Super-Secret

Amy, dressed in regular clothes now, and me, going out of my mind, got out of the hospital without drawing any attention to ourselves. It took longer than I'd hoped because Amy could only move her legs so far before they ached, but she did an alright job of hiding that from me. Amy disappearing from her room would probably cause a bit of a panic, I told her, but she didn't care. They'd see that some of her clothes were missing and the hospital gown was in the bathroom and figure out she left of her own volition. I'd heard that some hospitals had weight sensors on the beds that would send a signal to the nurse's station whenever someone got out of bed, but that either wasn't the case or wasn't a problem.

We both got in my car after I'd moved Rubino's box from the front seat and we began the hour-plus drive north to DC. The drive was mostly long stretches of silence with some scattered conversations mixed in.

"So," she said toward the middle of the trip, "do you have an agenda?"
I thought about the different applications of that word for a second, then asked, "Agenda like, 'Today's Agenda' or like 'Hidden Agenda'?"
She turned from me to look out at the road ahead of us. "The first one," she said. "Are you just planning on going in there and saying, 'My name is Chris Baker. You killed my father, prepare to die'?"
I blinked twice, trying to remember what movie that was from and then giving up. "Not exactly that terse," I said. "There are still some things I need explained."
"Like what?"
"Everything Schumer told me about the whole brain-washy hypnotic training program kind of makes sense to me, except for two things that don't add up. He said that Comstock's job at the school was to make sure I always had a free hour so the trainers come come in and knock me out, but I can account for every one of my classes for the last two semesters still. Every class I either have with multiple people that I've talked with and done group assignments, I can remember very vividly, or I have with you. Study hall, the most boring hour and what seems like the perfect opportunity to take me out a back door and flash lights in my eyes, I have with you. Have you ever seen me leave that class for more than a few minutes?"
She thought for a few seconds, then said, "No, I don't think so. Maybe they do it before or after school, like you're signed up for some nonexistent club and don't know it. They could make you think you go straight home after school, but really you hang around for an hour so they can do the... thing."
"Military History Club!" I said with sarcasm dripping from my tongue, "It's all a conspiracy."

She didn't seem so amused. "What's the second thing?" she asked.
"Ok, well, Schumer said that this whole thing is just a way to skip basic training. That the stuff I was taught under hypnosis would just be enough for me to know the basic stuff they teach, how to make your bed, how 1300 hours means 1PM, chain of command, how to hold a rifle with the business-end forward, how to climb a rope, how slapping another man on the ass isn't gay, stuff like that. If that's the case, though, why do I know much, much more than that? Dumping milk in your eyes if you're hit with pepper spray, a thousand different ways to get people's addresses or bank accounts over the phone, picking security-bar locks, picking handcuffs, treating strychnine poisoning, disarming two Marines of two weapons apiece, it all seems far beyond your average jarhead's training."
"When did you pick handcuffs?" she asked.

I remembered then that I never told Amy about Pratt, the Interpol officer in Austria.

"I forgot to mention," I said, "I may or may not have killed some wealthy guy in Austria two years ago."
"Two years ago? When you were fifteen?"
"At least one person thinks so," I said.
"Well, let me know how that all works out."
"I think it might have just been a ruse to get me into custody, like when Dingan said I'd kidnapped you. I don't know how Schumer would be able to pull that off in Austria, but it's more likely than anything else. That or there's someone who looks like me, pulling hits in Europe."
"What, like, maybe they saved your genetic blueprints when you were just an embryo and they sold it abroad as a grow-your-own assassin kit?"
"If clones have anything to do with this," I said, "I'll lose all faith in reality."

Schumer's apartment building in downtown DC was in a semi-upscale area but wasn't quite as nice as the buildings around it. There was no doorman or lobby, just a locked door and an intercom/buzzer with a button for each tenant. I had his apartment number on the sheet Rubino gave me, but the nameplate for that unit on the intercom was blank. He must not have wanted many visitors.

Seeing nothing better to do besides scaling a ten-storey building, and because my car was illegally parked on the street, I pressed the call button for Schumer's unit. Then I pressed it again. Then I leaned on it for thirty seconds. No door buzz, no voice through the intercom. Either he wasn't home or the intercom tone inside the apartments wasn't annoying enough.

