Whisper

by Tal Bauer

  “Everything okay?” The bartender’s gaze went from Kris to David and back. “You two all right?”

  Kris bobbed his head, something between a no and a yes and a what the fuck?

  “We’re fine,” David said smoothly. “The glass slipped. We’re sorry.”

  The bartender stared for another long moment and then nodded. Strode away.

  “David?” Kris hissed.

  That was his voice. David’s voice. But David was dead. He was dead and gone and Kris knew that because he’d never come back. He’d never reached out for Kris, had never tried to find him. He’d seen David’s body, for fuck’s sake. He’d seen burned bones, piles of ash. A man didn’t walk away from that. There was a fucking headstone with David’s name on it, just across the river. There were fucking bones beneath the ground. “What the fuck?”

  “I didn’t know you were alive,” David breathed. “I didn’t know.”

  “You didn’t know—” Kris boggled, almost bit off his tongue. His eyes nearly popped out, and he just barely restrained himself from grabbing David. Shaking him and shaking him, slapping him across the face so hard his palm burned. You couldn’t slap a ghost, right? “What— Where— How—”

  The bartender was glaring at them again. Kris’s gaze bounced from David to the bartender, around the bar. People were staring.

  David grabbed his arm, pulled him off the barstool. “Come here,” he murmured in Kris’s ear.

  God, David’s touch. Kris melted, the very center of him going liquid, just like he had sixteen years ago in the mountains of Afghanistan. David’s hand on his body, the too-close brush of their presences. He followed behind David, powerless to stop. Once, he would have followed David anywhere. Would he follow David’s ghost, too?

  David led him into the bathroom, locked the door behind them.

  He took his time turning to face Kris, though.

  A million questions formed at once, as soon as David pulled away. How? Where? Why? Each clamored to be asked first, demanded to be heard. His breath sped up again. His body trembled.

  “I thought you were dead,” David whispered. He leaned against the locked door, his hands behind his back. He stared at Kris, sorrow bleeding from his gaze.

  “That’s my line,” Kris hissed. “That’s what I say. Because I saw your fucking body! I saw your fucking corpse! And they took you from me and they buried your bones in the fucking ground!” He heard his shouts bounce off the walls, echo in the cramped bathroom. “You died over there! I saw you die!”

  “It wasn’t me they burned,” David said softly. “Al Jabal took me—”

  “Were there no fucking cell phones where you were?” Kris bellowed. “Have you been living on the surface of fucking Mars? You’ve got both legs! Both feet! Two hands! Was there no possible fucking way you could pick up a phone, or send an email, or walk to the nearest embassy? Crawl to a fucking military base?”

  David stayed silent.

  “It’s been almost a decade,” he hissed. “And you never said a word? And now you’re here? How the fuck did you appear here?”

  “I looked you up. When I arrived. I had to know if you died that day. I never saw you move after the blast.”

  “I wish I’d died that day!” Kris whirled, his fingers clawing at the tiles. “I was the only one who lived! Do you have any idea how many nights I laid awake begging to die? Because of that day?”

  “I thought you were dead,” David repeated. A tear slid from the corner of one eye. “I—”

  Kris’s hands trembled off the walls. He folded into himself, dug his fingers into his arms, the bunched sleeves of his trench. “How did you get here? This isn’t some fucking sci-fi show where you can just transport down from your spaceship in the sky! How did you get here?”

  David looked away, to the side.

  “Answer me!” Kris shrieked. “Are you here for me? Did you claw your way back from the dead, across the entire world, to come back to me? I fucking would have for you!”

  Slowly, Kris pitched forward, drawn to David. One hand reached for him, shaking like he’d frozen from the inside out. His fingers whispered over David’s shirt, closed around the fabric. Grabbed, and pulled.

  David fell toward him, falling as if he were crashing down to earth, a fallen angel who had lived on the dark side of the moon for the last ten years. He crashed into Kris, arms wrapping around him, so familiar, as if it had only been a moment and not a decade. His face buried in Kris’s neck, and Kris felt, God, he felt, David’s breath, the physical evidence of his life. Heard the beat of David’s heart.

