Jeremiah by Kris Michaels
Chapter 24
Eight months later:
“This is a big step for you.” Jeremiah sat across from Doctor Adam Cassidy. The man had been a challenge to engage as a patient, but he was willing to start, and they’d had their first productive session. Adam had a long way to go. Admitting you need help, especially as a medical professional, was damn hard. The idea of being able to heal yourself was a byproduct of their training. It was also wrong. Self-diagnosis was always skewed.
“Th-thanks.” The man dipped his head and nodded to the door. “R-ready?”
Jeremiah glanced down at the folder in front of him. His first Shadow. Jamison had extensive case notes on the man, and Gabriel provided more information. Information that, in his opinion, put the man in the same category as Cyrus Macmillan, and yet the man was free and working for Guardian. Taking a bolstering deep breath, he nodded. He’d do the evaluation, and unless something miraculous happened, he’d stamp a No Go on the man’s file and move on.
Jeremiah stood up and limped over to the door. Adam pointed at his leg. Jeremiah understood the question. “I twisted it getting out of Phil Granger’s tractor. Wasn’t watching what I was doing.”
Adam nodded and pointed at the door. He opened it and let Adam leave first and smiled ear to ear. Damn it, he knew there couldn’t be two Ember Harrises in the world. He knew this woman.
“Good morning, sunshine! How the hell are you?”
The redhead squeaked and then jumped up. “Oh, my God! Remi Wheeler! What are you doing here?”
She launched into his arms and he laughed. “I could ask you the same question, Red.” He pulled her tight and twirled her around before setting her down and planting a completely innocent kiss on her upturned lips.
Ember laughed and turned to the man she’d been sitting with while still hugging him. “Joey, this is Remi Wheeler. He and I were on the same rotations during medical school. We put up with the same doddering old doctors and dealt with the same hospital politics and med school bureaucracy before we went our different ways.”
He released Ember and held out his hand. Ah, so this was Joseph, aka Fury. “Dr. Jeremiah Wheeler. I take it you two are friends.”
Joseph extended a hand and grasped his. The power behind the shake was an obvious warning. “No, she is more than a friend. In the interest of full disclosure, if you kiss her like that again, I’ll kill you.” Aggression rolled off the man in waves. Jeremiah had dealt with people of his ilk before, but usually, they were behind bars. Thank God after signing iron-clad NDAs they had briefed him on exactly what these… assassins could and couldn’t do. It took him months to wrap his head around the fact that Guardian employed assassins to perform horrendous acts which were sanctioned by a worldwide council.
He gripped the man’s hand harder and stared straight into his eyes. “Yeah? Well, if you kill me, it won’t be sanctioned.”
The assassin wrapped his arm around Ember’s shoulders and tucked her close to his side. Another possessive move, bordering on abusive.
“True, but the idea of an off-the-books hit doesn’t bother me right now. Make an informed decision, Doc. It may be your last.”
Jeremiah threw back his head and laughed. If the man wasn’t a psychotic killer, he could like the guy. ”Fair enough. You have no worries. I have a woman in Hollister that will string me up by the balls if I stray. Now, since I sense absolutely zero trust from you, big guy, why don’t we do our session first, and if Ember agrees, you can sit in when I talk to her about last week?”
Ember rushed to agree. “That’s fine. I think I’d actually prefer Joey to be with me.” He nodded. He could read the room, and he could see that this man didn’t want him to be alone with Ember. Fine, he’d adapt.
Jeremiah sat down and pulled out a pad of paper and a pen. He drew a deep breath and released it, clearing his mind of everything but the evaluation at hand. He watched the assassin scan him up and down with those cold-as-fuck eyes. “Done measuring me?”
“Yes.” Well, no attempt to obscure the facts at hand. Straightforward was a demeanor with which he could work.
“Tell me. What do you see?”
“Clarify the question,” Joseph snapped the response.
Ah… this was going to be a tough nut to crack. This man would never open up. What he needed to know would be obtained with the word equivalent of a crowbar. “You sized me up. What do you see?” He leaned back to relax the conversation, but the information that Gabriel had provided him yesterday was still in the forefront of his mind.
