THE HAGUE, THE NETHERLANDS
Despite her years as a medic—or perhaps because of them—Alex hated hospitals. They smelled like death, and she’d grown weary of that.
As her Uber pulled up to the Den Haag Centraal Hospital, she saw it featured a modern glass-and-steel façade bolted onto the old building, forming a sunlit extension. That renovation added a sense of modernity to a tired old building. Inside, the lobby was expansive and flooded with natural light from its southwest exposure. Someone had used a vibrant color palette to revitalize this wing, making it resemble a modern shopping center—that ultimate comparator of lively civic spaces—rather than a place of illness, mortality, and death.
A waterfall and a reflecting pool added to the tranquil ambiance. Overhead, a complex system of polished wooden arches reached skyward to the top of an enclosed glass arboretum populated with trees, ferns, and tropical plants, giving the impression one was center stage in a rainforest. A young woman sat at a baby grand piano on the other side of the pool, playing a lively tune that might have been Scott Joplin. Alex hummed along to the melody, and as she did, she was struck not with the whiff of illness and death she had feared but with something else altogether—toasted bagels. A modern food court extended off the main lobby.
She resisted the urge to get one and instead walked past the security desk, where a guard gave her a once-over as she strode from the main lobby toward the elevators.
Stepping off the elevator on the sixth floor, she was relieved to find the signs were written in both English and Dutch. She hurried down the hallway, passing into the locked ICU as a porter wheeled a patient out through the door.
Once inside, she found herself in a hallway lined with single-patient rooms running down both sides. The step-down portion of the unit was for patients requiring somewhat less care. She kept going until she came to a ninety-degree bend that led her around the front of the nursing station. Doctors and nurses hovered over keyboards and banks of monitors that beeped with the vital data of the patients in the unit. Opposite the desk, the beds were separated by curtains, not walls, allowing for a more fluid response and dynamic approach to care that any given patient might need.
It took her back to her early days as a 68W—an Army combat medic specialist—and her training at the US Army Medical Center of Excellence at Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio. The smell of an ICU was the same the world over. Whether in Texas or Baghdad, Bagram or The Hague, a mix of cleaning agents, soaps, and medical-grade plastics, as well as more human odors, hung in the air.
So focused were the staff in performing their tasks that not a single person even lifted their eyes to her as she continued her quest. But as she rounded another corner of the horseshoe-shaped ICU, two heavily armed, uniformed police officers barred her further progress. Beyond them stood Jonathan Burgess, IT security specialist extraordinaire, in the doorway of a large room, his arms folded, chin resting on a closed fist, hovering at the foot of a bed.
Madame Celeste Clicquot lay comatose on the bed. Intravenous lines ran into her arm from a multitude of IV medication pumps. A ventilator moved highly oxygenated air into a hose connected to an endotracheal tube, the inside of which fogged up and then dissipated on the other side of the breathing cycle. Monitors displayed her ECG, breathing patterns, and other vital signs.
Alex gasped at the sight of her friend, tears welling up in her eyes until one burst free and ran down her cheek, dampening the corner of her mouth. She wiped it as much as wished it away. The quote about time being fleeting was only a half-truth. It was not time so much as life that flies past while we cling to it as tenuously as a dying rose holds on to the last of its wilting petals.
Mom.
The involuntary association came to her, and suddenly Alex could barely contain her grief, feeling more overwhelmed than she had since her mother’s funeral and, more recently, the one for her late husband, Kyle.
Jonathan turned toward her at the sound of her sniffle.
“Alex,” he said as he hugged her. “I’m glad you’re here.”
She realized then that they had never met in person. All their work together had been over the phone and computer. He was handsome and as young-looking in person as he was over a video chat. Goateed and dressed in a light-colored casual dress shirt and black pants, he fit the image of a capable IT security specialist with Interpol.
“I’m glad we finally get to meet.”
“Shitty that it has to be like this,” he said, waving toward Madame Clicquot’s bed, “but it’s great to finally meet you, too.”
She felt a hand placed on her shoulder from behind. At first, she thought it was a staff member or a police officer coming to escort her away for being there without permission from the nurses. She was braced to resist, but when she spun around, there stood Martin Bressard, her former boss at Interpol, an expression of compassion on his face like she had seldom seen before. She leaned into his arms, and he wrapped her tightly in an embrace.
“Chief,” she sobbed.
“I’m glad you’re here,” he said.
She stood back, and he stared at her, an uncle assessing a favorite niece not seen in years, although, in this case, it had only been a few short months.
“I’m so sorry, Alexandra.”
He was dressed in a dapper double-breasted suit, as always. Ever stylish, Chief Bressard was of medium height and build, with wavy salt-and-pepper hair and a short, nicely groomed beard. His royal-blue silk tie lent him a more cheerful than formal appearance.
“Has she been unconscious the whole time?” she replied, composing herself.
Bressard nodded his head. “I’m afraid so,” he said, his baritone voice and Belgian French accent on full display. “There has been no change since the paramedics brought her in. In fact, the doctor said they’re intentionally keeping her in a coma.”
She understood this. A medically induced coma allowed the brain and vital organs to rest, better equipping the body to heal from damage suffered during a traumatic event. In this case, the event had been another attack that Alex might have been able to prevent had she been there.
She straightened up. “I’m going to find out who did this, Chief.”
“God help them when you do.”
Bressard told her everything that Interpol and Dutch police knew as they sat in the family room off the hallway outside the intensive care unit. Multiple vehicles, multiple bogeys. Same MO—right down to the hired Afghan mercs—as the attack at sea, only this time on the streets of the Netherlands’ de facto capital.
