by Nick Cook
‘You, me, Hart – we all got screwed.’
He heads for the door, stops, turns and hands me a piece of paper. ‘Almost forgot. Doctor gave me this.’
I unfold it.
When I raise my eyes and draw breath he has a finger pressed to his lips.
The note is on the letterhead of the consultant who has been overseeing my recovery, but the writing, in black felt pen, isn’t his.
It has an angular, familiar look.
Consulting Room. Third Floor. Now.
Hetta stands in the shadows to the left of the window. She’s in mufti: faded denims, a white hoodie. Her right leg is encased in a ski boot; her crutches are on the table. DJ is outside, pretending to make a call.
The room looks like it hasn’t been used for consulting in a while.
‘How are you doing?’
‘OK,’ I lie.
‘You see the news?’
I shake my head. ‘No.’
‘Your phone switched off?’
‘I left it in my room. What is this?’
‘Before the crash, while you were with Offutt and Professor van Buren, Wharton met me at Anacostia–Bolling. I told him that I needed two things. Everything that the Bureau had on Ilitch and everything SAIC Lefortz ever told him about the President’s probe. Lefortz never told DJ what it was about, but, at Lefortz’s request, DJ told him a bunch of stuff from way back that Justice, Treasury and the FBI had been doing to help the Ukrainian Government.’
‘Listen, Hetta—’
‘That’s all I know. But it tells me the President has an interest in this that he hasn’t communicated to the rest of us, and that this is what SAIC Lefortz was digging into when he was killed.’
‘Hetta—’
‘Thompson is going to Jerusalem, Josh. He announced it two nights ago in the State of the Union.’
‘I don’t want to know.’
‘He’s dropped the Moscow summit and pulled forward the conference to next month. Next month. What the fuck is wrong with you?’
‘What is wrong with me is that by rights we should be dead.’
‘But we’re not.’
‘The doctors are saying it’s a miracle.’
‘Not the word I’d use, but—’
‘Hetta, this is all academic. Reuben’s told me, and Graham’s told you. We’re off this case. And it’ll be seriously detrimental to your health and mine if they think for a moment that you’re still—’
She cuts me off again. ‘Ilitch is half Ukrainian on his mother’s side, Volga Tatar on his father’s. The Tatars are a Russian Muslim people, Josh. Ilitch’s father, a Muslim, was some kind of Soviet-era racketeer. There is a big Russian connection to all of this: Ilitch, the Orthodox Church in Jerusalem, the number fifteen.’
She pauses. ‘In the late nineties, two Ukrainian weapons scientists were arrested for trying to smuggle nuclear material to Al-Qaeda. It was a sting. The FBI was involved in it. I asked DJ to look through the files. It was a part of the joint Justice–Treasury–FBI investigation. Among the materials that Al-Qaeda was trying to buy was something called a ballotechnic.’
She pauses to see if this registers with me.
‘The thing on the wall of the cabin was part of a consignment of nuclear materials destined for an Islamic terror group more than twenty years ago. We’ve got to go see the guy.’
‘What guy?’
‘The guy who knows about this stuff. His name’s Nils Bogarten. He works for the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.’
‘Hetta, nobody was meant to survive what we just survived. The people who brought our V-22 down aren’t going to stop until they have taken care of the problem. And you and me are the problem. We’re not going anywhere, you hear?’
It’s useless trying to argue with her. She doesn’t get it.
I tell her to wait two minutes before leaving the room.
Outside, I speak to DJ. If you care about her, I tell him, you’ll get it into that thick, obsessive, OCD skull of hers that our every move is being watched and if we so much as look as if we’re on the case—
He places a hand on my shoulder. ‘Colonel – Josh – I already took care of it.’
She has a brother, he says. A brother who’s a cop.
‘Mikey.’
DJ knows Mikey. Mikey is a good guy.
Their plan is to drive Hetta up to Philadelphia tomorrow. Mikey is taking some leave. He won’t let her out of his sight until she’s better.
