Sample chapters from The Marundi Affair

THE MARUNDI AFFAIR

Stan McCown

Chapter One

She saw nothing at first, it only came to her as a sound: a scraping, scuffling noise just off to her right in the total darkness beyond the glow of street lamps. Before she could react, someone had her, someone stronger, strong enough to twist an arm behind her back in a compliance hold and still cover her mouth with the free hand.

Before she could recover from the impact, he had quick-marched her the thirty feet across the hospital emergency driveway, flattening her face-first against the side of a vehicle that was almost invisible in the darkness.

With whispered words, he warned her of what would happen if she tried to run or if she screamed, and then opened the door and ordered her inside.

Just from his voice, before she saw his face, Sharon knew who had kidnapped her; even as she obeyed his command and climbed into the front seat, she readied her first line for when he joined her inside.

“Are you proud of yourself, Prentiss?”

Sharon’s assailant planted his hands on the wheel and stared across at her, his eyes widening in feigned disbelief.

“That’s it? I’m giving you the chance to throw the mother of all fits, and that’s your best shot?”

“That’s what you’d like, isn’t it? Somehow, that would get you off, but I won’t play along,” Sharon told him.

“What I will do is ask how you dare come for me this way. How much guts did it take to grab me from behind? Hardly more than to just put a gun in my back. And not as satisfying as laying your hands on me and hurting me.

“I may be committed to non-violence, but if you touch me again, and any part of me is free, you’re going to find out that even I have limits on how much I’ll take.”

His jaw tightened and un-tightened, his hand gripped the wheel with white-knuckle intensity, and Prentiss glanced over at her two or three times.

“How else could I do this? If I’d just waited for you here and kindly asked you to get in the truck, would you have come with me voluntarily?” he said. “It would have taken a gun, or like this. Wouldn’t it?”

“Yeah. I would never go with you willingly, ever. Yeah, that much is right. But I’ve already looked down the barrel of your gun before and I’d have rather done it again than have you lay your hands on me.”

The urge to cover her face and cry almost overcame her but Sharon clenched her jaw and fought it down. 

“But it’s past that now,” she said. “You have me, and I know where this is heading. All I have left is to ask to see my husband again, so I can say goodbye.” She barely got the words out without letting her voice break.

“Now leave me alone until then.”

Sharon lolled her head against the window and tried not to cry or to give in to the rising tide of fear and sorrow at the way her life was about to end.

Sharon had first met Prentiss a month earlier, on her third day after arriving in Baghdad. That morning, she had glanced up from her laptop at the sound of tapping on the edge of her door-less office space. Expecting to find someone she knew, she peered at the man, not recognizing his face from the staff files. On instinct, she rose to her feet, already looking for a way to get out of the tiny room if she felt the need.

“Yes? Do you need help, treatment?”

“No Ma’am.”

He was about her age, a little over average size, better than average looking, enough that she would have remembered his face if she had seen it when she ran through the staff files her first day there.

“Then why are you here. This is an office area, so unless you’re visiting someone—”

“That’s why I’m here, to see you, Dr. Witt.”

She expressed surprise, asked if she was supposed to know him and suggested he had her mistaken for someone else but he shook his head.

“What are the chances a man would mistake you for anyone else? Not you. I doubt there’s another woman in this god forsaken country who’d make me look away from you.”

He made a point of eyeballing her from top to bottom and back again, nodding to himself in what was meant to convey appreciation, or something more base.

Sharon had faced this too much in her life and it always gave her a sensation of being naked. Unconsciously, she tugged at her top, the way she always did in times like this, trying to flatten her chest.

“If this meant to flatter, it’s gone sour,” she told him. “It comes off rude, and I don’t much appreciate your manner. I don’t know who the hell you are but if you really have valid business with me, let me hear it then go away.”

The man, whose name she would of course learn was Prentiss, whistled softly through his teeth and grinned.

“I see how you get your reputation. A woman who’s used to being in charge. It makes you all the hotter.

“I bet you run a tight, tough O.R. The terror of the nurses, aren’t you? I wonder if you’re as hard on the patients. As you are on me.”

Prentiss continued to lounge in the doorway his arms folded, his original soft smile now a leering grin.

“Listen, you’re teetering on the brink of sexual harassment. I’m telling you to leave before you push me over the edge.”

“Of what? What’ll you do? I know for a fact that you and I are the only Americans in this building right now. And the locals know me and are afraid to challenge me, so I could bend you over this desk and they wouldn’t lift a finger. But I’m not sure you’d mind. Shall we?”

Her jaws tightened and she began assessing her chances of rushing past him if he entered the room, and how far she could make it down the hall if he did, before he tackled her out there and finished what he had threatened.

Sharon felt her knees weaken and locked them, not wanting to collapse while he was there to pounce. Nothing strong enough came to mind now, she just wanted to whimper and beg him not to hurt her, so she clamped her jaws and said nothing.

“Dr. Witt?” he said and the question, in fact the softness of the words made her jump a little.

