“Look, Dav, just because I got shot doesn’t mean the world’s going to end tomorrow. I’m just saying that you should give it a week, try again when we go back. Maybe use a different approach.”
The pilot appeared, announcing their imminent departure.
“Right. Get comfortable, Gates.” Dav nodded to the nurses, who closed ranks to pull out the pillows he’d shoved in to support himself and helped him lie back. “Get some sleep if you can.”
“Think about it, man,” Gates offered as a parting shot.
Dav got the last word, however. “Advice from someone who’s had it work out so well. Thanks.”
“Fuck,” Gates muttered, allowing the nurses to fuss around him, anchor the equipment they’d insisted on bringing. As they buckled into the nearby chairs for flight, he closed his eyes, intending to ignore it all, get some thinking in.
Dav’s words reverberated in his mind. Life is short. Every time he closed his eyes, Gates relived the bullet’s impact. Behind his closed eyelids, he replayed it. The needle-sharp pain, the hot smell of singed flesh and fabric, the almost simultaneous crackling of the car door’s glass. Ana’s scream. Dav’s shout. Being lifted; Ana’s voice telling him she had him and to hang on.
It all came back to Ana. Every time.
She had him, she’d said it. She had his back. She wasn’t some frail flower needing or wanting protection. Instead, she was there for him. Now, to add to his nightmares, he could see her face as he essentially told her to get lost, that it had just been a fling.
The pressure of takeoff was nothing compared to the pressure in his chest, in his heart.
Ana. She was it. She was the real deal, not some weak fool to be dismissed.
With a soft moan for the pain in both sides of his chest, he twisted on the bed, feeling in his body the pain of his sheer bullheaded stupidity. What had he done?
He sensed the nurses bustling around, but paid them no heed. What could he do? How could he fix it? He’d well and truly screwed everything to hell, and he knew it.
Her features, wracked with pain, leapt into his mind like an IMAX movie. She’d recovered quickly. She was well trained, well schooled in making her face show only what she wanted it to show. But he’d seen it. The same agony he felt now.
Somehow, he had to mend the breach. To make it right. Yes, that’s what he’d do.
He was about to open his eyes and demand his laptop when he felt the cooling change in the IV line still taped to the back of his wrist. His thoughts fogged, and his mind drifted away from its sharp focus.
“Thank you for coming, Agent,” the head of the Panel of Inquiry started the proceedings. They’d kept her cooling her heels for a day in DC. She’d spent most of the time in the CIA Headquarters, waiting, only to be sent back to her hotel for the night and called back the next day.
Seated next to her, Ana’s advocate noted the time on his legal pad. “Yes, sir. I appreciate your time and efforts,” Ana replied, taking her seat.
The four men looked slightly nonplussed by her thanks, but they opened files and began reading the pertinent details of the Inquiry into the record.
“On Monday, February fifteenth,” the man on the far left read. “The following events occurred which are the subject of this Inquiry.”
Reese, her advocate, wrote the names of the panel in order across the page. Ana tuned into the recitation only so much as necessary to be sure they were following her statement, which they were.
The flight had been long, and she’d slept for only a little while because she knew she had to. The data on Jack G. D’Onofrio wasn’t panning out. He didn’t have a shipping arm of his magazine business as far as she could tell. His main business was West Coast too, San Francisco, Oakland, Sacramento, Lake Tahoe, Las Vegas.
Nothing showed. The problem was, she knew something was there. He was too much a New Yorker to not have something on the East Coast. You didn’t leave your roots behind when you were a New York City boy. Not one who’d spoken with such pride about his roots to a total stranger at the gallery showing.
On her own pad, she wrote: D’Onofrio. New York? California. Gallery. Berlin?
Reese tapped her toe with his, signaling for her to pay attention as the executive agent presiding over the Inquiry