Agent for a Cause (The Agents for Good), page 7
“Thank you!” Was all she could say over and over again.
I could tell by a tightening of her features that she was in pain.
“Does your head hurt?” She nodded slightly.
“I don’t want to give you anything for it right now, but perhaps I will a little later. Your body’s been through a lot and I think it’s best to just rely on letting it recover for you on its own for now. I’ll go and get a cold wash cloth.”
Her eyes followed me as I left and never seemed to leave me even when I was out of sight.
I pressed the cold rag onto her forehead gently. She seemed a little cold so I pulled a lush blanket out over top of her. Her hand caught mine and I looked at her.
“Please don’t go!” She said desperately.
I sat back down pulling my chair closer having never let go of her hand, “I’m not going anywhere and that’s a promise! I’ll be right here for you when you wake up okay?”
Her eyes looked troubled, “The man that….?”
Her voice trailed off and I squeezed her hand, “Will never bother you again I made sure of that.”
A look of relief washed across her face.
“Anna when you’re up to it later I need you to tell me everything, especially as to why someone would want you dead.”
She nodded.
“Now go to sleep and dream of me.”I said.
She smiled and I was overjoyed beyond what words could express at seeing that irresistible smile again. Everything was going to be okay.
Her lips curved sensually, “And what are you going to be doing while I dream of you?”
With no hint of the teasing tone that was in her voice I responded simply, “Sitting here as I simply watch you continue to breathe.”
Her face gentled, “I love you Tyre!” She whispered up at me just before her eyes closed.
“I love you too.”
I didn’t think she’d heard me until I felt her fingers squeeze mine. She didn’t wake up again until 10 p.m. and I could see she was feeling better.
She was hungry so I gave her a little food and something to drink. After she was done I scooped her up off the couch. Her hand slipped around the back of my neck as one of her eyebrows rose in a suggestive unasked question.
“Don’t get any ideas! Your heart has had more than enough exercise today.” I said as I laid her down on the sheets of the bed, which I had pulled the covers of back earlier.
She lay there and smiled beckoningly and I moved back several feet unconsciously and her smile widened.
“You should lay on your right side, because it’s easier on your heart.”
“Yes doctor, but aren’t you forgetting your promise?”
“Promise?”
“You promised not to leave me.”
I pointed to a chair in the room, but she shook her head no and patted the bed beside her. I started to shake my head no, but she cut me off with her words.
“If you’re not going to keep your promise then I’m not going to listen to your commands.”
I swallowed, she wasn’t playing fair. I pulled my shoes off, “Okay, but no kissing or anything else got it!”
“Yes doctor.” Her triumphant smile never dimmed as she moved over onto her right side away from me.
I lay down beside her and pulled the blankets up. It was an odd feeling laying next to someone.
“I’m cold.”
How could she be cold? She had a sheet, a cover, and a blanket in between. I had survived -30 degrees nights in Russia as a kid with little more than a torn blanket!
I reached out and felt her arm. It was cold. I rolled over onto my side and cautiously moved closer. She grabbed my left arm and held it against her belly as she scooted back against me.
She’d tricked me the little rascal! I gritted my teeth hard, as I felt her nuzzle her bottom into me. Didn’t she realize how acute her torture of me was?
Yes, was the resounding answer and she was loving every second of it. My grimace faded away as I felt her drift away into the sleep her body needed. Yes this was torture of the sensual variety, but I was glad to suffer it. I’d come so close to losing her today and I would be grateful for every moment more that I was privileged to spend with her. Surprisingly I began to drift off to sleep myself with the smell of her hair enticing my senses.
Chapter Eight
Secret Revelations
I awoke to her lips on mine. After a while she lifted her head and gave me a husky smile, “Good morning darling!”
“Good morning.” I responded still hazy from the kiss and just waking up.
“How do you feel Anna?”
She groaned, “I’m suffering from acute tension over suppressed passion, but other than that I feel perfectly fine.”
She gave me a quick peck on the cheek, “I need a shower and while I’m doing that I don’t suppose you’d mind starting breakfast would you?”