“Yes?” she murmured.

“I think you’d better sit down. I let this go beyond anything I intended. I’m not here to touch you, and I’m sorry I stared. You are a looker and surely you know it. A man sometimes loses focus.

“Please, sit, I’m staying put, right over here until I’m finished, but we have to talk.”

“Talk,” she said, feeling color returning to her face.

“Okay. Here’s the thing, I came here with a message for you. And it’s this: as long as you’re in this hospital, you run the risk of being arrested.”

Hearing that, her strength returned in a rush. 

“Me? Who’s going to arrest me? For what? I’m just a doctor, I’m totally neutral and pacifist. Who’s talking about arresting me? Why?”

Prentiss sighed and the gesture transformed him. Having already stopped ogling her, now he looked down, at a space on the floor that had no features, his head nodding in an almost spastic way.

“If you stay here, at this hospital, you run the risk of being implicated in terrorist activity and we’d have to take you in. They might send me and I don’t want to be the one. If I can talk you down from this, we’ll both be a lot happier in the end.”

Sharon could not decide whether to laugh in his face or explode in outrage. She demanded to know if he was serious and if so, by what insane logic anyone could implicate her in terrorism.

“I told you I’m totally neutral, I’m here to save lives! I don’t support the terrorists, the bombers, any of them, I just support the civilians.”

“Yes. And that’s the problem.” Prentiss now went off into a tangent about the fact that no one who did not work directly for the occupation forces could be considered neutral or innocent. Every man, woman, and child, he insisted, could be turned into a living bomb, or could pull a gun out of their clothes and shoot down occupation forces.

“They’re all the enemy, and sooner or later, if you treat them, you’re going to treat someone who’s killed one of your own people, or someone who does it after you’ve saved them. Every person you keep alive is a potential human bomb, or a shooter, or somebody to trigger an IED. You just cannot know. It doesn’t matter, an old lady, little girl, pregnant woman, they all hate us, they all want us dead, and we came here to save them!”

“That’s pure crap,” Sharon told him. “The saving part. You came here for the oil and the base of operations to take over the rest of the Middle East. And the excuse to please the military-industrial complex with a war they’ve been demanding since the last one here. That’s all. And it all was done by a lie. The only people who belong in jail are the president and his boss—the vice president—and a few others.

“But they can’t be arrested, so you come for me. For treating the victims of this travesty. It’s fitting, isn’t it? You people kill civilians in the thousands, I guess you arrest them too. For no reason. It must not be a stretch to come after an innocent civilian doctor while you’re at it.”

“You aren’t listening. Doctor Witt, we absolutely don’t want to arrest you,” Prentiss told her. “It would be a nightmare, for everybody involved. You think I want to lock someone like you up? The last thing I want is that. I’m not here to threaten you, Doctor, I’m here to convince you to do the right thing so we never have to.”

“And what’s the right thing? Make sure my patients don’t survive? Or interrogate them first? Or just go home and abandon them? What are you asking?”

“You’re one of the world’s best. You’re wasted here, you’re needed where our men and women are being treated, at the hospital in the Green Zone.”

“The one you took over. Yeah, I know about that. Now it’s the occupation hospital. Well no thank you. I didn’t come here to support the occupation.”

Sharon demanded to know why this issue was not broached to her when she processed through the State Department to work at the civilian hospital. No one warned her that she was liable for arrest as a supporter of terrorists, nor did they even hint that she should work in the occupation hospital in the Green Zone.

Prentiss nodded, pensive.

“I understand that. The answer is that this is all off the record. It’s actually classified. You aren’t to repeat this, now or when you get home. If word reached the media that a renowned civilian doctor is threatened with arrest, with no charges that can be sustained, essentially as an enemy combatant, well the public will put up with that for Arabs, for known terrorists, but not you. If your face was plastered on the tube, on papers, and it was reported you’re arrested as an enemy combatant, it could flip the tide back home.

“Nobody needs that. You don’t need to be locked up for years in some barbed wire enclosure, or somewhere worse. We don’t need the publicity, and I personally don’t want to see someone like...you put away. But I’ll do it.”

“Wait a minute, they’re talking about...me...enemy combatant? Without charges, or due process? Locked up in Guantanamo? No.”

Her head began to swim and she felt her knees weaken all over again, and if she started to sink, he would come to her, with mock concern, and touch her. She let herself slowly into the chair, so he could not see how badly his threat had shaken her.

“So you’ll do what I’m asking, transfer over?”

“I don’t know. I have to think. Let me think. Not now, I can’t just answer now.

“I won’t go to that hospital, no matter what. I’d go home first. Yes, I’d go home before I’d support the occupation. Let me decide.”

“What do you mean, you would refuse to treat your own people?”

“I won’t treat the military, on either side, unless they came to me here. I didn’t come here to treat military, they have their own doctors. Or anyone cooperating in the occupation. I can’t.”

Prentiss stiffened and she could see his jaw muscles working.

