I crumpled the note, swearing softly. She had no right to order my life around. It had probably never occurred to her I needed these precious six hours of pay. She probably thought she was doing me a favor. No, scratch that. She was doing herself some strange and mysterious favor.
A second and more thorough search confirmed what I thought—she had not simply hidden the cell and other items. I continued into the parlor, where I discovered the outer door locked and bolted. The security panel flickered yellow and orange when I pressed my thumbprint to the reader. When I tried a second time, the recorded voice said, “Technological malfunction. Please contact security support by phone.”
My skin rippled with a sudden chill. This, this was not another of Sara’s whims. She had gone to great and detailed lengths to shut me away from the world.
I have to get out of here.
I rested my arm against the door and considered what to do.
Epiphany came almost at once. The other telephone, of course. The apartment had its own landline—another perquisite that older residents favored. I could call the Hudson offices and tell them about the malfunction.
I hurried back to the parlor, to the cabinet that housed the landline device, and snatched up the receiver. Yes.
No, dammit.
The receiver was dead. I slammed the useless thing onto its cradle and checked the wiring for what I already knew. Sara had left the phone but removed its cord.
I retraced my steps to my bedroom and tried the windows. It took me a few struggles, but I wrestled one open as high as my head. The screen itself was easy to yank from its frame, but I had forgotten about the metal grating and the electronic barrier beyond that.
I leaned as close to the grating as I dared and studied the gardens below. They were a stew of crimson and gold and crackling brown. On any other day, I might have drunk in the heady scents of moldering leaves and damp earth, but today was not any other day. If I tried to break through the metal grate, I would only injure my one good arm. Or get arrested.
For form’s sake, I searched the rest of the apartment. Sara’s bedroom was locked. All the closets, cabinets, drawers, and shelves contained only the usual collection of coats and boots and umbrellas. My efforts brought me at last to the kitchen, where the promised soup and coffee and bread waited for me. Sara had laid out plate, mug, bowl, and silverware on the counter, making it easy for a one-handed person to serve herself. She had even sliced the bread before setting it in the oven to keep warm.
I poured a mug of coffee and drank it. Hot. Strong. Delicately flavored with a spice I could not identify.
From the coffee it was only a minor compromise to try the bread. The bread woke my appetite. I finished off all the slices, then the soup. By the time I had drunk the last of the coffee, I was thinking more clearly. So. Right. Sara Holmes meant to keep me here until she finished whatever mysterious errands she had. I set the dirty dishes in the sink, then returned to my bedroom, prepared to wait.
Only to find a new surprise.
I remembered clearly how I’d been in a rush the previous Saturday. There had been groceries to buy, a visit to the bank to dispute various fees, a prescription for sleep medication that Faith Bellaume had eventually, under duress, provided to me for the worst nights, and other items I no longer recalled. However, I could clearly picture the brief visit to the used-paperback store, where I’d picked out three new books for the week. When I returned to the apartment, Sara had just finished serving out a dish of spiced noodles. I had dropped the books in a heap on my bookcase and run back to the kitchen.
Now that same heap was a neat double stack. And there were ten books, not three. I picked up the topmost one. It was Cold Magic by Kate Elliott, one of my three. The second, however, was a mystery by P. D. James. Inside was a folded sheet of paper with a note: Look behind me.
Behind the double stack of books was an old-fashioned, battery-operated AM/FM radio, the kind my grandfather had talked about building from a kit when he was ten or thereabouts. It operated by a wind-up crank, and you set the station with a series of switches and dials. These days, there were only a few broadcast stations left in the U.S. Most of the commercial ones had died off in the late 2010s, courtesy of Trump’s most paranoid days, when he turned the FCC into a hammer against his enemies. The few that had survived were independent operations run by cranks or activists. My mother always said it was often hard to tell the difference between them. My father always replied it was worth the effort.
