The stay at Landstuhl would end with a return to Rammstein, where a C-141 Starlifter would ferry them to Joint Base Andrews east of Washington. Jon would spend weeks at the Inova Fairfax Hospital in Falls Church, where they would rebuild his destroyed joint. Months of therapy would teach him to walk again and he would probably use a cane ever after. Kyra wasn’t sure whether he would grouse about that or embrace it, claiming it made him look dignified.
She felt a presence behind her and looked up. Kathy Cooke was standing over Jon, looking down at his pale face. She reached out and moved a stray bit of hair off his forehead.
“What did they say?” Kyra asked.
“They didn’t tell you?” Cooke asked. Kyra just shook her head.
“Those Russian doctors wouldn’t tell me anything. Persona non grata, if you’ll recall.”
Cooke grunted, a quiet laugh. “He’s stable. They don’t think there was any permanent trauma to his brain or other organs. It looks like the only real permanent damage is to his leg. The surgeons will have to replace the knee.” Kyra looked down toward Jon’s lower limbs but couldn’t see the damaged joint under the sheet. The image of his leg hanging at a strange angle when the GRU soldiers had transferred him to a gurney for his trip to Botkin broke into her thoughts.
She tried to push the image away. “I thought he was dead for a second when I saw him. Just for a second… then he was laughing,” Kyra said, her voice flat, and the memory surged up in her mind of Jon in the metal chair. She had to fight down the urge to vomit. The image had been stalking the edge of her thoughts since that moment Sokolov had opened the door, and it had come through more than a few times. “I wish he hadn’t jumped that wall. I would’ve burned every asset we have in Moscow myself before I would’ve let Lavrov’s men do this to him.”
Cooke knelt down beside her, staring at the man she loved. “Kyra, do you know why Jon joined the Red Cell?” she asked.
Kyra stared at the man, watched his chest rise and fall as the tubes fed oxygen into his nose. “He told me about that ambush in Iraq… the one in the Triangle where he saved Marisa Mills. He never gave me the dirty details, though. I didn’t tell him but I looked up the after-action report on it. He killed two men. I assumed that the post-traumatic stress disorder was why he quit the field.”
“Actually, it wasn’t,” Cooke replied. “He was determined to tough it out, but Marisa didn’t think he should be in the field. So she asked headquarters to reassign them to someplace where they could still work counterterrorism without being on the front line. I don’t think she expected the Seventh Floor would be stupid enough to send them to one of the black sites. Jon ended up working with the interrogators. Some of the detainees had been held in custody by foreign intel services who… well, they had no moral objections to torture.”
The deputy director of national intelligence reached out and brushed Jon’s dark hair back from his forehead again, but it just fell back into place. “He saw what torture does, both to the subject and the men who carry it out. Jon was handling his PTSD okay until he saw that. That’s what finally broke him. He told me that he saw men lose their souls and he walked out before he got comfortable with it. He joined the Red Cell and that’s when he started closing his office door to everyone else. Between shooting those men and seeing others hurt in custody, Jon suffered more emotional pain in a shorter time than anyone else I’ve ever met. He closed his office so no one could do that to him again… and so he wouldn’t hurt anyone else, any more than he could help it, anyway.”
Cooke laid her hand on Jon’s and squeezed it. “One of the best men I’ve ever known. He didn’t close himself off because he despised people. He just didn’t want to hurt any more.”
“He never told me that,” Kyra replied.
“I’m not sure he would have,” Cooke said. She smiled, a memory playing on her face. “Do you remember that first day I took you down to meet him?”
“Yes.”
“I thought for sure he was going to kick you out,” Cooke told her. “Or find some reason that you couldn’t stay there. But he surprised me. He figured out what had happened to you down in Venezuela a few months before and I guess he decided that you’d been hurt like him. I think it touched a soft streak in him.”
“I didn’t think he had a soft streak in him, not until he came out and saved my tail with that rifle last year when we got caught out in the bush… when the revolution broke out in Caracas,” Kyra replied.
“He did,” Cooke told her. “Kyra, I think Jon jumped that wall because he’d seen torture. He knew that there are ways to torture a man, and there are entirely different ways to torture a woman, and you’re a beautiful girl. I suspect Jon was worried that Lavrov’s men would break you in ways that can’t ever be fixed.”
“He was probably right,” Kyra said, her voice flat. “He’s always right.”
“Yes, he usually is,” Cooke agreed.
One of the flight nurses came over to check Jon’s vitals and the intelligence officers fell silent until the woman had left. Kyra watched her go, then looked at Maines strapped down on his own litter between two special agents and handcuffed to the fuselage. “What happens to him?”
“Maines?” Cooke asked, seeing the direction of Kyra’s stare. “I talked to the attorney general this morning. There’ll be a trial, of course, but he’ll end up in supermax. Life with no parole.”
“He’s the one who pulled me out of that safe house three years ago. I owe my life to a traitor,” she said. “I don’t suppose those Bureau boys would let us drop the ramp and just push him out.”
“I won’t stop you if you want to ask,” Cooke told her. She stood.
“Ma’am… do you think he’ll come back to the Agency?” Kyra asked, nodding at Jon.
Cooke studied Jon’s swollen face, as though trying to reach into his thoughts and discern how he might answer the question. “I don’t know,” she admitted finally. “He really never belonged at the Agency. He has a sense of justice that’s hard as rock, and in this business, most of the time, all we have are bad options… all we get to do is pick who’s going to get hurt. So we save the ones we need, not the ones who deserve it. Sometimes we get lucky and they’re the same people. But Jon could never make that call. He would save the deserving ones. That makes him a good man but a terrible intelligence officer.”
“Maybe we should be more like him, instead of thinking he should be more like us,” Kyra said.
“Probably,” Kathy admitted. “And in the end, the CIA would become the most moral and least useful intelligence service in the world. We deal with the devils, Kyra. But I don’t want him to have to do that anymore… or to do it myself. Whether Jon comes back or not… I’m going to resign. And I’m going to ask him to marry me.”
Kyra looked up at the woman, surprised. Cooke smiled, rueful. “Jon’s been more patient than I ever asked him to be… and I’ve given up as much for my country as I can stand. I almost had to give up too much and I’m not going to let that happen again.” She put her hand on Kyra’s shoulder. “I have to call the White House. President Rostow wants another update. Thank you for staying with him.”
Cooke trudged toward the front of the plane, and Kyra turned back to her patient.