Fixer Redux

by Gene Doucette

  It wasn’t really the seeing that caused them distress, as existentially interesting as that idea happened to be. Corrigan could both see and alter the future, and manifest alterations caused them pain. The one time he was on their end of the timeline when such a manifest change transpired, it caused him pain too, so he could almost understand.

  “Kora-gan-see,” it repeated, this time while pointing at Corrigan with one of those alarmingly long fingers. Then it tapped its own chest. “Kilroy-prime.”

  “It’s nice to meet you, Kilroy Prime.”

  He tried raising his arm to shake hands with the Kilroy, which was a tremendously bad idea all around. His arm was tethered to the bed because of the IV attached to it, and the Kilroy’s fingers ended in sharp claws. Shaking his hand would probably result in a severed artery or something.

  They didn’t shake. Kilroy Prime nodded its head to acknowledge the greeting.

  “What are you doing here?” Corrigan asked.

  “Kora-gan-see-fix.”

  “Fix?”

  “Fixer-fix.”

  “Corrigan is a…I called myself a fixer, yes. I fixed the future. It was my job, sort of.”

  “Kora-gan-see-fix. Fix.”

  This is going nowhere, he thought.

  “Look, you can keep saying that word if you want, but you have to say other words too, or I’m not going to understand.”

  “Fix-see.”

  “Yeah, I don’t…”

  Monica’s re-entry was telegraphed by the Kilroy, who could see into the hallway. She was about to come in with a woman Corrigan recognized as an FBI agent, from Maggie’s team.

  “Help-fix-see,” the Kilroy said. Then he stepped back and let the two women enter. Corrigan flat-out didn’t understand anything they said to him, because he was firmly focused in the future and they were talking over each other all the way down the timeline. He waited until the Kilroy left the room, and then tried to recalibrate.

  “Stop talking,” he said, to both of them. “Just for a minute. Then you can tell me everything.”

  16

  The FBI has, so far, released photos of exactly one person. Call me crazy, but unless this woman conducted two high-profile attacks on these facilities all by herself, there’s something they’re not telling us…

  * * *

  …no, I don’t imagine what it could be.

  —Counterterrorism expert Jacob Clark,

  CNN live coverage

  Maggie got the news that Corrigan was awake, just as she climbed aboard the helicopter that took her to Hanscom. That was where the military plane, which then took her to Lee County, Virginia, was taking off from. It was the only way out of town; all commercial air travel to and from Boston had been shut down.

  She wasn’t in a position to turn around. As it was, her travel arrangements—including making certain she got in to see Nick immediately, rather than in the ‘several days’ the prison initially insisted on—practically required an act of Congress to secure. Tearing all of that up so she could visit Corrigan, who wasn’t going anywhere, wouldn’t be well-received.

  Justin promised to put Corrigan on the phone when he could, and since he had the good sense to sound apologetic about demanding Maggie leave town in the first place, she thought she could hold him to that.

  She kept getting updates of the situation on the ground, while en route. In addition to Joe, Dave, and Bernard Jenks, the assault on the Suffolk County Jail killed thirteen deputies and wounded seventeen more. There were also three dead and two wounded at Boston FBI headquarters. That body count would no doubt have been higher had the place not been nearly empty at the time. It would also have been higher by at least one civilian life, had Erica Smalls not proven to be extremely resourceful in a time of crisis.

  If Maggie hadn’t moved members of her team to the hospital to guard Corrigan against an attack that never came, they might have been among dead. It was ultimately a happy accident: by ordering them into what she thought was the line of fire, she was actually taking them out of it. This didn’t mean Justin wasn’t slightly uncomfortable with the process resulting in that decision. He hadn’t said so, but he probably thought had there been more people in the office, Sheila would have been stopped, and they wouldn’t be closing down the Eastern Seaboard to get her into custody now.

  But there would be video of what happened at the jail. He would reconsider, once he saw.

  There was a loud buzzing, as the gate she was standing in front of slid open, and allowed her and her FBP escort to step into the next room. Getting into the penitentiary was like clearing dull trials in the most boring version of Dungeons & Dragons imaginable. Every section had a desk behind bars, with a person at the desk who wanted to see your papers, and your ID, and for you to answer some questions. She’d checked her weapons already at one desk, and gotten patted down at another, and thought maybe this next one would have a blood test or a current events quiz.

  She’d been through all of it before, because this was not the first time she’d been to the prison for an interview with Nick Borowitz. It was, however, the first time she’d arrived with something that might get him talking.

  The process was a little like what it took to get in to see Bernard Jenks, she thought. This was probably her mind trying to find a way back to David and Joe’s final hours, because for some reason Maggie couldn’t stop thinking about that. It wasn’t just that she should have been there instead of Dave, although that didn’t help. Theirs were the personal faces she could put on a tragedy that was otherwise too monstrous to grasp.

  It wasn’t true, anyway. Lee Penitentiary was a super-max, and Suffolk County jail wasn’t. What Sheila did at the jail was impossible for anyone who wasn’t like her; pulling off the same thing at the prison was impossible, period.

