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Sorry, I'm a bit late this week, but studying has held me up.
And now: Have fun! :)

Chapter 2

Back in the nurses' room, Susan simply dropped the stack of papers on a free part of the desk. Absentmindedly she noticed the hand-held telephone lying around on the desk and put it in her pocket while she went searching for a chair. Before she had even settled down, Marry, her colleague came over the few feet from her work space and asked: "So how is our new patient?"

"He's alright, just came up from IMC, pain medication works out fine and I think if food agrees well with him later on, we can already try and get him up for the first time tonight," the primary nurse summed up the situation, but her associate rolled her eyes.

"That's not what I'm talking about. I mean what is he like? How old is he? Is he cute? Do you like him?"

Now it was Susan's turn to roll her eyes. "You do know that I have a boyfriend, right?" she asked her colleague, but Marry didn't seem to care.

"Oh, yeah. That federal guy who drops by every other month or so. I don't know how you can call that a relationship," she responded ironically. "What was his name? Wagner? Weston?"

"Webster," Susan corrected and suppressed a sigh as she read through the same line for the third time. "James Webster, and he's an FBI agent, not just some federal guy."

"And a pretty boy," Marry went on, standing up to store away a stray thermometer that had been lying on the desk. "I bet you he's got a girl in every town. He'd totally have me with that smile, I tell you. If he wasn't your guy, that is."

With a sigh she was no longer able to suppress, Susan ruled out what she had just written, but that didn't make her any happier with her work and so she took a new sheet of paper, while she decided that her love-life definitely wasn't the right topic now. Or ever, for that matter. "So how is it going with you and Grant?"

"Oh just don't ask," Marry replied as if she didn't want to talk about it, but in a way that made it unmistakably clear that actually she wanted to talk about it, especially with the way she started talking then, "I'm pretty sure he's hiding something from me. Most likely he has another girl, I'm certain he has. I bet it's that impossible secretary person who's working in his office, Jaquelin or Janessa, or whatever her name is..."

With a satisfied smile Susan tuned out of the conversation and finally concentrated on her paperwork. Sometimes it was amazing just how easily some people could be kept occupied, but like most diversions, this one also only worked for a limited time, until Marry decided to switch the topic: "So is it true he's British?"

"What? Who?" Susan was startled up from her papers and didn't immediately catch the other nurse's thread.

"The new patient who came in earlier," Marry answered, coming closer and looking over Susan's shoulder. "You know, I've heard that all British guys are cute, but I've never met one."

Irritated Susan pushed away her colleague and was about to give a snappy reply, when she heard the sound of a door. Looking up through the glass front of the nurses' room, she saw the police officer leaving the room in question, which gave her a better idea. "You know what, why don't you go have a look for yourself?"

"Are you sure? I mean, I'm the one who's got a boyfriend that's actually around," Marry asked carefully, although the glitter in her eyes told that in fact she was delighted by the idea.

Susan turned around to her colleague and nearly even put down her pen. "It's about time someone checked in on him again, and you're my associate nurse today. Besides it's not as if you got anything better to do right now and I still got to finish this paperwork. Now go, before I change my mind."

"As you wish," the associate nurse said and went out of the door and down the corridor, a big smile on her face.

With a disbelieving shake of her head, Susan focused her concentration back on the paperwork, and without any further distractions, after five more minutes she was done. Satisfied she looked through all the papers again to make sure she had everything she needed, when suddenly she could hear a shrill scream echoing down the hallway.

Immediately, Susan dropped the papers and rushed out of the nurses' room. The scream was still sounding from the direction of rooms 10 through 18, and she had a bad feeling she knew exactly where it was coming from. As soon as she was around the corner, she saw the forms of the officers lying motionlessly on the floor in front of room 815. Her first impulse was to speed up, but as soon as she noticed that the door of the room was open, she slowed down and made sure she wasn't seen from inside.

A sigh of relief escaped her lips when she noticed that the two policemen and their spokeswoman were still breathing, red feathery bushes standing out on their night-blue uniform jackets indicating that they had been shot with tranquilizer darts. Out of instinct rather than anything else, Julia bent down over the nearest of them and picked his gun out of the holster he hadn't even been able to reach for. In a move that had been practiced so long she hardly had to think about it anymore, she unlocked the safety of the nine-millimeter gun and made sure it was loaded before she ducked around the corner and into the room.

The first thing Julia noticed, when she entered the room, was Marry. Right then her colleague was hard to miss, for the younger nurse was still screaming in an unbelievably shrill and high-pitched voice at the top of her lungs. Standing in the middle of the almost square room, Marry partially covered the other nurse's view onto the single bed, but Julia saw enough of it to be sure that it was empty. If not the bleeping alert signals of several machines that was almost drowned out by Marry's voice – which was an astonishing feat of the junior nurse – would have suggested it anyway.

