by Nick Cook
‘What?’
‘An envelope.’
‘Do you have the envelope?’
‘No. But I know what was in it. A photograph of Mac … and the other guy.’
‘Mac?’
‘Jack’s nickname. When he was in the Marine Corps. In ’Nam.’
‘And the other guy?’
‘Jack’s pilot. Freeley.’
‘And Hope is telling you this is important?’
‘Yes.’
‘What else?’
‘She’s telling me she loves me. And …’
‘And …?’
‘That she’s sorry.’
‘What for?’
‘For what happened … to us.’
‘OK. Let’s move on. Ask her permission to go to the wreckage of the Jeep.’
I do as he says. My breathing becomes labored again.
‘She’s not letting me.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because there’s something else she wants me to know. Something that’s more important.’
‘What?’
‘She’s taking me back. A long time back. To a night soon after we were married. We’re on the beach. I built a fire. She’s lying next to me. Her hand on my shoulder. Music’s playing on the porch. That song she used to love …’
‘What song?’
I feel myself drifting deeper.
‘“Stardust”.’
‘By Nat King Cole?’
I shake my head. Smile at the memory. ‘No. The first version. The Ella version. She absolutely loved it. Used to play it on our CD player. From our porch. We’d lie on the beach, night after night, letting it wash over us, as we watched the stars.’
‘And that’s where she wants to take you?’
‘Yes.’
‘Why?’
‘I don’t know.’ Suddenly, I feel my whole body go tense. ‘Something’s happening, Mo.’
‘What?’
‘She’s telling me I have to wake up. I don’t want to. I want to stay with her, but she’s shaking me.’
‘Josh?’
Before he can bring me out of it, I snap to. It’s so real, I roll off the chair onto the floor, convinced the flaming branch of the tree is about to fall right on top of me.
I go to the bathroom and take a moment to compose myself. I look in the mirror at the gray-blue eyes staring back at me. I’m still me and I’m still here and so is the pain. I limp back into the room.
‘What did it all mean?’ I ask.
‘I’m not certain, to be honest.’ He pauses. ‘You want me to regress you again?’
I shake my head. I couldn’t go through it twice. And I’m not sure it would do any good anyway.
‘The therapy will continue to go to work,’ Mo says. ‘You may find it’ll help loosen something in the days and weeks ahead. What it prompted, though, was interesting. You sure about that photo?’
‘I’m sure.’
‘In an envelope?’
‘Yes.’
‘Anything else with it?’
I tell him about the ankh, the tree of life and the silver, eight-pointed star.
‘Interesting guy, this Jack.’
‘Meaning?’
‘The ankh and the tree are Jungian archetypes, Josh. You don’t need me to tell you that. I don’t know about the significance of the ankh, but the tree meaning is obvious. It’s symbolic of your life. Roots that anchor you to the ground, branches that soar skyward, symbolizing all your hopes, your ambitions—’
‘And the eight-pointed star in a circle?’
‘I don’t know. I’m not an expert on this shit, but these are very clearly messages from your subconscious.’
‘It was like she was there, Mo.’
‘Fella, I’m not denying she was real to you.’
‘The envelope exists. I found it in a box of her things in a garage at her mother’s place. Real, solid things. Are you telling me I’m being presented with objects manifested by my own psyche?’
‘This is powerful stuff, Josh. Stuff you’ve never dealt with.’
He’s avoided the question.
He looks at me. ‘So you now have a choice. The hurt, your mood-state and everything you’ve described are linked. As a doctor, and your friend, I am bound to tell you what I think’ll make you better.’ He pauses. ‘You can medicate. I can give you shit that’ll help you get through the day; that will dull the pain in your side, too. But I don’t think that’s what you want to hear.’
‘What’s the alternative?’
‘You know this better than me. You follow the advice your own subconscious is giving you. Go see the pilot.’
