Chapter Thirty-Four

As Trapper sat on the edge of the bed listening to Leah's heart, the Colonel came in quietly without being noticed and observed.

Agatha turned with the bottle of medicine she had prepared in her hand and almost dropped it.

Gaddafi bowed his head. "I apologize for your fright."

Stiffening, Trapper looked down at Leah and almost imperceptibly shook his head. Removing the ear pieces of his stethoscope from his ears, he felt her forehead.

Leah closed her eyes, letting the touch of his hand spark her memories of their last night together, giving her the hope she had almost lost.

"Your heartbeat is still a bit fast." When Agatha touched his shoulder, he turned and took the medicine and a spoon from her. "But I think it may be something you ate, rather than a problem with your heart." He looked at the monitor, and feigned surprise at Gaddafi's presence. "Miss Haverty, this medicine should settle your stomach. I suggest you be more particular about your meal choices."

She smiled, allowing her eyes to flutter for the Colonel's benefit. "I don't get a menu. Just a plate…or a bowl."

"Dr. Boudreau, are you saying her diet is the cause of this?" asked Gaddafi.

After putting a spoon of the medicine in her mouth, Trapper stood and turned to the Colonel. "I have no idea what she's been fed, but it's not settling. Libyan cuisine is not bland by any means, and those who aren't used to it sometimes have problems."

"What would you suggest, Doctor?"

"A mildly seasoned soup for a day or two, and then perhaps bread and meat without any kind of sauce. And fresh vegetables."

Gaddafi turned to his daughter who had accompanied him. "See to it Marwa." The young woman bowed. "And what have your machines told you about her heart?"

"Other than a slightly elevated heart rate, it tells me that she's all right…for now. But without knowing her history beyond the heart transplant, I can't say."

"History?" asked Gaddafi, slightly turning his head. "What other history?"

"Well, it would be helpful to know if she's had any problems since the heart transplant. If she had mild rejection at the start or if she's required follow up surgery to repair any problems with the arteries leading to the heart. It's not uncommon."

Gaddafi nodded. "We have none of her medical history."

"Then I would like to come back every other day or so to check her condition. When she feels like talking, I'd like to ask her a few questions about her medical history."

"Dr. Reynard called you by another name." Turning his head slightly and narrowing his eyes, Gaddifi said, "Trapper, I believe it was. How did you come to have another name, Doctor?"

Scratching his head, Trapper managed a smile. "It's a nickname and easier to say than Dr. Boudreau, so I usually ask people to call me Trapper. It actually started as rather derogatory. You see, in Canada, we hunt…elk, moose, deer, bear. I don't use a gun to kill them. I trap them."

"Why do you not use a gun?" asked Gaddafi, seeming genuinely interested.

"I don't like guns, Colonel. They do a great deal of damage to tissue whether it's animal or human. Besides that, they can do a great deal of damage to pelts and hides. No one wants a pelt with holes in it."

Gaddafi looked him up and down, then quickly nodded. "I will arrange for you to stay."

Trapper's jaw dropped, but he quickly recovered it. "I mean no disrespect Colonel, but I came here to provide medical services to all the people of Libya, especially those local to Tripoli, not one American woman who should be in her own home in her own bed." Trapper backtracked at Gaddafi's stone-like expression. "She's in no danger of losing her life, however, I have patients in town who are. I will stay to get her back on her feet, but beyond that, Colonel, Dr. Reynard is expecting me back to help in the clinic."

"You will come back."

Trapper chuckled. "Of course. House calls come with the territory. And I don't need an escort."

Gaddafi's suspicious expression had not changed. "Why are you doing this?"

Moving his hands to his hips, Trapper put a little pepper in his reply. "I'm a doctor. I'm here to heal people, regardless of whether they live in a house, on a street, in barracks," he said, nodding toward the guard. He motioned around him. "Or in a compound."

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Frazier elbowed Delgado at the same time he ducked. "We've got company."

Both men pulled their equipment to the floor of the van, covered it and themselves with an assortment of textiles, and lay still. They felt the van shake as someone pulled hard on the door handle.

"Did you lock it?" Delgado whispered.

Though Eliseo couldn't see, Frazier rolled his eyes. "I'm not even going to answer that."

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Trapper noticed that Agatha had been paying particularly close attention to the monitors while Gaddafi visited. "Excuse me, Doctor, but you should look at the monitor."

Looking back at Gaddafi, Trapper said, "Excuse me," and went back to the monitors, where he and Agatha put their heads together, pointing at the moving lines on the monitor. "Frazier says you have to stay here," whispered Aggie. "The US government knows you're in Tripoli. They're looking for you."

"You're right, Agatha." He grabbed his stethoscope and listened to Leah's chest, flaring his nostrils at her questioning eyes. "Cough," he mouthed.

Leah did as she was told, but what started as a mild hack turned into an all out choke which sent the alarms on the monitors beeping all at once. It took a few moments and a glass of water to get it under control.

"Colonel, is your offer of a room still good?" asked Trapper. He turned to the Colonel. "She just went into AFib." When the Colonel lifted an eyebrow, Trapper explained. "It's call atrial fibrillation. It's arrhythmia…an irregular heartbeat that can cause blood clots, stroke or other problems. These problems she's been having…nausea, light-headedness, weakness…they're all symptoms."

"Why didn't you know this before?" Gaddafi demanded.

"Because she had gone back into normal rhythm," said Trapper, moving the bell of his stethoscope back to her chest. "This is the first we've seen of it, but it warrants my attention."

"I will have your assistant escorted back to your clinic. Marwa can assist you as you need."

Trapper's eyes shot up to Aggie's. They shared a nervous stare before Trapper snatched the sheet of paper with the recipe for Leah's stomach medicine out of Aggie's hand and walked over to Gaddafi. "Can she read this?"

