The Murderer's Memories

by T. S. Nichols

  “That’s good,” Bernard said to her. “That way, you’ll have a reason to stick around even after you tire of me.”

  “Oh, honey, I tired of you weeks ago. Haven’t you noticed?”

  Bernard looked at her. She was standing in the doorway, wearing only a white T-shirt that fell halfway between her knees and the tops of her thighs. The white made her tan skin look even darker. “I try not to notice things that displease me,” Bernard answered her. “Life’s too short. Speaking of short, what would happen if you turned around and reached your hands into the air?”

  “Really?” she said to him. “With that smell in the air and the sounds of the city just outside our window, that’s what you’re thinking about?”

  “I’m an excellent multitasker.” Bernard gave her a wry smile.

  In response, she turned around quickly, lifted her hands in the air, and then turned back toward Bernard, leaping into the bed with him. In that one quick moment, he saw her T-shirt lift up, exposing the cleft at the bottom of her round buttocks and the utter lack of anything underneath her shirt. As she cozied in next to Bernard, he grabbed her and held her and pulled her lips toward his own. “I still don’t understand any of this,” she said to him in the short moment between kisses.

  “What’s there to understand?” Bernard answered her, flipping her over onto her back.

  “How I got here? How we found each other? How any of this is possible? Where any of this is going?” she said, staring up at him.

  Bernard pushed her legs apart. “We got here on a big jet airplane. We found each other because I was trouncing around Asia and you were working at a hotel that I was using to shower in. This is possible because, while everything is highly unlikely, almost anything is possible.” He slid his body between her legs and leaned down to kiss her again.

  “What about the last question? Where is this going?” she muttered in between gasps.

  “If you don’t know the answer to that, then I am doing this very wrong,” Bernard said to her. Then he slid his face away from hers and began to run his lips over her body.

  “I’m serious, Bernard.” Her breathing grew heavier and shorter.

  “We’ll see,” Bernard replied. “For now, let’s remember that the chocolate croissants will be done baking in another twenty minutes or so. That doesn’t give us a lot of time to make sure that we experience everything all at once. That’s where we’re going right now. After that, we’ll see.”

  She could hear a touch of sadness in his voice. She didn’t want to make him sad. Even more than that, she didn’t want him to make her sad. Besides, she wanted to experience everything all at once too. “Okay,” she said to him, lifting up her shirt just as his lips landed between her legs. She gasped, inhaling the smell of chocolate and letting it fill her completely.

  Maybe it was the memory, so strong, so engrossing, that kept Bernard from sensing their approach. Maybe it was simply the warmth of the sun. Or maybe they chose to approach more quietly this time, setting a trap instead of initiating a chase. Whatever the reason, by the time Bernard sensed that something was wrong, they were already closing in on him. By the time he sat up and looked downriver, they were almost on top of him.

  They were paddling up the river. Bernard counted five of them in the boat—four men and one woman. Three of the men paddled while the man in the front and the woman in the back turned their heads back and forth, scanning the river. The small boat had a motor in the back that wasn’t in use. It was the motor that betrayed them. In Cambodia, that engine was worth the price of a small house. These weren’t fishermen. They were hunting something else.

  Bernard did his best to act unconcerned. He didn’t want to give himself away if they weren’t yet certain they’d come upon their target. He knew, however, that a white man alone in a boat on this river was going to stand out. He had been counting on their inability to find him here, not on their inability to catch him. He’d escaped close calls before, though, so he moved to the back of his boat with as much patient grace as he could muster. With one eye on the approaching boat, he slid toward the small motor on the back of his own boat. They hadn’t given away their game yet. The paddlers continued to paddle and the watchers continued to scan the river. Bernard had already been sweating, lying beneath the hot sun, but now sweat began to pour out of his skin. He grabbed the rope attached to his boat’s motor. He’d practiced, knowing that the time might come when he’d have to start it quickly to get away. He was up to something like an eighty-percent success rate on the first pull. He squeezed the rope, remembering the lawn mower he used as a boy to mow his and his neighbors’ yards. It started the same way. Back then, it always took him three or four tries. He wasn’t that boy anymore, though. That little boy hadn’t been heard from in a very long time.

  Bernard moved his arm in one swift pull. The motor crackled to life. Then it paused. Bernard looked up now. The men on the other boat were moving. Two of them were shifting back toward their own motor. Two were stowing the oars. The woman was staring at him. “Come on!” Bernard shouted at the motor. He lifted a hand and brushed the sweat from his eyes. The motor coughed. Then it caught and began to hum. Bernard sat down. He grabbed the throttle and twisted it all the way. His boat started to move and, in a moment, had reached its top speed.

  Bernard counted the seconds as he aimed his boat at a gap in the mangroves to his right. He was trying to figure out how much of a head start he would have. He knew he couldn’t outrun the other boat. All he could do was use his knowledge of the river to lose his pursuers or, a bit more accurately, lose himself. Nine seconds elapsed between his starting his motor and his pursuers starting theirs. He heard it over the sound of everything else: his own motor, the wind in the trees, the birds squawking overhead, even his own pounding heart. Nine seconds wasn’t much.

