Act of Vengeance

by Michael Jecks

  ‘So he died.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  Jack shrugged.

  ‘I doubt anyone could have stopped him. He was pretty determined. The bullet shows that.’

  ‘Well, I’m surely sorry he took his life up here. If he’d come down to the town, maybe someone could have helped him bit more. Ach! What do I know? Look, you want a ride down to the Jeep trail?’

  ‘Yes, I’d appreciate that.’

  ‘Don’t mention it,’ Chief Burns said. ‘I still ain’t figured you out, Mister Lawyer. I reckon there’s more in your head than just a little dead client here. Still, none of my business.’

  Jack smiled and nodded, but his mind was already on the pine tree. Shotgun Pine seemed a long shot for a journal, but the fact that Lewin had been up there so often, the fact that he had painted it in his home, both showed that he had some feeling for the tree and the view from it. Jack should at least check it out.

  *

  10.18 Whittier; 19.18 London

  The tree was easy to find. As soon as Chief Burns let Jack out of the car and pointed, he could see the splintered, broken top of the tree through the smaller pines all about it.

  ‘It was the last of the old ones round here,’ Burns said, as he sniffed and scratched at his ear. ‘The army came up here and drove the road through, but they didn’t cut the old Shotgun Pine down. Don’t know why. It was left as a landmark, I guess. Reckon it was after the earthquake. Maybe it’s the last of the trees from before the quake of ‘64.’

  ‘Quake?’

  ‘We’re close to the fault line here. In ‘64 the place was trashed. Quay, fuel stores, the lot. The military buildings survived, but that’s about all.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘The land here shifted by feet. Hell of a tsunami, too. We’re kind of used to the elements fighting back around here. Look, I have some of Mr Lewin’s belongings back at the station house. You want to come take a look? Fine. I’ll be busy rest of today, but you can find me there any time tomorrow. We’re in Kenai Street. Ask Suzie to show you the way.’

  Thanking him, Jack closed the door and trudged up the roadway. It was very poor here, little more than a bed of loose chippings, and the ground rose, leaving the water far below. Jack stopped when he crested a hillock and stared about him. The sea was grey and inhospitable. Opposite him, on the other side of the bay, the mountains rose from the water, lush and green at the base, thinning as he found his eyes drawn upwards, and grey and bleak at the top. It was all the same around here: pines and rock, and little else.

  He liked it. Turning back to the track, he continued up until he came to a wide space.

  The tree stood at the edge of the track, which curved about it, and looked entirely out of place. It was as though an army engineer, guilt-ridden at the destruction of so many other trees, had finally selected this one remaining bough to live on. And then, ironically, because it was so much taller here and solitary on its little hill, it had been the easiest target of lightning when it struck.

  He approached the tree cautiously. If this was a blind drop, there would be nothing for the casual observer to see. But for Lewin, it must have been easy to find originally, when he first began to look for a secret hideaway. He wasn’t a trained agent, but an interpreter and interrogator. Finding suitable caches was not part of his job.

  But he had made that painting. Looking about him now, Jack could appreciate why. The place was higher, secluded, and yet gave good visibility of much of the track leading here, and over the water. A man up here could be sure of seeing when someone approached.

  Pulling out his phone, he looked through the photos he had taken in the room: two showed the painting, although neither was well focussed, and the picture on his mobile was not as clear as it could have been. He wished he had taken a photo of the picture itself, but it hadn’t seemed important enough to justify it.

  He stood with the phone at eye level, comparing it with the tree. Moving around the tree to match it with the photo, he soon found the exact position where Lewin must have sat to paint. It was a tree stump, ancient and rotten, and standing beside it, Jack wondered whether the painting had held a clue. Perhaps there was something that distinguished the location of the journal? But if that was so, the clue had been lost. The phone’s screen was poor, and the resolution of the picture terrible.

  Putting the phone away, he walked to the tree. From this side, there were only cracks in the wood. One looked hopeful: a broad fissure that rose to some height, but the bottom was covered by a brittle layer of bark, and when he touched it, the bark fell away. If anything had been installed there, the bark would not have survived. Still, he reached inside and quested with his fingers. Nothing.

