He sipped his coffee.
“Hungry?”
He nodded, rose, and sat across from her. “You should’ve gotten me up when you got out of the shower,” he said grumpily.
“It was a lot more convenient this way,” she said. “With you sound asleep I could get dressed in here and not in the tiny bathroom. You know, this marriage arrangement is going to turn out to be awkward,” she said, eyeing him over the rim of her cup.
He stretched out his bad arm gingerly.
“Is that why we’re going to the doctor’s?’
“Yes, but just not for the reason you’re probably thinking.”
“What a surprise.”
They grabbed a taxi to Leona Bartaroma’s cottage, a simple stone structure set off a gravel road. It was about two miles from Malahide Castle where Leona was a tour guide. When they got out and looked around Katie said, “Strange place for a doctor’s office.”
“She’s retired.”
“Oh, that makes perfect sense.”
Leona invited them in, said hello to Katie, and sat them down in her roomy kitchen overlooking the back garden. She said nothing about Shaw’s altered appearance but eyed Katie. “May I speak freely in front of her?”
“I wouldn’t have brought her otherwise.”
“Frank already called.”
“Of course.”
“He said you promised not to visit me.”
“No, I promised not to visit you about this.” He tapped his right side.
“His men are all around here,” she added.
“I know that.”
“How?”
“I smelled them.”
“So you know I can’t do what you want me to do.”
“How do you know what I want you to do? I haven’t told you yet.”
She looked curious while Katie’s gaze darted back and forth between the two.
“Tell me, then.”
He rolled his sleeve up, exposing the metal staples in his wound.
“My God, how did that happen?”
“I guess Frank forgot to tell you about that.”
She looked at the wound more closely. “It looks like it’s healing nicely. The surgeon did a good job.”
“I’m grateful for your expert opinion. But that’s not why I’m here.”
“Why, then?”
He took a small metal cylinder from his pocket. “I want you to put this in there,” he said, pointing to the rip in his arm.
“You’re not serious.”
“Shaw!” Katie exclaimed.
“Dead serious.”
“What is it?” Leona said slowly.
“You don’t need to know that,” Shaw said. “It’s stainless steel, if that helps.”
“It doesn’t. There’s the risk of infection,” Leona began.
“Put it in a sterilized bandage. But there’s where I need it. Can you do it?”
“Of course I can do it. The question is, why in the world should I?”
“Because I’m asking you. Politely.”
“How far in?” she said nervously.
“Not too far. Because I may need to get it out in a hurry.”
“This is ridiculous,” Katie snapped.
“Not too far in, Leona,” Shaw said again. “And you owe me.”
“I don’t see it that way.”
“But I do.” He pulled out his shirttail and lifted up the front, exposing the sutured tracks of the scar on his right side. “I do.”
Katie looked at the mark and then over at Leona and frowned. “Did you do that to him?”
Leona wet her lips. “I don’t have a surgery here, Shaw. No instruments.”
“Dublin’s a big town. I’m sure you can find what you need.”
“It’ll take a bit of time.”
“This afternoon,” he shot back, a tinge of menace in his voice.
“I can’t. I have to go to Malahide.”
“This afternoon.”
“All right. I’ll call you.”
Shaw rose to leave and Katie quickly stood too.
“I don’t have the means to put you completely under,” Leona said. “Just a local. There’ll be pain.”
He tucked his shirt back in. “There’s always pain, Leona.”
Outside, Katie said, “Okay, who the hell was that, Dr. Frankenstein’s wife? And what is going on?”
“It’s better that you don’t know, Katie. Trust me.”
“Trust you? What about trusting me like we talked about?”
“I said I was going to work on it. I didn’t say I was there yet.”
CHAPTER 74
THE RAIN HAD PASSED and it was a lovely day in Dublin. Skittish birds flitted from tree to tree; colorful flowers in neat beds waved in the slight breeze; people walked and chatted, drank coffee at street cafés; cars drifted down wide streets.
