“Thanks, Barbara,” Kate said.
They were all quiet for several moments as they raced along behind the gurney.
“Grayson will kill the president as soon as he knows the exchange went sour,” Lorraine said, able to think more clearly since being relieved of responsibility for keeping Peter alive.
“Not if I have anything to say about it,” Kate said, her jaw set resolutely. “How much time would we have?”
“Hard to say,” Lorraine answered. She pulled out her cell phone and dialed another number as they ran. “King. I need a cleanup crew now.
Lincoln Memorial.”
“What was that about?” Kate asked.
“It will take Grayson longer to figure out the operation was blown if there are no bodies to find.”
“Oh.” Kate bit her lip, torn between her need to stay with Peter and her duty to save the president. She knew what Peter would want her to do. “Jay, I need you to go with Peter.”
“Of course, we’ll all go.”
“No, honey. We can’t.” Before Jay could protest, Kate added, “The Commission still doesn’t know about you. You’re our secret weapon…”
The Value of Valor
“You’re going after the president.” Jay’s voice was almost a whisper.
Kate squeezed her hand. “I have to, Jay. Please understand.” She looked deeply into Jay’s frightened eyes.
“I do,” Jay said softly.
Kate squeezed her hand. “That’s my girl. Find a fax machine—send Trish what you have—you can explain it all to her over the phone from the clinic. There’s no time for you to get to New York. We have to get the story out right away. It may be our only chance…”
“I’ll do it,” Jay said, her heart pounding.
Kate turned to Barbara. “Are you okay to go with Jay? I’d feel a lot more comfortable knowing you were overseeing Peter’s care.” Her voice broke.
“I’ll take care of it.” Barbara’s head was pounding from the concussion, and her ribs ached from breathing deeply as she ran, but she would not let Peter down.
“Kevin, you, Lorraine, and I have a date with the president,” Kate said.
“I don’t want to rain on your parade, love, but how are we going to find him?” Kevin asked.
“Max has Englert. Englert’s the key. We just have to find them,” Kate answered.
When they arrived at the plain black van, Kate pushed her way past the paramedics to get to Peter’s head. She leaned close to his ear, her hand smoothing his hair. As tears coursed down her face, she whispered,
“Don’t worry, Technowiz, I’m going to finish the mission, I promise.
You hang in there. Don’t do anything rash while I’m gone.” She swallowed hard. “I’ll see you in a little while.” She kissed him on the forehead and moved away.
Jay took Kate into her arms. “He’s going to make it, honey. I know he is. Barbara and I will take good care of him.” She looked up at her lover, smiling weakly. “You just take care of yourself.” She paused, then added,
“Come back to me, Kate. I love you.”
“I will, sweetheart. I promise.”
“That’s good enough for me.” Jay pressed Kate to her so that they were connected all along their lengths. She kissed Kate hard on the mouth. “There’s more where that came from.”
“In that case,” Kate swallowed, regaining her equilibrium, “I’ll definitely be back.”
As the van sped away, Lorraine said, “I have a car. It’s on the other side of the memorial…” Her voice trailed off as a cell phone rang.
After a second, Kate realized it was hers. “H-hello?”
“Kate? It’s Max. I saw the van leave. Is he…is he going to be okay?”
Lynn Ames
“Hard to say. He’s tough, remember?”
“Yeah, I remember.”
“You’ve got Peter’s phone?”
“Yeah, he made me take it before…well, before.”
“We’ve got to get to the president, Max. Lorraine says Grayson will kill him.”
“I know where he is, and we’ve got Englert. I’ll pick you up in a second. Stay where you are.”
In seconds, a nondescript sedan pulled to the curb, the driver’s side door flying open. “Come on,” Max called. “Get in.”
There was a somber silence in the car as Max navigated through D.C.
streets at top speed. After a few minutes, he looked in his rearview mirror at Lorraine. “I didn’t get a chance back there to say thank you. I’m guessing you’re the reason Englert didn’t get shot at.”
“Yes, he was my assignment.” She looked at Englert, who sat between her and Kevin, his hands cuffed once again. He hadn’t said a word since the exchange. “Dr. Englert, the Commission wanted you dead because you knew too much. You’re lucky you had Max and Peter to protect you.”
