The security office emptied out. Edie caught the door before it could close and lock behind the officers. “Inside,” she told Scott. When he stepped in, she pulled him down and out of sight behind the waist-high wall, peering out through the security glass that ran to the ceiling above the wall. Then she pulled out a knife and watched his eyes flash at the sight of its steel. She knew he wasn’t himself, wasn’t thinking straight.
“Damn it, Scott, if I wanted you dead, I’d have just left you there,” she said. “Hold still, and give me your right hand. I’m trying to help you.”
“Looks like it,” he said sarcastically, eyeing the door.
Edie sighed, swiveled the blade around expertly in her hand so that she was holding the point and offering him the handle. “Do the honors if you want or let me. We don’t have long if we’re going to get out of here in one piece.”
Shots rang out. She grabbed his right wrist and started cutting. The bandages free, she showed him his hand. “The left one I can’t do anything about, this one though will be good as new as soon as I remove these.” She started popping out the surgical staples crossing his palm. “Hurts like hell, I’m sure, but hold still.”
Scott crumbled into the wall. “What in the hell’s going on?” He flexed his hand, looking at it as if it were attached to someone else’s body. “Just anything here.” He started to pull at the bandages on his left hand. “Anything at all.”
“Don’t,” Edie said, swatting his fingers away. “Take this already.” She flashed a pill at him, the only one she’d been able to salvage from the floor of the infirmary. “You should’ve taken this hours ago.”
“More speed?” Scott pushed backward.
“Scott, I’m sorry. Unfortunately, I didn’t know who could be trusted. The only person I knew I could trust was Master Chief Roberts.” She tried to explain. “It’s more complicated than you think.” She slid a cellphone across the floor to him. “Videos one and two. Should be everything you need to see.”
Chapter 7
Scott picked up the cellphone and started playback with a touch of a finger. “Okay,” he said, watching, “Midshipman Tinsdale coming out of the bathroom.”
“Focus, please,” Edie said. She reached out to him with the pill between her fingers. “Take this already. It’ll make everything clearer. Trust me.”
Scott studied his right hand as he flexed it, then fixed his eyes back on Edie’s. “What is it?”
Edie’s face lit with a half smile. She cupped a hand to his cheek. There were tears in her eyes. “You just don’t get it, do you? I’m trying to tell you,” she said. “The videos. Play the videos.”
He restarted the video from the beginning. “Okay,” he said. “Tinsdale, bathroom. Got it.”
“Not Tinsdale,” Edie said. “Someone with a passing resemblance, but Tinsdale herself? She was stuffed in the stall — dead.”
Scott’s eyes flashed to hers. “Dead?”
“Keep watching,” she said. “It’s several sequences spliced together.”
Scott watched a view of the busy hall outside the situation rooms. When the video started fast-forwarding he thought he did something wrong but quickly realized it was the recording itself. It’d been run through some type of analysis software. Just as a woman in uniform was about to enter the bathroom, the video slowed and a facial recognition block zoomed in. It was Midshipman Tinsdale this time.
The recording went back to fast-forward. No one came out of the bathroom, but another woman entered and the facial recognition block zoomed in on her face as well. Back to fast-forward, the other woman now in uniform came out, Tinsdale didn’t. A cut and splice — a long time gap perhaps. The same woman, watching Scott and Edie from a distance. They were embracing and kissing in the hall after he’d learned she wasn’t dead as he’d presumed. He didn’t need facial recognition blocks to know this, but there they were. The angle was different though, so it was the camera at the opposite end of the hall.
The next sequence switched back to the camera facing the other direction, showing Scott and Edie enter the hall, the other woman following after a skip and splice. She didn’t seem to know they’d slipped into the bathroom, then seeing Scott and Edie come out she followed them. The video ended.
“She’s after you, Scott,” Edie said.
“Or you,” he shot back.
Edie hesitated, as if uncertain how to proceed. “Play the second one.”
Scott jumped to the second video, pressed play. “The nurse attacked me. I saw the uniform. I knew that.”
“Watch it again to the end this time,” Edie said. “It’s not who you think. I had to watch it several times too. She could have got me, but she swished right past me to you. The nurse just gets caught in the middle.”
He restarted the video. The camera angle didn’t help. He pressed pause when he saw the hands holding the garrote go up. The nurse had been so close to him. Her hands were up, perhaps instinctively as she saw what was coming, but the hands holding the razor wire weren’t hers. After the jumbled images he’d seen previously, there was a sequence of time-sequence slow-motion shots and stills that explained everything.
Scott felt a spike of something as close to fear as he got. It was Peyton Jones — the civilian patient he’d been talking to before Edie called him over to the wounded marine. His eyes shifted from the phone to Edie. Her eyes though were looking through the glass and out into the hall.
“Pistol,” Edie hissed, holding out her hand.
Scott didn’t realize his back was pressed against a weapons cabinet until he turned his head. The cabinet was locked; he broke the glass with his elbow. As he reached in, he saw a coat of arms medallion with a white Maltese cross on a red field. The “Tuitio Fidei et Obsequium Pauperum” emblazoned beneath it. Defense of the faith and assistance to the poor.
It was the motto of the Sovereign Military Hospitaller Order of Saint John of Jerusalem of Rhodes and of Malta. The Knights of Malta as the order was more commonly known, the world’s oldest surviving order of chivalry. How odd, he’d been reading about the order on the Times of Malta website a few days earlier. Something about an upcoming Open Day. He remembered because he thought it an odd lead story.
“Scott, Scott,” Edie said.
“Madonna ta’ Mount Philermos,” Scott said to himself, before picking up a pistol. Our Lady of Mount Philermos — the name for the Blessed Virgin Mary members of the order often invoked when facing fears or trouble.
“Peyton attacking you in the infirmary instead of me kind of clears up who the target is. Don’t you think?” Edie said as she took the Italian Police Berretta from his hand. “It’s why the chief did what he did.”
“The chief?” Still trying to come to grips with what happened, Scott scooped up a pistol for himself. “What’s he got to do with any of this?”
“Give me,” Edie said as he tried to check the magazine and ready the first round with one hand. She took his pistol and gave him hers that she’d already readied. “Take the pill already.” She held out the little red pill. “It’ll clear your head. It’s not speed, not exactly. Got that?”
His mind was more than clear; it was racing, associating everything his senses took in. He took the pill anyway, swallowing it with a lump of spittle. “You need to tell me what the chief did. Exactly.”
“That’s where things go a little wrong, I think.” Edie shifted up, her eyes trying to look through the security glass without being seen. Without looking back, she pointed to the phone. “Video three.”