Joseph’s facial expression didn’t change one iota as he replied, “You appear relaxed. You’re not. You limp slightly on your left leg. I would exploit that weakness should I decide to kill you. Your heart rate is elevated. Your repetitive clicking of that pen indicates you’re nervous. Smart man. You’ve read my file, and my relationship with an old friend of yours has upset you. Most likely because of what you’ve learned from that data. You’ve been around hard people. You’re comfortable in that environment. You’re not comfortable around me. Probably because what I do upsets your morals.”
To say he was astounded at the clarity of the man’s mind—and to a degree, his ability to read him, even with his professional armor on—would be an understatement. He placed the pen and paper down. Okay, so it was time to find Joseph’s edges. “You’re very astute, Joey.”
The man’s eyes narrowed. “If I weren’t, I wouldn’t be alive. Knowing my environment and my enemy is essential. My name is Joseph.”
Jeremiah smiled. One point for him. Joseph considered him an enemy, and he didn’t like the use of Joey, at least not from him. “I’m not your enemy, and Ember called you Joey.”
“You’re not my friend. Therefore, you’re a potential enemy. She is the only one who calls me Joey.”
Ah. Point number two. There was no in-between with the man. You were one or the other. Friend or foe. Straight lines and structure-based reasoning. He needed to push farther. “The fact you limit your friends isn’t surprising. Why is Red the only one who calls you Joey?”
A sneer appeared on Joseph’s face for a nanosecond. “I allow her to do so.”
Interesting. Jeremiah knew the answer to the next question, but he asked it anyway. “Do you have to control everything? Even what people call you?”
“Yes.” Joseph’s expression revealed nothing.
“Why?”
The man focused somewhere over his shoulder and answered. “I want to live.”
Jeremiah went through all the documentation they had provided him. The recent wounds that the man was recovering from were a testament to that will. “You almost didn’t live. Your last assignment almost killed you.”
“Yes.”
Again, no eye contact and one-word answers. So, he prompted, “Tell me about it.”
“Clarify the question.” Again, the assassin’s quick comeback zinged his way.
Jeremiah referred back to the verbal crowbar and expounded, “Tell me what happened after your cover was blown.” He leaned back in his chair and waited.
“I was taken.”
“And then?”
“I woke in a dungeon with my hands tied to a wooden pole. They didn’t secure my legs. That was their second mistake.”
Jeremiah jotted that down. Interesting, leading off with a second mistake instead of a first. Something to circle back and address. “Go on.”
The man shrugged. “Things got uncomfortable. You read my file. You know very well what happened.”
He dug deeper as he needed to determine if this man could perform for the company, and what he’d received so far was minimal. He turned the verbal sparring corner and asked a harder question. “How did you endure the pain?”
Joseph blinked and looked at him. “Clarify the question.”
Jeremiah did. “According to the medical records, they peeled your skin off your back. The pain must have been excruciating. How did you deal with the pain?”
The man’s expression didn’t change. “I focused.”
Jeremiah waited a minute before he asked, “On what?”
That sneer came back in full force, and Joseph spoke with a growl, “Killing the motherfucker.”
“And did you?”
“Yes.”
“How?”
Joseph lifted his hand and replied, “I freed my left hand and severed his carotid artery with a scalpel.”
Jeremiah had read that account. He’d thrown the scalpel. He continued through the incident. “How did you escape?”
“I ran.”
Jeremiah lifted an eyebrow, “Just ran? Nobody said anything to you about the strips of skin hanging off you? The blood? That must have been obvious.”
“An old woman saved my life. She hid me underneath the floor in the kitchen of the compound where I was held. Two days after she moved me out of the crawl space, they found it. She refused to tell them where the women of the village had hidden me. They pulled her into the town square and raped her––broke every bone in her body and then eviscerated her alive as a warning to others never to help the enemy again.”
That bit of information wasn’t in his briefing. The atrocities of war were impossible to understand unless you’ve been there. He knew that from working with people who’d returned from combat. The world did not reserve depravity for the Cyrus Macmillans of the world, proof in point. “Intelligence reports indicate all the men in that compound were mutilated and dismembered.”