  David was alive.

  Kris grabbed him, held on. Ran his palms over David’s back and his chest, trying to touch everywhere. He couldn’t get to David’s skin, not through the jacket, not through the shirt. His hand rose, over David’s neck, into his hair.

  Their eyes met. Why? screamed from every pore in Kris’s body, from every shattered remnant of his soul. Why here? Why now? Why for so long? Why hadn’t David said anything?

  He didn’t care, though, about the answers, not when David looked at him like that. Not when he was falling into the event horizons in David’s eyes, trapped, never able to be free, and not when David leaned in, closed his lips over Kris’s. Kissed him like he thought he’d never be kissed again.

  It was every one of their kisses, from the first to the last—that Kris never knew was going to be the last they’d ever have, through the window of a busted Afghan sedan on the way to pick up Hamid—all wrapped in one. David’s hesitancy mixed with his urgency, his need tempered by his love. Power, the depths of David’s soul, opening beyond their kiss.

  Kris tried to climb his body, tried to disappear into David’s arms. He reached for David’s waistband, his jeans—

  David pushed him away.

  Kris’s back hit the far wall of the cramped bathroom, next to the urinal.

  “I can’t,” David stuttered. “I’m sorry.”

  Turning, he fled.

  Chapter 29

  CIA Headquarters

  Langley, Virginia

  September 8

  0645 hours

  “Caldera? What the fuck?” Wallace’s confused voice broke through Kris’s haze, shattered his ironclad concentration. “Fuck have you been doing in here?”

  Exhaling, Kris sat back from his workstation. Coffee cups littered the floor, beside a thousand sheets of paper, printouts from the CIA archives, records, reports, after-action reviews. Anything he could access from his workstation, pore through and dissect in minutiae.

  David’s autopsy, such that it was, lay open on the desk. Burned bone fragments recovered from the trunk of unidentified vehicle parked inside mosque. Incomplete skeletal remains. X-ray imaging inconclusive. DNA dental or bone marrow recovery impossible. They’d decided it was David because of David’s blood on the outside of the car, in the back seat, and on the trunk lid. The bumper. Evidence suggests drag patterns and blood spatter. Overwhelmingly, the evidence points to DAVID HADDAD as the deceased.

  But it wasn’t David.

  They’d missed something. Goddammit, they’d missed something, for a whole decade.

  “Caldera!” Wallace, again. This time, he shouted. Wallace was his SAD team leader, and if there was anyone who hated Kris more than Ryan did, it was Wallace. “I asked you a question!”

  Kris’s bones creaked as he pushed back from his desk. His chair ground over paper, crinkled reports on the strike team’s mission, the recovery team’s findings at the destroyed mosque. His mouth tasted like death behind his molars, like burned coffee, worse than Afghanistan’s had been. Something was alive in his veins. Rage, hope, or too much caffeine, he couldn’t tell.

  How long had he been sitting there? All night, since he’d raced back to headquarters, after picking himself up from the bathroom floor? The bartender had wanted to call the cops, certain Kris had been attacked, assaulted. He’d stumbled, fumbled, kept saying no, but no one could understand him through the shrieks, the w
ails, the body-shaking sobs. He’d managed to slip out of there before the cops arrived, jogging down the street as the bartender bellowed for him to come back.

  An hour in his car, screaming, punching his steering wheel. Losing all of his shit, every last bit, like he’d never done before.

  Until all that was left was silence and snot, an ocean of dried tears cracking into salt flats on his cheeks. Streaked mascara.

  And questions.

  He’d turned the key, put the car into drive. Steered toward headquarters.

  Somewhere, there were answers. And he’d always been the man to find them, no matter how far he had to dig.

  “I’m working, Wallace.” Kris stood, grabbing David’s autopsy and a list of files he couldn’t access, not from his station. He needed to get to the archives, pull the hard copies.

  “Working what? Making a fucking mess isn’t your job!” Wallace grabbed one of the papers off the floor. His eyes flicked to Kris. “Why are you digging up this shit?”

