Chapter 24
Waking wasn’t supposed to be painful, though at her age it often was.
The mental haze was one she recognized. She first experienced it during her intake testing to work at the Central Intelligence Agency.
Back then she’d been a naive twenty-one-year-old Yalie, months from completing a masters in Russian literature with an undergrad degree in Greek dramatic writing.
At his inauguration, President Kennedy had asked what she could do for her country.
Ah, poor JFK. So much hope cut short by an assassin’s bullet.
Her wandering thoughts traveled back to part of the qualification testing of new agents.
Could she stand up to the psychotropics without revealing what had been fed to her as critical information?
The psychotropic drugs became part of agent training that was repeated and formalized over the years.
The agency’s trainers held onto them much longer than the hippie counterculture.
She recalled a civilian blood donation she’d made in the seventies in which the nurse had asked her if she’d ever taken any drugs.
Annoyed enough to answer, she listed them all: hash, heroin, acid, speed, and peyote.
All the different forms as well: purple hearts, dexys, French blues, and black bombers for the uppers, acid on paper, in drops, as crystals…
None were on the woman’s interdiction list, so they’d taken her blood.
When fuzzed out as she was now, she liked to picture which of her flashbacks some poor woman was experiencing after a surgery.
Staying stoned for much of her years deep undercover in North Vietnam had been a welcome escape.
Those were different days. By the time she was sleeping with a Soviet two-star general, their drug of choice was vodka.
Now it was usually Murchie’s Earl Grey or their No. 10 black tea.
But this fog was a new one. She could happily return to sleep if the room wasn’t busy doing the spins.
Squinting an eye open offered only a blur of dark shapes.
Interesting. Benadryl Cocktail? No one had ever hit her with the common date-rape drink before, but there was a symptomatic match.
A cautious shift of her hips… She wore clothes and they felt like hers.
At eighty-five, perhaps she’d lost the allure that had so often aided her work in the past.
There’d been…gunfire. A dead person? Yes. She was relatively sure of that. Another injured? Yes, she’d shot two; too bad there’d been four.
Again the body check. No feeling of unusual tightness such as a bandage or a restraint. Just the spinning nausea and the sleepies.
Her last thought was to wonder who had found her after all these years. Who had been willing to expend the manpower and take on the political risk to attack her in Montana?