Chapter 98: The Hospital
Simon came awake all at once, which was how he came awake when his body had decided the sleep was over rather than when he'd decided it was.
He looked at the ceiling. Different ceiling from the exercise facility. Whiter, lower, with the specific quality of surfaces that got cleaned regularly with industrial products.
He looked at his hand. IV line. Taped at the wrist, running to a bag on a pole.
He looked at the monitor. Numbers in normal ranges, or close enough that no one had come running.
He pressed the call button.
A nurse came in within two minutes — professional, efficient, the particular warm-but-not-personal manner of someone who dealt with patients all day and had calibrated their bedside presence to be useful without being draining.
"You're awake. How do you feel?"
"Hungry," Simon said. "And everything hurts. Where am I?"
She checked the readings at the bedside, made a notation. Then she crossed to the window and opened the blinds.
"West LA Medical Center," she said. "Your friends brought you in last night. They said it was a car accident." She looked at him with the brief professional assessment of someone who had treated enough car accidents to know what they looked like. "I'll get the doctor. Your friends are outside — I'll send them in."
She left.
Casey and Sarah came in.
Simon looked at them.
"Don't look at me," Sarah said immediately. She looked at Casey.
Simon looked at Casey.
Casey sat down in the chair beside the bed with the posture of a man who had prepared what he was going to say. "It was my design. But it was your request."
"My request was to learn interrogation technique," Simon said.
"You asked me to teach you," Casey said. "The best way to teach interrogation is to put the student through it from the other side. Every operative goes through a version of this. Classroom theory doesn't prepare you for the real thing. Only the real thing prepares you for the real thing."
Simon looked at the ceiling.
"And Beckman?" he said.
"She came when she saw the preliminary performance data," Sarah said. "She wanted to see the final assessment in person."
She opened a laptop on the bedside tray table.
Beckman was already on the screen.
"Agent Lewis," Beckman said.
"General."
"You have questions," Beckman said. "I'll answer them."
"What was the actual objective of the exercise?"
Beckman folded her hands. "Casey's evaluations identified a consistent pattern. Under operational stress, your moral threshold — your unwillingness to kill — becomes a liability. As a private citizen, that's a virtue. In the field, it creates a specific kind of vulnerability that opponents can exploit."
"They exploited it," Simon said.
"Twice," Beckman confirmed. "Both times you had a clean shot and didn't take it. Both times the hesitation produced a negative outcome for your teammate." She paused. "The exercise was designed to create pressure sufficient to break that hesitation. To give you an experience of the cost of it, in a controlled environment, so that the first time you encounter it in the field you've already processed it."
"Did it work?" Simon said.
"You fired on the fourth trigger," Beckman said. "After Casey was shot a second time. The hesitation compressed under sufficient provocation. Which tells us the threshold is moveable." She looked at him steadily. "What we need to work on is the activation threshold — the point at which you authorize yourself to act. In the field, you may not have four opportunities."
Simon absorbed this.
"The exercise also confirmed several things I was already confident about," Beckman said. "Your resilience under sustained physical and psychological pressure is exceptional. You held through three full cycles of electrical interrogation and a direct threat against people you care about without compromising any operational information. Your improvised escape was creative and well-executed under significant physical impairment." She paused. "And your combat performance after the break was — thorough."
"How many?" Simon said.
Sarah answered: "Thirty-five security personnel in tactical gear. You put down thirty-five people."
Simon looked at his hands.
"Effective today," Beckman said, "you are formally commissioned as an independent operative. You report directly to me. Your unit designation and operational parameters will be communicated through Casey's secure channel." She held his eye. "Welcome to the work, Agent Lewis. Officially, this time."
"I'll take that as a compliment," Simon said.
"It's an assessment," Beckman said. "Rest and recover. We'll talk when you're operational."
The screen went dark.
Casey stood. "Not bad," he said. "For a Buy More employee."
"You're going to hold the screaming thing over me forever," Simon said.
"You sounded exactly like Bartowski," Casey said, without inflection.
"I heard that," Simon said. "That was cruel."
"It was accurate," Casey said. He moved toward the door. "Get better. We have work."
He left.
Sarah stayed for a moment.
"Meg's on her way," she said. "We called her when you came in. She thinks it was an accident." She looked at him. "You should have a story ready."
Simon closed his eyes.
"Anything else?" he said.
"Ellie Bartowski is your attending physician," Sarah said. "She saw the admission notes. She may ask questions."
Simon opened his eyes.
"Of course she is," he said.
Sarah left.
Ellie came in five minutes later in her white coat, tablet in hand, with the focused professionalism of a doctor who was also — Simon could tell from the particular quality of her attention — noting that she recognized the patient.
"Simon. They said car accident?"
"That's what I told the paramedics," Simon said.
Ellie looked at her tablet, then at him, then at his tablet again. "The bruising pattern on your back and chest is consistent with repeated blunt force trauma. That's not a car accident."
Simon considered his options.
"I witnessed a mugging," he said. "I tried to intervene. The guy had friends. They hit me with the car when I chased them, and then they got out and—" He gestured at the general situation of his body.
Ellie's expression moved through several things. "Simon. You need to report this."
"I know how this works better than you might think," Simon said. "If I report it, they come back. For me, for people near me. It's not worth it."
"That's not how we should handle violence in this city," Ellie said. "If everyone made that calculation—"
"I know," Simon said. "You're right in principle. In this specific instance, I'm asking you to trust that I have reasons."
Ellie looked at him for a long moment with the exact expression Chuck used when he was deciding whether the thing he was being asked to accept was acceptable.
She made a note on her tablet.
"I'm going to put it in the chart as an assault with an unknown perpetrator," she said. "Which is what it is. I'm not going to advise you further on the reporting question because you've made clear you understand your options."
"Thank you," Simon said.
"You have three bruised ribs," Ellie said, shifting into clinical mode. "No fractures. The soft tissue damage is significant but not structural. You should be ambulatory by tomorrow. Pain management we'll handle with what you're already on." She looked at him over the tablet. "You're going to be sore for two weeks."
"I know that feeling," Simon said.
Ellie finished her notes and moved toward the door.
"Simon," she said, stopping. "Whatever is going on with you — whatever the real version of this is — be careful. For your own sake."
She said it without drama, without interrogation, in the manner of someone who had drawn a conclusion and was choosing to leave it at that.
"I'm working on it," Simon said.
She left.
He heard voices in the corridor — one of them familiar in a way that tightened his chest slightly.
He had about thirty seconds to compose himself before Meg came through the door.
He used them to think about what he was going to say.
He didn't come up with anything that was both honest and complete, because there wasn't anything like that available.
The door opened.
Meg looked at him — took in the IV, the monitor, the visible bruising at his collar where the shirt didn't cover — and sat down in the chair beside the bed without saying anything for a moment.
Then: "What happened?"
Simon told her the mugging story.
She listened to all of it without interrupting, which was either trust or the specific patience of someone who was listening for something specific.
When he finished, she said: "Okay."
Just that.
He looked at her.
"Okay?" he said.
"I'm not going to argue with you in a hospital room," she said. "I'm going to sit here until they say I have to leave. And then we're going to have a longer conversation."
She took his hand — carefully, mindful of the IV line, arranging it so the connection was comfortable rather than incidental.
Simon looked at their hands.
"Meg," he said.
"Not now," she said. "Just rest."
He rested.
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