The Escape Artist

by Brad Meltzer

  “It was a long time ago, Mr. Zigarowski. I’m sorry. I didn’t know her that well.”

  Zig stared down at his own warped reflection in the chrome bumper, kicking himself for even asking. He wasn’t new to this, wasn’t a recent mourner. Maggie died over a decade ago. His wounds had scarred over. No, he thought, had healed. His life was good now. And fulfilling. He was healed.

  “You must be Zig,” a voice called out.

  Fluorescent lights popped on in the distance—motion sensors kicking in—lighting the hallway and revealing a paunchy little man folded like a dumpling. His plodding walk and bow tie said he wasn’t military, but the way he was twirling his key ring like a gunslinger… Administrator, Zig thought.

  “Barton Hudson,” Nola whispered in Zig’s ear.

  “Barton Hudson,” the man said, offering a damp handshake. Through his gold-framed glasses, he had desperate eyes, eager for attention. “You like the Locomobile, yes? Have you seen our Napoleon cannon?”

  Before Zig could argue, Barton led him back up the hallway, toward a massive antique cannon that was nearly as big as Pershing’s limo.

  “Named for its killing power—which explains why Uncle Sammy brought it here for the Civil War. Beautiful, yes?” he said, Zig realizing he was one of those people who added “yes?” at the end of his sentences to get people to agree with him.

  “His wife died last year. Cancer in her kidney. He’s got no one to go home to,” Nola said in Zig’s ear. “Keep him on track, or he’ll talk your ear off all night.”

  “I really do appreciate you staying late,” Zig said, glancing down the long cinder-block hallway that had all the charm of a prison. Nearly half a football field down, the hallway dead-ended at a set of sealed metal doors. Even from here, there was no missing the white sign with bright red letters:

  Restricted Area

  Warning

  “So about Sergeant Brown…” Zig added.

  “Of course. So sad. So sad,” Barton said, giving another twirl to his key ring and heading deeper into the building. Every twenty steps or so, more motion sensors clicked, lighting the hall with bright fluorescents. “Everyone here—we’re all heartbroken.”

  “He’s a liar and a petty man,” Nola said in Zig’s ear. “Tried to get me transferred every year since he first met me.”

  “Such a tragedy,” Barton added.

  “Cameras on your right and left,” Nola warned as Zig counted no fewer than four ceiling cameras, as well as a temperature alarm, chemical reader, even a moisture monitor, like you see in the world’s top museums.

  For well over a decade, the Army has been trying to open its own Army Museum. Until the funding came through, this enormous warehouse, tucked away at Fort Belvoir, was where they stored their best weapons and treasures, from thousands of antique and modern guns, cannons, bazookas, and every other armament, to flags flown in the Revolutionary War, to a rifle used at the Boston Tea Party, to frock coats worn at Gettysburg, to Ulysses S. Grant’s Civil War cap, to the drum that the 3rd US Infantry—the Old Guard—played at JFK’s funeral.

  “He also fidgets when he’s nervous: touches the arm of his glasses, twirls his key ring,” Nola added.

  “So when was the last time you saw Nola?” Zig asked, watching Barton smooth his thumb against the length of a hunk of keys.

  “I guess…last Thursday, yes? The day she left for Alaska,” Barton replied, weaving off the main hallway, toward a door that looked like the entrance to a bank vault.

  There were doors like this all around the building. Some protected military artifacts, others secured the Army’s sixteen thousand pieces of fine art, from propaganda paintings by Norman Rockwell to watercolors done by Adolf Hitler himself, captured by US troops during raids at the end of World War II. But of all the treasure-filled rooms in the building, this was the one he most wanted to see.

  “To be honest, I haven’t been here since she—since everything—Well, you know…” Barton said, unlocking the door, shoving it open, and revealing a long rectangular room that smelled like paint and turpentine. The sign read: Room 176—Artist Studio.

  “Here you go. Nola’s office,” Barton added.

  “Tell him to leave,” Nola said in Zig’s ear. “Remind him you’re investigating my death and that y—”

  Zig reached for his earpiece. Click.

