“How’d you hurt it, anyway?” he asked, putting Scotch tape on a hole in one of the plastic bags.
Duct tape might work; Scotch tape wasn’t going to do the trick. “I played tennis,” she said.
“No, really, what happened?” he asked.
The bag continued to leak, but she was too benevolent to make any remarks about this, or criticize his efforts in any way. “I borrowed Susan’s racket, and went over to the courts to try and play with Tammy, but I ended up hitting with this person who’s on the tennis team, instead, and it was great,” she said. “Even though I guess it was a pretty dumb thing to do.”
This was enough to distract him from the dripping water. “Wait, you’re serious,” he said. “You really played tennis?”
By some definitions. She shrugged. “Well, I hit forehands for a while, and maybe eight backhands.”
He sat back, grinning at her. “That’s totally cool, Meg. I’m—I’m gobsmacked.”
Well, okay. Why not. “Are you chuffed, too?” she asked.
He nodded. “I am. Totally and completely chuffed.”
He was often an odd fellow, if sweet. “I have to ask,” she said. “Why are you such an Anglophile?”
“Well, I mean, my mother’s British,” he said.
Really? News to her.
“That’s the way she talks,” he said, “so I guess I do it sometimes, too.”
In the photos she had seen, his mother appeared to be just as classically Californian as the rest of his family, so she was going to have to adjust her internal image to fit the new details. “So, that makes you half British,” she said.
He looked at her curiously, and maybe glanced at her bottle of pain pills, too. “I don’t really think of it that way, but yeah, I guess so.”
Was she, just possibly, about to achieve one of her lifelong Holy Grails? “Does that mean you know something about cricket?” she asked.
“Yeah,” he said. “My uncles are really into it, so they always have us out there playing when we visit. I’m not the greatest bowler, but I’m a pretty decent batsman.”
Ergo, he really understood cricket—and she was on the verge of a great personal victory. “Can you explain it to me?” she asked. “In depth?”
He laughed. “Sure,” he said.
Yay!
* * *
WHEN SHE WENT to physical therapy the next afternoon, Vicky was pleased that she had attempted something bold, but disturbed by the degree to which her knee had continued to swell overnight. Orthopedists were promptly summoned, and she ended up back inside her home away from home, the MRI machine, as well as having a creepily large amount of fluid aspirated from the joint. There didn’t seem to be any new ligament tears, but she had to sit through three different lectures about why she needed to be more careful, and what she had to do in order to maximize her chances for healing. Her lone accomplishment of the afternoon was convincing them not to call her parents.
Except that when she got back to the dorm, there were two messages from her father, and one from her mother, so while the doctors might not have talked to her parents directly, they had apparently had no qualms when it came to alerting Dr. Brooks about this latest damn setback.
When she caught him between appearances, she told her father, several times, that she was fine, and that he definitely didn’t have to rush off and get on a plane, and once she and her mother finally spoke, she gave her the same assurances, although her feelings got hurt when her mother immediately suggested that maybe her father should fly up, as opposed to offering to come herself.
Not that she wanted either of them to race to her side because of her—admittedly extreme—version of a garden-variety sprain, but it might have been nice if her mother had barely been able to restrain herself from doing so.
Regardless, she changed the subject, and answered questions about her classes, and whether she was eating enough, and how she was sleeping, and that sort of thing, instead.
Right before they hung up, her mother coughed.
“I hesitate to bring this up, but did you grope your strikingly handsome wealthy blond Republican boyfriend at a crowded party, to the shock of nearby onlookers?” she asked.
Ouch. More merry fun for the tabloids, it would seem. And she was pretty sure exactly which party it must have been, since they maybe had been a tad indiscreet at a beer-sodden brawl some of the guys on the Ultimate team had thrown one night. “You know, someone on your staff has way too much free time,” Meg said.
“I happen to agree, and shared that opinion with him quite strongly,” her mother said, “but I’m still not hearing the outraged and offended denial I’m expecting.”
She was going to have a long wait for that one. Meg tried to think of a reasonably adroit way out of this. “I wouldn’t say they were shocked, exactly.” Or that more than a couple of people had even noticed. Although someone had apparently felt the need to report it, and probably got paid a chunk of change for doing so, which posed a significant security breach to consider. “I mean, most of them were pretty drunk, and—” No. That was an unfortunate detour. “Juliana said she was maybe a little taken aback.”
There was a long silence on the other end.
“I might be wrong,” her mother said, “but from what you’ve told me about her, I would think that it takes a great deal to startle Juliana.”
Yeah.
Her mother sighed. “I don’t want to tell you what to do—”
But.
“But,” her mother went on, “would it be too much to ask for you to confine yourself to groping him when the two of you are alone together?”
A far less demanding request than she would have predicted. “Okay,” Meg said. “I can do that.” No point in mentioning that he’d mostly been groping her, not the other way around.
There was more silence.
“Would you be upset if we didn’t pursue this conversational thread any further?” her mother asked.
Delighted would be a better description. “Not in the slightest,” Meg said.
