Chapter 7 — Trampoline

Samantha was working on her new physical therapy routine. It seemed crazy to her, but she was used to following orders, so she did as she was told. She had to bounce on a mini-trampoline while tossing a tennis ball in the air. To her surprise, this was very difficult for her to do. Luckily, her nurse had a good supply of tennis balls because the floor was littered with her misses before she finally mastered the task.

Once she could bounce and toss at the same time, her nurse held up pre-school flashcards with pictures for her to identify as continued with the exercise. She recognized the flashcard pictures immediately but discovered that sometimes she had to hold on to the ball for a couple of bounces before she could recall the correct word. Her brain must be more badly damaged than she realized.

After thirty minutes of therapy, Samantha received her second visitor of the day. This man was harder to categorize than the first. He was dressed like a federal agent, but his walk and his hair cut belonged to a soldier. His face looked young, but his hair was salt-and-pepper. He seemed intense, but there was a warm smile on his face.

When he entered the room, her nurse called an end to the therapy and left the two of them alone. Samantha stepped off the trampoline and grabbed a towel to wipe off her face. She was amazed at how much energy that simple exercise had taken and how exhausted she felt.

“Hi, Samantha,” he said, extending his hand. “I am Bob Kehm. I am one of the men who found you in Ohio. I wanted to see how you’re doing and make sure you are getting the care you need.”

Kehm’s hand was warm. He was certainly more personable than Black, but Samantha knew that didn’t mean anything. She had been up against personable enemies before. She needed to break through his good-guy veneer and see what was underneath. “Oh, I’m okay, Agent Kehm, but you could have gotten that from my medical chart. I take it that you’re actually here to debrief me about my recent missions.”

“Not really,” he said. “Someone will probably be by later today for that.”

Samantha scowled. “Oh, right. And after the debriefing, I’m going to be charged with numerous crimes for following orders. But, of course, if I agree to come work for you then all charges will be dropped. Am I close?”

Bob reminded himself that Samantha had been through a lot and took a deep cleansing breath. “Well, I think you probably will be caught up in a tug of war, but that’s not what this is about. I’m not here to recruit you.”

“So why the fuck are you here, Bob?”

“Samantha, you have been on a steady diet of bullshit for years, and I want it to stop. I want you to know what is going on around you. I want you to have enough facts to make your own decisions.”

Samantha shook her head. What these visitors really wanted was to feed her their own steaming pile of lies so that she’d make the decision they wanted. Samantha felt safer with Agent Black than Agent Kehm. These guys were all fucking bastards, and at least Black was so obvious about it that there was no chance she’d begin to trust him.

“The only facts I need are my orders. If you aren’t my commander, then you can shut the fuck up.”

“You haven’t officially been under anyone’s command since you were discharged from the Army,” said Agent Kehm. “Over the next couple of days, there will be a string of people coming in here trying to change that and put you under their thumb.”

“You’re number two," she said.

“Well, you need to grow up, put on your big girl panties, and decide how you are going to deal with them. Maybe you really are a psychotic asshole who is only suitable for wet work, in which case you should just take the best offer. But maybe you are a good person who has been taken advantage of by psychotic assholes, and you just need a chance to regain control of your life.”

“I still have a chain of command,” she rumbled menacingly. “I report to the Chaplain, and he is not a psychotic asshole.”

“The Chaplain is dead. He ate his gun four months ago.”

Samantha stood there staring at Bob, silent, her knees weak, not wanting to believe him. The Chaplain was a father to her—more than a father to her. He was too brave to kill himself, wasn’t he? A grim expression carved into her granite face, but a tear trickled from her eye to drip onto her t-shirt. She took a step backward and felt the cool wall support her back.

Bob continued, “He was running his own clandestine organization with no government sanctioning. He was running drugs to finance his work. We finally collected enough evidence to bring him in, but when we were closing in for an arrest, he decided to protect his associates and avoid the spectacle of a public trial.”

“But he didn’t do anything wrong. We were protecting America!” she exclaimed.

“You don’t protect a country by violating its laws,” he said softly. “You and I have both taken a vow to uphold the Constitution. The Chaplain forgot that commitment.”

Samantha quickly wiped her cheek and pushed her feelings to the back of her mind. She was having a great deal of difficulty keeping her emotions under control since coming out of the coma. She used to be able to hide them in her worry box, but that didn’t work anymore. “So, these other groups that are trying to recruit me, are they lawless Constitution violators too?”

“I can’t speak to that. But I do know that you’ll need to be a cold-assed bitch if you go to work for them.”

“And if I don’t want to do that anymore, I’ll be arrested?” she asked.

