Consequences of Love and War: Chapter 22
A/N: Thanks for all the reviews! It made me happy to see that so many people are enjoying the story. By all means, keep them coming. If there's something you think needs to be included to make the story run better, let me know.
I'll include a recap in the next chapter.
Peter Kirkan shut off the engine and sighed, leaning forward for a moment to rest his forehead on the steering wheel. He straightened before he could gather any attention; dark-haired men acting suspiciously in the parking lots of United States Army research facilities rarely had a nice day after that.
He had gotten in his car that morning with every intention of driving north to Long Island, Ziva David's words of warning be damned. He didn't care what she said about the useless of such actions; he was going to go to the Hamptons, call Lyndi and get her to get him an invitation to DiNozzo's party, and confront this man, this Zajac. He didn't know how he was going to get him to talk - such things are easier to write into novels than actually plan out in real life - but in his mind, he was going to get the information out of the arms dealer, tell Gibbs and the rest of the MCRT where Alyse was, and get his wife back.
He had gotten as far as the Capital Beltway - ten minutes from his Bethesda condo, thanks to the morning traffic in front of NNMC - before he realized how insanely stupid that plan was, and how little getting himself killed in the playground of the rich and famous was going to help Alyse. So without really knowing what he hoped to accomplish, or even say, at his new destination, he changed directions and drove into Virginia, to the parking lot where he was currently sitting.
With another heavy breath, he stepped out of the car, using the remote to lock it behind him as he crossed the parking lot and headed into the building. He nodded to the civilian guards as he stepped through the metal detector on the way to the front desk.
"I'm here to see Bryan Lindemann," he informed the uniformed sergeant. The Army non-commissioned officer gestured toward the sign-in sheet.
"Name?" the sergeant—Zilka, according to his nametape—asked. Kirkan smirked slightly as he offered a Navy dependent card.
"Peter Aachen," he said. Sergeant Zilka glanced at the ID card and nodded. It was a legitimate Department of Defense card; in typical government contractor fashion, the man at the ID desk hadn't been paying attention to what he was doing when Kirkan registered as LT Alyse Aachen's dependent, and made the card with her surname on it. Alyse had laughed and asked if they could keep it. Apparently, the man making IDs didn't realize that, legally, it was supposed to be destroyed.
"Do you have an appointment?" Kirkan shook his head.
"No, but I'm a friend," he said. Sergeant Zilka frowned slightly, but handed over a visitor's pass anyway. Kirkan clipped it to his shirt, smiling wryly as he thought about just how many visitor's passes he'd been wearing the last few days.
"Do you want an escort?" Zilka asked.
"No, I know the way. Thanks," Kirkan replied, smiling slightly as he turned and headed down the corridor.
Bryan Lindemann's office was on the fourth floor, a large corner space that would make vice presidents of corporations in DC jealous. Kirkan rapped his knuckles on the open door, earning him a slight smile in response. "I got a call that a Mr. Peter Aachen was here for me," the engineer commented without looking up. "I was tempted to correct the sergeant and inform him that it was Gregory Aachen, but I figured you wouldn't like that much."
Kirkan rolled his eyes. "Not like he would know who that was," he scoffed. "I'm a writer, not some actor or producer or something. I'm hardly a household name."
"Hey, you're the closest thing to a celebrity of any of my friends, so that's good enough for me." Lindemann finally glanced up from his computer and glanced up at his friend, and just as he did every time he saw the former Army officer, Kirkan felt like he was looking at a World War I Army recruiting poster. Lindemann's sandy hair, while longer now than it was in the days when he still wore a uniform, was still regulation length, and with his blue eyes and strong features, he had 'All-American-Good-Boy' written all over him. Jess Ting liked to joke that if they included a picture of Bryan on the West Point brochures, they would have no problems recruiting female cadets. He looked more like an actor playing a soldier than most actors did; Kirkan was always surprised that Hollywood studios hadn't snatched him up when he left the Army.
Of course, most Hollywood studios weren't interested in one-legged soldiers.
"So what's up?" Lindemann asked, distracting Factor from his internal musings. "You didn't sign in as Peter Kirkan and show your press pass—which you're supposed to do, even if it's a social call—so I know you're not writing a story."
"No," Kirkan agreed. "It really is a social call. I was in the area—"
"Bethesda is almost an hour away. Longer in traffic."