She finished in a softly begging tone of voice.
I grinned, “Hungry are you?”
“Starving!” She said as she kissed me hard again for a moment.
She whispered against my lips, “In more ways than one!”
She then bounded up off the bed heading for the bathroom leaving me achingly alone on the bed. I got up then.
My clothes, in particular my shirt were all rumpled, something which normally would have bothered me, but not this morning. I went to the kitchen passing Kevin along the way playing away on his old computer.
I had breakfast made and plated up, but there was no sign of Anna yet, which is when I learned something about women and Anna in particular. There is no such thing as a quick shower. I put Kevin’s plate down on the table and called his name. Dutifully he came. I was going to wait to eat with Anna, but there was no reason why Kevin had to wait.
At least one of us would get to taste what breakfast tasted like warm. Instead of sitting down at the table to eat Kevin grabbed my hand and started to lead me to his old computer. I went along surprised by his actions. Did he want me to watch him play one of his games?
“Kevin it’s time to eat.”
He didn’t respond other than to gesture to the chair in front of the old behemoth of a computer complete with an equally massive flickering screen. Wanting to humor him I sat down. Kevin reached forward and tapped several keys in quick succession.
The game on the screen disappeared and the face of a man appeared on a backdrop of an official looking document. Kevin went to the table and began to eat his breakfast as I stared in stunned amazement at the FBI data folder in front of me.
The kid had hacked the FBI database!
The man’s name was John Lazak. He was the CEO of Raton Pharmaceutical. A company that appeared to be entirely focused on vaccination creation and the clinical trials of them.
He appeared to be squeaky clean, which was suspicious in and of itself. It was no surprise to me that the FBI had such a complete dossier of a man who appeared to be guiltless of anything more dangerous than a traffic ticket for running a red light.
American citizens and citizens of countries all around the world would be surprised to know the depth of their government’s record-keeping of both their public and private lives. Invasive was a small word for it.
Mister John Lazak before becoming CEO had cut his teeth as an exec in charge of acquisitions. That was a hard job to have and not have gotten dirty hands. There had been one incident during that time of a man, who alleged, that Raton Pharmaceutical had stolen the proprietary results of some studies he had been doing under the cover of a university’s funding grant.
He had some convincing evidence to prove his allegations, but everything seemed to have blown over after the man had succumbed to a heart attack. That was four years ago. John had only been promoted to CEO last year. I glanced over at Kevin placidly eating his breakfast. What was he trying to tell me other than the obvious?
Better yet how had he hacked this folder from the FBI database? I knew he was a genius, but given his condition how was this possible? He was only seven years old!
Throw away both of these odd occurrences from a seven-year-old and you still had the mystery of what in the world was going on with this old computer!
It was a piece of antiquated junk! A worn sticker on the monitor identified it as Windows 95 operating system. Something that old would move at a snail’s pace and wouldn’t even be compatible with most current software’s.
How had Kevin hacked the FBI database with it? Forget that, how was even getting on the internet? This relic was before Wi-Fi for sure!
I looked over at Kevin again. I had so many questions I wanted to ask, but couldn’t. He got up and came over to me and punched in a series of seemingly random keys that spelled nothing. The file folder shrunk to a thumbnail size on the screen.
An eerie feeling swept through me as red tracer lines radiated off the thumbnail file icon into other thumbnail icons that appeared all across the screen until it was full of them. I moused over a thumbnail and as I did a page came up large screen.
Maria Sarasena, age 34 died of a heart attack like symptoms, 2002. There were more just like her all over the screen, twenty seven in all. I had only gone down one branch of the tree of red lines that spread out across the monitor before me.
I was pretty sure that what was represented on the screen was at least in some part related to linchpin theory, which was basically a theory that stated that a small unlikely event could cause a greater calamity. It was often characterized as a theory of probable events based off of tidbits of facts of interlaced stories to show meaningful conclusions of the past, present, and possible future.
