David Dun - Overfall

“No,” Anna said mostly to herself. “Please don’t die.”

The monitor that was calling out his heartbeat went flat. The medics grabbed electric paddles. As the life went out of his body they jolted it with current. Again and again they tried.

Shohei never came back.

John Weissman looked to be sleeping at the desk, but Sam feared the worst. He launched a flying kick at the door and broke the lock. In seconds, a small crowd gathered in the hallway.

He found no pulse in Weissman’s neck. Lifting him out of the chair, Sam laid him on the floor. Weissman’s lips were blue, his pupils dilated; he had a dead man’s pallor. Sam began compressing his chest. An officeworker knelt next to him, accepting a small part in the grotesque theater unfolding before them.

“Breathe into his lungs. Two breaths for five beats,” Sam said.

Another man came to the door.

“Call an air ambulance,” Sam said. “You must go through the government to land on this roof.” He gave the man the number. “Tell them what’s happening. Tell them it’s for Sam.”

This time it was eighteen minutes before the med techs were down from the roof with a gurney. They took over, but Sam knew it was hopeless. He didn’t want to think about the meaning of it all: Weissman’s wife; his kids; the grandkids, the family dinners; holidays. The shared joys were now gone because Sam had decided to stick him in a room instead of taking him to the roof.

The police had arrived and were clearing the area. Sam threw open the drawers, looking for the CD and knowing it was fruitless. His only hope was that the material had been transmitted to Harvard in time.

He walked to reception, passed a uniformed cop, but May was nowhere to be seen. Obviously the detectives hadn’t arrived yet. With his cell phone he dialed John Quarries, an assistant director of the FBI in Washington, DC. It took him three minutes to explain that he had stepped into a nest of bad people and was going to need somebody big to vouch for him. Some minutes later he had Quarrles’s assurance that the New York office of the FBI would tell local law enforcement what it needed to know about Sam’s and Anna Wade’s involvement in the deaths.

Jeremiah Fuller sat in his living room with his eldest daughter, her husband, Marmy, and his two grandchildren. Stacy made a pitcher of iced tea while he checked the steak on the grill and came back inside.

“Okay, Dad,” his daughter said, “it’s clear that your disease has taken a turn for the better. Can you give us a clue what they did to force the remission?”

“Who cares what they did?”

“Well, do you even know?”

“Actually I don’t. It’s part of the program. They don’t tell you exactly what they are doing. That’s why they do it in the far corners of the earth.”

“That seems unethical to me.”

“But look at the results. I need the pills in my dresser drawer or I get awfully jumpy, but that’s the only downside.”

“I just can’t believe it. Before this you could barely remember that you went to the store for milk. Now you can memorize a dozen digits. More than any of us.”

“Ain’t it grand?” he said, and excused himself to the bathroom.

Life was good. He was in love with his wife for the third time and all his kids were more or less flying straight and level. Entering the master bathroom, he saw that the window was up an inch. Funny, this time of the year, with the cold weather, Tracy didn’t normally leave the windows ajar. He closed it.

He urinated, still a little worried about the slow flow. “If it’s not your brain, it’s your prostate,” he muttered.

In the mirror he checked his teeth, found the piece of meat that had been bothering him, wet his toothbrush, and gave a quick brush. He winced-something seemed to have stung his gums. He looked closely at the brush and saw a tiny wire. As he did so, his chest felt a terrible compression, his vision blurred, he swayed on his feet, and he knew that he was falling and that he would die.

There was an extraordinary brilliance and exhilarating warmth. In the brightness he called out to God.

Four men were dead, one of them a close friend. Instead of sitting depressed and drunk or mourning, Sam took a cab down to Greenwich Village and walked into Babbo, a restaurant known for its out-of-the-ordinary cuisine. Sam was after the Brandiso, a delicious white fish cooked with fins and head, then deboned to order.

The place was a relatively simple, long hall-like affair, white-walled and with upstairs and downstairs dining. It was described as Italian Nouveau cuisine-Italian for those who liked Italian, and Nouveau for those who enjoyed perfectly looped lines of avocado paste on bone-white china impeccably designed with a colorful arrangement of vegetables and greens that even included a flower.

Sam knew that a Babbo care package would help Anna find her equilibrium. He had persuaded Lenia, an assistant chef, to put together all the makings of a Brandiso dinner that Sam would bake at Anna’s.

With the loss of these good men, he didn’t care if he ever ate again, much less whether it was gourmet fare, but he knew it was expedient that they keep living in every sense. Anna might not understand at first, but soon she would feel the same.

Sam allowed Lenia to include some cream sauce for a side of pasta and a marvelous mushroom salad. He listened carefully as she explained the presentation, although he had no intention of following directions when it came to that. It was ghastly enough to think of flavors and appetites or anything of warmth and comfort in this time of mourning. But the fellowship of those who were fighters was imbued with an unwritten rule that allowed remembrances but no funerals. The mourning would be private; this dinner was to be a celebration of the life lived and a commitment between the survivors to keep on living.

As he waited for Lenia to finish he called Anna.

“You okay?” he asked.

“I think so.” Then she was silent.

“Anna?”

“I’m sad. And I’m worried about Jason. We need to do something right away.”

“We will.”

When Lenia emerged, she paused a moment to look at him. Taking the bag, he kissed Lenia on the cheek, gave her a hug.

“Take care of yourself,” she said. “And come and see me when I can cook for you.”

It was when he walked onto the street, the cars beating the air into a steady whir, their lights tracing white lines and red bubbles in the night, that he realized he was struggling to answer a question that he only barely understood. As the cabdriver made a blur of the electric light marquees of New York up Seventh Avenue and through the incredible bustle of Times Square and onto Broadway, he gave up the pondering and decided to act.

He called Paul.

“Remember what we heard about six months ago-that Wes King believed someone had gotten to his software codes?”

“Yeah, but we figured we couldn’t tie it… you know, just a coincidence.”

“I was tired. Now I’m not. I want to dig it out.”

“But we’ve got everyone, every resource, dedicated to figuring out DuShane Chellis and Samir Aziz… and how to extract Jason.”

“While you are doing that, in spare moments, I want any connections between Suzanne’s case and this one. Anything.”

“Got it.”

“How are we doing on Jason?”

“Good. The Canadians are on board.”

“Did Harvard get the transmission from Weissman?”

“They got a lot. Some of it is encrypted. Quite a bit actually. They’re working on it. You can call Carl at home tonight.” He gave Sam the number.

They talked as Sam rode up Broadway to the Upper West Side. By the time he arrived at Anna’s block, he was satisfied that all the minds at work in his office were focused on the right issues.