“You’ve got to watch that kind of talk, Doctor. Even to me. You’ve heard the president, you’re either with him, or you’re the enemy. If you don’t support the effort here, and you’re arrested, it would be as an enemy combatant.

“I’m going to keep what you just said to myself, but never say it while you’re in the country again. And you’d better think about what I’m offering and make a decision.”

“How long do I have?”

“Until you treat the wrong person and the occupation finds out.”

Prentiss told her he was with the Blue River Security Agency and that the hospital was within his perimeter so he would monitor her, and he would come back for her decision if she didn’t act first.

“I’ll even go so far, if I can, to warn you off the wrong patients, while you’re wrestling with your decision. I’ll do all I can to protect both of us, you from arrest, and me from having to arrest you, for as long as I can.

“And I don’t mind any excuse to see you, so I’ll hold out as long as you do. The longer you take, the more of an eyeful I get. If that works for you, then so be it. But I can’t watch every minute. If you take the wrong patient and I’m not there to help you...I’ll be there to deal with you.”

He excused himself and was gone from her sight before she could respond. For the moment, Sharon wilted with relief. The alarm and fear would come later.

Chapter Two

For about a week after the first confrontation in her office, Prentiss did show up at least once every day, but only forced an exchange of words the second day. In that face-off, he chided her for ignoring his warning, yet reiterated his promise to try and shield her from treating “the wrong people,” as much as he was able.

“Remember, I never asked you to,” she responded. “But you have to do what you have to do, and so do I.”

He only nodded but no longer smiled, and when he left, seemed more to wander away than to go with any conviction.

After that, he only let her see him across the room

each day, rather than approaching her to talk, and she had no idea how he could have been actually checking up on her patients to see which of them were “the enemy” of the occupying forces. She wondered what he would have done if he did somehow determine someone waiting for treatment was a risk...and even wondered how she would have had to respond.

When he abruptly broke the string of appearances, Sharon did not realize it until the end of the shift when the brief thought passed through her tired mind that she had not seen him all day. After that, however, he was absent for nearly a week, by which time she had stopped even thinking about him and had relaxed over the warnings he had tried so hard to sell her on.

The circumstances of Prentiss’s return were literally explosive.

A bomb had gone off blocks away and wounded poured into the hospital in a flood. Sharon was in the process of lining up her first cases for surgery when Prentiss insinuated himself into the picture. Bending over a patient who lay on the floor, assuring the man that she would soon be treating his shrapnel wounds, she heard a commotion behind her and then Prentiss’s voice, directed at people who had accompanied him.

“The operating room is through there, go ahead and take him on in,” Prentiss was saying. Sharon snapped her head around in time to see him leading two of his men, identifiable by their Blue River outfits, carrying a stretcher with a fourth man, toward the swinging doors leading back to the treatment area.

“Where the hell are you going?” Sharon called across the room to Prentiss. “You can’t just barge in there, there’s no room in there, either. Let me see what you’ve got.”

“You can look at him in back,” Prentiss said.

While she worked her way over and around the patients

lying across entire floor, Sharon told Prentiss she would examine the man right there. “Just hang on, I’m coming,” she added. “What are you doing here anyway? You tell me to go work in the government hospital, so why the **** don’t you use it yourself?”

Prentiss ignored her question but instructed his men to wait for her to join them.

“Is that it, only this leg?” she demanded when she had looked the wounded man over. “Well good god, if that’s all there is, this isn’t critical. Why on earth would you rather bring him to a hospital with worse conditions than your own? Look around, we have people dying here and you bring a leg wound?

“You know better than this, Prentiss. We can’t touch him for hours, you want him to lie around like this? What are you trying to prove?”

Prentiss took her by the arm, guiding her with nearly painful pressure away from his men.

“I’m doing this for you,” he told her in a low tone. “We’re aware that people in this room are involved in the bombing. I’m protecting you. While you work on my guy, I’ll quietly slip around and tag the ones you mustn’t touch and you can leave them for the others. And in the meantime, you get a gold star for helping Americans and everybody comes up a winner. Just go along.”

“Listen to me, Prentiss—no. It would be the height of hypocrisy for me to waste another second on someone who has a bigger, better hospital available, just to help my own cause. To hell with it, you get him out of here and where he belongs. Or I’ll go back over there and him that you’re using him for a political game. Or whatever game it is you’re playing.

“What’ll it be?”

Prentiss let out a long breath. “Well I tried. Now you’re in it, no mercy, Witt. I thought we had something going, but since you prefer to treat the enemy instead of your own people, I’m going to nail you for it.”

His voice had gone icy but he let her go and returned to his men. She heard him ordering them out, his voice nearly shaking with barely controlled anger. She also heard curses aimed her way from the other two men, perhaps even the wounded one but she was already on her way back to the patient she had selected for the first surgical procedure.

By the time she was scrubbed and inspecting X-rays, Sharon had already put Prentiss out of her mind. It was only later that she caught on: he claimed to have known who among those in the room were involved in the bombing, yet he showed no interest in arresting them, or even marking them as he had said he would. Instead, he pulled his men out in a huff and let the bombers, if there really were any, get away clean.