Yet the other woman was not looking at Julia, but at a man who was almost through the door to the neighboring room, which was usually locked. Most likely it had still been locked, for instead of opening it, someone had punched a hole through it. The man was clad completely in black, with a mask over his head, and he was wearing a gun.

All of this Julia noticed before she had even finished her first step into the room. With her second step, she had aimed her gun, and once fully through the doorway she pulled the trigger twice. The first bullet hit the goon's shoulder and he dropped the gun. The second bullet hit his knee and he dropped himself.

As effectively as the shots disabled the attacker, they silenced the second nurse, for now Marry turned around to Julia, her eyes and mouth wide open with shock, but not able to control her voice anymore. But the primary nurse, currently had other concerns. The sudden silence of her colleague not only made the beeps of the machines on the empty bed seem louder, she could also hear something that might have been a shout, had it not been muffled somehow, and footsteps from the adjoining room. Thankful that that room was empty, she ran over to the door stepping over the howling figure on the floor, but before she could get a good look at what was going on, something swished past her head and forced her to duck. When she dared to raise her head, the room was empty.

"Go back to our room, lock the door and call security," Julia ordered the other nurse, as she crossed back through the room, still ignoring the injured man on the floor and the beeping of various devices. Marry hadn't changed her position in any way other than following Julia with a dazzled, incredulous stare, and it took another "Go!" from her superior nurse to make her snap out of her trance enough to run down the corridor, back to the room she had earlier come from. Julia herself took the opposite direction, following the hallway that led to the foyer and elevators, where the friends of that strange, black-clad man must have gone.

She came around the corner just in time, to see some more black figures in front of one of the elevators, and just caught a hue of something white that might have been a hospital-issue dressing gown vanishing in it. But just as she spotted them, one of them spotted her, and soon enough two of the men were coming her way. Immediately, Julia ducked back around her corner and ran. She could hear the heavy footsteps behind her, and knew that it was only a matter of time until they would catch her, and in the broad, open corridors she was an easy target.

Still, she had the home advantage, and just in time a helpful door came her way. Almost missing it with her speed, she yanked open the door to the small storage room and slipped right through. She didn't wait to see if they would follow her, but crossed the small room on top speed and went right out on the other side, into the main storage of this level. Slowing down a little, she left this larger room again, into the foyer, which was now empty.

Crossing the hall, she then opened the door to a room that actually belonged to another ward. It was an office, an office with a hardly known door, unseen from the entrance, for it was half-covered by a bookshelf. The door led to a small, now unused shower room, which had another door that led out into the other ward, but always was locked from the inside. A well-known short-cut among the hospital personnel, but almost impossible to find for anyone who didn't know it was there.

For a moment Julia just stood there, leaning against the tiled wall in the half-light of an old, uncovered light-bulb, and listened if any of her pursuers might have noticed and followed her. But all stayed silent and so she slowly relaxed a little, sliding down the wall, as her legs gave way with the fading adrenaline rush.

Sitting on the cold stone floor, she thought about what to do next. She would be safe here, for now. No one could come in here unless they had hospital keys and then they'd have to know she was here, first. But that meant that unless she wanted to risk to be either captured or shot by those men in black, she had to stay in here. She could be pretty sure that Marry had followed her advice and called hospital security, for what it was worth. Still, she had a feeling that they, and even the police they would surely call, did not stand a chance against these hostiles. And especially now that they had Benji, she couldn't just leave it to the local authorities, but to call someone she had to leave her little hiding place. Unless...

With a sigh of relief, she felt the dent in her pocket that was the bulky hand-held part of the ward's telephone. She had put it into her scrubs earlier so she didn't have to go back to the nurses' room every time it rang. With still shaking fingers she stiffly typed in the number she had learned by heart and waited for a reply.

After five beeps she started counting the seconds.

After half a minute she looked on her watch.

After forty-two seconds a computer-voice told her that the person she was calling was not available and she should try again later. Blankly Julia stared at the phone in her hands as what had seemed to be the best idea of the day suddenly vanished into thin air. She felt like she wanted to cry.

\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/

Lines of alphanumeric characters slowly scrolled over the screen, forming rows of combinations incomprehensible to anyone who didn't at least have a basic understanding in programming. And even understanding what was written there, did not yet mean one would also understand what it really meant.

Luther's problem was a bit of a different one, as he looked over the lines of code over and over again. The file this code belonged to, was the only thing on a flash-drive that had been sent to the hotel Benji had booked in Portland, to the alias the reservation had been made out to. Only Benji himself had never arrived at the hotel to pick it up. It had been sent from Bozeman, Montana, where he had started out, so most likely the Brit had sent it there himself as some sort of contingency plan, which would mean it was somehow important. Only Luther couldn't see how.

