Painless (8 page)

Chapter 15

In the wee morning hours of September 12, a black stretch limousine drove out of the gates of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. The car carried one passenger—U.S. Director of National Intelligence Kerry Rutherford. The silver haired sixty-one-year-old rubbed his wrinkling temples—it had been a long night.

As the September 11 anniversary passed like a ship in the night, sighs of relief could be heard from the many cabinet members who were pulling an all-nighter in the Situation Room. But a lone day without American bloodshed wouldn’t lift the weight from Rutherford’s shoulders. He knew the shadowy terrorists weren’t as concerned with the symbolism of that date as the politicians were. They wanted to color every day of the calendar the color of Western blood. And when the mushroom cloud filled the sky above New York or Los Angeles, there would be a new date on the calendar to mourn.

As if the anniversary of 9/11 weren’t enough motivation, the execution of the Iranian hostages had put the president and his cabinet on high alert. The chatter in intelligence circles consisted of everything from contamination of the water supply to infecting cows with a deadly disease, along with the usual suspects: bridges, tunnels, and nuclear reactors. But Rutherford knew the biggest concern for the politicians in the room was an election only fourteen months away.

He didn’t believe they were bad people who were apathetic to human life. He just felt they were in way over their heads. Rutherford worked under numerous presidents and politicians in his rise from a young marine intelligence officer in Vietnam to the head of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), an influential US intelligence agency run by the Department of Defense and stationed in the Pentagon. With the CIA usually getting the headlines, the DIA often operated under the radar.

To Rutherford, this president was no different than the others he had served. The current “leader of the free world” happened to be a left-leaning Democrat, but Rutherford had learned that all politicians were made from the same cloth, no matter where they fell on the political spectrum. The Republicans tended to spend more money on defense, but in the end, all politicians were tied to the special interests and started seeking re-election before they even got elected. Rutherford didn’t want to get elected; his goal was to save lives.

So another day passed without incident in the most thankless of all thankless jobs. No credit for doing well, but ultimate blame when things went wrong. And in his job, wrong was measured in body bags. But despite the drawbacks, Rutherford didn’t hesitate when asked to take the job of intelligence czar. He had just left his job as head of the DIA and was pondering retirement from public life. But he took it because he felt it was his duty to serve the president when asked. To quote his hero, Nathan Hale, his only regret was having only one life to give for his country.

But any goodwill for surviving the arbitrary September 11 deadline ended around the break of dawn. As the sun rose over the Potomac, word came down of impending congressional hearings regarding the Iran hostage incident, with Rutherford being the star witness. Senator Oliver LaRoche from Pennsylvania, the president’s chief adversary and biggest roadblock to his re-election, would chair the hearings.

Fearing LaRoche’s grandstanding, Rutherford was peppered with questions by the nervous cabinet. But he didn’t answer truthfully. In the intelligence world, telling the truth was not a virtue—it was a sure way of getting people killed.

They maneuvered through morning D.C. traffic, eventually crossing over the Potomac River and arriving at the entrance of Arlington National Cemetery.

“I’ll be about an hour, Benny,” Rutherford told his driver. He then began his daily trek to pay homage to some old friends, which he made every morning when he was in the D.C. area.

Upon departing the car, he meticulously fixed his suit. A career military man, he was always punctual and his uniform in perfect order. He was more comfortable in his military uniform than the dark “civilian” suit he wore this morning.

The morning was warm and muggy, with rain expected later in the day. He struggled to walk the rolling hills of the cemetery, passing an endless ocean of white crosses. Crosses representing sacrifice. He felt sweat seeping through the back of his suit jacket and his aging knees creaked, but he pushed on.

Unlike most tourists, he walked past the eternal flame of John F. Kennedy without a glance. He wasn’t here for politicians. He avoided the trip to view the changing of the guard at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. The soldiers he came to visit were very much known to him.

