Burned Bridges

by A. J. Stewart

  The window was just below the midpoint of his chest, not an easy height to get through for a man who had put on a few pounds in the years since basic training. With his left side more hindrance than help, he decided to go through headfirst. He bent over the sill of the window—a thick, ragged clay ledge—and then squirmed like a pregnant lizard outward. Side to side, using his right hand to push himself out. Once he reached the tipping point, he reconsidered the plan, but it was too late, and he spun and dropped through the hole and onto the hard-packed earth under the makeshift canopy. He landed hard on his left side. More pain, so intense he felt consciousness come and go. He grimaced and swore under his breath and then repeated the process of levering himself into a sitting position. Even under the iron canopy, it was hot, and he felt the world tip side to side, fore and aft. Then the bright day ebbed away and his head fell back onto the clay wall with a crack.

  The staff sergeant’s eyes snapped open. He wasn’t sure if he had been out for a second or for hours. The shadows looked vaguely similar, as if not much time had passed. He felt the pain stab at his left arm. Above him, a plume of black smoke billowed from the window. The staff sergeant wanted for nothing more than sleep, but the dinosaur part of his brain told him to sleep later. He edged up the wall, the clay scratching at him through his thick combat uniform, until he found himself leaning into the window space. There were no solid forms to see, just colors. Orange and red and black. The smoke choked at him and he closed his eyes and leaned his body through the window to lever himself up.

  The diesel did its job well. It burned as it should. Less flammable as a liquid, it needed to be converted to a vapor to burn efficiently in an engine. In the clay building, it served to do no more than heat the room like a pizza oven. And it heated the contents of the space like a pizza. The oven gradually turned the liquid gasoline in the drum to vapor until it hit 232 degrees Celsius.

  At which point the vapor ignited.

  The blast erupted out of the three openings in the building. The staff sergeant was pushing himself away from his window when flame and heat exploded around him, propelling him like a missile across the space and into the side of the truck.

  If death meant the absence of pain, then at that moment the staff sergeant was truly alive. It defied categorization. Not stabbing or shooting or numbing. It was as if the entire world were agony, a new state of being. The last coherent thought the staff sergeant had was that his face was on fire, and that self-preservation demanded he put it out. He plunged his face into the sandy ground, but before he could decipher the effect of that action, a new world of darkness opened up and swallowed him whole.

  Chapter Two

  San Rafael, California, Six Years Later

  John Flynn slipped his snow jacket into his pack and zipped it closed. It was Tahoe wear, too heavy for the Bay Area in the fall, but a required item for a trip back East. Beth paced into the room wearing a blouse and tights that seemed utterly inadequate for DC. She wiggled into a skirt and threw a business jacket on top, and glanced at his backpack with a smile but said nothing. He knew the look. We’re flying first class and you’re carrying a backpack. He’d never gotten comfortable with luggage he couldn’t carry on his back. He felt like his body had grown around the shape of a pack. His trapezius muscles were overdeveloped and his core was strong to bear the weight across his hips. He could feel as light as air walking with a properly fitted pack. Dragging a suitcase on wheels never felt that way.

  Flynn hefted his pack onto his back, picked up Beth’s suitcase, and headed into the living room. Beth already owned the townhouse when they had met, and he liked it fine. It was a new build, so under California law, it could not have a wood-burning fireplace, and Beth had not opted to install a gas fire, which had suited Flynn well. He took a look around the orderly room. It was all Beth. Flynn had no eye for design and was happy to defer to her on all such matters. It wasn’t a large space, but it was more than enough. And it was home.

  Beth swept in and pressed her hands against Flynn’s chest. She looked at his crisp blue shirt and tan trousers and smiled up at him. He felt like a tech worker from Silicon Valley, wearing the company uniform. Not that he was against wearing a uniform—he had done so for a long time—but he wasn’t sure what this particular uniform represented.