“Do they?”
He nodded. This was the money question, the one thing that would stop this man from going back out to the field. If he went off script, it would end his career. “Yes. Did you do that, Joseph?”
The man met his eyes. “No.”
“Then who did?”
“I don’t speculate.”
Jeremiah snorted. He would not let this one go, and the assassin in front of him had to know that fact. “Ah heck, just this once, give it a try. It’ll stay between us.”
Joseph gave him the full weight of his icy stare.
“I killed who I had to, Doc. Clean, quiet. When I finished, I opened the compound gates and drove one of the guard’s trucks away. The women must have done what is indicated in the reports.”
There was no way in hell. He shook his head, not trying to hide the disbelief. The man had to be lying now. “Women? You believe old women committed this… this atrocity?”
“Aside from the fact that it takes a fair degree of strength to dismember a body and I was not at my best, those men took everything from that village. They murdered husbands and sons. Daughters as young as eight vanished into the compound, never to return. The women spoke of the screams they heard at night, the helplessness and guilt they lived with. Those bastards kept them alive to be servants, and the dogs were treated better than they were. I’m an assassin, Doctor. They were victims. I made it safe for them. What they or anyone else did after I left isn’t my concern.”
Jeremiah absorbed the words and the simple way this man dealt with the horror that he’d read in the report. “You’re very matter of fact about this abomination.”
Joseph laughed and Jeremiah flinched at the outburst. Jeremiah drew a breath and pushed his focus back onto the man in front of him. “I don’t fabricate drama or surround myself in fantasies, Doctor. You asked for the facts, then you asked me to speculate. I provided you both. How you process the information isn’t my concern. Your outrage is your baggage. You deal with it.”
Jeremiah counted to seven slowly. The assassin in front of him was blunt and, in fact, correct. He cleared his throat twice and glanced down at his pad. Time to circle back to the points he still needed to address. “Okay, let’s backtrack for just a second. You said leaving your legs untied was the enemy’s second mistake. What was the first?”
This time that sneer almost appeared as a smile. “They didn’t kill me immediately. Rank amateurs.”
Jeremiah leaned back. Time to take off the gloves and make a determination. “Tell me, do you care about the lives you took?”
“Bingo. The money question sprung after a distraction. Do they teach that in Shrink 101? Every fucking one of you have the technique down. I don’t have sociopathic tendencies, Doctor. Why don’t I save us both some time and effort? Do I value human life? Yes, I do. Would I have taken those lives if it were not for the requirements of my job, for my safety, or to protect those women? No. Did I have average family attachments growing up? Yes, I love my family. They’re big, noisy, and messed up, but they are mine. Do I have healthy relationships with women? If you asked me before Ember came back into my life, I would say no. I used women for sex. Do I have problems dealing with what I do for a living? Absolutely not. I have never had a sleepless night. I trust my handlers at Guardian implicitly.”
Jeremiah narrowed his eyes and picked out the slice of that diatribe that clunked. Everything else was smooth, almost practiced. Something a sociopath would say in order to make themselves sound normal. “Since Ember came back into your life? You knew her before?”
“Yes.”
He had to stop himself from chuckling. One-word answers again. “Would you care to elaborate?”
“No.”
This wasn’t getting easier. The man was slick, but he’d yet to provide any information that he could grasp onto to prove or disprove his diagnosis. “You threatened to kill me if I kissed Ember again. That is territorial and in direct conflict to your stated reasons for killing—your job and safety.”
“Yes.”
Jeremiah leaned forward. “Please explain.”
“Ember is a part of me, and you threatened that part.”
He scoffed. “With a simple kiss?”
“Yes.”
He pushed on. “Don’t you trust her?”
“Of course, I do, but I don’t trust you.”
Ah, back to the straight lines and structure. Friends and foes. “Why not? Guardian does. Gabriel does. He directed you to talk to me.”
Joseph cocked his head. “If a complete stranger did the same to your woman in Hollister, would you trust him?”
He smiled. “No. Can’t say that I would. But I don’t think I would threaten to kill him.”
