by Nick Cook
For a fraction of a second, I think she’s talking about me. Long enough to wonder how much, with her access to every kind of Secret Service database, she really knows about me.
‘It depends what you mean by “function”.’
‘I couldn’t help hearing some of that stuff Misty was telling you about Duke’s father. While we were in the kitchen, and you were with Lou, I asked about his mental state at the Veterans Center. You’re the expert, but I can’t get my head around the spooks wanting to employ someone with his kind of symptoms and history.
‘His anxiety became depression. Then his depression seemed to morph into something more serious. Kind of bears out what Misty was telling you and what his medical notes said – if we can trust them at all.’
She knows what I think: that they’ve been altered, though quite why is anybody’s guess. ‘How serious is serious?’
‘He heard voices. Saw things. Had hallucinations.’
‘While he was in therapy?’
She nods. ‘Before they placed him in work.’
‘Did anybody voice their concerns?’
‘Yes. According to Misty, Lou did. Before she got sick. To his recovery support therapist.’
‘When we get back, we’re going to need to speak to him or her.’ Then we’ll know whether his notes are real or not.
‘Best of luck with that. He was killed in a road traffic accident shortly before your friend Katya took on the DoD for compensation. She didn’t tell you?’
No, she didn’t.
‘Where are you going with this?’ she asks.
‘A year, maybe eighteen months after he went AWOL, Duke allegedly called his mom. A number of times. Told her he was scared. It only ever happened, though, when Misty was out.’
‘So?’
‘Maybe he had eyes on the trailer. Did you see the way his mom pointed at the trees? The forest backs onto the yard. My guess is he had a prepaid cell and she really did see him there.’
‘Where?’
‘In the trees. Beyond the chain-link.’
She looks at me long and hard. ‘The phone company said there were no calls.’
‘If they can alter his medical notes, then they wouldn’t have any difficulty manipulating the phone records.’
‘And that shit about his dad?’
‘In the kid’s mind, he might not have been dead.’
She gives a slight shake of the head. ‘Say that again.’
‘Duke clearly did not want to be foreign-deployed. With his history, being sent back to the desert would have been a big stressor – severe enough quite possibly to have brought on a psychosis in which he believed that he saw his dead father.’
‘Like a hallucination?’
‘If he was that sick, yes.’
There’s a ping from her inbox. She detaches the sat-phone lead, and we open up the file to see what we’ve got.
I’m amazed by how much better the resolution is.
The lake is twenty miles from the nearest road. Rocks and trees pepper the desolate landscape.
We zoom in from space to a point where we’re hovering just a hundred meters above its surface.
‘There,’ she says, pointing with her pen. ‘There’s something right there.’
I peer at the screen. It isn’t easy to see. It isn’t where I would have expected it, down by the water’s edge, but higher, partially obscured by the trees, around two hundred meters above the shoreline: a cabin.
15
THE LAKE APPEARS AS IT DID IN LEFORTZ’S SATELLITE IMAGERY, only darker – a sliver of azure in the granite. It has taken a five-hour hike for us to reach it from the empty camping ground where we left the Lexus.
Hetta raises her binoculars and places the cabin under observation for several minutes before passing them to me. It’s halfway between the lake and a jagged bluff that juts into the valley. Since the satellite pass that produced our imagery someone has carried out extensive repairs to it. The roof is newer than the walls; the lumber there has been freshly cut. The windows have been boarded over and the door seems to have been strengthened. I can see the last of the daylight glinting off the metal reinforcements.
It takes us another ten minutes to cross the valley. Hetta and I hunker down by a cluster of boulders. The cabin is now less than a hundred meters away.
The shrill cry of a night bird sounds from somewhere in the trees. The moon, three-quarters full, paints the lake and its surroundings blue, black and silver.
After ten minutes more of eyes-on, we’re satisfied we’re the only living souls out here beneath the crystal-clear star bed. But even though the cabin appears lifeless, we take the precaution of approaching in stealth mode.