  Probably, she thought.

  The guy at the third desk asked for her name, ID, and paperwork, so she slid them across. Then he asked who she was there to see.

  “Oh,” he said. “You’re from Boston, huh? We got word to expect you.”

  She just nodded, and waited for him to clear her to move on. He looked like he was ready to have a much longer conversation, before deciding this wasn’t the time.

  Maggie had checked in twice with the office already since landing. Maybe the only good news, at the end of this long day—it was nearly 10 PM—was that Sheila hadn’t turned up anywhere else with murder on her mind.

  The first press conference happened while Maggie was in the air; a photo was shared, and the tip lines were opened, to see if anyone knew of Sheila’s whereabouts. It was the same as one of the photos Maggie had with her—a still shot pulled from the security cameras at the jail. They were showing the same photo to a lot of paramedics and emergency room employees at the same time, in the hope that Sheila sought medical aid after the gunshot.

  The hospitals were a dead-end so far, and the police tip line had exploded, but with no good leads.

  It’s early, she reminded herself.

  Besides, she wasn’t positive she wanted Sheila found, not yet, not unless it was dead somewhere in an alley after having succumbing to blood loss. Otherwise, if they wanted to stop her, they were going to need a fixer, and Corrigan wasn’t ready yet.

  The next door buzzed.

  “You can go on,” the guy in the cage said. “Room twelve.”

  He handed back her papers and ID, and waved toward the door helpfully.

  Her FBP escort—his name was Clint, and that was all she knew about him—led the way to room twelve. He cleared the room first for her, then brought her in, to sit at a steel table that was bolted to the floor. There was only one other door in the room, on the opposite end, which opened as soon as she took her seat, and the door she came in through was closed by Clint from the outside.

  Two guards entered, with Borowitz between them. He was leg irons and handcuffs, and all of it was chained together, so he couldn’t walk; he could only shuffle.

  Nick Borowitz was a handsome man
with blue eyes and a disarming smile. So handsome was he, the first time his picture appeared in the papers, he started getting fan mail.

  From what Maggie had been told, the fan mail deluge never stopped, even after the trial. There was a man at the penitentiary whose job it was to screen all of the mail before Nick got to see it, but there was far more mail than could be screened adequately by one man, so most of what he received was sitting in boxes, somewhere in the building. On the list of things Maggie expected to accomplish: collect all the unopened mail and send it to Quantico, where recruits with free time could go through everything, to check for communications from Sheila.

  She’d probably have to get the opened mail too, but that might take more doing, unless Nick felt like handing it over.

  Nick smiled when he saw her at the table. He had a natural charisma. It was easy to see how he could convince a certain kind of person to commit acts of terrorism in the name of A Cause. Which was why he became the target of Maggie’s investigation fairly early on, and also why once he was caught, there was a strong push to close the investigation.

  Maggie had misgivings then, but she couldn’t express them in a way anyone above her found compelling. Now, of course, everyone wanted to know why she closed the investigation when there was clearly more to it.

  There were too many things about the case that just never made sense. Nick was a California guy, who looked like he was born to have his picture taken next to a surfboard on a beach somewhere. He, and a small gathering of friends, assembled what could charitably be called an environmental activism group, whose initial foray into the public consciousness consisted of petitions and loud appearances at town councils in various parts of the state. There was a distressingly long list of things they were against, and none of it was a secret because they also had a website.

  They were also incredibly harmless; doing the kinds of things bored upper-middle class white kids did with their time when they hit their twenties. Really, the only threatening aspect of the group was the name they went by: The Environmental Justice Fighters, or EJF. Like a lot of these groups, it was a hyperbolic title, adopting the language of violence while supporting non-violent protestation. Of course, once the EJF became associated with actual acts of terror, the media loved the name.

  The violence was confounding. At some point in the evolution of the EJF, the group transformed from a collection of like-minded kids worried about beach erosion, to a cult of personality orbiting Nick Borowitz, and later just a cult, period. That tipping point—when they went from passing out pamphlets to doling out explosives—was the subject of an entire psych department in the FBI, because nobody quite understood it. There were thousands of small groups that looked just like the EJF, but none of them took the same turn, and everyone wanted to know what happened differently this time.

  But, the facts were clear enough, even if the motives—and the development of those motives—were not. Pretty, charismatic Nick recruited a lonely, disgruntled army officer named Sharon Ledo. Sharon had access to military-grade weapons and explosives.

  There was another grey area here, because nobody had figured out yet how Sharon was able to use that access to get as much C-4 off the base as she had. Her access could put her in the room with a tremendous quantity of it, but that wasn’t the same thing as being able to walk off the base with a supply, and yet that was what she did, despite the ample security measured in place to prevent any such thing.

  After that, and after Ledo went AWOL but before anyone noticed the missing C-4, bombs started turning up, first in random spots—like the one under the bridge that first got Maggie’s attention—and later at some government buildings, which changed the dynamic of the threat significantly.

