Heart of Darkness Chapter 2

There was a cold breeze slouching its way through the back alley behind Harboview Towers as Sarah Webber slipped her skeleton key into the back door and made her way inside.

Once in, she quickly made her way to the basement and knocked on cold steel door. After waiting a moment, she opened the door.

“Are we set?” She asked the other occupant of the room as she lifted her automatic pistol out of its leather holster and checked the cartridge.

“In a minute,” Jagger replied as he finished typing some commands into a laptop. “There. For all intents and purposes Jason Morgan’s penthouse is now cut off from the rest of the world. His silent alarm will go off, but it will be rerouted here. His video security cameras will loop the last five minutes of empty penthouse.” He pulled a small metallic disk out of the laptop. “All thanks to this gizmo the Consortium gave us.” he looked at Sarah for the first time since she entered. “Why the heavy artillery? We are just planting the bugs and getting out.”

“I know,” Sarah replied evenly. “But considering who’s penthouse we are bugging, I want to be ready. Kosokov will be arriving in a few days and I don’t want anything to go wrong at any point. The Consortium’s plan to remove Corinthos from the scene for a while worked, but don’t underestimate Morgan or his organization.”

Jagger shakes his head. “I still can’t get over Morgan and Corinthos dealing with an Eastern Europe gun smuggler like Kosokov. Doesn’t quite seem their style?”

“I didn’t think there was any love loss between you and Corinthos?”

“There isn’t. I just always thought....”

“What? That because they wear Armani somehow their good mobsters. A thugs a thug, whether on the streets of Port Charles or the villages of Bulgaria.” Sarah’s face hardened. “And if I have my way, a certain thug has only a few more days to live.”

Jagger paused. “Don’t make this one personal Webber.”

“Too late.”

Ten Minutes Later

Sarah automatically stands to the side when the elevator door opens, motioning to Jagger to do the same. She pauses, gun lifted ready to confront Morgan’s guards if their distraction did not work. She waits a minute or two and when there is only silence, looks down the hall.

“Damn,” She mutters as she races down the hall to the fallen figure in front of the Morgan doorway. She reaches down expertly, mindless of the blood, and takes a pulse. “Dead. He’s still bleeding.”

“So whoever did this is still around,” Jagger reasons in a cold voice and cocks his own gun. Sarah nods. “You think this is a routine mob hit or someone after our friend.”

Sarah shakes her head. “Either way, we have no choice.”

Stealthily she enters the doorway, being careful not to jar the door more than it already is or to make any noise. The penthouse is quiet, too quiet. Waving Jagger to search the first floor, she makes her way with her gun drawn up the stairs to the second.

As she hits the second floor landing, she can hear muffled noises coming from the bedroom. The door is ajar, she softly pushes it a little, no more than an unexpected breeze would push it. Straining silently, she can hear a small child, maybe three or four, crying and assumes its Morgan’s stepson. She searches her memory for a name and a face and smiles as it comes to her. Michael. But if Michael was here, where was his mother? More to the point, what were either of them doing here? She and Jagger had done survellience on Morgan for a week. The wife and kid spent every afternoon at her mother’s.

Through the crack in the door she can see the wife. Caroline. But they called her Carly. What had her profile said? Flighty. Impulsive. Stubborn. Protective. Her sources listed the marriage as troubled and hinted at infidelity but nothing that anyone could confirm. No one had denied that both Morgan and his wife were crazy about the kid.

Apparently she wasn’t the only one who knew that the kid was the weak link in Morgan’s armor Sarah realized as the other figure in the room came into view, a male heavily armed with all of it pointing at the head of a small child. Sarah swore softly. Someone in Morgan’s line of work had no right dragging a wife and child into his world. All they were were hostages to fortune, pawns to be used against him. A child deserved better.

A child deserved to live and Sarah’s finger slowly squeezed on the trigger. One shot to the back of the head. But would that be in time to stop him from shooting the boy. What the hell did the guy want anyway? They’d assumed Morgan was a contact. What if Morgan was in deeper?

She heard Morgan’s wife begging and pleading for her child’s life. The word’s tore at her despite herself and for a second, just a second, it was another mother pleading for her child. Another plea going on deaf ears.

“Please,” Carly begged desperately. “Whatever you want- just take it. My money. Credit cards. Jewelry. God. Please don’t hurt my baby. Please.”

The man didn’t falter, he kept his gaze locked on the child and his gun aimed at the boy’s head. “This isn’t about money. You facist pigs think everything is about money.”

“Of course its about money,” Sarah said smoothly as she entered the room. She needed to distract the gunman from the child. She took a chance that he would shoot her instead, no questions asked, but it was a chance she was willing to take. Besides she knew his type. They always liked to brag before they killed. Either brag or give a tirade about the evils of the Western World. This guy looked like he wanted to do both. “Money for guns. Money for bribes. Money for generals to live in fancy houses while soldiers freeze because there isn’t enough firewood and entire villages die of starvation because fields are burned.”

Carly looked up in terror as the second figure entered the room. Was this woman going to stop the first man or help him finish the job.

“Who the hell are you?” The man demanded imperiously, he couldn’t perceive of this girl being a threat so he didn’t shoot automatically. The ego of men Sarah thought. He should have shot her when he had the chance.

She held up her left hand to show the gold ring where a wedding ring would have been. “Recognize this?” She whispered.

The gunman did as he paled. Sarah raised her gun and prepared to fire, debating for a split second whether to let him live long enough to answer questions by shooting him in the stomach, when the man did the unexpected. Instead of shooting her or attempting to flee in his panic, he decided that he was going to die having succeeded with his mission and delivered his warning to Morgan. He turned away from Sarah and back to the child.