 Sharon ended up working through the day and most of the night, catching a couple of hours sleep in her office, but only then because she feared exhaustion might erode her skills. Not until after noon of the next day were all the patients from the attack finally treated or taken to be buried. Neither Prentiss or anyone else from the occupation came back and arrested the alleged perpetrators but by then, the incident with Prentiss seemed to Sharon like no more than a bad dream.

She would not see Prentiss again until the next major outbreak of violence in the area. Based on what Sharon heard just from the buzz in the room, this incident had begun at a roadblock and exploded into a horrific firefight, with anyone within two blocks caught up and wounded or killed.

The first to arrive from the scene was a British reporter carrying a child of four or five who had been separated from her parents and was hit twice herself by stray bullets.

“How about you?” Sharon asked the man, while she checked out the little girl.

“Me?”

“Hit? Are you wounded too?”

“No, thank the lord. Oh Jesus, will she live?”

Sharon tried to reassure him, not at all certain the little girl would survive. She offered the reporter a seat behind the admitting desk where he could wait, knowing that in minutes the rest of the space in the room would be filled.

Sharon dispatched the child with a nurse to be prepped for surgery and while X-rays were being taken and developed for the child, she allotted herself another ten minutes to examine incoming wounded before scrubbing. Prentiss was not in her thoughts until he appeared much as before, with four men standing and one injured.

Sharon greeted them with a stern pose, pointing back out the door, but this time, Prentiss lost his temper more violently than before. With a nod of his head, two of his agents seized her by the arms, covering her mouth before she could protest or scream.

“We’re doing it a different way this time,” Prentiss told her. “You treat my man or I’ll shut this place down and take you in. I won’t even worry about whether any of the perpetrators are here or not, you sealed your fate last time and it’s already on record. A hell of a lot of good you’ll do your allies in a cell. It’s you choice.”

“You wouldn’t,” she said through clenched teeth. “If you do, I’ll let it be known you saw terrorists last time and ignored them.

“You don’t even give a living **** about catching bad guys, you’re playing some other kind of game, and you’re taking something out on me I can’t even figure out. So **** off, I’m not putting up with it any more. You’ve been bluffing all along.”

Prentiss drew his weapon and fired it into the floor, causing her to shriek. Then he pointed it for a moment at the space between her eyes.

“You ****. Bluffing? Have I? Believe me, I will shut it down, and that includes arresting the entire staff and locking them out. With the patients inside. Yes or no?”

“You’re a maniac. But put that ****ing thing away, you win, you *******. I’ll do it, goddamn you.”

“I thought so.”

He slowly removed the gun from against her head and directed his men to let her go. For some reason certain he would not shoot her, she had been more frightened when he shot the gun than when he pointed it at her, and she was able to stalk her way back to the wounded man, directing the two stretcher bearers to carry him into the back.

Working quickly, she still lost a half hour doing a proper job of removing a tiny shrapnel from just under the surface in the hip and suturing it up, all the time agonizing over the little girl who needed surgery sooner than later.

Finished, she gazed into the man’s eyes, trying to judge his level of pain.

“Have you had morphine?” she asked the wounded man but one of his buddies told her he had.

“Then you don’t get more right now, too soon.

“Get him to the Green Zone, let them decide whether he goes to bed or stays ambulatory, and if he needs more morphine by then, that’s their call. You got that?

“Here’s a souvenir for his necklace,” she said, handing the shard of shrapnel to Prentiss.

“Now get out of here, all of you.”

“Sure. But as far as I’m concerned,” Prentiss told her, “you’re here on borrowed time now. Ten to one, you’re going to end up in our custody before you can go home.” He turned on his heel and led his men back into the lobby.

Before he had taken two steps, Sharon raced to the prep room to scrub up and try and save the child, relieved to find she was stable, and after two hours of work, satisfied herself the little girl would live.

After finishing the child, with her next patient being prepped, Sharon spared a minute or two and stepped back out into the lobby, relieved to find the British reporter still waiting.

“You saved her, she’s going to make it,” Sharon said and he burst into tears. She held him a moment, patting him on the back.

“Doctor, those animals, those Blue River chaps—what they did to you—I got that whole thing on camera. I’m going to make the blighters famous. This’ll play well, in Europe, at least in some parts, showing how they work.”

“I’m not sure that’s smart. If you think you have to use it, you ought to wait until you’re out of the country, and out of their reach,” she advised. “But you’d know better than me. Do whatever you think, but I have to get back.”

“Doc—you’re an angel.”

Sharon smiled but made no attempt to respond, unwilling to waste another second in even such relatively pleasant conversation.

She did not think to ask if her face had appeared in recognizable form on the screen, unable to imagine at that moment how the video could come back to haunt her in time to come.

Each time, Sharon had described to her husband the conflicts with Prentiss as they occurred, and Doug had urged her to end her tour early and return to Seattle before Prentiss carried out his threats.