  Call ended.

  A few minutes from now, Zig would tell Nola that there was no signal in the building, that his phone dropped the call.

  Would she believe him? Maybe.

  Did he care? Not at all.

  An hour ago, Nola asked him to go to her office to grab something she couldn’t grab. But considering how many bodies had already shown up—and that Nola was the only one who somehow escaped the plane crash—Zig wasn’t putting his life at risk without first investigating the one person who required the most investigation: Nola herself. Zig needed to repay her, and he might be sentimental, but he wasn’t stupid. Heart or no heart? He needed that answer.

  “Best I get out of your way, yes?” Barton asked.

  “Actually, before you go…” Zig said. “Can I ask you a few questions about Sergeant Brown?”

  “Sure. Of course.”

  Two hours from now, when they were cleaning up the blood, this is the moment Barton would remember. He’d wonder why he was so helpful to Zig, and why he let him in in the first place. He’d ask it over and over: Would things have turned out differently if he didn’t? But the truth was, nothing would’ve changed at all. The blood was always coming.

  22

  Nola is— Or rather…she was—” Barton took a breath and shifted his weight, his whole round body wobbling. “Nola’s an artist.”

  Zig knew that tone. No one likes speaking ill of the dead. “That bad, huh?” Zig said, adding a warm smile to keep him talking.

  “She was just—” Standing in the doorway, Barton stopped himself again. “Nola was…interesting.”

  “Sir—”

  “Call me Barton. I’m civilian, just like you.”

  “Barton, then. Nice to meet you, Barton,” Zig said, flashing a new grin, the grin he learned in his old life, when his job was to put people at ease so they wouldn’t stiff him when they saw the final price of the casket and burial. “Barton, at the start of my career, I used to be a funeral director—and I can tell you: people only use the word interesting when the deceased was a pain in the ass. Now I know it’s tough, but this investigation—”

  “What’re you investigating? According to the news, the plane went down because of mechanical failure, yes?”

  “Absolutely,” Zig said, kicking himself for being careless. He hadn’t looked to see what the news was reporting. Mechanical failure. “That’s our belief too,” Zig added, not even realizing how easily the lies came. “But back at Dover—you know the job—we check every box, make sure we’re not missing anything. So. Whatever you think about your coworker Nola, your candor would be greatly appreciated—even if she was a pain in the rear.”

  Barton twirled his key ring, letting out a little chuckle and glancing around Nola’s office. Behind them, back in the hallway, the lights went out—pooomp—the idle motion sensors returning everything to darkness. “They tell you what Nola’s job was here?” Barton asked.

  “I know she was a war painter.”

  “Not just a painter. She’s the Artist-in-Residence. It’s one of the Army’s most prestigious honors; dates back to World War I and runs through every battle since—Normandy, Vietnam, Cambodia, Iraq, you name it. Anywhere we’ve stormed the beaches, we’ve had a painter there. You know why?”

  “So we can document it?”

  “No. Documenting is easy. You want to document something, send photographers and videographers. The reason we send a painter, it’s not for documentation. It’s so we can learn. Painters can— Look. Here… Look…” Barton said, taking out his phone and pulling up a painting of a soldier, an oil on canvas.

  “Like this,” Barton said,
shoving the screen toward Zig’s face. The painting was of a soldier from the chest up, in full army fatigues, standing in the clearing of a jungle.

  “This was painted in 1944 when we invaded the island of Peleliu,” Barton explained. “It’s called The 2,000 Yard Stare. But you can see what the artist does here, yes? The soldier is looking right at us, but his eyes are wide, vacant…his cheeks hollow and covered in the grime of war. He doesn’t even see the giant tank and the slumped body that’s behind him. So what’s the effect?”

  Zig studied the painting, mesmerized. He’d seen looks like that before, on Dover’s young cadets, every time they’d see their first decapitated body. Zig used to have that look too. But it came from something entirely different, something that he thought he’d put away—that is, until Nola showed up and ripped his old scars open. “This soldier looks shell-shocked.”