  For an hour he prodded and tapped, checking roots, testing the bark and wood, fingering the thin soil all about it, and found nothing. The whole area was a mess of chipped stone and loose soil. Even grasses found it hard to survive here with the freezing winters, but there was no obvious hiding place, no matter how hard he searched, and he wandered to his starting point where the stump stood, and sat upon it. It rocked as it took his weight, but he remained there, staring at the Shotgun Pine, glancing at his phone every so often.

  And then he closed his eyes.

  ‘You prick!’

  He stood and studied the old stump. It was a little proud of the ground and, as he pushed it, it shifted. Some old plants had grown about it, and there was a loose flap of lichen and moss at one convergence of the roots. He pulled it aside, and peered in. There, among the roots, he could see a carrier bag. He tugged it free and opened it to find a clear plastic box. And inside was a leather-bound journal.

  *

  12.03 Whittier; 21.03 London

  Jack didn’t look inside. That could wait until he was back in his room. For now, he had the boxed journal stuffed into his coat, the zip done all the way up to his chin. Even with the thick down inside the coat, he was aware of the chill, and he stuffed his bare hands into the side pockets to try to warm them.

  The town appeared before him sooner than he would have expected. Here the roads were so poor that driving along the track meant a speed little better than a trot, he guessed.

  It was a curious place, this. Whittier suddenly appeared from the east through the trees. First the quay and a huge passenger ship at the dock came into sight, and then the rest of the town began to sprawl away on his left. It was like a huge scoop had been lifted from the side of the hill here, and a ‘U’-shaped road network inserted. Surely this was where the glacier had once lain because the pines were all a darker mass nearer him, while in the bowl of the rocks there were low bushes or scrub. That must have been the glacier’s position. Amazing that it had moved out of view.

  Next to come into view was the hideous old block. It loomed up on the extreme left, a foul cancer of concrete, with black, glassless windows. It was vast, and stared out over the rest of the town with a malevolence Jack could almost feel.

  At its foot he saw the girl he had seen the night before – the blonde, slim girl with the fear in her eyes. She looked over as he approached, and he smiled.

  ‘Hello,’ he said.

  She didn’t reciprocate his smile.

  ‘You’re new here.’

  He nodded.

  ‘Just visiting. A man I knew died. Did you know Dan Lewin? I am his lawyer.’

  ‘He killed himself.’

  There was no emotion in her voice. Only a dull conviction.

  Jack motioned towards the building.

  ‘Horrible old place.’

  She turned away from it.

  ‘I nearly died there. Johnny did. A walkway fell on him. So loud!’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘He thought the Buckner Building would be safe. He’d made himself a place in there, but it crushed him. Do you think it’s haunted?’

  Jack glanced at her. She was plainly sad, but there was no harsh edge to her misery, no cracks from which the tears could spring, and he guessed that she
must be medicated to seem so stoic.

  ‘Why should it be?’

  ‘I don’t know. I seem to hear things.’

  He pointed to the building.

  ‘Buckner? Why’s it called that?’

  With a sing-song lilt ,as though repeating a mnemonic from many years before, she replied, ‘He was the army General who did so much to make this town.’

  ‘What of that one?’ Jack said, pointing to the only other apartment block in Whittier.

  ‘That’s the Begich. It was named after a politician who died in a plane crash. Lots of men died here,’ she said, and suddenly began to sniffle, as though the immensity of her grief had returned to take her. ‘So many die.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘You know, if you come here late at night, you can hear them. The screams and sadness. All the ghosts of the Bucky.’

  Jack had been going to ask her where Chief Burns had his office, but the girl’s fey manner affected him. He felt as though he would be trampling her feelings into the mud by bringing her back to such mundane affairs. It was a relief when a woman gave a cry and ran towards them. She took the girl’s hand, throwing a suspicious look at Jack, and hugged her.