The only thing he had found there was a simple executive file that opened an elaborate but still rather pointless calculator program. It looked like the work of a bored student, especially as it was written entirely in Java, a language no good developer would ever use if he was sane, but which was very often used by beginners, simply because it was easy.

By now Luther had also begun to suspect that it might be computer generated, because the tightly packed lines of code did not seem to have any order at all, but that could as well have been a beginners mistake. In no way did it resemble anything of what he had seen of Benji's work so far, and he couldn't see just what might make this file so important, or even in any way relevant, but he had a bad feeling that he was missing something. With a sigh he decided he would have to go through it very slowly, and get some structure into this unordered mess before he could find anything, when his phone rang.

"Yes?" Luther answered more annoyed than he had wanted to, but after a one-hour flight to a boring city for a more or less fruitless search, and at least another hour of trying to make any sense of the only hint he had found, everything else was rather hard. He had contemplated not answering at all, the number did not match any of the contacts saved in his phone and he didn't recognize it either, but the area code put it somewhere on the upper west coast of the US.

That meant, it could very well be one of the others, or even Benji. And that they were calling him directly from some public phone would indicate that most likely there was some kind of trouble. But the voice that answered was not one of his fellow agents, it was a female voice, unexpectedly familiar and somewhat shaky. The speaker was not panicking, but definitely shocked. "Luther? This is Julia!"

Luther's eyes narrowed, shifting the writing on his screen out of focus. "Julia who?" he asked promptly, although he already had a suspicion. A suspicion of something that, as far as he knew, just couldn't be. But then he had seen more than a few impossible things in his time with the IMF.

"Julia Hunt," the woman replied, articulating both words carefully. But then, Luther had known that already. After all, how many other Julias were there who knew his private phone number. And yet, it had been three years. If Julia was really still alive, he surely would have heard something in that time.

"That's impossible." he replied. "Because if you are who you say you are, then I know for a fact that you are dead."

"I know. I mean..." There was a pause on the other end and Luther could hear her take a deep breath. "I can explain this, everything. But there's no time. Strange men have been here, and they took Benji. They almost got me, too, and I can't reach Ethan or ..."

"Hold on, you know where Benji is?" Luther interrupted her rapid, breathless explanation. That he finally had a lead to the other technician, and one at that, that might lead him directly to him, which was something he wouldn't even have dared dreaming off, suddenly made him not care anymore whether or not he was talking to a ghost.

"Yes, he's here." Julia replied. "Or at least was until those men came."

"Where?" the agent asked. Of course he could have easily tried to trace the call, but this was decidedly easier.

"St. Michaels Hospital, Seattle," she replied with a mental face-palm. Of course he was the only one who still didn't know where she was. "Eighth floor, surgical ward."

Luther refrained from asking just what Benji had been doing there, and instead looked up the address on his phone. "OK. Are you safe?"

"I'm in a storage room," the nurse answered, not knowing how else to describe her current situation. "It's hard to find and locked from the inside."

"Alright, hang in there. I'll be there in an hour," Luther replied, packing up his equipment. "And in the meantime you can tell me all about what has happened in detail."

\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/

Julia didn't know how much time had passed, since Luther had ended the call. In the time they had been talking, she had explained everything, starting with how Ethan had set her up in the hospital, up to the little she knew of what had happened to Benji. After that the agent had hung up. He wanted to try to reach Ethan again, who obviously was currently looking for Benji, too, and would call again for directions once he was in the clinic.

With a sigh she shifted her legs into a more comfortable position. The floor was hard and there was nothing else to sit on, but she didn't dare to leave the room, even into the more comfortable office next door. She knew that there was nothing more she could do, up until Luther arrived and tried to get her thoughts off the topic, yet they always seemed to come back to Benji and what those guys who had kidnapped him would want from him.

With an effort she forced herself to think of her other patients, trying to make a mental list of all the things that still needed to be done and putting them into an order and time-frame in which she would do them, although she knew that there would be nothing normal about this shift anymore, when she heard something outside. Instinctively she reached for the gun that was still lying next to her and pointed it a the door that was kicked in the next moment without even the effort of trying to open it manually.

Several men and women rushed into the small room, several more waiting outside. All were wearing black bulletproof vests with either Police or FBI written on, and armed with handguns or assault rifles. Overwhelmed, Julia slowly lowered her own weapon, when she heard a familiar voice from the back of the crowd. "Sue?"

