THE 13: STAND BOOK TWO (3 page)

Suddenly, she realized what was happening.
Oh, my goodness! I’m in a hospital. I’m unconscious. They think I’m dead. Am I in a coma? What if they disconnect the life support? Can I breathe on my own?

She began to panic. She hadn’t come through everything in her life just to end up dying at the hands of a stupid hospital administrator. She focused harder than any time in her entire life. She had to let them know she was in here. She couldn’t let them just throw her away.

She felt the man’s hand slide down her arm and grasp her hand. She cleared her mind. She relaxed and felt the rise and fall of her breathing. She placed every conscious thought she had on her fingers. And then she told herself,
Squeeze!
Nothing. She did it again.
Squeeze!
She tried to empty her thoughts and just focus on her fingers.

The man had been talking to her. Saying good-bye. She could hear, and sense, that the man was upset. She needed to do this.
Squeeze! NOW! SQUEEZE!

Suddenly, the man stopped talking and jerked his hand away.

“Hello? Di–did you just…,” the man stammered. “Did you just squeeze my finger? Hello? Are you in there? Please! Please, wake up.”

Slowly, she felt the control coming back to her. She could tell, now, that she was moving her fingers.

“Ha-ha! You did! Director Hassan! Come quickly.”

She was moving her hand freely now. And she could hear the gathering of several people around her.

“She squeezed my hand, Rashid.”

“Dr. Naser, we really don’t have time for these antics.”

Antics! Was this guy kidding? It took everything she had to make her hands move. Who was this guy? And who put him in charge? And why couldn’t she open her eyes? How did she get here? What was going on?

“I told you, Rashid,” her advocate said. “I told you she wasn’t a lost cause! She’s alive!”

She really didn’t know what was going on. But one thing was for sure. She wasn’t about to sit here and have two Arabic men arguing over whether or not she was dead. She had made her fingers move; the rest was sure to follow. She tried to focus again. It was still all black.
That’s okay. I’ve been in worse places
, she said to herself.

She tried to concentrate with everything she had.
Open your eyes…
.
Open your eyes….OPEN YOUR EYES!

She felt her lids flutter. They felt so heavy.
Do it!
she screamed at herself.

At first, it felt like she was looking directly into the sun. The light was so bright it was painful. She blinked a few times and tried to bring everything into focus. After a few seconds, she began to make out shapes. People. Lots of them. At least ten. Slowly, little by little, the shapes took form and she saw faces. Doctors and nurses. But how did she get here? And why was she even here in the first place?

And then it all started to flood back. The car. The wreck. She had tried to fight back. But it was bad. Real bad. She remembered…she remembered…that she had died.

“Hello.” It was the voice called Naser. She recognized it.

She tilted her head to face the voice. A young, attractive man was kneeling beside her. He had a white lab coat on with a stethoscope hanging around his neck.

“I’m Doctor Farid Naser. I have been taking care of you.”

She tried to sit up a little. But her head started swimming instantly.

“No, no, no…lie still,” Naser instructed. “Everything is going to be okay. Can you talk?”

She tried to open her mouth and speak, but only a guttural, dry sound came out.

“Here,” Naser said, tilting a small cup of water to her lips.

She sipped at first. But after a few seconds, her throat opened up and she began to drink the water in gulps.

“Easy,” Naser said, smiling. “You’ve been away for quite a while.”

She drank the cup dry and licked her lips. She felt like a plant that had been dying in the dry desert heat that had finally been watered. She took a deep breath and said, “More.”

Naser reached over to the small table sitting beside her and filled the cup from a pitcher there. She drank two more cups before nodding she was finished.

Naser sat back and looked to the others who were standing by. “See? I told you!”

An older man, the one Naser had spoken to, stepped forward. “Hello, miss. I’m Doctor Hassan, chief of medical operations and director here at American Hospital, Dubai. Can you tell me…do you remember anything? Do you know how you got here? Can you remember your name?”

