The Occurrence

by Robert Desiderio

  “You’ll have your answers in time,” he said.

  23

  Julian made his way through the labyrinth of Walter Reed Medical Center, Bethesda, Maryland. He knew Brian Halloway was there.

  Four days without sleep and full-out mania had gotten Halloway sent home handcuffed to a stretcher.

  Halloway’s breaking point came after he’d watched a sergeant step on a pressure-plate bomb, on a roadside in Fallujah. Julian had ordered his men to collect the body parts in a body bag. But when the bag ripped open on the back of their Ford F-350, and blood and organs slid out like groceries through the bottom of a wet paper bag, the human soup hit Halloway in the face. His knees buckled and he vomited so bad Julian pulled him off duty and sent him to a combat-stress trailer.

  After days of no sleep and erratic behavior—Halloway mumbling he could feel the spirits of the dead—he was ordered home.

  There was something about the look in Halloway’s eyes that had haunted Julian. And when he saw the same look in his own eyes as he stared into the bathroom mirror of Dominique’s apartment in Mosul, he wondered if he too was going mad.

  Julian stood in the hallway of Mologne House on the grounds of Walter Reed. The servicemen and women here were the crushed and shaken. They convalesced in three-star rooms among chandeliers, and wingback chairs in this curious outpost of the war on terror. They were the lucky ones.

  The thick curtains of Halloway’s room were drawn and gave it a mid-afternoon melancholia.

  Halloway sat in a chair facing the darkness.

  The doctor’s defeated smile let Julian know there was little help for the man he was here to see.

  Julian entered the room, alone. He stood next to Halloway.

  Halloway turned and looked up.

  Tears flooded his eyes, and a huge smile lit his savaged face, when he saw Julian. It was recognition, not madness, because the first words Halloway said were, “I know why you’re here.”

  Halloway knelt down by his bedside and pulled out his duffel. He unzipped it, dipped his hand into the bag and pulled out a ragged notebook. Sand dripped from it. He stared at the grains on his pant leg and studied them as if he were reading a map.

  Julian watched.

  Halloway took loose pieces of paper out of the notebook. He came back to Julian and handed him the papers.

  What Julian saw scribbled out in a childlike manner in crayon were drawings of tornados of sunlight swirling in slashes of gray dots and black smoke, just like what Julian had seen in the warehouse after the explosion.

  Halloway stared at Julian.

  “You saw it, too?” Julian asked.

  “Yes,” Halloway answered in a soft exhale of disquiet and release. It was as if he’d been holding his breath since the roadside bomb. His face and muscles relaxed as he told Julian of the swirling light and the smell of roses that happened to him that day in Fallujah.

  He’d feared telling anyone anything after he’d claimed to feel the spirits of the dead, so had chosen the path of silence—the agreed-on path in the collateral damage of war. Whatever trauma Halloway had demonstrated, which led him here, disappeared in the clarity of his eyes, and the force of his voice as he related to Julian, who understood why Halloway had chosen this path. Julian had done the same in the aftermath of the occurrence in the desert—he, too, had chosen evasion.

  Halloway grabbed Julian’s hand. “We’re not crazy, man. We’re not crazy.”

  That he wanted to believe a man in a locked-down ward, more than he’d allowed himself to believe Dominique, was crazy. But Halloway was one of his men, one of his tribe of warriors. That bond was deep.

  And as the two men held each other’s gaze, Julian saw the clarity in Halloway’s eyes replaced by the collateral haze of war that seemed to never leave a soldier’s psyche. And Julian knew—some were capable of handling the mysteries of life better than others. This brave young soldier was safer inside these walls, at least for now.

  24

  Friday, September 18

  The Welcome Home party Julian’s father threw at a posh George­town restaurant was filled with friends and political movers and shakers. But unease plagued Senator Ledge’s mind as he watched Julian’s fourth martini slosh through his son’s fingers. The senator was all too used to this scene, since he’d spent a lifetime watching his wife steady her drinks.

  Despite his unease, the senator saw good things on the political front for his son, and knew now was the time to strike. But he was rattled because of what happened to Julian in the warehouse. He knew it went deeper than Julian had let on, and was playing havoc with Julian’s mind.

  Ledge had private information that a fellow senator was about to be brought up on charges for illegal actions, and wanted to use the opportunity to open a space for Julian to make a run for that seat. The fact he was a war hero, and his father House Whip made it a sure thing his name would be top of the list.

  Ledge and Brent Samuels, a high-powered political consultant, watched Julian charm the wife of one of Ledge’s largest contributors.

  Martha Ledge wobbled to her husband when she saw him with Samuels. She had a drink in her hand. She always did.

  “I don’t know, Paul. It may be too soon. You don’t want to push him into this,” Samuels said.

  “Don’t hold tonight against him. He’s celebrating.”

  “You sure that’s all it is?”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” Martha slurred. “Our son is not one of the weak ones.”

  “All right,” Samuels said. “We’ll see. Silver Star. Ivy League. It could come in handy with Senator Mills set to implode. Have Julian see me in a few days. We’ll talk.”

