The Sand Trap (35 page)

And for the second time in her life Estella
abandoned one life and one name to start another.

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Burt fingered the scabs on his cheek as the
Captain announced the descent into Cabo airport. He looked out the
window as the plane made a slow bank over the Sea of Cortez and
wondered how anyone could make a golf course out of the desert
scrub that ran from the ocean to the mountain range that ran down
the spine of the Baja peninsula. “At least the beaches look great,”
he said to himself as he strained his neck to see how far up the
coast the endless stretch of apparently unoccupied beaches
stretched. As the plane got lower he could make out a couple of
small settlements up the coast and the occasional beachfront villa.
There were a few tourist type fishing boats cruising the shoreline.
“Well if the golf doesn’t work out I can pretend to be the old man
in the sea!" he laughed to himself. “I can just add it to the other
impersonations.” The latter thought made him lean back in his seat,
rub his sore knee and close his eyes. The reality of landing in
Mexico brought back the torrent of thoughts that came every time he
tried to make sense of the last month. The events were easier to
put together in hindsight.

It was a special hospital in Ottawa for
government, military and diplomatic personnel and their families
only, so the nursing and medical staff was used to dealing with
strange illnesses, diseases and accidents and doing it quietly,
sometimes explicitly secretly. But even for these people who had
thought that they had seen it all this was as strange case. The guy
was brought in by military transport and not by ambulance and had
been immediately transported to the most secure wing of the
hospital. Initial triage showed he was not that badly hurt.
Although his head and face were so covered in blood they could not
see what he looked like, he appeared to only have a concussion.
There was no visible wound. His left leg was a mess though.
Something, maybe a hammer or maybe he was hit by a car, had totally
destroyed and mashed his knee and his tibia was disconnected from
his femur. He was unconscious but very much alive and they
immediately started a morphine drip. He was sure to wake up with a
very bad headache. After initial triage and first aid, he was
rushed off to the secure wing where the medical staff was all
military with the highest security clearance.

As far as security staff was concerned he
was allowed only two non-medical visitors the whole time he was
there. One was a geekish looking woman in her mid-forties and the
other a pinstripe suit in his sixties. The bet between the guards
was that the guy was some sort of terrorist, but someone pointed
out that the security seemed more to keep people out rather than
him in; so that didn’t fit. They all settled on the story that he
was a defector from somewhere who was hurt in the defection process
and they were fixing him all up before sending him out into a
secret life in some part of rural Canada. They would never know how
close they were in their guess. The only others who were regulars
with John Doe -- the guards now called him John Defector – were the
team of knee surgery specialists brought in to work on the guy. A
physiotherapist followed the surgeons so it was not hard to guess
what was being done to him. The arrival of a cosmetic surgery team
verified their defector and relocation story, so those of the
security corps who bet otherwise finally paid up.

Gord was not aware of any of this conjecture
or he probably would have made his own bets. He liked a good bet.
He was still unconscious when he arrived and after extensive
examination of his brain, MRI, x-ray, and old fashioned pin light
examination through lifeless eyes, it was determined that with the
level of swelling and bleeding evident it was safest to keep him in
a medically induced coma for a period of time to see what would
happen. The brain specialists who examined him marveled at both the
impact that must have caused the damage and the good luck that left
him alive. Teams of surgeons came and went and Gord knew none of
it. If he had been able to rationalize the final and last events
before he passed out, he would likely have concluded he was dead
and this fuss was simply the mortician preparing him for the worms.
He would have been surprised when two weeks after he had arrived, a
team of doctors and his two special visitors met in his hospital
room and agreed that it was time to try and bring him back to
current events. He would have watched with interest while a doctor
squeezed a syringe full of some sort of cloudy liquid into the
access hole in the drip tube already feeding his arm.

“How long will this take?” the tall, older
man asked a youngish woman doctor.

“Well, we can stop the induced coma
immediately with adrenalin injection, but that doesn’t mean his
brain is ready to wake up. Quite frankly it may never be ready. The
brain is funny that way, doesn’t like getting knocked around.”

Richard Fairfield ignored her sarcasm.

“I asked how long?”

She returned his icy stare. “You’ll know
within a few moments if he is going to join the living.”

And everyone in the room, Richard, the
geekish lady with him, the doctor, two nurses and two military
types dressed in civvies with large bulges under their armpits and
new brush cuts, all turned to look at Gord Salmy lying peacefully
in his hospital bed.

“Fuck my head hurts!” were his first words.
“Is this hell?” he continued as his eyes focused on the crowd
around him and his eyes stopped at Richard. “Yup. Must be hell. I
knew we’d meet there one day Fairfield!”

The doctor took over and started to examine
his eyes with a light sabre. She looked quickly at the monitor on
the wall that extracted every biological measure possible from
Gord’s body. “Heart rate is a little fast. Blood pressure a little
low. All the vitals look good.”

“Fuck my head hurts,” was all Gord could
keep saying.

“For Christ sake, give him something for the
headache!” Richard ordered.

The doctor took another syringe and injected
something into the drip tube. “This will help with the pain but
could put him back to sleep, although this time I expect it will
just be a sleep and not a coma.”

“Thank you Doctor. Now I would appreciate it
if everyone left the room. You can monitor his vitals from the
nursing station and be in here in a second if anything goes wrong.
But for now my assistant and I would like to be alone with him.” He
looked over to the two military guards. “John and Assam, wait right
outside of the room please.”

Mary and Richard were left alone with
Gord.

“Head a little better?’ Mary asked with
genuine concern.

“Yeah, much … Thanks. What’s going on
Richard? Where am I? Why the band aids on my face?” His face was
totally swathed in gauze. “And why can’t I move my left leg?”

“All in good time Gord,” Richard soothed
him. “I just need to ask you some questions first. What do you
remember?”