She thought for a moment. She still couldn’t remember everything. It was all sketchy. But one thing was for sure. She didn’t need to tell these people a lot.

“Can you remember anything at all?” It was Naser. “Your name? Anything?”

She could. Slowly, it was all coming back to her. She wasn’t going to offer anything important. But she figured she could at least tell them a name.

“My name’s Alex. Alex Smith.”

M
egan Taylor rubbed her eyes and tried to focus. Her breath was coming in rapid, short gasps. Sweat poured from her forehead. Her skin felt clammy and cold—just like it did every time she had the dream. Which lately had been every night. Sometimes two or three times a night. She tried to calm herself and stay her breathing. But the tears started. Just like they always did.

The dream was always the same—she had found Keene in the prison camp. She didn’t know how she got there, or where it was. But she was there. Outside the barbed-wire perimeter. And she could see Keene, standing in the middle of the courtyard. And Chin was there—standing in front of Keene, holding a gun to his head. From there, everything always happened in slow motion. She would reach for her gun, but it would get caught in her holster. Then Chin would turn around and look at her. Keene would yell to her.
“Shoot him!
”

But she couldn’t get the gun out. Then Chin would turn back to Keene, laughing, and squeeze the trigger. The gun would go off in his hand like a cannon. And Keene’s lifeless body would slump to the ground.

She’d been having the dream now for almost a month. Ever since President Walker and Director Jennings had made the call to let him go.

“We can’t spend valuable resources, any longer, trying to find him,” Walker had said.

The decision had come down the morning after Walker’s address to the nation—in which he had announced the cease-fire agreement only a few weeks after China’s attack.

Jennings had argued vehemently with the president about Keene. But in the end, Jennings had conceded the president was right. The country was in a fragile, vulnerable condition right now. They needed to focus on how to move forward. And with Walker refusing to launch a counterattack on American soil, General Chin had agreed to negotiate new borders.

And why not? They had what they came for. The United States had been sitting on one of the greatest oil reserves in the world. And still, with Congress refusing to drill, coupled with the fact that China had become the leader in world oil consumption over the last fifteen years, the Chinese could not afford to let such a great resource go unused. Add that to the fact that the United States had borrowed almost seventy-three cents of every dollar they spent from China and it was only a matter of time before something like this happened.

The Prophet had tried to warn them. Hadn’t he? He told them God wanted them to change. He said America had gotten so far away from what it once was that God was displeased and was going to give the nation over to someone else.

Now, here they were, a nation—if you could still call it that—occupied mostly by China, trying to figure out how to move forward. The Prophet was still nowhere to be found. And the government had abandoned Jon Keene.

She kicked the covers away from her and swung her legs over the side of the bed. She took a couple of deep breaths and forced herself out of bed. She checked the clock on the dresser and let out a long, exasperated sigh. It was going to be another long day.

Halfway to the bathroom she heard the buzzing of the sat-phone on the bedside table. She thought about just letting it go. But then she rationalized,
Who in the world would call at four thirty in the morning?

“This is Taylor.”

“You up?” It was Director Jennings.

“I am now.”

“Get in here. I just heard from Jon.”

M
ilton Hayes closed the door to his office inside the North Carolina State Supreme Courthouse. He had always, even before the invasion, been the first person in the building. Five thirty every morning for more than twenty years.

After taking off his robe and hanging it on the wire hanger beside the door, he sat down at his desk, picking at the stack of briefs that had been there for a few weeks now—though he had no idea why he was even bothering. Since the invasion by the Chinese, the entire country’s judicial system was a complete and total mess. But the president had demanded that state and local governments get back to “business as usual,” as he had put it. As if nothing had happened.
What an imbecile
, he thought. Did the man not see that the entire country was still walking on pins and needles, waiting to see what was coming next?

