Before I could lose courage, I clicked Send.
There was a faint whoosh, as if my email were a winged creature, shooting through electronic skies. I stared a moment longer at the screen, then shut down my browser and rested my head on my hands.
Like a voice whispering in my ear, I heard Sara telling me, You need not make yourself a paragon of cheerfulness. You have lost your job and quarreled with a friend. You are permitted to show yourself discouraged.
Right. Thank you. I knew that.
I sighed and rubbed my knuckles against my forehead. Outside the skies were muddy gray. Inside, the air felt sharp and dense, like lightning before it struck. It took me ten or fifteen minutes before I could continue the script Sara and I had worked out. It was simpler, if not easier.
I opened up the VA job search portal and updated my résumé, judiciously edited to avoid any reference to “involuntary separation.” Next, I applied to six positions in DC listed as temporary or contract only. After that, I added a custom search filter for medical jobs in Vermont, Michigan, and California. Techs, GPs, physician assistants. Anything for a paying job. And as a final touch, I submitted the necessary forms to receive a copy of my employee file and the reasons for my discharge.
Current time, twelve forty-five p.m. Too early to return to the apartment.
I spent another half hour meandering through the services offered by the VA for returning vets. When I had exhausted all the variations Sara and I had prepared for, I logged off and headed up Sixteenth Street to the U Street corridor.
I bought a falafel sandwich and a large coffee from the next street vendor I met. More wandering brought me to the Mall, now fading into a late autumn brown and gray. I plumped myself onto a bench and arranged my sandwich and coffee next to me. A half-dozen or so office workers on their lunch break surrounded me. One family with the children tumbling over the grass. No one bothered me. I was dressed like the homeless, in my baggy trousers and my hoodie, but I had a substantial meal laid out, and by now I had recovered from the shock of Saúl’s email. I no longer twitched, and my rage I carried deep inside.
I’d picked a spot by the World War II Memorial. The Reflecting Pool was a silvery rectangle to my right, with Lincoln’s cold pale face gazing over it. Away to my left was the Washington Monument. A couple years back, my mother wrote how some protester had painted Washington’s face black. A stupid, stupid person, she had said. Not that she disagreed with the protester, but because she knew the cost of showing anger.
I finished off my sandwich and coffee and bought a second cup that I carried west toward the Lincoln Memorial. This, this was my personal pilgrimage, the magnet of my discontent. Mr. Liberty for the black people of the United States, and oh, we should be so grateful.
Grateful is a bitter word, my father once said.
I tilted my head up at Lincoln. Stared at him while I drank my extra-strong coffee. Maybe he had done all that he could. He had paid with his life, after all. And yet, I could not rid myself of the anger that others had risked as much only to be forgotten by history.
My duffel bag beeped faintly. I ignored the first round of signals, but when the second began, I sighed, tucked the coffee cup between my feet, and dug out Sara’s message device.
Okay? it said. The clock blinked two thirty, which was later than I had guessed.
“I’m okay,” I said quietly. “Coming back soon.”
It was closer to three thirty by the time I had negotiated the locks into apartment 2B of 2809 Q Street. Sara met me at the apartment door and led me into the kitchen, where a mug of chicken-and-peppercorn soup waited for me. I levered myself onto the stool and bent over the mug, breathing in the clouds of spices until I no longer shivered. Sara waited patiently while I drank down the soup, then held out the mug for a second helping.
“Saúl answered my email,” I said. “In case you didn’t know.”
Her only reaction was a swift, assessing glance. “I didn’t. Which is an important data point.”
Right. Yes. So glad to provide my grief for your analysis.
She handed me the filled mug. I stirred the liquid with my spoon. As with every dish Sara prepared, the soup was a perfection of flavors and texture and color. Even the ceramic mug and wide silver spoon whispered of expensive craftsmanship. Because she comes from a rich family. She’s never lived on a dirt farm or scrubbed toilets in payment for a cottage on the beach.
Unfair, that. But I wasn’t feeling all that fair after my visit with Mr. Lincoln.
“I wrote back,” I said, still staring at my soup. “You didn’t tell me what to say, but I knew. I—”
I dropped my head onto my hands. I had no more tears except ghost tears. Like my arm that no longer existed but never entirely vanished from perception. Sara made no move to comfort me. She waited, silent and invisible, while I grieved—for Saúl, for Belinda Díaz, for any number of companions who had died in these wars. At least with Saúl, I would get one last message: User Account Not Found. A form of closure, courtesy of the internet.
At last I raised my head, wiped a hand over my face. “This is good soup.”
Sara accepted the change in subject. “I thought you might like it. And I have my own contribution of news. Your final employee report.” She pushed a thick brown accordion folder over the counter.
“I applied for this already.”
“I know. We’ll compare this version with the one they send you.”
Oh. Right.
I upended the contents of the folder and spread the papers over the counter. Here were my résumé and application, the various forms I had signed when they first hired me, and those I had initialed for each step during training.
A few sheets included commentary from the doctors, nurses, and senior med techs. Meticulous. Conscientious. Shows an understanding of proper medical procedures.
