by Linda Nagata
She puts the tablet away. Chris is already standing in the aisle. “Gather everything,” he reminds them. “And make sure all the storage bins are open to inspection.”
Every muscle in True’s body has gone stiff. She’s not the only one. There’s a general groan as the team stands up to collect their gear. They exit the plane with their hand-carries and present themselves to US Customs. Passports are logged. Biometrics are crosschecked with database records. They queue up for the scanners: one to inspect for contraband and another seeking signs of infectious disease. Automated interviews follow, conducted individually in soundproof booths. True sits, facing a video screen, maintaining eye contact with a generated female persona in a customs officer’s uniform. The persona projects an aura of stern suspicion as it asks in its synthesized voice, “What was the purpose of your travel, ma’am?”
“Business,” True answers, aware that the AI behind the screening procedure is analyzing her voice and facial expression.
The persona follows the standard question tree: “What is the nature of your business?”
“Paramilitary activity.”
“Do you have a license to conduct paramilitary activity?”
“Yes, I do.”
A brief pause while the AI crosschecks government records. Then: “How long were you away?”
“Two days.”
Another pause. This time the persona turns its head to look off-screen. True has seen this behavior before. She suspects the AI is awaiting results from the swarm of fast-moving, fist-sized robotic crawlers used to inspect all incoming aircraft, and from the baggage scanners, which will be logging the presence of their weapons.
After a few seconds the persona returns its gaze to True. “Confirming all necessary permits and licensing. Welcome home, Ms. Brighton.”
The team gathers outside of Customs. Miles is the last to be cleared. He’s looking shaky as he explains, “They weren’t expecting me, so they had my profile flagged. It took a call to the State Department to confirm I’m legitimately me.”
They return to the plane. Chris and True work with the flight crew to inventory the contents of the cargo hold, confirming all their gear has been returned to them. Then they take their seats.
Six more hours in the air and they’ll be home.
~~~
True doesn’t sleep on this last leg of the homeward journey. In the intervals between banal conversation and phone calls with Treasure and Connor, she stews over what she’s learned. She turns it over and over in her mind—the implications, the possibilities.
This is dangerous ground, and not just for the reason she cautioned Miles. Shaw Walker might be a threat, yes, but that’s a remote fear, something for the future.
Many times since Diego’s death she has fallen into a pattern of obsessive thoughts, reliving over and over what was done to him, what he was made to go through. She appears quiet as she sits gazing out the window of the plane at the patterns of farmland far below. But as her mind walks that path again, there’s panic at the cellular level. It’s a frantic metabolic reaction, very real. It kicks up her core temperature and sends heat flushing through her as she considers his terror, the agony he must have known, all the while haunted by her own helplessness to intercede.
She shoves her sleeves up, presses a chilled bottle of water against her cheeks.
Don’t go back there, she thinks.
“Hey, True,” Juliet says, popping up to look at her from over the back of the next seat. “What’s the best time you ever ran the mile?”
“It’s your three-mile time that matters,” True says, striving to keep her voice steady.
Juliet grins and drops back down into her seat to continue some inconsequential argument with Rohan.
Did Lincoln lie to me? True wonders.
She wants to hear his side, his explanation, but she doesn’t call him. No chance of a private conversation on the plane. She schools herself to patience. She wants his raw reaction to this news of Shaw Walker; she wants to give him only a little time to prepare. So she waits until they’re twenty minutes out from Paulson Field. Then she emails him the photo Brooke sent, with Shaw’s face circled. Her accompanying note is terse:
Identified by Miles as Jon Helm. Brooke confirms. Have not shared with team yet. We need to talk.
His answer comes in less than a minute:
This is bullshit. Shaw is dead. And Dushane is mistaken. I’ve got over fifty family members here, half of them kids, waiting for your plane to arrive. Do not throw a flash-bang into the middle of this reunion, True.
Her reply goes out just as quickly:
I’m not planning to make an announcement. But when I step off this plane, you and me are going to talk.
He doesn’t answer.
She doesn’t follow up.
Reunion
Their chartered jet touches down in early evening. They deplane down a stairway and cross the tarmac to a ground-floor terminal where their families and coworkers wait behind a glass wall, waving enthusiastically. No media are present. No journalists. This is a private airfield and a private reunion, though of course there are plenty of cameras.
Juliet reaches the door first. A cheer goes up when she pulls it open. Cries of greeting, hoo-yahs. The rest of the team crowds in. All but True. She lingers, watching through the glass, waiting for everyone else to get inside, giving Lincoln a chance to greet them.
Juliet throws herself into her husband’s arms. Miles is met by his weeping parents and his grinning sister. Cameras flash amid a swirl of kisses and hugs and handshakes and small children lifted joyously over the crowd, and teenagers on the periphery, hanging back with embarrassed half-grins. True slips in behind it all.
Alex is there, just inside the door. She warned him something was up, no details. He looks wary as they share a ritual kiss.
Lincoln is with him, wearing his typical uniform: tan ReqOps polo shirt, brown slacks, and a casual jacket. “I don’t want to talk here,” he says, his artificial eye contributing to his intimidating glare. “It’s not secure.”
