A Dark Perfection

by James, Mark

  Jack laughed again, like he hadn’t in a long time. “You think? You know, Johannes, I think I missed out on not being around to do some operations with you. Actually, I’m sure of it. We would’ve had fun.”

  Below, the ship was closer, heading towards the commercial dock. It hammered through the white caps, its massive weight ignoring the swells.

  “Here she comes, Jack.”

  The ship, barnacled and scarred, pulled up to the side of the dock, scraping against the rusted iron apron. This was not a welcoming port. Such ships, such men, only came here to take their cargo and leave – like men down through history who have always lived off the refuses of war, off the misery of others. Gunrunners.

  “Stay here,” Engel said.

  The Frenchman walked to the lot edge and headed down the crumbling concrete stairs that led to the beach.

  Jack could see him exit from a straggled line of trees and cross the beach towards the dock. The freighter extended a gangplank and a large man crossed over. He began walking towards Engel.

  Jack watched through the binoculars as the two men met midway on the dock. Engel said something that the man obviously didn’t like, shaking his head and rubbing at his beard. Like a bad actor, the man threw his cigarette on the dock. When he went to rub it out, Engel leaned over, whispering. The man froze, forgetting the butt, and without another word reached out and took the roll of money that was now in Engel’s outstretched hand. As he took it, Engel continued to hold to the money and said something else. The man looked at Engel, gauging him, and then pocketed the money and began walking back towards the ship.

  Engel began ascending the stairs and Lani joined Jack at the top. Seeing him halfway, Jack headed down, helping Johannes up the last few steps.

  They all stood in the lot, considering what was next.

  Engel looked at his new friends, as if looking at familiar ghosts. His old ways had come back to him and he knew what was ahead for them; could see it in the images, in its darkness. It was the same place from where he’d escaped from so many years before.

  He turned to Jack, “Say nothing to the captain or the crew. They’ll take you to a hiding place in the hold.”

  He took a deep breath, looking back out to an empty sea, “Remember, no words. They have no interest in that.”

  †

  Jennifer O’Connor had always dreamt of becoming a White House Intern.

  She looked down again at the lurid photos: the first of a hotel room with cocaine smeared on a glass table. In the far bedroom, her nude body sideways across a disheveled bed, her face blurred. She turned to the next photo, the one she always tried not to look at: the face of the unknown man, her face, the images clear. He is behind her, then inside of her. And then to the next photo, even closer: showing it entering her, the disgusting image reflected again and again on the mirrored wall across the room.

  She remembered none of it.

  She woke up in the hotel room on that bright Saturday morning alone and confused. Her only memory was that the night before she’d met up with some of her intern friends for dinner, intending to be home by eight for Bob’s phone call. Later, her friends told her she’d left early to catch a cab, they were sure. The next day, when Bob called – so worried about her not answering the night before – she told him that her cell phone had been acting up.

  It was the first time she’d ever lied to him.

  She hated these people, hated what they were making her do.

  “There are copies, of course,” the voice had said. “We have a video also, quite revealing, more than the photos. We only require small things. No one need know. Specifically, we require information on Osborne’s movements. When we ask, you tell us, that is all.”

  But that wasn’t all.

  She’d given them some information and always in fragments, some true, some not, and wondered if they knew when she was lying. Now they were pushing at her once more, at her throat, seemingly inside of her again.

  What would she ever tell her husband?

  She needed to do something, to protect what was hers. She needed to become, for this moment, a woman she’d never been before.

  †

  “This way,” the grizzled man said in a thick, Balkan accent.

  The ship’s hold had been dark and Jack and Lani squinted as they hit the gray, Croatian light. It’d been twenty-four hours in the freighter’s hold and they thanked God that Johannes had possessed the foresight to bring along some food: oranges, the sweetest they’d ever tasted, some bread, Edam cheese, water.

  “Look at that,” Lani said, touching his cheek. She smiled, “I think we need new skin again.”

  Jack felt the skin appliqué peeling on his cheek and looked out to sea, from where they’d come, and then to this newest coast, even bleaker. “It doesn’t matter anymore,” he said, pulling her close. She felt his warmth against the cold air, against the coming war.

  “Here,” he said and peeled the remaining fake skin from her forehead. “Better.”

  The man beside them grunted and they began to move off the ship and onto the ramp to the docks. In both directions, the coast was desolate and rocky, not another person in sight, only grey seas stretching into a greyer land.

  On the dock below, they could see the same captain talking to another man, handing him something. The captain looked up, “Down here,” he called to them, irritation in his voice.

  As she watched his scowl, Lani thought it was from a man who was always irritated by something.

  They exited the ramp and Lani held her coat up against the wind kicking up across the sand.

  “Everything you paid for is there,” the captain said, pointing to a car sitting alone at the back of the lot towards a gate.

  They began to say something and he only stared at them – like the pirate that he was, like he was looking at dead men.

  He smiled darkly and, without another word, turned and walked away.

  38

  The car was dingy and worn, its make and model indecipherable. Walking up to it, Jack turned and smiled, “Perfect.”