I started down another branch of the red outlined tree. Bank accounts. Certain numbers would highlight and then new pages would pop up. The money trails went to other banks and trusts. The money was labeled as anything under the sun, but it was blood money. When a trail culminated with a person a rap sheet popped up. All of them were killers.
The man I had killed popped up. He was a recent hire. This had been his first job and he had botched it by being impatient. All the money traced back to the acquisitions Department of Raton Pharmaceutical and was stretched out over a period of seventeen years.
John Lazak’s path to the top had been paved in blood and there was no doubt left in me that Anna had simply been the last of an already morbidly long string of uninvestigated murders. I looked at Kevin, who was watching me.
“Why?” I asked.
He pointed to some more thumbnails and I scrolled over them. One was a traffic camera, which showed the entire scene unfold of me stopping the ambulance and taking out the SUV and its occupants.
There were other videos of me from my past that I had thought gone unnoticed or long forgotten. I looked back at Kevin feeling a little shaken as to the glimpse into my own violent life. I think I got the message. I could protect his mother.
I was doing just that already. Kevin reached out a hand to me and I took it. He trusted me. I suppose that was explanation enough. He had done an unfathomable amount of deductive reasoning and fact-finding all in the course of a single night to keep his mom safe.
I had thought his potential for greatness was unusually high, little had I known that greatness was already his. I would need to protect him as much as his mother. Perhaps in his own way he had guessed as much.
The bedroom door opened and Anna stepped out smiling sheepishly in a bathrobe. Upon her appearance Kevin’s finger snaked out turning the monitor off. His mother could have no clue other than the ones I had given her as to just how advanced Kevin actually was. He seemed to like it that way and for now I was willing to go along with it, but she would need to know at some point.
“I’m sorry! That spa shower is so nice and I had to shave my legs and well I just lost track of time.”
I straightened back up and shrugged, “No big deal.”
Her gaze turned curious, “What have you two been up to? Has Kevin been showing you one of his games?”
“More of a puzzle actually. Here let me warm up your breakfast for you.”
I really tried to just focus on eating my breakfast, but that wasn’t possible. Hopelessly impossible. Anna was such a distraction! How could one focus on eating when you had her to look at, her hair damp from her shower with her smile so bright and vivacious.
She was the soul of freshness and everything wholesome and worth having in life. Would this really be my life soon? Could I really expect to meet those dancing green eyes across the table every morning from this day on? It seemed too much of a fairytale to be true. My gaze not for the first time drifted down to the tide off cord that held her bathrobe together. One little tug would be all that it took.
Ahhhh! I was driving myself crazy or better put, the allure of her was driving me crazy. One more day and she would be mine! Just one more day! I could do that. Stop thinking about it.
Yeah right, like that was possible! Anna to me was like the most coveted present that I could ever have asked for or even dreamed of and I longed to unwrap her and discover everything there was to know about her.
“Tyre, I need to get dressed and then I’ll tell you everything I know.”
I nodded my gaze falling to my half eaten plate of food.
She brushed by me and stopped only for a moment. She spoke her honey smooth words directly into my ear before she kissed it and moved on, “Only one more day darling until I’m all yours.”
I was still gripping the table’s edge hard long after I heard the door of the bedroom close. She had the power to completely unravel me. I wasn’t sure if I liked that or not.
I cleaned the kitchen up and then went to my room and changed, when I came back she was ready. We sat in opposing chairs and I struggled to maintain some sort of objectivism as I observed her. She looked a little nervous perhaps even embarrassed and I could understand why. Sharing one’s life story would be something incredibly embarrassing for me to even contemplate doing.
“Where do you want me to start?” She asked as her hands twisted together in her lap nervously moments before one darted up to brush a strand of her blonde hair away from her eyes.
It was one of those feminine gestures she did that I loved. During my barstool stalking days I had prayed for and anxiously waited for a strand of her hair to fall forward so I could see her do that little maneuver.
“Start where it all went wrong.”
She bit her lip and looked away for a moment and then back to me, “This is hard!”
I nodded not liking my role in this one bit either, but I wanted to know what possible motive there could be for someone to put a bounty on Anna’s head.
