A Vicious Balance: A Mystery Thriller

by Jolyon Hallows

  “Given your obvious contempt for me and maybe for anyone who wears a skirt, why do you want me?”

  “Contempt for you? I don’t know you well enough to be contemptuous. I want someone because there’s value in another set of eyes and ears. It’s stretching things to say I want you, but I need someone who is sold on the rightness of this investigation, someone who believes it to be just, and who I think will be willing to fight for it.”

  “So why not Adam Archer? He was all hot to go ahead.”

  “Archer would be willing to work on the investigation, but not to commit to it.”

  “So you can read peoples’ minds.”

  “It’s not a question of mind reading. To Archer, it’s an interesting puzzle to be viewed with professional detachment. That’s my job. To you, it’s personal. It is—or at least you said it was—an affront to your legal training that a man is in prison for a crime that, by any standard of reasonable doubt, he didn’t commit. Even though you’ve been threatened, you’re willing to go ahead.” He hesitated. “I appreciate that.”

  “And why does it matter to you?”

  “There’s something about this case that doesn’t sit right with me. It’s more than just a woman who jumped into bed with the wrong men.”

  Kagan said, “Why do you think that?”

  “A couple of things Detective MacIlhenny said. For one, there are no records on her. High school, university, credit cards, driver’s license. Nothing. That’s a red flag to me. And it’s a sign there’s a lot more going on. You know, I’m not even sure Sherry Galina was her real name. I’d love to know her history.”

  9

  Julia Dennison slumped at her desk in her dormitory room, a bottle of sleeping pills and a can of beer in front of her. To say she was studying them, or staring at them, or even looking at them would imply focus, but any thoughts she had were more fleeting observations that someone about to end her life should feel an emotion. Fear, sadness, expectation, anything other than this void that had emptied her mind.

  Her thoughts flitted through images like a slide show where each picture flashed to the next before she could grasp it. The pain of her father’s lurks to her bedroom. The guilt in her mother’s eyes. The shame that infused her. Her only respite, the only boost to her self-esteem, came when she realized her face and figure made her a prize in the game of sex. She would fall into bed with anyone who would have her. Copulation meant caring. After all, her father loved her. Didn’t he?

  Throughout her teens, she had struggled with society’s platitude that these were the best years of her life. To her, that meant things would only get worse. She left high school with nothing but her pain and the anguish that the message was right.

  She had been coping, but coping had been a trial that had dominated her life. A few months earlier, her desperation had led her to buy the sleeping pills, but some undercurrent of self-worth—or was it cowardice?—had caused her to back away, to hide them in a closet. She had learned she could handle the pain by forcing herself to take life day by day.

  Until today. She had been in the library stacks when she heard Gene’s voice. Of all the men she had entertained, Gene was special. He talked to her, made her laugh, made her believe he was interested in her mind and her opinions and her hopes. Gene had made her dream that perhaps he was the one. With him, love and life might just be attainable. She allowed herself to smile as she listened to him talking to another man.

  “Room 229. Knock before you bang.” Both men had laughed. She felt a rush of anger. Or was it betrayal? Room 229 was hers.

  “Is she an airhead or does she actually have a brain?”

  “Who cares? Look, you gotta flatter these broads. If you can make ’em laugh, they think you’re special and they get even more horny. And her brain? All I want her brain to do is spread her legs and move her ass up and down.”

  She had collapsed onto the library floor, too stunned for tears. Gene’s contempt was like acid burning away her façade, slamming her into the mirror of her reality. She was a slut, a public vagina, a whore no man would ever respect. Or love. After how long she couldn’t have said, she forced herself up, stumbled out of the library, and dazed her way back to her room, not because she wanted to be there, but because there was no place else to go. She retrieved the sleeping pills from the closet and a can of beer that someone, perhaps even Gene, had left in her room. She didn’t think of backing away, she didn’t think of going forward. Her actions were as automatic as rain, as preordained as decay.

