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Resurface
Chapter 10
G felt too close to Hetty or maybe Hetty was too close to him. She sat on the brown leather sofa, and he sat on the brown leather recliner.
They were less than two feet from each other.
Either way, he wanted to move away from her and at the same time he needed to keep his eye on her person and purse. G feared his nightmares had more than a surreal component.
"Now then Mr. Callen, let's start from the beginning."
To his ears, Hetty sounded like a lawyer and police officer wrapped into one, and he wondered when she'd start reading him his Miranda rights.
Before he opened his mouth she spoke again. "Was this that ops where evidence went missing?"
G tried not to gawk at her. He attempted to keep his face calm and non-emotional, but he knew by the look on her face that he must've revealed something to her. "A different one." It was all he could muster and his voice had the quality of a squeaking mouse.
"Go on." She encouraged.
He cringed and found himself at a loss for words.
"G?"
"I…" He stood and rushed out of the room. Well, as fast as one could rush with a Rollator Walker. It was the fastest he had pushed the darned thing since he had gotten shot two days ago. In the master bathroom, he locked the door and stood in front of the open toilet seat, waiting for all of his breakfast to land in the toilet. Instead dry heaves wracked his body from neck to stomach. Sweat beaded up on his face and neck. It was the worst case of stage fright G suffered from in a long time.
He remembered the first time Hetty asked for a report after an ops. G stood before her and lacked the words to communicate even the simplest sentence structure. After several false starts, the words flowed freely from his mouth. Back then he had a good excuse; young and inexperienced. Right now, he understood the cause of his stage fright as well; G had stolen a nuclear device from an ops. Actually, the root of his nerves stemmed from something else he'd done. That made him feel jittery all over inside. He hoped it wouldn't present itself to the outside world yet. G needed more time to divulge his secret, but he doubted that would happen now with Hetty here.
He rinsed a washcloth in cool water and placed it over his whole face and then pushed the walker back to the living room. G lowered himself into the recliner.
Hetty stared at him. He deserved every bit of that look.
"I ripped it off from an ops and there's no justification," G said, the words finally flowing from his trembling lips. He hoped she couldn't see them moving, and he hoped she couldn't see the beads of sweat forming on his face and neck again.
"Mr. Callen!"
Yep, he deserved her outrage. After all, he had gone rogue and he promised her and his partner it would never happen again. So much for promises.
"Why on God's green Earth would you do such a thing?"
"At the time I had my reasons and now they don't seem that important." Except in one way one point had remained critical, protecting his country from potential harm.
"And those men who kidnapped you?"
"Want their device back."
She looked him over several times. "They want it back?"
"Yes, you heard me right the first time," he said, rubbing the side of his thigh where he had been shot. "It was theirs and I took it, hoping for a while they wouldn't know it was missing."
"You were undercover in their operation, if I remember correctly."
"Yes."
"And you never thought about the consequences?"
"Not once."
"I'm glad I wasn't around when this happened," Sam said.
"Yeah, I know what you would've done to me." He glanced at his partner and then down at the ottoman between them.
"What now, Mr. Callen? Have you thought about your next move?"
"I've got no next move because I never thought I'd survive their kidnapping and beatings." He now wished they killed him as they threatened to do numerous times during his incarceration in that cement hell hole. But they wanted their stuff back, as they put it, and failed to find it on their search of his home. "Heck, I had no next move after I stole the device. I just knew I couldn't let those creeps keep it and start another economic melt down of our country or the world for that matter."
"And you decided that no one could help you with this dilemma."
"What do you want Hetty? I went rogue and going rogue means going it alone. What part of going rogue don't you understand?" He never thought those words would come out of his mouth. At least his lips no longer trembled, but the sweat continued to trickle down the back of his neck onto his too-long hair, reminding him to get a hair cut soon.
"Mr. Callen!" She stood and smoothed down her black, pin-striped pant suit.
He waited for her to draw her weapon.
Hetty walked past him and clasped her hands behind her back.
G disliked that pondering pose because it meant one thing; she was drawing a weapon somewhere in her mind. Maybe this time the weapon was meant for someone else. Fat chance.
"Where's the detonator?" she asked.
"In the garage."
"Here? In your garage?"
"Yes, hidden in another safe though less accessible than the nuclear device," G said. "I had to make certain someone couldn't easily obtain it."
"You'll take me to it right now!" She pointed toward the garage.
G stood and guided the walker toward it.
Hetty took out her cellphone.
G imagined she was calling the calvary. Whether it was for him or for the nuclear device he wasn't certain. Possibly both and that spelled doom in the simplest of terms.
He stopped and faced her. "If you're calling for more man power, you'll need a backhoe," G said.
"Where in blazes is it, Mr. Callen?"
"At least ten feet under and covered with cement," he said, walking again to the garage. "I even followed the rules and obtained a permit and called the utility companies."
"So you didn't go all the way rogue." Sam snickered and matched his partner's strides.
#
G was thankful for one thing, his partner's sense of humor during his time of mental and physical crises. At first he thought Sam took sides with Hetty, but he soon learned his partner supported him. He stayed back from the backhoe as it dug up the cement in the front part of his garage.
Sam stood by his partner's side, arms folded.
G understood the stance; deep in thought about the next step they should take.
"With you out of commission, things are at a stand still for now." Sam faced his partner. "But as soon as Hetty gives the signal, you and I are gonna handle this situation dead on, no pun intended."
"I've got to say one thing to you. Thank you for not totally flipping out on me and our partnership."
"And I've got to say one thing to you. Don't ever go rogue again unless you pass it by me first." Sam winked at him.
G sighed.
When the steel bucket on the backhoe connected with something solid, the operator stopped the equipment.
Hetty was the first person to venture over to where her workers had been digging, and peer over the edge into it. "What in blazes did you bury it in?"
"An oversized gun safe," G said, looking over the edge beside her. The pit spanned twice the length and width of the container buried in it.
The NCIS construction workers lowered a ladder into the deep hole and started fitting the gun safe with a rope and pulley system.
"How heavy is it?" one of the workers asked Hetty.
She looked at her lead agent.
"I don't know, but I placed it into the ground with a backhoe."
"Seriously, G, you operated a backhoe?"
"I needed to make certain—"
"Yeah, I get it." Sam stood next to his partner.
The workers attached the pulley system to the backhoe's huge bucket. "Ready. Steady as she goes."
With the gun safe laid safely on the driveway near the house, the backhoe's operator filled the hole again.
"Looks like I'll need to resurface the whole garage and driveway again," G said. It was a cost he expected to incur eventually, but not this soon after he buried his treasure.
"Wait. That's what looked different in your backyard," Sam said. "I knew something had changed."
"Yeah, I took out a permit for repaving my driveway, thereby concealing what I actually did."
"So you were truly undercover, undercover."
"What?"
"You had two undercover ops going at once."
"Yeah, you could say that, going rogue again is how I looked at it."
"The miracle is Hetty never once caught wind of what you were doing," Sam said. "And that means—"
"Don't get any ideas, Mr. Hanna and Mr. Callen, because I'm gonna close that loophole ASAP." She admonished them both with a pointing finger, stopped, and strolled back into the house.
Thank you for reading.