  “At least there’s no fog, easier to drive,” she said.

  Loading their backpacks, laptop and food into the back seat, they turned back towards the freighter one last time. On the dock below were groups of refugees being escorted down the ramp, the captain on the bridge looking down.

  As if he felt their eyes, the captain looked up to them on the bluff.

  “I think those men are tied together,” Lani said.

  Jack met the captain’s gaze, holding it. “There’s nothing we can do.”

  At his core, Jack was a ‘protector.’ It’s what had drawn him to prosecuting – the protecting of the weak, the lost ones, from the predators amongst us.

  He held the captain’s gaze a moment longer. “I’m sorry, Lani, we have to go.”

  Lani suddenly saw the choices of war, the ones that could never be truly felt from an online image: of the endless faces and their downturned eyes, the hungry looks of the carpetbaggers, vultures and vampires.

  She stood, unable to move as Jack came around the car, “We’ll be alright,” he said, holding her. “I could say, close your eyes, but you know that we can’t. Not yet.”

  The first five miles Lani couldn’t get the images out of her mind. One of the refugees, almost a boy, had looked up to the bluff, seen her, as if looking straight into her.

  “I’ll never forget that, Jack.”

  “I know,” he said. It was all he could say.

  He tried to get her mind from it, “What did Johannes say on the distance? Fifteen miles, right? Not too far. And what about the GPS? It’s amazing it still works out here.”

  “Well, the satellites are still in the sky and the roads haven’t changed. Right here, Jack, it says take a right.”

  They passed through another abandoned town, nearly turned to rubble, a dog with ribs showing and smelling at rocks. “Christ,” Jack said, “it’s like Dresden, or Beirut.”

>   “Gone With the Wind,” she whispered. “Do you remember that? The ground wiped clean…”

  At the end the American Civil War, General Sherman had marched the Northern army through the heart of the Confederacy, cutting a mile wide swath from Atlanta to the sea. Like the ancient Romans – burning Carthage to the ground and salting it over – the North had struck a dagger at the spleen of its enemy, holding them down, making them look at their own blood, their own defeat.

  “No winners here,” Jack said as they passed another burned out building. “Never are. Another waste.”

  “Maybe we can thank God for one thing,” she said.

  “What’s that?”

  “No orbs and no GMA.”

  Jack looked off into the distance, smoke rising from the horizon in multiple places. “Well, you’re probably right there, although I wouldn’t put much past that GMA crowd. They’re free actors – gone rogue. I sure like the no-orbs part though.”

  “Hey, remind me of something when we get home,” he said, smiling over at her.

  “What’s that?”

  “Remind me to hand out more money to more people, starting with those folks that protect us from crap like this. And more cash to the ASPCA. And more for that crazy lady in Borneo still trying to save those orangutans. Hell, more for everybody!”

  “Can’t take it with ya,” she laughed, leaning over and resting her head on his shoulder.

  Then, her voice lower, “Besides, I wouldn’t think of going down with the Titanic with anyone else…”

  He looked down at her. It was the first words she had allowed herself, about them, since their night at the French farmhouse. It seemed a long time ago. “Me too,” he said and gently kissed her cheek.

  †

  “We have three targets moving through checkpoint Zebra,” the man said in Arabic into his headset. He signaled in sign language to another man on the opposite rooftop. They were afraid that the satellites – now able to discern a postage stamp from orbit – would one day be able to read their hands.

  Below, Jack and Lani were entering the town of Gradeci. “I think we’re here,” Lani said, looking down at Johannes’s printout of the cell’s location – latitude and longitude exactly meeting at a church at the far end of the town.

  “There’s not a soul here,” she said, pointing to the dark shops with broken windows, the ransacked interiors. The main street, once open and vibrant, felt like a gauntlet.

  “What do Aisha’s instructions say from here?” Jack asked.

  “Look for a sign that reads, Anoteka Dragovic. They still speak Serbo-Croatian here. It means, Drago’s Pharmacy.”

  “There,” she pointed. The sign was almost off its hinges, scattered with shell shot. “The instructions then say, pull over and walk to the end of the main street, to the church, St. Nikola Apostol. Then it says we’re to “hold hands high and close eyes.” Not sure I like that last part. I sure hope Mac got this right. You think you can trust this Aisha? She’s just a girl, you know.”

  “I’m pretty sure. Though, she only knows what she knows. These are the last coordinates she had for the cell. If the church is empty, we turn back.”

  “To where?”

  She wasn’t questioning him; she just wanted to hear his confidence, to hold to it.

  “We’ll, as the saying goes, we’ll cross that River Styx when we get to it. We have to keep going forward.”

  “Alright,” he said, “here we go.”

  The closing of the car doors echoed off the buildings in waves, off the broken glass and careening towards the church’s grey form in the distance.

  They began to walk slowly down the street, Lani looking left, Jack to the right, then above. The cobblestones turned to asphalt and then back to stones, worn from centuries.