"I take Beach Drive. No traffic lights." As he did every time he visited Lindemann at his office, he found himself glancing around at his surroundings, even though nothing ever changed. Lindemann had his diplomas—a Bachelor's in mechanical engineering from West Point and a Master's in the same from CalTech—as well as his rank certificates and pictures of his units. The only strictly personal touches he had were a pair of pictures on his desk: one of Bryan and Jess as newly-commissioned second lieutenants at their West Point graduation, and another of them years later, dressed much more casually at a waterfall in Hawaii. Kirkan often wondered if Lindemann kept a picture of Jess in a bikini on his desk to make other men jealous, or to remind himself to go home every night. Even as a happily married man, Kirkan was able to recognize that Jayashri Ting—the petite yet well-endowed half-Indian, half-Chinese daughter of two Mayo Clinic physicians—was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. He also knew that he was only allowed to admit that because Alyse happened to agree with that assessment.
When his eyes met his friend's again, he saw Lindemann giving him a long look. "Let's grab lunch," the engineer said abruptly, pushing his chair back from his desk.
"It's ten am," Kirkan pointed out.
"Brunch, then."
"Brunch is something the girls do on Sundays and inevitably involves a lot of champagne and mimosas."
Lindemann snorted as he grabbed his keys from his desk drawer. "No kidding," he scoffed. "Every week, Jess comes home completely drunk, immediately passes out, and wakes up hung-over just in time for me to want dinner."
"They work hard," Kirkan pointed out as they headed out of the office. "Sometimes they tend to party hard, too."
"I think if most Americans knew how their doctors acted in their off-hours, they'd be a lot less likely to ever go to the hospital." Kirkan chuckled in agreement as he followed Lindemann to where the engineer's car was parked, in the far corner of the parking lot. Despite having only one leg—and a very expensive prosthetic second leg, courtesy of the United States government—he refused to get a handicapped placard, stating that they were for people who were handicapped, and that most certainly wasn't him. Not only did he walk without a limp, but he still regularly competed in marathons. He had less difficulty crossing a parking lot than Kirkan did.
They ended up at a pancake place about half a mile from Lindemann's office, which had plenty of empty tables at that odd hour. "How's Jess?" Kirkan asked after the waitress took their orders and left them with an entire pot of coffee.
"She's Jess," Lindemann replied. "You know, works too hard, drinks too much, complains about her job, doesn't tell anybody anything about how she's feeling or what she's thinking. Same as always."
"Having issues?"
Lindemann took a long drink of the too-hot coffee. "I got offered a position teaching at West Point," he said.
"Your dream job."
"No kidding. I talked about it with Jess, and you know what she said?"
"Not to take it?"
"No. That's just the thing." He frowned. "She said it's a great opportunity for me, et cetera, et cetera. She's starting a two-year fellowship at Shock Trauma in Baltimore in July. I told her that if I'm going to be turning down my dream job to stay near her, I'd like to know that she thinks about me as more than a roommate. So she said that maybe I shouldn't turn it down."
"Ouch."
"No shit. We're in a détente at the moment." He smiled up at the waitress as she brought their pancakes and dug in with sufficient gusto that made Kirkan wonder if the other man was moments away from heading out on a combat mission. "Monday evening," Lindemann began after he swallowed, changing the subject. "Olazzo. You in? It was just me and Jess, and then she had to go invite Luigi. I need someone there to keep me from taking a swing at one of our brothers-in-arms." 'Luigi' was Dr. Josh Campano, another Walter Reed surgeon, who, at the beginning of their internship years before, was supposed to go to a concert with Alyse but ended up getting drunk and hooking up with Jess the night before and called it off with Alyse. The 'friends with benefits' thing with Jess lasted about three months, before she ran into Bryan in Ward 57 at Walter Reed, when she was post-call and he was there for a follow-up appointment for his amputation. A quick lunch turned into grabbing drinks and appetizers during happy hour, which turned into a full dinner, and by end of the evening, the two Army captains remembered why they had dated for almost three years at West Point, and Dr. Campano was all but forgotten. Kirkan still couldn't figure out how the three doctors were all still friends after all that, but it didn't seem to faze any of them.
"I think I'd be more likely to help you take him down than to keep you from doing so," he said dryly in response to Lindemann's comment.
"He never slept with your wife," Lindemann pointed out.
"True," Kirkan agreed. "I'll let you know about Monday."
"It won't be the same without Alyse, but the wine is half off on Mondays, so that should mean something." He took in another few shovelfuls of food before speaking again. "How is Alyse, anyway?" He must have seen something on Kirkan's face, because he put his fork down and gave the older man his undivided attention. "Nothing happened to Alyse, did it?"
Kirkan frowned at the question, but didn't answer it. "I have a combat-related question for you," he said slowly. Lindemann's eyebrows rose.
"You were a scout sniper," he said. "I was an engineer who, for some strange reason, was given an airborne infantry company before I missed the landing zone and ended up hitting the one undetonated land mine in a four hundred kilometer radius. You saw a lot more combat than I did."
