Authors: Alan Zendell
Samir was much too smart to buy that crap, but to my surprise, he just shook his head in amazement. Weak as my explanation was, he obviously couldn’t imagine a better one.
“By the way,” I said, “what did you say to Achmed that made him so rabid?”
“I told him your mother was a Zionist whore and you wiped your ass with pages torn from the Quran.” I suppressed an impulse to hug him and tell him how glad I was that he was alive.
Samir’s acceptance of my flimsy explanation, followed later by William’s, taught me a valuable lesson. People are drawn to success. They want to believe in winning streaks. Caught up in the excitement of watching someone roll a string of sevens, no one thinks about how improbable it is. All that matters is winning, and the greater the stakes, the more likely people are to accept it without question, so I decided to stop worrying about protecting my secret. If I told the truth no one would believe me, anyway. And if they began suspecting that I had my own confidential sources, I could live with that.
I left the Detention Center high on the knowledge that I’d been able to use the strange turn my life had taken to save Samir and the two gorillas, but the terrorists were still winning. My high wouldn’t survive long against the reality that they’d successfully smuggled dangerous isotopes into the area.
With eighty minutes until my train left, I walked, soaking up the vibrancy of the city. I went north on Hudson Street, not far from where the NRC radiation lab that was the site of my first job had been, remembering the queasy feeling I had when I discovered that such a place existed in the heart of lower Manhattan. I’d worried, back then, what would happen if the isotopes we worked with got loose. All these years later, I’d come full circle.
I’d been involved with William for more than half that time, but I’d always been the science geek, letting others do the dirty work. That had changed, today. My rush long since spent, I thought about what I’d done to Achmed and recoiled inside. Had I witnessed someone else doing what I did, I’d have felt…what? With each step I took I relived the feeling of his bones crunching under my heel. I stopped and leaned against a lamppost trying to silence an inner voice that accused me of violating something basic I’d thought I believed.
I started walking again. At Clarkson Street, I came to a New York anomaly, a monument to a Depression-era mayor, neither statue nor building, but a postage stamp-sized park. Where but New York City could you cram a baseball field, a municipal swimming pool, and five recreation buildings into an acre and a half?
A game was in progress. I slipped inside the fence to find a set of bleachers much like the ones in the Detention Center, except that these were populated by kids and parents, old, lonely-looking men, and a few, like me, who just looked like they needed to escape for a while.
I watched the kids play, feeling, at once, the idyllic nature of the scene and the horror of what it could become if terrorists were allowed to turn it into a radioactive wasteland. Suddenly, what I’d done to Achmed didn’t seem so bad. I wondered what my father would have said.
He’d been awarded a Purple Heart in Korea. I’d always been naively proud of his injury, without giving any thought to what he must have experienced in combat, until the day he heard me telling Gregg he was a war hero. Looking stricken, he walked to the corner of the room and sat in a chair, staring out the window. Hours later, he approached me with tears in his eyes, the only time I’ve ever seen him cry.
Speaking softly, as if he had barely enough energy to get the words out, he said, “I’m no hero, Dylan. There’s nothing positive about being in combat, not ever. You do things you thought you never would because you have no choice. I didn’t know if I was capable of firing my gun at another human being until the day my platoon was ambushed and I saw my friends being shot down. I was no hero, I was crazy with rage and fear. I killed four enemy soldiers and got shot in the leg. They gave me a medal, but it was the most terrible day of my life.”
I told him he was wrong, he’d just done what he had to but he shook his head.
“You just don’t get it, Dylan. That doesn’t matter.”
Doesn’t it? I’d never understood it before, but I knew, at that moment, that my father was wrong. He’d fought his war on a battlefield. Mine was here, in the streets, on the pier, in that gym – wherever people like Achmed threatened the things I cared about. I took no joy in what I did to him, but I’d do it again if I had to. Damn right I would.
***
I called Gayle’s house from behind third base. She’d been fitted with a walking cast, and she’d be back in the office next week.
“Wilson told me you stopped by yesterday.” She sounded awful.
“I was checking on how things were going. He said everything was on track, and you were managing things from home.”
“They’re doing great without me, thanks to you.”
“It’s not because of me. Except for a two-minute conversation with Wilson, I’ve barely had time to look at your project all week.”
“I guess you were too busy to return my calls, too.”
Oops.
“I only heard your message a little while ago.”
“I left a couple on your cell phone on Wednesday, too.”
I still wasn’t sure how people reacted to my not being there when I skipped a day, but this week, even on my Wednesday, I was completely out of touch.
“I’m sorry. It’s been a hellish week. I haven’t looked at my cell phone since Tuesday.” I’d swapped it for my secure Agency phone before leaving to meet William, Thursday morning. It had been locked in my briefcase, and I hadn’t turned it back on until a few minutes ago.
“Damn, I did it again. I shouldn’t lay my problems on you. It’s just that…”
“What? Tell me.”
“You’ll think I’m nuts,” she sighed. “I really needed to talk to you Tuesday evening, but I didn’t want to bother you at home, so I put a reminder in my phone to call the next morning. The last thing I did Tuesday night was think about what I wanted to say to you. Then, Wednesday morning, I had a nagging feeling there was something I was supposed to do, but I couldn’t remember what. It was only when my phone chimed that I remembered how badly I wanted to talk to you. It was weird.”
“Not really. You’re under stress.”
“That was what I wanted to talk to you about. But there’s more. Something distracted me, and I forgot again. When my phone reminded me an hour later, I had the oddest sensation, like it wasn’t just slipping my mind, something was making me forget.”
Something like a giant rubber band imbued with enormous potential energy?
“Let’s not worry about that now. What do you need?”
“What do I need? Maybe a new husband.”
Oh.
“Are you sure I’m the one you should be talking to?”