Interesting. The doctors had rated me far higher than I expected. Respect for my degree? Honest opinion? A mixture of both? The reviews from the med techs were mixed, but I recognized the ones Antonelli had provided. Rises to the challenge, even when there isn’t one. Then, in the neat script I recognized as Thompson’s handwriting, Reliable. At times displays an arrogance of intellect.
“She likes you,” Sara observed. “So does that Antonelli.”
I snorted and turned over the next sheet. Here started the official transcript of my employment. Job title: Junior Medical Technician. Status: Part-time personnel. I skimmed down the list of excused absences and tardy arrivals. Then followed a chart labeled Metrics, with my percentage of cases completed at or under the regulation time limit. One hundred percent green was the goal, according to our orientation. Mine was 75 percent. Borderline, if I believed the chart’s legend.
Then I came to a page labeled Reasons for Termination:
Subject frequently tardy without proper notification. Regulations require medical technicians to be on site fifteen minutes prior to start of shift.
Subject regularly exceeds recommended consultation time.
Subject at times has not displayed a team-player mentality. She argues with senior personnel and has at times abused her access to VA resources to bypass recommended treatment protocol.
Subject often uses prohibited language . . .
That made me pause. Sure, I had said damn and shit and even the occasional fuck this. We all had, even RN Thompson, even Drs. Patel and Anderson. Not to the patients, of course . . .
Oh. Now my skin went stiff with a cold that no soup could vanquish. I turned over the page to see a paragraph rendered in large font and boldface:
Complaints recorded against the subject by patients:
Incident. 8:00 p.m. October 15. Complaint filed 11:00 a.m. October 17. Subject used inappropriate language to patient.
Incident. 1:00 p.m. October 17. Complaint filed 2:10 p.m. October 17. Inappropriate language with violent overtone. Recommend immediate termination.
Lies. Neatly packaged and delivered via regulations designed to
protect our patients. I felt a twinge of genuine violence for anyone who appropriated those safeguards for their own murderous ends.
“Those reports are false,” I said, handing the file back. My mouth twisted into a cold and angry smile. “I wish I knew who filed them. I’d show them what inappropriate language sounds like.”
Sara’s smile was equally cold. “So would I. But our best revenge is . . . revenge. So. Let us ignore the false reports. Let us focus on their intended effect. Which comes back to you and your troubling inquiry into Belinda Díaz’s medical records. One inquiry probably did not trip their alarm, but you weren’t satisfied with those first results. No, you launched a second, far more comprehensive search that romped through the VA medical system and Capitol Diagnostics as well. A few hours later, you sent an email to your friend Captain Martínez, where you explicitly mentioned Belinda Díaz and that you were puzzled by her death. One or both of these actions sent our friends into sudden panic.”
“But—”
Sara held up a finger. “Hush. Let me finish. We cannot tell yet which event provoked the attack, only that it happened. However, you yourself are nothing more than a surgeon in the army, recently discharged, with no influence. No, they were not watching you. What I find much more plausible is that someone has planted a trigger, designed to alert our adversaries whenever anyone showed any interest in the surviving members of the Red Squirrels. That, together with their ability to plant false reports, tells us they have burrowed deep into the VA’s computer system, and also into Capitol Diagnostics. Possibly and probably any other system connected to the VA as well.”
Yes, oh yes. But I held my breath, waiting for the rest of Sara’s hypothesis.
Sara smiled, as though she guessed my thoughts. “Eat your soup, and I shall continue. But soft, soft, doucement, mon amie. Taste the soup before it dies from the cold.”
Knowing she would not go on otherwise, I dipped my spoon into the thickening broth and listened as she continued to detail the supposed plots of our enemies.
“So. You conduct this search,” she said. “It failed, but the mere act sets off alarms for our adversaries. They think to themselves, This woman is a lowly medical technician. If she dies, no one will notice. So they hire a thug to murder you. An extreme answer to their problem, but easily accomplished. The difficulty is finding a competent thug these days. They ought to have sent for me. I know several.”
I laughed, as I knew she expected. It wasn’t a happy laugh.
Sara acknowledged that with a brief nod. “They are worried about you,” she went on. “Our adversaries know nothing about me, or at least not my true identity. Our trip to Florida proves that. Let us hope they continue to be baffled by that point. Anyway, our friends fret over you the next day, but you remain at home. Injured, they hope.”
“Locked in my prison,” I muttered.
“Hush, my love. Do not interrupt. I am hunting criminals.”
I am not your goddamned love.
But by now I understood she meant nothing by that careless endearment, so I hushed. I listened.
“You were safe the following day only because you vanished and I took measures. That same day, Captain Martínez’s jeep crashes for no particular reason. Two people die and a third remains in critical condition, unable to tell anyone what happened. What do you say? Coincidence or opportunity?”
“Opportunity,” I said. “Though how they could arrange such a thing, I don’t know.”
Sara, however, nodded. “Let us proceed with that assumption. I propose that our enemies discovered your email to Captain Martínez. Perhaps they feared you suspected more than you admitted in that email. Perhaps they wished to prevent you from sharing those suspicions. It’s even possible he held certain clues that were innocuous on their own but dangerous when combined with yours. Therefore they arrange for that tragedy on the road to Decatur, which tells us they are adversaries with a great deal of money and unsavory connections. Also, a secret they will protect by whatever means they believe necessary.