I have no idea where Freeley fits into all this, but a thought from the garage keeps replaying: Gapes connects me to the President and the Engineer, Hope’s portrait of Jack, and to a nickname I didn’t know he had.
‘I don’t even know if he’s alive.’
Mo accesses the veterans register.
Colonel Nelson Freeley is seventy-eight years old and living in Vermont, close to the Canadian border. Five hundred miles away.
The distance isn’t the problem. The fact that I may still be under surveillance is.
‘As your therapist, I circulate a report that you’re not well enough to present a threat to anybody except yourself,’ Mo says. ‘That what you need to recuperate, more than anything, is rest and some light travel.’
I nod.
Nobody – not even the intel community – is going to waste time on a washed-up nut-job.
44
THE DRIVE TAKES ME THE BEST PART OF THE FOLLOWING DAY.
As I head up through New Jersey and New York, the weather becomes progressively colder, the snow on the ground thicker.
Freeley’s is a white clapboard Vermont house, overlooking a causeway leading to an island on the eastern shoreline of Lake Champlain. An old Plymouth sits on the drive and smoke rises from the chimney. The clear blue sky is crisscrossed with vapor trails.
I pull up next to the Plymouth and am about to switch off the ignition when there’s a rap on the window. I turn and look into the ice-blue eyes of a tall, thin man with a neat white goatee. He has lost a lot of his hair since he and Jack were photographed next to their plane.
‘You can’t park here.’ His voice is muffled by the window between us, but the message is clear. ‘This is private property.’
I turn off the engine and wind down the window.
‘Colonel Freeley?’
He blinks in the bright sunshine.
‘Yes?’
‘I’m the—’
‘The President’s personal physician, if I’m not mistaken.’
‘The President’s former personal physician, sir.’
His frown disappears.
‘Well,’ he says, as we shake, ‘this is all rather extraordinary.’
‘May I come in? I appreciate it’s getting late.’
‘Yes. Yes, of course.’
Freeley walks me through to the living room, where a fire crackles in the grate.
‘Do we know each other?’ he says.
‘No, sir, we don’t.’ Through the plate windows that lead onto the patio I can see a woman in a thick coat and woolen hat, brushing snow off of a bird table. The yard looks over the frozen waters of the lake. ‘You said, though, this was extraordinary—’
‘Because I was talking about you to my wife only this morning. There hasn’t been any news for a day or two …’ He starts again. ‘We – Alda and I – we were wondering if you and the other survivor …’
I tell him Hetta and I are both doing just fine.
Freeley wrings his hands, nods, and directs me to a chair by the fire. He invites me to call him Tom. Nobody calls him Nelson much, unless it’s official or he’s in some kind of trouble. He glances out the window at Alda.
I smile and thank him. ‘I’m here for personal reasons. I’d be grateful if this remains confidential – just between us.’
‘Of course.’
‘It’s about Jack Ackerman.’
He leans forward. ‘Mac?’
I nod. ‘He was a friend. More than that.’ How to describe Jack? ‘My wife’s stepfather. My wife … died … almost sixteen years ago. She and Jack were close.’
‘I see.’ He says this in a way that denotes more than a passing understanding of the things people do – the way they behave – in the wake of traumatic events. Having not fully rehearsed what I am going to say to him, I sense an opening. ‘My doctors said it would be good for me to get my teeth into something …’
‘Sure,’ he says. ‘A little family history. I’d be happy to talk about him. Mac was a great guy. An extraordinary guy. Truly.’
At that moment, his wife walks in. Alda is in mid-sentence – Tom needs to go to the store to buy some more birdseed – then sees me and stops. I get to my feet and Freeley does the introductions. When he tells her who I am, she melts. She vanishes into the kitchen, promising coffee.
‘OK.’ Freeley leans back. ‘Where do you want to start? It’s been a while since anybody asked me about Miracle Mac.’
‘Excuse me?’
‘I said it’s been a while …’ He sees my confusion and smiles. ‘That’s what we used to call him. All of us did. Miracle Mac was our talisman.’