“No, I’m doing the most productive work of my career. I won’t let this ******* scare me away,” she had told him initially.

After the last incident, she was far less sanguine. “I thought he was bluffing, but the moment he pulled out his gun and shot at my feet...I’m not so sure. My god, Doug, I nearly peed on myself, you know how I hate guns!

“But I won’t be forced out of my commitment. If I did, would you come with me, back home?”

Doug told her he would stay in Baghdad, and it bothered her that he did not even seem upset to think of their being parted so drastically. She struggled, not for the first or tenth time, to keep from asking him what had gone wrong between them, but did not want to bring it into the open and force his hand.

“Another reason not to go,” she said without energy, meaning the separation if she did go. She tried to interest him in sex but he claimed to be too tired and said she must be as well and she realized he might be right.

Following the threat to shut down the hospital, Prentiss did not return for days, but when he did appear, it was with a squad of men, who carried an Iraqi male that Sharon vaguely remembered having treated a few days earlier. His shirt was unbuttoned now, exposing bloody bandages around most of his upper body.

“He says you were his doctor. He seems to have torn his stitches, you should take a look.”

“I see, yeah. Let’s bring him back here and I’ll find out what needs to be done. He was supposed to stay in bed. Where did you find him? I’m a little surprised you’d give enough of a **** to bring him in for repair. What is he, one of your informers or something?”

“Hah! Hell no,” Prentiss said. “But we didn’t bring this piece of **** in to be repaired. I just wanted to know if you’d admit treating him. He says the American woman was the one. That would be you. So yes or no? Did you treat him or not?”

A cold feeling flowed through her, dawning realization of what was going on here. Hating to lie, Sharon denied ever having seen him before, knowing it was too late, she had already as good as admitted it.

“He says different,” Prentiss told her.

“Go on,” he coaxed the Iraqi man. “Was this your doctor?”

“My doctor, no, but she treat me. Woman has no right touching man, I was unconscious. Bitch.” He spat on the floor at Sharon’s feet.

“There you go, his word against yours,” Prentiss said. “It’s good enough for me.”

“Oh yes, you believe your enemy first, when it fits your game. What is this little kinderspiel about? What exactly are you trying to prove?”

“That’s the question you ought to have avoided like the plague,” Prentiss told her. “This character used a cell phone to set off a roadside bomb, and didn’t have the balls to blow himself up with it. Killed three marines. Luckily, a spotter saw him and they were able to grab him. They weren’t as kind and gentle as they might have been, so when he started bleeding they noticed he’d been stitched up recently. When he cursed about having a female doctor, we kind of added things up.

“Tell you what, I’ll even give you a pass for denying you worked on him. For lying to me. That’s small potatoes. I’m just interested in the big one, that you saved the life of a terrorist.”

“Is this true?” she asked the prisoner. “You set off that bomb?”

“God is great. Yes, I do it.”

“God damn you,” she hissed. “I didn’t put you back together so you could kill people. You bastard!”

“You should never have touched me. I revile you—a woman should never touch a man except to ****. I wish you had been with the others when I set it off. Go to hell, woman.” This time he spat directly on her but Sharon did not flinch.

“I almost wish—” She caught herself and wandered away, shaking, sobbing, her mind in a fog, oblivious to everyone around her. She dropped to her haunches, fighting nausea, barely aware when two boots appeared within her field of vision.

She looked up to find Prentiss grinning down at her.

“Oh, you’re loving it aren’t you, you prick,” she told him. “Well don’t think you can make me feel any worse than I do. But you know what? This doesn’t change anything. I’d do it again, because I didn’t know what he meant to do. I can’t read minds. And I’d sooner he be in your prison in one piece.”

“Of course you would, noble to the end.”

Oddly, he reached down and offered her a hand back to her feet and still dazed, she accepted.

“So what are you going to do? What happens now?” she asked. “What do you do to me now?”

“Nothing, yet. You’re easy, I know where you are, which is the hell of it as far as you’re concerned. I can come back for you when I get around to it. Right now, it’s all about this guy—he’s going to put me on the map, my first serious terrorist score. That means I don’t need you right now, but now you get to wonder when I will get around to dealing with you.”

He reached out and now Sharon backed away, afraid for a moment than in his triumph, he intended to touch her inappropriately, but he stopped short and smiled almost wistfully then spun away, leading his men and their prisoner out the door.

At home that night, Sharon tried to talk out her feelings with her husband.

“You know, this is the first time in my career that I had to even think of regret at having saved someone’s life,” she told him. “Now, I’m afraid it’s going to haunt me. What should I do?”

“I’m not quite sure what you’re asking. I’m trying to figure out if you’re saying you do regret saving him, or that you think you ought to regret it, or that you want to be reassured that you don’t have to regret it. No, here’s the real question: are you feeling guilty or responsible for the deaths?”

“Would a reasonable person—not this Prentiss, but somebody outside the system—hold me responsible?”

“No reasonable person, hell no,” Doug told her.