“That’s the problem. Right now, you’re being herded into a dead-end canyon. Either you go back to being an attack dog or you rot your ass off in jail. Personally, I think a distinguished veteran like you deserves better than that.”

“The doors around here aren’t locked. Maybe I should just take a long walk down a short corridor,” she replied.

Agent Kehm shook his head. “They won’t let you, Sam. Whether you realize it or not, you are under house arrest here. Didn’t you think it was a bit odd that you don’t get the chance to interact with other patients, or that you have no access to television or the internet? They want total control over who you talk to and who talks to you.”

Samantha immediately began to replay the last couple of days through her mind. There were gaps but based on what she remembered this guy could be right. She felt like an idiot for not considering that possibility until now. She would have to start pushing the boundaries around here and see where she ran into a hard stop.

“I want you to have a third choice, but I have to believe that you can leave here and assimilate back into society. I have to be confident that if you get a free pass, we won't end up with another Ohio.”

There it was again. What the fuck had happened in Ohio after she was stabbed? Did Kim and her terrorist buddies blow up power lines or kill an important person? Was it Kim’s escape that resulted in the Chaplain’s death?

“Was Ohio really that bad?” she asked.

Agent Kehm looked disappointed. “If you don’t think so, then maybe you need to accept one of those attack-dog jobs.”

Samantha scowled. “There is more than one reason to ask a question like that, asshole. It wasn’t rhetorical. You forget that I’m recovering from a little bit of brain damage.”

Agent Kehm paused, then nodded. “Sorry. Yes, it was that bad. You kidnaped and tortured an innocent person.”

She had him now. That was clearly a lie. “Bullshit, asshole. I tracked her for a month. I even photographed her passing data to a known courier. She admitted it under questioning. She was definitely dirty!”

“No, it was her husband who was dirty. He was just using her. Anything she told you during interrogation was just some bullshit she made up to get you to stop torturing her. She knew nothing about it.”

Samantha stared at Agent Kehm trying to figure out his angle. How would it benefit him to lie about something like that? Was he working with the terrorists to keep one of their operatives in circulation, or had she really blown it and picked up the wrong person?

“That’s one of the things they don’t want you to find out," he said. “They’re worried you might have a conscience, and they don’t want their attack dog to have second thoughts.”

Suddenly, Samantha felt exhausted. She desperately wanted to sit on the floor, but that would put this guy in a superior position. Instead, she crossed her arms across her chest and broadened her stance. She took a deep breath and realized how much of that awful smelling antiseptic they must use to keep this room clean.

“If I’m nothing more than an attack dog, then why are you helping me?” she asked.

Bob rubbed his eyes. He had been asking himself the same question since he came up with the idea six days ago. “I spent four years with special forces in Iraq, so I know what it’s like to be stationed over there. I’ve read your record. You were dedicated, you did good work, and your reward was to be used, lied to, and taken advantage of. No soldier should be treated the way you were. I want you to have real choices. I want you to have access to real help.”

“Well, if you’re telling the truth about Mrs. Ammar, then I’m pretty well fucked, aren’t I Bob?”

A smile flitted across the agent’s face. “The only real evidence against you is from your last assignment, and that one has the Chaplain’s fingerprints all over it. I have a grant of immunity for your Ohio activities in exchange for testifying against the Chaplain in Federal Court.”

“I can’t do that," she gasped, without hesitation.

“You don’t need to. Even before he died, the decision was made at a very high level to sweep his whole operation under the rug; you know how it is. Besides, your medical chart says you have a hypo-something brain injury and can’t remember shit.”

She couldn’t believe she was getting a free pass. “Are you authorized to do this?”

“Don’t worry, I was involved in the Chaplain investigation. I’m authorized. I’ve already convinced the prosecutor to sign the paperwork. I just have to file it at the courthouse and it’s a done deal," he said.

“I know this will cost you, Bob. Why are you doing it? What’s the catch?”

“Well,” he said, handing her a business card, “you haven’t convinced me I should do it, yet. We’ll have to talk again. My cell phone number is on there so you can call me anytime.”

Samantha watched the federal agent leave. When the door closed, she reached into her pants pocket and pulled out a pencil and a piece of paper. The paper had her exercise routine written on the front and some scribbles on the back. She began to make notes for herself so she wouldn’t forget anything important about this meeting.

She wrote using her private variant of the Pigpen cipher, where you used small symbols and squiggles instead of letters. Pigpen dated back to before the Revolutionary War and could be broken without too much difficulty by someone who knew what they were doing. But it was easy for her to read and write in real-time, and she was confident that it was sufficient for her current situation. If anyone casually looked at her notes, they would assume that she had just been doodling.