“Who else? I don’t usually discuss these things with women friends. I could talk to Ilene, but you’re the one I trust with this. I know you’ll keep me honest. Unless you’d rather not?”
I assured her that I was okay with it, and she said being home all week had been the breaking point for tensions that had been growing over many months when Rod either wasn’t there, or took no responsibility for the house or family when he was.
“Except for the inconvenience it causes him, he completely ignores my injury and the pain I’m in. He’s either locked in his fortress or angry at me for upsetting his routine.
“Have you tried telling him what you need?”
“He doesn’t care, Dylan. I’m just a hindrance to him.”
She couldn’t hire someone to help out because Rod wouldn’t permit a stranger in the house. He wouldn’t even let the kids bring their friends down to the expensive playroom they’d had built. I had to struggle to suppress my anger.
“Remember last week when I asked you to get my briefcase from downstairs?”
“Sure.” I also remembered thinking Rod ought to keep his shit away from his family.
“Yesterday, I asked him to bring some things up from my office, and he snapped at me about handling my own affairs. I couldn’t manage the stairs with a full cast, so I went down like a toddler, on my butt, one step at a time. I was so angry, I forgot my shoulder bag, so I had to climb back up on one crutch carrying the stuff under my arm. I lost my balance and dropped it all. Some disks rolled toward Rod’s office door and I crawled after them. He came out, saw me on the floor outside his office, and started screaming at me about spying on him, that he had his hands full with his own problems and I should stay the hell out of his way. I’ve never seen him that way before. He ran past me up the stairs and slammed the front door on his way out.”
“This happened yesterday?”
“Yes, in the morning.” The Thursday of the short-lived blockade in the harbor, not the one that killed Samir and injured me.
“I know you feel terrible, but don’t do anything precipitous. You’ll be in the office next week, right? We’ll take a long lunch Monday and talk this through, okay?” Which would give me time to discuss it with Ilene, thank God.
“You know what the worst part is?” she asked. “When he’s really angry he curses in all those languages he speaks.”
Rod had grown up in Lazistan in eastern Turkey, one of those places that changed hands, politically, every generation. Rod, which he’d anglicized from Rasid, spoke Turkish, Laz, Armenian, Russian, Arabic, and Kurdish, to name a few, which was probably why he was so valuable to his think tank employer. Maybe I was paranoid, but his extreme behavior suggested that he might be involved in something else, too. Given everything else Gayle was dealing with, I thought she had a right to know as she evaluated what to do about her marriage. Maybe William could use his connections to check him out.
“What’s the name of that outfit he works for?”
“DNZ-LLC, formerly called the Dinza Group. It’s a Black Sea trade association headquartered in New York.”
That sounded suspiciously like my own cover. I tried cheering her up for a few minutes, until it was time to catch my train.
***
Whatever Jerry may have expected, it wasn’t Ilene’s opening salvo.
“Dylan and I are really grateful for the way you handled our situation last Sunday, but a lot has changed since then.” She’d selected a different chair this time. We were arranged in an isosceles triangle, with her in an equal position. Handing him the case studies he’d given me, and sounding more like a colleague discussing a case than a client, she said, “We won’t be needing these anymore.”
Jerry raised his eyebrows. “I’m sorry they didn’t help.”
“They did,” I said. “They were just what I needed to stabilize me at the time.”
“And now?”
“Now I’m fine. There’s nothing wrong with me.”
“You’re not living Thursday before Wednesday any more?”
“Actually, I am.”
Jerry shot Ilene a pleading look.
“He really is,” she said. “Jerry, you know me. I wouldn’t say that if I weren’t absolutely sure. I witnessed it myself.”
“I don’t understand.”
I felt for the guy. “Tell him, Ilene.”
So she did, about waking up Wednesday without me, finding me injured at St. Vincent’s, then waking up next to me on Thursday before I was hurt, and again this morning with the burns on my face healing and scabs where the other injuries had bled on Wednesday night. My head was spinning when she was done, but Jerry, bless him, stuck with her all the way. If she hadn’t been someone he knew and trusted, I don’t know how it would have turned out, but in the end he was able to suspend his disbelief. He examined my face and felt the scabs. Then, I placed his fingers on the still sizable lump over my left ear, where my head had impacted the truck, causing my concussion.
“This happened, how?” he asked.
“That’s a whole different thing. It’s delicate.” I wished I’d taken more time to think this through before we got there, but Ilene rescued me.
“Jerry, I know how seriously you take confidentiality, but before we can say any more, you need to understand that this involves an entirely different degree of secrecy, and even then we can only share some of it. Are you sure you want us to continue?”
“If you don’t, I’ll be up nights wondering about it.”
“It’s all right, Ilene,” I said, “I’ll tell him. Remember my idiotic quip about secret lives and CIA agents?”
“How could I forget it? It almost felt like you were baiting me with it.”
“Maybe I was laying a trap for myself, but this isn’t a multiple personality thing, it’s real. I can’t go into details, but I’ve been involved in covert activities for most of my adult life.”
“He has,” Ilene confirmed.
“Okay,” Jerry said. “Let’s start from there, at least as a working hypothesis.”
“You know, Jerry, when we discussed coming back here, I told Ilene that what I valued most about you was your honest skepticism. There are risks involved for all of us in telling you this. What convinced me to go ahead is that you’ve probably already seen some of it on the news.” Since morning, the story had grown legs, as they say in the news business. The media hadn’t dropped it.
“You mean that ship explosion? That’s how you were injured?”
“Yes, sort of.”
“I’m confused. You said he was hurt on Wednesday, Ilene.”
“No, I didn’t. I said he’d already been injured when I saw him on Wednesday. That’s the whole point, Jerry. His injuries occurred on Thursday.”
“But the explosion was this morning.”