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The room was still without being silent.
There was a machine that kept his heart beating, pumping out beats in beeps that were slow and steady.
Another machine kept him breathing, rising up and falling down in another rhythmic contraction that was just out of time with the first machine.
He was fed through a tube connected to his stomach and eliminated into two other tubes, small sacks of yellow dribble and brown goo that would be collected by a nurse and replaced with fresh sacks to repeat a weird cycle ritual the next day.
He had six tubes running from various bags hanging from poles beside the bed, three to an arm.
Medicine to keep him pain free, saline to keep him hydrated, different medicine or fluid or clear bags of hopes and dreams that would wash into his system and out into the waste.
He didn’t open his eyes when the nurse led Brill in.
Didn’t move, except for the machines doing all of the work.
“He hasn’t been awake,” said the nurse.
She was small and lean, all muscle with tiny bags under her eyes from a long night shift coming to an end. A badge on a lanyard around her neck told him her name was Becky, and she looked like it fit.
Like her eyes would be bright and cheery, but for the nights and the death that surrounded her.
“I can only give you a few minutes,” said Becky as she checked a tablet hooked to the end of the bed.
Brill wasn’t sure she would let him in at first, ready to present her with excuses as to why he should be allowed to go in before visiting hours.
But the tired and the sympathy and perhaps the fact that the man in the bed had yet to have any visitors made Becky let her guard down and saved him from sneaking past her.
She said yes and led him into the room.
“I’ll be back,” she said.
“That’s the world’s worst terminator impression,” he quipped.
It sounded flat and forced, and he was just trying for a joke, anything to get her pursed tight lips to relax into a smile.
Just for a moment, they almost did.
“It’s not a tumor,” she grumbled in a faux Austrian accent and pulled the door shut behind her.
There were a couple more movie quotes that popped into his mind, drifts and scraps of scenes that stuck with him, just as they stuck with the rest of the American psyche.
The guy in the bed didn’t feel lucky. He wouldn’t get involved in a land war in Asia. There were no Sicilians to go up against.
Brill sat in the plastic covered chair next to the bed.
He reached out and put his scarred hand on top of the thin bones wrapped in paper thin skin on the sheet, and bowed his head.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered.
He didn’t know what he was sorry for though.
Cancer was a bastard, an indiscriminate killer that didn’t care about race or gender, or socioeconomic political leanings. It didn’t care that the man in the bed was an assassin, and soldier and once that phase was done, a business man and security consultant of unparalleled success.
He had two billion dollars in African defense contracts that stretched across the Dark Continent into Southeast Asia, and cancer didn’t give a damn about his money.
It happened quick and Brill almost didn’t have time to say goodbye.
Would still be unable to utter the words, according to the muscular nurse with blue eyes and a hard frown.
The hand under his twitched and made him look up.
One dark eye was cracked open, little more than a squint and staring at him. It was like looking into the black eye of a great white, cold, impassionate and Brill had been told, much like his own.
The hand twitched again until it grabbed Brill’s index finger and made a motion with it.
“Pen,” Brill said.
He dug around the drawer in the table by the bed and found a scrap of paper, care instructions for one of the maladies affecting the man, and turned it over. He stuck a ballpoint in his claw and waited.
The fingers scratched out three letters, then dropped the pen. The one eye, still open, glared at Brill.
It was more squiggle than letter, but he could make out the letters S…I…S.
“Sister?” Brill stared at the black eye.
The head nudged, a hint to a nod.
The eye closed and the machine that was beeping began to buzz an alarm as the beating heart slowed to a stop.
The respirator still pumped its slow contractions under the bleating alarm. Brill stepped back as the door opened and the nurse came in.
She wasn’t in a hurry. There was no scurry of feet and flurry of activity around the body, working to keep it alive for a little longer.
She pressed a button on the heart monitor and turned it off.
“It was like he was waiting on you,” she said as she moved to the other machines and switched them off.
“I guess he was,” said Brill, watching the ritual of a woman who had done this before. Too many times, he had guessed.
He had watched men die before. Many men.
Often with him as the instrument of their demise.
Still, there was a sadness in the way she moved, almost without looking, as if dying was a part of her everyday too, and she had let something inside her go numb to deal with it.
Just like he had.
“Sister,” he said to himself as she pulled the lines and capped the needles, tossing them covered into a red biological waste box.
He didn’t know Simon had a sister.
And if he didn’t know, that meant no one else knew either.
Which meant a hunt.
The old mercenary knew just who to put on that trail, thought Brill. He had a particular skillset honed by the man dead in the hospital bed. He was a hunter and killer.
Now, he had a target.
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