by Nick Cook
On a cork board, amongst numerous scraps of paper with the scrawled numbers of doctors, florists and funeral homes, are some photos of the residents, a picture of our wedding, one of Hope and another of Jack, and an overblown tabloid headline: Prez’s Doc Tried To Save Crazed Protester.
We chitchat for several minutes, then suddenly she says: ‘You can cut the crap, Josh. I get six cards and half as many emails from you in a decade. So, why are you here?’
‘There’s something I need to ask you.’
‘To do with that?’ She points to the headline.
I can’t lie to her.
‘OK …’ She sits down slowly, watching me.
‘When I brought down the U-Haul, there were only two things of Hope’s I kept. Jack’s old blanket, and her portrait of him. Lately, I’ve taken to looking at it. A lot. I mean, really looking at it. It’s like having him in the room.’
‘She could sure paint.’ She sips her coffee, watching me. ‘They both could.’
‘This may sound strange, but have you ever come across another one?’
She leans back, studying me. ‘Another portrait of Jack? By Hope?’
‘Wearing that old blanket.’
‘The one she was working on when she died?’
‘This one’s different. Finished.’
She shakes her head.
‘No sketches? No preparatory drawings?’
She shakes her head again.
‘Have you been through all her things? The boxes—?’
‘Goddammit, Josh. You want to tell me the hell this is all about?’
I take my phone out and show her the picture from the cabin. Pam studies it a while, shakes her head and hands the phone back.
‘Nobody’s been here, asking questions, have they?’
‘Questions?’
‘About Hope and me.’
She reaches across the table and takes hold of my hand.
‘Hope died a long time ago, Josh. You’ve got to let her go. God knows I adored my child, but she was complicated.’
‘Tell me about it.’ Complicated was one of the three million reasons I loved her. ‘What about her things?’
‘Her things?’
‘The boxes from the U-Haul. Could anybody have gone through them?’
‘Let her go, Josh.’
‘Mind if I take a look?’
I drop to one knee and shine the flashlight under the door.
The light bounces off of the chrome fender of Jack’s Impala – so close it’s almost in my face. I sweep the beam across one tire, then another. Both flat. Breathe in dust and engine oil. The door, its hinges rusted to hell, has jammed a meter from the ground.
Pam is standing just behind me, waving a cigarette. The smoke drifts across the beam. ‘You got a painting and an old blanket. I got his klunker. Good old Jack …’
The way Jack told it, two days after quitting the military, he was making for the coast, enjoying his newfound freedom, when the Impala died on him and, long after he’d fixed it, he and the car remained in Tresco. Jack put it down to fate – the area had once been Shawnee land. Pam had a more prosaic explanation – the Chevy, a ’62 model, was a piece of shit that was running on borrowed time and wouldn’t have made the coast anyway.
Irony is the car’s now worth a small fortune and canny Pam is waiting for the right moment to sell it.
I roll under the door, haul myself to my feet, and dust down my pants and jacket.
Pam’s voice, muffled, comes to me from the other side of it. ‘Switch is on your left as you face the wall. Bulb’s probably shot, though.’
She’s right.
I raise the flashlight. Everything is covered in a thin film of grime. Spiders’ webs hang from two sets of shelves above a workbench; behind the webs are jars with mottled labels filled with liquids and assorted bits and pieces. The moving boxes are stacked against the wall next to the Impala.
I’d shoved Hope’s stuff into boxes four years after she died, and a year after I retrained as a psych. I couldn’t bring myself to look at the paintings. I simply wanted rid of them. Shipping it all back here, I thought, would solve everything. Out of sight, out of mind.
I work my way through the boxes now, find the one labeled ‘Studio’, open it, wedge the flashlight between my neck and my shoulder and start rifling through it. A watercolor of the house, a couple of the beach, the sea beyond the point, a load of still lives, and some sketches: of me, of Heather Kantner, of a load of old people I don’t recognize – her art therapy patients, maybe – and her mom.
But no sign of Jack.
