Day Three

by Patricia Spencer

  T. Brownlee frowned. “You look awful, sir. Can I get you anything?”

  Daniel shook his head. He didn’t suppose the man could arrange a mercy killing.

  Chapter 10

  Brenna waited for Daniel in the passageway outside the clinic. She had a way of catching him unprepared. He’d looked so stricken, and over something that wasn’t that big a deal. So he’d lost his clothes. All it had been was a little skin. Okay, a lot of skin. A lot of beautiful male skin.

  And she had looked. Too closely, she supposed, because his ears had caught fire the way they did when he was embarrassed or aroused.

  At first, she’d studied him because of the bruises. He was covered with them and they were deep—so much so that she could see the swelling from the door. The purple patch over his left shoulder perfectly outlined the seat-back he’d rammed into while he kept her from being hurled through the windshield of the van.

  Then she had stared at him because he wasn’t all ruin. He was powerful. His shoulders broad, his chest deep and strong beneath a mat of fine dark hair. Seeing his muscular arms, she understood how he’d been able to pull her over the railing at the market. His torso tapered to narrow hips. Just below his waist the remains of a tan line demarcated the private zone where his flat belly plunged to the masculine bulk that his dropped gown had unveiled.

  She smiled. He was a deluxe model, fully loaded.

  The clinic door clicked open and Daniel stepped out. Steadying a foam coffee cup in one hand, he slipped a small pill jar into his jacket pocket with the other. Dressed in the same jeans and jacket he’d abused the day before, stitched, scraped, and bristling with stubble, he looked like the loser in a drunken brawl. “All set,” he mumbled, his clear blue eyes avoiding hers.

  Just as well.

  She didn’t need him seeing her burning face.

  Squeezed inside the APC, shoulder to shoulder with Daniel and four king-sized infantrymen in full gear, Brenna pulled her camera onto her lap.

  “I recorded some interviews in the mess hall this morning,” she told Daniel. “A chaplain and three soldiers who witnessed a massacre in a village west of here. The padre said some things you might find thought-provoking, after what happened yesterday.”

  She powered up the camera, referenced the thumbnail screen on the LCD monitor to find the clip for that morning’s shooting session. She plugged an earpiece into the stereo mini-jack and handed it to Daniel. He pressed it into his ear. Turning the camera so Daniel could watch, she started the playback.

  The interview with the padre, who was also a credentialed psychologist, started rolling. Daniel’s eyes narrowed as he concentrated.

  She leaned back and shut her eyes, hoping Daniel would appreciate that the Padre’s take-home message applied to him, too.

  As spiritual counsel, the padre had said, his most important job was to help the troops cope with the fact that the rules of engagement had forbidden them to intervene. “We envision ourselves as men of action, but there are times when we are powerless to change the course of events.

  “Acknowledging powerlessness changes a man’s view of himself,” he said. “It brings into question the concept of free will, of moral responsibility. It’s profoundly destabilizing. So much so that it isn’t uncommon for the men to reinterpret their actions as cowardice or complicity. Reinterpretation is perverse. Yes, it restores a kind of mental balance because it allows a man not to feel helpless. It gives him back his precious sense of personal agency. But. It also carries a hefty burden of guilt.”

  Many of the troops would suffer Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder as a direct result of having witnessed the monstrous events in the village, he told her. They would be plagued by recurrent nightmares, panic attacks, flashbacks, and anxiety. They would be irritable, work themselves to exhaustion, have difficulty sleeping, have outbursts of anger, engage in high risk behaviors. They would become depressed, withdrawn, and alienated from their loved ones.

  Without professional counseling when they returned home, nearly twenty percent of them would commit suicide.

  The interview ended. Daniel sat up and tugged the tiny plug out of his ear. “Christ. Those troops. Just standing there, watching.”

  Her body swaying with the lurching truck, she eyed him sideways. “Like you on the balcony at the market, huh?”

  A puzzled look crossed his face. “You were there, too, Brenna.”

  Pazi, Snajper! RUN or R.I.P.!

