“Okay. Schmidt.”
“Be careful,” Hannah said. “And make sure you secure the remains. We’ll want to ship it to Area 51 for the Archives.”
“Roger.” Neeley waited, listening to the static from the encryption.
Finally Hannah spoke. “Good luck.”
The line went dead.
Neeley closed her eyes. She thought back to Vermont, to burying Gant, to the rest of that winter alone in the bitter cold, barely feeding the fire enough to survive.
You came into this world alone; you leave it alone.
Neeley went back into the TOC.
“He’s stopped,” the specialist reported. He pointed at the screen. “I ran it. It’s a care facility. Elysian Fields.”
Neeley considered this misdirection.
“Maybe he’s visiting family?” someone suggested.
The problem, Neeley knew, was that there was no way she could check further on Burns’s background. Like some other covert units, once someone became a member of the Nightstalkers, their past disappeared. They were gone from the face of the Earth, every record of their existence wiped clean. It was a two-edged sword, because if they went rogue, it was that much more difficult to track down someone who didn’t exist. Neeley had run into the problem numerous times in the past.
Hannah had a point and this development backed it. If Burns ditched the Prius, they’d lose the advantage of the LoJack. Neeley shouldered her field pack and ran for the Nighthawk. They were airborne and racing southeast at max speed.
She opened up her laptop and contacted the IT expert for the Cellar, directing him to hack into the database for Elysian Fields. She scanned the list of patients. Fifth one down was a Peter Schmidt. Father? Brother? Neeley checked deeper. Peter Schmidt was seventy-two years old. Diagnosis, advanced Parkinson’s. In a coma. So, most likely father.
Sentimentality was a weakness. One Neeley had found useful in the past to track down rogues. She wondered what it would be like to care so much about someone that even though Burns had to know they were after him, he still took the time to break Protocol to visit his father.
Startled by a sudden memory, Neeley’s head snapped up. She closed her eyes, trying to remember the conversation so many years ago she’d had with Hannah, about the death of Hannah’s parents, a huge force in shaping her into what she was now.
Hannah’s parents had died in a car crash. But it wasn’t that simple. Hannah had pieced it all together from memory and told Neeley the story while they were on the run, being chased by a rogue Cellar agent, while at the same time being part of Nero’s grand plan to find his successor. The manner of her parents’ deaths was a large piece of what put Hannah on Nero’s radar.
Hannah had been six years old. Her father had been picked up by the local sheriff for public drunkenness, apparently not a rare event. Her mother took her daughter to pick him up from the station, shoving her in the backseat. Neeley smiled grimly, thinking of Dr. Golden and her recurring theme: childhood trauma. She wondered if Hannah had ever told Golden this story of her own trauma.
Doubtful.
On the way home, Hannah made the mistake of speaking, of asking. There were many times when asking any question was not good. Her father had turned around and slapped Hannah so hard he bounced her head off the side window. Then he’d slumped back and passed out.
Hannah had remembered that her mother started talking, but in such a low voice, and her head hurt so much she couldn’t remember or tell Neeley what her mother had said. Hannah had fallen asleep in the backseat and woke up only when she heard the train.
She’d remembered few details, just the blinding light of the on-coming train and her mother reaching back to her and grabbing her hand and asking for forgiveness.
Then the train had hit.
The newspaper article about the “miracle” child who survived such a horrific accident must have piqued Nero’s interest deep inside his cave underneath the NSA. Such an odd and touching story. What fertile psychological ground. Who knew what could blossom in a person’s psyche from such an event?
It was a story Hannah had only told once as an adult: to Neeley. Not even to her husband, who had also betrayed her. Then Neeley realized why she was remembering Hannah’s story. What was key about it. It was the final thing Hannah had said to her at the end of that story in the French restaurant in Strasbourg as they got up to leave: “Because I know betrayal too. But I know something you don’t. Sometimes betrayal is the only love left. Remember that.”
Neeley’s eyes flickered open as the crew chief tapped her on the shoulder. “Six minutes out!”
Neeley wondered what role Burns’s father had had in his life to cause him to deviate from whatever his plan was to visit him. To make himself vulnerable to visit someone in a coma. What was the point? He wasn’t the same man who had raised Burns. He was the husk of a person who couldn’t see or hear.
Neeley was split between envying Burns and despising him for his weakness. The chopper was descending and she tapped on her screen, shifting to GPS mode. She’d designated a landing zone out of hearing distance from the home. An unmarked car, keys in, was waiting there for her. Neeley did one last check of her gear, making sure she had a round in the chamber of her pistol and that her various other weapons were accessible.
She was ready.
The chopper touched down next to railroad tracks. Neeley hopped off and the chopper popped back up into the sky and moved away to await her call for extraction. Neeley got in the car and drove, checking the GPS.
It didn’t take long to get to Elysian Fields. There were only a dozen cars in the parking lot, the Prius one of them. Neeley walked in the front and flipped open her badge to the person on duty behind the desk and then flipped it shut.
“Schmidt?”
The old black woman in a starched white nurse’s uniform behind the desk didn’t even blink. “Might I see that badge again? Long enough so I can read it, miss?” Her name tag read Washington.
“Certainly, Nurse Washington.” Neeley bit back her frustration. There was always someone who had to do it by the rules. Neeley opened her badge and held it out. What this old woman didn’t know was that the people who made the rules also had the power to break them. She remembered Gant’s three rules of rule-breaking:
Know the rule.
Have a good reason for breaking the rule.
Accept the consequences of breaking the rule.
And if this woman didn’t let her pass, Neeley was quite prepared to break more than just some rules.
Nurse Washington nodded. “Room one-one-six, Special Agent Curtis.”
“Thank you,” Neeley said. As she walked away, she saw Washington writing something down. More rule-following. Probably calling the local field office to confirm her identity. Which would, of course, confirm it, because Special Agent Curtis, out of Washington Headquarters, was indeed in their database.
As soon as she was around the corner from the busybody, Neeley drew her pistol and screwed on the suppressor.
There was a slender window allowing someone to peer into room 116 and Neeley angled up to it. Burns was standing next to a chair, facing a bed in which an old man lay. The old man was hooked up to various machines and his eyes were closed. Burns had his back to the door.
Another violation of Protocol.
He leaned forward and ran a hand tenderly over the old man’s brow, avoiding the breathing tube. Even in the hallway, Neeley could hear the rhythmic thump of the ventilator. Burns sat back down and reached into his long coat. Neeley brought the pistol up, estimating how much firing through the glass would affect the trajectory of the bullet.