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It’s a beautiful Virginia night, perfectly still, the air warm, and behind me are the rushing red and white lights of good people heading home or going to work. Each set of lights represents a person with a life story to be told, so many tales of love and loss, setbacks and triumphs, all taking place in this wonderful nation.
But I know there are other powerful and far-reaching forces that are also in play this night, rushing to some type of explosive and dangerous end.
I look at my old phone in my right hand. It’s a special phone, given to me months ago by Ned Mahoney of the FBI. It’s unhackable and untraceable. It’s a perfect phone for what I’m facing in the next few days.
I trust Ned Mahoney, and I would trust him with my life and that of my daughter. But I don’t know who put this phone together or who gave it to Ned to give to me.
I hold my hand over the bridge and drop the expensive, complicated phone into the river.
It’s time to resume driving and not stop until I get to Vermont and Elizabeth Deacon.
As I get back into the stolen Lexus, I again remember the urgent cautionary words of Ned Mahoney:
Don’t trust anyone.
Chapter
60
Bree Stone isyawning as she walks down the hospital hall to see Alex in the ICU. Behind her, in the waiting room, both Nana Mama and Ali are fast asleep, Ali stretched out with his head in his great-grandmother’s lap.
Damon and Jannie are back at the house, heating up some leftovers to bring with them, since there’s only so much hospital food they can stand. Nana Mama even had a suggestion: “You bring a bowl of my chicken gumbo, and we’ll sneak it into Alex’s room.”
“But Nana Mama, you know he can’t eat.”
Arms folded, chin jutting out, Nana Mama said, “I don’t intend to feed him, girl, I’m not stupid. If that good surgeon thinks he’s aware of what’s going on around him in that damn coma of his, then let’s put a bowl of that gumbo under his nose. Maybe the scent will stir him awake.”
Bree smiles as she walks to the ICU, recalling that brief moment when everyone laughed over Nana Mama’s fine idea.
A nurse recognizes her and opens the sliding door to the ICU, and as Bree walks in, she senses that something is off, something is disturbed.
She turns the corner and sees a cluster of folks around Alex’s room, and her hands grow cold. There are DC Metro Police officers there, and two large men from her security firm, the Bluestone Group.
No one is smiling as she approaches.
“What’s wrong?” she says to no one in particular.
A DC Metro officer says, “Ma’am, you shouldn’t go in there.”
“The hell I shouldn’t,” Bree says, pushing past him.
The room is crowded with nurses and doctors, and their voices are low and urgent as they work on her Alex. Various medical devices are emitting either alarm signals or a constant tone. One doctor is leaning over Alex’s hidden head, and a nurse is drawing medication into a syringe, and Bree’s mouth instantly goes dry.
A nurse spots her and says, “Ma’am, you shouldn’t be in here!”
“The hell I shouldn’t, that’s my husband,” she snaps back, surprised at how cool and even her voice is when her heart is breaking at what she sees. All that’s visible of her Alex—the smart, loving, complex, and sometimes infuriating husband and father—is one bare arm with IV tubes in it.
Bree can’t even see his face, as swollen and bruised as it is and with the ventilator tube taped to his mouth.
If Alex is about to pass, she needs to be close.
“What’s going on?” she demands.
One of the nurses says without looking at her, “We’ve been weaning him from his sedation, hoping to wake him up so we could remove his breathing tube and get him off the ventilator. But he started crashing. Doctor, his blood pressure is really low, seventy over fifty, and his heart rate is one hundred thirty.”
“What’s his oxygen saturation?” a doctor asks.
“Eighty-six percent and dropping.”
