“You’re a coward,” said Fisher, his hands balled into fists. “And I did need you, you’re the only one the public gives a damn about.”
There.
Nick pretended to hesitate. “If I’d died, and you know I almost did, you’d still be able to make your case, in a court of law or public opinion. The evidence photos of my body carry the same weight, dead or alive.”
There was that waver of heartbroken sympathy again. This was a very kind man, just not one who had any idea of how to apply that to people instead of ideals. In this case, Nick needed to capitalize on that disconnect.
Nick forced coldness to his face. “Besides, I’ll write a book, get rich, and be a public hero.”
Fisher flushed red. “You selfish little bastard!”
Neil Kasdan entered, and instantly, unthinkingly, threw himself between Fisher and Nick.
“Don’t ever speak to this man like that again,” ordered Kasdan with surprising ferocity. “Now get the hell out of my office.”
Fisher took his leave with a lost, conflicted glare.
Kasdan looked at Nick in shock, realized he was still holding bags from the deli, and set them on the desk.
“I’m so sorry, Nick. What happened?”
Nick answered honestly. “He’s pissed because I signed that deal with NYPD.”
“Oh. You’re all over the news, you know that?”
“Yes,” said Nick. “I’m more interested in lunch.”
Kasdan handed him a deli bag with a sweet-natured smile. “I hope you like what I got you.”
It was imprinted with the name of a local Kosher deli and smelled wonderful.
“You keep Kosher?” asked Nick, curious.
Kasdan nodded. “I don’t do it because I think G-d would fine me for violating Old-Testament era food-handling regulations. I’m not really that religious.”
“Why, then? It sounds like a lot of work,” said Nick.
Kasdan looked down. “My paternal grandparents were in Birkenau. My grandfather died in there. My grandmother is still alive and lives in New York. Keeping Kosher is sort of a tribute to where I came from.”
“Ouch,” said Nick softly.
“I just feel incredibly privileged to live in modern day New York City,” said Kasdan. “I see the sense of wonder and gratitude she still has when she looks at the city, and our family, and her grandson in the FBI.”
“Why’d you join the FBI?” asked Nick.
Neil looked down at his sandwich. “Silly reasons.”
“Like?”
“There are no surviving images of my grandfather. Except -- Henri Matisse painted their portrait. My grandmother says it was one of his best portraits. The painting was, of course, looted by the Nazis. It hasn’t been seen since. We don’t know if it was destroyed like so much other art, or -- it would be valuable, if it still exists today. My grandmother would pay anything to see her husband again, even just on canvas. I joined the FBI hoping maybe some day I would be able to track down that painting and return it to her.”
“I think that’s a beautiful reason,” said Nick.
Neil gave him a shy look. “Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
“I got into the FBI, and then I put two and two together that this is a huge bureaucracy that doesn’t exist for agents to track down long-lost family treasures. Pretty much, it was, ‘Neil, you’re a moron. Now go find the IP address for this Nigerian prince.”
Nick gave him a wry smile. “That why you wanted to work with me?”
Kasdan looked a tiny bit chagrined. “I ....might have wanted to ask the best underground art guy the FBI has if he’d keep his eyes open.”
“Get me everything you have on it, and I’ll do what I can,” promised Nick. “It’s horrifying how much art - and how many human beings were destroyed. But there were survivors.”
Neil met Nick’s gaze directly and let him see the emotion his words evoked. “Thank you. Hope means everything. Caring means everything.”
Nick smiled. “They do.”
“Even if -- it’s in a private collection and there’s no way to get it back ....I’d be so grateful to have a photo of it, and know it was being appreciated. If we need to be content with that and not ask questions ....”
“You got it,” said Nick, sobered. “The sandwich is delicious, thank you.”
DAN FISHER
Fisher sat down at his desk, hurt and angry. It seemed like he spent a lot of time like that, and lately he wanted to give up. On his career, on humanity, maybe even his life.
He took a sip of brandy-laced coffee from his thermos. It was the only thing that softened the tight knot in his stomach, these days.
He’d swallowed, barely, the bitter pill of learning that the majority of the American public didn’t care what was happening to terrorists in a Cuban prison. That they were perfectly happy to throw out the Constitution, humanity, and even effective law enforcement in favor of revenge on people who hadn’t done it.
He’d tried desperately to forget what the eyes of a man being tortured looked like.
He’d won small victories, lost others, and now lived with the ache of knowing Americans in prison didn’t matter either.
They did, actually, to the FBI. The agency took fighting corruption and brutality in law enforcement seriously, and that was some solace.
But it was the same damn problem. Revenge over rationality. Revenge over rehabilitation. Over and over again, and he wasn’t going to be able to change it, ever.
He liked Nick Aster, despite it all. He felt for the man, prayed for him, and was determined to bring the people who had brutalized him to justice. But Aster, like most criminals, cared only for himself.
