Gary Ponzo - A Touch of Deceit

Nick sees Kharrazi in front of him as clear as day. The voice next to him says, “I said it’s personal.”

Nick turned and saw Dave Tanner. He narrowed his eyes at Nick. “You look washed out.”

Nick sat back and realized his heart was pounding in his chest. A trickle of sweat snaked down the side of his face. “Just hang with me, Dave. I’ll fight through it.”

“That’s all right,” Tanner said. “I’m on your side, remember?”

Nick slumped his head against the window. “I know.”

Dave Tanner was driving too fast when he skidded to a stop in the half-circle drive that fronted the Emergency room. Nick jumped from the car and ran inside. Breathlessly, he scanned the waiting room for a familiar face. Between the fatigue and the short, quick breaths, he was forced to see through a maze of floating spots across his field of view. Without knowing where he was going for certain, he leaned his head forward and his body followed. Nick almost knocked himself out when his momentum drove him into a closed steel door.

“You can’t go back there, Sir,” a women’s voice came from behind him. He turned to see a heavyset woman sitting behind a stark white desk.

Nick yanked his credentials from his pocket and shoved them to an inch in front of the women’s nose. “FBI. Where’s Julie Bracco?”

The woman was startled for a moment, then searched her computer screen. “She’s in OR number three. She’s being operated on right now.” The woman looked at Nick as if she wasn’t sure how far she had to go to appease him.

Nick shook his credentials, which were still accosting her face. “Let’s go.”

“Sir, I. . uh-”

“If you want to see my gun I’ll be glad to show it to you.”

That got her picking up the phone. “OR nurse to reception desk please,” she said, her eyes never leaving Nick’s face. “Stat!”

The steel door swung open and Nick rushed past a girl in blue scrubs, who was pulling down her mask. “Sir,” she started, but Nick’s mind was too occupied for her trivial objections. He was going to find his wife and make certain she lived, even if he had to hold his 9mm to a surgeon’s head to get his best effort.

Nick frantically scanned the labels above each door as he scurried down the long corridor: storage, scrub room, OR #1, OR #2-there it was, OR #3. Nick thrust open the heavy door and rushed inside.

The room was vacant. There wasn’t even a table sitting under the enormous round light that hung from the ceiling. Nick stepped outside the room and quickly double-checked the number. When he returned, he heard water running. A man dressed in green from head to toe was scrubbing his hands in a metal sink, his back to Nick. Nick was so frenzied, he’d missed him the first time around. He quickly glanced under the surgery light again to see if the table had returned. It hadn’t.

The man seemed to sense Nick’s presence and looked over his shoulder. “Can I help you?” he said, pulling off his green surgeon’s cap.

“Julie Bracco?” Nick stammered.

The man hastily worked his hands between a couple of paper towels. He stepped on a lever at the bottom of a white waste receptacle and discarded the towels when the lid opened. He strode toward Nick with and open hand. “I’m Doctor Williams,” he said, shaking Nick’s hand. “Are you Julie’s husband?”

“She was here?” Nick breathed, pointing to the empty spot where a table belonged.

Dr. Williams didn’t bother to look. He appeared to understand what Nick was suggesting. “She’s alive.”

Nick felt the color return to his face. “She is?”

Dr. Williams coaxed Nick to an empty stool that sat next to a dormant ECG monitor. “Sit down,” he said. “You are Julie’s husband, right?”

Nick nodded.

The doctor removed a cone-shaped cup from a dispenser and filled it with cold water from a water cooler. He handed the cup to Nick. “Here, drink this.”

Nick poured the water down his throat in a gulp and crushed the cup into a tiny ball. “Tell me, Doctor. I want to know everything.”

Dr. Williams pulled a rolling stool in front of Nick and sat facing him. “Mr. Bracco, your wife was shot in the back of the head at pretty close range.” He pointed to the back of his own head with an index finger. “The bullet entered her scalp here, in the occipital, at such an angle that it deflected off of her skull, remained inside of her scalp, then traveled around the exterior of her skull-” He traced a line from the back of his head around to the middle of his forehead. “Then it exited here, at the frontal hairline, never entering her skull, and never compromising the integrity of her cranium.” He smiled, exposing a mouthful of perfectly straight teeth. “Mr. Bracco, your wife is a very lucky woman.”

Nick’s jaw trembled. “She’s not going to die?”

The doctor shook his head. “She has a few contusions from her head hitting the ground and a clean gunshot wound in her shoulder, but that’s all.” Dr. Williams slapped the side of Nick’s thigh. “She’s going to be fine, Mr. Bracco. Now you on the other hand?”

Nick felt a smile crease his face.

“She’s down in recovery,” the doctor said. “Go ahead and grab a seat in the waiting room, and a nurse will take you back to her when the anesthesia wears off. Should be another hour or so.”

He must have seen a suspicious look on Nick’s face, because he held up his right hand as if being sworn in to testify in court. “I promise, Mr. Bracco, she’s in the best of hands here. Let her rest up and you’ll be able to see her.”

Nick slowly traced his steps back to the waiting room. He ignored the stares from the few employees that milled around the reception desk and found a hard plastic seat at the far end of the room.

Dave Tanner appeared in the seat next to him. “How is she?”

“She’s going to be all right,” he said. “Apparently, she’s got a hard head.”

Dave didn’t ask any more questions and Nick leaned back in his chair, closed his eyes and dreamed of open fields of grass, swaying in the breeze. A mountain full of trees loomed over a valley with a cool stillness. Somewhere in the distance a child giggled.

Walt Jackson and Louis Dutton were never the closest of associates. Dutton always tolerated Jackson’s defense of his Baltimore Field Agents and Jackson merely endured Dutton’s arrogance as FBI Director. But ever since the KSF began their bombing spree, the two men seemed to unite in an unspoken bond.

In a gesture of great deference, Dutton declared the Baltimore FBI field office as the command center for the KSF operation. This gave Jackson the show of confidence that not only FBI agents took notice of, but the White House as well. Louis Dutton was throwing his support behind Walt Jackson and if there were going to be any political scapegoats, they were going to have to indict the entire agency, not just Walt.

Inside of the War Room, Jackson paced in front of the computer-generated images projected onto the white walls. There were twelve separate images of varying sizes. Some showed a constant satellite image of suspected KSF safe houses, while others displayed radar screens. At the end of the wall, sentences scrolled downward in a continuous display of real time Associated Press releases. The image getting most of the attention was the illustration of North America.

Jackson wore a sophisticated headset with a wireless transmission that contained seventy-five separate frequencies. In his left hand was a tiny control panel that he used to direct the traffic of information that he was constantly receiving. Feeding him the data were ten FBI analysts, twenty-two FBI terrorist specialists, three CIA operatives, and two NSA analysts who were furiously feeding information into the multi-million dollar computer link-up between all three agencies’ database. A merging of information the intelligence agencies had never seen before.