Realizing instantly what his intent was, Sarah yelled no as she pulled the trigger, instantly shattering the back of the gunman’s head even as she heard his gun go off.

Moving quickly across the room, Sarah shoved the body of the dead man to the side and moved for the child, praying to God that there was some way of saving the child.

She stopped as she realized that it wasn’t the child who needed saving.

Carly Morgan had, in her final act, sacrificed herself to save the child she loved. Sarah could hear the startled cries coming from the play pen as Michael began crying in earnest. She could hear the harsh gurgling coming from the woman as she lay dying. Desperate to help, Sarah took off her jacket and used it to apply pressure to the mounting crimson stain pouring from the chest.

She heard Jagger at the door.

“Call 911.”

Jagger didn’t move.

“Dammit Cates. Call 911. To hell with the Consortium.”

She pushed harder against the wound but the blood continued to flow. She could feel it warm and sticky against her fingers.

“Cates.” Her scream rose above Michael’s for his mother.

She felt a strong arm pulling her away and resisted.

“She’s dead Sarah. She’s been dead since the bullet hit her.”

Sarah stood frozen, Michael’s screams echoed inside her head over and over until it was no longer Micheal’s voice she heard.


Spring 1998
A village in Eastern Europe

Sarah Webber was petrified as she huddled on the cold damp dirt floor of the small hut, trying to ignore the sound of gunfire and explosions that thundered around her.

They were going to die. She knew that, no matter how much her mother might try to whisper otherwise and no matter how stoic her father was being. There was too much killing going on for it to miss them.

The world itself was dying and they were going to die along with it.

She thought briefly of Liz back in Port Charles and wished that she had said more, done more, to repair that relationship. I hope you know that I always loved you Lizzie she thought to herself. Always.

She listened vaguely as her father spoke with Katya, the village women who was risking her own life and that of her small grandson to hide them from the encroaching military. Even though she had only been here a few months, Sarah knew enough about the current regime to know that it wouldn’t phase them that her father was here on a UN medical mission or that he was a doctor. To the soldiers rapidly approaching they were the enemy. Her father would be killed and Sarah had a sinking feeling that whatever happened to her and her mother would be worse.

She heard Katya speaking to her father, heard her father’s protest. Katya’s
daughter and husband had been killed in an earlier raid a month ago, her grandson would have died if Sarah’s father had not been there. She heard Katya say something about showing her gratitude. Then, before Sarah’s father could stop her. Katya placed her grandson in Sarah’s mother’s arms and moved to the front of the hut.

With a sad smile, the old women turned to look at her grandson and then walked out.

Sarah heard the old women say something, but the words were indistinct and blurred. The gunshots that followed were not.

She heard her father scream and stand to leave the hut to help when the small wooden hut was suddenly struck by a hailstorm of bullets that tore at the wooden walls as easily as they tore at Jeff Webber’s body.

It was an image that would remain frozen in Sarah’s mind. Her father going to help, the agony on his face as bullet after bullet struck him, and then the awareness as he fell. Her father was dead. The man who had read her bedtime stories and grounded her when she missed a curfew.

The hut was eerily silent as the gunfire died and something, some force in Sarah snapped.

Too many people had died today. She wasn’t going to be one of them.

She ignored her mother’s hysterical screams and the cries from Katya’s grandson even as they ringed in her ears. Moving forward, Sarah turned her father’s body around and trying to keep her mind from realizing that it was his blood on her hands, his corpse she was touching, she reached for the gun she knew her father carried.

The gun she knew he had never used.

Jeff Webber was a healer. Once as a young girl his daughter had once contemplated a similiar career. The next few minutes would change all of that.

With a coldness in her heart, Sarah aimed the gun at the door to the hut and waited. What had she heard in that movie- if you want to kill aim for the head.

She ignored her mother’s pleas to put the gun down.

She ignored her own fear.

The only real thing to her at the moment was the door to the hut. One soldier. One shot and he falls. A second soldier. Another shot. It misses. The next one doesn’t. The third soldier falls as easily as the first.

A fourth one doesn’t come.

Sarah lowers the weapon after a long moment and then forces herself to listen to her own breathing and realize that she is still alive. She hasn’t died.

Then Sarah sees the look in her mother’s eyes as she stares at her daughter who has just killed and realizes there are more ways to die than she had ever imagined.

Port Charles
The Morgan Penthouse

“Snap out of it Webber. We have to get out of here.” Jagger said impatiently.

Sarah shook her head to dispel the images of the past. You can’t go back, you can only go forward. “We can’t leave the child. We don’t know if our friend there has back up or not.”

“I’m not playing babysitter Webber. This whole thing is going bad on us.”

Sarah’s professionalism kicks in as she manages to distance herself from the body of Carly Morgan.

“We take the child. And then we take Morgan. This can still work. All we have to do is keep what happened here quiet.” She walked over to Michael and picked him up. “Call a sweep team. But make it clear I want the body stored not disposed of. This boy is going to have a grave to visit, got it Cates?”

Jagger nodded uneasily.

“All right, if we move fast we can have this done and pick up Morgan before anything else happens. Once we can control Morgan, we can set the trap again.”

“What makes you think we can control Morgan?”

“If we can’t, we’ll kill him.” Sarah said decisively. “Let’s get out of here.”

“Didn’t I say that already?” Jagger mumbled.

They had just made it to the elevator when it opened and Sarah’s heart stopped.

Emily Quartermaine, on her way to visit her godson, stared in horror at the bloodied young woman holding Micheal in one hand and a gun in the other.
“Sarah?” She barely choked the words out before the darkness exploded.