That was what assuaged Fisher’s guilt as he pressed save. If this ended his career, so be it.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Playing With Tigers
DAN FISHER
At 3:15pm, Special Agent Dan Fisher, with a disposable smartphone in Queens using two proxy services and an untraceable email address, sent activist Marion Day the scoop of a lifetime.
Nearly 100 evidence photos of Nick Aster and every scrap of video the FBI had managed to pull from the jail’s surveillance system.
Another 25-photo bonus that he knew would be overlooked in the frenzy included images of other inmates badly beaten in the course of breaking up the fight, two of them restrained, motionless in shock, in tiny cells identical to the one Aster had been found in.
Aster was the only one who’d been found in the arms of an FBI agent when Fisher’s team arrived.
Fisher remained parked at the curb and looked down the generic, run-down city street walked by run-down people. He took a minuscule sip from his thermos, then another. He was driving, and wanted to be certain he wasn’t impaired.
Aster infuriated Fisher, but he was likable. His record with Agent Langley showed a fundamentally good human being. And if the doctor was right, mild brain-damage could explain much of his criminal behavior.
He was the closest thing to an innocent victim that Fisher had encountered in years.
And his protective handler John Langley was the sort of agent Fisher wished he’d gotten the chance to be. The truth was, he wasn’t just fighting evil people like so many agents. He was also fighting for spectacularly unlikable people.
First he’d gone to bat for terrorists. Now he was fighting for murderers and con artists. But he wasn’t, not really.
He was fighting for humanity, for the soul of his nation’s law enforcement. He was fighting for the thirty people who had died in an ambush in Pakistan, including two Americans and innocent Pakistani women and children.
Fisher would never get over seeing those photos with the knowledge that the carnage had originated where he worked. He’d spent months with a fanatic named Ali, gaining the man’s trust and respect. The scraps of information Ali began to feed Fisher were real and useful. Until some asshole grabbed him and submitted him to torture, and Ali led his new interrogators straig
ht to a trap.
Fisher was left looking at photos of dead kids, and his own reassignment letter, in the grip of rage and grief unlike anything he’d ever known.
He tried to leave memories behind, and watched a couple of black kids skateboard down the street, and smelled the cigarette smoke left in their wake. They whizzed past an old black man in a tan overcoat. The man picked up a rock and threw it at them, cursing. He missed and the boys went on.
It was the collateral damage Fisher cared about. The detritus of the culture of revenge. They were the people he was fighting for, and he was losing.
He checked his phone. The photos were being posted on Day’s website. Fisher disassembled the phone, wrapped the SIM card in Kleenex, and got out of the car. He dropped the pieces in the middle of a scarred concrete parking lot, emptied two cigarette lighters over them, lit a match, and walked away. Nobody paid attention.
NICK
The photos posted to Marion Day’s site showed the face of a man who’d been badly beaten, and it took Nick a few moments to realize it was him. Day had found photographs of him uninjured, and created gruesome before and after comparisons.
Fisher had Wiki-leaked the hell out of the case on cue.
As Nick scrolled down, his stomach began to tighten. Day’s commentary implied untold sexual horrors, beside a grainy screencap of Nick lying naked and beaten on cement with the boots of several corrections officers surrounding him.
Nick caught a tremor in his hands. He’d expected it to be rough. But not this bad. He’d had no idea. His first look in the mirror had been after surgery, so he’d had no idea what a debt he owed to the plastic surgeons who reduced that horrific bloody mess to bruises and a few neat, tidy cuts glued shut and already healing.
He remembered John looking so directly into his eyes in the cell, that his steady gaze went right through the blood and the tears and the pepper spray blocking his vision. John had looked right into his heart, and held on tight. It must have been the only way he could see Nick, because the thing in these photos looked nothing like Nick Aster.
He was unrecognizable, only his hair showing it was really him in these pictures. It must have taken a lot for John not to recoil, or stare at his face in horror.
He remembered John coming straight to his room and hugging him, fighting off tears after he’d watched the video footage. Nick curled his hands into fists, closed his eyes, and missed John intensely.
He wanted to hug that agent who’d gone to rescue Nick Aster, and encountered instead an unrecognizable mess of puffy, swollen bruises and blood. Who'd brought home his debonair consultant and gotten a crying, traumatized, drugged crime victim stuck at the emotional age of about eight years old.
Because John Langley had not flinched. Not once. He’d comforted, protected, held, and loved without one moment’s hesitation. His friendship had been truly unconditional.
John had been gone for one day, and Nick missed him with an ferocity that ached. Being thrown suddenly out of the Langley house and losing the warm company, calm friendship, and the sound of John’s voice hurt more than he would have expected.
