The Jefferson Allegiance (14 page)

Already tired,
too tired
, he thought, he lowered the binoculars to the blanket that covered his lap, helping to protect his frail body from the chill that penetrated even the well-insulated house. He placed his hands on the arms of his wheelchair, the large Naval Academy ring glittering on his ring finger, just outside the thin wedding band. His wife had died eight months ago, and ever since, his will to leave the house, to do anything, had diminished. He knew it was wrong, that he was failing in his duty, that it was a time for action, and he was caught between the pincers of guilt and sorrow, but his fatigue kept them from being very sharp.

He turned his wheelchair to the left and looked at a wall festooned with plaques, photos and certificates. A lifetime of service. He turned in the opposite direction and stared at a wall covered with photographs of his family. Wife. Two sons. A daughter. Eight grandchildren. And two great-grandchildren.

He smiled.

A low beeping sound came from down the hall. The motion detectors that surrounded the house. Normally they were routed to the NCIS detachment at the Academy, and a car would already be rolling out here to check. But Groves had gone on the computer and shut down the link earlier the previous evening.

Groves took a deep breath. He was decked out in his Dress Whites. The same set he’d bought as an ensign after graduation from the Academy. He liked to think he had maintained his trimness to be able to wear them, but he knew it was the cancer in his gut that had ripped forty pounds off his body in the last few months.

Nine rows of ribbons adorned his chest indicating service from the Korean War up to the Invasion of Iraq, when he had finally been shown the door by a Navy that didn’t want his kind around any more. He was old school, a relic from a different Navy, where people mattered more than computers and missiles. Thinking about computers, he rolled his chair across the room to a laptop computer and hit the ‘enter’ key, sending the message he had prepared the previous evening. As soon as he received the acknowledgement that it had been sent, he accessed a wipe program and started it. A countdown appeared on the screen indicating the computer’s hard drive would be completely clean in two minutes and that a message had been sent—to another Navy SEAL.

He pushed his chair to the far wall until he was underneath a flag encased in a glass frame. He parked below it, turning to face the hallway. Reaching into the bag hanging on the side of the wheelchair, he pulled out a silver-plated M1911 Colt Automatic with pearl handles. He’d been given it by the Marine contingent aboard an aircraft carrier he’d commanded many years ago. It took all his strength to pull back the charging handle, loading a round into the chamber. He laid the gun on his lap, covering it with the blanket, his right hand wrapped around the pistol grip.

Just in time, as a dark figure appeared in the doorway.

“Admiral Groves.”

He was old enough to be surprised, and chagrined that it was a woman. She pulled back her hood, revealing her face. A short, beautiful blond.

“Who the hell are you?” Groves demanded.

“Just call me the Surgeon. Just as I might call you Philosopher.”

“Why are you doing this?”

“Because I’ve been ordered to,” she said, walking into the room as she drew a sword from underneath her robe. “You understand about orders, don’t you?”

“I understand about serving my country and fulfilling the oath I swore to defend.” He noted the large ring on her left hand. “Which Academy?”

“Air Force.”

Groves laughed. “Leave it to a Zoomie to bring a sword to a gun fight.” He pulled the trigger on the hidden gun. The sound of the .45 caliber pistol going off was deafening in the room, the round punching through the blanket and hitting the Surgeon in the chest, knocking her back a step. The recoil of the gun kicked Groves’s hand up, snapping his fragile wrist with an audible crack.

The Surgeon’s reactions were too quick for Groves to follow through his pain and shock. She dove forward, did a roll, and came to her feet just to his right, the blade flicking away the blanket. Even as the blanket flew up, the blade darted down, skewering the hand holding the gun, and compounding the broken bone in the wrist.

Groves gritted his teeth to keep from crying out in pain as the pistol clattered to the floor. The Surgeon pulled the sword out of his hand and took a step back, breathing slowly and deeply. With her free hand she felt in the cloak for the place the bullet had impacted. She pulled it out of the Liquid Armor and dropped it to the floor.