From thirty meters away, there is an overpowering smell of creosote.
When I reach the door, I put my ear to it and run my hands over the reinforcements. A huge, industrial-size padlock hangs from a bolt that’s as thick as my wrist. There is no rust on the screws. The work has been done recently, perhaps within the past month.
Hetta pulls out her Beretta and chambers a shell. I stand back.
The lock is no match for a .357 round.
The sweet smell of rotting tissue is so thick it makes me gag.
Hetta is standing just inside the door, her back pressed to the wall. Her hand covers her mouth and nose.
Her flashlight cuts through the darkness, the beam bouncing off of the walls and things that don’t belong in a place that’s twenty miles from the nearest road.
I struggle to take in what I’m seeing.
The cabin is maybe ten meters by eight. Just one room. I expected to see bare lumber; not this.
There are thousands of them. On the walls, strewn across the floor. I look up. They are even pinned to the ceiling.
Pictures, photographs, sketches, printouts …
Hart shifts the beam to the left of the fireplace. She moves it to the right. Up. Down. It’s all the same. They’re everywhere.
Images: Of people, places, objects, things …
Hetta retches and drops the phone. She runs outside.
The light remains fixed on the ceiling.
I look up and see a burning building, a blindfolded hostage with a knife to his throat, a power station belching smoke, kids at a rock concert, a train station, a fisherman staring at a dried-up lake, a plane slamming into the World Trade Center …
Hitler and Stalin and John F. Kennedy …
A volcano, the Eiffel Tower, an overturned battleship at Pearl Harbor …
The Kremlin, the Beatles, the Taj Mahal, a machine that looks like the Large Hadron Collider …
The Golden Gate Bridge.
And these are just the things I can put names to. There are hundreds, thousands, I cannot, because they are so ordinary, so everyday.
People in cars, sitting at desks, asleep in bed, walking, reading, laughing, crying; adults, kids, black, white, tall, short.
Houses, office buildings, slums, churches, cars, computers, guns, planes, tables, rivers, meadows, fish, mammals, insects, trees.
Some of the images are clear; some are fuzzy, like the grainy video you see of state funerals or politicians at rallies in the fifties and sixties.
Some are taken from ground level; some are like ones I had access to when I was in Special Forces: drone-camera, spy-plane and satellite shots.
It’s like an exhibition of visual thought, at once random and connected.
Hetta walks back in. She picks up the phone. Neither of us says anything.
She swings the beam and it catches something to our right. The wall isn’t the solid surface I initially thought it was, but a drape, a length of dark cloth, strung across the full width of the cabin.
Hetta signals me, nods, and starts toward it, weapon extended.
There’s a moment during which she and I look at each other from both ends of the drape. Then, on her command, we throw it aside.
The inner sanctum is dominated by something red and oozing: a skinned car
cass with a rope around its neck, tied to a butcher’s hook that’s bolted to a beam. It comes alive when I pan my flashlight along it, because it’s crawling with larvae. A deer, I think; strung up, I guess, because it’s food and Gapes had nowhere else to keep it from predators.
‘You know,’ Hetta says, her words muffled by her hand, ‘they should do crazy wall kits at Kmart or someplace, because they’d fucking clean up.’
She’s right. Every psycho, it seems, has to have one these days.
The light catches areas of meat missing from the deer’s haunches.
She shifts her beam onto the wall behind the carcass.
I find myself staring at a poster-sized reproduction of a painting – an Old Master of Christ on the cross. To its right is some of the same grainy imagery we saw when we walked in, but devoted exclusively to the President – on the campaign trail, smiling, laughing, waving.
There are photographs of him in stadiums and on soapboxes at rural rallies – sometimes on his own, sometimes with Jennifer and the kids. Some are taken from a long way off: Thompson and the First Family tiny against large, cheering crowds and thickets of blue campaign banners. Others are about as close to the President as I’ve ever been. Gapes, or whoever took them, must have been standing only a couple of meters away.
