She would never agree to accompany him to All Hallows by the Tower anyway, let alone to be given back to her attackers. Sam lit a smoke, jumping at the brush of fur against his calf.
“Jesus, Bruich!” he mumbled around the cigarette as the tobacco took, illuminating Sam’s face in an orange glow. “You want to give me a heart attack?”
Suddenly the silence was shattered by his ringtone, jolting Sam backward a second time. “For fuck’s sake!” he moaned in frustration as the sharp, repetitive tone irritated his ears.
I told you so, he heard Nina say in his mind. Long ago, she’d told him that he should use a favorite song as ringtone, but he found that then he could not hear his phone ringing, or he would prefer to listen instead of taking the call.
Before Sam could reach for the illuminated screen to see who it was, it stopped short. The sudden silence was deafening. He looked at the clock. It was near 4 a.m. already. The phone screen revealed nothing but a private number notification. Bruich purred on Sam’s feet. He had a new thing to be befuddled by. Had it been Nina, there would have been a text at least. Her calls would bear her name and her calling from an unknown number was highly unlikely.
It would not be Purdue, because he and Sam had more than five different devices to communicate on. The billionaire genius had devised prototypes that he had finally perfected and built especially for times he had to get hold of Sam in tight situations. Apart from them, Sam was not really in contact with anyone personally.
“Oh my God!” he exclaimed, as it hit him out of the blue. “The fucking terrorist!”
That is what Sam called the man on the screen, just for convenience. He knew how extremely accusatory and discriminating such a moniker would be in public, but he could not help but see a Taliban interrogator every time he looked at the man. Sam was convinced, and with a secret number at this time of the morning it would be a safe assumption. Still, he couldn’t do anything about it. He could not call back, nor did he have any desire to do so.
“I may as well be up — officially. Hey, Bruich?” he told his cat, running his free hand through his hair. The cat was sleeping. Sam sighed, “Bastard.”
At once, the phone lit up again in its cacophony. Sam got such a start that his hand propelled the device onto the table with a clatter that sent Bruich speeding down the corridor to safety. “Christ!” he shouted, finally fed up with the intrusion on his fabricated peace. He grabbed the phone that still showed no caller identity and yelled, “What?”
A quick pause revealed a background of people talking and the ambient noises associated with an office, but at four in the morning? Sam frowned, momentarily contrite for his rudeness.
“Sam Cleave?” a woman’s voice exclaimed. By her tone, she was not inquiring as much as exclaiming in astonishment. “Sam? Is that how you always answer your phone, dearest?”
“Who is this?” he asked equally standoffish. He was exhausted, stressed about the video message threat and its possibilities. This was no place for politeness, not at this time of the morning. The voice was vaguely familiar, but he had no clue where to even begin recalling.
“My apologies for calling at such a dreadful hour,” she apologized unconvincingly, “but I knew you’d be up. You were always nocturnal, like the rest of us journalists and reporters.”
At once, it dawned on Sam, leaving him with an even more rancid taste in his mouth than before he’d taken the call. “Jan Harris,” he stated.
“Well done!” she cheered, her voice still vexing him with the same intensity that it had back then, if not more. “I’m flattered that you remember my voice so well.”
“As a dying man recalls the shriek of a mandrake,” Sam replied sarcastically.
“Play nice now, Sam,” she warned, “…because you never know the ammunition held by the one you choose to insult.”
“Actually, I am quite surprised that you even grasped the meaning of the insult, but I guess you’ve learned to look things up since I last saw you,” he snapped.
“Oh, I did,” she concurred with a gloat, “but it’s not only research that makes a reporter, as you well know. Congratulations on the Pulitzer, by the way. Even if it came at a hefty price.”
Sam swallowed hard, trying to keep his composure when Jan referred to his late fiancé, Patricia, being shot in the face and killed right in front of him during an exposé on a gunrunning cartel.
“So sorry to hear about… Pat… was her name?” Jan stabbed mercilessly.
“Leave Trish out of this, Harris. You didn’t even know her. She was twice the reporter you will ever be,” he retorted.
“That is true,” Jan agreed, gearing up for another low blow. “Apparently she even got shot twice, right? I hear that half of her pretty face was ripped clean away. My God, the poor woman — and you watched?”
“Fuck you, Harris,” he sneered, his heart racing with rage.
“Just before you hang up, dearest, I have a proposition for you that you might want to have a look at,” she said quickly.
“As always, you fail basic communication skills. I said, ‘Fuck you, Harris,’” Sam growled and without hesitation hurled his phone against the wall. It shattered into three pieces which landed over a radius around the couch and two coffee tables. Sam could feel it well up inside him — the breaking point.
He had not felt this bottomed since, well, since he’d seen the love of his life get half of her face blown away a few meters from where he stood filming it. But the hyperventilation and sweat did not come from reliving Trish’s death, or even from being reminded of it. He had lost Nina’s affection because he could not cope with a chain of events he had chosen to become a part of. All of this, his fight with Nina, his predicament with the attackers of the thankless bitch he’d saved, Harris reappearing for God knows what reason — all these things were weighting down on Sam in an unprecedented manner he feared he would collapse under.
He wanted to weep. In fact, he felt the ache in his chest as there were an iron rod lodged there. Tears begged release, but he refused to buckle and he elected to even rebel against drink, which was usually his first pacifier. Sam had had it with his own weaknesses, much as he could not deny the pressure on him for another second. It was not about unhappiness or ineptitude. It was about staying out of matters he knew nothing of, the very antithesis of who he was.
Sam’s nature was engaged in battle with his common sense and both sides were bound to lose more than a healthy portion. What was pivotal, though, would be which parts of which facets he would retain long enough to stay sane.
An hour later Sam emerged from the shower, feeling somewhat proud of himself. Not only had he not reached for the alcohol, but he’d managed to formulate some sort of plan for the next day or two. Losing his phone to a fit of rage was a remarkably light matter for him, especially since he would not be able to receive calls from that bitch, Jan Harris. A less cheerful thought was that he now could not be in touch with Nina, even after she would have calmed down. But overall, these were good things. With the women unable to distract him, he could focus his attention on the other woman who has been causing him hell — Patient #1312.
The least he thought he could do, was to ascertain her whereabouts in case he was confronted by more than he could handle in the way of the men looking for her. After all, Sam Cleave was not exactly unknown to the media world and he could probably be easily located with the proper resources available, which he was sure the man on the video clip had.