“Okay, let’s get to the real question in all this, and I’ll let you answer it for yourself,” he said. “How would you feel if you worked in the Green Zone hospital? How would you feel about healing soldiers who then went out and shot up innocent civilians the way they do? Ask yourself if you would feel any differently than you do about this.

“Really, how would it be different? You can almost argue this guy is fighting for his country against an illegal occupation. How would you feel differently if you put together a soldier who was killing civilians himself? How?”

His logic hit her with a sledge-hammer impact. She gasped, and held her stomach, and then became calm.

“No! No different. I would hate them for going out and killing after I saved them, as much as I hate what this one did. You’re right.

“Oh lord, Doug, this doesn’t make me feel better, but I can live with it. I don’t have to regret having healed him the first time. All he did was kill the people he perceives as the enemy.

“The thing that hurts is that I only came here to treat noncombatants and I’ve already ended up working on fighters, it doesn’t matter which side. Yet I can’t turn down a patient. Imagine I was in Dr. Mudd’s place. Could I have refused to treat Booth? No. I would’ve turned him in, but I would’ve fixed his leg first. That’s what I do.”

“And that’s the answer. It’s what you do. Do what you trained to do first. ‘First, do no harm,’ right? Then deal with the moral issues of your patients when they’re whole. Right? You have no cause for regret, you own the high ground in all this, Honey.”

“Oh god, no wonder I adore you,” she said. “You saved my sanity.”

Her husband grinned and reminded her it was his profession to save people’s sanity, including hers.

He seemed embarrassed and a little resistive when she went to him for a kiss. This time, however, he cooperated when she wanted to make love, and after such a terrible beginning, the day ended on a happier note than she could have imagined.

Chapter Twelve

It blew up without warning.

Among the forms of fundraisers Sharon attended were plays, in which the last evening’s proceeds were donated to the cause of the moment. Sharon had presented a considerable sum and along with others who had contributed, accepted an invitation to a party after the performance.

She did not see him until it was too late.

“Ah, Dr. Witt, I want you to meet the prime benefactor of the event. He’s our angel, we couldn’t do this without him.”

Lee played the game of meeting Sharon for the first time. She thanked him for his work with the charity and he shrugged in his usual shy way. “Sure,” he said, and although it meant nothing, the woman who had introduced them beamed. Sharon could not move, could not find a gracious way to get out of this and the woman prattled on, her words blurring in Sharon’s ears.

Someone attracted the woman’s attention and she excused herself, leaving Sharon and Lee frozen in place. He seemed more stricken by the suddenness of this face to face confrontation than even Sharon felt.

“Look, please believe me, I had no idea this would happen, Sharon. I’m sorry.

“But I need to know, is everything all right? Are you still safe? I’ve been worried as hell about you. I’ve heard things that scare me.”

“Scare you? What? Who threatened you?”

“No,” he said, his eyes darting around the room. “Not about me, about you. Jesus, thank god you’re still all right. You are, aren’t you?”

“Yeah, sure. What do you know?”

“I’m not going to say it here. And I promised to leave you alone. I don’t know how to pass it to you.”

“Listen, I can’t imagine how you’d know anything about me but if you do, I need to hear it.

“I think I’ve lost my mind, but I think we’d better talk. I came in a cab to avoid parking. What about you?”

“No, I’m parked.”

“I’ll slip out, onto the sidewalk and you go get your car, pull up and let me in and go on. Are you free to leave now?”

“To hell with anything else. Let me start first, I’ve got farther to go to get the car.”

She nodded and the moment he left her side she hugged herself to still the trembling in her limbs.

Five minutes later, she climbed aboard and he rolled away.

“I didn’t eat, did you?” she asked him, receiving a negative reply.

“I know a quiet restaurant near my house. If you keep your eye out and nobody seems to follow us, let’s go there and talk.”

She directed him around from the one way street before the playhouse, and he made two or three additional turns, finally assuring her nobody was following, as he had done that last time she saw him. Fifteen minutes later they were parked by the storefront restaurant, waiting in the crowded entry for the next seat.

“This doesn’t seem real,” she said. “Jesus, Lee, I hope what you’re going to tell me is worth this risk. I’ll be very ****ed off at you if it’s nothing.”

“I wish it were nothing. I’d risk having you angry at me if I found out there’s no risk for you. I’m not sure but it seems ominous to me.”

“I guess I’ll find out.”

“You’re sure it’s okay to talk here?” he asked her.

“We aren’t going to shout it at the top of our lungs. The chances that someone I’m worried about would be here is pretty low. And the chances they’d know to somehow bug this place are next to zero. If I don’t like the looks of anybody seated around us, I’ll kick your foot twice, okay, and we just eat and talk later.”

“Got it.”

They made no further conversation until they had been seated and made their order. Whatever else might come of this, it was a pleasure to have a glass of wine with no covert implications. She raised hers and a little mystified, Lee touched it and they smiled across the table.

“Would it shake up the world if I told you how much I’ve missed you?” he asked her.

