9

Suz

 

 

The House That Jack Built, Bethesda, Maryland

 

 

Suz closed the door behind the Iniquus Support Officer. It would be the last time Suz would have their help, but he didn’t know that. Before the ISO left, he gave Suz his cell number and told her he was assigned to her and that if she needed anything at all to send him a text. Suz put the number in her wastebasket, and reached down to rub the pups’ ears. “You two look like you were spoiled rotten.”

Dick waddled into the living room and flopped onto his bed.

The guy had handed her a takeout bag from one of her and Jack’s favorite lunch spots. Jack must have listed it with her preferences in some data base somewhere. Suz put her head in the bag a sniffed the rich spicy aroma of the Moroccan cuisine as she shuffled to the kitchen with Jane at her heels. Suz hadn’t eaten anything since her MRE in the woods. And she had eaten that for the kids’ sake. They had been watching her closely. Seeing how she acted. She pretended that everything was a-okay. But the truth was, Suz was so depressed that the act of chewing and then swallowing seemed too monumental to take on.

The to-go box was filled with couscous topped with chicken and vegetables that had been slow roasted in a tagine. The side dishes were the apricot fitters with pistachio coulis that she ordered every single time, and Zaalouk, an eggplant and tomato salad. If anything could get her eating, this was the meal. Jack must have noted that too, otherwise the ISO could have picked up a pizza at Jack’s and her go-to “I don’t feel like cooking” spot, up the street. Truth be told, Iniquus spoiled her.

Suz understood that Iniquus took good care of her as part of their business model. The United States government put a great deal of time and money into choosing and training the best of the best in their special ops military programs. There were only but so many retired SEALs, Green Berets, Marine Raiders and other specialists to be had. Iniquus also had internationally proficient hackers, lawyers, spies and thieves. The thieves part she was making up – maybe. Iniquus wanted the best of the best on their payroll so that no matter what emergency sprang up, they had the right person with the right skillset ready to leap into action.

Keeping those skills on the Iniquus payroll, and not someone else’s, meant more than a fat paycheck, it meant a commitment to excellence, a highly sought after sterling reputation, and a sense of family. The operatives never worried about what was happening on the home front. If there was a way to solve an issue, Iniquus solved it — from mowing the family yards, to road side assistance, to flying in world-renowned doctors, to, well, anything that was needed. Suz had never heard of a family doing without – except of course for doing without their loved one. That was the price. Too rich for her blood. But that didn’t mean she couldn’t enjoy this last, and very delicious, Iniquus delivered meal.

Suz decided her lunch needed a cup of mint tea. She got up and put the kettle on to boil. She was a purest when it came to tea making. It was as much about the process as it was about the drinking it. She had just turned the element on high when the bell rang again.

“Did you forget something?” She called as she moved toward the front door, threw the bolt and swung it wide to two men in long black coats.

“Miss Molloy?” The man in front asked. He was tall and thin with wide apple cheeks and pale eyes that reminded her of a shark, cold and emotionless.

She scowled at him.

“My name is Samuel Jones. I need to ask you a few questions.”

Jane was at their feet growling and soon Dick trotted over to sniff at the strangers. Neither seemed impressed. Their barks echoed off the ceiling and bounced off the walls. Basset Hounds were known for being loud, but Dick and Jane were unusually riled. Suz pushed the door to close it. “This isn’t a good time. You should call my lawyer and make an appointment.” Suz didn’t have a lawyer, but suddenly she felt claustrophobic and anxious. These guys needed to go.

Samuel Jones reached out and blocked the door’s movement. “You misunderstand,” he said in his quiet alpha-male voice. “I am not making a request.” He walked in as if he had been invited. As if he owned the place.

The two men stalked into her living room corralling her away from any exits. “You may call me Jones. Take a seat, please.” He gestured to the arm chair where Jack would never sit. It had no view of the windows or the doors, and the back was “unprotected”, according to Jack. As a matter of fact, the Iniquus team would rather sit on the floor up against the wall than sit in that particular seat. It was the submissive seat. Suz felt her vulnerability quotient ratchet up.

Jones sat in Jack’s spot. The alpha place in the room. Between Jones’s posture, his voice, and this seating selection, Suz recognized that the man in front of her was of the class of men who killed as part of their job description, and he was here on a mission. For the good guys? For the bad guys? Suz knew from stories told around the campfire by Jack’s soldiering friends, that there was a whole lot of grey in the world. So even the good guys could act like the bad. In the grey world, classifying someone came down to their motivation not how they got to the end result. Sometimes any means to the end was necessary. Where did what was happening here in her living room land on that spectrum?

The other man turned the bolt on the door, clicked on the living room lights, then moved to the windows where he yanked the drapes tightly closed.

Jones looked down at the dogs baring their teeth and yapping at him – which was about as vicious as these two sad-eyed, droopy-eared dogs could get—and he flicked a finger toward the second man.

The other man—medium everything, non-descript, monochromatic—who had not yet mentioned his name or spoken, reached into his pocket and pulled a handful of liver-smelling treats. He fed a few to each of the pups and rubbed them behind their ears, making them moan and wag their tails.

Traitors.