“You want to go to headquarters?” she challenges him. “That’s fine with me. But I don’t want the team hearing about this from Miles.”
“About what?” Alex asks. “What does this have to do with me anyway?”
True turns a cold eye on Lincoln. He makes a good guess at what she’s thinking. “I did not lie to you, True.” He says it in an undertone, barely audible over the chatter around them. “I told you the truth. Shaw Walker was declared dead. That was the official conclusion.”
True turns to Alex. “You remember Shaw?”
“Of course,” he answers, cautious as a man circling an IED.
“He’s alive. Brooke confirmed it. Which means someone in the State Department already knew. Maybe it’s been known for years.”
“I don’t believe it,” Lincoln insists. “It’s a case of mistaken identity. I went to Nungsan. I went in with the forensics team, helped locate the bodies. I saw what was left of the structure where Shaw was held. It was incinerated. A smoking hole in the ground with the trace remains of at least three people. He did not survive.”
True shakes her head. No way will she accept that conclusion, not anymore, not when she has two sources telling her that Shaw is alive. “Were those trace remains enough for a DNA identification? If not, you can’t prove he was there, Lincoln.”
“Come on! You know he was there. You heard him on the video.”
“That was days before the village was targeted! That doesn’t tell us where he was when the missile hit.”
“True—”
“Hold on!” Alex interrupts. “God damn it, what are you saying?”
She turns to him, puts her hand on his arm. “There’s a black-hat mercenary working in the TEZ who goes by the name of Jon Helm. It’s a pseudonym, a nom de guerre. Miles picked him out of a photo lineup. It’s Shaw.”
Alex gives Lincoln a puzzled look. Then he returns his attention to True. �
�So what if it is Shaw?” he asks her.
She understands. He doesn’t want to deal with it. Just like her, he’s afraid of reliving the grief, the horror of that place and time when Diego’s death was raw and new. His reluctance is plain to see—but she needs him on her side. She tells him, “If it is Shaw, he is the last living man who saw our son alive and I want to talk to him, ask him why he’s alive, and what happened in that forest. What went wrong and what part he had in it and why he didn’t come home.”
Quickly, breathlessly, she sketches for Alex the story Hussam told of Jon Helm in Burma—how he killed his assailants when they tried to crucify him. “If the story is true, Shaw fought his way out of there. He could have come home. He should have, but he didn’t. Why?”
“Because the story’s not true,” Lincoln says.
That’s what he wants to believe. She tries to get him to reconsider. “When you were there, did you find the steel pipes of the cross they used?”
He presses his lips together. His living eye narrows. “Yeah,” he admits in a wary voice. “I saw that. It was knocked over by the blast that took out the building where Shaw was being held.”
“Did you find bodies near that cross?”
He glances around. Everyone else is clustered in front of the bar or alongside the buffet table, absorbed in their own conversations. His measuring gaze pauses on Alex before returning to True. “Two burned corpses. We don’t know who they were.”
“Saomong?” Alex asks.
“Yes.”
True says, “That supports the story. What did you determine as cause of death?”
He scowls. “Nungsan was hit by a cruise missile, True. When it took out the target building, debris was flung in every direction.”
She considers this for a few seconds. Leans in. “Sure. I know. Anyone in front of that building would have been pummeled by the debris. But were they dead before that happened?”
Seconds slide past as they glare at one another. Alex shifts restlessly, wondering, maybe, if he should intervene.
Lincoln breaks first. He tries to back out of the discussion, growling, “All of this is classified.”
“No,” True says. “No, you don’t get to go there.”
Lincoln has never been an expressive man. The burn scars and the artificial eye make him an even harder read, but True sees contrition on his face as he says, “Look, we can’t know what happened. There were different factions among the Saomong. They were probably at each others’ throats.”
“Maybe,” she allows. “Tell me what you saw. Tell us. I just want the truth.”
He eyes her for several seconds. She holds her breath.
He raises his hand, taps the side of his head with two fingers. “One had his skull caved in here.” He touches his forehead. “The other one, here. Like they’d been hit with a small sledgehammer.”
She turns away, struggling to hold on to a semblance of calm. Beyond the glass, a ground crew services the plane. She feels the weight and warmth of Alex’s hand on her shoulder.
Lincoln says in his habitual monotone, “We concluded that they’d been executed.”
She rounds on him. Alex’s hand falls away. “You want me to believe they were formally executed—with a hammer?”
“Yes.” He’s willing her to believe what he chose to believe eight years ago.
That is not a game she can play. “Let’s say Hussam’s story is true.”
“Okay! Fine. Let’s do it that way. Shaw killed those two, disappeared into the forest, and died there—because if he’d lived, he would have checked in. He would have let us know.”
“Let’s say all of Hussam’s story is true. Shaw lived, but he didn’t check in. He took off on his own.” She goes on to tell them about the tattoo Miles saw on Jon Helm’s arm. She touches her own forearm. Her throat feels thick. Her voice is low. “The epitaph read, Diego Delgado, The Last Good Man.”
Alex steps back, shaken. Lincoln reacts in contempt. “That motherfucker—if it is him—even back then, True, he was not the hero you imagine.”