“No, but it wouldn’t do anyone any good.”

By now, she had surveyed the other diners around them in the dark, narrow little room and saw no one who appeared to be paying them any attention. With that satisfied, she asked Lee what it was that had given him such a scare.

“I know that you’ve been worried all this time that anything might link your name with the people who held you,” he began. “I’m not sure that what I’ve found has anything to do with them, but if it does, you should know it’s emerged.”

“You say that like it’s something I might have anticipated. Am I really supposed to know what you’re talking about?”

“I don’t know. If nothing stands out, then I guess you don’t. But you would have to be aware of a severe clash between you and a squad of men from the Blue River Agency, in the hospital there in Baghdad was recorded.”

“How do you know?”

“What’s emerged is a video taken by a British reporter during a time when you were coerced into treating one of the Blue River men and they became threatening.”

“Oh ****. Video. I’d forgotten. Yes, he told me afterward but I forgot all about it, so much else had happened since. And now it’s out? Oh Jesus, you were right, this could be...maybe not deadly, but terrible trouble.

“How did you get onto this?”

“Sharon, people are asking about Americans disappearing in Iraq and Afghanistan, who’re reported to be blown up in ‘incidents.’ A well known television journalist lost a colleague so she’s asking around and long story short, she went to England and the video fell into her hands. She swears she’s keeping it under wraps and so are her contacts, but who knows how long they can. Or will.”

“And how did this reach you?”

“She contacted us, by following up on it, learning you were working with the Belgian group. When we heard she was nosing around, we got proactive and intercepted her before she could go to you. We told her a lot was at stake and kind of bought her off to stay away from you. But she had the clip and shared it with us.”

“Wow, all this going on all around me, buzzing around my head and I’m so out of it I have no idea. Lee, thanks for heading her off. This woman could cause more trouble than the video. And that’s ****ing bad enough.”

“Yes. But Sharon, did you hear what I said? Several Americans have disappeared, mostly reporters, in Iraq and Afghanistan.”

“I’m not surprised. But that’s all unconnected to me.”

“Even when they were all reported disappearing under identical conditions to your husband?”

“Those are the most dangerous places on Earth. What’s your point?”

He explained Henrietta Masterson’s belief that her friend and other colleagues had fallen into the hands of the government and only reported dead. At that, a cold river flowed through Sharon’s body, that Lee had guessed the truth.

“There’s a growing belief,” he went on, “that the government—our government—is arresting people and not even reporting them as enemy combatants, and locking them up, and covering their disappearance by reporting they’ve died without a trace.

“Sharon, given what you said, that someone arrested you under suspicion that you were somehow supporting terrorists, and then this video of somebody from Blue River threatening to arrest you...it’s difficult not to see something there. I’m not asking you, but try and imagine what I’m thinking.”

“Lee, I’m going to the bathroom, I need to be alone a couple of minutes to think and I can’t do that with you watching me. This is a...might be a turning point. Please.”

“Of course.”

She excused herself and with no one else in the bathroom, she slumped against a wall and closed her eyes, wrestling with the issues coming to a head. The resolution came more quickly than she had anticipated. Dashing water into her face to be sure she was thinking clearly, she gave it another minute. In that time, a terror came over her, that Lee would be gone when she returned and she suffered a dire sense of loneliness. In a panic, she hurried back to the table and nearly cried when she found him still there.

He gazed at her but did not press for a response.

“Lee, I have a feeling you’ve figured out the truth. I’m crazy to do it but I’m going to let you in on some of it. I’ve only told one person any of it at all but I’m going to tell you more now. Accept what I tell you and don’t ask for more. Promise me that or I won’t tell you anything.”

“If you need to hear it, then yes, I’ll do with whatever you can tell me.”

“Good.

“It’s true, the Blue River Agency is involved in all this. But they aren’t alone and they’re only serving as go-betweens in a way. I won’t tell you who else is involved but it doesn’t matter.

“The major thing I can tell you is one you seem to already suspect: my husband is alive and being held as a hostage to coerce me into cooperating in something I can’t begin to let you hear. If you knew, I don’t think you could stand not to try and do something to help me and for my husband’s sake, I can’t risk that.”

She had found his hand on the table top and caught herself caressing it but could not bear to stop. His eyes were keen on hers and she could imagine him processing what she had said and seeking a way to help her, and she feared she was growing close to taking another step to cooperate, and knew she must not.

“Say something, Lee. What are you thinking, knowing this?”

“I have to ask you something first. I wonder if you’ve figured out that I couldn’t have become so caught up in this if I hadn’t fallen in love with you. Can you tell me you didn’t know?”

“Oh god, Lee, I couldn’t let myself think that way. Listen to me, there’s no good to come from it. But if you have to know, yes, I would believe it. Just don’t expect me, a married woman, to answer it.

“Okay, you love me. What then?”