He whistled, and they happily followed him into the kitchen where he opened the door and let them go out.

Suz was wide-eyed at the audacity. Her gaze travelled to the trashcan where her Iniquus support guy’s number lay. She wondered where she put her cell phone. She eyed the antique dial phone next to Jones. Jones turned his attention to where she was looking. He leaned back and pulled a knife from his pocket, reached over, and cut the cord that lead to the wall socket.

“What do you want from me?” she asked with a whisper thin voice.

“We have a few questions, we have a few requests, but it is not really what we want, it is what your little students want that is most important here.”

Suz felt darkness slowly drape down over her eyeballs. She felt heat and pressure round over the spheres, blocking out light, then she saw a fringe of brown fibers. Those are my eyelashes, she thought. I just blinked. Her mind had moved with the adrenaline that spiked through her system into that weird vortex-y place where it felt like her brain opened up and vacuumed in every single extraneous morsel of information. The cardinal who sat in a nest under her eves let out a call that sounded like a bomb falling. The long whistle came to a momentary halt, then bounced four times on nothingness, each time emitting a short, staccato note. Suz had these thoughts inside her head but another part of her brain sat just to the side, yelling, “Stop! You have to stop. Something horrible is happening. You need to focus on the important things.”

The tea kettle’s shriek jolted her in her seat. She stared into the kitchen at the high pitched sound, not knowing what she should do. Instead of making an actionable decision, her brain went to a word she had studied for the GMATs that were required by her grad school: “impuissance, middle English, French derivation – the lack of physical or mental power, weakness.” That word did nothing to help her deal with this situation; it simply stated the obvious. Suz’s eyes followed the second nameless guy as he went into the kitchen. She heard him lift the kettle, rendering it instantly silent, then he rattled around in there.

Jones snapped his fingers and the spell was broken. Suz focused over on him, her brain functioning again. Suz hated adrenaline.

Jones had removed his overcoat and draped in neatly on the arm of the chair. She had missed that while she focused on eyelids, and bird songs, and tea whistles. He reached into the inside pocket of his suitcoat, pulled out three pictures, and handed them to her. She reached out and saw that he wore gloves made of thin black leather. They looked odd with his suit coat. It was odd to wear gloves inside her house.

She focused on the pictures. The first one was of Rebeca, Ari, and Caleb Levinski cheesing it up for the camera. The second one was of Ari and Caleb looking like they were asleep in the seat of a mini-van. In the third, the boys were squatting in the mud, dirty and wild-eyed.

“Where did you get these photographs of the children?” she asked, not understanding their import.

“The Levinski children have been of interest to us for quite a while. But they suddenly became relevant.”

Suz knew the cryptic-speak were code words for something, but she just didn’t understand.

“We think that it would be a very good idea, for your good health and that of these children that you cooperate by answering my questions.”

“If I can. . .”

“You can, and you will.” Jones leaned back and crossed his ankle over his knee, looking perfectly comfortable.

“I’m sorry, let me re-phrase. If I have any information, I will tell you. If I don’t have the information, well then obviously, I can’t tell you.”

Jones dipped his head left and then right as if weighing her words. “That sounds fair enough.” He glanced up and number two was coming in with a tray that held a steaming tea pot and a plate of cookies. He set it on the coffee table and said something in a foreign language to Jones. Jones responded in that same dialect. Suz tried to puzzle out what language they were speaking, it sounded vaguely Russian. That’s as far as she got. None of the words stood out as familiar.

The other man left then came immediately back with another tray with her lunch on it. Jones swept an open hand toward the tray as the other man brought it over and set it on her lap. He too was wearing the thin black gloves.

“Please, it seems that we’ve interrupted your lunch. Enjoy.” He spread his colorless lips in what might have been an attempt at a smile. Suz fought her desire to shutter. She looked down at the stew; she had absolutely no appetite. But to show her good intentions of being cooperative, until she could find a way to escape this mess, she offered up her own semblance of a smile and took a bite.

Jones waited for her to finish every last painful morsel on her plate, then he nodded at the other-man. The other-man immediately stepped forward and took the tray.

Jones leaned forward with his elbows on his knees, his fingers loosely interlaced, and his cold-fish stare. “Let’s begin.”

Suz gripped the arms of her winged back chair. What did that mean? Her mind went to interrogation scenes in movies where the man would take out a cloth and unroll it on the table, revealing his torture tools. She stopped breathing.

“How long have you worked with the CIA?”

The question caught her off guard. She stared at the man as if he were mad. Her brain tried to churn through the situation and what it came up with was a burst of laughter. “What?” she sputtered.

The man turned his head slightly as the other-man handed him a piece of her stationary. He glanced at it. “Dearest Jack.” Jones attempted to smile again. “This is your boyfriend?”

Jack! “My ex-.”

“You always write dearest to your ex-?”

Suz had trouble holding eye contact with the man. She found herself staring at the stationary instead. “He doesn’t know he’s an ex- yet, I was writing the letter to tell him.”

“Ah, I see. And dearest Jack is also the Captain Jack that your students are speaking of on the television.”

Suz nodded and swallowed.

“He set up your great escape. He is a military man, a captain, huh? A special operative?”

