"Quiet, Rollie," the hushed whisper came as an order.

Once inside a smaller room, Rollie was pushed down roughly in a chair and waited. Since the total confusion in the quiet room, he had done as he was told. He had not seen Kholler killed, he heard the air pop of the silencer only. Someone or something had deactivated the cameras in his intracular lenses just before Kholler was killed and all sight had been lost to Rollie at that point. The voice that had roused him from his shock was Michael Sanchez’s.

"So, you with me here?" Michael said, his voice louder as Rollie turned his head in the direction of his voice.

"Where’s here? What are you doing? I thought you were dead- Brabon said you were dead," Rollie replied, confused and tormented by the recent events spinning around him.

"Brabon, that son of a bitch- was the damn linch pen in all of this- kept the wheel on the splinter group. I thought it was Martens but he was only a follower of Brabon. It was only after I saw how interested he was in you, you’re being unable to be debriefed that I realized how he had deceived me."

"I don’t understand, Michael. I thought Brabon was brought in by you to help me. I thought he was like you, on the outside- escaped from the group?"

"A butterfly rogue and a damn good one! When I left the hospital last night, he tried to hit me. I did a belly flop in the harbor for that. He was supposed to have met me to finish our deal. He owed me big time for saving his hide outside of Munich when another rounder tried to do a hit. Now that I think about it, it was just a set-up to test my loyalty. He never left the group; he was the rounder picking off the strays. He is good, I got to give him that."

Rollie was confused, dazed and not comprehending what Michael was telling him. He only knew one thing. His son was missing.

"Did he take my son, Michael?"

Rollie heard nothing but the sound of steam pipes nearby; "Michael, did Brabon take my son?" he repeated.

"No."

Rollie put his hands to his own face; "Who took my son? What happened to my sight?"

"I deactivated your sight with a special device that counters the signal input between the camera and the diode in your retina and before you ask why- Kholler was working with Brabon. He was setting up the remote electromagnetic pulse generator so that they could start reading your electroencephalographic discharges. They were fascinated with your inability to be debriefed. If they could reproduce it, they could have quite a weapon against debriefing and use it for their own advantages. As far as your son, he would make a perfect second study- genetically speaking they could do the same type of testing on him."

"Bloody bastards!" Rollie blurted out, gripping the edge of the crate he was sitting on as it rattled from his shaking so hard, "if they don’t have my son, who does?"

"He’s right here…" Rollie heard Michael say, his voice low as Rollie stood up, his hands clenched together tightly.

Michael grabbed his arm and pulled him toward him and led him about twenty feet further into the room. He could hear Michael moving things and finally, he heard the grunts and sucking noises he was familiar with from holding Aidan before in the NICU.

By guiding Rollie’s hand, Michael greeted father to son again as Rollie let out a sigh of relief, touching the soft, grasping hand of his son.

"I came back to the hospital late last night after my ‘swim’, saw Brabon near the NICU and found that he had been inside, reviewing Aidan’s medical records. I knew then, that he planned to also take advantage of your son. I had to move quickly after that. Once I saw that Angie had left early after feeding him, I came in, found out he was being planned to transfer to the well nursery. I figured that Brabon would make his move sometime at the transfer. I beat him to the punch and took Aidan from the nurse down there, posing as the well-nursery transport attendant. I saw Kholler with Brabon shortly after I put Aidan down here. When you were taken into that quiet room, I knew what they planned to do. I couldn’t let them do anymore to you, Rollie…" Michael’s voice had an emotional rise at the end that was uncharacteristic for him and Rollie, taking in his words, was digesting the whole ramification of Michael’s intervention.

"We have to get to Angie!" Rollie exclaimed, his pulse racing then for now he felt she was in danger as well.

"She is surrounded by Mira and Francis and most of the downtown precinct. She is safe. Brabon wanted you and the boy," Michael replied, as Rollie’s mind continued to wander in confused circles.

"Will I have my sight back? Can you reactivate my signal?" Rollie asked, almost desperately.

"It doesn’t work that way, Rollie. When I deactivated the signal, the diode implants were destroyed. I’m sorry but I couldn’t let them use that pulse generator on you. You would have been a lab rat to them," Michael replied, his voice solemn.

"Worth a shot, eh?" Rollie asked, bitterly and felt his son’s forehead, stroking the top of his silky, slight swirl of hair, "tell me, what’s he look like?"

Michael cleared his throat slightly, knowing how painful this was for Rollie and he definitely didn’t want to go further into an emotional conversation with him; "he looks like a baby, I don’t know…" he replied, gruffly.

