Tess Gerritsen - Double Impact

A cup of coffee in her hand, Ami sat on the well-worn couch in the nurses’ lounge, closed her eyes and leaned her head back. It felt so good just to sit. And the quiet. Oh, that was heavenly. Jane and Lonnie had made a cafeteria run. The doctor on call was poring over reports in the tiny room designated as the on-call physician’s private sanctuary. The triage nurse was holding the fort at the front desk.

All Ami needed was five minutes of quiet and this cup of coffee. She took a deep swallow and moaned her satisfaction. No one made coffee like Jane did.

The squeak of the door echoed in the quiet and Ami reluctantly opened her eyes expecting to find the triage nurse with word that another onslaught of patients had arrived. To her surprise, a stranger-a man wearing a travel-wrinkled suit-entered the lounge and closed the door behind him. He was tall, she noted. Black hair…nice tan. Ami was pretty sure he wasn’t on staff here, which meant he was probably lost.

Annoyed at the intrusion, she sat up a little straighter. Maybe he was here with a patient. A father or brother or son. She supposed in his distress he could think this was a public lounge.

“May I help you?” she asked.

He just looked at her.

Ami stood, trepidation belatedly setting in. “If you’re looking for the cafeteria, it’s on the opposite end of the building. This is the nurses’ lounge.” When he continued to stand there staring a hole through her, she added a bit more firmly, “I’ll have to ask you to leave.”

“Jesus H. Christ,” he murmured, disbelief evident in his voice as well as his expression as he sagged against the door behind him.

Ami had the sudden almost overwhelming urge for fight or flight. Another of those feelings she couldn’t quite place or name welled inside her.

He pushed off from the door and moved toward her. She backed up a step, only to be halted by the couch she’d vacated seconds ago.

“My name is Jack Tanner.” Ami’s breath caught as he reached into his inside jacket pocket. He smiled as if he understood. “Don’t worry, it’s just my ID.” He flipped open a black leather credentials case. “Miss Donovan, I’m from the Central Intelligence Agency.”

Ami blinked. The CIA? Yeah, right. She understood now. This was a joke. She was going to kill Lonnie. It wasn’t bad enough that he’d ragged her all day about the Israeli guys. “Look, I don’t know who you are, but I’ve had-”

“Like I told you,” he cut in smoothly, moving a few steps closer, “I’m Jack Tanner from the CIA. I just need a few minutes of your time.”

He was serious and still holding his ID in plain sight. Ami stared at the credentials now. Tanner, Jack. Central Intelligence Agency. This guy was for real. She shook her head in confusion. Why would anyone from the CIA want to talk to her? The answer that reverberated through her made her go cold. Her hands shaking, she placed her coffee cup on the table before she dropped it.

“I don’t understand,” she offered, then blinked, her vision all at once cloudy. The floor seemed to shift beneath her feet, making her feel unsteady. She took a deep breath to counter the wave of dizziness. Her blood sugar level must have bottomed out, she reasoned. Lunch. She shouldn’t have skipped lunch, but there hadn’t been time. “Why would you want to speak with me?” she eventually managed to ask.

“May I?” He gestured to the chair directly across the coffee table from her.

She moistened her lips and tried to think of a reason to say no but found none. “Sure,” she relented.

He sat, his gaze steady on her. “I’d like you to join me, if you will.”

Ami eased back down onto the couch, still feeling a bit unsteady. She wasn’t sure why she did as he asked. Maybe, deep down, she was afraid not to. He was CIA, after all.

“Miss Donovan, you were in the ER when Natan Olment was brought in?”

“Yes.” He was here about the Israeli guys. Relief, so profound she could barely hold herself upright, rushed through her. He was investigating the assassination attempt. Why hadn’t she thought of that?

“I understand that Mr. Olment reacted as if he knew you somehow?” Tanner went on.

Uneasiness stirred again. “Well, yes. It was kind of odd. But the…doctor said that his reaction was probably trauma-induced hallucinations.” Well, Robert had said it and he was a doctor.

Tanner nodded. “And then this morning another gentleman, Mr. Amos Amin, also reacted oddly to your presence?”

Ami swallowed. Her throat felt viciously dry. Where was he going with this? What did it have to do with the assassination attempt? And how the hell did he know about it? “Yes, he did. We had to call Security.”

“Have you considered why these two incidents occurred?”

“No,” she lied. “I don’t have any idea.”

Tanner lowered his gaze, staring at the floor for a time. Ami found that move far more unnerving than if he’d continued that relentless stare directly into her eyes.

When he at last met her gaze again, he asked, “You really don’t know me, do you?”

She did not know him. She didn’t know either of the men on the fourth floor. This had to be some sort of bizarre mistake. She shook her head. At least she thought she did. She wasn’t sure the movement was much more than a pathetic twitch.

Tanner reached into his pocket once more. This time he pulled out a couple of photographs. He laid them on the table in front of her. “Do you know the woman in these pictures?”

Don’t look! Don’t look! a little voice deep inside her cried. A part of her was certain that if she looked, something very bad would happen. She sucked in a ragged breath and tried to calm herself. Why was she so afraid? They were only pictures. The knot of fear twisted in her stomach. She had to look, didn’t she? She forced away the questions whirling in her head and stared down at the pictures. The inner trembling she’d been restraining for hours erupted inside her. Her hands shook with the force of it.

In the photographs was a woman, a couple of years younger maybe, but she looked exactly like Ami. Exactly. Down to the unruly ponytail in which she wore her hair.

“It’s not me,” she breathed, her voice scarcely more than a whisper. She felt the color leech out of her face. This had to be some sort of joke. It couldn’t be real. “It’s someone else. Someone who looks like me. A mistake,” she insisted.

“Miss Donovan,” Tanner said quietly, “I’m afraid there is no mistake. For two years we’ve thought you were dead.”

Two years. She’d been found wandering in the park two years ago. For all intents and purposes, her life began two years ago. “No.” She shook her head again, harder this time. She had to make him see that he was wrong. His last statement abruptly reverberated in her ears. “‘We’?”

“The CIA,” he explained.

“It’s not me,” she repeated. She’d never even met anyone in the CIA-at least not until today.

“Your real name is Jamie Dalton. You were born in Baltimore, Maryland.”

She didn’t want to hear this but she couldn’t seem to think of the right words to make him go away. This couldn’t be real. Maybe she was hallucinating.

“I don’t know a Jamie Dalton,” she told him flatly, and yet she rolled the name around in her mind to see if it stirred a response. Jamie. It didn’t feel wrong, but it couldn’t be right. No, she denied. She wasn’t the Jamie he was talking about. She couldn’t be. She was Ami Donovan now. Her past was gone.

“You were a second-year medical student when we met.” He averted his gaze briefly as if it pained him to remember. “Your father was Jamison Dalton, a politically connected man who knew his way around the wealthy and the powerful in this country. His ability to pull together financing made him a strategic player in the success of a new, top-secret antiterrorism force. The private sector had been secretly helping certain elements of the government, of which I’m not at liberty to discuss, put together this joint force. Your father was assassinated by someone who wanted that effort to fail.”