The wraith groaned and pushed himself to a seated position. He reached over to a stained nightstand for a syringe and bottle by the edge. Inside the glass was a cocktail of three antibiotics mixed with anabolic and anti-inflammatory steroids. He inserted the needle into the bottle, drew the liquid, and plunged it into his arm. He could barely feel the shot. Compared to the hurricane in his back, it did not register.
He stood up, and the old man watched him in silence. It felt like a Herculean effort, but he knew the extreme pain and stiffness would gradually wear off. It had done so each morning, afternoon, and evening when he awakened from sleep to impose drugs, feeding, and exercise on his protesting frame. He stepped on a scale acquired from a drugstore and watched the numbers settle to one hundred and sixty-five pounds. At five foot, eleven inches, this was thin for him. Of far greater concern was that he weighed nearly thirty pounds less than before the bloody encounter with Lopez. He picked up a notebook from the floor and logged the number. Focusing intensely to do even simple math, he grunted with satisfaction as he looked at the growing list. The numbers were still low, but they had slowed their decrease dramatically. Tomorrow, he was certain, the trend would reverse.
To make sure that happened, he walked over to the sink. He pulled three different protein powders from the shelf. One canister contained egg albumin mixed with numerous branched chained amino acids and vitamins. Twenty-five grams of protein per scoop; he added two. A second was casein protein from milk — hard to digest, but providing hours of nutrients as it made its way through the digestive tract. One scoop. Finally, hydrolyzed whey protein, the most biologically available protein known. A staple in cancer wards. Used quickly, it went straight to the tissues starving for nitrogen. To the mixture, he added water, three different unsaturated oils, maltodextrin for the insulin spike to shuttle the nutrients to cells, and creatine. He punched the button on the blender and let it scream for a minute. He downed the nasty concoction and rinsed the container.
Now for the real test of will.
He began with mild stretching exercises. Excruciating, yet his continued progress encouraged him. Then, resistance training, limited at present to body weight exercises. Through a pained grimace, he smiled that he could do ten squats without holding onto the chair for support. He lowered himself for pushups, careful not to wrench his back. Sweat poured down over his body and pooled on the floor below his face. He nearly collapsed with exhaustion, holding onto the side of the bed for several minutes, unable to move.
The soldier finally spoke again. “Javed, what will be left of your body when all this is over? Steroids, growth hormone, grenades?”
The wraith did not look up, his breath coming in gasps. “Those thoughts are a weakness. There is no long term. There is only the mission, and I must be ready soon.”
The soldier nodded his head. “You sound like troops preparing to continue some war.”
“There is a war!”
“Yes, I know. Your war.”
Slowly, the wraith collected himself. The workout had gone well. Now he had to clean the wounds.
“Are you having second thoughts, Avram?” he asked the soldier.
“I began with second thoughts, you young ass. But your pain was bigger than my wisdom. Your vengeance would not be ignored.”
“Then get in here and help me wash.”
The old man laughed and rose with a grunt, his broad legs bowed but his gait sure. The wraith shuffled into the bathroom, fatigue heavy on his frame. Dark splotches of skin appeared randomly across his body like advanced vitiligo.
“You look like a burn victim,” said the soldier, gesturing across the young man’s frame. “These chemicals you had me retrieve — they will fix this?”
“They will. But it needs constant attention. Now is not the time. Appearances will come later.”
The old man nodded. “Yes. It’s the back that worries me. The shrapnel went deep in many places. I’ve seen it before. You would have died from an infection without me.”
The wraith grasped the edges of the sink as the soldier removed the bandages and worked over the wounds. The pain decreased each day as he healed, but it was still very raw.
“It is much better today. You have the health of a young ox.” He laughed sharply. “Plus the horse steroids!”
The wraith winced from the pain. He looked into the mirror, trying to catch the soldier’s eyes. “Why did you come?”
The old man did not stop working on the wounds and didn’t return the gaze. “We had an agreement. You paid me much to train you and even more for a contingency — yes, the right term?”
“So? You were halfway around the world. You knew if you got that signal I was probably dead.”
The soldier grunted. “Yes, I thought you were dead. You should be dead.”
“Then why?”
The old man sighed loudly and paused his work. “What you do is the most basic of the acts of war. And you do it against the gods themselves. This is bigger than me.”
“That’s all? Poetic nonsense?”
“No!” the soldier pressed firmly with a gauze pad on the wound, the wraith nearly gasping.
“Then what, old man?”
“Where I come from, you don’t leave a soldier to die on the battlefield alone.”
19
Several days had passed since they left the South and the horror of what had transpired. Lopez felt disoriented. Following a bizarre trip to the Knoxville trauma center, he was now far from home, absent from his school on a wild hunt for his brother’s killers: a celibate priest rooming with a female CIA agent, watching her sift through data online for hours in the dim confines of a Virginia motel.
He felt like an intern at a law firm. He brought in food, got her coffee, ran other errands as she worked, and asked her questions that she usually had no answers to. But she did work, often late into the night, her hair like a golden veil over her face and the computer, her athletic form splayed at odd angles from hours hunched over the laptop. Two or three times a day, she would stop her work, take to the middle of the floor, and perform a set of unbelievable stretches that looked to be of some martial arts origin. Lopez could only wonder how she never tore any muscles.
Perhaps she did it to release emotional tension as much as physical. Even though Houston felt that the answer lay within the CIA, without hard evidence, she didn’t think they could bring a case to her superiors. Lopez sensed that something lay underneath her reluctance, some past conflict she was not articulating. Was she pursuing Miguel’s killers without the approval of the CIA? Maybe they didn’t believe her intuition. But would they now?
He couldn’t imagine how they would present a case. They didn’t even have a clear hypothesis themselves, only a train of strange coincidences, hints in medical records, and a hunch that something much bigger was underlying it all.
It was all growing increasingly frustrating. While she used Agency devices to log in securely and comb through accessible files, he paced. Sometimes, he prayed the rosary. At others, he simply stared into space recalling the nightmare at his family house in the mountains. And he was running out of time. The deadline his bishop had given him was approaching in a week, and they seemed to be little closer to discovering the identity or location of his brother’s killer, or to understanding the mystery behind the events of the last month and a half. The hotel room was fast becoming a prison. He fiddled with the arrowhead underneath his shirt. My new nervous habit.