  Daniel glimpsed the red-lettered warning sign through the APC’s peephole as the vehicle crossed the deserted parking lot surrounding the Holiday Inn. Looking upwards into the falling rain, he saw that the top of the hotel was gutted, its window glass gone and yellow paint scorched by fire. Down on the ground, stacked sandbags formed a defensive wall. Evidently the hotel was Nationalist hunting ground.

  The APC tilted down the ramp into the underground parking lot and Daniel’s view went dark.

  The vehicle took a turn and rolled to a stop. “Good. We’re here,” Brenna said.

  Finally, he thought. Now they would connect with Geoff Garrett and get the shoot organized.

  The soldiers, who would continue on to their postings, opened the hatch doors to let them out.

  Brenna lifted her bags and the camera. Stepping over their gear on the floor, she edged past the hulking soldiers. A camping lantern swung into view, held aloft by a bony-cheeked young woman wearing an oversized green blazer.

  “Welcome back, Miss Rease.”

  “Thank you, Natka,” Brenna said, hitching her pack onto her shoulder.

  Daniel stumbled out. His hip jabbed painfully when his feet hit the pavement, painkillers notwithstanding.

  “Welcome, sir. No bags?”

  He shook his head.

  “This way,” the doorwoman said, extending her arm as graciously as if she were guiding him through a polished brass portal. She led the two of them up the service stairs, lantern held high. At the landing, Brenna extracted a cranberry granola bar from the inside pocket of her jacket and slipped it to Natka.

  “Thank you,” Natka replied, sliding the bar into her pants pocket as if it were an ordinary tip. Stepping aside, she opened the door to the deeply-shadowed hotel lobby and let them pass.

  Daniel stepped into the din of the cavernous room and stopped in incredulity.

  With the plate glass of the south entrance boarded over, and no electricity, the space was cave-dark, with only pools of gloomy light illuminating it. The perimeter walls were sectioned into makeshift stalls tented with heavy plastic sheeting tacked onto reclaimed lumber. Hand-made signs duct-taped to the huts proclaimed them to be news bureaus: ABC, CBS, NBC, AP, Agence France Presse, and other international agencies.

  Good God, he thought. A refugee camp for journalists.

  Inside the cubicles, he saw monitors, stacked video-editing decks, audio-recorders, external data recorders, and data-transmission units. Thick black electrical cables snaked out along the walls, presumably toward dedicated generators. At a nearby booth, an unkempt-looking group of men and women were clustered around a large monitor, intently watching the CNN news feed.

  With a jolt, he realized the footage was familiar. A high angle of the Kavsak market square. General Goran Cavic standing in his jeep, signaling the start of his gruesome massacre. Shock ran through him, followed by a wave of nausea. Brenna’s footage, on the air.

  A deafening explosion shook the hotel.

  Daniel ducked instinctively, shielding his eyes from the grit floating down from the ceiling.

  Calm as suburbanites who stop talking while noisy airplanes pass overhead, the seasoned journalists waited for the reverberations to stop, then casually resumed where they had left off.

  A familiar-looking correspondent whose name Daniel couldn’t immediately place glimpsed Brenna.

  “Yo! Brenna!” he called from the cluster of CNN-watchers. “Way to kick Cavic’s butt!” The others dragged their eyes off the screen and saw her. Hooting in cheerful support, they
began applauding, shouting out: “WooHoo! Go, you good thing! Victory la-ap!”

  Brenna dipped her head, acknowledging their raucous acclaim, and moved on, searching the lobby.

  “Brenna!”

  She stopped, scanning the multitude, pinpointing the source of that one particular voice. Daniel saw her eyes lock with those of a swarthy man with the right side of his face covered by burn scars. She tapped her watch, held up five splayed fingers, and pointed upwards, her index finger bobbing. The man nodded and vanished.

  “Let’s get Garrett’s room number,” Daniel said, turning in the direction of the reception desk.

  “No.” She forestalled him with her hand on his forearm. “He’ll be at the bar.”

  Poom. Poom-poom. Three more shells landed in quick succession, their noise drowning out the din of the lobby. Daniel startled, dodging reflexively.

