the IV imbedded in his vein, she thought back to that rainy night off the coast of Connecticut. She had been in a state of shock, her face bruised and bloodied, as Reece loaded her aboard a Pilatus aircraft that was to be their extract. She moved up the steps in a daze, her body exhausted as the adrenaline that had sustained her through the violence of the previous hours subsided. Her mind barely discerned the voices; they sounded muffled as if she were submerged in water with someone shouting at her from above. It had somehow registered that Reece was not coming with them.
As Reece stepped back to close the door, Katie had turned sharply in her seat and snapped out of her trance.
“Reece, how did you know Ben didn’t have that detonator connected? How did you know he wouldn’t blow my head off?”
Reece had paused, looked Katie in the eye, and over the sound of the wind, the propeller, and the rain, replied, “I didn’t,” before shutting the door and moving off at a run toward the marina.
I didn’t. Those words had haunted Katie ever since.
She had masked her uncertainty since their reunion, waiting for the right time to conduct this interview. Her father had taught her that trust is the foundation of any relationship. He’d been a spy whose family was extracted from what was then Czechoslovakia by Reece’s father. She knew Tom Reece had defied orders to bring them out and that if he hadn’t, her father would have been executed and she would never have been born. Escaping to the United States in the 1980s, Katie’s father had been, and still was, a big Ronald Reagan fan. Trust but verify, he had told his children.
Katie intended to verify.
Reece stirred, his eyes flittered, once, twice, and then opened to take in the vision that was Katie Buranek.
“Hey, sailor,” she joked, knowing that even though Reece had spent his entire adult life in the navy, he would never consider himself a sailor. These days, the navy plowed through the world’s oceans on computer chips powered by nuclear reactors; wind and sails were of a bygone era.
“Katie, you didn’t have to wait.” His voice was raspy from the breathing tubes that had kept him alive during the almost four-hour surgery. “But I’m glad you did,” he added with a smile.
“Well, the anesthesiologist is kind of cute, so…”
Now was the moment of truth.
Having a father who had passed medical information to the Americans on top Czech party officials in the name of freedom meant she was well versed in the worlds of medicine and espionage. Katie had listened and learned.
Witnessing the Warsaw Pact’s response to the Prague Spring in 1968, a young Dr. Buranek decided he did not want his family to live as he had under the iron fist of Soviet Bloc repression. The winds of change had started to blow. His position as a physician and surgeon for the party elite gave him access to medical records and sometimes put him in a position to ask certain questions after a surgery as his patients emerged from the fog of general anesthesia. The post-anesthesia phase, when they were uninhibited, was the time to elicit key pieces of information of interest to the CIA. Party officials were always guarded during medical procedures, but per human nature, the thugs in dark suits would occasionally slip up and turn away to flirt with a nurse, sneak a cigarette, or go to the bathroom. That was when Katie’s father would work in a question passed to him by the Central Intelligence Agency. Reece was in that same phase of the post op drug sequence, though since the introduction of Versed fentanyl in 1990, the effects were even more dramatic. Sometimes called truth serum, Versed fentanyl was used for pain control and sedation in postop, a time when Reece would be most vulnerable and susceptible to questioning. Fentanyl was an opioid painkiller while the Versed was an amnesic sedative that left a target ripe for an exploitation they would never remember; a controlled amnesia.
Of course, Katie could have just asked Reece over a dinner in Georgetown but then she remembered his eyes that night on Fishers Island as he fired four rounds into Ben Edwards’s face. They were ice cold. No remorse. She needed to know with absolute certainty and the “truth serum” provided her the opportunity she needed. Katie knew the clock was ticking. With every second that went by the effects