‘And you?’ he says. ‘You look like you could use a little.’
‘A little?’
‘Time out from all this.’
I tell him I took the precaution of booking myself into a clinic – an out-of-the-way place four hours from D.C. on Delaware Bay, overlooking the Atlantic. I just about manage a smile.
‘What?’ he says.
‘I helped to set it up.’
DJ ponders this irony for a moment before telling me he’ll drive me there personally. After he’s dropped Hetta with Mikey.
42
WE DRIVE NORTH ON THE I-95 IN SILENCE, WITH CHESAPEAKE Bay on our right for most of the journey.
DJ and I sit up front. I can tell that he’s read Hetta the riot act, instructed her to stay with her brother, and that she’s not happy about it. She sits in back, her leg stretched across the seat, radiating contempt.
We’re somewhere past Baltimore when DJ, to break the mood, tells us that the upside of his removal from the Gapes inquiry is that he and his wife-to-be get to spend a proper honeymoon together.
‘First time around?’ I ask.
‘Second.’ He pauses. ‘I was lucky. My first was a real good one. Lena and I shared twenty-five great years before she got sick. Cathy and Bernie were our neighbors. Bernie died five years before Lena. Cathy was her best friend, and helped me nurse her till she had to go into the hospice.’
He pauses again. ‘It took Cathy and me a while to get together. I’m pretty sure, wherever she is, Lena’s OK with it.’
I’m pretty sure too.
‘Josh should take a leaf out of your book,’ Hetta says. It’s the first time she’s spoken since we passed Baltimore’s northern limits, around fifty miles back.
‘How’s that?’ DJ glances into the mirror.
‘You know how many years it is since his wife died?’
‘Sorry for your loss,’ Wharton says, turning to me.
Hetta leans forward. ‘You said it yourself, DJ.’
‘Said what?
‘That Lena wouldn’t have wanted you to stay stuck in the past.’
‘She wouldn’t.’
‘So, why can’t you move on, Josh?’
Wharton’s jaw clenches. ‘You’re out of line, Hart.’
‘Just saying.’
DJ adjusts the mirror so he can look at her directly. ‘So, how many relationships you had that panned out?’
‘I’m nothing to do with it. This is about Josh.’
‘You can be so damned obnoxious at times, you know that?’ DJ says.
‘I’m trying to help.’
I turn and face her. ‘So tell me. How the fuck does this help?’
‘Well, I—’
‘You don’t simply move on.’ Wharton softens his tone, but I can hear him still trying to tamp down his anger. ‘Grief needs to make its own journey.’
‘What does that even mean?’ she says.
‘It means it’s personal. Everybody does what he or she does to get through it. It also means that being with Cathy doesn’t mean I’ve stopped loving Lena.’
Hetta sits on this for a mile, maybe two, until the silence becomes deafening.
‘And your new wife is cool with that?’
‘Yes,’ he says. ‘She is completely cool with that.’
We pull up in front of a one-story house with a flagpole out front on a quiet street in Philly’s northeast quarter.
DJ comes round the back and opens Hetta’s door. She swings her leg onto the ground, stops, tur
ns to me and touches my shoulder.
‘Josh, hey, I’m really sorry …’
I look at her and nod. She gets out. Wharton, holding her case, walks her up to the porch where her brother is standing and staring at us. Mikey isn’t what I expected: he is short, wiry, balding and close to fifty. You’d never believe he’d survived a bullet. Just before she reaches him, Hetta turns and gives me a weak smile.
DJ and Mikey exchange a few words and shake hands. Mikey and Hetta then disappear inside.
Fifteen minutes later, DJ and I are heading south on I-95.
‘I’m sorry,’ he says, a couple of minutes after we cross the Delaware River.
‘What for?’
‘For what was said back there.’
‘Don’t be. It wasn’t your fault.’
‘Sometimes … Hart, she—’
‘It’s OK, DJ. Really.’
‘I had no idea,’ he says after we’ve driven on a while.
‘About what?’
‘Your wife.’
