Chapter Twenty-One
He was sitting on the couch in the dark, sipping very, very slowly from one of Sam's beer bottles. He didn't want an alcohol haze, not that one beer would do that. Mostly, he didn't want anything dulling his senses. What he needed was pain relief for his shoulder and his thigh. He figured a beer would do it. If there was an aspirin or pain reliever anywhere, he couldn't find it. Ask Fi? Bad idea times ten.
She was in bed, sleeping fitfully. It was more than just the latter stages of her pregnancy. The demons running around his brain when he slept lived with her, too. He could see the differences in her movements and tell when the boys were fussing and when demons were the disturbance in her force.
Boys. She was so utterly convinced they were boys, he'd started calling them boys, too. Was he going to argue with her? Nope. He wondered if she'd be disappointed with girls, but when it came to Fi's intuition, she was rarely wrong.
There was something that had long irritated him: the fact that she was rarely wrong.
Once she'd told someone he couldn't focus unless a multinational conspiracy was trying to ruin his life. She might be right about that, because currently he couldn't focus on anything beyond today, but he knew he needed to. Married men with pregnant wives did that, didn't they? They figured out how to support their families. Take care of them.
Michael looked at his wedding band, tapped it on the bottle, and took another sip. A wedding ring was not something a spy wore. Except Max had.
He and Fi discussed this before they were married. They told each other they wouldn't wear one; it would keep them safer. That presumed he would always be as spy and she'd run guns, didn't it? He'd hit a wall in the carefully formed belief system he developed during more than two decades of service to his country. Things changed. He had changed, hadn't he? When did that happen?
Yesterday he was a lone operator who had a on and off relationship with one woman and was estranged from his family. Today, tonight, tomorrow he was going to have his own family. He was a son, a brother, and uncle. A friend. He took another sip from the bottle and tapped his ring on the glass. From the minute Fi had put the ring on his finger, it struck him that he didn't want to take it off, and he didn't understand why, and he wanted to.
He'd started this internal journey the morning after they were married. He hadn't traveled much farther beyond recognizing being married to Fiona was the best idea he'd ever had, and he couldn't figure out how to communicate that to her.
Or live up to it.
He spun the ring on is finger. My heart, indeed. The Gaelic words had been her suggestion for their rings. Perfect words, hidden in plain sight. Fi had removed her ring because something Larry said when he was kidnapping her. He didn't know they were married. But Management knew.
He could figure that one, but had to wonder about Sam's current theory that they'd killed each other.
Michael yawned and stretched his shoulder; the plates and screws in his clavicle repair still ached. It had been a very, very long day. His thoughts were muddled and bleeding into each other. His ability to keep them neatly compartmentalized crumbled. It was annoying. Confusing. Irritating.
The scene he found this morning was confusing, too. When he went to investigate the source of the gunshots, it had taken him a few seconds to sort out who was who. He knew it was time for a shift change. The two guards sent to relieve the two who worked all night came prepared to eliminate them; their weapons had silencers.
What the two with silencers hadn't counted on was the alertness level of the other two guards. When Michael arrived, he saw them down, wounded but defending themselves. But the other two appeared to have some kind of disagreement, and had started firing on each other. When they spotted Michael, they aimed at him, but he managed to put both of them down and had disarmed them by the time the cops and EMTs arrived.
The two guards Michael injured were currently held in prison hospital, while the other two had been taken to the local hospital where Raines reported them to be in critical condition.
It wasn't until Raines, Sam and Jesse returned that Michael and Fiona learned both men were on Raines' newly decrypted list of traitorous CIA operatives and were about to be arrested.
"Someone knows you have that list," Michael told Raines. "It's not the secret you think it is. Hell, does the CIA have secrets anymore? I can't tell."
And somehow Larry was involved, Michael told him, but of course Raines disagreed with that assessment, another sticking point for Fi, Sam and Jesse.
"The guy just never goes away without a reason," Sam told him. "He's been connected this whole time. Don't you see it?"
No. Raines didn't. The fact that Larry was no where to be found was the logic Raines used to promote his view, and there had been no way to change his mind. Raines had left, disgusted with everything that had happened, intent arresting the other operatives the list had revealed.