“You still have fight in you, old man. Commendable for a Squid. The other two went down much too easily.”

Admiral Groves clenched his fist to try to stop the flow of blood. “If I were younger—“

“You wouldn’t have gotten the advantage on me,” Lily said. “My mistake. Where are your disks?”

“You’ll burn in hell before you ever get my disks.”

“Hell?” She seemed amused. “That’s a story for children. There’s only here and now. All that matters is if one is holding the sword or facing the point of the sword. Where are the disks?” She punctuated the question with a slice of the wakizashi, drawing blood from the old man’s shoulder.

“Ruined the damn Academies letting women in,” Groves said. “Women can never do the job that—“

The wakizashi sliced the other shoulder.

“—men can do.” Groves acted as if he hadn’t been cut. “I’d like to see a woman handle a tow line in a storm when the decks are slippery and the ship is heaving to and—“

“The disks,” the Surgeon yelled over his diatribe.

“All you’d be good for,” Groves said, “is serving me coffee. Had a female pilot when I commanded the
Truman
and she splashed a jet on a routine take-off. Put sixty millions dollars worth of aircraft into the ocean. Damn bitch.”

“I earned—“ the Surgeon began, but Groves cut her off.

“You’ve had different standards than the men since you entered the Academy. Yet you’re supposed to do the same job. You
know
the standards were different. You’ve had men cover for you, thinking, maybe, just maybe, they might get a piece. Be honest about it. You think they were being altruistic? Bet your daddy never acknowledged you. You couldn’t measure up if—“

The Surgeon took a quick step forward, the point of the wakizashi stabbing into the old man’s stomach.

Groves gasped in pain, but he still managed a smile. “Women are too damn emotional. Took you long enough.” With that, he wrapped his hands, blood pouring out of the one, around the blade, ignoring as it sliced into his fingers and ignoring the grinding of the broken bone in the one wrist. With his last surge of strength and all the discipline of over forty years in the service to his country, he shoved down on the heft of the blade, cutting through his gut, eviscerating himself.

************

Letting go of the handle, Lily took a step back. She stared at the dead man, breathing hard, trying to get under control. Then she nodded. “Commendable, Admiral,” she whispered to the body. She knelt next to him and leaned over. She kissed the old man on the lips, lingering a bit too long. She shivered and blinked, confused for a moment, then she straightened and saw the battle flag on the wall: a blue flag with white letters spelling out:
DON’T GIVE UP THE SHIP
.

Without thinking, she brought the wakizashi over her head in a two-handed grip and slashed down, slicing through the frame, breaking the glass and cutting the flag in two.

She slowed her breathing down to normal as she looked about. She picked up the .45 and tucked it in a pocket. She noted an officer’s saber mounted on a plaque near the door and ripped it off the wall, tucking it under one arm. She pivoted, just as she had in Lucius’s office, a military maneuver, and stared at the dead man, and then up at the sliced flag dangling off the wall above him, re-reading the words.

Lily smiled. “You almost fooled me, old man.”

Chapter Eight

Kincannon was stretched out on the back seat, resting. Ducharme was driving, not liking the uncertainty that lay ahead in Baltimore. He glanced over at Evie. “The question would have been rude when you were a stranger, but since we’re foxhole buddies, can I ask you something?”

Evie gave a cautious look. “Really, everything that’s going on and that’s all you’ve got? Why, don’t you have a boyfriend, husband, lover?”

“I’m just trying to pass some time and it seems to be tied in with the long story you mentioned earlier,” Ducharme lied.

Evie called him on it. “You’re trying to figure me out. And rather bluntly, if I might say so. And you want to know who my powerful friend is.”

Ducharme almost smiled. “Guilty.” In the back seat, Kincannon rolled his eyes.