I had the sudden image of my parents, then, bending over the radio inherited from Grandpa Benjamin. One bright and lovely picture that made my breath catch. The sharp electric scent of the old device. The warmer scents of that house they had struggled so hard to buy, and even then, it was little more than a square surrounded by other squares, and the higher walls of the nearby shopping mall, with only that field of weeds and wildflowers to interrupt the concrete.
I carried the radio and an armful of books back into the parlor. The books I set off to the side while I fiddled with the radio controls.
WFED, the Federal News station, was entirely dead.
WAMU, from American University, was nothing more than a steady hiss.
Irritated, I spun the dials. A squawk of golden-hit rap music poured out. I stabbed the controls until the noise died to a whisper, then cycled through the stations. In the end, the only one that didn’t offer noise or right-wing commentary was an indie station that alternated between jazz and the occasional segment on world news.
While the radio continued to deliver its stream of music and news reports, I stared at my haphazard collection of books. One by Martha Wells. Another by Delia Sherman. The volumes by Le Carré, Butler, Sayers, Nisi Shawl, and Nalo Hopkinson. I leafed through them, finding scribbled notes in the margins dissecting the plot’s accuracy, as well as the author’s views toward race and sex and gender. The commentary was so typically Sara. Under different circumstances, I might have found it entertaining.
The indie station had begun another news segment, so I listened to reports about the war in Oklahoma, which in truth was a war that had grown, like a tumor, throughout Missouri, Mississippi, Arkansas, and Kansas, with tentacles reaching into Colorado and Tennessee. They replayed a speech by Sanches, then another by Jeb Foley, who argued for reconciliation. Sanches’s voice sounded weary to my ears, as though she had already laid aside the burden of her office. Foley’s speech disturbed me, with its call for a more Christian nation, one where “true Americans” could be proud. My parents had lectured me and my sister, Grace, about those dark days in the late 2010s when white supremacists had taken over our country and the world. Maybe those days had come back. Maybe we had never left them behind.
Jeb Foley was a legacy of those goddamned dark days. Like our forty-fifth president, like that weasel Paul Ryan and the rest of the GOP, he was the kind of man who would abandon a veteran like Belinda Díaz even while he called more soldiers to war. I had volunteered my service freely and with passion. I believed myself a patriot, or at least a foot soldier in the unending battle for civil rights. But I hated how my service—our service—had been misrepresented in this election season.
The news gave way to a segment of piano concertos from a modern composer. I relaxed back into my chair with the Butler, which discussed a world where Earth had destroyed itself, leaving behind a remnant of humankind, now captive to a strange alien species. The protagonist was written in such a matter-of-fact voice, and yet I could hear the anger beneath her so reasonable accounting of the events that destroyed her life and her world. I read on, half-listening to the radio as it cycled through another news segment about the elections . . .
I must have dozed off, because the next thing I heard was the click of a door. A cool hand pressed over mine. My eyes blinked open to see Sara Holmes’s face a few inches away. There was a whiff of rosemary and cardamom in the air, a fainter one of Sara’s favorite perfume. Her eyes were dark, her expression difficult to read in the fadin
g light of this damp October day.
“Do you want salad with your steak?” she asked.
“What?” I tried to lift my hand to my eyes. It was the wrong hand. By the time I realized it, Sara was stalking toward the kitchen. She flung a leather satchel to one side as she went.
“Whiskey is in the bag,” Holmes called back to me. “Pour us both drinks.”
She vanished around the corner before I could protest.
Right. Of course, Sara. I don’t mind being locked up without any explanation.
But arguing with Sara Holmes was like arguing with a tornado.
I decided I could at least get a drink, and possibly a few answers, before the storm whirled past. I dragged the satchel closer and dug through its contents.
Several real estate brochures lay on top. A couple advertising leaflets with coupons. Then a dozen election pamphlets of all flavors. Covering our bases, are we? I thought. I had never questioned Sara’s politics before, but then, I had not offered to discuss my own.
