MJ-12: Shadows

17

Maggie hated hospitals. Hated them with a passion, really. Even before her Enhancement, she had hated going to hospitals. First her grandfather, then her aunt, and when she was just out of high school, it was her older brother. She went to hospitals to see people suffer, to say goodbyes, to watch over people as they died.

All those memories came flooding back as she walked the fourteenth floor of the Bethesda Naval Hospital, past room after room of sick, wounded, dying men. It was just after midnight, so at least the relatives and visitors weren’t there and most everyone was asleep — otherwise, the emotions would’ve overwhelmed her senses, crippling her with sorrow and worry and desperate hope. Even now, though, the place seemed to be infused with a low-grade, background feeling of depression, as if the walls themselves had seen just about all they could take.

Maggie straightened out her white dress and felt for her little white nurse’s hat for what seemed like the millionth time, all the while keeping an eye out for anybody else wandering the halls. The trick, she found, was to look really busy and walk fast, and for the past thirteen floors, it had worked pretty well.

It had taken Mrs. Stevens a couple of days to hatch a plan to get into the place — it was a military facility, after all, and the Navy did a good job of keeping things buttoned up; unlike the joke about killing Truman, Mrs. Stevens was taking this pretty seriously and wanted to insure they would get out undetected as well. So, after hours of watching each entrance from cars and park benches, the genius woman had come up with the idea of getting in through the laundry service.

Bethesda Naval Hospital had its own laundry, of course, but the doctors and nurses had multiple uniforms — surgical clothes, white lab coats, casual military uniforms, dress uniforms. Once a week on Saturday morning, all those clothes were taken out to be properly cleaned. And on Saturday night, all those clothes were sent back pressed and ready to wear. At that point, it was a simple matter to track down the cleaner’s location. On Saturday evening — instead of enjoying a night on the town as most sane people would — the two Variants managed to sneak into the truck with the uniforms and rode right into the loading docks at the hospital. From there, Maggie only needed to give the driver a little distraction — a sudden pang of lust for the shift nurse in charge of uniforms — and they hopped out of the truck and snuck right into the building.

Sure, the driver got his face slapped in the process, but Maggie assured herself that, yes, even that was in the national interest.

Maggie had availed herself of a nurse’s uniform, while Mrs. Stevens had opted to change into a blue smock used by the janitorial staff, her belief being that while one new face on the nursing staff could be readily dismissed as an oversight, two would stick out like a sore thumb. And besides, who paid any notice to the women emptying the wastebaskets, anyway?

They looped round and round each floor, looking for former Defense Secretary James Forrestal. The newspapers had said he’d checked in with a case of “nervous and physical exhaustion,” but the scuttlebutt around town was that he’d gone ’round the bend. Naturally, with that in mind, Maggie and Mrs. Stevens had first visited the psychiatric wards on the first floor — where they found nothing.

“If he’s got a cover story for why he’s here, they’re not gonna put him in with the loonies,” Maggie muttered quietly as she joined Mrs. Stevens for an elevator ride on the sixth floor. “Probably gonna be in some VIP area for the muckety-mucks.”

“Now, Maggie, it’s not nice to call them loonies,” Mrs. Stevens chided quietly. “Psychiatry has come a long way.”

Maggie just grimaced. “You obviously haven’t been committed before,” she said, memories of the California mental hospital she’d been committed to leaping to mind. “Loonies is being kind. Let’s go.”

The two decided to split up to cover more ground, making their way through the rest of the floors, checking each of the four wings. Maggie had picked up a couple of boxes of bandages, and as they went around, she placed boxes in different cabinets, picking up similar-looking ones elsewhere. Nobody noticed. The nurses and corpsmen on each floor were uninspired at best, focusing on crossword puzzles or reading for the most part.

Finally, the sixteenth floor was different.

The elevator opened onto the corridor as usual, and as it happened, the car next to Maggie’s opened at the same time, Mrs. Stevens exiting it. “Went up a few floors to work my way down,” she whispered. “Heard someone say something about special guests on sixteen, so here we are.”

Maggie nodded and pointed off to the left, and Mrs. Stevens pushed her wheeled garbage can that way. Maggie walked to the right, noting that the halls in this area of the hospital had better paint and more recent furnishings — a bit of an upgrade from the usual navy-issue metal chairs and desks. At the intersection of the cross-shaped floor, she saw the nurses’ desk off to her left, but she kept going, knowing that she’d want to avoid the nurses’ station until last, so she could make a quick getaway.

The desk distracted her just enough to miss the Navy corpsman walking toward her from the end of the hall. Shit.