Rollie smiled then, knowing that it had taken a lot of courage to come back and do what he had done. He did have an emotional attachment to all of them, whether he liked it or not.

"What’s the plan then, Michael?" Rollie asked, thinking ahead to Brabon and his comrades searching the hospital for him and his son.

"For now, you stay put with your son. I need to get out of here and finish something…" Michael told him, walking away from him.

"You going after Brabon alone with some of his friends out there as well?" Rollie asked, shaking his head.

"It will be like snuffing out birthday candles, piece of cake- no pun intended," Michael answered, his voice sarcastic and edgy.

"Can’t you call someone to help you?" Rollie added, still not reconciled to Michael’s abruptly thought out plan.

"Jesus, Rollie! I thought Martens was the head of this, he did know about most of it and I killed him. He was sitting up there in the friggin’ Langley office. I can’t trust anyone now. Who I thought were my friends are not…!"

"Yeah, got that, sorry! I wish I could help you, is all…" Rollie replied, cursing that he could not see. He felt useless and resigned to a victim once again.

"If I get outta here, I have one other contact- a legitimate source for working on retinal implants, Rollie. He is not in this. He’s a doctor in Bonn, Germany. Remember his name, okay? Rolf Eckmiller…he’s been working with implants as well. Not these exactly, no night vision- just the hope of thousands of people who want to see again. I think he is working with MIT, in fact."

Rollie nodded his head; "Thanks, mate- now you’d best be off, so break a leg, Michael!"

"I hate the movie industry…" Michael muttered under his breath and Rollie heard him exit, shutting the door behind him softly.

"Hey there, little man!" Rollie told his son, putting his finger back down inside the transfer crib and feeling his son’s grasp again, "wish I could see you…"

Angie had gone back to her room with Mira coming back with periodic reports. There were no sightings of Rollie or her son. There were two policemen outside of her door, posted and they were not to let anyone in, save Mira or Francis. No government agents, no other departments were allowed access to her. Angie had to smile at Mira’s total control of the situation as she paced her room. She had put on her clothes, amazed that her maternity clothes were hanging off her so. At least, she was shrinking quickly enough now, she thought trying to keep her mind off what was happening around her.

A knock came to the door and a policeman opened it, with a white jacket arm reaching deftly behind the officer, a stun device rendering him to the ground. As Angie backed up, Brabon entered the room, breathless and angered.

"Come with me now, Mrs. Tyler. You want to see your son alive, then come now!" he threatened her. Angie did not argue and she accompanied him as he put his arm through hers and led her down the hall. She said nothing as she internally shook with fear and anger at the same time. She knew that Brabon had done something with Rollie and her son. She knew she should never have trusted him.

"Down here," he told her, leading her to a stairwell as she tried to keep up with him. His grip on her arm was like a vice and her hand that had been broken was pounding with swelling and pain as he took her further down the stairs toward the basement.

Once down in the bowels of the hospital, they walked until they reached a room, laundry machines and dryers filling the entire length of it. As they entered, the men she had seen and talked to upstairs greeted them.

"So, we have our bargaining chip now, snatched from under that bitch detective’s control. I underestimated Michael’s ex, for a cop, she has some power here that I didn’t count on," said the man called Brant.

"Enough talk, we can track them now with the nuclear tracker. Both of them!" Brabon said, in a sharp, aggravated voice.

Angie watched as she was pushed roughly down on the floor, her captors not caring if she was hurt or not. She was studying the tracking device they held. She realized that the small nuclear generators in both Rollie’s implants and Michael’s were what they were tracking. She only hoped that Mira had found out by now that she had been taken and was searching for her as well.

She studied her surroundings as the men set-up their device. She could hear their success as she inched her way back a little bit at a time. She wasn’t about to just sit there and wait for her own execution. She looked down at herself and rolled her eyes for she had saturated her blouse. She worried about Aidan and whether he was hungry. She worried about Rollie and what had happened to him, was he safe? She knew now that these men did not have her son. In her mind, she felt almost a comfort- that Rollie and Aidan were together somehow.

"Got one here," came the excited voice of one of the agents, pointing to the screen of the tracker, "and, someone moving over here," he added as Brabon looked intently with him.

"Go, find them now!" Brabon ordered and they were dispatched, leaving Brabon and one other, the operator of the tracking device.

Angie looked up at the ceiling, seeing the pipes and covered sealant used on some other pipes nearby. She wondered…and straining, she traced the covered pipes to the corner of the room and saw what she had hoped for, the radiation warning label stamped on the end of the pipe.