To their right is a sketch of a bearded man with long black hair and pale, watery eyes. They stare at me with an unsettling intensity. Is that anger or passion? Does he hate or love me? He is about thirty-five years old and looks intensely familiar.
It might be the face of a 9/11 hijacker, or the priest who officiated at my confirmation. I haven’t the first goddamn idea, although the script beneath the picture – in Arabic or Farsi – offers a clue.
Fuck.
Is this what a mind looks like when its switch trips?
I move on. At the far right side are images of an ancient and modern city, one with a familiar skyline: Jerusalem. They fill the circumference of the beam. But I’ve missed a section. I shift to the left, knowing, even before I do, what I am about to see.
‘Whoa!’ Hetta says. ‘That is fucking incredible.’
I guess it is. I have my very own stretch of wall, with shots I’ve never seen before. A class photo from elementary school, me standing next to the teacher. I can’t remember her name, but it’s her for sure. A sketch of an Army officer. A little crude, but recognizable as my father.
I stare at myself on the school football team. I’m about thirteen, because I’m missing a front tooth, thanks to some asshole – Bertelsky – who knocked it out during practice.
Nearby I’m graduating from the Air Force academy – proud in my blue uniform, bow tie and graduation medal, flanked on one side by my commandant and on the other by my mentor, Senior Sergeant Deakins, who always said I could do it – that I had officer stamped across my forehead.
And here I am at USU, with some undergraduates, clowning for the camera with a guy in a long black wig: Dayno. We were going to a seventies party, I think. I look again. Jesus, I hope we were.
And I know what’s next, because it’s growing at the periphery of my vision – a sketch of Hope and her mother. Next to it is a snap of us on our wedding day. We’re in the garden of the home – it must have been taken by one of the residents. Jack is holding Hope’s hand as he gives her away. There are tears in his eyes. I’m starting to feel them in mine.
I move on quickly and suddenly I’m in Iraq, on the floor of a Black Hawk, kitted for action with my rifle and my blood bags. I don’t remember anybody taking photos, but there I am giving them a thumbs-up. It was the night we went into Fallujah.
The next picture chills the shit out of me. Our backyard: a place that wasn’t just inaccessible to the outside world but also invisible to it, because Hope and I liked to keep it that way.
I haven’t seen it in fifteen years. There are the carved pieces of driftwood she used to collect, the ship’s lanterns with the scented candles she lit on still nights, and the things she called her Pollyanna crystals – pieces of glass and translucent stones strung between the trees so they could catch the sunset.
Nothing, though, prepares me for the sight of our Jeep Liberty. It is so utterly crushed by the force of the truck that it’s barely recognizable. The twisted wreckage is surrounded by flashing lights and a small army of first responders.
Somewhere behind them, I am fighting for my life.
And Hope is dead.
Outside, everything is as it was a second before we went in: the upturned bowl of black sky, the stars, the moon, the silence, and the bitterness of the creosote that manages to overcome the smell of death.
The world has continued to turn, but for me everything is different. I walk toward the lake. When I’m far enough away from the cabin, I settle on a log and breathe in the sharp air.
I have no idea how Gapes went about collecting his material. There’s no electricity here, no phone signal, no Wi-Fi. It’s as remote a spot as you’ll find on the planet, and yet up on my wall, in addition to everything else, was a portrait of Jack. Jack in his Shawnee blanket. Not the one in my apartment, but unbelievably like it, and unquestionably painted by Hope. But completed. I have never seen it before in my life.
I hear a noise behind me.
‘Colonel?’ There is a surprising tenderness to her voice. She sits beside me.
I’m so cold that I feel the warmth of her body through the fleece of my jacket.
‘How are you doing?’
‘Needed a little oxygen. Sorry.’
‘I guess that was your whole life back there.’
‘The best bits. And the absolute worst.’
