“Why would our guy in Gibraltar attempt to serve an illegal subpoena on British sovereign territory, Bobby?”
The President’s younger brother threw up his hands in exasperation.
“It’s academic anyway. The Brits have now refused to co-operate with any subsequent US-based investigation into the Scorpion affair.”
“You can hardly blame them.”
“No,” Bobby Kennedy agreed disgustedly. “I suppose not!”
Chapter 31
The first few times Gretchen was in any way cognisant of her immediate environs she was horribly sleepy and nothing really made much sense. Later there was a little pain, it seemed like her body was strapped down, feebly immobile and she started hearing muffled sounds. The next stage was hurtful. Everywhere and everything hurt and she was too weak to raise a finger or even to blink an eye. This phase also passed but not the dryness in her throat, her thirst and her frustration at not knowing what was going on or what had happened to her. She had no sensation of the passage of time other than that sometimes it was brighter than others, quieter or noisier and at first she was completely unable to focus her eyes. Now and then she heard nearby voices that might have been talking to her. Her world was thus a myopic, baffling, painful and frightening place in which her mind only very slowly began to piece together the scattered fragments of her memory. To begin with she did not know who she was; and later she realized this ought to have been a lot more frightening than it had been at the time. Once she had re-found the name ‘Gretchen’ — the man’s voice she heard from time to time had used that name a lot and it felt familiar, she had a keystone, a foundation brick upon which to build. And so it went on over hours and days broken with the overlong darkness of unconsciousness and exhausted sleep, one building block of remembrance stacked hesitantly upon another until she stumbled upon that night at the Main State Building when her life had changed forever.
“Gretchen?” The man’s voice asked with hoarse anxiety. “Gretchen? Can you hear me?”
“Dan…”
“Oh God,” the man sighed the sort of sigh that raggedly expelled every last breath of wind from one’s lungs. “You’re back with us!”
Gretchen was far too out of it to comprehend what the big deal was about that. She felt gentle pressure on her left hand, attempted to turn her face to that side but something restrained her.
A shadow fell over her.
“Don’t try to move, Gretchen. You hurt your neck and they don’t want you moving your head for a while. They’ve got you in a sort of cage.”
“Oh, right…”
Gretchen could not figure out why the man was crying.
“How long?” She gasped almost inaudibly.
“Nine days. They brought you here about a week ago. You’re at the National Naval Medical Center at Bethesda.”
“How long have you…”
“I found you soon after they brought you in.”
“You looked for me…” Gretchen lapsed back into an exhausted slumber contemplating the incontrovertible fact that somebody had travelled from the safety of faraway Boston to a battlefield to look for her. And that somebody had been Dan Brenckmann whom she had treated like a schmuck from day one.
She remembered being in the Main State Building and the rattle of automatic gunfire, the darkness and nothingness; in that darkness and nothingness Dan had come to Washington to find her. Well, whatever was left of her.
She panicked when Dan was not there the next time her conscious mind put up a periscope to test her new reality.
“Dan,” she murmured.
He was there in a moment.
A cool cloth dabbed at her parched and cracked lips.
“You’re safe, Gretchen.”
“Safe?” The word had no immediate meaning or context.
“Things are still a bit crazy out on the streets but the 101st Airborne have got this neighbourhood nailed down. They say there’s been no serious fighting in DC for three or four days now.”
For the first time Gretchen squeezed his hand back.
“Your father is here in DC,” the man went on. “He’s visited every day and most evenings. He’s been to the White House a couple of times. There’s talk of transferring the Federal Government to Philadelphia or New York while DC is rebuilt. Things are pretty messed up hereabouts…”
Gretchen tried to speak but her throat was on fire.
A straw was gently, tenderly placed between her lips.
“Try to drink. Just sip. They had to do a whole lot of things to your throat and to your neck, it will be as sore as Hell until it all heals up.”
The drops of water tasted like the finest wine as they dribbled into her mouth. The man mopped up excess fluid as it escaped her lips.
“I was with the Under Secretary of State when,” she began after perhaps a silence of a minute, “there was huge explosion…”
“Under Secretary Ball didn’t make it,” she was informed apologetically. “They didn’t find you until the next day and you were the only survivor in the part of the Main State Building that they found you in, Gretchen.”
There must have still been hundreds of people in the building when the first bomb went off.
This was insane…
“There was an attempt to overthrow the government,” Dan explained, belatedly concluding that he was just confusing Gretchen. That was both careless and cruel, and that would never do. He spoke slowly and carefully. “It caught the President and the military completely by surprise and it was a day or so before reinforcements arrived in the city and began to take back all the buildings and ground the rebels had seized. There were huge fights around the Pentagon, Capitol Hill and the White House, I daresay. It is all very confusing at the moment and a lot of people have been killed and injured. The Marines who discovered you at the Main State Department Building transferred you to an emergency field hospital in Rawlins Park, and then the Navy brought you to Bethesda by helicopter. They didn’t know who you were but I identified you from the documentation the medics at Rawlins Park sent over with you.”
The man stopped speaking because he had forgotten to breathe.
“How did you know I would be here?” Gretchen whispered.
Dan hesitated. How could he tell the woman he had loved — basically, from first sight at an ‘at home’ in Quincy held by a senior partner in her law firm the summer before the October War — that he had sat down and after thinking things through recognized that the only place he was likely to find her alive was at the one functioning major hospital in the city?
“I came here because I was afraid that if I you hadn’t been brought here that you were most likely dead, Gretchen,” he confessed. “And I wasn’t prepared to face that until there was no hope left.”
“Good call,” she groaned. Talking was wearing her out but she had to know how bad things were before she slept again. She had to know. “How,” she began, stopped to marshal her failing strength, “how bad am I…”
The man leaned close so she could see his face.
“They don’t know how bad, Gretchen.” He touched his brow with his free hand. “You had a fractured skull. They were afraid you might be blind or worse; but you’re not. Blind, that is, or any of the things they warned me about because you can see me and you can talk, so that’s good. There are busted bones in your neck and your back and the guys who rescued you from the State Building and got you here couldn’t help moving you about in ways that probably made those fractures a lot worse. They’ve immobilised you to stop any more nerve damage while stuff knits back together.” He moved on hurriedly. “You got shot twice in the back. One of the bullets penetrated your left lung. Your left leg was bust, too, but that will heal up fine in time…”