93 - Baghdad
SEVERAL YEARS AGO So what did that mean in the long run? I hadn’t the slightest idea. But in the short run, it meant that it was even less likely that the Sergent was going to believe that it had been Jackson that helped me out of … wherever I had been.
“I don’t know what to tell you sir, other than what I’ve already said. I went out with Carter, Lee, and Rush to investigate the museum and got shot. When I came to, I was in a series of rooms under the museum which I then managed to escape from. I returned back here only to find that two weeks had gone by. That’s really all I knew.”
I finished it all a bit breathless. He was just watching me with an unreadable expression on his face. All of that I’d said before, but never all at the same time like that. That was new and I couldn’t tell what he was thinking about it.
“Sir?” I said after a long moment waiting.
“We’ll have to get a sample of your blood, see what we can find.”
“What we can find?” I didn’t particularly care for the sound of that.
“Well, if you were unconscious as you say you were for the better part of two weeks, there has to be something in your blood stream.”
Of course I’d already thought of that and checked for IV marks, but I had a feeling that wouldn’t be enough to satisfy him. And hey, maybe a blood test could turn up something I had missed.
“And on the other hand, if you’re lying to us and you really are working with the opposition…”
“How can you…”
He raised a hand and I backed down.
“The thing is, padre. I want to believe you, really I do…”
“Then why don’t you?” I cut in. I was starting to lose patience. There was only so much that I could do without risking some sort of disciplinary action, but at this point, that was almost sounding preferable to the alternative.
But the Sergent didn’t seem particularly perturbed by my outbreak. Indeed, he hadn’t even seemed to have noticed. Right as I cut in, something else had caught his attention, a sort of buzzing coming from his pocket. He pulled out a smart phone, took one look at the screen, and then immediately looked back up at me.
Now I was expecting a berating.
But no, nothing. Instead, he said, “we’re going to have to continue this later,” and turned on his heel.
He was halfway back to the door before my brain caught up enough to actually ask “what’s going on?”
But he didn’t answer. He didn’t even so much as slow down or turn back to me. He just pushed his way through the door, closing it behind him. I heard the locking sliding back into place and once again I was alone.