“Somehow, I don’t feel very lucky.”
“How did you get mixed up with the Commission, anyway?” Kate asked from the front passenger seat.
Englert shrugged, clearly embarrassed. “I was careless with a patient during surgery once. He was a very famous person; he died because of my mistake. I was an up-and-coming surgeon—regarded as one of the best in my field. I was going to lose everything—my license to practice, my house, my car, my savings. Wayne Grayson came along and offered to make it all go away in exchange for certain favors. I didn’t see another way out at the time, so I said yes. I had no idea what kind of Faustian bargain I was striking. I didn’t know that someday he would blackmail me into harming the president of the United States.”
“Doctor, you told the boss that you know how to reverse the poison, right?” Max asked.
“Yes.”
“Where do we find you the drugs to do that?”
“I have them stored in a hidden safe in the president’s treatment area.”
Kate turned and raised an eyebrow at him.
“I told you,” he shrugged again, “I never wanted to harm the president. I secretly hoped I would have a chance to administer the antidote, but I was always being watched. I’m no hero like all of you—I didn’t have the courage to risk my life.”
“You’ll have a chance to be a hero now, Doctor,” Lorraine said.
The Value of Valor
“How are we going to get in there?” Kevin asked. “Presumably, this bugger has the place pretty well protected.”
“Doctor, what does the setup usually look like?”
“There’s always a nurse on duty, and three, no, four, security guards.”
“The guards are Secret Service?”
“I don’t know—I know they’re the Commission’s people—that’s all I know.”
“Grayson may have boosted the security presence by now,” Lorraine said. “Steven—the lead agent—was supposed to check in with the Viper after the job was done.”
“Who’s the Viper?” Kevin asked.
“Secret Service Agent Douglas, aka the Viper, is the man Peter killed.
He was the main contact for Grayson. When he didn’t call in, Grayson probably sent someone out to the site to see what happened. An eerily quiet scene will no doubt make him extra cautious.”
“That makes sense,” Max said. “How many additionals?”
“I can’t say for sure—it depends on just how threatened he feels. At least two, more likely four.”
“Eight of them, four of us. I like the odds,” Kate said sarcastically.
“We need a plan,” Max said.
Kevin laughed. “Take out the bad guys, save the president.”
“Works for me,” Kate smiled, grateful for the Kiwi’s laid-back approach.
“I was thinking—perhaps—something a little more specific,” Max said, also smiling.
“Max, you and Kevin cover the left interior entrance, I’ll take the right. Kate, it’s your job to keep Dr. Englert safe and get to the president to administer the antidote,” Lorraine said. “Any questions?”
“I love a woman who takes charge,” Kevin said amiably.
“We’re almost there,” Max announced.
“Showtime,” Kate said.
Lynn Ames
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
arbara squeezed Jay’s hand as technicians wheeled Peter through B a corridor and into an operating theater. “I’m going in there to observe. Will you be all right out here?”
Jay nodded, her expression fretful.
“We’re going to do everything we can, Jay.”
“I know you will, Barbara. Are you all right?”
“Yes.” She kissed Jay on the forehead. “Have I said how wonderful it is to have you back?”
“It’s great to
be
back.”
“I’ll see you in a bit.” Barbara squeezed Jay’s hand reassuringly one more time and walked through the double doors into the scrub room.
When she was gone, Jay went in search of a phone and fax machine.
A nurse showed her to one of the surgeon’s offices, which afforded her the privacy she had asked for.
When she sat down behind the desk, Jay was surprised to find that she was nervous. She couldn’t imagine what Trish would think after all this time. She wiped her sweaty palms on her jeans. The clock on the wall read 1:24 a.m.
Jay closed her eyes, took a deep breath, and dialed Trish’s home number from memory. She took another deep breath in an effort to calm the butterflies in her stomach.
“Hello,” a sleepy voice answered the phone.
Hearing her good friend’s voice erased the nervousness she’d felt.
“Trish?”
After a momentary pause, Trish demanded, “Who is this?”
“It’s Jay, Trish. Jamison Parker.”
“The hell it is,” the editor boomed, apparently having come wide awake.
Jay held the phone away from her ear. “Trish, please. Don’t hang up.
It’s a heck of a story. I…we—Kate and I—we need your help.”