  ‘I was worried about you, honey.’

  ‘I went to look at it again.’

  ‘You have to keep away from that place. You know it’s dangerous, Kase. Keep away from the Bucky.’

  ‘I will.’

  Jack felt he should add his own comment.

  ‘She didn’t go inside, I don’t think. She was watching from out by the road when I came by.’

  The woman nodded, but said nothing more. Instead she turned and took the girl with her, walking over towards the tall block. Jack went to his room at the bar. He tossed the journal in its wrapping on his bed. There was nowhere to hide it in his small chamber, he realised, looking about him. He dare not leave the journal here. The thing was too important for him to risk losing it. He wanted to keep it on him at all times. So thinking, he took it from the box and shoved it into the lining of his coat, before pulling it on again and going down to the bar.

  He asked for a coffee, and sat at the same table as the previous night. This time, when he looked out through the window, the blonde girl, Kase, wasn’t there, and it seemed as though the view was incomplete without her. He would have liked to have been able to help her. She had a strange, fragile manner about her that called to a man to try to comfort her.

  Suzie was soon there with a mug and a pot of cream.

  ‘There was a girl I saw in town today,’ he said. ‘Kase?’

  ‘Oh, yeah?’

  ‘She was talking about ghosts and things.’

  Suzie chewed her lip.

  ‘Well, Kase is a nice girl. Don’t think anything else. But she went up the old building over there with her boy, Johnny Durham, and there was an accident. A walkway fell on them. Killed Johnny outright, and it sort of loosened her mind, you know?’

  Jack turned back to his coffee a few moments later with a sense of real sympathy for the girl. To have her boy crushed to death in front of her… And Suzie’s reticence to talk about it spoke much about the horror of the girl’s experience.

  It was that horror which made him think of Claire. She had none of that fragility and vulnerability about her before, but she did now. Perhaps it started when she first realised his real job had nothing to with petrochemicals. It had taken her a long time to accommodate the truth, and then they had started to drift apart, with her growing increasingly withdrawn. But it was only when they separated that she had displayed her anxiety openly.

  She had become more alarmed, like a trapped animal, when he first joined the Scavengers after 7/7. The more she understood about his job, the more the implications seemed to knock her down, both mentally and physically. She even walked stooped. It had been utterly different when he was in charge of his network in Russia because she had no idea about his work. He was at home most evenings after his day’s work, and she never guessed that he wasn’t working in the oil industry. When he established the Scavengers that all changed. He was confronting real danger, having to face situations he had never anticipated before, and, worst of all, he found he enjoyed it. It drew him away from Claire, and she could sense the gulf opening up between them.

  The house in Devon had been in her family for a couple of generations, and although she had agreed to convert it to a semi, and sold off the second half, she was adamant that she would never sell the rest. Even when they came so close to the final break up, and he demanded that she move back to London with him – God that had been a row to end all rows. He could still remember her tear-ravaged face as she shrieked at him that she would rather die than go back to live that empty, wasted life with him in London. He had only ever seen her like that once again. That time when he saw her…

  That wasn’t a scene he was going to dwell on. Instead he took a glug of coffee, pulled out the journal and opened it.

  And saw why this journal was so dangerous.

  Monday 19th September

  19.12 Whittier; 04.12 London

  ‘I went there thinking I was going to help in a war,’ Jack read, and stopped to take another gulp. It was hard to read this. He felt he knew what he was going to learn.

  ‘I was appalled when I heard of the tragic attacks on the two towers. New York had always seemed a place of excitement to me. I loved it after visiting twice, and to see it brought so low showed me that there was genuine evil in the world. As a Christian, I saw it as my duty to help eradicate the murderers who could do such things. They had to be stopped.

  'I was an enthusiast for the war. It could not come soon enough.’