Michael took another sip of the beer. He realized he was battle weary. He'd experienced this as a Ranger, and too often after lengthy and dangerous missions as a covert operative. As he'd come to understand in recent years, he and his brother and mother had also known the same kind of stress with his physically and emotionally abusive father.
At times, stress kept you sharp, alert to changes. Now wasn't that time.
Max had told him he was in trouble, and he knew it. He knew he was distracted. The changes in his life had come at him at warp speed starting with discovering Fiona was pregnant, and now all of this.
He had an enormous desire to set everything aside and find a desert island somewhere for himself, Fiona and their children who were about to be born. But he knew he couldn't do that, no matter tempting the idea.
He set down the bottle, mostly empty now, and joined Fiona in the bed, resting his head on one arm while wrapping his other arm around her, and pulling in close to her warmth. Her restless movements ceased, and so did his. His last thought before he drifted into sleep was to wonder how long this brief peace would last.
#
#
#
"I have two funerals to attend, and you're all capable of defending yourselves. I think. Try to stay out of trouble. I'll be back."
Raines was not happy that the team had declared themselves guard-free. And they were leaving him. "We did what you wanted, and we're done," Sam announced.
They planned to finish sorting through the files on the remaining operatives to be located, and would prioritize them before they left.
"You got a whole list of bad guys you can go after," Jesse told him. "So that means we take our lives back."
Most the operatives who had been found on the hidden files within the NOC list had been arrested in a swift, coordinated, world-wide sweep two days earlier. There were several people currently being sought, but none who had been operating in Miami, except for Management and Larry, of course. And both of them had dropped off every radar screen anywhere.
Sam promoted his theory that they'd probably killed each other, saving everyone a great deal of trouble.
"Sure, but we need to find their bodies," Raines told him. "Until that happens, they're still on our most wanted list."
Raines stalked out the door and looked like he would have slammed it except the hinge was equipped with a pneumatic closing mechanism and spoiled his fun.
Jesse reached for his sports jacket, and shrugged into it. " I need to know what's happening at my company, so I'm going, too. I'll be back before he is. You guys stay safe."
"You, too, Jess." Sam moved to the center of the room where Michael and Fiona sat on a couch, going through a stack of files piled between them. Raines had opted for the low tech approach-words on paper instead of computer screens. Once everything had been printed and delivered to him, it was a matter of sorting threats.
"This sitting and doing nothing is on my list," Fiona muttered.
"We're doing something," Michael said.
"What list?" Sam asked.
"Things she hates."
"That's gotta be a hell of a long list," Sam said as he picked up one of the files Fi discarded because the employee was already incarcerated, someone once on Management's go-to list.
"Dammit." Fi struggled to stand up, so Sam reached over and gave her a hand. "Number one!"
Sam raised an eyebrow as she headed toward the bathroom then glanced over at Mike who was smiling. "Number one?"
"Trips to the bathroom are at the top of the list of things she hates. It's a long list."
"Didn't I just say that?"
"It'll be better when the boys are born."
"You're as crazy as she is about this boy thing." Sam flipped the file down in the seat Fi had vacated. "I'm kinda worried. She sure looks a lot more pregnant than 34 weeks. Maybe it's cause she's so little."
"You've been reading that book again."
"You haven't?" Sam returned Michael's jab.
Michael looked up. "We all have. I saw Raines looking at it."
"Looking at what?" Fiona asked, but before she say another word or take another step, she grabbed the back of a chair and let a stream of air hiss between her clenched teeth.
Michael was instantly at her side. "Fi?"
"Braxton-Hicks." She inhaled slowly. "I think." She exhaled slowly. Her knuckles were white from her grip on the chair back.
"You think?" He took her arm to help her back to the couch, but she stopped.
"Just a sec. I need to . . ." Another wave of muscles tightening across her abdominal wall halted her forward motion.
Michael's voice was calm. "Fi, we need to get you to the clinic. This looks like more than Braxton Hicks."
"Not so fast . . . . Doctor . . . . Westen," Fiona said between small spasms. "We can call . . .oooh." Another spam hit.