* * *
SHE DID HER best to take it easy, but every time she put any weight on her leg, her knee seemed to puff right up again. On Wednesday, she considered skipping physical therapy altogether, because she really didn’t feel like having a surgeon stick a huge needle into her joint again, while other doctors hovered around with strained expressions. But if she didn’t go, her father and Dr. Brooks would probably jump on a plane, so she was going to have to haul herself down there.
As a result, she was in a pretty foul mood, and also really tired. She napped in the car on the way, and Paula had to wake her up once they arrived, so she felt sluggish and logy before the appointments even started.
Afterwards, she was all the more exhausted, and it took a great effort to put on a big smile and pose for a photo when some people stopped her in the main lobby as she was trying to leave. But, the man’s son was on crutches, and she would have been a complete jerk if she said no, so she did her best to look enchanted by the opportunity to have her picture taken yet another time with a total stranger.
Then, once she stepped outside, a grey-haired woman wearing a beige raincoat approached her, holding an envelope and what looked like a Raggedy Ann doll. It could also probably be a Raggedy Andy—she really wasn’t up on her dolls. As far as she was concerned, they were all sort of spooky-looking, and best avoided whenever possible.
“Would you mind signing this for my granddaughter?” the woman asked, indicating the card inside the envelope.
God-damn it, she felt too lousy to be friendly and polite. Nevertheless, Meg smiled as though nothing would please her more, and accepted the pen she was holding out. “Sure. What’s her name?”
“Gladys,” the woman said.
Hmmm. Either she was even more sleepy than she thought, or that was a hard one to spell. “Um, okay,” Meg said. “That’s G, L—?”
“—A, D, Y, S,” the woman said.
Right. Okay. Meg nodd
ed, trying to repeat the letters silently to herself, since she would look like an imbecile if she had to ask twice. “Thanks. As you can see, I’ve been getting a really good education.”
The woman smiled widely, although there seemed to be a bit of a disconnect there, somehow.
But, okay. Whatever. Maybe she really wasn’t as damned funny as she thought she was. Meg balanced the “Get Well” card on her right arm, above her splint, and tried to sign it as neatly as possible.
“Your mother kills babies,” the woman said, still smiling away.
For a second or two, Meg couldn’t quite process that, but just as she realized that there was something very wrong, the woman was already reaching into her raincoat pocket, yanking out something metal, and lunging towards her.
She tried to leap back out of the way, but her knee buckled, and as she fell, she was aware of movement and noise all around her. She heard a strange hissing sound and then, a lot of shouting and swearing—followed by a gunshot somewhere close to her head. Or, maybe, more than one. There seemed to be a red mist in the air, and—Jesus Christ, it was happening again. How could this be happening again?
Oh, God.
Oh, no.
Oh, help.
52
THE GREY-HAIRED woman seemed to be screaming louder than anyone—hatred and anger and blood and death—and Meg tried to get up, or at least scramble away from her, but then, suddenly, hands were grabbing and lifting her off the ground—except that she god-damned well wasn’t going to go without a fight this time. No fucking way were they going to get her twice, not a single chance in—and Christ, there were people everywhere, standing and staring and—
“Get down!” she yelled. “They have guns!”
More hands were grabbing her now, and she was being propelled backwards—to another van? A truck? Maybe just a car, this time? Oh, God, there was no way she could do this again. Not a single chance in hell.
“Don’t fight with your bad hand, Meg,” a voice said harshly in her ear. “Protect it.”
Garth. Christ almighty, they had managed to buy off Garth? And Kyle, and Jose, and Paula? At first, the concept of that was so terrifying and overwhelming, that she couldn’t move at all, but then she started fighting twice as hard, swearing and struggling and trying to punch her way free.
Doors. Glass. Bright lights. A hallway. A room. A desk, with a woman ducking down behind it, her eyes terrified.
They were going to bring an innocent civilian into it, too? Bastards. They were unbelievable, cowardly, bastards. She fumbled around on the desktop, trying to find something—anything—she might be able to use as a weapon. She was going to do some damage this time, serious damage, even if—Garth still had his gun in one hand, and was speaking into his wrist receiver, as he did a full visual sweep of the room, and there seemed to be lots of people out in the hall and just inside the door, also holding guns.
“Get her pants off!” someone was yelling. “Fast.”
“That’s a lot of blood,” someone else said, sounding scared, while a third voice shouted, “Is it hers? Where’s she hit?”
There were hands on her legs, pulling at her sweatpants, and she heard a jumble of urgent conversation with scattered words like “acid” and “corrosive” and “butyric,” and a male voice was saying, “No, no, it doesn’t smell right,” while another man said, “Jesus, we’ve got to stop the bleeding, someone get some pressure on her.” There were too many people speaking for her to focus on what the hell they were talking about, and her ears were ringing for some reason, which made it hard for her to hear clearly, but when she felt her sweatpants being ripped down past her hips, and someone else tugging at her shirt, she twisted away from them, kicking out with her good leg, hearing a grunt when she connected.
The door to the hall was blocked, but maybe there was another door, or a window, or—
“It’s not blood!” someone yelled. “Okay? Get on the damn perimeter!”
Was that Garth? It sounded like Garth.