He laid patriotic ribbons on the scattered gravesites of those from his Vietnam unit, just as he did during each visit, including his best friend Greg Ponson, who died in the arms of the doctor who saved his own life during the Tet Offensive in 1968.

Rutherford then moved to Section-59, where twenty-one fallen comrades were buried. They made up a portion of the over two hundred US military personnel killed at the hands of terrorists on October 23, 1983, in Beirut, an event for which he still felt responsible, and which had shaped his views for the last twenty-plus years. He read the names—Corporal Angellini 1962-1983, Sergeant Laird 1954-1983, First Lieutenant Brewer 1960-1983, Javier R. Heredia, #m-3 United States Navy 1958-1983. And so on, twenty-one times. Kerry Rutherford saluted the men, remembering it like it was yesterday. Tears leaked out from underneath his sunglasses. He wiped them away as if he were wiping away perspiration.

It was just after six a.m. on that fateful October morning in 1983 when a large delivery truck drove to the Beirut International Airport, which also contained the US Marine barracks. After turning onto an access road leading to the campus, the driver rushed through a barbed-wire fence, passed between two sentry posts, and then crashed through the gate to deliver a direct hit on the lobby of the barracks. The driver detonated the explosives and the four-story building crumbled to the ground, crushing numerous US servicemen while they were sleeping.

Kerry Rutherford was a DIA intelligence officer in the region and believed that the agency was also asleep, although not in a literal way. He felt they should have been awake to the danger, but politicians and bureaucrats didn’t allow them to do their job to the best of their ability. If they had, then maybe they would’ve recognized the complexity of the enemy the US now faced, one willing to trade lives in return for a carton of Western blood. It foreshadowed the modern day quandary: how does a civilization fight an enemy who is willing to sacrifice their own lives for the cause, when its own society has embraced a culture where such a sacrifice of life is unacceptable? Rutherford was convinced if the storming of the beaches at Normandy occurred in today’s society, there’d be protestors in the streets. Newscasts would promote body counts, declaring it a failure, and demanding that Roosevelt pull out.

He knew America would have to create its own clandestine fighting force to match this new enemy. Much sacrifice would be necessary, and failure was not an option. Operation Anesthesia would come to symbolize that sacrifice.

But he now concluded that Anesthesia had run its course. He knew that being exposed, which the Iran hostage debacle almost did, would ruin all the work they had done the last twenty years for the greater good.

Chapter 16

Billy thought they had crossed all the t’s and dotted all the i’s last night concerning his gig as Carolyn’s babysitter, which began Monday morning. But he grossly underestimated the neurosis of Beth Whitcomb.

The house was littered with notes like a Post-it bomb had detonated. He spotted the first note on the kitchen counter. It provided instructions concerning Carolyn’s pain medication for her tongue. Another hung inside the refrigerator, banning solid food, and providing a choice of applesauce, pudding, and strawberry milk, which Billy was sure wouldn’t disappoint her. In the breakfast nook was a note reminding him to check her for fevers every half hour. The largest of the memorandums was taped on the front door. It stated in threatening language that they were
under no circumstances
to miss, or be late for, the long overdue ceremony to spread Beverly’s ashes over the Long Island Sound, which was to begin at seven o’clock sharp. It was going to be a long day.

Billy’s first challenge was to get the notoriously deep sleeper out of bed. As always, she began the night in the airport hanger disguised as her bedroom, but after her first dream about dragons she was planted neatly between her parents in their bed. The room was usually full of sunlight from its surrounding windows, which provided a greenhouse effect. But with drapes drawn, Billy entered into darkness.

He softly shook her, not even receiving a budge. Just a slight whistling snore between the toothless window in the front of her mouth, exposing the healing, but still gruesome, battle-scars on her tongue.

Mesmerized by the tongue, Billy sat beside the sleeping girl. He was no child psychologist by any means, but knew that people mutilated themselves in an attempt to fill a painful void. So why would such a carefree, happy child commit such an act?