Michael looked over at Sam. "If you can hold on and make sure she doesn't fall, I'll go get the car. Fi, we need to get you to the clinic. Your doctor said since we aren't sure when you got pregnant you might be farther along than we think. Let's not take chances, okay?"
"Over - " Fi took a breath, shuddered with the grip the contraction had on her, then started again. "Over -" She squeezed her eyes shut from the pain. Her knees seemed to weaken, so Michael put his arms around and under hers, supporting her weight. And once more she was unable to speak because the contraction rippling across her abdomen was so strong and painful. "Over-reacting, Michael," she finally said as she straightened up.
He grinned at her. "Don't think so."
Sam met Michael's worried gaze, but spoke to Fiona. "Let's not take any chances, kid. Not today."
Sam steadied her in place, but she wasn't ready to give up her steely grip on the chair. Michael crossed the room, swung open the door and stopped abruptly. Dead Larry was standing exactly in front of him with a gun pointed at his chest.
"I was just about to knock." Slowly and with great care, Michael raised his hands in the air.
"Talk about service with smile. Things are going better than I planned," Larry said. "And believe me, I've planned." He indicated Michael should turn around with a wave of his gun. "Back inside, Westen. And let me relieve you of that." When Michael turned around, Larry tugged the revolver from the holster secured at the back of his waist and pointed both hand cannons at him.
Michael slowly stepped forward.
Sam swore. "Crap."
Fiona groaned out a long breath of air at the small scene at the doorway. "Shit," she said nearly under her breath.
"That, too, sister," Sam's reply was barely audible. "You okay?"
Fiona straightened up, glanced at Sam and nodded before she took a small step back from the chair and angled her body to the doorway where Larry held Michael.
Wherever Larry had been, whatever he had been doing, Sam would have bet he was on drugs. His eyes looked wild, unusually focused, and his grin had a macabre grimness.
"Well, look here," Larry snarled. "There's the little mama, and it looks like she's just about ready to have those babies. Is my timing impeccable or what? Of course, I have you to thank for messing things up the other day." He jabbed Michael in the back with one of the guns in his hand, moving him back into the room.
He spoke slowly, with a vicious edge to each word. "Do you have any idea of how tired I am of you people? And you, especially, Michael. Every time I'm ready to move, one of you blocks my way. But that stops today. I've already had some good luck. I took care of Jesse before I got here. One down, and what? Five to go. I'm looking forward to my three-fer with Fiona. She's first, then Sam then Michael. And then I'm going to go get rid of the old mamas, and the brother and Raines. Truly, today is going to be a cleansing experience for me."
"Nothing will wash you clean, Larry," Michael said.
Larry reacted swiftly and smashed the gun butt in his right hand into Michael's skull. The blow sent him to his knees, tumbling forward, unconscious. Larry twitched his shoulders and lowered his aim to Michael. "I can always improvise."
Sam and Fiona formulated an unspoken plan in less than half of a heartbeat. She reached for her Ruger and Sam pulled his .45 from his belt, and with precision coordination, they aimed in the same instant Larry looked up to see their guns pointed at him. He raised his weapon and pulled the trigger as they fired in unison. Larry fell instantly.
So did Fiona.
"Crap!" Sam turned and dropped to his knees to check her. She was bleeding along the right side of her ribcage.
"I'm okay. It's just a nick, here on my side," she said, holding a hand against her ribs. "Check Michael."
Sam hurried over to where Larry had fallen, kicked the handguns out of his reach and knelt down to check his pulse. It was fading. Larry opened his eyes long enough to smirk at Sam. "Hope she dies." Then death overtook him.
Michael was unconscious. Sam examined his head wound, turned his body over and shook him. "Mike!" He slapped his face lightly, and shook his arm. "Mike! Come on, buddy. Come on back, Mike. Come on. Need you here, buddy. Mike!"
A few seconds later, Michael opened his eyes and attempted to focus.
"Oh, good," Sam sighed. "Come on, Mikey, we gotta get Fi and you to a . . ."
Fiona let loose a low groan of pain.
Sam left Michael and pulled his phone from his pocket and punched in 911. By the time he reached Fi, she was in a half sitting position on the floor. In puddle.
She looked up at Sam and blinked. Her eyes were huge and emerald dark as she realized what was happening. "My water just broke."