This response is not what True expects. She didn’t know Shaw well, but she’s never before heard Lincoln say a word against him. “No man is perfect,” she says, surprised at her own desire to look back on Shaw in a clean light.
She’s stunned when Alex tells her, “Shaw wasn’t even close.” Certainty lies behind his words, an implication that he knows more than he should, that he’s kept things from her. She looks at him in shock, wanting the truth of it, but he doesn’t see her. She’s been sidelined. He trades a gaze with Lincoln as if they’re conspirators in some crime and says, “If the story is true, he’s sold his soul.”
Lincoln acknowledges this with a slow nod.
True looks from one to the other, unsure what’s going on, and that makes her angry. “I missed something,” she says. “But I’m putting you both on notice. I intend to find him. I need to find him. He was there with Diego at the end.”
Some Words Are Like Bullets
Twenty minutes later, True walks with Alex to the car. Neither speaks. He carries her pack and her duffel. She carries her weapons, stowed in cases. The parking lot is dark, the dull amber lights from the single-story terminal building insufficient to chase back the shadows. Past the parking lot, the black expanse of an empty field stands as a buffer between them and the bright headlights of a busy highway.
Out of habit, True scans the parking lot, on guard against anything that feels out of place. Alex makes his own survey. He’s been out of the army twenty-five years, but situational awareness is a survival skill for paramedics as well as for soldiers.
The night is calm, peaceful. There’s just a susurration of wind, and the traffic’s muted growl.
Alex pops the trunk and drops her pack inside. She offloads her guns.
“Did you fire them?” he asks.
“A few rounds from the KO to discourage the bad guys while Jameson hit ’em with a flash-bang. Blackbird—the AI flying our Kobrin—did most of the shooting. Knocked out their automated defenses.”
He grunts and closes the trunk. Then he follows her to the passenger door and, moving in practiced ritual, he opens it for her, shutting it after she slides in. Though she does not live a traditional life, old courtesies live on between them, reassuring gestures that ease their sometimes-stormy relationship.
True is all too aware of heavy weather incoming. They both know it. Back inside, the reception is still going on, but it took just a look from Alex and a word not even spoken aloud—Ready?—to forge an agreement to leave early.
That was right after Lincoln spoke to the gathering. He congratulated the QRF and read aloud a note of gratitude from Fatima’s parents. He also warned everyone to be on their guard in the wake of the mission: “The guiding sentiment behind Requisite Operations is ‘right action.’ The work we do is honorable and within the bounds of the law. Even so, our existence is controversial. It brings out the crazies and the paranoid. That’s why I prefer we operate under the radar when we can. Minimizing publicity lets us protect the privacy of our clients while enhancing our own safety. Public attention is a dangerous thing—and unfortunately, we’re going to get a lot of it going forward.”
True braced herself, afraid Lincoln would make an announcement about Shaw Walker—but that wasn’t what he had in mind. His stern gaze picked out Miles among the listening crowd. “We made the mistake of rescuing a journalist.”
This won a burst of laughter, and Rohan calling out, “Ah, he’s just a Ranger gone wrong.”
Lincoln acknowledged this with the ghost of a smile. “A press release has already gone out. There’s no reason to say more, so if you receive a request for an interview, ignore it. And all of you, families included, be aware of your surroundings, exercise caution wherever you are, keep your fairy godmothers on duty at all times, and let me know if you even suspect trouble.
“And before I let you return to the buffet, one last bit of bad news. All QRF personnel will rep
ort to the office at 0800 for debriefing and interviews with federal officials.” A groan ran through the gathering but Lincoln ignored it, pointing into the crowd. “That includes you, Khalid. Welcome to the Requisite Operations family.”
True understands that being part of the Requisite Operations family is no easy task. She glances at Alex as they drive away from the airfield. His gaze is fixed on the strip of road that lies ahead. He’s not ready to talk yet. True is content to wait him out, knowing it won’t be long—and she’s right.
He waits until they’re on the highway, locked in the flow of evening traffic, before he says, “You need to let it go, True. Even if Shaw Walker really is out there playing mercenary badass, he’s got nothing for you. Nothing he can tell you about Diego will make it hurt less.”
“You’ve got it wrong,” she tells him. “I’m not looking for comfort.”
A soft, cynical hiss. “Yeah, I know. I just wish you were.” He stares ahead at red taillights. “You know and I know… we can’t ever escape it. What happened to him… it’s got a gravity of its own. Like a black hole in our lives that we’ll always be circling around.”
It’s a metaphor she hasn’t heard before and she’s startled at how well it resonates. “I never thought about it that way,” she says. “But you’re right. That’s exactly how it feels.”
“Don’t let it pull you in,” he warns.
She scowls at the implied assumption that she is fragile, vulnerable, prone to emotional decisions. “Look, I don’t know what you think I’m going to do—”
He cuts her off. “You’ve already told me what you’re going to do! You’re planning to hunt down Shaw Walker. And I’m telling you, no. Don’t do it.” She doesn’t interrupt; she lets him finish. But she’s bristling, like she does every time she feels the leash tighten.