by Sarah Black
“Oh, man.” Gabriel pulled off his reading glasses and leaned his head back, closed his eyes. “Three strikes. I wouldn’t have guessed that, John. I’ve known a few guys with short fuses, but they always had that jitter, you know? Like they should have been kept on their Ritalin a little longer.”
“We don’t know the whole story,” John said, tugging the glasses and files from Gabriel’s hands and putting them on the bedside table. “Painter made an assumption based on reading old progress reports, but I want to hear the other side of the story. Brightman seems to be the kind of kid who just takes it and takes it until he can’t take it anymore.” He reached out, ran two fingers down Gabriel’s jaw, over his mouth. “Like you. I love you, Gabriel. I know you don’t need to hear that right now.”
Gabriel turned into his arms, buried his face in John’s chest. “Yes, I do. I do need to hear it.”
It was the tenderness that always broke his heart, John thought, sliding his hands over Gabriel’s warm back, holding him tightly against his chest. Tasting the worry on his mouth, then feeling his sigh, warm breath, and the weight of his head, the way it drooped on John’s shoulder. They fit together like two pieces of a puzzle, legs tangled, arms around each other, Gabriel’s head on his shoulder, John snuggled warmly against a neck that was so sweet and tender to the bite. After so long, to be able to sleep together every night, wake up together in the morning, it was unbearably sweet. John had to remind himself sometimes not to get used to it, not to take it for granted. Because anything could happen. Something could pull them away from each other. If they weren’t careful, the separation would feel like the end of the world.
The morning haze over the DC skyline was as gray and cool as his mood as he navigated airport traffic. Gabriel hadn’t slept, was swinging between outrage and fury and panic over what his boy had done, what had been done to him. John kept his hand on his back, grounding him, until the last possible moment when they had to separate, and he had to let Gabriel go on alone.
Brightman was already at the hotel when he got back from the airport, waiting in the lobby. John waved him up to the room. “Brightman, you’ve got my permission to go into my room and work, okay? You don’t have to wait for me. Don’t think of it as my bedroom, but as operational headquarters.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Mr. Sanchez had to fly back to Albuquerque this morning. A family emergency.”
John recognized the droop to Brightman’s shoulders. He was sure his own were drooping as well. “Is he coming back?”
“I hope so.” John hesitated. “There’s a problem with his son. It may take a while.”
“Yes, sir. I’ll pick up his assignments. If you just tell me what to do, I’ll do whatever you want.”
John forced himself to let the plane go, to bring his attention back around to the young man standing in the elevator with him. “When we get upstairs, let’s talk for a bit, Brightman.”
His shoulders drooped even farther. “Yes, sir.”
Brightman followed him like he was heading to the principal’s office. John opened the door, studied the little coffee pot by the sink. He pulled up the room service menu. “Brightman, what do you want? General Painter is going to treat us to breakfast.”
Brightman looked interested at this, looked at the menu over John’s shoulder. “Those eggs Benedict look good.”
They did look good, but after pizza last night, John decided to go for the fruit bowl with yogurt. “Call down for the food, and have them bring up a pot of coffee with, and a couple of bottles of water. We eat, then we get to work.”
John pulled his yellow legal pads to the center of the table, got the Sharpies from his messenger bag. At the center of the page, he wrote Ali Bahktar in big letters, circled the words. Then he wrote some additional words, drew lines from the central circle. Family, grandfather, education, history, religion. “What is that, sir?”
“It’s a variation of a mind map,” John said. “For us, these are areas of influence we need to know about. Any one of them might be more powerful at different times, but they all have some power.”
“I don’t know what a mind map is,” Brightman said, and he pulled a chair up to the table to watch John draw.
“Think of it like an outline,” John said, pushing a yellow legal pad over to Brightman. “It’s a tool for strategic planning, for strategic thinking. The benefit is the creative way you can find connections between disparate elements. Okay, do this.” He drew a star in the middle of the page. Inside the star, he wrote, Sam’s Perfect Life. “So what goes with this? Love? Work? Family?” Brightman picked up a marker, hesitated a moment. “Don’t write two good eyes, Sam. This is a map of the possible, of the future.”