A male hand ran across her bare thigh, and she kicked at whoever the person was, yanked her sweatpants back up, then stumbled over to the desk, still looking for a weapon.
“I said, back off!” the same man ordered. “I want this whole place contained!”
She grabbed the sharpest object she saw, then spun around on her good leg, ready to defend herself. But, the room seemed to be clearing out, although the hallway was crowded, and there was still a lot of shouting. Dave and Jose were posted on either side of the door, with their guns, and the only other man in the room was Garth.
Meg stared at him. “Are you kidnapping me?”
Garth looked startled, then shook his head, spitting sharp orders into his wrist receiver.
But she still seemed to be trapped in an unfamiliar place. Isolated. In danger. “Am I a hostage?” she asked.
“No,” he said.
Christ, did that mean they were just going to kill her? Some sort of savage, public execution, and—except he was still giving a long string of commands, and—what the hell was happening here? She shook her head to try and make the ringing in her ears stop. “Don’t!” she said, as the woman behind the desk started to stand up. “It’s not safe!”
The woman looked at her uncertainly, then crouched down again.
“Put that back, Meg, okay?” Garth said. “You’re not going to need it. I promise.”
Meg looked, stupidly, at her good hand and saw a stainless steel letter opener clenched in her fist.
“Meg,” he said, and reached out to take it from her.
She gripped the handle more tightly. “What are you going to do to me?”
For the first time, he really looked at her. “Nothing, sweetie,” he said, and reholstered his weapon, his voice very gentle. “Take it easy, okay? You’re going to be fine.”
Out in the hall, she could still hear a lot of commotion, and words like “secure” and “police” and her code name and such. Normal Secret Service stuff.
The desk. She was in an office. A stranger’s office. A very frightened and confused middle-aged stranger. She stared down at the letter opener, trying to remember where she had gotten it.
“You aren’t kidnapping me?” she asked again, just to be sure.
Garth shook his head.
Oh. She tried to stick the letter opener into a mug full of pens and pencils, but her hand must have been shaking, because instead, she knocked the whole thing over, which was loud enough to hurt her ears, and the woman behind the desk cringed away from the sound. Garth might have ducked, too. She tried to pick the pens up, but couldn’t seem to control her good hand well enough to keep from dropping them again.
Her heart was beating crazily, and she thought she might be having an attack, but then she saw that her legs and torso seemed to be covered with bright red sticky liquid, and the room went grey for a minute.
“Yes, I want a doctor,” Garth said to someone in the hall. “How many damn times do I have to tell you I want a doctor in here?”
The blood had a strong, familiar smell—a sickening smell—and she realized that she must have been shot, that—
“It’s only paint, Meg,” Garth said. “You’re okay.”
Paint? But she smelled chemicals. She was sure she smelled chemicals. Jesus, were they burning her skin? She felt her stomach, and then her legs, but everything seemed to be—maybe she was—
“I’d like to check you over, if that’s okay, Miss Powers,” a man said.
A man she had never seen before. Dark, thinning hair, a neatly-trimmed mustache, maybe in his forties. She shook her head, taking a couple of backwards hops on her good leg, moving to keep the desk in-between them.
“I’m Doctor—” he started.
“Nope,” she said abruptly. “Sorry.”
He looked confused.
“I don’t know you,” she said. “Please leave, sir.”
He glanced over at Garth for guidance.
“Please leave right now, sir,??
? Meg said. Which was maybe the only good idea she’d had all afternoon. “Garth, I need some privacy, okay?”
“Well,” he said, “I’d feel better if a doctor—”
She shook her head. “It wasn’t really a request, Garth.”
He frowned at her for a minute, and then nodded.
She indicated the telephone on the desk. “Is this secure?”
“More so than most,” he said.
If this was a predesignated fallback room, then that’s the sort of detail which would have been handled long ago. She hoped. At least it was a land-line, not a cell. “Okay, thank you.” Jesus, if they didn’t all leave her alone very soon, she might scream. Or hit someone. She turned to the still-unidentified woman who was standing nearby. “Would it be all right if I borrowed your office for just a few more minutes? I need to make a phone call.”
When the woman nodded, Meg looked around for her cane—which seemed to be long gone, and so, had to use the desk to support herself as she moved to sit down in the office chair.
Her heart was pounding away, and she wasn’t sure she was going to be able to stand it if they all didn’t just go already.
When she was finally alone, with the door closed, Garth and God only knew who else posted out in the still-frantic corridor, she picked up the phone and tried to dial, but it didn’t work for some reason. She set down the receiver, stared at it, and then felt around for her satellite phone, which also seemed to be missing.
Swell. Just fucking swell.
She wasn’t about to ask anyone to come back in and help her, so she slouched forward with her head on her good arm, trying to think. Trying not to cry.
The way her heart was beating was genuinely alarming, and she felt her chest, worried that maybe she had been shot, after all. But, as far as she could tell, there were no open wounds, although there did seem to be something wrong with her heart. Something bad.
Fuck. And double-fuck.
She looked at the phone again, and then remembered the concept of dialing nine to get an outside line. So she tried that, and this time, the call went through. It only took a minute or so for her to get connected to the communications director, although her heart did more crazy jumping around the entire time.