‘Your talisman?’
‘Our good luck charm.’
I ask him to start right there.
The Hoi An incident wasn’t the only time Mac cheated death. It didn’t matter who he flew with. ‘When you shared a cockpit with him,’ Freeley says, ‘you always knew you’d come back. In the end, none of us took to the air without rubbing one of his lucky charms first.’
‘An ankh, a tree and some kind of star in a circle?’
He nodded.
‘Which had the magic touch?’
‘All of them did. But I got the impression it was the star that was special to him.’
I ask how long this ritual continued for.
‘A year, eighteen months – the whole time VMO-3 was based at Da Nang East. It was quite a blow when he left.’
‘Where was he posted?’
‘It wasn’t that straightforward,’ Freeley says. ‘A month or so after Mac and I got the Navy Cross, a couple of guys showed up from Washington. Well, I say that. In truth, I have no idea. They looked … official. Whatever, they took him away.’
‘Why?’
‘We just heard rumors.’
‘What rumors?’
‘A drug thing.’
‘It was the sixties, wasn’t it?’
‘’70, ’71. To begin with, everyone turned a blind eye, but they clamped down when aircrew were found flying under the influence – though I don’t believe Mac ever did.
‘Morale plummeted, the attrition rate went up. In the end, we had to be deactivated and shipped back Stateside. I didn’t see him again for four, five years. By then, we were based at Willow Grove, in Pennsylvania. I came home one day to find him on the porch. He was still in the military, but he looked a total wreck. I asked what he was doing, but he wouldn’t tell me – said he couldn’t tell me.’
‘Where had he been all that time?’
‘All he’d say was that he’d come east for something. He talked about meeting some people in D.C. Important people. That didn’t make much sense either, but then …’
‘Jack didn’t always.’
Freeley gets up and shows me to his office. On the wall, along with photos of the kids and the grandkids, are several of the OV-10 Bronco with the snake and the knife on its fuselage. In one, he and Jack are smiling in front of it.
‘How did he die?’ Freeley finally asks.
‘With great dignity,’ I reply. ‘Surrounded by people he loved.’
When I turn, there are tears in his eyes.
‘It was hard seeing the way he was that day – the day he came back. It was like his brains had turned to mush. He was drinking …’
‘Don’t we all? War doesn’t make sense at the best of times. And that war …’
Freeley shakes his head. ‘Mac didn’t drink to forget the past, Colonel Cain.’
It’s a while before he speaks again.
‘He drank in order not to see the future.’
45
I STAY AT A MOTEL DOWN THE ROAD AND HEAD BACK TO Washington before dawn the next morning.
I’m on a remote stretch of highway, across the New York state border, the sun is coming up, and I’m still thinking about Jack. I pull over and get out of the car. I’m a hundred meters or so from one of the many finger lakes that pepper the borderlands between the two states.
The air is freezing. A few pines, snow on their branches, are scattered between the road and the shore. There’s no traffic, nothing except a light breeze in the trees to interrupt my thoughts.
And, suddenly, we’re on the beach. It’s a month or two after we bought the house. It’s night, and it’s warm. The waves are rolling in, the stars are out; a fire crackles beside us. Hope is massaging my shoulder muscles, transporting me to a place I’d like to visit more often, and she’s talking about when Jack first came into their life.
‘I was anxious about pretty much the whole world back then, Josh, but he took my fears away – about life, and about death.’ She scoops up a handful of sand and lets the grains slip through her fingers. ‘He used to tell me about the Shawnee, and their being in tune with nature. Jack sees connections in everything. He sees his ancestors in everything.’
‘That’s because Jack smokes a lot of stuff he shouldn’t,’ I say. ‘When we die, we die.’
She claps me lightly on the back of the head, then leans forward and kisses me. ‘If I go before you, Joshua Cain, which I hope I do, but not for a very long time yet, I am going to find a way of proving that you’re wrong.’
The city is dark and rainswept.