“Now that I know for sure about his situation, my top mission has to be the one thing that could make you happiest—rescuing your husband. I have the feeling that if he were safe, you’d be safe, that whatever threatens you would no longer apply. If I could, I’d throw all the resources I could get my hands on into bringing him back and eliminating whatever scares you. I wish I could, Sharon. I would drop everything else in my life to fix yours.”

“Yes, I know you would. But rescuing him’s impossible. There’s no guess in the world that he’s even in Iraq now, and wherever he is, no way to get him or anyone else out of their hands, and then if you could, they’d kill any prisoners before they let them go. Lee, forget a rescue.

“I have to wait and obey their orders, and that’s all either of us can do, wait.”

“It’s killing me to see you tied up like this, Sharon.

I feel as tied up as you do.”

“Why? Really, Lee, deep down, how does this tie you up? I’d like to know.”

“I can’t rest, I can’t relax, I can’t be happy while your life is torn up like this, Sharon. Don’t chastise me, I can’t just will it away. I keep thinking of how I’d like to take you where you could be safe but now I understand you refuse to give them an excuse to keep him.

“Is there something they want you to do before they free him? I’m not asking what, but what would be the price if you did it?”

“No, it’s something I can’t do. I can’t do anything that leads anyone to who they are, the people behind this, not even you. And they want me to...renounce something I’ve...****, I can’t say another word or you’ll figure it all out.

“Lee, drop it, I’m begging you.”

“You’ve become my life, Sharon. Even knowing I can’t ever be closer than this, I can’t think of anything but you.”

“Stop it, Lee,” said but her voice was weak.
“I’m going to tell you something that’ll end this. Something that’ll change how you feel and think about me.”

She described everything that had transpired between Prentiss and herself, including her attempts to lead him on to believe she would sleep with him in order to try to worm something out of him that would somehow help her.

“Lee, I would never have sex with him, but I’m ashamed just to lead him on. What do you think of me for that? I encourage you to consider me hardly better than a whore, if it’ll help you, make it easier for you to turn your back on me.”

Far from the eyes of someone stunned and hurt by her revelation, Lee gazed at her with more adoration than ever.

A wave of arousal swept through her and she had to close her eyes and turn her head away.

“Lee, for god’s sakes, stop it. How can you look at me that way after that? How?”

“Sharon, it makes you all the more precious to me. And knowing you’re forced to see this animal now, to protect your friend, it makes my blood boil. But it excites me that you’re playing the clandestine game. I don’t care in the least that you’re dangling sex in front of him. I know you won’t give it to him, but in your situation, I’m proud of you for doing what you have to, trying to get an edge against this *******, and these nightmarish people.

“I love you all the more to know you’re still fighting them in what way you can.”

“I left out one thing about my dealings with this ******* now.” She related how she was protecting her best friend by holding the prospects of sex in Prentiss’s face, and hearing that, Lee covered his face and she realized with a tug at her heart that he was struggling not to openly cry.

“Lee?”

“How could anyone have a better friend? You’re so far above me, above anyone I know. I love you, I adore you, but you’re more than an angel.”

“Stop it,” she hissed. “I got my friend into this, how could I let that animal go after her if I can keep him away by teasing him? Of course I do, it isn’t a stretch and it doesn’t make me an angel. Or anything like it. Combined with my attempt at ferreting intelligence out of him, it seems a natural.”

“I don’t care, you’re amazing.” Lee wiped at his eyes and she felt the sting of tears in her own.

“Lee, if we’re going to admit secrets, I can’t hide one from you. I’ve tried to ignore it, to shrug it off, to deny it, but I can’t: I’ve missed you, too. I’ve even dreamt of you. Lee, you’re as sweet as any man I’ve ever known, including my husband.

“And yet, none of this changes the situation between us. It’s no more safe for us to be seen together than it ever was. Every time we say goodbye, we have to treat is as the last. This one may nearly kill me, Lee. Do you...do you know that I’m falling in love with you?”

“You said you can’t dare think that way, and I can’t think that way about you. My god, Sharon, I’d give everything I own or could ever own to have you in my life. But I’d do the same thing just to set you, and him free.”

“I know you would,” she murmured. “Do you know that if there were no innocent third person involved, I’d ask you to take me away tonight? And stay with me?”

They clasped hands over the table now, and with no more they could say in that place, only now began to pick at their meals. But suddenly, the urge to be somewhere more private took them both and they rushed through the meal, and in a half hour, strolled down a side street, away from his car, into dark shadows among the bushes fronting one of the houses.

He crushed her to him, running his fingers through her hair and she never wanted to be anywhere else. The kiss was more passionate than the fleeting brush of lips that the last, and first time, when she had run away. Now, she gasped in pleasure at the touch of his lips.

“I need you,” she whispered. “Let me go and walk away. Please, quickly. Please, go.”

They held hands as far as they could reach, until his next step pulled them apart. Sobbing, hugging herself, wishing she could die or run back to him for all time, Sharon wandered the long blocks back home, and fell face first on the bed, curling up in a fetal ball, fighting the desire to imagine Lee’s touch all over her body.