James Grippando - Need You Now

As instructed, Mongoose took a taxi to Lemuel Shattuck Hospital and went to the food court on the ground floor, an enclosed mall-like area that was completely separate from the prison unit. He sat away from the crowd, alone at a table outside a sandwich shop that had already closed for the evening. From there, it was a classic case of “hurry up and wait.” The package arrived twenty minutes later. The courier didn’t introduce himself, but Mongoose recognized an operator from a private military firm when he saw one. He’d dealt with dozens of them when he was with the CIA. He assumed that Barber had hired the same private firm to pay Evan Hunt a visit while Mongoose was in Ciudad del Este; Hunt’s job had “contract” written all over it. Mongoose took the package, no questions asked, and went into the men’s room.

Three minutes later, he emerged wearing hospital scrubs and a photo-identification badge that bore the name Henry Bozan, Nurse Anesthetist.

A nurse? Really?

As he passed a doughnut shop, he checked his reflection in the plate glass window. He hadn’t liked the plan from the beginning but, seeing himself in nursing scrubs, he really didn’t like it.

You are a disgraceful waste of talent.

Those words, buried in his memory, were suddenly burning in his brain. It was the blunt answer he’d gotten after confronting his platoon leader and demanding to know why he wasn’t recommended for advancement to SEAL Team Six, the elite of the elite. Raw talent had never been an issue. He’d been one of many incredible young athletes, all former high-school and college stars in their own right, who’d entered basic underwater demolition/SEAL training in California. Six months of intense training-everything from two-mile ocean swims and “drown proofing” in frigid water to four-mile timed runs in soft sand and mountain endurance runs wearing forty-pound rucksacks-had whittled down the field of 250 candidates. Mongoose had emerged as one of nineteen who’d actually finished. But his platoon leader had never liked him-or maybe he’d just seen through him. It was often said that men who survived the rigors of training to become SEALs possessed much more than physical strength. Under any adversity, even in unbearable pain, they had the depth of character to put aside their own pain and fear to help a struggling buddy. There were always one or two who lacked that commitment to higher purpose, a few who managed to beat the odds in service of their own ego. A SEAL, however, was no tenured professor. The bad fits were inevitably rerouted, forced to stand aside as their former platoon performed “kill or capture” missions in the “sea, air, and land” war on terrorism, from the elimination of Iranian-trained snipers at the bottom of the pyramid to the takeout of bin Laden at the top. For Mongoose, the bitter irony was that his reroute to the Treasury Department’s financial war on terrorism had led him to the end of the road-a bullet to his spine, disabled by chronic pain.

He was the expendable pawn in Joe Barber’s Operation BAQ.

“Excuse me, which way is the nurses’ lounge?”

Mongoose turned to see a blue-haired senior citizen staring at him, a hospital volunteer.

“Hell if I know, lady.”

He continued around the corner and found an alcove beyond the elevators. Barber’s voice mail message had told him not to call, but he didn’t care. He dialed the private number.

“I’m not in a place where I can talk,” Barber said.

Mongoose heard the crowd noise in the background, could even hear a band playing “Stardust.” “You’ve got two minutes to call me back,” he said, then put away his phone and waited.

Two minutes more to consider his place in history. Rare indeed was the former SEAL and CIA agent who murdered civilians and turned against his own government. Some might put him in the category of Jeffrey MacDonald, the Green Beret who butchered his two daughters, ages five and two, after stabbing his pregnant wife thirty-seven times. Others would equate him with Robert Hanssen, the FBI counterintelligence agent who acted as a paid spy for the Soviet Union and Russia for two decades, telling the FBI after he was caught that his only motivation was the money. Mongoose saw himself as neither. It wasn’t really about the money. He hadn’t snapped under pressure. He was making idiots like Joe Barber pay for their arrogance, their narrow-mindedness, their sweeping definition of “collateral damage.”

Some might even say he was a patriot.

Mongoose checked the time, and his phone rang. Barber was back on the line with ten seconds to spare on his deadline.

Mongoose pulled no punches. “I’m not going in as a nurse, completely unarmed. If I go in as a corrections officer I can at least pack a sidearm.”

“It’s too risky to involve the Department of Corrections,” said Barber. “This way we need no one’s approval, no one’s cooperation to get you in.”

“Are you saying that I’m going in without anyone from corrections knowing anything about this?”

“Correct. Our techies have already hacked into the prison-unit records to add Henry Bozan to the list of approved practitioners on the pain-management team. You’ll sail through security check-in.”

A naked undercover mission. That made things more interesting. “You could have at least made me a physician.”

“Going in as a nurse anesthetist gives you another layer of protection. If anyone questions what you’re doing, tell them that you’re following the directions of the anesthesiologist in charge of the team. The only treating physician in the prison unit right now is a general practitioner named Alice Kern. If she has a problem with anything you’re doing, she’ll have to follow up with the anesthesiologist. You can be in and out of there by the time she gets any answers.”

This discussion was making him all the more aware of his own chronic condition, the pain that never stopped running down the back of his leg. “All right. I’ve seen enough pain-management specialists to pull this off.”

“Not that this is a complicated assignment. You go straight to room eight thirty-four and check on the patient. The prison unit typically uses Demerol in an IV to manage pain for cancer patients. The maximum dosage for someone his size is one hundred milligrams every two hours. Whatever he’s getting, adjust the drip to one hundred every hour. Leave before his breathing begins to slow. By the time you’re outside the building, the patient will be in fatal cardiac arrest.”

“What if Mandretti’s son is still in the room?”

“It doesn’t matter. He doesn’t know who you are or what you look like. He has no reason to believe that you’re not simply there doing your job.”

“I still don’t like going in unarmed.”

“You can’t adjust the IV dressed as a corrections officer. If someone were to walk into the room, or if a security camera were to pick up a corrections officer messing with medication, the only way out would be a gunfight. It’s much cleaner this way. And it’s too damn late in the game to change plans.”

Mongoose couldn’t argue, but he was naturally suspicious. “Fine,” he said, “but remember what I told you. If I don’t come out of that hospital alive-”

“My memo goes viral. I understand.”

“Be sure you do,” said Mongoose.

He ended the call and crossed the food court, following the signs marked A UTHORIZED P ERSONNEL O NLY on his way toward the prison unit.

I couldn’t stop talking. I was leaning on the bed rail, my father’s hand in mine, telling him stories.

The minutes had passed too slowly in silence, and I’d suddenly felt the need to tell him everything I’d been doing for the past fifteen years. The stories kept coming, evaporating the gloom, and it didn’t matter that he couldn’t hear me. Maybe he could, on some level. I wondered how deep and restful his sleep actually was. My poor mother had married a man who snored like a grizzly bear. This was clearly drug-induced sleep, something altogether different. Quiet. Quiet awareness, maybe. Who knew?