Brightman’s neck flushed with color. He pulled the map over and stared down at the star. John pulled off the top sheet, drew his own star in the middle. Then he wrote Gabriel, in big block letters, put a thick line to his star. Kim was next. Work.
Brightman watched him, then turned back to his own paper. Self-Discipline, he wrote, drew a circle around it. Self-Control. Education. Physical strength. Mom. Work. He connected all his words to the star with thick, bold lines.
“Good,” John said. “Now, move out from there.” On his paper, he drew more circles, started filling them in. Next to Kim, he put success in his work and family and love. “These outer circles are connected to the inner circles, see? They are the things we want, or hope for, the things we need to work on to accomplish a goal.”
Brightman was scribbling hard, filling up his paper, and John pulled a couple of blank sheets off the pad and put them on the table next to his original so he could keep going.
John started a new map, put Green and Forsyth in a circle. What did he want? Nobody dead. Nobody hurt. Both boys home. No political crises, real or manufactured. No destabilization of critically balanced situations in the region. As little harm as possible for Painter’s company.
Brightman got up to let in the waiter with their breakfast, and John pulled his original map of Ali Bahktar over, set it next to the map with Green and Forsyth’s names. “If this guy was General Painter, we might think what he wants the most is power. If he was one of those good-looking Hollywood actors, we might think he wanted fame and money. If he was working his way up a major corporation or the ranks of an Islamic jihadist group, he might need money and power, or have the desire to change the world. If he was me? Work, and love. If he was you?” John looked over Brightman’s mind map. “If he was you, he might want to be a better man. For now, let’s assume he is more like the rest of the world than like you, keeping these other human needs in the back of our mind. Okay? So what does Ali Bahktar want most?”
“Money and power,” Brightman said. “Possibly fame.”
“Exactly,” John said. He picked up his phone, called the number David Painter had given him. “David, when you got word the boys had been taken, did you get the feeling some baksheesh would make the problem disappear?”
“No, I didn’t. That’s what I assumed, just the usual, but I got a lot of flaming rhetoric in return to the standard preamble. I got the feeling the boy was looking to make his name by winning a pissing contest with an American.”
“If I can negotiate peace for cash, how much can you afford?”
“The insurance will give me half a million for each boy. Unless you want to throw your fee in to sweeten the deal.”
John laughed. “It’s more expensive than you might think, David, to dress well.”
“I’m sure it is! Is Brightman holding it together?”
John looked at him, tucking into eggs Benedict and drawing exclamation marks and stars with green magic marker on his mind map. “He’s good.”
Brightman looked up when John set the phone down. “Painter tried money. It looks like power, Brightman.”
“Sir? So how do we proceed?”
“We haven’t done our due diligence yet, so we don’t really know. I believe in backing up a good guess with some e
vidence. Also, the warrior-philosopher always has a secondary plan or two, in case the primary is a failure. Never forget that we may be wrong. The most power hungry, money hungry vulture of a man might still have a grandmother who loves him, and for her, he is a different man. She might be the crowbar we can use to crack his rusty chest open. Now, why don’t you tell me about what happened with you?”
“You mean, to my eye?”
“No, I mean to your eye surgeon.”
Brightman got busy suddenly, clearing dishes from the table. John waited, enjoying the excellent coffee, watching him. He was a nice kid, John thought suddenly, not even waiting for the explanation. John was looking at a man embarrassed by his loss of control. He’d been right to pick him and felt a tiny bit of relief that his people radar had not become rusty.
“It was a detached retina, and it just took too long to get back to the states, to a good eye surgeon. I mean, I understood that part. There was a head injury, too, and I wasn’t the only person hurt, one of the other guys in my unit, Jake, his arm was shredded, and Colt blew out his eardrum in the blast. So there was a lot going on. It wasn’t just me.”
“They sent you back to Walter Reed?”
