“Yes, but he’s Mus… ” Emma checked herself. The nurse smiled. “He doesn’t want me to end the pregnancy. Look, I’m not going to have a baby. I’m still in high school.”
“What about your father? Does he live with you?”
“He does,” Em allowed, wiping away her tears, “but that’s kind of recent. My mom basically brought me up alone till he came back.”
“Are you saying he’d have objections to your terminating your pregnancy?”
“No, I don’t think so. I mean, it may sound weird to say this, him being gone most of my life, but he’s a pretty good dad.”
“I’m glad to hear that. Emma, please call him. Let him know what you intend to do. Then we can confirm that you have a parent onboard, okay?”
“I really don’t want them to know.”
The nurse eyed her closely. “I’ll have the doctor talk to you. But at least think about your father. It’s just a call. We have a simple approach to this. He sounds like a decent guy.”
He is. But Em had never felt a greater need for personal privacy.
The woman started to leave, then turned back to her. “The doctor will listen to whatever you have to say. Just tell the truth. It goes a long way around here.”
“Thank you.”
“Here.” She handed Emma a pamphlet. “That has answers to a lot of the questions that patients have.”
“What’s the doctor’s name?”
“Dr. Mohammed Abbas.”
Mohammed? Abbas?
Emma watched the nurse walk away — and felt an instant urge to rush out of the clinic.
The roughneck’s name was Cal. Strips of his skin had been laid aside carefully by the ISIS fighter. Jimmy stared at them, one at least ten inches long.
What a son-of-a-bitch. Jimmy had never killed anyone. Seeing the peeled skin left him with no regrets.
“He was working his way up my body,” Cal said. “The only reason he left my foot alone was when he was all done he wanted to march me around up there for the news choppers. This hurts so fuckin’ bad.”
“We should wrap it up,” Jimmy said, stripping off his T-shirt. “You don’t want to be bleeding all over the chain. You’ll slip and fall and we’ve got work to do.”
“Don’t put that shirt near me. Man, you got smallpox, right?”
“Sorry, sorry. I wasn’t thinking,” Jimmy said. “Come on, let’s just head up.”
“Head up? We gotta get the hell out of here.”
Jimmy shook his head. “The chief engineer’s still alive, right?”
“Maybe. They’ve got him trying to disarm the blowout preventers.”
“Is he doing that?”
“He’s trying. They’re threatening him with all kinds of shit. They want to turn this place into a tar pit.”
“I heard that. Look, they’re going to kill him no matter what he does,” Jimmy said. “We’ve got to save him.”
“Listen to me. No way we’re gonna do that. They got him on the computers in the operations center, and it’s surrounded by these murdering assholes. Be easier to break into Fort Knox.”
“Why are you down here?”
“Because that dead shithead won me for cutting off the most heads the fastest when they took over this thing. I shit you not. It was a contest and I was the prize.”
“There’s really no way to save him up there?”
Cal shook his head. “I ain’t lying. You want to commit suicide, you go right ahead.”
Jimmy looked up at the platform. Saving the chief engineer did sound impossible. “Do you think you can climb down this chain?” Blood now covered Cal’s foot.
“To get off this hellhole I’d climb down razor wire.”
“I’ll lead the way, but we got one thing to do before we take off down there.”
“Yeah, what’s that?”
“We’re blowing the oil pipe so the BOPs kick in before they get disabled.”
“That’s going to really piss ’em off. We better be ready to tear ass out of here.”
“Pissing them off is the plan, and tearing ass out of here is a big part of it.”
Jimmy helped Cal to his feet.
When they looked up, a pair of eyes were staring down.
Chapter 24
Lana was up and performing her morning rituals by five-thirty, though greatly hampered by her crutches, cumbersome fixtures since the surgery on her calf. She had a six-thirty video teleconference scheduled with the President’s Chief of Staff William Evanson. She presumed the marginal, break-of-day appointment time reflected Evanson’s lack of priority on their meeting. But Lana found awakening so early a welcome change, even after her middle-of-the-night phone call with Galina. She liked the peace and quiet and trusted it would continue for at least a couple of hours.
With Don and Emma safely tucked away — and no hint of the mayhem at large in the world — Bethesda could seem like an oasis; one purchased, she understood, at the cost of bulletproof glass and steel doors. Recognizing this tempted Lana to check on Emma upstairs; but her daughter, once the proverbial log in bed, had become such a light sleeper that she didn’t want to disturb her. Em was, after all, fighting a stomach bug. And Lana didn’t relish navigating the stairs on one good foot and two clumsy crutches.
After arranging her hair carefully and applying lipstick and a bit of blush, she donned a blue blouse that she kept fully buttoned. For a videoconference, she only needed to look professional from the middle up—“table date acceptable,” as she and her friends had once joked about pear-shaped men. So her shorts would do fine and spare her the ordeal of putting slacks on over her wound.
Lana made short shrift of her first espresso before hobbling into her home office. She was adjusting the lighting for the computer camera to avoid freak-show shadows when she heard the front door burst open. She assumed it was Agent Robin Maray, but switched on the screen that showed her home’s entry points. Robin, indeed, was slamming the door behind him and yelling “Go to the safe room, I’ve got it opening right now.”
The panic room?
“What about Emma and Don?” Lana yelled, jamming her Sig Sauer into her shorts, grabbing her crutches, and starting down the hallway.
“I’ll get them. You get in there now.”
The steel cubicle had been placed off the living room behind a bookcase that swung open at the touch of a switch, a location central to the home’s traffic patterns.
“Emma,” Lana yelled as she limped along. “Emma!”
When Em didn’t reply, Lana launched herself toward the stairs. As quickly, Robin swept her up into his arms and carried her toward the door to the secure room.
“Sorry,” he said as he deposited her into the steel-reinforced confines, “but I said I’d get them, and I’ve got my orders.”
“What’s going on?” she asked, but Robin was already closing the panic room door.
Lana flipped on the room’s monitor and switched to her home’s exterior cameras as two men in black ski masks set off a charge by the big front window. She felt the violent vibration in the one foot she had on the floor and sheer panic at the sight of the pair piling into the house.
Switching quickly to a living room cam, she saw swirls of dust and Robin staggering across the floor toward the safe room with a long shard of glass sunk in his shoulder, blood already soaking his white shirt and darkening his suit jacket. She called 911 as he tripped on a length of mangled window frame and spilled to the debris-ridden floor, not far from where Cairo lay unmoving on more rubble. Wincing in pain, Robin tried to lift himself up and draw his gun. Too wounded and too late: before he could even raise it, the men ripped the gun from Robin’s hand and dragged him toward the safe room, visible through the broken remains of the bookcase. Volumes lay strewn on the floor. The men kicked them out of their way and stuck their guns to Robin’s head right in front of the cam that framed all three of them.