  Bernard knew where he was. It was a big river, wide enough in parts that it was difficult to see from one side to the other, and broken up by archipelagos of mangrove trees. That’s where he was headed, inside one of those islands of twisted roots and trees that grew right out of the river, gaps and open spaces running through them like veins. Bernard’s boat was smaller and could better find the gaps. He plunged through the first opening without even slowing down.

  The other boat followed and from the sound of it, not far behind him. Bernard knew that it would be hard for them to catch up as long as he kept turning his boat through the trees, but unless he could find an opening that they couldn’t fit through, they would eventually catch him. That’s when he heard the other sound, proof that the Company had simply had enough of his running. The sound had its own foreign rhythm, which Bernard recognized: It couldn’t be a coincidence that the first time he heard it in these parts was while being chased by the Company’s henchmen. He looked up toward the sky but he couldn’t see through the leaves of the mangrove trees. Still, the sound of the helicopter kept getting louder as the helicopter kept getting closer. Bernard could hear all three engines now, his own, the boat that was chasing him, and the one in the sky.

  For the first time in a very long time, Bernard really thought about what it would mean to be caught. Of course he thought about it all the time, but rarely as something that might actually happen. It would be the end of him, of course, but what did that mean? It wouldn’t be the end of his memories, memories that the Company had spent millions of dollars helping him to create. No, those memories would be sold off to the highest bidder. But it would be the end of him; he wouldn’t be able to experience those memories anymore and, even worse, he wouldn’t be able to make any new ones. He still had plans, still wanted more out of this life. He saw an opening in the mangroves. It was unlikely to be thin enough to strangle the boat chasing him and, with the helicopter overhead, he wasn’t sure if losing the boat would be enough anyway. Still, he aimed for the opening. Then, just as his boat was about to shoot through it, he leapt over the side into the river’s dark waters.

  Bernard didn’t simply dive into th
e water. He took a deep breath and reached for the mangrove roots. Once he had hold of one he used it to pull himself deeper and deeper under the water, until he had reached the river’s muddy bottom. Then he waited. It was pitch black beneath the water. Five seconds after he reached the bottom, he heard what he’d been waiting for. The other boat roared over his head. Bernard knew it wouldn’t be long before it was clear that his boat was empty so he started moving downstream, feeling his way from root to root in the murky darkness like a blind man swinging across a set of monkey bars. He didn’t know how long he would be able to hold his breath, but he didn’t plan on coming up until he had reached his limit.

  Bernard held on to the mangrove roots until he began to get light-headed. It wasn’t unpleasant, floating in the deep black water, feeling the onset of the euphoria caused by his brain’s lack of oxygen as everything kept flowing by him in the darkness. He actually thought for a moment about how easy it would be to stay deep in the water, starving his brain more and more until his light eventually went out. At least then he could stop running. But while Bernard had plenty to die for, he had much more to live for, if he could only get away for good. So, before he grew too dizzy to be able to determine which direction was up, Bernard let go of the mangrove root and began to float toward the river’s surface.

  The sun didn’t break through the river’s brown water until he was near the surface. When it did, he looked up at the world above him. That’s when he saw them waiting there for him, two boats floating silently on the surface. Bernard tried to force himself to swim back down into the murky depths but his body wouldn’t let him. He didn’t have enough oxygen to run anymore.

  Two large hands plunged into the water before Bernard even had a chance to crack its surface. They grabbed him under his armpits, lifted him quickly into the air, and pulled him directly onto the floor of one of the boats. Bernard wanted to scream but he was still gasping for breath, trying to pull air into his body, not let it out. The two men who had pulled him out of the water were now pinning him to the boat’s floor. Bernard looked up, mostly because there really wasn’t anywhere else to look, and saw a third man standing above him, holding two large syringes. “Keep him still,” the man ordered. Bernard tried to struggle but the men’s grips were too strong. Then the third man plunged one of the syringes into Bernard’s neck. It felt like a bullet entering his body. A moment later, everything was gone. The next time Bernard woke up, he would be in a small cell on the other side of the planet.

  Chapter 8

  ONE DAY, SIXTEEN HOURS AFTER THE FIRST BOMBING

  Cole thought Ivan was most likely the murderer. It was close to a statistical certainty, which was why, at first, he wasn’t too concerned that Ivan’s memories seemed to be crowding out Faith’s. That wasn’t a problem as long as she was merely a victim. Then they brought in a terrorism profiling expert to work with Cole, to tell him what to look for in Faith and Ivan’s memories. It was the middle of the night when Cole spoke to the expert. He hadn’t slept in a day and a half. Everyone was on call all the time. They couldn’t afford to waste a single minute. The profiler told Cole that, while the statistics are hard to verify, it’s estimated that roughly twenty percent of all terrorists are women and that, somewhat counterintuitively, the more educated a woman is, the more likely she is to become a terrorist.