I step back, and stumble over something behind me. There’s an almighty crash and my shoulder hits the wing of the Impala.
‘Josh?’
I tell her I’m fine.
I see the glow of my flashlight beneath the sump, kneel down, my forehead against the cold bodywork, and manage to roll it toward me with my fingertips.
The box I tripped over has split, its contents scattered between the Chevy and the wall. A scrapbook of the artists that had always inspired her: Klimt, Rothko, Picasso, Chagall. The small wooden casket in which she used to keep the things that had been most precious to her.
Inside it, there’s a leather bracelet from Pam, the china rabbit that somehow managed to survive her childhood and make the journey east, a couple of CDs of bands she’d loved, some items of jewelry, a handful of heart-shaped beach pebbles, and her favorite photos. This is probably where she kept the ultrasound scan before taking it to Lakeland that night.
There’s a shot of me taken the year we met, one of Pam smoking, and an envelope marked ‘Jack’ in Hope’s loopy, distinctive hand. It contains a medal ribbon and his three pieces of jewelry: the ankh, the weird, stylized tree in the circle, and the silver star.
There’s a photograph, too, in color, but so faded it could almost be sepia-tinted, of a couple of guys in flight suits and Aviators in the cockpit of a plane. It takes me a second to realize one of them is Jack.
I once asked him what he’d flown in Vietnam, but never got a straight answer. I knew forward air controllers hadn’t had it easy. Their job had been to fly low and slow over the jungle, watching for enemy troop movements and calling down strikes.
I smile to myself. Before Jack grew his hair, before he smoked himself to death, he had really looked the part.
There’s a motif on the fuselage, just below his right arm.
It’s a mean-looking blade with a snake coiled around it, jaws open, fangs exposed, ready to strike. On the side of the cockpit is a single word: Jackknife.
The scrawled signature bottom right of the picture catches my eye. The writing is unmistakably Jack’s.
I tilt it to the light.
It says ‘Mac’.
26
BEFORE LEAVING THE FIVE PINES, I GO ONLINE AND FIND JACK’S aircraft – a prop, long out of service, that had been designed for the FAC mission. A Bronco. The Marines had used them extensively in Vietnam.
I Googled Marine Corps Bronco recipients of the Navy Cross and found only two: a pilot, Lieutenant Nelson Freeley, of VMO-3, a unit based at a strip near Da Nang, and his observer, Sergeant Jack Ackerman.
Jack’s call sign had been Jackknife 13, which must have morphed into Mac the Knife then just plain Mac, which he abandoned as soon as he came back Stateside and dropped out.
Jack and Nelson had both received the Corps’ second highest award for gallantry for an action in which Jack had guided a force of Marine Corps/ARVN out of the jungle to a beach near a place called Hoi An, where they were rescued by boat.
With no other air assets available, they’d remained on station for as long as their fuel had allowed, advising the unit commander of the exact location of the enemy – which had meant flying below 150 meters, exposed to ground fire throughout. Their ground crew counted more than three hundred holes in the Bronco’s fuselage.
They had severed electrics, hit black boxes, punched through the self-sealing fuel tanks,
drilled through the canopy, dented both armor-plated seats and missed their bodies by a centimeter or two, max. That they had both survived was a miracle; that neither had even been scratched almost beyond belief.
I ask Pam if she knows any of this. She shakes her head.
But Hope must have done. Why else had she tucked away the photo in her treasure chest?
On the way back to Camp David, I rack my brains – somehow Duke Gapes connects me to the President and the Engineer, Hope’s portrait of Jack and a nickname I didn’t know he’d had.
The three pieces of jewelry, now on the passenger seat, trigger another memory. Three months before the crash, Pam called to say Jack was dying. The cancer had turned aggressive.
Hope and I flew up that afternoon. It had been a tough month. The workload had been intense. My drinking had gotten heavier. I couldn’t remember the last time we’d touched, much less held each other, but she gripped my hand the whole way. In the dark of our hotel room near the airport where we stayed before driving up to Tresco, we’d made love with such tenderness I can feel it now.