“I shouldn’t have left her.”
“It’s not your fault or your responsibility, Alexandra,” Bressard said. “Valtteri had a security team—”
“About that,” she said. “Where were they? I understand there were only two of them there when the attack happened. How could that be? Any protection detail worth their salt would have had triple that number assigned to these two.”
“I am told Valtteri declined a heavy security detail. He, and quite honestly Madame Clicquot as well, found it too ostentatious.”
“Security isn’t a fur coat, Chief. Protection should always be right-sized to the threat and circumstances. Street knew this. He had at least twelve men on board the Aurora when it came under attack, and look at all the casualties. This was a determined adversary. Why would he have scaled the protection detail back like that?” Bressard said nothing. “What? He’s in this hospital, isn’t he?”
“He is, Alexandra. He took two bullets in his vest, and one grazed his shoulder. I’m told he’ll be okay in due time—”
“Not when I get through with him,” she said.
“Go easy on him. According to Street, Valtteri said it was to be him and one other bodyguard or none at all. And remember, he lost men in the raid on the Aurora, and now one who was with him last night. That must be a powerful blow. He’s only human, Alexandra.”
“Is he going to be okay?”
“The doctor said he had bruised lungs and a myo-something something.”
“A myocardial contusion. Bruising of the heart muscle.”
“Yes, that’s it.”
“And what about the other man? Do we know who that was?”
Jonathan piped up. “The second man’s name was Jocko. I don’t have a last name. He was driving. He didn’t make it.”
The ocean of white noise in her ears sounded like a gale-tossed sea. Every other sound around her faded into a hollow, distant din. How many times had she lost friends and comrades? Too many to count.
The concept behind the Secret Service and other agencies charged with dignitary protection and the guarding of VVIPs—very, very important persons—was to apply layers upon layers of defense. From the gathering of protective intelligence to the analysis of threats, to advance teams that liaised with boots on the ground, to proactive and dynamic close protection of their principles, to responding to threats with an overwhelming show of force and violence of action. Street should have applied a scaled-down version of this model, but he didn’t. He had taken a minimalistic approach to his duties, and now two more were dead, and another was at death’s door.
Isaiah 6:8. Send me.
“I should have been there, Chief.”
Bressard was shaking his head. “It’s not your job, Alexandra. You have your own responsibilities.”
“But I would have pushed Street for more security.” She nodded in the direction of the ICU. “I would have forced her and Valtteri to up their protection. Or at least convinced Street to stand fast and not let his client dictate the protection they wanted like they were at some security buffet when it was his job to spec out the details. Or, as a last resort, to lock things down. They shouldn’t have gone out to dinner. That was cavalier.”
Like a patient father, Bressard listened before speaking. “Neither Valtteri nor Madame Clicquot could be confined for very long,” he said when her rant was over. “Besides, she was still piecing things together herself. She was considering a request that had been made of Interpol.”
Bressard was a good cop, the polar opposite of those portrayed by the news and entertainment media. Or the ones who discredit their uniform and colleagues by doing stupid and abhorrent things. Criminal things.
“What request?”
“She had been speaking with a Finnish official—”
“Their NATO ambassador, Mikko Selänne.”
“Yes,” he said. “Ambassador Selänne. He had met with Madame Clicquot aboard Aurora before the attack and told her that he had been approached by Finnish intelligence. They wanted him to ask Interpol to quietly investigate any connection between events that had transpired across their country over the past year or so.”
“Why the back channels?”
“Obviously, she felt other avenues of approach were compromised.”
“Government channels?” she asked.
Bressard shrugged. “Diplomatic channels.”
“Okay, but surely Selänne had specific objectives. What were they?”
“The Finns wanted to know if the events were linked to Russia or if they represented something else.”
“That’s not new information. I knew that already.”
“But did you know that Madame Clicquot may already have turned up evidence linking it to another group, and possibly not the Russians at all?”
She didn’t know that, but it would make sense. She was still angry with herself, though. And angry with Street. And mad at whoever was orchestrating this.
What was this all about? Who was behind it?
Whatever it was, whoever was responsible, she vowed to find out.
Alex stood beside the hospital bed, warming Celeste’s cold hands in hers as if warming the hands of a small child who had lost their mittens in the snow.
A nurse stepped into the cubicle and hung a new medication bag from the overhanging IV pole suspended from a track in the ceiling that circled the bed. Then she punched a series of buttons on the medication infusion pump and gave Alex a reassuring smile.
To the uninitiated, the frenetic activity and cacophony of sounds in the ICU could be overwhelming, but Alex took comfort in watching the nurse perform her routine. An ICU nurse was a highly educated professional with the knowledge, skills, and expertise to hold a frail life in their hands, as this young woman did. The nurse’s environment was different from the one in which Alex had practiced her combat medic trade, her work environment more controlled, but it was no less consequential.
“Thank you,” Alex whispered as the woman stepped away.
She gathered her thoughts and gripped Celeste’s hand more tightly, gazing into a face disfigured by the breathing tube that entered her mouth and descended her windpipe. The tube was attached to a machine that performed the most basic act of living for her. It breathed for her. Meanwhile, other medications held her cradled deep in sleep and free from pain, causing the muscles of her face to go slack.
“I’m sorry, Celeste,” she began. “I don’t know who did this, but I will find out. And when I do, I’ll make them pay.” Her Saint Michael medallion hung from a box chain around her neck. She pulled it free of the confines of her blouse and wrapped a hand around it. “I can’t bring Valtteri back, but I can do what I do best. Your suffering and your loss will be avenged. This I swear.”