Project Perses: Redemption

Chapter Forty

Chapter Forty

“Are you sure you’re okay with letting them all go together?  I’m mean, you didn’t even keep one of the doctors with you, you know…just in case.”  Teddy is leaning his back against the wall near the window as he sits on the floor.  I turn my head to glance at him and the dark living room behind me from my perch in the open window sill where I’ve been watching the evening traffic six stories below.  I’ve been spending a lot of time in this spot.

He’d been asking me the same question for the last three days.  We’re holed up in a penthouse loft on Mercer Street in Soho, taking up the entire top floor of the building.  The place was certainly nice, with four bedrooms and four baths; it covered over 3000 square feet and came fully furnished.  I appreciated the state of the art security system, remote controlled roll down window guards, impact resistant glass and private elevator.  The place was a virtual Fort Knox.

It’s amazing what cold hard cash can get you when you wave enough of it around.

The realtor had damn near fallen over himself when Teddy and Warner had entered his office and demanded to purchase an immediately available property downtown while Li and I waited in the black SUV outside.  It wasn't like I could just walk in to buy our next hideout, so having the team with me ended up being a God send. The multimillion dollar price tag had been nothing to sneeze at, but that’s where my funds in Dubai came into play.

I watch a jaw walker almost get hit by a cab before I respond.  “I already told you, it’s better if they’re with Alia.  Ellis may know a lot about our physiology, but Adler made us what we are.  If I need them, I’m sure we can get them back here soon enough.”  I sound grumpy, which pretty much confirms my dark mood.  I’d been in a funk ever sense I watched Vanessa enter the elevator at the Barclay with Alia, David and the doctors.  I knew I had done the right thing, insulating Vanessa and Alia with the best protection possible but when the door shut, marking their exit from my life forever, it was like the light went with them. 

Teddy flexes his bare feet and stretches.  We haven’t been out of the loft since we got here.  We had the place fully stocked with food via a delivery service before we arrived; the same service was also scheduled to deliver an identical order every four days thanks to my peculiar eating habits.  I also took care to make sure the utilities were paid six months in advance too.  The result, we could stay holed up here indefinitely without interacting with anyone.

Or at least until things died down.

God only knew how long it would be before that happened, if ever.  The incident on the roof was on every newsstand, TV channel, radio station, and was blowing up the internet.  The sheer volume of footage that was funneling through You Tube was mind blowing.  The media had indeed put everything together, just as Matt the Cop had said. 

Every public thing I had done all the way back to the shooting at Vertigo was a topic of conversation.  I was never more thankful than now that my old boss didn’t keep records and paid under the table since it also meant he had never needed to document any of us thugs he hired.  It didn’t mean that someday someone wouldn't get smart and figure out who I was, but at least I had anonymity for now.  Sadly, once the media dug into the files the Project had on me specifically, I'm pretty sure that would quickly be over.

CNN, FOX News, and just about every other ‘serious’ news service was combing through the ungodly amount of classified data that Teddy had leaked, which in a way was a good thing just because it was taking them longer to connect the dots, but still every day there was a new revelation or shocking discovery that required a significant amount of reporting.

It was like nothing else was happening in the world.

Mitchell had already been indicted, that had happened almost immediately upon his arrest.  The amount of damaging evidence regarding his activities was enough that the press was calling for his head and the Pentagon as well as Congress was calling for him to be tried as an Enemy of the State.  If that happened, it would mean a military tribunal for him, not a normal court of law.  He could spend ages locked in a maximum security cell, ala Guantanamo Bay, until his day of reckoning.