  “Not just shell-shocked. Horrified,” Barton said. “This is how you show people horror. Artists can make knapsacks and rucksacks bigger, can add sweat to worried brows. No photo would ever capture this moment, because this isn’t just a painting. It’s a story.”

  Zig was still staring down, hypnotized by the young soldier’s faraway gaze. “What’s this have to do with Nola?”

  “To create a painting like that—that’s not just something whipped up by a kid with some crayons. The last Artist-in-Residence was forty-two years old. A sergeant first class. The one before that was forty-three. Nola Brown was twenty-five—just a private when they brought her in. So ask yourself: How does a twenty-five-year-old get a job that’s always been held by people almost twice her age?”

  “I take it it’s not because she’s a really great painter?”

  Barton was still standing in the doorway, like he was afraid to step inside. “You never heard what Nola did in Iraq, did you?”

  23

  It started nearly two and a half…maybe three years ago, yes?” Barton began. “I didn’t even know Nola at the time. Her Army unit was in Northern Iraq, tracking an ISIS electronics supplier who was using old phones to build detonators. Somehow, the trail led to a little town called Tel Asqof.”

  Zig knew Tel Asqof. Last year, he’d worked on the body of an Army Ranger—thirty-one years old, from the same town in Arizona where Zig’s college roommate lived. Fallen #2,286. Shot from the side, through the esophagus.

  “When they arrived, Nola’s unit spent hours kicking in doors, looking for the supplier,” Barton said. “At the time, Nola was stationed up on the roof, providing cover. Then the unit got a call to lift and shift. Apparently, they had bad intel—the supplier was spotted in another nearby town. ‘Stand down,’ their unit leader said, telling them to eat some lunch as they waited for the Humvees and trucks to arrive. So what do most soldiers do in that moment?”

  “They eat lunch.”

  “Of course they eat lunch. Everyone eats, smokes, writes a letter, whatever. And then there’s Nola,” Barton said with a brand-new coldness in his voice. “Up there on the roof, Nola pulls out her sketch pad and starts drawing. From her high perch, the street, the houses, they look almost mystical. So there she is, drawing away, her pencil scribbling as she adds the details you see on every poorly paved street in Iraq: trash and rubble, a burned-out car, a rat the size of a small cat…she even draws the manhole cover at the center of the road,” Barton says, pausing for effect. “And then it hits her. Why would there be a manhole cover when Iraq doesn’t have a defined sewer system?”

  “Oh crap.”

  “Oh crap is right. Dropping her pencil, Nola grabs her rifle, looks through the scope, and…there it is—a copper wire running out from the manhole. ‘Clear out!’ she yells to everyone. ‘Clear out!’ As the last person evacuates, Nola leans over the side of the roof, shoots once with the rifle, and misses. She shoots again and misses. Then with her third shot, she hits the wire and…”

  “Boom,” Zig says.

  “Like you wouldn’t believe. The whole damn street exploded, then collapsed on one side as a volcano of fire erupted into the air. From what they could tell, there was a massive weapons cache hidden underground. Our troops had been through there over two dozen times, but no one ever saw it…until Nola drew her picture and realized that this street with a manhole shouldn’t have a manhole.”

  “I’m surprised they didn’t give her a medal,” Zig said.

  “They should’ve. But then her commanding officer came running up to the roof, screaming at her for firing her weapon without first being fired upon. That’s a violation of the rules of engagement. Could’ve gotten everyone killed.”

  “But she saved the day.”

  “She thought the same. So before her commander knew what was happening, Nola hit him in the chest, ripped his captain’s patch off his uniform, and tossed it off the side of the building, down into the flames. ‘Sir, see you back at camp, sir,’ she told him, giving him the eff you of a full sir sandwich.”

  Zig couldn’t help but laugh. The motion sensor lights in the hallway popped on again. Pooomp.

  “Janitor,” Barton reassured him, pointing out into the hallway.

  “As for Nola,” Barton continued, “she was confined to her barracks for nearly a month, which apparently was something that happened a lot. A few weeks later, they transferred her to a new unit—now they had her doing supplies—shipping clean water to all the other nearby units. And then she does it again.”