  The whole journal was plain paper, A5, unlined, and there was a thin leather covering that was bound with a thong. It was written in a hand that varied wildly, with pencil mostly, that slashed at the paper with vicious strokes, or a dark blue fountain pen that seemed to match a happier mood. When the pen was used, the characters were more rounded and appeared calmer. Sketches filled certain parts, some being pictures of walls, of bars, or scenes from the countryside which looked as though they might have come from around here: pines and bushes, fireweed and stark, bare trees. Pictures of the cabin, from several sides, and a series of the Shotgun Pine from varying angles.

  But it was the faces that were the most common. Stark, gaunt faces, with eyes that haunted. The cheeks were deeply sunken, the skin lined and haggard: faces from Belsen or Auschwitz. They leapt from the pages, and Jack had to hold the journal away. He couldn’t bear to have them too close to him, as if their horror could slip into his own soul – his soul that was already so scarred. It was hard for him not to pick up the phone, but a glance at his mobile told him that there was no signal still. He couldn’t call Claire. It made him feel empty.

  He turned back to the beginning. It took a little time to decipher some of the pencil writings, but once he was used to the harsh, angular scrawl, he found he could read it much faster.

  In the main, the book told of Lewin’s arrival at Iraq, and how he spent a lot of time travelling about the country with his regiment. He had been seconded to them in order to help interrogate the prisoners who were caught as the troops passed through certain areas of Baghdad, and in the main, although all were nervous, the population gratefully received them. ‘They are an ancient race, and they show it. Urbane, gracious, generous, nothing we wanted was too much trouble. We were invited into their homes…’

  He was sent into Fallujah to help the American troops just before the big push to destroy the rebels within, and there he was impressed with the professionalism of the soldiers. In this, his first six month tour of duty, he appeared to enjoy the work, and his enthusiasm for the country grew.

  And yet it also meant that his tolerance of the men whom he considered terrorists, those who were prepared to bomb or shoot the ordinary Iraqis, was growing ever more fragile. He hated those who could harm others for no reason, and he could see no good reason for the continuing raids
and attacks.

  ‘My first descent into hell.’

  The title of that page drew Jack up short, and he sat for a long time reading the passage.

  It told of a time when he had a boy in his custody. The lad was not yet eighteen years old, younger than the British soldiers who brought him in, and yet Lewin was convinced that he was a terrorist. Lewin had been told as much by the major in charge. This prisoner was guilty of storing weapons. He had been found with a handgun in his room. Usually a pistol was no indicator of criminality, but there was a strong belief that intelligence proved this boy had been aiding a group of disaffected Iraqis who had tried to bomb a police station. He knew their names. He must give them up.

  Lewin questioned him. There was no response. He tried to shout and swear to induce fear, so that the boy would begin to talk, but the lad watched him from those large, bovine eyes, and said nothing of any use. He denied knowing the bombers, denied helping anyone. He was a supporter of the Americans, he said. The pistol was only there so he could defend his mother and himself. He didn’t want to see his mother harmed or raped. Everyone needed a weapon for defence.

  There appeared to be no way to break him. There was no proof that the army could give Lewin, there was only more force. Over time, since arriving in Iraq, Lewin had been happy to use increasingly harsh techniques. He had brought in trained dogs to intimidate prisoners and he had set electrodes on his desk and left prisoners staring at them while he went out of the room. This time, though, with this prisoner, he lost it.

  Too many nights of demanding answers that were not forthcoming, too many days in the middle of the desert, fearing the next explosion from an IED, too much time listening to the stories of soldiers who had wept as they told of their comrades blown to pieces or shot dead. This time, Lewin ran out of patience. He punched the boy on the nose. He felt the bone snap under his fist, saw the smudge of blood, the way the boy’s head jerked back, and rather than feel shame or guilt, he felt power, power mingled with pleasure. The boy made some comment, snorting and his nostrils bubbling with blood, and Lewin felt only rage. He slapped the boy with the back of his hand, then again with the front, knocking his head from side to side, lost for that moment in his own rage at the futility of his questioning, and at his impotence. The boy closed his eyes, and Lewin bunched his fist to punch him again, when he saw that the boy was crying. Not sobbing like a man, but simply crying, like the boy that he was.