"Not home?" Amy asked over my shoulder.
"Could be. Or he could be dead," I said.
"That would be unexpected."
"And inexplicable."
"Could still be at the office. Quantico's on the way home."
"It's late, he should be home soon."
"Want to wait here?"
"It would be easier than breaking into or out of Quantico."
"Probably," she said.

The thought that Schumer might be dead was starting to weigh on my mind. The last time I went to someone's home to try and get some answers, that someone was lying dead at his front door. I couldn't think of anybody besides me who would want to kill Schumer, but it still bothered me.

"Maybe we should go up and see, just to be sure," I said, walking across the sidewalk back to my car.
"Up is this way," she said, standing at the door of the building, pointing her thumb over her shoulder.

I opened the passenger door of my car, reached into the box in the back seat, and pulled out my as-yet unused USP. For no reason I made sure the magazine was full, the chamber was empty, and the safety was on, then tucked the gun awkwardly into the back of my pants. Seeing this, Amy came over and seemed about to protest when I stuck the handle of one of the Berettas into her chest.

"Just like your dad's," I said.

She made a pained face, then grabbed the gun and turned around with her back toward me so she could tuck it into her pants without being quite as obvious as I. Back at the the apartment door, I looked at the intercom panel for a good while.

"Know any super-secret ways to bypass these things?" she asked.
"I know one," I said, counting the rows of buttons and the number of buttons per row.
Amy didn't say anything, perhaps trying to decide if I was serious or not.

There were fifty-two buttons total. It seemed like enough. I pressed the first button, then the second, then all the rest of the buttons, sliding my finger down the rows of buttons like a kid selecting all the floors in an elevator. About twenty variations of "hello?" and "yeah?" came through the intercom before there was a loud buzz and the door's lock clicked open. With fifty-two units, at least one person is expecting somebody or doesn't care who they buzz in.

"Gee, I never would have thought of that," Amy said with just the right amount of derision as I pulled the door open and let Amy through.

Schumer's apartment was on the fourth floor and, though I had a compulsion to take the stairs, we took the elevator for Amy's sake. The hall on the fourth floor reminded me of a hotel with the vertically striped wallpaper and the overly-complicated pattern in the short-fibered carpet. Schumer's door was in the middle of the hall and, of course, locked. I pressed my ear to the door and knocked, listening for movement but hearing nothing. Not home, or not alive. The door had a lock on the knob and a deadbolt above it. The knob wouldn't turn at all, meaning the knob lock was enabled. Most people don't bother with both locks, opting for one or the other, when they leave. The knob can usually be locked from the inside with the door open before leaving, requiring far less effort. Odds were, the deadbolt wouldn't be locked.

"Know any super-secret ways to pick a door lock without a lock pick?" Amy asked.
I tapped on the wood above and below the deadbolt before saying, "I know one."

I took a step back and kicked the door just to the side of the knob, putting more pressure into the follow-through than the drive. With a sharp crack followed by a loud thud, the small latch ripped through the soft wood of the door jamb and the door swung open freely. The noise was louder than I expected, so I went in, pulling Amy after me, before anybody would come to investigate.

"Your creativity is inspiring," Amy said.

I shut the door and looked around the apartment. It was sparsely decorated, with unmatching furniture and nothing but military junk on the walls. There were no dead bodies in any of the rooms. Amy began roaming around the small living room, looking at the plaques and photos on the walls while I tried to survey the apartment as an ambush location. Right next to the front door was a tall bookcase, and on the middle shelf on the end closest to the door I found a loaded revolver hidden by a leaning book. There was another pistol in the drawer of the small table beside the bed in the bedroom. In the closet of the other room, made into an office, were two locked gun cases and several boxes of ammo. Above the door, inside the closet, was a shotgun mounted on the wall. This guy seemed a mite paranoid.

I closed the closet door and came back into the living room. "We're leaving," I said.
Amy turned from a black and white group photo on the wall to look at me. "Why?" she asked, "We could wait for him here."
"You know how they say, 'Is it still paranoia if people are really out to get you?' The answer is yes, and there's no way I could completely clear this place of guns without missing something."
"Then where?"
"Parking garage," I said without thinking.