  It was a short walk from their home near Mission San Rafael to the bus station, a massive open-air terminal shuttling people around Marin County and further afield. They waited in the cool morning air for the Marin Airporter. Beth put her arm around his waist and pressed herself into him. The air was clear and the sky azure, with barely a breath of wind. Weather conditions across the Rockies and the Midwest were good. Flynn expected a comfortable flight.

  The airporter coach deposited them at SFO an hour and a half later, where they checked in, the woman at the first-class counter giving nothing more than a slight grin at Flynn’s backpack. Beth sipped a coffee in the first-class lounge and read the morning Chronicle. Flynn couldn’t get used to the coffee of his homeland, so he took tea and found a copy of Psychology Today on a shelf.

  The flight wasn’t much different from the lounge. The aircraft was new, the service attentive, and the coffee undrinkable. Flynn watched what he thought of as the preflight briefing—exits, oxygen, life preservers—but he appeared to be the only one who cared. As the aircraft leveled out, the seat in front leaned back, but there was plenty of legroom. Flynn was not an unusually tall man—his driver’s license said he was six foot, but he thought of himself as 183 centimeters—but their first-class seats provided plenty of space. Beth’s feet couldn’t reach the seat in front. She preferred to cross them under herself anyway, watching some news program on her tablet, one hand on the device, the other resting on top of Flynn’s hand on the armrest.

  Flynn had spent his fair share of time in the air. More than a family man who took annual vacations to Mexico or Florida, less than one of those software salesmen with the platinum frequent flyers and a king’s ransom in hotel points. Very little of Flynn’s airtime had been this comfortable. But regardless of how often he did it, or at which end of the aircraft he sat, he always felt the same disorientation when landing after a long-distance flight. The human body could handle sitting for five hours watching videos at 35,000 feet, but the human mind found the whole exercise disconcerting. They had left their home at 0600, boarded the flight at 0900 and landed five hours later at 1700, or 5:00 p.m. local time. All the passengers’ habit-driven minds were ready for lunch and the push on through midafternoon, not a cab ride from Dulles just in time for dinner.

  Washington, DC., itself was in a state of flux. It was difficult to ascertain whether the day was ramping down or ramping up. People were moving in great numbers—on the sidewalks, on the roads and beneath on the subway system—from one place to another. Office to bar, bar to restaurant, restaurant to home. Some were headed straight to suburbs clinging around the Beltway. The city was alive, the streetlights and flood lamps highlighting the vast buildings and giving the city dimension.

  It wasn’t a city that had grown to become grand. It had been designed that way from the ground up. The layout of the streets, the size and scope of what were for the most part nothing more than administrative buildings. Designed to inspire its people and intimidate everyone else, leaving them in no doubt that this was a young nation to be taken seriously. It still worked over a hundred years later. Flynn sat in the back of the cab, taking it all in with a sense that the city was watching him as much as he was watching it.

  The Watergate was a plush hotel previously favored by a clientele a good thirty years older than Flynn. It had closed for many years and undergone refurbishment to pitch itself to a younger crowd. There was lots of low furniture and wood trim, and to Flynn, it all seemed to be trying too hard. But there was a bed and a light and a shower, and he didn’t care for more. After checking in, he and Beth found their room and changed into running gear. Flynn pulled on a hoodie with Giants written across the front an
d then flipped the hood up over his head.

  They ran down Virginia Avenue, past the evening traffic fleeing through Foggy Bottom, until they reached the Mall. Then they took to the path around the Washington Monument and onward toward the Capitol Building. The evening air was brisk and Flynn noted many other joggers were wearing gloves. Beth had pulled her Lycra sleeves down over her hands. Flynn liked the prickle of the cold on his skin. They ran past what might have been the greatest collection of museums in the world. When they reached the end of the National Gallery of Art, they crossed the Mall over to the National Museum of the American Indian and ran back along the other side, past the Smithsonian Castle, lit like a sentry over the whole strip, and on to the Lincoln Memorial.