I know this isn’t true. But I know, too, he’s saying it for all the right reasons.
‘It doesn’t go away, does it?’
‘No,’ I reply.
We drive on.
‘DJ?’
He turns, expecting me to say something about Hope or Lena. Instead, I ask him why he thinks Lefortz was interested in a couple of Ukrainians involved in the illicit trade of nuclear materials and components.
He gives it some thought. ‘I don’t think it was about the nuke stuff. I think it was about money. The real focus of the Bureau’s work with Justice and Treasury was some kind of high-profile, cross-border money-laundering scam.’
‘And that’s what the President was interested in?’
‘I think so. Lefortz implied that this probe was extremely close-held.’
It must have been. Even Reuben didn’t know about it.
‘And you and Lefortz spoke about it the night he died?’
‘Yes,’ he says. ‘Right before he met you out at the airport.’
We drive on.
‘He asked you to throw Bureau protection around a couple of our key witnesses that night, right?’
He nods. ‘Sure. Your shrink pal out west and the lawyer who forgot the two of you ever met.’
‘Would you be able to contact them without anybody knowing?’
‘Sure. Why?’
‘Because I need to disappear for a while.’
‘I thought you … You mean …?’ His eyes narrow. ‘Well, I’ll be dipped.’
We don’t exchange another word till we pull off Delaware Route One and turn into the Community Based Inpatient Clinic, a cluster of low buildings on reclaimed mudflats south of Dover Air Force Base.
A flock of wading birds, startled by our arrival, wheel above our heads. Their shrill cries fill the damp, cold air.
DJ walks me to the entrance where a nurse, in white, is waiting.
43
IT IS NO ACCIDENT THAT THE CLINIC IS A STONE’S THROW FROM Dover.
At nights, I lie awake listening to the whine of jet transports ferrying our troops around the world. By day, I sit with soldiers, sailors and aircrew, many of them fresh from battle, most of them sharing similar symptoms to mine.
There are few rules.
We’re not allowed drugs or alcohol.
We can leave when we want.
What’s said in the group stays in the group.
On Day One, I meet the first of my four therapists.
What I tell them is largely the truth. I describe my lability of mood, my darkening thoughts, the sense I am on a slippery slope that leads to a place I’ve already been. I tell them about the pain in my left side that keeps me awake nights. I tell them, too, that it’s probably a blessing, because when I do close my eyes, I get a conflation of images: dead people mostly, the girl in the abaya, Gapes, Lefortz, and the V-22, upside down, moments before it spirals into the ground.
The two incidents I still can’t conjure up are the ones I need to: what happened in the V-22, and my final moments with Hope in the wreckage of the Jeep.
I need a treatment to stop me from sliding down and they know it. But after a week of prolonged exposure and cognitive processing therapies that are proven to work the world over for the kinds of symptoms that I have, they are surprised there’s no improvement.
Halfway through the second week, I’m lying on my bed, in the darkness, eyes closed, when I hear a knock at the door.
It opens and the light flicks on.
I blink under the glare.
Mo Kerchorian is standing in the doorway.
We walk along a muddy path above the bay the morning after. Tankers carve in both directions through the gray, choppy waters between the river and the ocean.
Mo hasn’t spoken to me since I called to apologize for the world of shit I dropped him into the night Lefortz was killed. But DJ has been quietly persuasive. I don’t know what he said, or how he even got to Mo, but for the past week my buddy from Georgetown has been liaising with my therapists, checking on progress, or the lack of it, and guiding their strategy.
When they reported no improvement yesterday, Mo told them he would oversee my treatment directly and jumped on a plane.
‘I told them your mood state and neuralgia are linked to the energy of multiple traumas which has nowhere to go but inward. To move forward, we have to expose those traumas to the light, allow your subconscious to make a meaningful narrative of everything that’s happened, process it, then move on.’
He makes it sound wonderfully simple.
We walk on another hundred meters. I hear the mournful sound of a ship’s foghorn somewhere in the distance.