  This was another element of the story that never made a lot of sense. After he was arrested, Nick went to great lengths to justify their actions in the context of their stated interest in the environment, but even if one allowed for the possibility that he was deeply unstable, it didn’t make a lot of sense. He argued that the only way to save the environment was to topple the United States government, and sure, that was an argument to be made in the abstract, but the execution of that plan was rather dubious. Even arguing that it might be possible to topple the entire government with some well-placed bombs, their list of targets was strikingly random.

  In the early days of Nick and Sharon’s terror campaign, the randomness of the targets was their biggest ally. The EJF-connected bomb that caused Maggie’s local case to turn into a nationwide investigation was the one received by a federal judge in Tallahassee. It didn’t go off until it had already been placed safely in the bomb squad’s iron drum, and the judge was fine. The second was at the home of a postal inspector in rural Ohio. That one did go off, destroying the house and killing him, his wife, and the family dog. It was initially attributed to a gas leak, and not connected to EJF until much later. Even if it had been recognized as a bomb right off, associating it with the event in Tallahassee would have taken a remarkable leap.

  The EJF also had a habit of not taking credit for their bombs, even after another three turned up (in Dearborn, Providence, and Albany.) By then nine deaths could be attributed to the group, and Maggie finally managed to convince her superiors that there was a terrorist group operating inside the United States, and that group was annoyingly declining to take credit for their actions.

  This was another reason the EJF evaded capture for longer than they probably should have. Bombs and an at least semi-coherent message are recruitment tools for terrorists. Their behavior fit the pattern of a serial bomber, not a team of environmentally conscious anarchists.

  It was thus the case that Maggie Trent knew just about all there was to know about the apparent charismatic leader of this little group, Nick Borowitz, long before anyone else. She remembered running through all of the likely reactions she would get from Nick after she apprehended him—assuming they were able to take him alive—and hoped that one of those reactions would include a nominal explanation of what he thought he was doing with all of this. When the day did arrive, and Nick and Sharon were taken into custody, his response was oddly underwhelming.

  He didn’t react like a fanatic. He didn’t react much at all, actually. Maggie couldn’t even put words to his emotional response until later, after he’d been put in the back of the police van.

  It was relief. That was his reaction.

  The guards sat Nick down, looped his chains through a bolt on the floor and a second on the table, and then left the room.

  “Hi, Nick,” Maggie said. “You’re looking good.”

  “No, I’m not,” he said, “but thanks for saying so.”

  His right eye was a little swollen, and his lip was cut. His hair was trimmed short in the way a barber with clippers and no professional training might do it. It looked like he hadn’t been eating much, and had seen very little sunlight. But, his blue eyes were just as blue and his smile no less brilliant.

  She pulled her phone out, set it to record, and put it between them. Then she read off the time and date and identified the two people in the room, for whoever transcribed it later.

  “So, what can I do for you?” he asked.

  “Have you been watching the news?”

  “Not really. Why, did something happen?”

  He was grinning as he said it.

  “Right,” she said.

  Maggie opened the Manila folder that had been inspected by three different sets of guards, and slid one of the photos across the table..

  “Who is she, Nick?” she asked.

  He picked up the picture with his shackled hands and looked at it for a few seconds.

  “Not a great angle, huh?” he said.

  “She didn’t pose for us, no.”

  “Is that a guard uniform?”

  “Nick.”

  “I mean, it looks like there’s a name tag there.”

  Maggie pushed across the other two photos, which weren’t a whole lot better.


  “I don’t know who she is,” Nick said.

  “C’mon.”

  “No, no, you don’t understand. I’m not going to do that thing where we go back and forth and I play coy about not knowing her, and you dangling some kind of concession. I know I’m not getting out of here. I mean, I don’t know who she really is. She killed Bernard, didn’t she?”

  The fact that the siege on the jail was conducted with the ultimate aim of killing one of its occupants had not been disclosed to the media. It would be eventually—sometime before Bernard’s trial date, it was going to have to come out that he was no longer alive—but there was still a lid on that information.

  “Yes,” Maggie said. “And we think you might be next.”

  Nick laughed.

  “No, you don’t,” he said.

  “No, we really don’t. We don’t know anything right now, because nothing she’s done has made sense. Look, you obviously do know who she is. Why don’t you give me something?”

  “Like I said, I don’t know who she is, or where she came from. I’m not saying that to be unhelpful; she just never provided a background story any of us was prepared to believe. But that was normal, you know? We were all using nicknames at the start. Back in Cali, I mean.”

  “She was with you back then?”

  It had been eight years since the Environmental Justice Fighters was founded. They only turned to violence in the final three years.

  “Not that far,” Nick said. “But yeah, when we were still, you know. Granola.”

  “Sure.”

  “First time she and Bernard started coming ‘round, she said to call her Shiva, and we were all, cool, that’s how you identify. He was calling himself…Sundance, I think. I forget. But eventually, we got his real name. We never got hers. Not that it matters, right? You need an origin story, I think, and Shiva doesn’t have one of those.”