. Spent as I was, I had questions. “My turn to debrief you.”
“…All right.”
“Starting with how the hell did you get the idea to hide in Thorvald’s Volvo?”
“What’s my mantra? Tactics and cover. I figured the last place they’d look would be their own car.”
“Plus-ten for you.”
“Except I didn’t figure on the airbag. Pissed about losing that SIG Sauer. I had it since training at Camp Swampy.”
“Lucky you had my snub-nose. How did you have my snub-nose?”
“I noticed you hiding something in the door pocket when we got to the villa. When Ludik and I hauled the bodies outside, I peeked in the Brabus and snagged it. You didn’t tell me you brought a gun.”
I hesitated, then tried out her own advice never to answer more than you are asked. “Harrison thought it might come in handy.”
It worked. She didn’t dig. “You’d only get yourself killed with something like that.” Cammie set down the cup of ice and kissed me. “Instead, you almost got killed saving me.”
“I think that should be worth something, don’t you? Payback-wise?”
“Like what? And why the look? Are you tired? Do you need something from the nurse?”
Deep fatigue was dragging me down, but I couldn’t delay this conversation anymore. “I want you to tell me about you photobombing that picture of me and Astrid. This time, the truth.”
She closed her eyes briefly and rocked herself as if she’d been waiting for this. “I owe you that. It began when the money trail was leading to Kogg. I needed someone inside to confirm where it was coming from and where it was going.”
“Hold on. Astrid was spying for you, not Espy?”
“Pike, I recruited her to spy on Espy. On behalf of Reed Coleman and the inspector general.”
Suddenly there wasn’t enough morphine in Germany. “Astrid was your…what?”
“My jane, yes.”
I wasn’t prepared for the heaviness that descended on me. Everything got so crazy at the shoot-out on the beach, I couldn’t stop to break down the idea of Astrid as a spy. But it sure explained her changes in behavior, her erratic schedule, her sudden absences. It also explained why she avoided my attempts to talk things through. And why our relationship started to crater.
I worried Astrid was having an affair with Kogg when she was covering up for spying on him. That was what she meant by her “duty.” Cedric’s picture from Hamburg delivered a twist: how ironic that while I was bending my production schedule to meet up with Astrid, she was straining to fit me in with her spying. Cammie read my reaction. “I know it caused a lot of stress between you two. Astrid and I became friends, and she confided that in me. There’s a lot of complication that comes with being in a relationship with someone in clandestine work.”
“I can attest to that. Times two.”
She let that pass. Cammie had more to say. “Do you know the reason I understand why you hate getting sympathy for her death? Because I go through it, too. I bear the same burden. Astrid knew the risks, but what happened to her… It gutted me.” Cammie’s lip quivered. “My friend was gone. And my guilt. Pike, I carry so much guilt for sending her out there.” She lowered her face, then brought it back up to mine. “And you, well…I can’t imagine what it’s like having it end with things…ending like that.”
“Cammie, I told her to go.” I raced to get it out before I cried. “She offered to come home, and I told her, no, take that trip.”
“Listen to me.” She cradled my face between her hands and spoke to me dead-on. “Sebastian Pike, you did not plant that bomb. You hear me? Any more than I did.” We held that tender pose, that deep gaze, in silence except for the metronome of my heart monitor.
Clarity comes unbidden. It can arrive even under sedation. My aha was that Cammie and I held more in common than each other. And more than tandem guilt about Astrid. We both knew her and loved her, and that said something to me. We talked about her a good while, and it lifted my spirits to be able to express my feelings and memories as well as to hear Cammie’s. She even confessed that she thought she blew it that time she called me Basty. She’d heard my nickname from Astrid and let it slip. “Please don’t hate me because I lied to you.”
I still cleave to truth, but you can’t be a purist and function in the world or a relationship. Didn’t I just lie to Coleman to protect her? I touched Cammie’s cheek. “You did your job. As for Astrid, she was willing, right?”
“All in.”
“I’m glad you were lucky to get close to her. But now that I know that, it makes me sorry for your pain.”
“Thank you for that.” Her expression went somewhere deep. She resurfaced. “We live with this now, don’t we.”
“We do.” She leaned in and we kissed lightly. Then she sat back with a sigh and wiped a tear. I shut my eyes, but sleep wouldn’t come. My body was beyond tired, but my brain kept firing. It absorbed. It processed. It wondered.
There was no way to know what was next or where we were going. But I knew one thing. Because of Cammie everything had changed. At her job interview she promised to help me get my mojo back for my show. Because of her I had it back in my life. Call it purpose or relevance, I felt rejuvenated, like I was reaching for something beyond my aspirational grasp again instead of going along and along.
Or going it alone.
But for how long?
There are dues you pay for your freedom. I need to move, you see, but it doesn’t mean I haven’t wanted someone to ride with. But not just anybody. Someone who’s also independent and fearless. That’s a tall order.
Without Cammie I wasn’t sure I could be satisfied going back to simply hosting a TV show. Not without a sense of—dare I say—mission. I’ll admit I wasn’t too crazy about the kidnapping, the beatings, the electroshock… Taking a 9mm slug was no picnic either, but I did that for a reason, and didn’t even need to think. I just knew. Kinda defining, I believe.