  She had no plan. She didn’t need one. Swallow the pills in handfuls and force down the beer. She hated beer, but it was there. Besides, someone told her it enhanced the effect of the pills and anyway, ending her life in distress seemed fitting.

  She opened the bottle of capsules and poured them onto the desk, but some of them rolled away, a few onto the floor. She spread a towel over the desk and dumped the capsules onto it. She picked up the ones that had fallen to the floor and piled them back with the others.

  She pried at the pull tab on the beer can, but it resisted, threatening to break her fingernail. That seemed fair. Her soul was broken. Why not her fingernail? She yanked on the tab, levered it up, and grimaced at the opening. She would not drink through that. She poured the contents of the can into a glass, letting the foam overflow onto the towel.

  She looked around her room, her gaze touching on the clothes she would never again wear, the pictures she would never again admire, the books she would never again study. She turned back to the desk and, as if in slow motion, picked up a handful of capsules, dumped them into her mouth, and took a swallow of the beer. She grimaced. It was as foul as she had remembered. She repeated, swallowing more capsules, chasing them with beer, then another batch and another.

  She was done. The capsules were gone. The glass was empty. She stood up, crossed over to the door, and opened it. She left it ajar, turned out the lights, and lay down on her bed. She wondered who would find her. She hoped it would be Angela with her giggles and her squeals and her homilies about how wonderful life was. The thought of providing Angela with a trauma that might condemn her to a lifetime of nightmares was Julia Dennison’s last prospect as her eyes closed and her mind ebbed.

  But her stomach was as averse to beer as were her taste buds. The capsules, combined with the beer and a lack of food, churned in her gut. The convulsion rammed up her throat and into her mouth slamming into her just in time for her to wrench her head sideways, catapulting the stream of vomit out into the room. Her stomach heaved as more bile, beer, and capsules spewed from her mouth to join the muck oozing across the floor.

  Having expressed its outrage, her stomach settled down, allowing the realization to swamp her that she was worthless. Not even competent to take her own life. She began to sob, her body convulsing as the frustration of her past mocked her. And in the dark, tears soaking her face, the stench of vomit invading her lungs, the bitterness of bile fouling her mouth, Julia Dennison knew she had reached the bottom.

  Her door opened. A voice called her name, hesitant. A voice that sought to help, to give comfort. A figure entered her room. Someone garbed in a chador. Mujaahida. A student that Dennison had mocked for her piety, for her eccentricity.

  Dennison whimpered at her to go away, but she stood, silhouetted in the doorway for a minute. She waded through the sludge on the floor, sat down on the edge of the bed, held Dennison’s hand, and stroked her hair. The kindness was too much to endure. Julia Dennison reached up, clutched the robed figure down onto the bed, and clung with the strength of desperation as she sobbed out the demons of her life.

  The two became inseparable. Mujaahida, her chador obscuring her body, contrasted with the tight sweaters and jeans that revealed Dennison’s. They communed as though they were alone in the world. Others in the residence puzzled over what either of them got out of the relationship. Both were loners, but while Mujaahida slept alone, Dennison had entertained a stream of men panting their way into her room, a
rdor that had ceased when this friendship began.

  “How do manage to be so . . . serene?” Dennison asked.

  “Why are you so insecure? What power have you given to these others to hurt you?”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “You are hurt because you long for their approval. Whether they granted it or not would be of no consequence to you if you didn’t care.”

  “All you’re saying is that if I didn’t care, I wouldn’t care. How does that help?”

  “Help? I’m not offering help. Only the observation that as long as the opinions of others are important to you, you will be vulnerable.”

  “How can I stop caring what people think?”

  “See them for what they really are. Shallow souls. Little more than grunting savages seeking only their own gratification. Slaves to a culture that fears worship and worships fear.”

  “What do you mean, worships fear?”

  “You must do your own thinking, create your own discovery.”

  Over the next few weeks, the path her companion had embraced beckoned her, pulled at her like a magnet clinging to the strength of steel.

  “You go by only one name, Mujaahida. What’s your last name?”

