by Jack Mars
“You’re a little early,” Alan noted.
“Are you suggesting it’s not ready?” Zero asked, gesturing toward the car.
“Oh, it’s ready. Just thought I’d have a little more time for chorus practice. Come on, hop in.” Zero slid into the passenger seat as Alan got behind the wheel. He twisted the key in the ignition and the engine roared to life, chugging powerfully beneath the hood.
Alan was a lot of things, and possibly a bit paranoid was among them. He was convinced that his garage had been bugged by the CIA no matter how many times he swept it. Zero had no idea who the Skylark belonged to, but behind its tinted windows and with the engine rumbling, no cameras or audio equipment would see or hear them.
“So what’d you find?” Zero asked.
“Me? Nothing.” Alan pulled an already-stained handkerchief from his flannel pocket and wiped his greasy hands. “But maybe Santa left you something in the glove box.”
Zero reached for it and pulled out the thick three-ring binder that was inside. Between the plastic covers were at least a hundred and fifty pages. “Jesus, Alan. Did you hack the CIA database?”
“Of course not,” Reidigger said indignantly. “I paid someone to do it.” He grinned, the corners of his beard curling. “That right there is the known identity and current whereabouts of every person affiliated with the CIA with the first or last name of Connor in the last six years.”
“Impressive.” Zero did a quick flip of the pages, seeing just a glimpse each of dozens of faces, ID photos most likely, with paragraphs of personal information beneath each one. “I’m waiting for the ‘but.’”
“But,” Alan said, “I’ve already been through it all, and…”
“And not a single mention of memory suppression.” Zero shook his head. “I didn’t expect there to be. I’m looking for someone who disappeared without a trace. Where what they claim in the files doesn’t match the kind of person he was, or his job description.”
“Maybe if you’d let me finish.” Alan sniffed. “I’ve already been through it all for that, too. Look, Zero, I’m very good at making people disappear if they want to, and I learned most of that from the agency. Your guy is either dead or isn’t in that binder, and there’s a good chance he doesn’t exist anywhere. Not on any paper or in any computer.”
“He’s gotta be somewhere,” Zero muttered. “Even just one needle in the haystack that they forgot to scrub. A secret bank account, or a gym membership, or an expired warranty…”
“And how do you presume we go about finding that?”
“I don’t know.” He opened the binder to a random page and scanned it. “I mean, how do we know it’s not this guy? He was an agent alleged KIA in Lebanon on an op. That could be a lie.”
“It could,” Alan agreed, “but that would mean he’s dead. You don’t want that either.”
“No. I don’t.” Think, Zero. There must be something you missed. “Let’s at least agree that he must have been an agent. We’re the easiest to make vanish. They could have said that he was sent off somewhere, never came back…”
“You’re speculating,” Alan warned. “And if anyone’s watching, this is going to start looking weird.”
“Yeah,” he murmured. Their little in-car meetings couldn’t be too long just in case there actually were prying eyes watching. “You’re right.”
Alan reached for the ignition, but Zero didn’t move just yet.
What am I missing?
Bixby’s words, from the week prior in Saskatchewan, ran through his head.
“After it was installed, as he was coming out of anesthesia, the neurosurgeon called him Connor. I remember that clearly. He said, ‘Do you know who you are, Connor?’”
“Wait!” Zero reached over quickly and stopped Alan from turning off the car. “That’s it! I can’t believe I missed it. The neurosurgeon called him Connor!”
“Huh?”
“That’s what Bixby told me,” he explained quickly. “I’ve been so fixated on finding this Connor that I didn’t even think about trying to find the neurosurgeon! How many of them could be in CIA records from the last five years? A hell of a lot fewer than this, I bet!” He shook the binder excitedly. Instead of a hundred or more possibilities, they could narrow it down to—well, Zero wasn’t even sure. A few dozen, maybe less?
Alan sighed. “Okay. So you want me to run another…”
“I want you to run another search, yeah.”
“You know that binder cost me five grand.”
“I’ll buy you a drink.” Zero grinned, but it faded quickly. “Please.”
“You know I’d do anything for you, pal.” Alan cut the engine; there was no “but” to his statement this time. It was a simple fact, and Zero knew it. Alan had saved not only his life more than once but also the lives of his daughters. He had bent over backwards to help Zero out of a jam more times than he could count. Alan had even faked his own death, given up his life for a few years and went on the lam, all for Zero’s sake.
Even worse was that the opposite was true. He would do anything for Alan… yet Alan had never asked him for anything. At least not anything as significant as what he’d already done and would still do for Zero. The engine ceased, but the silence that ensued in the cab of the Skylark was just as roaring.
“Thank you,” Zero said quietly. “You know I wouldn’t get very far if it wasn’t for you.”
“You’d be dead if it wasn’t for me.” Alan grinned, even though it was the truth. “So we find the neurosurgeon…”
“Get whatever intel he knows…”
“Find the agent…”
“And hope he’s not dead,” Zero finished.
“Piece of cake,” Alan chuckled, but it faded quickly. “We’re going to find this guy. But you’re going to owe me two drinks.”