  And with that Samuels left.

  “Have you even spoken to Julian about this, or have you just decided to use him to your advantage?” Martha’s voice was loud, and her face liquor-red.

  “Would you even give a shit?” Ledge hissed.

  Martha turned away and grabbed another drink the waiter offered her.

  Across the room, Julian grabbed another drink, too, raising the glass to his father and giving him the finger.

  The senator helped Julian to the waiting limo. He opened the rear door and was about to guide his son inside when fog filtered down from the lamppost light and pulled Julian’s attention.

  Julian stared at the swirling mist.

  “What are you looking at, son?”

  Julian was transfixed.

  “Julian, what is it?”

  “It’s just fucking fog.”

  Julian shoved his father away and crawled into the back seat of the limo.

  25

  Sunday, September 20

  Chilled deep under his skin and drenched in sweat, Julian woke in the room he’d grown up in. The nightmares wouldn’t stop no matter how much he tried to numb them.

  The young girl he’d killed. The blood of innocent children splattered on walls of insurgents’ homes. The spilled guts of his own men who thought too long before they fired.

  Julian forced himself out of bed and fortified himself with pills he’d brought back. Pills a buddy had told him to keep for the battles that would rear their heads stateside. The blues, whites, yellows, and reds that quelled the panic. Panic he couldn’t strong-arm like he’d been able to before the warehouse.

  The ice-cold shower shocked him awake. And the pills calmed his mind. He felt weak needing these, but need them he did.

  Julian walked through the home of his youth. The deep mahogany of the walls and staircase. Rooms filled with beautiful antiques and fabrics his mother had chosen in her few moments of happiness. They all held memories of anger and resentment now. The agonizing battles his parents had over his father’s absences and his mother’s drinking. Battles that carved psychic scars, and drove him into isolation as a child. Until he pleaded to be sent away to school. Away from the grief of living here.

  His time at the sprawling campus of Carson Long Military Academy in Pennsylvania prepared him for
even more assaults. The kind he’d find in other battles. And he joined the front lines in the war on terror when his father and others had voted to send young men to die. Julian despised their privilege and forsook his own.

  Julian entered the den, surprised to see his father there and said, “Thought you’d be at church.”

  “It’s been years,” Ledge replied.

  Julian went to the bar in a corner of the den and poured himself a scotch.

  “Brent Samuels wants to talk with you.”

  “Not interested.”

  “You don’t even know why.”

  “I’d have to come from another planet to not know you want me to go into politics. And somehow you convinced him, and who knows who else, the government needs a soldier. I guess my almost getting killed improved my stock, huh?”

  Ledge changed his tactic.

  “Have you thought about what you want to do, then?”

  Julian pressed two fingers into his temples.

  “I worry about you.”

  “I’m fine.”

  “If you need to talk to someone—”

  “I said I’m fine.”

  Julian turned to leave the room.

  “We didn’t try to kill you. That’s not what we tried to do.”

  “I know about the ‘errant bomb.’ Shit happens.”

  Julian had been steeped in the impossible knot of war. The wondrous acts of courage. The acts of evil. The strange miracles of bombs that didn’t go off. The horror of the ones that did. Bullets that missed. Those that didn’t. And he wondered if he could ever return to a life beyond that cauldron. He’d mastered the art of defense with an exquisite lethal skill that kept him alive. But a gnawing in his gut had scattered the deck of his life into corners he didn’t want to go. He saw a similar helplessness in his father’s eyes and sensed they had more in common, but shrugged off the thought.

  He walked to the sideboard to pour himself another drink, popping a pill out of his pocket without even checking to see the color.

  “How was your visit to Walter Reed?” Ledge asked, surprising Julian, who turned on him and said, “You spying on me?”

  “I’m concerned.”

  “Is there anything you don’t stick your fucking fingers in?”

  Ledge moved closer to his son.

  “I wasn’t there when you were young.”

  Julian raised a hand, a sign to keep his father at a distance.

  “I don’t need you to make up for it.”

  But he did. He needed his father and mother, neither of whom had been there for him, to atone for the years of absence in his younger life. But his mother was at the bottom of another bottle in her bedroom upstairs; desperate for the innocence she’d lost. And his father struggled for forgiveness.

  “We have no idea what happened to turn that drone around.”

  “Yeah. Life’s full of mysteries,” Julian said, as he left the room.

  But Ledge lied. He knew why the drone had turned around.

  26

  Ledge walked into his wife’s bedroom. They’d slept in separate rooms for years, and long ago stopped pretending there was any relationship here to salvage.

  “Did you tell him?” she asked, standing at the window, a drink in her hand. She answered her own question. “Of course you didn’t.”

  “You’re drunk.”

  “Of course I am.”

  “What would you have me say to our son?”

  She turned to him. Her eyes bloodshot. Her voice on fire.

  “Not the truth. That disappeared long ago, when all hell was about to break loose and all you could think of was saving your career. Why change that now? You’ve perfected lying. But it happened to our son. I knew it would.”