"Ah, Fi . . . come on. Dammit!"
When 911 answered, Sam rattled off his name, the building address and the problem. "We got an injured man, and an injured woman with twins going into labor, and one dead. And check the highway on the way here. There may be another man in a Porsche who's been shot or worse." He disconnected, and called to Michael who was now sitting upright, groggily rubbing his head, across the room.
"Mikey, get your butt over here. You're gonna be a daddy today."
Fiona groaned. "Real soon." She groaned again. "Real soon."
"How the hell did this happen so fast?" Sam yelled.
Fiona started to answer him but couldn't. She waited for the pain to pass before she could speak. "I don't think . . . they . . . were . . . Braxton . . . Hicks." She tugged and tried to remove her knit pants and panties, and Sam helped pull them off. Modesty took a hike because her boys were impatient.
Sam yelled at Michael who was standing, but holding on to a table for balance. "Grab some clean towels from the bathroom, and get over here, Mike. And don't fall down!"
He turned his attention back to Fiona. "Okay, I guess we're going to do this cave woman style, today. You ready? You probably don't know but I've done this before. Delivered three kids already. Not mine, if you're interested. Didn't plan . . . on more." He shoved her knit pants under her. They had to be cleaner than the floor.
Fiona rested on her elbows. "That's good," Sam said. "Stay like that. Best position for a mama. Oh, yeah . . . let's see. There's the kid . . . looks like . . . "
When Michael appeared at Fi's side, Sam pushed him in front of her and moved back. "There you go, Mikey . . . oh, yeah . . . one more push, Fi and wow. Wow. You got a boy."
Any moment a new life enters the world, there is a glimpse of all that is pure, holy and good, no matter the circumstances, and Sam knew he was as teary as his friends.
Blood was running down Michael's neck from the blow Larry had administered when he'd hit him, but he was oblivious to it when he saw Fiona. He couldn't take everything in fast enough, watching her tear-streaked face to their son emerging from her womb. "Oh, Fi . . . oh . . . Lord, I love you, woman."
He moved one of the towels under her just in time to catch his son as he was born. He held the slippery child up for her to see. "You were right."
"That's Seth," she said with satisfaction. "Seth Michael." She reached to hold him, but couldn't because another violent contraction gripped her and held on. Her fingers dug into the carpeting on both sides of her, before she took a deep breath and waited it out. Michael watched as she breathed in deeply, then out, taking another breath before the next big contraction hit her. Her face was wet with tears and pain, tears that matched his.
"There we go, there we go, Fi," Sam coaxed, "And there you go, honey, and here's your other boy. Damn, Fi. Look at that. You got twin boys, girl!"
"Justin . . . Samuel." Fi announced as Sam placed the slippery infant on his mother's belly. Fiona wrapped her hands around tiny shoulders and smoothed her hand over a tiny head. Michael was gently patting his firstborn's back, and the lad objected to the harsh cold and light beyond his mother's womb with a very loud wail.
Fiona laughed, and Michael maneuvered his crying son to Fiona's belly while taking his second born son to gently rub his back until he inhaled and exhaled with an identical wail of complaint.
It was a beautiful sound interrupted when the EMTs arrived to find one man dead in the doorway, and another two men, one of whom was injured, kneeling next to a woman who had just given birth to twin boys. They were all laughing and crying at the same time. Two EMTs moved in to assess the mother's health, and wrap her and her babies in warm, sterile blankets for transport to the hospital.
The man who identified himself as Uncle Sam, stood, wiped his hands across his eyes. The man who was bleeding from a head wound wouldn't leave his wife or infants, so they stopped arguing with him, put a self-adhesive bandage over his head wound and kept them as a family unit in the same ambulance.
When the cops arrived, Raines was right behind them.
Sam took one look at Raines before forgetting his better judgment and swung a fist that connected with his jaw, and sent him stumbling backward. When a cop stepped over to grab Sam, Raines waved him away.
"Leave him alone. That was personal. I'm sorry, Axe."
Sam rubbed his knuckles. "Jesse?"
"Injured. On the way to the hospital. I don't know more than that."
"Is it over now?"
Raines shook his head. "No. It's not."
"Crap."