Brightman shook his head. “Walter Reed’s closed down. They sent me to Bethesda.”
“Oh, right. I had forgotten.”
“So the surgeon, he tries to repair the retina and it doesn’t work. And he just sits there and looks at me with these big eyes, he had such pretty blue eyes, long black lashes, and he stares at me and his eyes were empty. He never even saw me. He was looking right at me, and I could tell he didn’t see me, didn’t care about me, and then he said I needed to get used to it, I should be happy I still had one good eye. Just don’t plan on playing baseball.
“I didn’t intend to hit him, General Mitchel, I swear. I just couldn’t stand it, him looking at me and not even trying to disguise the fact that he didn’t give a shit about me. That he didn’t really care that I was not ever going to see out of my right eye, not ever again on this earth. I mean, how could that not mean anything to him? But it didn’t, and I hit him.”
“And what happened then?”
“Well, the blow partially detached the retina, but of course he was right there in the hospital and had excellent medical care, so he’s walking around with two beautiful blue eyes and a good story.”
That sounded like a piece of irony worthy of God himself. “I meant what happened with you.” John held up a hand. “Not what they did to you. You’re still mad about it, Sam. You still feel a grievance. You haven’t been able to let it go? Are you seeing a counselor?”
Brightman studied his shoes for a moment, then the walls of the hotel room seemed especially interesting. John watched him, remembering how young he was, very young and still hurt. He was hurt because he had been expecting care, tenderness, concern, and had been slapped in the face by someone he was depending on. “Sam, can I offer you a practical suggestion?”
“Yes, sir.” His voice was wooden again, like it had been in the airport.
“I like to contain the poison. When someone behaves in a way I think of as especially shitty, I like to study on it a bit, see what I can learn from the encounter. But I hate to let those thoughts and feelings run loose in my head and make me crazy. And other people can make you crazy if you let them.” Brightman looked up, his face starting to show a little interest. “I just stick it all in a box, and I have a huge warehouse full of boxes in my mind. And when I feel calm and in control and I need to think on something, I pull out a box and work my way through. Think about how much of my reaction to a situation was their behavior and how much was actually me. I guess I don’t mind owning up to some of the lesser emotions. If I can recognize the way I felt in certain situations, then I have control over those emotions in the next encounter. I’ve brought them forward in my mind, where I can keep an eye on them. I don’t like to be blindsided by my own feelings.”
“What do you mean, sir?”
“Here’s a recent example. I had an old acquaintance. I counted on him to support me through a conflict. But he discovered I was gay, and his feelings changed. He didn’t betray me, but he was just less helpful, less supportive than I had come to expect with our history together. I suppose it was a betrayal of sorts. He stood on the sidelines and watched a situation fall apart, rather than coming to my aid. I let that situation become dangerous, because I didn’t want to recognize that he didn’t like me anymore. I kept insisting to myself that he had my back. I didn’t want to feel the pain of rejection. He gave me plenty of clues, and I just didn’t want to see them. So I didn’t, and the result was people I loved were in danger. I beat myself up about that a bit, and then I put it in a box. And I pull it out and think about it sometimes.”
“So what did you do?”
“I developed a bullet point.” John felt his face heat up a bit at the confusion on Brightman’s face. “It doesn’t sound like much, but I write a lot of reports, and bullet points are how I corral information into manageable bites. And I did not want to feel like I was childish enough to want to hit back at someone who had hurt me. Though I admit I did write an article about the USS Maine that was a brilliant piece of scholarship, and I know he was fucking green with envy when he wrote me a note of congratulations. Cuban-American relations are his area of scholarship,” John explained. “But I am better than him in every way.” He smiled, and Brightman smiled back at him. “So put it in a box, kiddo. Draw yourself a mind map to find your way back home.”
Chapter 9
BRIGHTMAN set to work on logistics, and John looked at his phone again, for about the tenth time in the last hour. Gabriel was still in the air. He couldn’t expect a call for a couple of hours. But no one would mind if he called home to check on his boys?