“Look, I don’t know who you are…”
“Trish!” Jay yelled into the phone. “Who else tells you that the angrier you get, the more pronounced your New York accent is?” Jay rushed on before Trish could interrupt her. “I hung up on you in mid-The Value of Valor
sentence the day before the capitol bombing when I saw Kate on television for the first time. Trish, nobody but you and I know that.” Jay paused, holding her breath.
“Jamison Parker, if you ever go away again like that and scare me to death, I’ll kill you.”
Jay laughed, touched by the heartfelt emotion she heard in her friend’s voice. “That’s my Trish.”
“What the hell is going on? Where have you been?”
“I’m going to fill you in on everything, I promise. But right now I’ve got the most important story of our generation, and I need to get it to you.”
“I’m listening,” Trish said.
“We need to run a special edition for this—put it out tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow? Are you kidding me?”
“When you hear the story, you’ll understand.” Jay quickly filled Trish in on the “deaths” of Kate and the president, the plan to spur a revolution in China, the plot to elevate Wheeler and Hawthorne to lead the country as puppets of the Commission—all of it. When she was done, she sat back and waited for Trish’s reaction. She didn’t have to wait long.
“I’m on my way to the office. Give me fifteen minutes to get there, then fax what you’ve got. Call me as soon as you’ve got anything else, and we’ll add it in. My God, Jay. Only you could come up with a story like this to get me to forgive you for dying on me.”
“I’ll take out that first guard,” Lorraine said, indicating the sole agent patrolling near the door to the building. They had arrived in the underground garage at the National Institute of Mental Health.
“Everybody set?”
“Ready, mate,” Kevin said, as he checked his two Sig Sauers.
“Let’s do it,” Max said, climbing out of the driver’s side of the car.
“Ready,” Kate said.
Englert merely nodded, his eyes big and round. Lorraine undid his handcuffs. “You can do this,” she said firmly. “We’re all here to protect you. This is your chance to redeem yourself. Don’t waste it.”
Kate came around to escort him. “I promise, I won’t let anything happen to you.” She looked at him kindly.
He nodded at her, giving her a brief, nervous smile in return. “Let’s go,” he said.
Lorraine went first, dispatching the guard with practiced ease.
When they reached the first door, Englert punched in a series of numbers on a keypad. He repeated the process at a second entryway.
Kate was glad beyond reason that Grayson hadn’t thought to change the codes yet or lock the doctor out of the system.
Lynn Ames
“This is the last door,” Englert said, his voice shaking. “There’s a small anteroom; the patien…the president is directly ahead once you get through that. There are usually two guards posted in the anteroom and two in the president’s room.”
“Okay, Doctor. Stand back.” Lorraine pushed him gently backward into Kate’s capable hands.
All of them had their weapons out and ready.
“On the count of three,” she murmured. “One, two, three.” She shouldered through the door, dropping immediately to a crouch and firing at the two guards to the right.
Kevin and Max followed, mirroring Lorraine’s actions and taking out the two guards to the left of the door.
The commotion drew the attention of everyone inside. As Lorraine had predicted, four more guards appeared from the inner chamber. She shot the first one as he came through the door.
Kate, who had been shielding Englert behind her, watched as the guard went down. Over his shoulder, she saw a man she recognized as Wayne Grayson standing over the president.
“No,” Kate growled. “Stay hidden,” she said to Englert as she grabbed him by the arm and propelled him behind the door. In a flash, she was moving, stepping over two of the fallen guards and staying to the wall. “Cover me,” she yelled as she dove through the opening into the president’s room.
Grayson stopped, shocked, in mid-motion. In one hand, he held a syringe; in the other, he held the president’s IV tube.
Kate heard a bullet whistle by her ear but paid no attention. She gathered her legs under her and threw herself forward, taking Grayson to the ground.
As she rolled over to stand up, she saw the syringe coming toward her neck. She dodged to the side, grabbing Grayson’s wrist tightly. She squeezed with all her might, until he was forced to let go; the syringe fell to the floor.
“This is for Peter,” she snarled, as she hit Grayson with a right cross worthy of Muhammad Ali. His head swung to the side. “And this one’s for the president,” she said, as she caught him in the chin with a vicious uppercut, snapping his head back. He fell bonelessly to the floor.