But America was resilient, if nothing else. It was now almost five months since the attack, and the country was showing the beginning signs of pulling together. Domestic crime was almost nonexistent. The economy was showing marks of stability. Americans—
being gullible once again
, he thought—were buying into this notion that the Chinese had what they came for and weren’t going to continue to push forward. As if, magically, everything was just going to go back to the way it was.

Still, companies were trying to restructure. People were returning to their jobs. Banks were scrambling to work with other international banking systems to get the money flow back on track. It was still a huge mess. And it was probably going to take several months—perhaps even years—to get back to some sense of normalcy. But regardless of how long it took, when everything settled, the Chinese were now going to be the world’s foremost superpower. And that didn’t sit well with North Carolina Supreme Court Chief Justice Milton Hayes.

He pushed the stack of papers aside and reached for the clunky office phone.
Funny
, he thought. A typical American conversation used to be,
What would we do without our cell phones?
Well, now they knew. Cell phone communications had been completely destroyed with the attacks. The Chinese had targeted cell towers all over the Midwest, as they entered the country. Cell companies were working tirelessly, trying to reroute communications so that the infrastructure would bypass the destroyed towers and utilize only those in the east that were working. “
It’s a technical nightmare,”
a spokesperson for one of the main carriers had said. They hoped they could have things somewhat normal—provided there were no further aggressions from the Chinese—in the next six months. Until then, back from the brink of extinction, Ma Bell was back at the top of her class. Landlines were being reinstated and used again. Since most of the technology had consisted of large fiber-optic lines that were buried beneath ground, it had been relatively easy to get them back up and running.
Funny
, Hayes thought,
my granddad was right. There is beauty in simplicity
.

He picked up the receiver and punched the numbers. There was some buzzing then a series of clicks—though they were working, the landlines still had some issues. Finally, he heard the ringing on the other end.

“Yeah?”

“Gavin, it’s me. Everything set?”

“Yep.”

“You want to drive?” Hayes asked. “Or do you want me to have my driver take us?”

“No sense in bringing someone who doesn’t need to be there. I’ll drive. Where you gonna be?”

“I’m at the courthouse now. We’re supposed to hear a couple cases today, but I doubt counsel will even show up. They haven’t all week.”

“It ain’t gonna get any better, Milton. Not until something changes.”

“Yeah.” Hayes sighed into the phone.

“People are scared, man. They still don’t know if we’re coming or going. That degenerate in the White House is laying down, man! He’s nothing but a yellow-belly.”

“Well, then, we had better be convincing, huh?”

“Don’t you worry about me. What I’m offering is pretty convincing. You just make sure you can sell it from a legal and judicial standpoint.”

Hayes bit the tips of his fingernails. What he and Gavin Pemberton were doing could get them killed. But he couldn’t stand by and watch his country just lie down and die. He wouldn’t. “I can sell it.”

“Good. Then I’ll see you in an hour.”

K
eene was cold. Freezing, actually. He opened his eyes and took in the scene around him. Dark room. He was in a bed, and there was something sticking out of his wrist. An IV. He traced the small tube with his eyes from his arm to the drip-bag hanging on the metal frame beside the bed. He was here alone. But where was here?

The last thing he remembered was sitting on the floor of his cell. They had finally broken him.

After he and his team had taken out the nuclear device that was meant for Washington, he had followed General Chin to a remote farmhouse somewhere just across the Canadian border. But he had been careless. Chin got the drop on him. He had been knocked out and taken to a prison camp.

Outside of being in a prison camp, he hadn’t known where he was. But at least he knew that he and his men had stopped the invasion. That was enough for him, then. Past that, the only thing he could remember was that they came for him. Regularly. For weeks on end. They would beat him until he was almost unconscious. Then they would send a medical staff in to tend to him, until he was well enough to be beaten again.

He had been brought to his wits’ end—the once hard-core, black ops operative, turned CIA agent. He had been reduced to a broken shell of the man he once was. He remembered wanting to just die. And he had asked God to let him die.