When we got to the Five Pines the next morning, Jack, amazingly, had rallied. Hope took a photo of him sitting outside, beneath a tree, his blanket around his shoulders. News of her homecoming, Pam said, had given him something to stick around for. But we knew that we were witnessing a burst of light moments before it burned its last.
Four days later, we gathered around his bed. He gave my hand a squeeze, then asked for hers. I heard him whisper something – she never did tell me what, but moments after he died, she retrieved the ankh, the star and the tree of life from under his pillow. The following day, back in Florida, she started on his portrait, and kept working on it, out on the porch, using the photograph as her inspiration, silently, methodically, as, unknown to me, our child had started to grow inside of her.
OK. So Gapes is psychic. However it works in ESP-land, he’d worked out a bunch of things about Hope and me. But that doesn’t explain the portrait. Or, as Hetta pointed out, why he chose to speak in riddles.
Unless that’s the whole point.
The thought makes my blood pump a little faster.
I remember Steve describing the moment Gapes placed his hand against the knots and scars on his face.
Remember, Gapes had told the paraplegic vet.
Memory was important to Gapes.
But so was time. Time figures in this, too. It’s like he was buying us time. Still is, maybe.
What for?
I’m wrestling with this as I grind through the gears on a twisty section of road on the home straight to Thurmont. It’s close to midnight and I suddenly feel drowsy. But Thurmont is only a few miles from Camp David. I don’t need to pull over. I don’t need to stop for coffee. I’m almost there.
Then my head starts to hurt and my vision begins to swim.
I blink. Headlights. Dazzlingly bright. Belonging to something big – something big on my side of the road …
I peer through the windshield.
Coming right for me.
I throw the wheel and send the car off of a six-foot drop. As it starts to roll, out of the corner of my eye I glimpse a big silver grille and red paintwork as the truck thunders past.
The car hits the ground and my head snaps left, then right. Trees, rocks and earth fill my field of vision as it rolls. Then the belt clamps my chest hard against the seat and there’s a bang as the airbag deploys.
A shriek of metal, the sound of glass breaking, the engine surging.
An enormous crash as the lights go out.
Then, at last, silence.
I’m alive, lying on my side, in the darkness.
I pull the airbag away from my face and become aware of the unearthly glow of the instrument panel. I smell damp vegetation and there’s a loud hissing sound from under the hood. The windows have all smashed. My cheek is pressed against wet earth.
I release my belt and try to move, but I’m pinned against the door.
Then, beyond the windshield, beyond some trees that I can begin to make out in the weak ambient light, I hear movement.
I tell myself I’ve imagined it.
I know I haven’t.
Something in the undergrowth. Getting nearer.
I lie there, listening, unable to escape.
Then, a voice in the darkness. ‘Colonel? Colonel Cain?’
I breathe again.
What in God’s name is she doing here?
27
HETTA FOUND ME, BECAUSE SHE’D FOLLOWED ME; STUCK A GPS tracker in the car I’d taken from the pool, and, maintaining a discreet distance, shadowed me all the way from Camp David to Tresco.
Why? She shrugs. A little dose of post-Lefortz paranoia, maybe.
I tell her I know the feeling.
She was less than a quarter mile behind me when I was forced off the road. My abrupt halt had shown up on the tracker. But between there and the scene of the crash, she’d passed nothing.
What I saw was real, but I can’t dismiss her version: that there had been no red rig on the road – no vehicle at all, in fact.
We take a left out of the dispensary. It’s a clear night. The stars are out.
‘Byford sent me some more files,’ she says, as we head for the trail that’ll take us back to the lodge. ‘I thought you’d be interested to know that the lab found a match with those hair samples in the Armed Forces’ DNA ID database.’
‘Who is he?’
‘Karl Dempf. Age forty-four. Wounded twice. First a decade ago, in Afghanistan, when he was an Army captain. A communications specialist. Second in Benghazi. He had the misfortune to be in our consulate when it was attacked by militants. Now he’s a consultant with Triple Z Services. They’re based in Herndon, outside D.C.’