She had hoped for this, that with a hospital this size, they would have a radiation discharge pipes leading to their nuclear waste unit that ran under the main floors of the laboratory and radiation department. These pipes would carry the waste to the central unit for waste control. If there was someway, she could get a leak, just a small leak- the possibility of uncovered, radiation would deflect the tracker.

I’m crazy, she thought to herself. There was no way she could get up there and no way they weren’t on to where Rollie and Michael were. They were in constant contact with the agents they had dispersed and Angie was able to move very slowly without detection. She was now almost directly behind the tracker operator as Brabon paced the room, leading the agents on with a headset transmitter through the maze of the basement areas of the hospital. She could see the gun in the operator’s holster, under his arm as he typed in new coordinates, busy with directing Brabon and the others.

What the hell, she told herself and with Brabon’s back to her as well as the operator’s, she went for the gun in a quick, painful move for her because of her hand, slipping the butt of the gun from the holster and aiming with both hands toward the pipe.

The operator had swung around and shouted as Brabon turned around, frowning. Angie fired once before being taken down to the ground with a swift, hard kick to the jaw by the operator. Darkness filled her mind, and she felt no pain after that.

Rollie heard gunfire, a single shot. He grabbed Aidan from the crib and felt the wall, hugging it as he went closer to the door, feeling his way along. Aidan was still not crying and he was relieved as he felt the door and put himself behind it. He could hide here hopefully if the door was opened. He had no idea if the room had anywhere to hide in…just his wits now were helping him along and then, a sharp bolt of light in his mind plagued him. Had he seen something? No, but images were flooding into his mind- and he smiled in the middle of his situation, grasping his son to his chest for the dreaming was there with him and he felt secure somehow, amidst the chaos.

"The bitch hit the radiation waste pipe!" Angie heard the shouting now as she shook her head and tried to focus on the room around her. The pain in her jaw was intense as she tried not to cry out. She could see that the operator had nothing but a skewed detection pattern on his screen and she was thankful for her small part to helping Rollie and Michael out. They were packing up, moving to get out from the spray of leaking radioactive waste that was trickling down exposed from the small hole in the pipe.

"Get up!" yelled Brabon as he grabbed her roughly by her broken hand and jerked her to her feet. His hand went around her throat as he tightened his grip and she choked, the air gone from her windpipe as he squeezed tighter.

He released his hold when the other agents came back to their home base and they all moved out from the laundry room, fanning out down the corridors in a precision mode, waiting and watching for any sudden moves. Angie could hear behind her the sounds of people trying to get into the basement. She figured that they had sealed off all exits to the basement and Rollie, Michael and Brabon’s agents were all here, waiting for the kill, hunters and hunted.

There was a sudden fire of a weapon as an agent went down in front of their group and everyone dispersed, as Brabon gripped her shoulder and pulled her over to a wall, beside a cement column. Angie saw another man fall over to their side as she held her breath, her heart pounding rapidly as she was roughly pushed forward.

A third man was hit next, blood spurting out from a neck wound as Angie winced, Brabon pushing her over the body as they moved for more cover. The sniper seemed to have quick, decisive moves, and was able to hit from all angles. Was there more than one? Hearing Brabon’s raspy breathing behind her, she gasped as the operator grabbed his chest, falling beside them. There was only one other agent left and Brabon. He deftly pulled her to his chest, a gun’s barrel placed to her temple.

"Come out, Michael. I will shoot this woman. She is really nothing to me. I can forget about Tyler and the boy. We can call it even. You leave, I leave. This has gotten messy," shouted Brabon.

There was no response and Brabon began to talk again; "I know you aren’t dead, Michael. Sloppy on my part, you know. I can tell your hit pattern, you always were such a magnificent sniper."

Brabon clicked the trigger of the gun, ready to fire as Angie gasped, the images of Rollie’s face and her baby in her mind, as the seconds trickled away.

The other agent moved over slightly and reacted to a click he heard. Brabon moved very deftly, as if he detected a slight breeze as the bullet whistled by him, striking the other agent in the head, immediately bringing him down.

"Okay, we are one to one now, eh?" Brabon shouted out, listening intently for any shift or sound but there was nothing or was there something? Angie heard a soft, wailing from a distance down the hallway. It was a baby crying.

Brabon dragged her forward, toward the sound of the crying. He grasped her neck, the barrel of the gun pressed into her temple tightly as she began to cry out, pleading for her child.