Neil Kasdan was a delightful handler. He loved his job and loved having someone to share it with. He didn’t look down on Nick, or feel the need to establish dominance the way every agent he’d ever met, including John, Kelly, and Wash, seemed to. He was quietly comfortable being in charge, but had no need to assert himself.
He proved to be unfailingly compassionate and supportive, and always spoke to Nick in a gentle tone of voice and moved deliberately so as not to startle him. It was something of a relief from the knowledge that if it was John, he’d be getting smacked around with file folders all day. He really, really didn’t need that right now.
But Kasdan’s compassion read a little too much like pity. John’s, tempered as it often was by insensitivity, read as love. Kasdan was trying to create a safe and gentle bubble. John knew Nick had to live in the world that had done these things to him, and helped him cope with that reality.
He felt safer with John. Less comfortable, less pampered, but safe and loved.
Kasdan walked back into the office with coffee. He set it in front of Nick, sat down on the desk facing him, and spoke gently.
“You see the photos?”
Nick nodded and sipped the coffee.
“Someone just showed me in the break room,” said Kasdan. “What can I do?”
“Nothing,” said Nick, avoiding the kindhearted agent’s gaze. He felt bad deceiving this man in any way. A cynic like Fisher, sure.
Nick shrugged. “I -- what’s done is done. So half the world’s going to know what I look like naked after a sound beating. I honestly didn’t start the day expecting that little treat.”
That much was true, he hadn’t. He’d expected bloody evidence photos. Day, or maybe Fisher, had gone right for the kill, an image with everything needed to show up on some horrifying “news photos of the year” compilation. An image Nick hadn’t known existed.
It was salacious, brutal, viscerally horrifying. It conveyed intense and absolute vulnerability to booted government thugs. The fact that it was a grainy screenshot off a CCTV recording made it almost worse, obscuring enough detail that the viewer had to fill in the rest from imagination.
“They’re sickening,” said Kasdan, pale and avoiding Nick’s eyes himself. “I feel shaky -- after just looking at the pictures. I can’t imagine you living it. Sitting here goofing around with me after going through that.”
They sat in shock for a few minutes. They didn’t know where to go, or what to think or say. Nick wanted to stop feeling shaky himself. He’d been well on his way to being okay. Now he felt sick again.
Nick’s phone buzzed with another update. He tapped it to bring up the images, past caring but curious. The first photo posted caught his breath.
In silence, he held the phone up to Neil.
It was John, cradling Nick in his arms in the cell. Nick was looking up at him in complete trust. An FBI agent with a badge and a gun and an inmate in red, holding each other with an absolute love and safety that erased the fear the other images evoked.
The image was so palpably caring that it cut through perception of the blood and the cell and the discarded restraints, leaving them only as background props.
Nick and Neil started breathing again, and relaxed in quiet relief. Neil got off the desk and pulled his chair close to Nick’s. “Okay if I touch you?”
Nick nodded. Kasdan rested a hand on Nick’s upper arm, keeping him company in silence.
Nick closed his eyes. He thought about the impact the other photographs had on him, and how the picture of him and John changed the mood completely. This was a gentle and quiet moment between two near strangers, brought about by a single image.
He thought about Neil sitting beside him, warm and kind and alive, his very existence and goodness defying a previous generation’s efforts to exterminate him. He’d joined the FBI not to take down neo-Nazis, but to find a work of art.
Nick opened his eyes. He knew, finally, how to achieve justice and closure for himself in this whole mess.
NICK
The next morning got off to a good start. The news was running a clip of the NYPD PR guy, Chris LeBlanc, mouthing off about the con artist Nick Aster and his baseless claims. The felon was lucky not to be facing charges, and of course he couldn’t possibly have been intimidated into signing the agreement.
LeBlanc’s recorded statement was rebutted by a showing of leaked photos that included the comparison of Nick before and after the beating, the image Nick mockingly titled, “Naked, with Boots,” and another CCTV shot of him being dragged in restraints, his arms wrenched at a horrible angle.
Then the announcer read part of Nick’s agreement not to sue, and the absurd charges the NYPD had been preparing.
It was a PR disaster of epic proportions, and Nick anonymously sent several reporters a heads-up about LeBlanc’s closet-skeletons.
By 9am, the new
s was running the smiling PR cop’s face alongside allegations of having sex with prostitutes he was supposed to bust, and snorting coke with drug dealers in the back of a dark bar.
Reuters actually dug up a photo of that, and by noon it was game over for LeBlanc. It turned out the NYPD didn’t appreciate their head PR guy getting them the worst press imaginable, and Chris LeBlanc was indefinitely suspended.
His replacement, a black woman named Kendra Mitchell, was suitably sober and humbled. Her department’s dedication to human rights, justice, and public service ran deep, and this was a grave matter that would be dealt with seriously.
Broken Blue Lines: Love. Hate. Criminal Justice.: An FBI Crime Drama / LGBT+ Love Story Page 20