  “What’s that?” Lani said, turning to see a puff of smoke rising from the road to her left. She had also heard a sound over her shoulder.

  Jack reached for her, grabbing her by the shoulder and launching them both through a window as another puff struck at his feet. As they dove through the window, shards of glass came with them.

  “Are you alright?” he whispered, “any cuts?”

  “Jack, what…”

  The wood floor exploded in three places, splinters thrown into the air and moving quickly towards them. “Over there!” Jack yelled.

  They scrambled towards the back of the store and away from the front windows.

  “Snipers!” she said, breathing hard from the adrenaline.

  “One, maybe two,” Jack whispered. “On the rooftops to the west. It’s a trap.”

  As he said the words, it’s a trap, he saw Aisha’s face, wondering how he could have mistaken those eyes so much.

  “What’s that?” Lani said, feeling the vibration through the floor.

  The tremors came before the sound, like thunder from over a horizon. In a sudden wave, the concussions moved from the distance and over them, the artillery blasts pounding the Earth and the town like an anvil, the remnants of the store’s windows blowing in with the force. Jack leaped on top of Lani as the last blasts moved over, receding into the distance as fast as they had come.

  A dead silence returned. They both crouched.

  “Christ, Jack, what’ll we do now?”

  Jack looked out the back window to a wide alley, or perhaps another street, it was difficult to tell as smoke from the shelling began to swallow the town. “Smoke, that’s good,” he said. “Good for cover.”

  They waited as the smoke seemed to descend, tendrils moving like morays into every door and window.

  “Alright, quick, we need to get to the church. Move tight along the buildings, use the smoke as our cover. Then once we’re away from here, we’ll head back into another building and then onto the main street, right in front of the church. We need to get close enough to say Aisha’s words. Hopefully, these guys are only trigger-happy.”

  They moved through the back door and along the storefronts, hugging to them and then through another building, exiting onto the main street. The smoke was thick and they didn’t see the forms lined up in front of the church until they were almost upon them. In their hands and over their shoulders were other grey forms. Jack knew the outlines – AK-57s.

  Instinctually, they pivoted and were startled to find hands pointing at their faces. Gasmasks? Guns? From the hands, a mist enveloped them, surreal against the layers of smoke, its scent like lilacs. They tried to move.

  Nerve agent, Jack thought, right before his thoughts splintered.

  The world collapsed in as her hand fell away, a perfect darkness all around.

  †

  The killer was aware that he was evolving, moving towards something ancient, something new. What it was, he could not say, nor was it necessarily important. The only important thing was this feeling.

  The world was becoming fluid, transparent, disclosing its deeper self, the days and nights flowing into patterns only he could see.

  It was this prescient power that would deliver him to his goal: an imposition of his self onto the world, onto history, upon evolution, indelible, everlasting.

  It was this last feeling that overwhelmed him. The desire to brand himself upon the collective mind of mankind, like a searing brand upon hide, like screams from the bowels of all those who had ever screamed, screamed as they had died, who had cursed this world, who had cursed being born.

  God was the vivisectionist to the world.

  The sin of God was sin.

  †

  Jack felt something steadying at his shoulders. He was on his knees, eyes covered. He couldn’t feel anything in his mouth. His mind still swirled with the drugs.

  “Lani?” he whispered.

  Relief washed over her, “I’m here. Right beside you, blindfolded, on my…”

  “Shut your heathen mouths!” a voice rang out from in front of them, echoing into the space. “Shut your filthy, heathen mouths!”

  Jack could hear shuffling movements to his
left. Testing the restraints, he found that his hands were tightly bound. There was whispering to his right – multiple sources, eight to ten, maybe more.

  Their blindfolds were suddenly ripped off. They tried to focus, the space large and dark, the drugs still swimming in them. To their left and above, a statue of St. Francis guarded an entry to a crypt, the stone hewn and ancient, as if forgotten. To their right were rows of benches – no, they were pews – the last two spilled over, the bolts ripped from the dank floor. Smoke from the artillery barrage floated above the floor in layers.

  “The church,” Jack whispered.

  “Look front only!” the voice yelled again, its Arabic accent thick.

  Yes, an American education, Jack noted, but the words remained stilted, didactic.

  He focused. Against the back wall was a crowd of forms, barely moving, watching and hidden within the hovering smoke. Three stepped out, a muted light from the cathedral windows hitting them in washes against their beige robes. No, Jack thought, not robes – djellabas, the hooded cloth of the desert. Even within the grey Croatian rain, they held to their desert ways, unable to change.

  From the three, one of the men stepped forward. He stood like a leader; tall, tensed with energy.

  Suddenly, a large shadow seemed to fall from the ceiling out of nowhere, landing in front of them with a heavy thud, causing Jack and Lani to reflexively jerk away. They turned back to the large mound in front of them. The air had been dead calm and the falling form had caused the smoke to swirl.

  Jack looked closer. He could see blood trails slowly tracing down the back of a shirt.

  “Who is he?” the young leader asked, leaning towards Jack.

  Jack looked at the body again as two men rolled it over.