I’m too tired to return the rental car, and pull gratefully into the last parking space outside my building. I look around as I pull my case from the trunk, but see nothing unusual. Mo’s directive, which he emailed before he flew back to San Francisco, appears to have done the trick.
The apartment has the chill of disuse. Maybe that’s because I’m out of a job. Reuben said I should go back to my patients. How can I? I’m filled with a sense of impotence and dread.
Unable to sleep and too distracted to watch TV, I go to the only place that offers any comfort. I sit and stare at the painting. A sliver of light from the hallway glints on Jack’s ankh, tree and eight-pointed star. I don’t know how long I’ve been staring at them before the room is filled with the scent of lemons. Hope’s Ô de Lancôme. And I hear the voice in my head.
After Mo’s diagnosis, I no longer know whose it is – hers or mine – but it doesn’t much matter. Are you just going to sit here, Josh, and feel sorry for yourself? Or are you going to get off your ass?
‘Doctor Cain? Doctor Cain …?’
I open my eyes. The flight attendant smiles as she folds my table and returns my seat to its upright position. ‘Sorry to wake you, Doctor, but we’ll be on the ground in around thirty-five minutes. I thought you might want to take the opportunity to freshen up.’
I’ve been out for the best part of three hours.
I get up and go to the bathroom. My leg hurts, but I make a supreme effort not to let it show. My face, regrettably, is better known than I’d like it to be. Some of the other passengers stare.
Back in my seat, I flick between the two documents I was reading before I fell asleep.
One of them is the agenda of the international psychiatry conference where, the day after tomorrow, I will be keynote speaker. The other is the interim accident report on the V-22 crash, which was released by the Department of Defense while I was mid-Atlantic. It says that the right gearbox seized due to a key component failure, causing a near instantaneous loss of power to its rotor. Because the Osprey was decelerating, it didn’t have enough forward speed for sustained flight, causing it to invert. It hit the trees and exploded on
impact, killing the three crew, Schweizer and Offutt. Hetta and I had been thrown clear as it flipped.
There was no sign of sabotage, and inspection of the V-22 fleet uncovered no systemic flaw. I can still hear Schweizer’s laughter in my head: the moment he said the President would never kill the Grid when he understood what it could do; that he’d want to build it bigger, faster, better.
I strap myself back into my seat and gaze out the window as the SAS Airbus’s slow turn gives me a perfect view of the blue waters of the Stockholm archipelago. Southern Sweden looks bleak. Despite a few faltering signs of spring, there’s still a lot of snow on the ground.
Thompson will go to Jerusalem in a few days. I’ve been immersed in articles on the conference’s multi-layered security system. Initially developed by US and Israeli defense experts, Needle Eye – a series of concentric rings from the city perimeter to the convention center – has been enhanced by European, Russian, Chinese and Indian contractors, supported by their security services.
As a result, Saudi, Israel, Palestine, Iran and Turkey will join the US, the UK, France, Germany, China, India and Russia – twelve nations – in formal attendance. All their major faith leaders will be there too. Christy will remain in D.C. with the Vice President to dispense national security advice during the three days Thompson will be away.
Expectations are mixed, but hopes remain high and Thompson’s ratings, at home and abroad, have taken off again.
46
THE HOTEL, PART OF THE COMPLEX WHERE I’LL BE SPEAKING, looks out across the harbor. Jetlag wakes me early.
I choose a route past the old City Hall, along the waterfront, through snow-covered parks and gardens, across an old bridge to an island beyond which the Baltic begins.
I follow signs to the Museum of Modern Art, a long building with a glass front, where I buy a ticket to the Chagall exhibition. Hope had so loved his work. He only just escaped the Holocaust, but it remains refreshingly optimistic. His subjects are mystical and magical: a man and a woman locked in an embrace above Vitebsk, Russia, the town of his birth; angels, mermaids and fairies; goats, bulls, flying fish and other animals, all painted in strange, highly improbable locations.
