Dead Ringer

CHAPTER THREE

Harmon parted the metal blind a little more. It was raining again. Maryland was wet, cold, and miserable this time of year.

He dropped the metal blinds and rubbed his left arm. Icy, wet, weather always made the old wound ache. Arthritis he supposed. The fragments of the bullet had lodged in the bone and when the old German doctor in Bonn had removed it, some of the bone was removed as well.

Harmon rubbed his left arm again and dropped the cord hanging from the metal blinds. He could feel the scar tissue through his shirtsleeve—an elongated bump.

After some careful talk on his part, the German doctor had not reported the gunshot wound to the police. Looking back, the old guy had probably been in the Hitler Youth—maybe later on attached to the SS—didn’t want to attract any more attention to himself than he had to.

Who knows, the old doctor may have been working at an internment camp doing experiments? He was about the right age—this had been in late 1966 when the doctor had dressed the gunshot gash—ruined his brown leather jacket—most of the bullet had gone right through the outer flesh of his arm, and his good jacket. A fragment had lodged in the bone, and the rest made another hole in the jacket on the way out. Harmon had dutifully reported the shooting back to headquarters.

Whoever he had shot had made a grunting noise and disappeared into the darkness. He knew that he had hit him. Harmon had recovered the Top Secret briefcase that had been stolen from the agency’s political attaché’s home. It was dropped in a snow bank as the thief ran. Harmon figured that he had shot him in the left arm.

The handcuff chain had been severed with bolt cutters. It had been cuffed to a steam radiator. The bolt cutters, left behind, were Russian manufactured. That had seemed to end it. Harmon was never told any more details and he was directed to turn over all of his files about the case.

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A small light come on at the security console down on the building’s first floor. The enlisted man noted the room number and ignored it for a few minutes. He knew that the room belonged to one of the Directors, Harmon Gregory. He had just pulled his name up on the screen.

There were at least fifteen violations noted on the computer screen table adjacent to Harmon’s name for “peeking” through the window blinds.

The Corporal finally put down the newspaper and logged one more violation into Harmon Gregory’s file. He went back to reading the Weather Section in the “USA Today” that someone had left in the lobby. He was due to go home on leave and was looking at the winter weather conditions in his hometown.

He unconsciously felt the flap on his pistol holster—it was unsnapped as security regulations required. The Corporal had snapped it once, a few weeks ago, as a kind of unconscious movement, and the Duty Officer had chewed on him for ten minutes. He didn’t want to go through that again. Besides he would like to make Sergeant someday.

The Corporal looked down at his shoes—one was scuffed.  He opened a desk drawer and got out his shoe kit.

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Harmon sat back down.

“I’ll leave them in the jungle for ten more days.”

He typed that in the notes file under the message from the Spec-Ops lead.