  “There,” Brenna said. “I see him.”

  Up three steps on a central raised platform, a circular bar dominated the lobby like an altar. Surrounded by cocktail tables, the bar was ground zero for the hotel. Low-wattage light bulbs strung across improvised posts were connected by jumper cables to a series of car batteries set at intervals along the counter. Green-jacketed, bow-tied wait staff deftly maneuvered food and drink trays through the crowded maze, unflappable hoteliers setting orders before grungy patrons wearing hard hats and miners’ lights. The Holiday Inn, with its incongruously Christmassy-sounding name, was the last remaining operating hotel in the city, a testament to the men and women who kept it open.

  Daniel followed her as she threaded her way among the tables, through a gauntlet of congratulations from the journalists with whom she shared the surreal life of a war correspondent.

  She stopped in front of a rail-thin, greasy-haired drunk with a stringy beard, who was wearing a long-sleeved T-shirt with yellow armpits, and jeans so filthy they could stand up by themselves. “Garrett,” she said, as though she were spitting something foul off her tongue.

  Daniel’s jaw dropped in disbelief. This wasn’t Geoff Garrett. Brenna was wrong. This man was dissolute, a lush, not his college friend.

  Garrett raised his glass and saluted Daniel. “Son of a bitch—you made it!” Holding his whisky out to the side so it wouldn’t spill, Garrett eased off the barstool, draped his free arm over Daniel’s shoulder and slapped him with genuine affection.

  Daniel recoiled from his fetid breath. “Geoff?”

  “Sit. Sit. Have a drink.” He signaled the bartender.

  Daniel caught his hand. “Geoff. It’s nine-thirty in the morning.”

  “Yeah, I know,” he said. “Late start.”

  “EBS must have given you a cash advance,” Brenna said, eyeing Garrett’s near-empty highball glass. “You’ve traded up from your usual rotgut.”

  “You’re talking, Miss Goody Two-Shoes? Didn’t I see you fall off your pedestal a couple weeks ago, just before you skipped town? Sitting right there with the rest of the rabble, sucking down the booze? We all fall into the abyss, pretty girl, and your turn’s coming.”

  Across the crowded seating area, Daniel saw two men dropping bills on a dish-cluttered table. He tapped Geoff on the shoulder and pointed. “There. Go get that table. We need to feed you.”

  Geoff glugged the last of his booze, thunked the glass on the bar and shambled past Daniel. The back of his shirt was crudely painted with crosshairs and the words: “You can’t kill me, I’m already dead.”

  Daniel studied Brenna. She wasn’t surprised to see Geoff in this condition. She’d just looked on as he’d traveled halfway around the world to hang Aya’s project on a drunkard’s shoulders. “You knew,” he shot at her. “You knew back in Washington and you didn’t say a thing.”

  She lifted an eyebrow. “I tried to. And you ignored me.”

  “You could have insisted.”

  “Oh? And just when did you expect this collegial exchange to occur? Between which of your interminable contracts?”

  He scrubbed his hair with the palm of his hand and growled with frustration at himself. She was right. He’d been so busy locking her down he hadn’t offered her the chance to contribute. “You know what? You’re right. I was an idiot.”

  “An asshole, more like.”

  “That’s an unladylike expression.”

  “If you wanted Miss Manners you should have hired her.”

  “Very well,” he relented. “I apologize. I was an asshole.”

  She gauged his sincerity. Satisfied, she nodded. “Did you pay Garrett already?”

  “Half.”

  “Write it off.”

  “I’ll sober him up.”

  “Look,” she said, “Whoever he was when you knew him? That man is lost. He doesn’t own his own life any more.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “He’s melting his EBS money in a spoon and shooting it up his veins.”

  “No. Not Geoff. Can’t be. What drugs?”

  “Heroin, I would think.”

  “Oh, good God. You’re mistaken.”

  “Am I?” She hitched her bag up her shoulder. “Easy enough to roll up his sleeves, isn’t it?”

  “Where are you going?”

  “I have work to do while you feed your stray. I’ll be back in half an hour and we can head out.”