Billy answered the phone in the kitchen, a modern phone that was tarted up to look old, and in fact looked like the phone from his mother’s kitchen. John particularly hated the new phone. “Hey, Billy. You hanging in there, kiddo?”
“Uncle John! Hey, guess what? Juan loves herbal tea! His favorite is ‘Love those Berry Blues.’ It has dried blueberries, lemon peel, lemongrass. I can check the label for the full ingredients if you want.”
“Everything going okay?”
“High drama around here last night. Kim sort of morphed into you right in front of my eyes. Scary.”
“Billy, is Kim around?”
“He’s sleeping. Abdullah is on guard duty. But Juan’s cool.”
“Is he there with you? Let me speak to him.”
John heard Juan’s cautious “Hello?”
“Hi, Juan. This is John Mitchel. Are you all right, son?”
“Yeah, I’m fine. It’s no big deal.”
“Your father’s on the way to you. He thought you might have been in trouble, and I had to keep him from bolting out of the hotel and running into the street and stealing a motorcycle and racing back to Albuquerque like he was in some movie. All he could think about was you might be in trouble, and he was getting home to you.”
John heard a sniff, but he had been around enough teenagers. Give them a millisecond, and their moods would change. “I didn’t know my dad knew how to drive a motorcycle.”
“If it moves, he can drive it or fly it or sail it. When he was coming home to see you after you were born, he took a helicopter, then a troop truck, then a ferry, then an airplane, and after all that he drove four hundred miles without stopping to get to you and your mom. It took him three days to get home.”
“Is he mad?”
“He’s scared for you. Sometimes that might seem mad, but don’t ever forget how much he loves you, Juan.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Is there anything you need, son?”
“No, we’re cooking. Billy’s showing me how to make a cowboy fry-up. That’s what his mom used to make for breakfast when they had people come up to the ranch in summer. They used to have a dude ranch, but there’s no money in it. That’s what B
illy said.”
“A cowboy fry-up sounds like fun. I’ll talk to you soon, Juan.” John hung up the phone, thought about Gabriel walking into a house that smelled like sausage and frying onions and green chilies. Maybe Gabriel could sit down and eat with the boys. He sent him a text message, call me, love u, then went back to work.
Ali Bahktar’s paternal grandfather had been the treacherous old Bedu that John and Gabriel had encountered. Who was the head of the family now? Were there any male relatives from the mother’s family who might have influence over the young man?
He researched for a couple of hours, studied the briefing paperwork Painter had sent over. Under in-country resources, Painter had listed Jennifer Painter with Amnesty International as a friendly, with a question mark by her name. He looked over at Brightman. “Jennifer Painter?”
“Oh, God.” Brightman blanched at the name. “Himself’s daughter. She’s off trying to save the world from her father. That’s what he says. She works for Amnesty International. She’s counting bones in mass graves or something like that.”
“Do you know her, Sam?”
His face was cautious. “We’ve met.”
“And?”
His cheeks went from pale to pink. John wasn’t quite sure what this meant, other than that Jennifer Painter evoked a strong response in young Brightman. “Nobody can tell her anything!” he said. “I don’t know why I’m getting the blame. I mean, he raised her.” John sat back. “Okay. So what happened is we were in college together, met our freshman year. But I ran out of money and joined the National Guard, and they shipped me into that hellhole blah blah blah. So after all the shit happened, General Painter came to find me and offered me a job. Said he wanted me to try and keep Jen from joining Amnesty International. Sir, I am the last person in the world to try and work undercover. It just isn’t in me, you know? I can’t hide information like that. And Jen, she’s the smartest person I’ve ever known. So it took about five minutes for Jen to get the whole story out of me, and when she found out what her father had said, she went straight to New York and the next thing we all heard she was heading for the Middle East. She wanted Iraq but the general paid big baksheesh and got her diverted to Algeria, where he had company people who could watch out. And then we heard she was part of the Amnesty International group going into Tunisia for the prison watch. You remember they let all those Islamic prisoners out of the Tunisian prisons last year? After all the riots and everything?”