‘But your cop buddy told me there’s more to it than that,’ he says.
‘There is.’
‘And that it’s not just about the pain.’
I hesitate, but only for a moment. ‘I need you to recover some memories for me.’
‘From the V-22 crash?’
‘Not just that. From the Jeep.’
‘OK,’ he says. ‘Speak to me.’
I hesitate. ‘I’m worried you might …’
‘What? That I might come to the conclusion you’re crazy?’ He laughs. ‘Josh, I knew you were a fuck-up from the moment we met.’
I manage a smile, then tell him about the voice in my head – the voice that had told me to undo my belt, then Hetta’s, and let go.
Not just any voice.
Her voice.
For all their independence, Community-based Inpatient Clinics are still military facilities and neither of us has any way of knowing who might be listening in. So Mo and I decamp to a Holiday Inn ten miles down the road.
We leave our phones in his car and unplug every device in the room. I settle into the armchair and focus on his pre-brief. His theory is that traumatic memories are held in every cell of the body. Mainstream medicine dismisses this as junk science, but assisted by an endorsement from our mentor, TVB, Mo’s therapy has been adopted by the VA network – with the caveat that it remains ‘experimental’. You say yes at your own risk.
Mo has immersed himself in my notes, including X-rays and MRIs going back years. When the V-22 crashed, he believes it triggered an acute reaction to my other unprocessed traumas: the dead baby in the abaya; Gapes’s shooting; Lefortz’s death. And my final moments with Hope in the wreckage of the Jeep.
He makes me count backward from ten and within a few seconds I’m under. I hear his voice, am conscious of sounds in and outside the room, but am suitably relaxed – in a state that desensitizes me to the acute feelings of anxiety that get in the way of answering the big questions.
We start with the night I went into Fallujah. The visceral feelings I tried to bury no longer rear their ugly heads. I must have processed those, at least. So we move on. It’s the same with the deaths of Gapes and Lefortz. Mo grunts his approval. I hear him tap some notes into his iPad.
Now he takes me aboard the Osprey.
>
‘Tell me what happened when the engine failed.’
Under hypnosis, it returns. Schweizer vomits because he knows what we all know: we’re not going to make it. But at that precise moment I’m imbued with an enormous sense of calm. I feel Hope by my side. I hear her talking to me. Her voice is soft, soothing and clear. She tells me exactly what to do.
Undo Hetta’s belt. Now yours. Trust me, Josh. Trust that it’s all going to be all right.
Let go.
The V-22 rolls. We slide across the floor and hit the bulkhead and the fuselage wall.
Through the mayhem of the exploding engine:
Reach beneath you. There’s a handle. Grab Hetta. Pull the handle.
The door falls away and we tumble into space.
We’re thirty meters up, falling toward trees ready to break our fall. I glance right, see the V-22 seconds before it hits the ground, and brace myself for the impact.
Trust, Josh. I’m with you. Let go.
And then it’s like the transmission stops.
The picture goes black. My breathing becomes labored.
‘Relax, Josh,’ Mo says. ‘It’s all right. What do you see?’
‘Nothing. I don’t see anything.’
‘OK. Where are you?’
‘On the ground. At the crash site.’
‘Why can’t you see?’
‘I’m unconscious. But I can still hear and smell. Fire. Burning.’
‘OK. Tell me what—’
‘She’s beside me.’
‘Who?’
‘Hope.’ My voice catches.
Mo guides me. ‘Keep talking. What’s happening?’
‘The V-22’s cooking off all around us. She’s lying right next to me. Talking to me. She’s telling me that I need to go back.’
‘Back?’
‘Yes.’
‘Where to?’
I try to make sense of it.
‘To the night Jack died.’
‘Jack?’
‘Old guy. Lived with her mother. Hope really loved him.’
‘Were you there?’
‘Yes.’
‘What happened?’
‘He said something to her.’
‘What?’
‘I don’t know. I couldn’t hear. Right afterward, though, right after he died, Hope removed something from under his pillow.’