She passes me her bottle of water.
I turn to her. ‘One to ten.’
‘I’m sorry, I—’
‘Crazy walls. On a scale of one to ten, where’s that one figure?’
She doesn’t answer. I guess we’ve had our Oprah moment.
A minute goes by. Then: ‘Colonel?’
‘Yes.’
‘Did you notice the ordering? If you read the wall left to right – the Christ painting, the President, Jerusalem?’
It clicks. It follows the flow of our discussion in the tower and the words they found on the remnant of the note: God, Threat, Proof, Mac, Jerusalem.
‘From the ordering and the content of the imagery, “Mac” must refer to you. You ever been called Mac? Anything like that?’
I shake my head.
‘Your wife?’
‘Her name was Hope.’
‘I know.’
Of course she does.
She waits a moment. ‘Could Mac have been a friend of hers? Somebody she worked with? There’s a lot of pictures of her up there – more than anybody else, in fact. Here.’ She takes out her phone and starts scrolling.
Aside from the photo of our wedding day, there’s one of Hope as a little girl – it must have been taken while she, her mom and her father were still living in California. She’s giving the camera a gap-toothed smile and holding up a little china rabbit – her only possession to survive the west–east journey.
There’s a picture of her and her mom sitting on the end of the bed of one of the old folk residents at the home, the three of them laughing over something Pam has said. But the one that pulls me up short is of Hope and the placard.
She’s posing with it outside a cafe called the Artiste, a place where I used to study at weekends with my med-student friends. In the odd moments I’d looked up from my notes, I’d found myself drawn to one of the paintings on the wall. A painting of a beach. There was something magnetic about it. Something haunting.
‘And I’d got you down as more of a Hopper or a Rockwell kind of a guy,’ the waitress had said.
I’d looked up to find myself gazing into the most beautiful eyes I’d ever seen.
When I looked down, I noticed that she had paint on her hands.
The color of the sea.
I’d seen her before – once, a glimpse only, and from
a distance: walking across the USU campus with an easel under her arm.
When she returned with my change, I asked her what she’d been doing at a military hospital.
She told me she was an art therapist.
I was twenty-three at the time and had no idea what that was.
She’d glanced toward a group of people outside. Some of them were holding placards. A couple of them stamped their feet against the cold. One of them, an old guy in a beanie, beckoned.
‘Who are they?’
‘They’re protesting the invasion. You want to come?’
I’d laughed and pointed to my ‘high and tight’, my military grade crew cut. It was a couple of months after 9/11 and we’d recently invaded Afghanistan. ‘I happen to believe in my country,’ I said grandly.
She nodded. ‘So do they.’
I peered a little closer. I recognized a few of them. I’d seen them on campus too. The university shared space with the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, home to a number of outpatient clinics dedicated to the treatment of veterans.
Earle, the guy in the beanie, had defended a hill single-handed against hundreds of Viet Cong and received the Distinguished Service Cross.
Ralph, a Navy navigator, had been put through a double mock-execution after he was shot down over Basra in ’91.
Keith, the youngest, still in his twenties, had driven his colleagues to safety, despite losing his right leg below the knee in an ambush outside Mogadishu.
‘They’re your patients?’
‘I’m not a doctor, Josh.’ She smiled. ‘I’m an art therapist.’
She was halfway to the door when I realized I hadn’t told her my name.
‘How do you—?’
‘Are you coming?’ she called to me over her shoulder.
When I hesitated, she stopped and turned. ‘I want to show you all the people who are going to live because of you.’
‘Colonel?’
I look up. A cloud has begun to creep across the face of the moon. I return Hetta’s cell.
She pulls out the sat-phone.
‘Wait—’
‘It’s encrypted.’ She dials a number, gets to her feet and walks back toward the cabin. Five minutes later, she’s back to tell me that Lefortz is sending a helicopter and a PIAD forensics team. He’s told her to stay and help secure the site, but I must go back.