He never gave any credence to Beth’s genetic hand-me-down theory, which she sadly clung to. He also doubted that Carolyn ever witnessed Beth hurting herself, resulting in a copycat crime. He did believe Beth when she said she stopped any self-destructive behavior the day the Healing Angel of Pain allegedly talked to her. The only other motivation he could think of was attention. But he doubted the charismatic kid would need to go to such extremes to have the class in the palm of her hand. Nothing added up. She was a happy child—she had no painful void.

Lacking answers, he stood and checked a few more notes, one reminding him to bring Carolyn’s raincoat because of a “40% chance of rain” later in the afternoon. He then turned his attention back to Carolyn, trying to be firmer. “C’mon, sleepy head, time to get up.”

Her eyes opened for a brief moment, before drifting back into her soothing coma.

Billy went to Plan B. He walked to the large drapes that acted as an impenetrable fort from the bright morning sunlight. He pulled them open in one sweeping motion. Sun barreled into the room and it sure didn’t look like a 40% chance of rain. Carolyn turned onto her stomach in disgust and planted her face into the pillow.

“C’mon, sleepy head,” he said again.

She defiantly pulled her pillow over her head.

Still thinking about her tongue, a strange thought popped into his head. He remembered Chuck telling him how she never complained about the deep eye abrasion. He remembered her giggle after the heavy bookcase split her head open. Billy was numb on the inside, so maybe Carolyn was numb on the outside. His fiction-writing mind then ran wild. Could she be an alien? A superhero? Beth did refer to her as an angel. This girl couldn’t feel anything!

He reached his hand to her small leg. Her head was still under the pillow. He pinched as hard as he could.

Carolyn turned over immediately like she’d been shot. Her hair was a tangled mess and she rubbed sleep from her eyes.

Billy laughed at his paranoia.
She felt me, but I’m not gonna apologize for having a good imagination.

“It’s about time, sleepyhead.”

She rubbed more sleep out of her eyes. “Hey, I’m not a morning person.”

Her clothing was laid out on a chair in orderly fashion. There was a pair of child-size jeans, mini-sneakers with flashing lights, and a light sweater that featured a large picture of a cow on the front. It was…

“That’s ugly,” Carolyn said with a cringe.

Billy agreed, but the note indicated that Evelyn had knitted the sweater for Carolyn’s birthday as part of the barnyard series she’d been creating. So there was no way around it, the sweater was mandatory.

Carolyn negotiated to tie the sweater around her waist until the ceremony, and just wear a T-shirt during the day. She won the first battle in what Billy assumed would be many throughout the day. Her T-shirt of choice had a red maple leaf on the front with the caption,
Canadian Kids R Cool
. Billy then tried to help brush her tangled hair. Carolyn got frustrated with his ineptness, and asserted, “I’m a big girl,” before taking matters into her own hands. She clipped on a barrette and made herself look better than Billy ever could have.

When she finished, a curious look formed on her face. She realized her normal morning pattern had been amended. Her face scrunched as she asked, “Where’s my mom?”

“She’s at school.”

Face scrunched again. “Where’s my dad?”

“Hunting.”

 “It’s just you and me?”

“Yes.”

Glee swallowed up her scrunch. “We’re gonna haff fun!”

They moved into the kitchen area. Carolyn sat in the breakfast nook and glugged down a glass of strawberry milk. She needed tongue-friendly food, so Billy made his morning special—Cream of Wheat with chocolate chips melted in. Carolyn wasn’t sure what to make of it, but followed Billy’s lead. She stirred it and the white Cream of Wheat turned chocolaty brown. He then made a moat around the outside and filled it with strawberry milk. The final touch was to sprinkle sugar on the center island like he was spreading fertilizer. He warned her it was hot, especially with her tongue recently sewn back together, but she threw caution to the wind and dug in. Billy burned his own tongue on it. With a half-smile, he shook his head at her fearlessness.