"I will take them both out, hell- Michael…it's not worth all this, is it?" shouted Brabon, to the air as he made it to the door of a small room. The baby’s cry was strong as Angie cried, her whole being shouting out for her son. How could Michael have left her son defenseless, alone as a target for Brabon to deflect away from him?

"Let go of my wife, you bastard…" came the guttural voice behind Brabon. The old debriefer felt the hard, cold steel against the back of his head.

"Mr. Tyler, I see you feel strongly about this but how is it, you are able to see me since I know Michael has probably deactivated your implants?" he said, quite calmly as he maintained his hold on a shocked Angie who couldn’t turn around and see Rollie.

"Don’t need um, got the dreaming, that’s all I need," Rollie told him, pressing the steel into the softness of the man’s neck.

"I’ve got your wife, and sorry to say- had just about enough of all of this!" Brabon responded and started to pull the trigger as Angie shouted out;

"Oh God! Rollie…"

This was a shot fired and then, another as Angie saw in front of her Michael, his steely frame standing straight and strong with his weapon aimed at her. There was a slight smoke discharge from the gun as she felt Brabon slump against her, pitching her forward against Michael. They hit the wall together from the sheer force of Brabon’s dead weight behind her and came down to the floor together. Angie looked over her shoulder, seeing Brabon on the ground, not moving. Behind him, stood Rollie, holding a small copper pipe in his hands. His hands were blistered from the apparent hot water inside the pipe when he had wrenched it from the wall with his bare hands.

"Oh Rollie, oh God!" she cried out as he stumbled forward, over Brabon and felt for her outstretched arms, finding her and holding on to her for dear life. Angie could feel Michael’s hand slip from her shoulder then and she turned around, her happiness clouded.

Brabon had found his target as Michael had found his. The blood was running from his chest freely, his eyes slightly open as he lay slumped, half sitting against the wall.

"Rollie, it’s Michael, he’s been shot, he’s…"

"Dead…I know it," Rollie said, in a low voice, as he reached out and took Michael’s hand, feeling for pulse and finding nothing.

Angie began to cry softly, her arms leaving Rollie as she carefully touched Michael’s face and closed his eyes without thinking. She touched his hand as well, the one that still clutched the gun that had killed Brabon. In the dimly lit hallway, she saw the shimmer of gold, his wedding band on his finger and she shut her eyes as Rollie took hold of her, his own tears of joy and sorrow wetting her face as well.

Aidan’s cry alerted them both then, as Angie got up, pulling Rollie up with her. She walked inside the room where Rollie had been and found her son, neatly in his crib but angered by all the commotion that had occurred around him.

There was shouting and running heard from outside the room. Angie peeked out to see a procession of police and hospital personnel behind them. She held Aidan and guided Rollie outside the door, standing by Michael’s body as if protecting him.

From the distance, she could see Francis, his face showing his relief as he saw them standing, the family of Tyler intact. Mira was to his left then, seeing them as well but she stopped in her tracks as she neared, as Angie’s gaze met hers, the sorrow- the look that went beyond communication and she looked down to where Angie hand had gone, softly touching the dark hair of Michael’s head.

Michael Sanchez was buried with full police honor in the same cemetery where Leo McCarthey had been laid to rest. There was no protest, there was no questioning by any police official. As the last volley of gun fire resounded in the warm spring morning, Mira sat perfectly still, flanked by Rollie and Angie to one side and Francis, who was holding her hand firmly on her other side. The flag was presented to Mira and even though she was divorced from Michael, she was his only family left. She held it against her, her eyes surveying the hill where she could see another grave, another policeman buried. Her eyes were clear but red-rimmed. She had done her crying alone just as she had borne the weight of their relationship since he had left. She had buried him with his wedding ring on, and surprisingly, as Francis held her hand, he felt a small, band of gold that had been returned to her finger as well. He smiled softly at her as she glanced at him and she turned to look at Angie and Rollie. Rollie’s sight was still gone but they were flying to Germany in a week’s time to see the specialist that Michael had told them about. Angie clung to Rollie, his hand holding hers as she leaned her head against his shoulder and he kissed her forehead.

Mira waited until everyone had left, her hand resting on the edge of the coffin as she laid a single, white rose on top. She was through with the interrogations from the different agencies that would not let her grieve a second as they questioned Michael’s moves all these years since he had left. There would never be enough answers for them or Rollie, she knew. Only Michael had known the answers maybe…

She smiled then, removing the ring from her left hand; the one that she had just put back on for the funeral that day and she placed it up, over the stem of the rose.

"There you go, amor- you’re free at last."

FINE