  “Sins of the father, is that what you’re saying?”

  “The thing that was a sin was your refusal to believe what happened to you was real. You abandoned a friend you loved to save yourself.”

  “Jack Dean had his own issues. I wasn’t the one to blow his career.”

  “You knew the truth then, and you know it now. You know what happened when that drone had a mind of its own. And what did you say to Julian? ‘You didn’t try to kill him? You had no idea what happened’?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I’m a coward.”

  “Yes, you are. It’s the first honest thing you’ve said in years.”

  “Are you going to tell him?”

  “That his father also had an experience he didn’t know what to do with? Why would I do that? You’d deny it. You could’ve helped him. But you destroyed that years ago. He doesn’t need you now. You made certain of that. So, don’t try to make amends. It’s too late.”

  That truth cut deeper into him.

  “For the love of God, what have I done?”

  Martha peered at him—caught off balance at his sudden vulnerability.

  If there was ever a moment that could spark the affection they once had, it was now.

  He stepped toward her.

  She turned away.

  27

  Catherine Book commanded attention as she walked through the glistening marble halls, past columns that stood like an army of sentinels in the CIA offices in Langley, Virginia.

  Her curves distracted men from the keenness of her mind. A hurdle she’d had to leap all her adult life.

  Eric Vickers—whose interest in her ability had heightened in the wake of her finding the Mosul warehouse—accompanied her. She knew he doubted how far her ability could go. She also knew her paranormal talent added to the complexity of how people acted toward her. Jealousy. Snickers. Leers. Vickers was no exception.

  Her remote viewing mastery to psychically see things far away had the added intricacy of pulling her close to the event. An occupational hazard she’d worked to keep at a distance as best she could. But she couldn’t shake the bond fusing her with the four survivors.

  She was called “Sister Spirit” when she was young. Traveled with her family throughout the country, revival tents and all. Some reviled them and called them snake charmers, others came away healed. It was a Gordian Knot childhood, put on display to present her uncanny ability to tell the believers not only what they wanted to hear, but to see their future. But it wasn’t until she was in her late twenties, working for the U.S. government as a diplomat in Israel, that she discovered she had the rare ability to remote view images at significant distance.

  She’d kept this new ability silent—until the government was about to go to war after the 9/11 attacks, and she knew there were no weapons where the administration insisted there were. But she couldn’t get anyone to listen to what she saw because those in power had an agenda for war. Her advice had become unwelcome within the halls of power until she was able to locate the warehouse in Mosul. It was a reality the new administration couldn’t dismiss.

  Vickers handed her a dossier as they made their way into the subterranean area of the CIA. She opened it and the first thing she saw was a photo of Abd al Hashim in a beard and dressed in the white robes and cap of an Islamic cleric.

  “Intel says he left Iraq under mysterious circumstances,” Vickers said.

  “Mysterious?”

  “He’s disappeared from our radar. According to some intercepted transmissions it seems his own people have no idea where he is either. Those transmissions could be real or a ploy. We need you to find him.”

  “I’m not making a believer out of you now, am I, Eric?”

  “Don’t be cocky because you drew a few pictures.”

  “Not defensive, are we?”

  They reached the top security area. Vickers used his key card and punched in the code. Doors whooshed open. Again, they were on the move.

  “What about the local cells?” she asked.

  “They seem to be as confused by his disappearance as anyone, but something’s up.”

  “And he’s still alive?”

  “You can’t ‘see’ that with that thing y
ou do?”

  “Fuck you, too, Eric.”

  “Ledge and Valen said they saw Hashim and the young boy alive after the blast.”

  “Any reason to doubt that?”

  “There’s reason to doubt everything,” he said, moving down the hall to a metal door.

  He input a code and the door clicked open, revealing a state-of-the-art video and audio recording room.

  For all their skepticism in paranormal science, the government held to the possibility the truth was out there. Whenever they were against a wall they gathered whatever psychic information could be leeched from willing and patriotic minds, and they had a room set up to prove it.

  She shook her head.

  “What’s the problem?” he asked.

  “You guys don’t listen, do you?”

  “What now?”

  “I’m willing to go through the ceremony you think you need to prove to everyone here how important you are. But I know Kurt told you all I need is a fucking pen and some paper.”

  “That’s in there too.”

  “You guys with small hands,” she mumbled as she went into the room.

  A world-weary tech attached a series of wires to Catherine’s temples and wrists. She knew whatever she saw wouldn’t be transmitted to a computer, however advanced they believed their technology had gotten. She had refined a way to blur her thoughts when needed.

  Catherine’s mind began to see images. They materialized as they always had, ever since she was child. Her unbending focus on a name, a face, and a location, meant images emerged that informed and directed her as to what had escaped the quotidian mind.

  Right now what emerged was a room and a man. Was it Hashim? She couldn’t tell. This man had no beard and wore a suit. But his eyes. Yes. She knew those eyes, and had the searing recognition it was without doubt Hashim.

  She surveyed the room he was in and landed on the name and address of the hotel on the pad of paper on the nightstand next to the bed.