“Help you, ma’am?” the corpsman said. He was a young man, uniformed in shipboard khakis, with a sidearm holstered on his hip.

Maggie smiled. “Restocking supplies, Corpsman,” she said. “Need to grab a few things.” She reached out with her Enhancement, pulling at the strings of early-morning routine calm she found in the man, blunting the dark gray threads of suspicion that had begun to grow.

The corpsman paused a moment. “Diet kitchen’s to your right. Other two rooms are off limits, OK?” He smiled at her, and she encouraged the idle interest in her just enough to make him want to please her — without really making him want to please her.

“I know,” she said smoothly. “Thanks, Corpsman.”

The man nodded and went down the corridor, turning toward the nurses’ station. Maggie watched him leave just as Mrs. Stevens arrived, pushing her wheeled can before her, the threads of excitement inside her growing. She’d seen him go and had the same question as Maggie: there weren’t too many armed corpsmen in the hospital this late, and most were guarding the entrances, so who was this guy guarding?

Maggie purposefully and slowly made her way down the hall, resisting the urge to hustle. At the end of the corridor were four doors leading to a kitchen, an office, a bath, and a numbered patient room.

That last room had a light on.

Maggie nodded in the direction of the room, then reached out with her Enhancement. Inside, there was restlessness. Tiredness, too, with an undercurrent of worry and strain. If she had to guess, whoever was in there was engaged in some sort of relaxing activity that might or might not have been working.

Mrs. Stevens rolled up and eyed the door. “Here?” she whispered.

“Yeah,” she replied, then pointed to the bathroom. “Put your can in there.”

Maggie slowly tried the door to the patient room. It was unlocked.

With one more quick glance around, Maggie opened it and ducked inside, quickly closing the door behind her, taking care to ensure it latched silently.

She turned to find James Forrestal staring wide-eyed at her.

“You’re one of them,” he said. “I knew it was only a matter of time.”

Maggie smiled and began to quell the growing alarm inside the man. “I am. Just want to talk, Mr. Secretary. It’s OK.”

Forrestal was in gray pyjamas and a plaid robe, sitting at a desk along the wall. He had a thick book open in front of him, and it looked as though he were taking notes or copying something. His hair was slightly disheveled, but otherwise, he looked perfectly sane.

“You’re calming me down, aren’t you,” he said softly. “So I don’t panic.”

That’s new, Maggie thought. Of course, Forrestal would’ve seen her file, known all about her. “Yeah, Mr. Secretary. I am. Like I said, just want to talk.”

Just then, another door opened, and Mrs. Stevens walked in through the bathroom. “Hello, Mr. Secretary,” she said quietly but with a winning smile. “Sure is good to see you well.”

Maggie had to tamp down even harder on the man’s growing panic. “I know both of you,” he said. “And I think I need to call that corpsman back here now.”

“Really, it’s OK, Mr. Secretary. Jim. Can I call you Jim?” Maggie asked. “We’re here on an official investigation. Really.”

Forrestal frowned. “If it’s so official, why are you sneaking around in the middle of the night?”

“Because we’re MAJESTIC-12, Jim. You know as well as we do, we don’t officially exist. And even our Secret Service covers wouldn’t get us in the door here,” Maggie said. “We just need to know who else knows about MAJESTIC-12, that’s all.”

Forrestal turned and carefully put down his pen, smirking at the page on his desk. “You know any Sophocles?”

Maggie shook her head as she pulled over another chair and had a seat. “Can’t say I do.”

“This is Ajax. Just copying it down. Helps me remember it better. It’s about someone who travels too far down a dark road, and what becomes of those close to him.” Forrestal smiled. “More or less. I thought it was fitting.”

“You think you’ve traveled down a dark road?” Maggie asked.

Forrestal regarded her with a curious look. “It’s amazing what you can do, Miss… Dubinsky, is it? Just amazing. You could probably kill me with a thought. And you, Mrs. Stevens, I believe. You could not only figure out how to kill me without a sound but get away with it scot-free. You’re literally two of the most powerful people on the planet, and I went along with the crazy idea that we could rein you in. I’m a fool, obviously.”

“We’re not out to hurt anyone,” Maggie said, feeling her own anger rise a bit. “We’re serving our country. And at the moment, we’re trying to protect the MAJESTIC-12 program and our fellow Variants. We know you talked to people. We just need to know the extent of it. Who’s Joe on Capitol Hill?”

Forrestal thought a moment, then smiled at her. “Interesting. I really want to tell you, to make you happy, but it’s not enough to compel me to tell you. And I know that telling you will only endanger others.”

“Nobody’s in danger, Mr. Secretary,” Mrs. Stevens said gently. “We just need to find out who knows what, that’s all.”

