Chapter 27
“What’s your name, son?” The man asked me. I looked up at him. He looked weird, like a cubist portrait of a man. Or I was looking out of one eye, the other obscured by something cold and white. An ice pack.
I was in an…office. When I should clearly be in a hospital room. Thought about his question. What was my name? Asked the voice in my head. “Danny?”
“Your name is Danny?”
I groaned. Pain was coming back. I didn’t know so many parts could hurt so badly, so… individually.
“Tell us your name, Danny. The Doctor will give you some morphine and you can sleep.”
“Fingerprints? Did you take his fingerprints? If he’s been in the services, his fingerprints will come up.”
“If this kid’s old enough to have served, he can’t have been over for more than a few months. He looks like he’s barely 18. Why is Parker Ames so set on getting you back, Danny? He’s NSA, one of their top agents. Why is he babysitting a PTSD vet?”
“He’s making some big noises to the agency about getting him back.”
“My head,” I said faintly, raising my hands and surprised to find them unrestrained. This room was a small one, me on a couch, a table between us, three chairs and three big men standing in front of the door. Ajar. I could see out into the hallway and knew I was in the security offices of the White House basement.
“Secret Service? You’re Secret Service. Great. Danny, what have you got me into? Now what? How am I supposed to get out of this?”
“He is nuts,” the agent called James admitted.
“I am not! There are two of us in here!” I yelled. “In my head.”
“You have a concussion on top of everything else,” he said and moved aside. “Let’s get him out of here, let Ames have his nutcase back.”
“Felice. Let me take talk to Felice,” I begged and it was Danny’s voice that spoke. I let him take over, I was curiously distant and didn’t seem to care much, not even when he said he was going to give me back to Parker and the Colonel.
“The President’s daughter isn’t interested in a nutcase. Why would she want to see you?”
It was Danny’s voice that answered him, Danny’s crackling high-pitched fourteen-year-old kid voice who begged, “Tell Lisi, it’s me, Danny. Downtown. Tell her Downtown said that I have to talk to her.” Before he could answer me, I felt my senses shutting down and I let go, even as Danny tried to get me to stay.
*****
“Dad, he’s not any threat to me or to you,” the girl’s voice argued. “Look at him. He’s beaten to an inch of his life. He can’t even open his eyes. I saw that man kick him in the face.”
No wonder my face hurt. My neck, too. I strained to open my eyes, and saw those green ones as I reached out to her face. She let me touch her soft skin and the shock was electric. Danny said, “Felice, you are so grown up. So pretty. Beautiful.”
“Who are you and why did you tell Jake that you know Dantan?”
“Downtown,” Danny said softly. “You used to call me, Downtown.”
“Dantan’s dead,” she said harshly. “He died over four years ago. What are you trying to pull?”
I heard the chuffing of an old dog, and saw the eyes of the Golden retriever whose face was silver gray and moved stiffly as if her joints ached.
“Dusty,” I said and she came into the room, pushing aside the agents to stick her nose into my face and licked me to the astonishment of both police and the Secret Service agents. Dusty reserved her affections only for close family and definitely not strangers. She laid her head on my lap and now, Felice, gently pulled up my swollen eyelid to peer into my eye.
“His eye is blue, she whispered. “And brown. Danny, tell me, what did I want for my fourteenth birthday?”
“Space camp,” I murmured. “I remember that, Lisi. Don’t remember much.”
“The fingerprints don’t match,” James argued. “I checked. His prints come back to a Daniel Atkinson, works out of Gen-dynamics, Nebraska, a division of AgroChem. He’s twenty-four.”
“Don’t know why I came here,” I said in a faint voice.
“Listen to him,” she argued. “His voice goes back and forth from a kid to an adult. Who are you now, Danny?”
“Daniel. Sometimes, I let Danny out. Right now, Danny is letting me talk.”
“Crazy,” one of the muttered.
She said, “I have a letter from Danny that he sent me and sealed with a kiss. I’ll bet you it matches this man’s DNA. I don’t care what your lab tests show, Jake. And Dusty knows him, too. Danny, what did they do to you?”
“Felice, we need to get him to a hospital, the doc thinks he has a concussion, severe whiplash at the least, maybe even a fractured neck.”
“I’m going with him,” she said, and over their protests sat next to me in the Escalade. I didn’t remember leaving the office, the ride up in the freight elevator or the ride in. Just a few images of her leaning over my face in her lap. And someone warning her not to move my head or neck. Something stiff around it. She smelled like lilacs.
*****
Daniel, can you hear me?
“Danny? Is that you?” I asked, wondering why I hurt so badly.
Daniel, I’m afraid. I’m not in the vault anymore. I can’t hide. You hurt so badly, and I can feel it, too. Daniel, why did they beat us?
“To keep from remembering, Danny,” I told him.
Remembering me, Daniel?
“I think so. Is it safe to wake up, Danny?”
I don’t know, Daniel. I’m stuck in this dark with you.
We heard the muted noises of a hospital, the beeping of machines and voices calling for doctors, respiratory techs over an intercom system and the squeaking of nurses’ shoes. We smelled iodine and alcohol, someone’s aftershave, the rustling of clothes, and the rasp as nylon brushed against nylon.
Coffee. Flowers. Faint odor of urine and sour sickness. Opened our eyes on the diminished slice of vision. Saw the same faces that I’d seen in the basement. “Who are you people?” I asked and it came out a gurgle. My head and neck were encased in a stiff collar. I groaned as the pain made itself known. My face hurt. My belly, back, all throbbed in the same rhythm as my hands, biceps and thighs.
“We’ll give you some more morphine, Danny,” the doctor said. I could barely read his name on his white coat. Doctor Christopher Soroka, M.D. Neurology. That James guy. Felice and a man I knew well from TV and briefings. Jason Rickover, the president. No sign of Parker or the Colonel.
“Just lay still, Danny. You have a concussion, you cracked several ribs, black and blues on nearly every inch of your body. Fractured cheek bone, broken eye orbit, two black eyes, your nose is fractured and your neck. How are your hands and feet?”
“Hurts, I managed.
“Good. That means you have feeling in them. Was he trying to kill you?”
“Parker?” I asked, feeling the slow tide of a drug going in.
“Agent Ames. Yes.”
“I stole his wallet. Ditched him. Pissed him off.” I paused for breath. “Don’t think he wanted to kill me. Too valuable.”
“To the Colonel? Who are you, Daniel? Your paper trail starts four years ago, to a Daniel Atkinson, adopted son of a Mitchell Gaines. Took some digging to find that out.”
“Mitchell,” I said slowly. “He was my dad?”
“What’s wrong with you? Are you mentally ill?”
I shrugged. “I’m not sure who or what I am. Sometimes, I’m Daniel. Sometimes I’m Danny. Sometimes, I’m whoever you tell me to be.”
“Who made you this way, Daniel?”
“Doctor Cohen. Doctor Cohen and Doctor Everett. The Colonel. They tore me apart and remade me. So I could spy on people for the Colonel.”
“Spy on people? How, Daniel?”
I quoted the Colonel’s favorite saying, “I will give you dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves on the earth and through their eyes and yours, Daniel, and I will dominate this world.”