"And as your girlfriend likes to remind me, I was a grunt," Kirkan said dryly. "I stood around and waited for someone to point my rifle in the right direction and tell me to fire. This is definitely a company-grade officer question." He cleared his throat slightly. "What I need to know… How do you act on intelligence that someone might be financing terrorist activity? That somebody might be behind…something big."
Lindemann frowned. "Please tell me you're researching a new book," he said slowly. When Kirkan didn't say anything, he pressed further. "Pete… What's going on? What happened to Alyse?"
The writer took a deep breath. "She's missing," he finally said. "She was abducted from her office at the hospital clinic."
"Holy shit," Lindemann breathed. "When?"
"A few days ago. NCIS is working on finding her. They received intel that an Eastern European arms dealer has been financing Taliban cells around Kabul and might have something to do with this. Said arms dealer is in the Hamptons for the weekend; a couple agents are going up to apprehend and question him."
"It sounds like NCIS has things under control, then," Lindemann said slowly. "I don't understand what your question is."
Kirkan's hands flew into the air. "I can't just sit around like this," he complained. "I need to do something. I feel like I need to go to New York myself, that if I could explain to this guy—"
"Not going to help," Lindemann interrupted forcefully. "Yeah, it's hard, Pete. It sucks, to be sidelined like this, but you need to let them do their jobs. Honestly, having a reporter-slash-novelist poking around and getting in the way of their investigation is only going to slow them down." He paused. "If there's anything Jess or I could do for you—"
"No," the writer said with a sigh. He rubbed his eyes, a habit he seemed to have picked up since Alyse's abduction. "I just… I can't help this feeling that this has something to do with me, and I have no idea why I feel that way. Everyone at NCIS seems to be convinced that it has something to do with the Taliban, except for their medical examiner, who I think thinks that Alyse somehow arranged this herself because she's depressed or suicidal or something."
"Alyse? Depressed?"
"Yeah. That's what I said. But they all seem focused on the terrorism angle, which I have to admit, makes the most sense. It seems like you can't throw a rock in the Middle East without hitting someone who wants to bring down the capitalist devil or some such thing, and other than Alyse, I don't even know anybody in Afghanistan, and I have no idea why somebody would do anything to her because of me."
"Other than the fact that the advance on your last novel had almost as many zeroes as my last research budget?" Kirkan frowned at the words, and Lindemann continued. "How many people over there know that Alyse Aachen's husband is the elusive Gregory Aachen?"
"A couple of the other docs," Kirkan admitted. He knew that he talked about it with Alyse once a couple of months before, but couldn't remember the whole conversation. He made a mental note to find that video and review it, to figure out just how wide-spread that bit of knowledge had been. "But if this was about money, don't you think somebody would have asked for some by now?"
"I know it's been twenty years since you were deployed," the engineer said, again picking up his fork, now idly twirling it in his hand, "and for the most part, communication back home is infinitely better—after all, you talk to Alyse on Skype every day—but finding new information isn't always easy, especially if what they're looking for is contact info of a novelist who doesn't post his contact info anywhere."
"If they have Alyse, why don't they just ask her for it?" He refused to think about the alternative, that she was in a state where she wasn't capable of letting her captors know his phone number or email address. Lindemann gave him an odd look, and he wondered if the younger man was thinking the same thing.
"Are we talking about the same woman here?" the engineer practically demanded, "because the Dr. Alyse Aachen I know is one of the most stubborn and independent women on the planet."
"Right after Dr. Jayashri Ting?" Kirkan asked dryly.
"Exactly," Lindemann replied, allowing himself a small grin. "You have to admit, it's not outside the realm of possibilities for Alyse to refuse to say anything. It probably wouldn't even register to her that talking would get her back to base or her clinic or wherever sooner; she's probably sitting somewhere, plotting how she can get herself out of the situation in true Great Escape fashion."
"More like Hogan's Heroes," Kirkan replied. "At least, that's what I'm going to choose to believe." He would much rather think of his wife being held by incompetent guards in a comedy than anything from Great Escape.
"I know a few people at Camp Phoenix," Lindemann said. "I'll get in touch with them and see what they know about Alyse, even though it sounds like NCIS has been doing that already. I know criminal investigations aren't exactly my area of expertise—pretty far from it, really—but I did spend a total of eighteen months in the Middle East, and I've never heard of terrorists acting this way. There would have been so much chatter that it would be all over ZNN by now." He gave his friend an intense look. "Pete, if you want to help Alyse, the best thing for her wouldn't be to polish your rifle and pretend you're still a sniper and go after this guy in the Hamptons. You're a reporter now; do what reporters do. Get to the bottom of this and try to figure out who the hell knows that Alyse is your wife and would benefit from that."