Surprised the nurse looked in the direction where the voice had come from. Only a handful of people used that abbreviation of her cover name and one of them was Peter Mason, head of the clinic's security staff, who was now working his way towards her. Although with his slightly over six feet of height he was gradually blocking her view on the others, she could now also identify a couple of his people in the black vests. "Are you alright? What happened? What are you doing here? And where did you get that gun?"

Still slightly too perplexed to answer any of those questions right away, Julia still tried to sort her reply into a coherent order, when Mason was interrupted by a woman in an FBI vest who was obviously in charge. With a nod, she ordered the other men out, which immediately made the room less crowded, before she gently pushed the upset man aside. "Sir, I think you should give the lady some room."

The FBI agent had a fluffy blond ponytail and a soft, yet determined voice, and once Mason had reluctantly stepped aside, she turned a friendly, but professional face at the nurse, who was still sitting on the floor. "Susan Tremaine, I presume?" she asked, kneeling down to get more level. When the other woman nodded, she continued, "I'm Rachel Parker from the FBI. Mr. Mason called the police, who informed us and we are handling the situation now."

Slowly the nurse nodded again, understandingly. She didn't know if that really improved the general situation, but at least the FBI was better than any local police.

Carefully Rachel stretched out her hand. "Would you please give me your gun?" she asked next, and when Julia did not immediately react, she added, "You're going to be safe now. We're going to take care of you."

For a moment the nurse hesitated, but then she didn't see any reason why she should keep it any longer and handed it to Parker, who secured it and handed it off into the background. "Good," she said, still in that kind of motherly voice, as if talking to some violent crackpot, but then she got a little more comradely. "Do you think you can stand up?"

"Yes," Julia replied getting up silently but more steadily than she had expected, although she noticed only then that her legs were shaking. With a friendly and slightly admiring smile, Special Agent Parker led her out of the small room and through the office into the hall. Someone threw a blanket over her shoulder, and she gratefully accepted it, although she was not entirely sure if she needed it. At the very least it gave her something to hold onto.

Passing through the office, she caught a concerned glance from Peter Mason. "Don't worry, Pete. I'm alright," she tried to assure him with a small smile, and when that didn't seem to help, she truthfully added, "I've been through worse."

Mason, who together with the chief surgeon was one of the very few people who knew about her past, at least in so far that she had been in Witness Protection, only looked more concerned, while a lot of other men and women around her gave her weird glances. She didn't care. Julia knew that she had been through worse. And she had gotten out of it. If nothing else, this statement had been to reassure herself.

\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/

The silent click of a demonstratively loaded gun had been hardly audible above their heated conversation, yet the agents' trained ears easily picked it up among the background noise. Slowly Declan turned around, and Ethan followed his example, holding his gun low in the least threatening way possible, but without any intention of putting it down.

Behind them two tall men and one equally tall and very sturdy woman blocked the entrance, while another man and woman moved over to the stairs, effectively blocking them in. Each was armed with a .9 semi-automatic. The agents gave each other a quick glance, but although they were slightly surprised, with an underlying tension of readiness, the edge in Ethan's voice was something more like annoyance. "And who might you be?"

"Where is the disc?" One of the men at the door took a step forward, without lowering his weapon.

Ethan raised one eyebrow in a half-mocking gesture. "I don't know what you're talking about."

"The list," the goon pressed on, moving forward another step. He was over a head taller than the agent, so the barrel of his gun was now aimed point blank at Ethan's face.

Hunt gave it a short cross-eyed look. "I don't know about any disc. And I don't know about any list," he said calmly, then glanced at his partner. "Do you?"

"Nope," the Irishman said just as calmly.

The man made a noise that resembled something like a snarl. "Give me the list," he repeated, articulating the order word by word. The goon thumbed off the security on his gun, and both agents tensed simultaneously. There was a hardly visible nod from Ethan, before he suddenly lunged forward, dodging the gun and ramming his shoulder into the spokesman. Once past him, he took aim on the two still guarding the door.

Declan reacted almost in the same instant, pulling the gun from the guy who had spoken, even before Ethan was past him, and turned on the ones at the stairs. Yet he hadn't been as quick as he had hoped. A bullet grazed his left arm, before he could take aim properly, and what he had hoped to handle with two clean shots turned a bit messy, but before either of his adversaries had a chance to land another hit they were both properly taken care of.

Ethan had disposed of the two goons at the door much in the same way, and walked back to their spokesman. The man had managed to get back onto his two feet, but before he could launch any kind of counter-attack, Ethan's fist sent him straight back to the floor. "Now I'm going to ask you a question," he said, setting one foot onto the goon's chest and aiming his gun straight at his face. "Where is the hard-drive?"

The man bared his teeth in an ugly grin and Ethan put a bit more weight onto his right foot, when the sound of a door distracted him. Looking for where the sound had come from, both agents realized there was a back door behind the bar. And the bartender was gone.