Inside the small, antiseptic room Shaw gritted his teeth and crushed the arm of the chair he was in. Leona, gloved, masked, and dressed in surgical scrubs, had pulled out several of the metal staples holding his ripped skin together while Katie gripped his other arm with her gloved hands.
“That was the easy part,” Leona said pleasantly as she dropped the last of the three staples she’d removed into a pan. There were four left in his arm.
“Glad to hear it,” muttered Shaw.
“Still want to go through with it? It’s going to set back the healing process.”
“Just do it, Leona.”
She used a slender instrument that looked like a miniature crowbar to pry open the wound and blood started to trickle out. Droplets of sweat popped up on Shaw’s brow. Katie tightened her grip on his arm. Leona had given him local anesthesia all around the wound but warned him again there would be pain. And the lady hadn’t been mistaken.
She’d wrapped the small metal device in a layer of sterilized mesh surgical wrap. “You can’t keep this in there long,” she said. “I’ve sterilized it, but there will eventually be infection. It’s unavoidable.”
“Funny, you didn’t say that the last time.”
“The last time was different.”
“Not for me it wasn’t.” He touched his side. “You never said me having this thing in me long-term was a problem.”
“Apples and oranges,” she snapped. “That device is like a pacemaker, designed for long-term use inside the body. But not this thing. So, as a doctor, I am giving you that warning. There will be infection here.”
“Duly noted.” Shaw grunted. “Now stick it in.”
She carefully wedged the device into the wound, her nimble, gloved fingers finding a small cavity where it would fit.
The pain made Shaw’s entire body shake.
“Take my hand, Shaw, squeeze it,” Katie offered.
“No,” he grunted.
“Why?”
“Because I’ll break every damn bone in it.”
A second later, the armrest came away in his hand, the screws sheared off.
Leona withdrew her fingers from the wound and looked with satisfaction at her work.
“I can put new staples back in, or even cauterize it.”
“Uh-uh.”
“Why not?”
“Because I won’t be able to get to the damn thing when I need it, Leona. Which is the whole point,” Shaw snapped. “Old-fashioned thread will be just fine.”
She shrugged, cleaned the wound as best she could, stitched him up, wrapped gauze around it, and sat back.
“All done.”
Katie let go of Shaw and also let out a relieved breath. Shaw slowly sat up, carefully moving his arm.
“Thanks,” he said gruffly.
“For you, Shaw, anything,” she said sarcastically. “As you said, I so clearly owe you.”
“Yeah, well now we’re even.”
“At least even,” she corrected. “The needle in fact might have swung to my side.”
“I don’t think so. Calling it even was a gift on my part.” He put his shirt on. While he w
as buttoning it up she glanced at the scar on his right side. “How is it working, by the way?”
“Ask Frank, I’m sure he’d love to tell you all about it.” He reached over and pocketed the tiny instrument she’d used to put the metal device in his arm. “For old time’s sake,” he said, when she looked ready to protest.
As they were leaving Leona stopped him at the door. “Is that thing in your arm what I think it is?”
“You never know, Leona, you just never know.”
CHAPTER 75
“SHAW, ARE YOU GOING TO TELL ME what’s going on? What is that thing in your arm? How do you know that Leona person? Where’d you get that scar on your side?” Katie fired off these questions as they ate dinner at the Shelbourne Hotel across the street from St. Stephen’s Green in central Dublin. It was late enough at night that they had a quiet table in the back and could discuss things. Though Shaw didn’t appear to be in a discussing mood because she’d been asking these same questions for hours and hadn’t gotten a single answer in return.
He stoically finished chewing his food. He hated Dublin now. He’d asked Anna to marry him here, at a little place north of the Liffey. On his knee with the damn ring. She’d said yes in nine languages. And now she was dead. There would be no marriage, no four or five kids, no growing old together. Nothing. Everywhere he looked he saw some place, some nook, cranny, smell, sound, even a funny thing the sky did, the drop of the rain, the honk of an Irish car horn that reminded him of her. He could barely breathe here. He could barely function. Hated it. And that wasn’t all.