  Kris shouldered past him.

  Wallace grabbed his arm, spun him around. He shoved the paper against Kris’s chest. “SAD lost six guys that day, you know. Because of you.”

  Kris stared. He said nothing. Didn’t reach for the sheet. Wallace let go, and it fluttered to the floor, slipping between their boots.

  “Why’d you live, huh? When good people, good men, died?”

  Kris ripped his arm free. He stared into Wallace’s eyes as he backed away, files tucked under his arms.

  “Gonna make us clean up your shit again, huh?” Wallace kicked an empty coffee cup toward Kris. It flew, skittering and tumbling in the air before veering into another workstation. “You’re a Goddamn shitshow, Caldera!” Wallace bellowed. “I can’t fucking wait to get rid of you!”

  Kris flipped Wallace off with both middle fingers as he backed out of SAD’s office.

  “Caldera—”

  Wallace’s shout cut off as the heavy door slammed shut.

  Kris ran, racing down hallways, pushing through doors and throwing himself down stairwells until he finally made it to archives. Chest heaving, breathing hard, he hesitated outside the double doors.

  What had they overlooked?

  How had they let David go missing for ten years? Why hadn’t they turned the world upside down, shaking every tree, every mountain, until they found him? Never, ever leave a man behind. It was ingrained into the marrow of their bones, engraved on the underside of their ribs. Never, ever. How had David been left?

  Had Kris missed something? Had he sentenced David to exile?

  How had he left his husband, the love of his life, for a decade?

  What had happened to David, all this time?

  What if he found what they’d missed?

  What if he didn’t?

  Kris badged his way into archives, bypassing the check-in desk and heading for the old mission records. Archives smelled like dust and secrets, like redaction ink and old tears. The secrets and lies of the CIA were buried in the stacks, in between papers and in between the lines.

  His hands trailed over documents boxes, spines of notebooks, bound folders wrapped with string. Canisters of microfilm. He counted down the numbers, the dates, until he got to what he was looking for.

  Afghanistan, 2008. Camp Carson. Hamid Operation

  Three file boxes. That’s what the fulcrum of his life was to the CIA. Three file boxes, two of which contained the Congressional inquiry’s findings and evidence. Had it been up to the CIA, there would be no file boxes, he was certain.

  Kris dragged all three to the floor and flipped the lids. Start from the beginning, the very beginning. He slid to his knees and pulled the first file—

  David’s personnel folder fell open in his lap. His picture was stapled to the front corner, taken just before their deployment to Camp Carson. At the bottom of the photo, David’s left hand was just visible, a gold ring glittering on his finger.

  He ripped the photo from the file. Crumpled it, gasping, bending over at the waist as he breathed in, the smells of Afghanistan flooding him from the files, the smells of death and waste. His eyes closed.

  Why did you never reach out? Why did you stay dead? Why didn’t you do everything you could to come back to me?

  I thought you were dead, David had said. He’d repeated it, like a robot, like a ghost. But ghosts and robots didn’t feel warm, and they didn’t leach sorrow like it was the only thing inside of them. He could still see David’s gaze from across the bathroom. A thousand regrets wreathed in a bottomless, aching pain.

  Slowly, Kris uncrumpled the photo and set it on the nearest shelf. Propped it against the files so David could watch over him. “I’ll figure it out,” Kris whispered. “You know I will.”

  He turned back to the files. Somewhere, there was a truth, a real truth, and Kris was going to find it.

  September 8

  1430 hours

  “Kris?”

  He opened his eyes. Fuzzy shapes appeared before him. Shoes. He followed the shoes up, to ankles, pants, legs. He rolled over. A paper stuck to his cheek.

  Damn it, he’d passed out sometime between reading the Congressional inquiry and cross-checking the team’s findings in the mosque with David’s autopsy. He lay on the floor of the archives, in between the stacks, in a pile of folders and scattered papers.

  He was a fucking mess. His clothes were ruined. Rumpled, with coffee stains and ink all over them. He could smell himself, the stink of his adrenaline, his desperation. How many hours had it been since he’d been home?