Evie played with a charm on one of her silver bracelets, and then finally turned to him with a sly grin. “Do you want the epic, the novel, the short story, or the theory?”

Fuck
, Ducharme muttered in head. He glanced at the mileage marker, did a quick calculation, debated between short story and theory, thought a little bit more about how much she had said back in DC, and said: “Theory.”

Her grin became a smile. “It’s my ‘Casablanca’ theory of love. Now, don’t interrupt me and I presume you’ve seen the movie?”

Before Ducharme could answer, Kincannon chimed in from the back seat: “’I remember every detail. The Germans wore gray, you wore blue’.”

Evie relaxed back in her seat, which Ducharme took as a good sign, and he also felt his shoulders loosen slightly and the headache fade somewhat. He would deal with Baltimore when they got there. “Yeah, I saw it a long time ago. Vaguely remember it, although apparently not as well as Kincannon.”

Evie spoke in a low voice. “You know how Bogart thinks of all the gin joints, she had to walk into mine? Well, my theory of love is that you really only need to have one great love affair—you know, to prove to yourself that you can do it. And it needs to end in some bizarre way out of your control so that you are both left with your love intact. You both are still in love and, but for circumstances beyond your control, you would still be together. Etcetera. Etcetera.

“Then you can get on with your life and never have to deal with that again. I mean, you can meet people and stuff, but you’re never going to project that kind of expectation on another person again, so you’re pretty safe. It’s like you’ve been vaccinated. I think that poor Bogart almost had a heart attack when Ilsa traipsed back into his life. Because at any moment she could open her mouth and say just the stupidest thing and he’d realize she wasn’t the great love of his life and then he’d have to start all over again. Really, why do you think he was so happy when that plane door slammed on her butt? Because he still loved her—that’s why. That whole movie is just him sitting on a ticking time bomb. It’s excruciating.”

She sat up a little straighter. “If we live through this, play it again and watch his face whenever she starts to speak. Unbearable. Really.”

“Nice pun.” Kincannon started laughing.

“What?” Evie snapped.

Kincannon shook his head. “No offense. I’m just thinking of the visual at the end of the movie. I never thought of it that way. You are quite the skeptic.”

“See, that’s such a knee-jerk reaction. I have a theory of romantic love to cope in a culture built around an insane ideal. That makes me a realist. Which is part of what you wanted to know about me. Could have just administered a Myers-Briggs personality assessment.”

Ducharme took both hands off the wheel for a moment and held them up defensively. “Ok. We’re sorry. Sorry. So did you have an Ilsa—my mistake—a Rick?”

“Of course I did or it wouldn’t be a theory. And technically, it’s a male version of an Ilsa, because she, as we know, found one more great love after Rick.”

Ducharme glanced in the rear-view mirror, then back at her. “Doesn’t that prove your theory wrong?”

Evie shrugged. “It wouldn’t be scientific if it couldn’t be proved wrong.”

Ducharme took the exit for Baltimore. “You know, you’re a real piece of work, Evie Tolliver.”

“I know,” she whispered, more to herself.

“I want to hear all about your Ilsa/Rick guy as soon as someone’s not trying to kill us.”

“You’d be bored. And be a little more subtle in the future.”

“We don’t have time for subtle.”

***********

The blood from the cut on Lily’s arm seeped through her black turtleneck sweater. The pain was exquisite, a bright red spike keeping her on edge and focused and providing her with a deep, dark pleasure.

She drove down a badly lit Baltimore street until the GPS prompted her to pull over. A brick wall surrounded an old, dark church. Leafless branches drooped over the cemetery surrounding the church, their limbs dusted with snow. Poe had written about places like this. Fitting that he was buried here.

Lily exited her van, walked to the front gate and found it locked. Pulling picks from the pocket of her cape, she made short work of that obstacle. She swung the gates open and walked through the light dusting of snow. A white monument to her right immediately caught her attention: an obelisk about five feet high.