Oh Look, Something Happens

After a while a nurse came in to shoot Amy up with another dose of hydromorphone, which Amy described as feeling like being squished with a rolling pin from head to toe -- in a good way, before falling asleep again.

I figured I should get out of there before her dad came back, and that I'd probably be in trouble for sneaking away from the hotel anyway.

I was right. When I parked my car and walked past the officer sitting in his car he gave me a funny look and brought his radio to his face, and when I walked into the lobby I almost ran into Special Agents Bremer and Rubino coming around the corner from the elevator bank. They both looked annoyed.

"Where the hell have you been?" Bremer barked, his jowls flapping with each syllable.
"I had to get some clothes," I said, realizing I'd left everything I'd bought back in the trunk of my car. Rubino and Bremer eyed me suspiciously.
"We thought you might have been nabbed," Rubino cut in before Bremer could continue yelling.

I took a quick look around the lobby. A man in a suit was standing at the front desk, flanked on all sided by expensive luggage, probably checking out. Two people were reading newspapers on the couches set up around the front door. Across the lobby I could see a few people scooping hot food from the breakfast buffet, reminding me how very hungry I was.

"Alright, look," I said, breaking away from the two-man FBI huddle and heading toward the food, "if there's ever a situation where the options are that I'm either in mortal danger or just doing something reckless and self-serving, it'll be the second one."
"Noted," Bremer said, falling in step behind me.

Forgoing any fears that everything probably had strychnine in it, I grabbed a plate and shoveled a bunch of fruit on it, then opened one of the two waffle irons and dumped a carton ofpre-measured batter onto it, closed it, and set the timer.

"We need you to come with us," Rubino said while I waited for my waffle to manifest.
I looked at him, then at Bremer, then back at Rubino. "What, like, I'm under arrest?" I said.
"No, we have some photographs we'd like you to look at on the computer. People suspected of murder-for-hire in the States who come from Western Europe. Maybe one will jog your memory so we can ID your newest fan."
"Couldn't you have printed them and brought them here?" I asked.
"There's two hundred and thirty seven," Rubino said, crossing his arms.
"Huh," I said just as the waffle iron beeped behind me.

Seated at a table now, I jabbed at sliced strawberries with a fork while Bremer and Rubino sat opposite me and sipped water from plastic cups.
"Where is your office, anyway?" I asked. "Is there a field office in Fredericksburg or something?"
"No, we're in the FBI headquarters in DC," Bremer said.
"DC? That's over an hour away," I said. There goes my whole day.
Both Agents nodded.
"But you're always ten minutes away whenever I call," I said, trying to recall our past meetings. When I'd called Rubino from the hospital he was there in under five minutes.
"We're usually in the field during the day," Rubino said. "Investigating."
"That's what the I stands for," I said to myself before finishing off the waffle.

"So that's as far as you are with leads?" I asked. "Pictures from the computer?"
"You could say that, I guess," Bremer said. "Other departments are doing most of the legwork, we're mostly just liaisons between them and you."
"Fancy," I said, thinking. "Come to think of it, I think that guy's accent might have been Irish, not Scottish. Scotch. Scottish?" I hadn't thought of that before. Whiskey from Scotland is Scotch, the tape is Scotch, so are people Scotch or Scottish. Maybe Scottish is the language. No, that's stupid, they speak English. Well, they try to...
"Ok," Rubino said, "that doesn't really change anything."
"Absolutely nothing," I said for the second time in an hour.
"Though if he's Irish he might be ex-IRA. He might have fled to another country, so he could be working out of anywhere. If he's IRA, you or the Brits should have a file on him." Yes, perfectly normal thing for a seventeen year old to say.
Rubino and Bremer were both squinting at me, like I were casting blinding light.
"Y-yes," Bremer said, "hence, the pictures."
"I know, I know," I said. "I'm just trying to work this out from my end. If he expatriated from Ireland to somewhere else, he could possibly be from whatever country my dad was trying to sell Schumer's program to."

Rubino and Bremer blinked, almost in unison, looked at each other, back at me, and said, entirely in unison, "What?"
I looked up at each of them and shrugged. "What?"
Rubino squinted again. "What did you just say?" he asked, incredulous.
"That this Irish guy might not be from Ireland, he might be from whatever country my dad was trying to leak national secrets to. He could have picked up some heat for some IRA nonsense when he was in his twenties and moved abroad. Like a free agent. This could have nothing to do with Schumer, this killer guy might be trying to clean up the evidence or whatever around my dad's death."
"No," Rubino said, then shook his head slightly. "What are you talking about? Your dad wasn't selling anything to anybody."

My jaw went slack. "Huh?" I said.

Rubino's face almost matched my own, he turned to Bremer, who said, "Is that what Schumer told you?"

I said nothing for a few seconds, then managed to echo my previous, "Huh?"

"Kid, your dad wasn't selling anything to anybody. He realized that the work he was doing with Schumer was massively, massively illegal and he contacted us to see if the FBI could shut it down."

I had no muscles. Nothing worked.

Rubino said, "He was in the process of filtering out enough information for us to move on when he 'mysteriously' died. He told us, at the beginning, if Schumer found out what he was doing, he'd probably kill him." Both their faces were flat, slightly concerned.

My face felt flushed, my heart was pounding, my mind was racing in a thousand directions. I wiggled my fingers, just to make sure I was still alive. I put my hand to my forehead, felt a bit dizzy.

My dad was trying to sell Schumer's program, government black ops secrets, to a foreign country. He was killed. That's the information I'd been working with this whole time. Where did I get it? Was it Schumer? Why the hell did I believe him? My dad was the bad guy. He was selling secrets. The FBI was investigating him for that. That was the truth, it was written on the back of my mind in permanent ink, but it didn't make any sense whenever I thought about it.