  “It is statistically much more likely that Ivan is the terrorist, but don’t take that for granted,” the expert had informed Cole.

  “So what does make someone a terrorist?” Cole asked.

  “There is no formula. There are no easy answers.” The expert was a man with dark hair, dark skin, dark eyes, and expressive eyebrows that furrowed into the top of his nose when he thought. “Terrorists seem to come from all backgrounds, all races, all religions. They normally have a cause that they claim to be fighting for, like militant Islam or racial purity or environmental rights. It is extremely rare for an act of terrorism to be justified merely by nihilism.”

  “You’re not really helping me here, buddy,” Cole said. “What should I be looking for in their memories?”

  “There are a few things that most terrorists have in common. First”—the expert ticked off the items on his list with his fingers—“they feel socially isolated. They feel like they don’t belong in the society they live in and because of that, they are lonely. Even when they are surrounded by people, they feel lonely because they feel like they don’t belong.”

  “Okay,” Cole said, “but isn’t that everybody, at least sometimes? We all sometimes feel like we don’t belong.”

  The man shrugged. “When you do what I do, you eventually determine that everybody’s a potential terrorist. If you don’t believe that, you’re going to overlook something.”

  “What else?” Cole asked.

  “They believe that their specific act of terrorism is going to accomplish something, even if that something is merely sending a message. Most terrorists act with reason and purpose. They know what they’re doing when they do it. Also, they often fall in line behind a charismatic leader who is encouraging their activity.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Well, this idea is rather new but we see potential in it. Most terrorists have trouble remembering good things from their past. Their memories are more abstract. They either can’t remember a time in their life when they had hope or, if they do remember such a time, the feelings in their memories are subdued and weakened. Without the ability to draw on memories of hope, the future begins to look darker and darker.”

  Cole thought on the profiler’s words. “So you’re telling me that I need to keep an open mind, but I need triggers. I need something to focus on that will help me remember anything about the path to becoming a terrorist. In order to figure out the who, I need to figure out the how and the why.”

  “Focus on memories of isolation and loneliness. Focus on memories that made them feel powerless and without purpose.”

  Chapter 9

  ONE DAY, TWENTY-ONE HOURS AFTER THE FIRST BOMBING

  Cole decided to go home after meeting with the profiler. He considered staying at the station to review Faith and Ivan’s files, but decided it might be more effective to look at the files alone. The investigating team had already walked Cole through the files once but he hadn’t had a chance to really dig into them. Besides, the investigators continued to add to the files as they learned more.

  They’d put everything that they could find out about Faith and Ivan into those files, like research for a biography that would never be written. The files had every important date in the suspects’ lives that the police could identify. They listed close relatives and included pictures of the suspects as well as friends and family and important locations. It was everything that Cole could ask for. Even a sprinkle of this on any of his other cases could have helped him to solve them in a fraction of the time. The problem was that a fraction of time was all he had on this case. Ideally, Cole would have wanted to visit these places himself and talk to these people directly, but everything had to be sped up here. Cole hoped that these artificial triggers would still work.

  He walked home. He didn’t live far from the precinct and thought the walk might help clear his mind. It was early in the morning, after the sun had come up but before most people had. Cole had made this walk from the precinct to his apartment many times, though rarely at this time of day. The city was still quiet, at least by New York standards. Along the way, Cole walked past a park with a baseball diamond in it. He’d passed the same park a thousand times before but this time, he stopped. The field was tucked away in between giant buildings. It took up one whole square block. It had real grass. Maybe it was the angle of the morning sunlight, but Cole couldn’t remember ever seeing the grass look that green before. He walked toward the chain link fence surrounding the field and slipped his fingers into the fence.

  Just like that, he was a young boy again, standing at a chain link fence, staring into the field, cheering as one of his teamma
tes knocked the dust off of his sneakers with his bat. “Come on, Juan!” he yelled out as his teammate lifted the bat over his shoulder and waited for the pitch. The catcher, who had a pair of knee pads but no other special equipment, squatted down behind the batter. “Let’s go, Juan!” Cole heard his other teammates cheering around him. The pitcher set up for his first pitch. He lifted the ball over his head and then swung his arm forward with lightning speed, the likes of which Cole had never seen on a kid before. The batter swung too late and the ball flew into the catcher’s glove with a snap. Cole didn’t know what the score was or what inning it was. It didn’t really seem to matter. The catcher tossed the ball back to the pitcher. Like the other boys, the catcher was uncharacteristically skinny, but tan and covered in sinewy muscles. The other team was cheering on their pitcher from the field, so Cole’s team began cheering for their batter again. “Go, Juan.” “You got this, amigo.” Anything to drown out the infielders. The pitcher raised the ball over his head again. He stepped toward the batter and let another pitch fly. The batter started his swing earlier this time, timing the pitcher. He made contact and Cole heard the magical sound of a bat striking a baseball. It was good contact too, but not good enough. The center fielder ran easily toward the towering fly ball and watched it drop into his glove.