“Of yesterday?” Gord had no idea how long he
had been out. Tears started to form at the corners of his eyes.

“Shit Richard. The fuckers killed
Monica!”

Richard looked at Mary, then back to Gord.
“Yeah. We know that much. If it is any consolation the pricks are
all dead now.”

“How …?”

Richard interrupted him. “I’ll fill you in
when you are ready. Right now we need to know what they said or
what you remember.”

Gord started his story from the time Monica
tackled him and described in detail what happened from that point
on, finishing at the whack on the head and the red vision. Richard
just nodded and encouraged him. Mary took some notes on her
iPad.

“Richard it was the maintenance man from
Korea. How is that possible? What went wrong?” Gord asked,
anguished at his memories from the event.

“And Richard …," he continued suddenly
remembering something else. “He said that they had a “nun” or
something inside our system. It was “built in” I think he said, and
they knew everything. How is that possible?”

Mary quickly left the room.

“And my stuff, my music, my equipment
Richard, I had things hidden behind that wall of equipment.”

“Don’t worry Gord. We knew about that hidden
wall and it's all safe,” he assured Gord. He watched as Gord’s
eyelids started to droop. “But that is all for now. Go to sleep and
we’ll talk tomorrow.”

Gord was asleep before Richard finished his
sentence and Richard left soon after that, leaving John and Assam
with strict orders to let no one but the medical staff into Gord’s
room. He and Mary had some work to do.

The next morning when Richard and Mary
returned to the hospital, Gord was awake and complaining loudly.
“Listen,” he was telling a very disinterested orderly. “Did you
know that this tea you serve in these no name brand bags is
actually the sweepings off the floor after the other good tea, the
kind that you should be serving, has been packaged?”

“I don’t drink tea; it all sucks,” the
orderly replied.

“I’ll bet you don’t eat oatmeal either
right? So there really is little point in me telling you that this
predigested mush you serve is of no value to any part of your
body?”

The orderly just looked at him strangely and
left the room with the empty tray.

“I can see you are feeling better?” Richard
announced their entrance.

There was no warm greeting from Gord.
“Headache is better. Knee aches. My face itches.”

“Good morning to you too Gord,” Richard
replied.

“How long will I be here? I’ve got some
things to sort out at home.”

Richard and Mary exchanged looks.

“You’ve had some surgery Gord. On your knee
and on your face. You have also had a concussion. The former two
will take a few weeks to heal and the latter maybe years, but they
want to watch you for a few weeks to see if anything is damaged
other than your personality. So you’ll be in this room for another
couple of weeks anyhow. You’ll start physio on your new knee right
away so you’ll be busy. We have some other work for you as
well.”

“New knee?” Gord asked.

“Yes. Sool’s kick totally ruined what was
left of your knee after the other hits it has taken in your life.
The surgeons built you a totally new knee. You are a real bionic
man now. Really, it’s not such a big deal anymore. People are
getting new knees, shoulders and so on. They have it pretty much
down to an art. The surgeons said you would not only be unable to
sense it was not real cartilage and bone, but probably be better
off than before. So before you ask, yes, ...your golf career is
still on track.”

Richard paused and took a DVD from his
pocket and put it in the DVD player attached to the TV. “But we’re
getting ahead of ourselves. Are you up for some of the blanks to be
filled in on what happened that night?”

“For sure. I’m more than a little curious as
to why I’m not facing cremation rather than physio. Not to mention
Monica? How did Sool know where I lived? What is a nun?”

“Ok, you can fill in your own story and
timelines but I’ll start about 6:30 that night when Mary and I met
in my office. I think I can imagine what you were doing at that
time?”

Gord blushed under the bandages.

“We received word from IT that there had
been some sort of hack into the CIDC data banks and while there
really isn’t a whole lot in our general servers that would be worth
international espionage, we weren’t certain the hackers hadn’t
gained access to our ghost server. In fact, we had the panicked
notion that the only real data worth getting was in that server. So
to be safe, I activated our special assault unit. Like you and
Monica, you have probably guessed by now, these are trained
military people who have regular jobs with DND in Ottawa but can be
called upon to do irregular things. They are very well trained
assault troops and there are only seven of them, a Colonel and six
others, active at any one time. Mary activated the squad and told
them your address while I made my own way there. We met on the road
beside the canal and looked around but couldn’t see anything
unusual. This was 6:45. Mary had located Monica’s car in the strip
mall parking lot so we went there but didn’t see anything unusual
either so went back to the house. The squad was all dressed in
civilian clothing so as not to catch attention and we spread out
over the whole block. I have to tell Ed to buy six different suits
for the crew before their next assignment. The only ones really
undetectable to anyone who was paying attention might have been the
two women in the squad who were dressed quite fashionably for a
warm Ottawa Friday evening. At any rate, when we returned to your
house I told Ed and three of the soldiers to spread out over the
block while I took the two women and one other man with me to the
front door. We still had no reason other than instinct to think
there was something wrong or you were in danger. Then as the three
of us we were walking towards the front door two Korean guys jump
out of a black Hyundai sedan parked by the curb and started to pull
pistols from under their armpits. The idiots were standing six feet
from two of Ed’s guys and they didn’t even get the guns partially
out of their jackets before they were on the ground and cuffed. Now
we were on full alert. We went into the house, the door was open
and we could hear the scuffling going on downstairs. That was
probably your little Kung Fu thing going on. One of the women
soldiers used a snake mirror to look around the stairs and into the
room. She made some hand signals to the other two and they
basically jumped down the stairs and each took out one of the three
Koreans. The woman who took out Sool hit him while his hand was in
the air over your face. I would say that a second later that hand
would have been coming out the back of your neck. So the timing was
good.”