“He’s not a captain, no. I was very afraid after Sandy Hook. . .”

“Yes, this was a very loving gesture, putting into place these plans so you would be safe. He did a superlative job by all accounts. I wonder how he knew what to do? Where he got his supplies. He must be special operative, no?”

“He isn’t with the military, no.” Suz saw Jones tweak his head and knew he didn’t believe her. “But he used to be in the Navy. He left the service years ago. That’s why they called him Captain, like the Gordon’s fisherman. You know, a guy on a boat.”

“A fisherman in the navy? A SEAL then?”

“In his dreams he is.” That was completely truthful, but she thought the bitterness in her words sounded a whole lot like sarcasm, and she thought that was probably how Jones read it. “Right now he’s not working. He’s disabled. As a matter of fact, he just came out of yet another surgery. They were trying to fix his knee.”

“And yet you are willing to leave the relationship when he is in recovery?”

“I’ve done all I can. I’m wrung out. I just can’t be part of his life anymore.”

“You have an engagement ring on your right hand. You planned to marry him?”

“No, he asked. He wanted me to hang on to the ring and think it over. And I decided to give it back and end the relationship. It’s on my right hand until I can give it to him.”

Jones held out his hand.

Suz stared at the open palm, then realizing what he wanted, she pulled off the ring and handed it to him.

“It is a very large diamond. Two carats? Three? This must be worth more than fifty-thousand dollars.”

“I…I wouldn’t know.”

“How would he get this kind of money, a disabled veteran?”

“Well the stone was his grandmother’s. . . so he didn’t buy it. He bought the setting for me. That shouldn’t have cost him much.” What a weird conversation this was.

The other-man came back and spoke to Jones in their foreign language.

“Come, I have a question for you.” Jones stood and opened his leather-clad palm to indicate the hallway to her bedroom. Those gloves – Suz had been scared for other people’s safety, scared for her students yesterday, and Ari and his brother in those photos. Those photos scared her. She was scared for Jack all the time. . . but she had never been scared like this for herself before.

Her bedroom felt too intimate a place, too far from an exit, she hesitated.

“Please,” Jones countered with a slight uptick in inflection which Suz herself used when she wasn’t giving her students any choices.

Jones had placed the engagement ring in his pants’ pocket and then swung in to walk behind her. They walked to her closet. She had taken out her suitcase and her summer box of clothes and was packing for her trip Thursday – it was something to do to keep her mind busy on things other than her broken heart.

The other-man pointed to the corner where she stored her birthday bag from Jack.

“This is a go-bag,” Jones said.

“It’s a zombie bag,” Suz countered to her own amazement.

“Excuse me?”

“Do you watch Day of the Dead, on TV? It’s about the end of civilization because there’s an epidemic that turns people into zombies. If that ever happened that’s my bag to get out of Dodge and flee the hoards. It was a birthday gift.”

“Out of Dodge,” Jones said then turned and conferred with the other-man who seemed to explain the idiom. That meant the other-man also understood English. Suz wondered why he had only conversed with this guy in their language. “Ah, and you packed this bag? Or did Captain Jack?”

“Jack did. As my birthday present.”

Jones had her take it out of the closet and open it. She unzipped the top flap that had the solar panels attached, and she lifted it up. There, in various holsters, was a gun, a machete, a big knife-like soldiers use, a large canister of mace, and a stun gun.

“You are as they say, ‘loaded for bear,’” Jones commented.

Suz looked up at him. “Who says that?”

“Take the gun out,” Jones said.

Suz reached out her thumb and forefinger and slid the gun out of the holster, leaving the pistol on the bag.

“It has a magazine inserted already. Is there a bullet in the chamber?”

Suz looked down at the gun, then up at the ceiling. “’Bullet in the chamber’ that means that the slide was racked, and a bullet was pushed up and ready for the trigger.” There was a window on the gun, Jack had shown her. She leaned over the Ruger and looked down, seeing nothing. She gingerly flipped it over and peered down again. There, just in front of the grip, she could see a little bit of brass. “Yes, there’s a bullet there,” she said.

“Good. Lift the gun and point it at my colleague.”

Suz looked at him and blinked.

“I wish you to point the gun at my colleague. He is here without your invitation. He has, in effect, broken into your home. Lift the gun and point it at him.” The growl was a command.

Suz vibrated from head to foot as she sat back on her heels, reached out for the gun, and wrapped it in her fingers. She had to process through the grip. It had been a long time since Jack had tried to teach her how to use it. Her index finger laid on the outside of the trigger guard. She lifted the gun and found the other-man’s chest at the end of her sights. Her hands shook uncontrollably, swinging the barrel in a disjointed pattern. She panted, her jaw dropped down, her tongue didn’t feel like it fit properly in her mouth.

“Shoot him,” Jones said softly.

Suz did nothing but quiver.

“Shoot him,” Jones’s voice suddenly boomed out with such authority that her brain seemed to want to short circuit her own decision making and hand its power over to the foreigner in her bedroom.

Her stomach dropped. Releasing the gun, Suz raced for the bathroom where she was just in time to lift the lids and vomit up the orange couscous.