  There they stopped, gathering their breath in visible puffs. Flynn arched his back and stood at the foot of the memorial, looking up at Lincoln in repose. He had learned all there was to learn about the man, from American textbooks read in classrooms in faraway lands. The textbooks conveyed Lincoln as a man of conviction and certainty, absolute in his knowledge of right and wrong. History had judged him favorably, but Flynn knew, from reading beyond the prescribed texts, that Lincoln’s views on such issues as slavery and emancipation and equal rights had developed and changed as he had progressed from a senator to become president. Things were not black and white, not in Lincoln’s day and not in Flynn’s.

  They walked back to the hotel along the Potomac River, past the Kennedy Center and around the Watergate office complex that had forever given up its name to political scandal, and on which the hotel had traded ever since Nixon. Beth showered first and got dressed in a knee-length black dress and a silver necklace. Flynn sat on the bed and watched her.

  “How does this look?” she asked him.

  “You’re fantastic,” he said.

  She frowned. “You always say that.”

  “It’s always true.”

  “It can’t always be true,” she said, dabbing perfume on her wrists.

  Flynn disagreed. It could always be true. He could never get his head around her lack of confidence about it. She was sophisticated in ways Flynn could never imagine in himself, but there was always an undercurrent of doubt, like everything she had achieved was the result of luck rather than hard work.

  “I should only be about an hour,” she said.

  “Fine.”

  “We’ll be in the rooftop bar. Why don’t you come up and meet me? It’ll give you a chance to meet the client. They want us to do some forensic digging on some financial instruments, and it sounded like there could be some work in it for you, too.”

  “What sort of instruments?”

  “Don’t know. They didn’t say much. These people are always so hush-hush until a contract is signed, but it’s usually bonds, or even just currency, something with a serial number.”

  “If it has a serial number, it can be found.”

  Beth wrapped her arms around Flynn’s neck. “Even the bogeyman can’t hide forever.”

  She smiled and kissed him. She smelled fresh, like the rose garden she and Flynn had visited in Golden Gate Park during the summer. It had reminded him of Belgium, although he had kept the thought to himself. Beth grabbed her purse and tossed in her phone, winked at him and then walked out. He watched her go and then watched the door slowly close with a definitive thunk.

  Flynn took his time showering and then turned on the television, which seemed preoccupied with the minutiae of Washington politics. He flicked around the channels and eventually gave up. He opened his backpack, fished around, and pulled out a plastic grocery bag, from which he took a small blue box. It was made from sturdy cardboard, and the lid fit tight, but he removed it with a good pull. Then he took the dark navy suede box from within and flipped it open. The ring was tasteful but elegant, so the associate had told him. The diamonds sparkled even in the dim hotel room light. Flynn stared at the gems for a moment, contemplating the jagged turns that his life had taken to get him to this point. He shrugged and closed the box and returned it to his pack. Uncertainty is the only certainty there is, and knowing how to live with insecurity is the only security. So said the mathematician John Allen Paulos. Flynn concurred. He got dressed in the same trousers and a fresh white shirt, and then he checked his watch.

  The rooftop bar swirled around the top of the hotel like the swell on an ocean. There were lots of low chairs and round manicured shrubs and glowing bottles of liquor. All the people were well dressed, somewhere between very smart casual and wedding ready. Flynn was at the far bottom end of the scale.

  He stepped into the middle of the space and noted two things. The first was that the views were to die for, as people liked to say. He couldn’t imagine putting his life on the line for a view, but he understood the sentiment. The city glowed below him—the Potomac, the Kennedy Center, the distant suburbs in Virginia. It looked a pleasant place to take a drink. Except for the second thing that he noted. The fall breeze had picked up, perhaps as a result of the altitude above the street, and the bar was only sparsely populated. Flynn barely noticed the temperature, but he knew Beth was perennially cold, even in California. It wasn’t the kind of place she would stay without a damned good reason.

  Flynn didn’t think that a new client was such a reason, so he walked a lap of the rooftop, and then a second, just to make sure. The space was punctured by tall heaters with flames inside long tubes. He felt his pulse rise as he glanced at them and then away. He told himself they were enclosed and safe, but the prickle in the hairs on the back of his neck told him he wasn’t buying his own story.