Anna was on her way back to Germany for burial with parents who blamed him. Blamed him for the death of a woman he would have gladly sacrificed his own life to protect. Anna on a cold metal bed in London with a hole in her head. Anna being shipped to cold, lonely ground in Wisbach, for all of eternity, instead of being held in his warm arms. Safe, together.
Katie interrupted these thoughts. “We need to find out who was really behind the Red Menace.”
“The whole world has been looking, and nobody seems to have found it yet.”
“I’m not sure the whole world really has been trying to find out the source. They’ve just accepted that it was true, sort of a rush to judgment. Or if they did look it wasn’t very hard. And then events kept happening and kept people jumping. After awhile, the story didn’t become who was behind it, but what the hell are we going to do about the evil Russians. I think the whole world was basically snookered.”
Shaw looked at her with new respect. “That’s sort of what Anna was thinking.”
“I’ll take that as a big compliment.”
“Any ideas?” he asked.
Katie pulled her chair closer and lowered her voice. “I’ve actually been giving that some thought.” She dug in her purse and pulled out a battered notepad. “When I was in Anna’s office that day she had to step out to see someone and I sort of looked around.”
“You mean you were snooping,” Shaw said a little angrily, instinctively defending Anna’s right to privacy.
“Do you want to hear what I found or not?”
“I’m sorry, go ahead.”
“I looked through some of the Red Menace stuff on her desk and some notes she’d jotted down. One was a list of Web sites or e-mail addresses. Maybe she’d contacted them. Anyway, one stuck with me and I wrote it down.”
“Why’d it stick with you?”
“It was called Barney’s Rubble-Land. You know, The Flintstones? It was one of my favorite cartoons growing up. Anyway, it was a blogger page. I didn’t check it out then, but while you were showering back at the hotel after Dr. Doom worked on you, I accessed the site from my laptop.”
“What’d you find?”
“This blogger, apparently his name is Barney, had some questions about the Red Menace too. From his postings he didn’t think it was legit.”
“How does that help us?”
“Well, quite frankly, I didn’t think the blogger site was legit.”
“What do you mean?”
“I think Barney is a sham. I have lots of friends who’re bloggers. You get obsessed with them, write stuff all the time. There’s really nothing regimented about them. Free association, spur-of-the-moment stuff. And you usually have a place for people to discuss things. I mean, that’s one of the main reasons to have a blog in the first place. Right?”
“Right.”
“Well, this blog didn’t have that. I checked the dates of the postings. They come out every other day at the same time. That doesn’t sound like Barney’s Rubble-Land to me. It sounds like it was on some sort of preset spit-out-a-blog mode, bi-daily pattern.”
“Why would someone set up a system like that?” Shaw wondered out loud.
“They might if instead of a real blog, it was a way to test the waters.”
“Test the waters?”
“Yeah, people in the entertainment and ad fields do it all the time. I actually did a story on it years ago. You put out a product and you want to gauge people’s reaction to it. You can have focus groups, opportunities to phone in opinions, Web site discussions. But some companies go a step further. They use blank drops, like a façade to get people to really let them know how they feel without feeling pressure. It can be a fake Web site, 800 number phone bank, or a questionnaire put out under a sham company’s name.”
Shaw looked very interested now. “So you’re saying this Barney Rubble might have been a façade to test how people were reacting to the Red Menace campaign?”
“And since Barney’s blog was highly critical and suspicious of the campaign…”
“They might have put that carrot out there to see if anyone else felt the same way. But you said there was no forum on the site to leave your opinion.”
“But if you e-mailed the site, which Anna did-”
Shaw finished for her. “Then they get your e-mail address. And Anna’s e-mail was
[email protected]” He looked sharply at Katie. “That may be how they found out about The Phoenix Group. Not through you.”
“That’s probably something we’ll never know for sure.”
A minute of silence passed while they fiddled with the remains of their meals.
“Katie, I…”
“Don’t even go there, Shaw. This thing is complicated and we’ve both made mistakes. And we’ll both probably make some more along the way.”
“Let’s just hope one of them doesn’t end up getting us killed.”