Underneath the pamphlets, I found a bottle of Macallan Sherry Oak, wrapped in sheets of bubble plastic. Next came two crystal tumblers with heavy bases. There was also a packet of clove cigarettes and ten lotto tickets.
I unwrapped the whiskey and the glasses. It took some doing without my device, but I managed to unstopper the bottle and pour drinks for us both. The alcohol was buttery smooth but left a faint smoky trail down my throat and into my stomach. I sank back into one of the parlor chairs and stared out over the star-spattered sky. It was a dark and moonless evening. City lights cast a halo over the horizon. High above, a faint contrail marred the pure black of the night. I could almost imagine myself as Lilith aboard the alien spacecraft, looking across the vast distance to an Earth that was no longer hers.
Fifteen minutes later, Sara returned carrying two platters with steak and salad. The one she set before me was bleeding rare, just as I liked it, and cut into bite-sized portions. She took the seat opposite me and picked up the second glass of whiskey.
“Eat,” she said. “Then we talk.”
“What if I’m not hungry?” I said.
“Liar. You ate the soup and bread, but you’ve had nothing since. Eat and we talk. Refuse and I shall sally forth in search of more congenial company.”
Fine. I tested a bite of my portion. It tasted of cumin and orange juice and a strong helping of fresh pepper. I decided I could be noble another day and dove into the steak and the salad. My jaw still ached, but not enough to slow me down. Halfway through our meal, Sara vanished into the kitchen and reappeared with a hot baguette, which I used to sop up the dressing and juice from my steak.
“I have a question,” I said. “It’s multipart and it is not one of your magical three.”
“Tschah, so many questions I never agreed to.”
“What you agreed to doesn’t matter.” The idea had come to me earlier, as I considered how thoroughly and absolutely she had isolated me. A professional job was the phrase that occurred to me. “Tell me this, Sara Holmes. Are you FBI, CIA, or any entity related to them?” Then a horrible thought occurred to me. “Or someone else?”
A very long pause followed before Sara answered.
“Call me a freelance operative,” she said. “Local, not foreign.”
“What do you mean by local?”
Her smile, the smile I knew so very well, that hid behind her carefully cultivated blandness, ticked up a notch. “I mean our own U.S. federal government.”
“Then what are you doing here?” I asked.
“Resting.”
In other words, she wouldn’t tell me. “Fine. How did you know I was in trouble last night?”
She shrugged. “Call it instinct. Are we done with your questions, Dr. Watson?”
“No! Why did someone attack me?”
A longer silence. “I don’t know yet. My investigations today were inconclusive, though certain individual details intrigued me. I plan to find out more tomorrow. But first I want you to answer a few questions.”
I glanced at her, startled.
“Oh, yes,” she said. “I don’t do anything out of the kindness of my heart. You know that. So. Tell me all about your day at the VA this Wednesday. Everything you can remember. What you did. What you thought. The people you talked to. Don’t leave out anything, even if you believe it’s unimportant.”
“And why should I cooperate?”
“Because you are as curious as I am. Because I cannot discover the grains of truth unless I sift through all the sand upon the shore.”
Like a doctor diagnosing their patient. I felt a strange urge to comply—brought about, I suspected, by the whiskey and dinner—but I could see her point. Very well. I started with my appointment with Terrence Smith and how that shifted my schedule at the VA Medical Center. And because she had insisted on all the details, I told her about Smith’s attempts to extract information he was not privileged to hear. I told her about my frustration with his attitude, and my fear that I had sabotaged my case, even though I had not meant to.
And, a miracle, Sara listened without interrupting. Her eyes went hooded. Her entire self went still. Only once, when I mentioned my offer to reenlist, did her gaze flicker up toward mine, but she did not speak.
From Smith, I continued my very boring account of my day. The patients I interviewed. RN Thompson’s compliment about my work. Sara continued to listen with all her attention, and, no doubt, all her electronic devices.