  “Kris?” Dan crouched in front of him. Beyond Dan, three techs from archives hovered at the end of the aisle, blatantly staring. “You didn’t come home.”

  Fuck. He was supposed to go to Dan’s. They were supposed to—

  Jesus fucking Christ, how could he start a relationship with Dan? When David was alive, was actually fucking alive, living and breathing and walking somewhere out there in DC? When Kris had felt him, felt his skin? Heard his voice.

  If David was alive, wasn’t he still married? Could he be married to a legal ghost? David was dead, according to the law.

  “Fuck, Dan,” Kris moaned. He pulled the paper from his cheek and sat up. Everything in him ached, his bones, his muscles. He fucked up his sparring partners every other week, spoiled for fights with Russian GRU agents in seedy bars, but this was too much. He was pushing on the door of forty. He wasn’t a young man anymore. “What time is it?”

  “Fourteen-forty. September eighth.” Dan swallowed, and his gaze wandered over the files Kris had spread like toys on the floor. “What are you doing?”

  Kris rubbed his hands over his face. How could he possibly explain this? Where did he even start? He couldn’t tell Dan about David, not yet. David was a ghost, still, for a reason. Kris had to know why.

  But bringing Dan into his quest for the truth about David just stung in all the wrong ways. Kris had done many things he wasn’t proud of in his life. But he just couldn’t do that to Dan. Or to David.

  “What if we missed something, Dan?” he whispered. “What if we missed something that day?”

  “What do you mean?”

  Kris swallowed. “What if David wasn’t killed? What if he survived?”

  “Oh Kris…” It was Dan’s turn to cover his face. Kris watched his shoulders shudder, heard his deep breaths behind his hands. “Kris, don’t. Don’t do this to yourself.”

  “I have to know. I didn’t— I’ve never looked at the files. I’ve never looked at what actually happened.”

  “Kris…”

  “I didn’t want to know. I couldn’t know. But, Dan, the autopsy. They couldn’t definitely prove it was him. Everything was circumstantial.”

  “I’ve read it, Kris. He was beaten to death beside the car,” Dan whispered. “There was enough blood in the rubble to know he’d lost so much. Then he was dragged into the trunk, where they poured accelerant on his body.”

  “There was no DNA match to the bones
.”

  “Because every trace of DNA was gone. He was ash. Even the bones that did remain… They fell apart when the team tried to recover them.” Dan’s face twisted. “Kris, they took him out of there with a shovel. His ashes filled a plastic bag. Don’t do this to yourself. Don’t hurt yourself like this.”

  It wasn’t David. It wasn’t David because I saw David last night, I held him in my arms.

  It wasn’t me they burned, David had said.

  “Kris.” Dan reached for him, grabbed his hands. Held them between this own. “Kris, please. If this is because of last night. Us. Please, Kris. You need help. I want to help you, but I can’t help with this.” He nodded to the files, the papers littering the floor. “I love you, and I want you to be happy. I thought I could do that for you, but this.” He kissed Kris’s hands. “You need help. Have you ever talked to anyone? About his death?”

  Kris ripped his hands away. “I’m fine.”

  “You’re not fine. This is not fine.”

  “I am fine! Don’t you think knowing is important? Don’t you think we should be sure, absolutely certain, about what happened?”

  “We are certain! We know! There was a Congressional inquiry, for God’s sake! You don’t want to go down this path, Kris. You’re only going to hurt yourself with the truth!”

  He stood, turning his back on Dan as he started gathering the papers, the files, the statements and evidence.

  “And you’re hurting me,” Dan breathed. “What is this? Another reason to not be with me? Another excuse for us not being together?”

  Kris sagged. The air punched out of his lungs, like he’d taken a hit right to the center of his chest. “Dan…”

  “We can’t keep doing this. I can’t keep taking this from you. Last night, you made me the happiest I’ve ever been. I thought, ‘Finally, he’s letting me in. He’s letting me love him. Maybe, maybe one day he’ll love me a little bit, too’.”