I tried to put everything in line, from the beginning. The FBI knew about my dad because they were investigating him selling secrets. No, the FBI knew about him because he himself approached them to report on Schumer's secret program. My dad was killed in a failed sting operation while he was meeting with the foreign buyer. No, my dad was killed because Schumer found out that he'd gone to the Feds. My stomach twisted, I felt like throwing up.

Schumer had my dad killed? Or he did it himself? No, he would hire the job out like everything else. It could have been Dingan, or this Irish guy. The guy who killed Comstock, who almost killed Amy, who wants to kill me, could have been the one who killed my father! Was he shot? Poisoned with more strychnine, writhing on the floor, breaking his own bones with muscular convulsions? Schumer had Comstock killed, and wants me dead. He must be trying to shut the whole program down, clean up all the scattered pieces.

God, this is all about Schumer. Why hadn't I just assumed that from the beginning?

"Are you alright, Chris?" Rubino asked.
I looked up at him, my face red and my teeth grinding. "Do you realize that if you'd have told me all this two weeks ago, absolutely EVERYTHING would be different?"
Rubino frowned slightly. Bremer spoke up, "He told us not to tell you if you didn't already know."
"Who?"
"Your dad," he said. "And he told us that if he died, to watch out for you until we bring this whole thing down."
I closed my eyes, hoping no new information could come in. "A personal favor," I said.
"Why do you think we've stopped the police from tearing you apart three times now, deleted an Interpol request for your apprehension, and even got you a gun just in case?"
"Got me a gun?" I asked after opening my eyes.
"The guy at the gun store in Lorton, he's one of ours. He called us from the range, told us how well you were shooting. We told him to make sure you got a gun."
"You had people following me?" I asked.
"When we could," Rubino said.
I shook my head.

"Your dad was taking a big risk," Bremer said. "He knew what Schumer was capable of, knew that if Schumer found out your dad was 'betraying' him, he'd probably kill him. He said he wouldn't give us anything unless we could guarantee your safety. I told him if he was so worried, to increase his life insurance policy until it was all done with. That's what he did, so that if he failed, you would at least have enough money to protect yourself, to get away or move on."
I leaned back in my chair, tipped my head back, and groaned out loud. My world was imploding into itself.
"Had no idea Schumer told you that about your dad," Bremer said.
"Though it does explain some of the angst," Rubino chimed in.
"Ok," I said, still looking up at the ceiling, "I feel like I've asked this before, but can I go shoot Schumer now?"
"Maybe later," Bremer said. "Your dad was killed before he could get us enough evidence to convince our superiors to bring the hammer down on a Lieutenant Colonel in the Marine Corps. If you're willing, we'd like you to help us by getting close to Schumer somehow. If we put a wire on you and you had one more meeting with him, he'd probably say enough to hang himself."
"Meeting? He wants me dead!"
"Right. So, first things first, lets go to DC and take a look at some pictures."

We all got up, I left my plate and silverware on the table, and we walked to the front door of the lobby. I felt like I was walking through a fog, or there was sand in my shoes. Once again it seemed like everything I knew about everything had been wrong, and my brain was having trouble processing it all again. Hopefully I'd be able to clear my head during the ride to Washington DC, and hopefully I'd learn to stop dancing around questions from now on and just get right into it. I couldn't figure out why my dad, after working in this program for almost twenty years would only now decide to report it. Did something new happen? Did I not turn out the way they wanted?

The three of us went out the front lobby doors and I stopped to find the black, officious-looking car that Bremer and Rubino drove. I spotted it in the first row of cars and fell in line behind Rubino toward it. Bremer stopped at the police car in front and leaned into the front driver's side window to talk to the cop inside. Something felt weird, like it was a prisoner transport. Something else, though. Something nagging on me, which was surprising because there were a million things that should have been nagging on me, but there was just one little thing poking at my conscious like a sliver in my eye, but I couldn't figure out what it was.

I stopped for a second to look around, letting my brain filter out everything except movement. Bremer was still talking to that cop, Rubino was taking slow, steady strides toward their sedan, on the street a few cars drove past the hotel parking lot, there was nothing else. I turned to keep walking when a while streak caught my attention, the side door of a white panel van sliding open. I stopped again to focus in on what I thought I'd seen when I heard it.

A loud, resonant sound I'd heard before. It came and went in less than a second, and before I could even process the sound my right leg gave out, buckling completely, and my left leg pressed my foot against the pavement below just quickly enough so I'd fall sideways and onto my back. When I hit the ground I recognized the sound and heard it again, and again, and again. Gunshots, close, and a lot of them.

Behind me, the wall of the hotel was peppered with a line of small impacts that sent brick and mortar dust outward like tiny little land mines. Then a series of hits rocked and shattered the glass of the row of cars I was laying behind. I turned my head to the right, Rubino was ducked behind the hood of a car, pulling the sidearm from his shoulder holster. To my left, Bremer was bent over and making his way to the front of the police car, trying to put it between him and the shooting. Another quick round of shots trailed from the rear bumper of the police car, fragmenting the tail lights, straight up the trunk, piercing compact little holes through the metal, up the rear windshield, cracking then shattering the glass into a rain shower of glass particles, then cut sharply to the left to cut down the police officer as he tried to jump from inside the cruiser. The cop landed face-first on the pavement, unmoving. Bremer stared at him, wide-eyed, from where he knelt behind the car's front end.

I just lay on the ground, feeling bits of gravel poking into my back, and remembering how much I'd needed a massage.