‘Never heard of them.’
‘You won’t have. They do a lot of sub-radar, security-related contract work. Byford’s looking into it. And Voss, too. The file she’s tracked down IDs him as Marine Raider Regiment. One of a fourteen-man Marine Special Operations Team that got ambushed on a covert attempt to take down some Taliban warlord. Whoever doctored Gapes’s papers conflated his story with Voss’s.’
‘Voss had no dependents?’
‘None. He was an orphan. And ugly with it.’
‘And Gapes? What do Christy’s files say about him?’
‘Everywhere the Activity went, the viewers went too, as part of the assault unit. This was the subset of Element known as Chronometer. Sometimes, the unit worked independently; at other times, with the Russians – it depended on whose sphere of influence they were in. But the part about the viewers remained top secret, special access, highly need-to-know, until the helicopter crash that saw three of them killed and Gapes so badly burned that for a whole year it was touch-and-go whether he’d make it.’
‘What about the Engineer?’
‘Nothing back yet.’
‘What’s taking them? Myth or reality, they must have something on him.’
‘I’m on it,’ she says.
Up ahead, an old iron streetlight marks a fork in the trail.
We veer to the right and start downhill. My ribs are beginning to hurt.
‘It took me a while to figure this part out,’ Hetta says, ‘but here’s the news, Colonel: you and I have had a whole lot of smoke blown up our asses. If you were into something as covert as Duke Gapes was, and you wanted to go off-radar, what would you do?’
‘Come on, Hetta, it’s too damn late for twenty questions.’ I move my hand to my ribs. ‘And stop calling me that.’
‘Calling you what?’
‘Colonel, for Christ’s sake.’
‘I elected to maintain some formality between us,’ she says. ‘Because I didn’t want things to become complicated.’
‘Do you have any idea how you sound when you talk like that?’ I laugh, then wish I hadn’t. I place my other hand on my ribs.
‘You’re hurt.’
‘Just some bruising.’ I look at her in th
e dim light. ‘You know what? Calling me by my first name and staying, just the two of us, in the President’s hideaway, doesn’t come under the heading of complicated. The world isn’t always the binary place you imagine it to be.’
‘Is that how I am?’
‘Is what how you are?’
‘Binary.’
‘I didn’t say that’s how you are. I said that’s how you see things.’
‘Do I?’
I could cut the air between us with a knife.
‘I’m a shutdown son of a bitch, Hetta. But none of us is perfect.’
We walk on. I look up. A plane, moving fast and high, tracks east against the star bed. I follow its winking lights for a moment or two.
‘I’m sorry,’ I say. ‘Long day. I didn’t thank you for coming to my rescue either.’
‘No need.’
We walk on.
‘You were saying … About the smoke …’
‘It can wait.’
‘No, it can’t. Tell me.’
‘INSCOM,’ she says, ‘proposed two pathways to the Executive Branch when remote viewing was resurrected after 9/11.
‘One was for the Army to use it against what it called time-critical targets. This resulted in the quick and dirty recruitment of viewers and the coupling of RV to the Activity’s search-and-destroy mission for the perpetrators of 9/11, initially, and later for jihadists seeking to take their game to the next level: the acquisition of WMDs.
‘The other was the development of some rigor to allow them to get a better handle on the RV process. For all the years it had been an active program in the seventies and eighties, despite the involvement of the Stanford Research Institute, the science of it had remained a mystery. No one had had a clue how it worked. All they knew was that, somehow, it did.
‘The intel community hated the “psychics”, as they called them, because of the unwanted congressional attention they brought upon the whole intelligence community. That’s what had killed the program first time around.
‘This time, INSCOM knew that they had to keep it under wraps. So, when they persuaded the Bush administration to resurrect it, they also convinced it of the need for one hundred ten per cent secrecy. To achieve that, the administration used a presidential finding – a covert delivery mechanism for the President’s executive order to the House and Senate Intelligence Committees. Stop me if you already know this.’