One Rough Man

She had a connecting flight to Charleston but didn’t feel like getting on it. She felt like curling up in a ball and forgetting everyone and everything. She instinctively thought she should be crying or grieving over the loss of Pike, but all she felt was hollowness inside.

She joined the immigration line, moving forward like sheep to a trough. She saw CNN on a TV across the immigration area. She caught the flash of Bosnia-Herzegovina and focused on the story. She couldn’t hear what was being said but saw a video of the market, men and women wandering in a daze, police waving the cameras back, firemen running holding bleeding bodies, and an incongruous single individual in a space-age bio-suit. The screen cut to a photo, the name Harold Standish beneath it. She had no idea what that was about and didn’t have the energy to care. She waited to see something about the president admitting the Taskforce’s existence or some other catastrophic news conference, but the story ended.

She handed her passport to the man behind the counter. He scanned it and stiffened. She felt a stab of adrenaline, remembering what had happened in Atlanta, followed immediately by resignation. She had no strength to fight the bogus terrorist charge. At least it solves my problem of what to do next. Before the man could say anything, she said, “I’ll come with you. Just take me wherever you need to.”

He looked at her suspiciously, saying, “Follow me.”

He led her down a hallway to a small room that contained two folding chairs and a table. He told her to wait, then left, locking the door behind him.

She sat for a half hour, mostly in a daze. She tried to remember her time with Pike, but her subconscious refused to engage. She was having a hard time seeing his face. She remembered the last thing he had said to her, and didn’t believe it. It wasn’t worth it. We should have let him get away. She laid her head on the table and began to cry. Sobs racked her body in convulsions. They slowly faded away, leaving her with the same drained, hollow feeling. She heard the door open and looked up, eyes red. She saw a man enter and smile.

“Jennifer Cahill?”

“Yes.”

“I’m Mike. I’m from the Taskforce. You’re not in any trouble. I was waiting on you to land. Kurt Hale wanted to see you as soon as you hit U.S. soil. I’m supposed to take you to him.”

She showed no emotion. “Okay. How’d you know I’d be coming here?”

“We didn’t. We have folks at every major embarkation point in the U.S. We left the terrorist alert in place. Sorry.”

She waved it away and stood up. “I could really give a shit about that. Let’s go get this over with.”

As they left the immigration area he asked about her luggage. She shrugged. “It’s in Bosnia. I don’t have any.”

They walked in silence for the rest of the way, exiting the airport. Getting to the car, he tried one more time to draw her into a conversation.

“I understand you ended up finding and stopping the terrorist.”

She looked at him like he was an idiot. “I guess so, if you believe forcing him to blow everyone up early is stopping him.”

He put the car in drive and didn’t say another word. The rest of the trip was spent in silence. As they got onto the toll road, the weather turned sour, with rain beating the metal of the car. The only sound was the windshield wipers flipping back and forth.

Jennifer gazed out the window, ignoring the drive. Eventually, the car pulled into a checkpoint. She registered that the car had stopped, then realized where they were.

“Why are we here?”

“This is where Kurt is at the moment. I was told to bring you straight to him.”

The guard waved them through to the West Wing parking area of the White House.

After a short walk, Jennifer stood outside the White House situation room, waiting to be asked to enter. The door opened and she saw a long table surrounded by wood-paneled walls with multiple plasma screens. She immediately recognized the president of the United States at the head of the table. He stood and approached her.

“Hello, young lady, we’ve been waiting for you. I’m Payton Warren,” he said, extending his hand.

Jennifer didn’t even begin to know what to say so she simply shook his hand, mute.

To his left was Kurt Hale. She looked around, recognizing the secretary of state and the secretary of defense. She saw other faces that she didn’t know, but felt she should, vague recollections from Sunday news shows. What’s this all about? Why am I here? She went from face to face, waiting on someone to tell her what to do. At the far end she saw a man with a horrendous visage. His face was scabbed, without any eyebrows. His arm was in a sling, a set of crutches to the side of his chair. He was smiling at her. The smile was real and familiar.

103

I saw Jennifer look from face to face, waiting for her to get to me, wanting to see the same glow I had experienced when she entered the room.

It dawned on me that I had been subconsciously holding back, protecting myself from the meat-cleaver of disappointment if it was a case of mistaken identity and someone else was at the Dulles Airport. Maybe secretly protecting myself against the trauma of having the newly formed scab covering the loss of my family ripped out raw had the unthinkable happened. In that moment, I realized that Jennifer had been right in Bosnia: Her death would have destroyed me completely. Left me broken beyond repair.

I watched Jennifer continue to search for some indication of why she was here or someone she recognized. She looked like shit. Like she’d spent the last twenty-four hours sleeping on park benches and knew the next twenty-four hours held nothing but the same. She finally got to me. I saw her face change from a lack of recognition to one of shock, then she fell backward into a chair. Not exactly what I expected.

From behind her, Knuckles jumped up, saying, “Whoa! Hang on there. You okay?”

I could tell she recognized him, but she simply stared like she was seeing a ghost.

He asked again, “Jennifer? You all right?”

Something clicked within her, and without a word, she jumped up and raced over to me.

Holy shit, she’s going to hug me. It would hurt, but I didn’t want to stop her.

She stopped short, smiling, tears running freely down her face. She leaned over and gingerly kissed my forehead on the crew-cut of singed hair.

“You bastard. I guess you do have ten lives.”

I grinned. “Yeah, I guess so. Took you long enough to get home. I was starting to worry.”

She ignored everyone else in the room, simply taking my hands into hers and staring at me. After a second, she seemed to remember where she was, and what had led to this meeting. She asked, “What happened? What’s going on? Why isn’t everyone dead?”

Kurt said, “Well, we ended up being very, very lucky. Scientists are still studying the material, but it looks like the WMD was only deadly to those genetically predisposed.”

“What’s that mean?”

I took over. “The weapon they found was an ancient sack of spores from a plant that’s probably extinct. It causes major anaphylactic shock in people predisposed to be allergic to it. Basically, it causes the same reaction as in someone allergic to bee stings, only a hundred times worse.”

“Okay… that still sounds pretty bad. Isn’t it?”

“Yeah, it is, but I managed to kill Carlos before he could set off the device. He fell on top of it, which somehow caused it to go off. His body tamped down the explosion, like a soldier jumping on a grenade. On top of that, it looks like folks from Europe aren’t nearly as susceptible to the spores as guys from Guatemala, where they came from. Luckily, I fall into that camp.”

Jennifer processed that, coming to the natural conclusion, “So, the whole thing was a waste of time? All that death and destruction for nothing? Ethan’s death—”