*
The community center smelled like cedar chips for some reason. Every room, even the halls, smelled like a hamster’s cage. Sara figured it was probably from the playground outside, but it was February, for Christ’s sake; the windows were closed and the ground was frozen. Why did it still smell like cedar chips?
She tried not to think about it as she maneuvered the brush in gentle strokes. There were fourteen in the class, people ranging from her age up to a hunched, balding man that she presumed was in his sixties. They were stationed at easels and stools in a circle, at the center of which was a bowl of wax fruit on a pedestal. Still-life, they were calling it.
Sara almost chuckled to herself. Still-life. Up until just a couple of weeks ago, that would have been a pretty apt metaphor for how she’d been feeling.
The art teacher was a frail-looking bohemian-styled woman named Ms. Guest, who wore kaftans and owlish glasses and head scarves over her frizzy mane of blondish hair. She made slow laps around the circle of students, pausing now and then to murmur words of encouragement like “yes, good” and “excellent perspective, Mark.”
Sara felt her spine stiffening instinctively—defensively—as the teacher paused behind her easel.
“My,” Ms. Guest breathed in her ear. “Such vision, Sara. There are no wrong answers, but please share with me: what inspired you to paint the banana pink?”
Her first instinct was to mess with this woman, to look up at her in wide-eyed earnestness and say, What do you mean? Is that not the right color? That’s how it looks to me. Instead she bit her tongue and considered an answer that a community center art teacher might find deep.
“Because,” Sara said with a dramatic flick of her brush, “everyone else’s is yellow.”
Ms. Guest put a hand over her heart. “My dear, you are going to do great things in this world.”
Sara held back a snort as the teacher moved on. Maybe the art class was a mistake. But she hadn’t drawn or painted anything in quite a while, and even though she loathed the therapist at that ridiculous excuse for a rehab center, there might have been just the tiniest iota of merit to her words when she suggested that Sara should find a pass
ion, something she loved, something she could cling to in her dark times. So painting it was.
There were still dark times. The worst of her addiction felt behind her; even the cravings were less severe now. She hadn’t touched as much as an aspirin since Thanksgiving. But still she feared the darkness in her, the too-real possibility that her demons might come clawing back at any moment. That they might take her completely by surprise one day and overwhelm her, drag her into a black mental chasm from which she wouldn’t be able to escape.
Again she almost laughed at herself. Such a tortured soul you are. If Maya was here she might suggest that Sara used self-deprecating sarcasm as a coping mechanism.
But Maya wasn’t here, so instead Sara painted pink wax fruit. In the evenings she studied for her GED. Ordinarily she wouldn’t have felt quite as inspired as she should, but—and she would never admit this openly—seeing her dad’s change in attitude of late was actually a bit inspiring. Despite how much she made fun of him, it was a welcome change.
Still super weird though. People didn’t just change like that. There was always a reason, a catalyst. Hers was clearly recovering from drug addiction. Her dad was keeping his motivation from them, she knew that much. But she had her own problems, and so did Maya, so neither of them pried any further.
“I’m afraid that’s our time for today,” Ms. Guest announced. “I have to get over to my ceramics class. You can leave your paintings here to dry, but please clean your brushes before you leave. Thank you!”
Sara sighed. She’d been painting her apple orange and was considering just turning it into a pumpkin, but that would have to wait. She dutifully cleaned up her station, hefted her backpack on one shoulder, and headed down the cedar-smelling corridor.
She took her time, shuffling her feet, not at all in a rush for the cold bike ride back home. Maya had offered to pick her up when she was done, but Sara didn’t want to put her out or have to rely on anyone. Besides, the chilly air whipping her face kept her alert.
She peeked into various rooms of the community center as she shuffled down the long corridor toward the exit. There was some kind of a kids’ gymnastics class going on, just a bunch of tykes rolling around on mats and trying to do handstands. She passed by a pottery class, an ESL course, a computer lab…
The door on her left was mostly closed, just ajar a few inches, not enough for her to see inside. But as she passed it, a snippet of conversation floated to her from inside.
“I promised myself I would never go back to heroin.”
Sara froze, quite literally mid-step with one foot in the air, and craned her neck toward the door.
“But as you can guess,” a woman said somberly from inside, “my addiction had other plans. One really bad afternoon, it got to me. I knew a guy, just down the street. I called him up.”
There was a sign on the door, just a sheet of white paper with some words printed in black ink, held by its corners with scotch tape.
Common Bonds
Sharing Trauma, Sharing Hope
“It was just a few minutes.” The woman inside lowered her voice, almost to the point that Sara couldn’t hear. She pushed the door gently, a couple inches wider. “I left my two-year-old son in the apartment alone, but it was just for a few minutes.” Inside the room, Sara could see women seated in a semicircle, facing one another, their expressions subdued, almost funereal.
“But in those few minutes, my ex-boyfriend—the father of my baby—decided to stop by.” The woman speaking stared at the floor. Her skin was pale and she wore no makeup, her brown hair pulled into a simple and hasty ponytail. “I got back with a baggie in my hand to find my son in his arms. That was the day I lost him…”
A face suddenly filled the partially open doorway, startling Sara into a gasp and a small jump backwards. A woman smiled out at her, looking somehow youthful and matronly at the same time, like the sort of suburban soccer mom who would invite her kids’ friends to stay for dinner and not take no for an answer.