“But you, you survive. You return to work, to the VA Medical Center, where you are free to cause more strife and worry. So they have you fired and discredited. And they include that very generous offer of a week’s pay, an offer tied to those odious forms you signed. No lawsuit. No further investigation. No more trouble from Janet Watson. All these contingencies very neatly fit together. We only need to know why.
“One thing I am certain of,” she said. “This has nothing to do with the New Confederacy. If they had infiltrated the VA computer system, they would not stop at a few murders. They would wreak havoc with electronic funds, they would sow disorder and confusion. They would win their war.”
“Then who?”
She shook her head. “The first question is why. That might tell us how. And that will lead us to who. And who can be a dangerous question to ask. The New Confederacy might be innocent of this particular crime, but the crime is most definitely connected with the war. Ask yourself if there was something in the events of last June that our beloved president does not wish known.”
Interstitial
October 22.
Make that October 23. It’s almost four a.m.
Over twelve hours since I came back to apartment 2B. Sara went out from six p.m. to one a.m. Running errands, she said. More business for the FBI and those loose ends connected to her money-laundering case. She wore outrageous, expensive clothes and a perfume distilled from unadulterated pheromones.
Before she left, she handed me a stack of her self-destructing paper. “Write if you must. And if you must, use this.”
And because she is Sara, she also left me a cook pot filled with a savory stew of chicken and white beans and fiery peppers, along with instructions on how to prepare the pasta.
I am in the parlor now. I am sick of my bedroom, sick of this apartment, but I don’t need Sara’s warning about tempting our adversary with trips outside. Sara herself has returned and has retreated to her bedroom where she plays endless variations on the piano. I don’t recognize the composer. My untutored ear says it’s medieval, but there were no pianos in medieval times. I can imagine, however, rows of monks chanting to this music, their voices overlapping in a complicated winding of tones. Music is to Sara as writing is to me.
But let’s get back to the investigation.
Until Sara said it, I had not even considered the political side. Typical surgeon, focuses on the immediate symptoms. How to cut away the disease, to repair the broken body. No thought about the family or the rest of the outer world, or at least not while I’m operating.
So let’s talk politics. Election Day is twelve days from today. The mainstream newsfeeds are useless. The independent feeds and political squirts claim that Donnovan and Foley are tied in the polls. Half the nation supports Foley and his call for compromise—Texas, Florida, Georgia, and a number of the Plains States. The other half, the ones who support Donnovan, point to our recent victories in Jonesboro and Little Rock as proof the Democrats and their Progressive allies can lead us to victory, if not unity.
All I know is that Saúl is dead and we have no proof, only speculation.
(Dear god, we have a mountain of guesses and speculation.)
Leaving aside our guesses, here is what we know so far . . .
Saúl: The driver that day was Corporal Ayers. For all her nastiness, she was good at her job. No record of drug or alcohol abuse. No recorded conflict between her and the two surgeons, which might explain a momentary lapse of attention. Ayers had driven that same route a hundred times. She probably knew every rut and pothole.
I will give the investigators credit. They examined the jeep and the accident scene thoroughly. The vehicle had undergone routine maintenance two weeks before the incident. No chance of tampering, unless our adversaries had access to the motor pool and the list of vehicles assigned for Thursday. Local weather reports stated heavy rainfall on Tuesday, but no precipitation after that. The investigators noted a few patc
hes of mud, but nothing to explain the jeep’s sudden swerve off the road. A sniper bullet aimed at the front passenger tire could have led to the same results, but no spent casings were found, and the investigators therefore did not include such speculations in their report.
In other words, no proof. No explanation. Nothing.
DEAD END
The Red Squirrels: Belinda Díaz’s squad. Eight died on the mission, including the staff sergeant. Of the seven survivors, four died later, two are in prison on assault charges, and one died of a drug overdose. Geller’s body was cremated. Díaz’s body was returned to her family in West Virginia and has been committed to the ground. The same is true for Walker and Molina, both now buried in a cemetery reserved for those without immediate family. Sara could request an autopsy, but she would need just cause. Otherwise, her chief will not support her request.
DEAD END
Badger Squad: Six died on mission. Staff sergeant court-martialed and currently serving her sentence in military prison. Charge: desertion in the face of combat. Her defense was that their orders did not include taking the outpost. She further stated that she had signaled to the other sergeant for a retreat, but the other squad had already charged forward. She has filed for an appeal.
NOT QUITE A DEAD END BUT DAMNED HARD TO INTERVIEW SOMEONE IN MILITARY PRISON WITHOUT ALERTING THE ENEMY. ALSO, SEE ABOVE ABOUT JUST CAUSE AND ALL THAT.
16
A cramp seized my hand. I dropped my pen and massaged my right palm against my metal fist. A very awkward, ill-formed fist, since my fingers froze halfway. How many more days or weeks until this device refused to answer to my commands?
A Study in Honor Page 20