  “Wait! Head out where? We haven’t discussed an itinerary.”

  “What’s to discuss? You know zip about Kavsak and I have everything set up.” She turned away.

  He caught her elbow. “Don’t treat me like I’m some bumbling tag-along.” He hated chaos. His body hurt. And his friend, apparently, was a junkie. Everything about this trip was out of control. Nevertheless, he had a documentary to produce, and he meant to do it.

  His way.

  “Are you standing there, living and breathing? Did I film General Cavic leading the market massacre? Did I get that footage safely out of Kavsak?”

  “Yes,” he said. “Thank you. Your point is taken. This is your home turf. I have no experience in a war zone. But I won’t be treated with disrespect.” He softened his voice, released her arm. “Brenna—you’re making the same mistake with me that I made with you in Washington.”

  “I’m being an asshole?”

  “You’re precluding a partnership.”

  Her eyebrows shot up. She snorted with disbelief.

  And no wonder. Any idiot could see she didn’t need a partner, didn’t need to cede her independence. She had him by the short hairs and she knew it. The irony wasn’t lost on him. He was demanding something from her that he himself had not given.

  “A partnership? No. Sam Chisolm wanted me hired and you did his bidding. Never. Not for one moment were you seeking a partnership. Because you didn’t want to work with me.”

  He inhaled sharply, as startled as if he’d suddenly found himself in the middle of a bullring waving a red cape.

  “Brenna, wait!” He caught up to her. “What’s going on, suddenly?”

  “Look,” she said. “I’m taking you sight-seeing, okay? Hospital. Morgue. Cemetery. Black market. Orphanage. All the highlights, all right?”

  “All right,” he said cautiously.

  “You know,” she said, tapping her scuffed boot, drumming her fingers on the strap of her backpack, “this will go better once you decide you can trust me.”

  He wavered. I know what you want, he remembered her telling him. But I’ll be damned if that’s what I’ll give you.

  “Jesus, Ellsworth.” She spun around and walked away.

  At the hotel, any floor above the fifth was especially vulnerable to artillery fire, and any room facing the river was a target for snipers. Brenna’s room was on the third floor, an easy climb in a building without elevators, and it faced north. Prime lodgings. She had been renting the room for over two years, and what little she possessed—rugged clothes, camping gear, and cameras—she kept here. Turning the key in the door, she entered, flicked on a battery-powered lamp hung by the door, and set
down her bags. Two wooden crates, about four feet square, were stacked to the left of the door, hugging the inner wall. In the outside world, the contents were valuable. In Kavsak, sold on the black market, they were worth a fortune.

  “I expected you yesterday,” a voice behind her said.

  She spun around. “Jasha.” He could creep up on a sleeping cat, steal her cushion and depart without being noticed.

  “May I enter?”

  “Yes. Of course.”

  He stepped into the circle of light. Shadows slashed across the burns on his face and neck. Jasha Subasic was the embodiment of the city’s history—a blend of Orthodox, Catholic, and Muslim traditions. A radio newsman, he had been ousted from his job when Nationalists seized the station early on during the siege. He could have kept the position had he been willing to broadcast their propaganda, but he had not. So now he contributed occasional news reports to Liberation, the city’s last independent newspaper. The job didn’t pay, of course. Few workers in Kavsak received paychecks, and those who did were paid in worthless dinars. On the other hand, hard currency—US dollars and Euros—bought anything.

  Jasha’s dream purchase was his mother’s escape to safety, an exceedingly expensive item. So he offered his services as a ‘fixer’ at the one place in town where wages were paid in hard currency: the Holiday Inn. Mostly, he drove, taking journalists wherever they needed to go. An outrageously expensive madman behind the wheel, he knew every barrier, trench, and switchback street in his home town. He spoke four languages, had contacts everywhere, and could arrange anything for the right price—or the right cause: saving his city.

  She refused to work with anyone else.

  “We move these today?” He gestured at the crates.

  “Sooner the better,” she said.

  “The man I see with you in lobby. He is the one you e-mailed me of, who is working with you?”