Until I reached the point where I learned about Belinda Díaz’s death.
“You say she confirmed her appointment the day before?” she asked. “Is that typical?”
I shrugged. “Some do. Some don’t.”
“How much simpler if humans conformed to expectations,” she murmured. “But then my work would be far less interesting. Tell me, what did you write in that message to Dr. Martínez?”
I hesitated. Sara smiled, that same infuriating smile I remembered from our first meeting.
“Do not be shy,” she said. “I promise not to judge you, at least not in your presence. Was he your lover? Did you mention any salacious tidbits of your times together?”
I slammed my right fist onto the arm of the chair. “He is my friend, dammit. Not my lover. All I said was that I missed him and I wanted to talk with him by cell on Saturday if he had time. And no, I did not mention you.”
Sara was unfazed by my outburst.
“That was exactly what you wrote?” she said.
“Yes. Well, no. I said I had lost a patient.”
I said it hurts. I said I wanted to fix things, if not for Belinda Díaz, then for the next one who came to me with their life shattered by war.
But I could not say those things to the cool and aloof Sara Holmes. I paraphrased as best as I could, certain even so she could read the true text behind my words. She did not smile, however, nor did she seem at all amused.
She nodded. “What time did you email him?”
“Right after my shift. Nine thirty or thereabouts.”
“Hmmm. The timing . . . But never mind about that. Was the connection secured? Tell me right away if you don’t understand the terminology.”
I wanted to throw my steak knife at her but resisted the temptation. “I understand the terminology just fine, Agent Holmes. I used my personal account and his service email. The computers in the common room are connected to the medical center’s systems, so we have to use our employee password to use them. Any email traffic gets routed through the military servers and the government censors.”
“What about the laboratory portal? Do you need a second log-in? What kind of encryption does the connection use?”
Meaning, could a foreign agent intercept my search request.
“It’s a secure line between the VA Medical Center and Capitol Diagnostics,” I said. “I doubt anyone could hack into the connection. I doubt anyone cares.”
“You would be surprised what people care about,” Holmes replied. “But I appreci
ate your honesty and your excellent memory. Tell me more about the security measures for the computers in the common area.”
I told her. She had several more questions, all about seemingly unconnected issues. The whole exchange took little more than half an hour, by which time I had finished off the last of my steak and salad. Telling the story had reawakened a host of questions as well, but between my isolated day and the whiskey, I found it harder to insist on questions and answers.
Apparently Holmes found it equally difficult, because she poured herself a second glass of whiskey and stared at it with an unfocused gaze for several long moments. “Yes. I think I see the problem,” she said. Then her gaze snapped back toward mine and she gave me an enigmatic smile. “Thank you. Yes. Thank you very much.”
She refilled my glass, then lifted hers in a toast. “Drink up. And let us celebrate enlightenment.”
She drank down the whiskey in one swallow. Without thinking, I followed her example.
Only to realize that she had drugged me once again.
10
Dreams came to me in the night. Dreams of a sort. Wisps and scraps of images, bloodred, fluttering into view, only to be snatched away by an invisible wind. Voices, too, but their speech was garbled, strange, and distant, as though a veil had dropped between me and the dream world. I cursed that veil and tried to rip through it, one-handed. I had the strangest notion that if I could break through the veil, if I could only hear what those voices talked about, I would learn an important clue.
Then a brilliant wedge of light broke through the gray, like the sun breaking through the clouded sky. The bloody images of war vanished, along with the voices.
This time I truly slept.
11
I woke to the hush and whisper of the ocean, to the gray haze of dawn and a bird whistling in the distance. For a moment, I thought I was a child again, ten years old, lying on that hard narrow cot next to my sister, the summer my parents had bargained for a cottage on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. It hadn’t mattered we had to clean the other cabins to earn our stay. All I remembered was the heavy tang of salt, the amazing, entrancing sight of waves rolling toward me from the infinite. Five sweet days in August away from the city that I still hated.
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