Gaddafi looked at the paper and passed it to Marwa. "This is not written in a language I know," Marwa said.

"No, it's not," said Trapper, gently taking the paper from Marwa. "The medical profession uses Latin."

He turned to Gaddafi. "She also knows nothing about monitoring the machines. I need Agatha if I'm going to be able to care for Miss Haverty, especially if we have to deal with a heart issue. There's no use in my staying if Agatha doesn't stay as well."

By the look on Gaddafi's face, Trapper knew he wasn't pleased. Still, Trapper couldn't afford to budge, so he held his fix on Gaddafi's eyes without flinching.

"Very well," the Colonel finally said. "But you must have her on her feet by tomorrow. She must be in the equipment room to finish what she started."

Sighing heavily, Trapper said, "I'll try my best. It appears she has a stomach issue as well as a heart issue, so I have to be careful with what I give her. I don't want the medication for her stomach to interfere with the AFib medication I give her for her heart. Is there a room nearby? I don't want to be too far away if there's trouble. Either Agatha or myself will be with her at all times."

Gaddafi left after shouting orders to his guards to prepare the room next door. He went straight to his own doctor and described what Trapper had said about Leah and her treatment.

"I would say, Colonel, that this Dr. Boudreau knows the heart very well," said the Libyan doctor. "What you have described is common procedure for a heart patient. The stomach issues as well. And Marwa would be inadequate to assist him without special education."

Gaddafi was so focused on getting his dirty bomb, that he left Dr. Boudreau and Agatha under the surveillance of a single guard in Leah's room. Aggie was able to communicate with Frazier, telling him the layout of that part of the building she had seen, giving him frequent reports on Leah's condition, and of Trapper's growing impatience.

Trapper had insisted on staying in the equipment room while Leah was there. When Gaddafi refused, Trapper stepped chest to chest with the Libyan dictator. "If she goes into AFib again, we'll need to bring her out of it quickly. There may not be enough time to get to her from her quarters." Colonel Gaddafi's personal guards jerked Trapper back, each man holding him up on his toes by his arms.

Now, Gaddafi stepped into his face. "If her heart goes, doctor. You have not convinced me that she is not better. She is not pale, she does not appear weak, and she is eating. I will not have you slow her down in her work." An angry nod at the door sent the guards, with Trapper between them, out of the room. They threw Trapper to the floor of his quarters and locked him in. Trapper sprang up and hit the door hard, beating it with his fists until he tired. He spun around and growled loudly. He was stuck, and there was nothing he could do until Gaddafi allowed him to leave his room. Even so, calming down wasn't something that was going to come easily. Leah's AFib had been real, and under the circumstances, it could happen again at anytime. If it did, every second would count. He had just found her…alive. He was about to lose her again.

Aggie remained in Leah's quarters. The transmitter had been quiet for some time. There had been nothing more to tell her team, but she had given them a lot to think about. She knew they were taking their time to plan how they would extract all of them from Gaddafi's compound.

Meanwhile, Leah was making swift progress now that all the equipment was fully functional. She sat at a terminal, typing in commands, seemingly looking for connections to satellites while Gaddafi became more and more impatient.

"Why does this take so long?" he demanded.

Without taking her eyes off the computer screen or even slowing her fingers on the keyboard, she explained, "This is the most difficult part, and it's going to take the most time. I don't know exactly where to look for connections to these satellites. The best I can do is move down any path I find and hope it gets me into one of them. And even if I get in, I have to search all communications coming into the satellite…test it to see what it is and where it's going." She stopped typing to look at him. "And then, I have to do it again on another satellite so we have a backup if the Department of Defense tracks us back to the satellite. Once they do that, they will shut the satellite down. In fact, they could very well shut them all down." She shrugged. "But it would take them some time to do that considering many aren't US owned satellites."

"And what happens when they shut down the satellites?" asked the Libyan technician Gaddafi had assigned to her. He had stopped speaking through Marwa. She wasn't able to communicate the technical jargon going back and forth, so he…compromised his integrity…for Gaddafi.

Leah had very little tolerance for him. He was supposed to be one of their best technicians, but she had to explain almost everything in what had become childish terms, which didn't make things any easier. She was just a woman after all, and she was being condescending to a man.

When he had spoken to Gaddafi, the Colonel promised, "You will be rewarded greatly for your tolerance of the woman. You may have her, if you want."

Closing his eyes and grimacing, the technician said, "And what would I do with such a woman."

"Shame her in the streets, if you like." Both men laughed.

Frazier sat in the van, his equipment connected to Leah's computer through a modem she had managed to install without notice. He knew exactly what she was doing and was 'following' her. When she created what looked like a viable connection, he tensed, not knowing if she was somehow capable of doing what Gaddafi wanted her to do. Still, he knew she was stalling. She was also communicating with Mark Hansen somehow who was doing his best to make it look like he was assisting her.

Another week into the search for a pathway, she announced she had found her way into the UK's EXOSTAT satellite. Gaddafi's technician congratulated her on her finding, pulled up a chair and sat next her. She typed something so fast, he didn't catch it, though he could see it was a transmission.

"What was that?"

She looked at him. "What was what?"

"You just sent a transmission."

"I sent the telemetry for the EXOSTAT over to Mr. Hansen's terminal," said Leah. "He'll be monitoring any new connections that might indicate we've been found out."

Mark had already been following everything she did. When the Libyan stood over his shoulder, he pointed to the telemetry they were both watching.

"Stop what you are doing!" yelled the Libyan technician. Turning to the guards, he said, "Take them to their quarters."

As Leah stood, she deftly hit two keys on her keyboard, cutting Frazier's connection off. Without an active connection, they would never find the leak.