The assassin looked bored. “No, you’d just think it. The difference between me and your polite society? I act.”
Jeremiah lifted an eyebrow. Directly challenging the man in front of him, he asked, “And still you maintain you have no sociopathic tendencies?”
Joseph chuckled and shrugged. “I’ve been tested. The results are in the records you hold. Now, can we cut the hypothetical bullshit about what I would or wouldn’t do?”
“All right, let’s talk about this past week. How many people have you killed in the last seven days?”
“Three.”
“How many were sanctioned kills?”
“One.”
“The other two?”
“Had the intent, opportunity, and capability of killing Ember. I prevented that.”
“And why would they want to kill Ember?”
“If you needed that information, it would have been provided to you. Not my place to fill you in on the specifics, Doc.”
“You act as if this is a game, Joseph. How many of these evaluations have you gone through?”
“Is that a roundabout way of asking how many people I’ve killed?”
It was. He was curious as to how this man had reached this point. “Yes.”
The assassin deadpanned, “If you needed to know, it would have been provided to you.”
Damn, he’d expected more out of the man. He blinked and then shook his head. “Pat answer and a complete cop-out. How many lives have you taken Joseph?”
“It doesn’t really matter. What matters is that I need to be cleared to take at least one more.”
Ah, this was new. Joseph wanted to be cleared again. “Why? What is so relevant about your next kill?” He leaned forward.
“It’ll be my last mission.” Joseph leaned back in the chair. “Clear me for this last mission, Doc. After it’s over, I’ll never have to be cleared again.”
Jeremiah smirked at the verbal maneuvering. It would not be productive. “That’s not how this works.”
“Sure, it is. You and I both know I passed every objective of this interview. Do your job and let me do mine.”
He steepled his fingers together. No, he hadn’t passed every objective. Not yet. “Tell me how many people you have murdered or assassinated, Joseph.”
“Two different topics. Murdered? One. Assassinated at my country’s request? Fifty-three.”
Unbelievable. The number was staggering. He thought of Cyrus, who’d killed over sixty people they knew of, and all the people he’d killed just because they were in the way of the person he wanted dead. Finally, he asked, “Fifty-three assassinations. How many more were collateral damage?”
Joseph shrugged. “None that were innocent civilians.”
A technical difference to Cyrus, but it was a difference. He changed tactics. “All right. Who did you murder?”
“The piece of shit that killed my father. I was sixteen. And yes, if I had to do it again, I would.”
So, no remorse. He moved forward using a different attack. “Have you asked yourself if you can walk away from this? Turn your back on the massive adrenaline spike? Will you be able to leave this life and power behind?”
“Leaving it behind won’t be an issue. There’s little likelihood I’ll return from this mission. Next to zero. This is the end of the road for me.”
Well, shit, that was not what he expected to hear. He needed clarification. “Then why are you going?”
The man leaned forward and talked to his loosely clasped hands. “If I don’t, they’ll find Ember and they’ll kill her. If the choice is her or me? The answer will always be her. I’m willing to die so she can live.”
Well, that statement just turned his anticipated diagnosis on its ear. “Does she know?”
“That I’m leaving? Yeah. She knows I won’t contact her again. I’ve told her from the start our relationship ends when I leave. She doesn’t know this is my last mission. She doesn’t know I don’t expect to come back alive. She doesn’t need to know the choices I made to keep her safe and give her a future. If you know her, then you know such knowledge would eat her alive. So, those sociopathic tendencies you think I have? They aren’t too much of a concern any longer, are they?”
He blew the air out of his lungs and answered honestly, “No. Loving someone so deeply would eliminate that concern.”
“Huh. You don’t say.” Jeremiah stared at the man. Joseph’s comment was the equivalent of a huge ‘fuck you’. He’d take it. The man had finally opened up and given him the answers he needed. He was going to get his Go on the evaluation.
Realizing he’d passed the evaluation, Joseph rose and went to the door. Jeremiah drew a deep breath and got ready to deal with his old friend with her overprotective assassin boyfriend in the room. Yay. He put his pen and paper down and rubbed his face. He was going to renegotiate his contract. Gabriel wasn’t paying him enough.