“And while it’s breaking my heart to keep this from you, I think I still have the wherewithal to do so,” Forrestal replied. “Yes. I don’t think I’ll tell you.”

“Why not?” Maggie said, trying everything in her arsenal — lust, sadness, hope — to get him to talk.

“Oh, Miss Dubinsky, I do want to tell you, really. And I’d like to do so much more with you. And… my, I’m a mess right now,” Forrestal said, running a hand through his hair. “But you see, nobody in MAJESTIC-12 is willing to do what has to be done with the Variants. Nobody’s ready to make the tough decisions. Hilly wants to treat you just like anyone else — as if you could treat an A-bomb like a person! And Truman, he’s so enamored of you that he can’t see straight. The others, well, they got rid of me, so now the others will fall right into line. Can’t you see? I had to tell someone else. Checks and balances, Miss Dubinsky. That’s what makes our country work. Checks and balances. Someone has to watch the watchmen.”

Maggie whispered through gritted teeth; she was done being nice. “Right. So, it’s Hoover. And Wisner. Who else?”

Forrestal’s eyes grew wide and fearful. “M-McCarthy. Joe McCarthy.”

Maggie frowned and turned to Mrs. Stevens. “Who?”

“Wisconsin senator,” Mrs. Stevens replied. “Not very popular. Kind of paranoid.”

Before Maggie could reply, Forrestal piped up. “Of course he’s paranoid! Look at what you’re able to do! Look at what you made me say!”

“Easy, Jim,” Maggie said, reining in her own anger as she tried to soothe his agitation. “We’re just trying to secure the program, that’s all. Nobody’s gonna get hurt.”

“You’re dangerous! You and your Variant friends! I see them in the shadows now all the time. Lurking. Moving. It’s why I stay up! I can only sleep in the day now, because… ”

Maggie felt the fear building in Forrestal as his face turned into a mask of horror. He mutely pointed at the corner of the room…

… where a shadow began to move.

“What the hell?” Maggie whispered.

Suddenly, Forrestal leapt to his feet and, shoving Maggie aside, ran out the main door into the hallway.

“Shit!” Maggie swore, her emotional connection broken. “Move it, Rose!”

The two women dashed after him, but to their surprise, he wasn’t in the hallway, making a beeline for the nurses’ desk or the corpsman. Instead, he’d gone into the diet kitchen on the other side of the hall.

They dashed in after him, finding him inside a small, closet-sized kitchenette, frantically tying the belt of his bathrobe to a radiator.

A radiator right under an open window.

“Jim! No!” Maggie shouted.

Before she could reach out to calm him, he hurled a small metal coffee pot at her. She dodged, but it managed to graze her forehead. And it was hot.

“Fuck!” she growled. And in that moment, her anger escaped her and filled the room.

Mrs. Stevens’ hands flew to cover her mouth as she backed into a counter, trying to get as far from Maggie as the small room would allow.

And Forrestal — wide-eyed and panicked — took one end of the belt in his hand…

… and jumped out the window.

“No!”

Maggie rushed forward and stuck her head out the window, only to find Forrestal hanging by one hand, grasping the cloth belt for dear life. She grabbed it in the middle and started trying to haul him back in.

“Hang on! We’re going to get you back in here, Jim!”

But Forrestal still looked utterly horrified — insane might have even been a good word for it — as he looked past Maggie’s right shoulder toward the wall of the building.

She turned to look, and saw the vague outline of a human figure in the shadowy corner of the building — sixteen floors up.

Maggie turned back to Forrestal, who looked at her now with anger and fear combined. “Maybe they’ll blame you,” he whispered.

He let go.

Maggie could do nothing but watch as he fell, landing far below on a roof only a few stories above the ground, his body askew and his legs buckled into horrible angles. She looked for movement, but there was none.

Closing her eyes to rein in her emotions, Maggie then turned to see Mrs. Stevens, still in the corner, eyes wide, tears welling.

“Out. Now,” Maggie said quietly. “Get your can and get to the elevator. I’ll take the far stairs. Get to the loading dock and get a car running. Meet you there. Go!”

Nodding, Mrs. Stevens fumbled for the door and headed for the bathroom to retrieve her garbage can. To her credit, she walked with only a little bit of a hurry. And it wasn’t like the elevators were busy. A moment later, Maggie heard the faint ding of the bell.

That was when she walked out and slowly made her way toward the stairs, well away from the nurses’ desk and the corpsman.

It was probably for the best that she didn’t encounter anyone on her way to the stairs, because she was in no mood to play nice, and she really didn’t want the hassle of leaving screaming, terrified people in her wake.