She looked down at her lap. “I’m not sure where life was ever all that good. Don’t get me wrong I’ve had good times, but the underlining thread of my life hasn’t been one I’d like to do over again. Growing up was hard, but my mother made it at least somewhat fun at times. I’m kind of like her in some ways not so much in others. She liked to have fun and she smiled a lot like me. She was a whore before she married my father.”
She stopped and looked over at me and I saw a deep-seated embarrassment and fear in her eyes, like I would think less of her because of what her mother had been.
I realized two things instantly in that moment. She hated what her mother had been and because of Kevin’s illegitimate birth she thought of herself as no better than her mother.
What does one say to that? I struggled for words because she was the furthest thing imaginable from a whore, but I stopped because I rightly surmised that she really wouldn’t listen to words so convinced was she of what she felt about herself. Maybe she didn’t want words. They did say that actions speak louder than words didn’t they?
I opened my arms and she fairly flew into them. After a moment she relaxed her grip to sink to her knees on the carpet as she laid her head across my thigh. My hand found its way into her hair and began to stroke through her hair. It just seemed the natural thing to do somehow.
“Anna?”
“Yes?”
She wouldn’t look at me so I turned her head in my lap.
“You are not a whore!”
She started to say something, but I didn’t let her. Holding one finger up for dramatic effect I said, “But you have my permission to act as sexy as you would like with me.”
A little smile touched her lips and she turned her head away as my hand continued to play with her hair. It was quiet as I waited.
“I’m not sure why he married her. I guess he thought he could save her, but you can’t save someone who doesn’t want to be saved.”
“Your father was a preacher?” I asked on a hunch.
“Baptist. You know how there are good Christians and bad Christians?”
“Yes.”
“Well he was the bad kind. No compassion, nothing but discipline and disapproval all the time. It was hard for my mother, but in all fairness she did cheat on him a lot. I don’t even think I’m his. I have none of his features at all or his somber nature. I do share quite a few characteristics with one of the ushers in my father’s church though. I think my father knew and he was all the more spiteful towards me, because of it I think. It got bad. My mother ran away when I was twelve. I can forgive her a lot of things, but not that! She left me alone with that pious monster. He made it his life’s mission to save me from my mother’s promiscuous blood as he would say. I wasn’t allowed to have friends or go out. I rebelled and he beat me. It was a continuing saga all through high school. Finally he told me I was unredeemable and threw me out in my senior year. I was walking along the street with nowhere to go, when Ms. Dorothy stopped. She took me in for a couple of weeks. She was an elderly widow and a member of a different Baptist church in town. Now she was a loving Christian! She lived everything my father preached about, but wasn’t himself. Those were some of the best weeks of my life that I spent with her! The authorities made me go back to my father’s house and it was better than before. I was no longer beat, because he had been put on warning by social workers. I decided I wanted to make something of myself so I enrolled in nursing school. I loved it. Life was going well and I wanted to complete the cycle of positives so I moved out of my father’s and in with Miss Dorothy. She died nine months later in her sleep and I kind of lost it for a while. I did some pretty inappropriate stuff and got kicked out of nursing school. I moved in with a boyfriend and then I got pregnant with Kevin. The boyfriend dumped me when I refused to get an abortion. I’m not a poster child for good choices by any means, but even I knew what was wrong and right. It was my mistake and not my babies’ so what gave me the right to kill someone because of what I had done. I got some fast food jobs and in short I survived. Kevin was born. He was perfect! In the midst of everything that had gone wrong he was absolutely perfect! The same friends who had pushed me to abort him now hammered at me to put him up for adoption. They said I couldn’t take care of him alone by myself. They said that the fun times I could have had would be all over if I was stuck raising him. They were crazy! They wanted me to be like my mother and leave my little baby boy, who had never done anything to anyone all alone in the world to fend for himself. I lost those friends and worked instead. It was hard, but every little impish grin Kevin gave me inspired me to do greater and I didn’t mind the sacrifice, because he was worth it!”