  There was no Beth near any of the heaters. There was no solo man who might have been the client waiting for her to return from the restroom. Flynn thought to ask the bartender but discarded the idea just as quickly. A woman, five-six, blond hair, black dress. That described about two-thirds of the female population of Washington, DC. He took the elevator down to the lobby and checked his phone on the way. No message.

  The lobby curled around like the rooftop bar, and resembled a swirling glass of cognac. There was a bar off the main desk, a showroom of whiskeys with a smattering of tables. The room was full of people dressed in the same style as the rooftop bar people, sans coats. The lively chatter bounced off the walls and formed a solid mass of noise such that no one conversation could be discerned from another. Flynn took in the space and then edged his way around the tables and the cliques of people standing around the room. He figured Beth and a client would want a table, so he focused on the groups standing around each table as he moved through the bar. A full circuit of the room drew a blank, as did a second. His third go-round saw him receive some frowns and looks of disapproval, as if to say whatever he was looking for wasn’t there, and now he was ruining everyone’s good time. He didn’t stop to engage any of the protestors. Such actions only ever served to slow things down. But he came to the same conclusion himself anyway. What he was looking for wasn’t there.

  His preliminary alarms weren’t quite going off, but they were warming up. There was usually a good reason for events, more often innocent than not, at least in civilian life. So Flynn did what he had always done. He put himself not in someone else’s shoes, but inside their head. Beth had gotten cold, so they had left the rooftop. The whiskey bar had been packed full, no place for a casual business chat, so they had sought an alternative. Where would a couple of professionals go? The restaurant, perhaps. Always quieter than a bar, and people always sat. No one stood around in a restaurant.

  Flynn asked at the concierge desk and was directed to the hotel restaurant overlooking the river. He asked the maître d’ for Beth by name, and a cursory look at a monitor produced no result. Perhaps they had used the client’s name, which he didn’t know, or, being a walk-in, they might have used no name at all. Flynn told the maître d’ he would take a quick look—in his experience, asking to look sometimes resulted in the answer Flynn didn’t want. The maître d’s mouth opened but no words came out, and Flynn strode into th
e space, marched to one end and then back. Nothing.

  He checked the lobby one more time, and then his phone. Still nothing. His internal alarm set itself to ready. He pulled up Beth’s number and called. He heard the distant buzz of ringing, a sound that no longer matched the tone that was heard on the phone at the other end. That could have been bleeps or harps or rap music. In Beth’s case, it was the strumming of an acoustic guitar. But Flynn didn’t hear guitar. All he heard was an electronic thunk and the fuzz of a disconnected line. No answer, no voicemail. An ended call.

  He stood in the lobby watching his phone. If he was interrupting an important conversation, Beth would return the call or at least text back. He waited. Nothing happened. He waited some more. People walked around him through the lobby, as if he were a statue or an art installation. He didn’t mind. Waiting was something John Flynn was very good at. He waited several more minutes for the call, at ease, hands by his side, breathing slow. Then his phone bleeped to let him know a text message had arrived as expected. He looked at the screen, and the alarm in his head went off like a Klaxon warning of a tornado. He didn’t take his eyes from the phone. It was a message from Beth. Or at least from her phone.

  We have your girl.

  Chapter Three

  The old Flynn would have moved instantly. The version of him that had been known as Fontaine. He would have saved the questions, the processing, the analysis for later. Forward progress would have been his immediate response. He could think and move at the same time. He had done so plenty of times before. But he was rusty and he knew it. This new version of himself, this new life, didn’t require that line of thinking. But now he needed to recall old skills.

  Flynn gave himself the full sixty-second count to process the emotions. Misunderstanding, disbelief, denial, anger, acceptance. They weren’t feelings that could be suppressed forever, but they could be managed, compressed, compartmentalized and then used to effect as and when. He stood in the lobby silently, breathlessly. He saw nothing around him, just let his mind do what it had to do. His jaw clenched and then relaxed.