  “Does what again?”

  “Painting,” Barton said. “When she draws— I know it sounds kinda whackadoo, but I’m telling you…Nola can—” He tapped the temple of his glasses with his pointer finger. “She sees things.”

  “So now she’s got superpowers? Like she got stabbed with a radioactive paintbrush?”

  “I know what you’re thinking. But one night in the back of a Humvee, Nola’s unit was heading to this tiny Iraqi town called Rawa. As she’s peering out the window, she starts sketching the landscape, drawing the sunset as it hits the fresh hay in the field. Here’s the thing: years ago, Rawa was bombed to devastation. Nothing grows out there; all the hay should be brown and dead. Nola of course starts shouting—Stop the truck! The hay’s the wrong color!—but her captain, he knows Nola’s a headache even on her best day. So maybe he pretends not to hear, maybe he doesn’t give a crap since his orders are in Rawa. Regardless, the Humvee keeps going. So Nola opens the door. And jumps out.”

  “Now the truck has to stop.”

  “From the report I read, she never even looked back. She was storming toward the field. And there it was. Hidden underneath the hay, they found two hundred stolen AK-47s—guns that would’ve killed countless of our sons and daughters.”

  “Okay, so she’s good at finding things that’re out of place. That doesn’t mean—”

  “Have you ever seen the report that was done on spotting explosive devices?” Barton asked. “Back in Afghanistan, the Army actually studied it. And y’know who was best at spotting IEDs? Redneck kids with hunting backgrounds, and poor urban kids who knew how to spot which gang controlled which block.”

  “What’s your point?”

  “That’s who was best at it. But Nola crushed them all. Two years ago, in an Iraqi slum where we’d never sent troops before, she spotted a green Mountain Dew bottle. How’d it get there? Behind one of the mud huts, she found a false wall that hid two ISIS chemical engineers, storing enough fertilizer, ammonia, and tanks of nitrogen to take out a small city. A few weeks after that, a large oil spot in a field led her to a stash of stolen Navy uniforms that ISIS was using to smuggle their people across borders. A month after that—”

  “I get it. She’s a bloodhound for finding stuff.”

  “I’m not sure you’re grasping the full picture here,” Barton said, not even noticing that out in the hallway, the “janitor” had gone silent. “Nola has an exceptional visual memory; she can absorb and recreate a crime scene in a moment. When she starts painting, details leap out at her, details no one else sees. But what she excels a
t more than anything”—he took a breath through his nose—“is pissing people off.”

  Zig thought about that, glancing into the office at the desk in the corner. Even from here, he could see there were no personal photos. “Is that why they stationed her here? When a disaster happens, you ship her out on a mission, then she can come back and keep painting without everyone trying to take her head off?”

  “They still wanted to take her head off. In six months, she went through six units. Seven different reprimands. It’s a personal record—and that doesn’t include all the captains and other commanding officers who looked so inept by what she found, they didn’t report her. From what I heard, a Marine gunnery sergeant took a swing at her. Nola’s reaction? She jammed a colored pencil into his elbow. But it’s not until he starts howling and ripping his jacket off that they see she stabbed him in the exact spot he had elbow surgery years earlier. Right in the scar. Like she could see through his uniform and knew the wound was there.”

  Zig nodded, replaying his and Nola’s near-silent ride over the past hour. Throughout the trip, Zig felt her stare. Even as a child, Nola’s black eyes looked through him. But now…he wondered what she saw in him today.

  “Eventually,” Barton added, “one of the Army bigwigs got smart and asked, ‘Why don’t we make her the Artist-in-Residence?’ So for the past few years, she’s been here, working out of our studio. As the artist, she can go anywhere, painting whatever she wants. If the Army needs her for something specific, they can send her in too—and take her out once she finds what we’re searching for.”

  “So she’s the Army’s bloodhound.”

  “Bloodhound?” There was a hitch in Barton’s voice. He shook his head. “Call her whatever you want, but trust me on this: Nola Brown isn’t a pet. She’s a gun. A weapon. You point her at something and you’ll get what you want—but just know it may also come back in pieces.”