“Hi,” the woman said quietly, as not to interrupt the meeting behind her. “Are you here for Common Bonds?”
“I, uh…” Sara cleared her throat and shook her head quickly. “No. I’m not. I was just peeking. Sorry.”
“That’s okay.” The woman took a small step into the hall and gently closed the door behind her. “We’re a support group for women who have experienced different sorts of trauma. Drug addiction, domestic abuse, PTSD, depression… We share our experiences, and through each other we find—”
“Common bonds,” Sara muttered. “Yeah, I get it.”
The woman smiled. “Right.” Then she did something strange—she looked Sara right in the eye, and she furrowed her brow as if frowning, though the smile never left her lips.
Sara did not like the look at all. It was like the woman was… reading her.
“Are you sure you don’t want to come in? You can just sit and listen. You don’t have to say anything.”
“No. Thank you. I’m… good.” Sara took another step backwards. “In fact, I was just leaving.” She’d done fine on her own without rehab; she certainly didn’t need a “support group.”
She turned, but the woman kept talking. “I’m Maddie, by the way.”
“Sara,” she called over a shoulder.
“It was nice to meet you. I’ll see you around, Sara.”
No, you won’t. Sara hurried on her way down the corridor. Suddenly the February chill in Maryland felt a lot more welcoming.
CHAPTER SIX
Maya stared at the cell phone in her hand. The call log was open, the number was right there. She just had to tap it.
Maybe tomorrow.
She sat cross-legged on her twin-sized bed, tucked into a corner of the bedroom opposite Sara’s with about three feet of space between them. The quarters were, at times, a bit cramped—but not all that unlike the barracks she’d grown accustomed to at West Point. And Sara had had four roommates when she lived in Jacksonville, so the accommodations were fine with both of them. They had, on more than a few occasions, had to turn their dad down from offering them the bigger of the apartment’s two bedrooms.
Maya tossed the phone onto the bedspread next to a largely ignored copy of Ulysses (a “triumph in masochism,” as her dad called it) and a half-eaten protein bar. She wanted to make the call. And she would. Just not today.
The number, if she had the gall to call it, would connect to the office of the dean of West Point, Brigadier General Joanne Hunt. Dean Hunt’s office had called Maya no fewer than four times in the past two weeks, though they had not left voicemails or any other indication of why they were trying to reach her.
They didn’t need to; she knew why. After a harrowing experience in a girls’ locker room and an altercation with three boys in which Maya had badly beaten two of them and nearly killed the third, Dean Hunt had graciously offered her the rest of the fall semester off, pending her return in January after winter break.
But Maya had not returned, and it was too late to do so now. She’d missed too much. She had unnecessarily prolonged her education by at least six months—a huge blow to her goal of becoming the youngest CIA agent in the history of the organization.
She just needed some more time. That’s what she had told her dad and her sister. Just a bit more time with them, and to herself, and she would return. But she knew damn well that every day that went by without her making the call and promising to return next semester was one more day to consider never going back at all.
The apartment’s front door opened and Maya stiffened for a brief moment, a natural reaction to the number of times someone intending to kill or kidnap her family had broken into their home. But she’d grown to recognize her father’s footfalls, his frustrated sigh when the door stuck a little having expanded with the cold, and she breathed easy.
“Honey, I’m home!” he called out.
“Who’s ‘honey’?” Maya called back with a smile.
“Whoever answers to ‘honey,
’ I guess.”
“It’s only me here.”
He appeared in the doorway, smirking. “In that case, hi, honey. Where’s your sister?”
“Art class at the rec center.”
“Right. Forgot she was doing that. But I’m glad she is. Does she need a lift?”
“Rode her bike.”
Her dad blinked. “In February?”
“She said she likes the cold. Keeps her alert.”
“Huh. And she calls me weird.”
Maya slid off the bed and followed him out to the kitchen, where he dug around in the fridge and came out with a light beer. After popping the cap, he ran one hand through his hair and sighed before taking a sip.
“You’re frustrated,” Maya observed.
“Nah, I’m fine. Happy as a clam.” He tried to play it off with a grin, but she could tell. “Actually, that should be ‘happy as a clam at high tide.’ You know that saying dates back to 1841? Some even attribute it to Robert E. Lee…”
He trailed off as she folded her arms and lifted an eyebrow. “You’re frustrated. Or upset about something. Maybe both. You didn’t take your shoes off when you came in, went straight for a beer, did the hair-and-sigh thing—”
“That’s not a real thing,” he argued.
“And now you’re deflecting,” she finished. “I’d bet money you were less than a minute away from suggesting we order pizza tonight.” Pizza was his go-to dinner option for nights in which he had too much on his mind.
“Fine, busted.” He added in a mutter, “Sometimes I wish I’d raised dumber kids. Or maybe just less observant ones.”
“You want to tell me how those ‘errands’ went?” Maya asked.