  “Mujaahida is my last name. And my first. And my only.”

  “Don’t you have a family name?”

  “I had a family name. I have renounced it.”

  “What was it?”

  “It is unimportant.”

  “Were you raised Muslim? How did you come to be called Mujaahida?”

  “I was raised Christian, but like you, I found my life to be empty, without purpose or hope. One day, a kind man invited me to a retreat. I barely knew him, but he had an aura of peace.”

  “Like you.”

  “As I have tried to cultivate. The retreat was for those who embraced Allah and the teachings of the Qur’an and who were attracted to its simple, structured philosophy. I resisted at first. In my blindness, I had rejected all religions. I wanted nothing to do with any of them. But by the time the retreat was over, I knew that for the first time in my life, I had something to live for, something to commit to, something to embrace. I took the name Mujaahida. It means warrior.”

  “Warrior? That doesn’t fit who you are.”

  “You don’t know who I am.”

  “Islam. I’ve never been comfortable with religion. I’m not sure this will give me anything.”

  “Give you anything? If you look on it as a commercial transaction, trading your devotion in return for some inner peace, you’re right.”

  Dennison took a deep breath. Her friend had given her a vision of a life she’d never thought possible. A life with purpose, without woe. Her voice shaking, she asked, “How do I find out more about this?”

  Mujaahida frowned. “What you’re asking is not easy. This is not some social club. You must prove you are worthy.”

  “How? How do I do that?”

  “If you wish to learn, you must come to a retreat. There, you will work hard, you will eat little, you will sleep less, and you will obey your teachers without question. Understand, when you are there, you must discard the trappings of your life here, the illusion that you have choice. You must yield to the control of others. You must dedicate yourself to them and to their commands.”

  Hard work and dedication? She had never been pushed, never been given the chance to prove herself. She had dismissed as indoctrination the platitude that life was worth struggling for, worth committing to. But her friend’s words gave her a surge of hope. If there was a possibility of peace, of belonging, of purpose, the search was worthy. “I want to learn.”

  Mujaahida smiled. “Come with me this weekend. Take next week off. We will return in ten days.”

  So that weekend, Julia Dennison followed Mujaahida to a camp in the mountains. For ten days, she arose at three in the morning and retired after midnight. She swabbed floors, scoured toilets, washed dishes, and scrubbed laundry. The pittance of lentils and rice she was given left her hungry. When she asked for more, she was denied her next meal. When she asked questions or made comments, she was punished with extra duties and reduced rations. But one day when she had completed her work, one of her spiritual guides bowed his head. Nobody had ever bowed to her before.

  She came to understand that she was there to learn, not to speak, so she remained silent except for reciting prayers at the times they were to be observed, spoken in a language she didn’t know.

  She sat on a mat while men whose beards cascaded over their robes talked of the discipline of their religion and the death of morals in the culture in which they lived. She recognized a chasm between the serenity of this way of life and the turmoil of the world she had come from. The difference between submitting to a path of austerity, and the struggle to choose from the chaos of the alternatives that clamored for her attention. And when the floors and the toilets and the dishes and the laundry were spotless, she understood that labor led to peace.

  But peace was not what her teachers had in mind.

  They taught her obedience.

  They taught her simplicity.

  They taught her hatred.

  They fanned the embers of her despair, stoking them into anger and honing them into rage. Into rage toward her parents and their avarice that had ripped away her childhood. Into rage toward the louts who had invaded her body. Into rage toward the dullards in her society who proclaimed respect but practiced contempt. Her teachers polished her anger until it gleamed, until it became a beacon within her soul, consuming her with fury.

  She remained at the retreat for a month. When she left, she bore a new wardrobe, a new resolve to bring the discipline of her new faith to the world she now loathed, and a new name. She was Faiza, the triumphant. And her shoulder bore a tattoo. A hammer crossing the crescent of Islam.

  When the university term ended, she and Mujaahida went to see her mother, a visit that doused her into the quagmire of the world she had forsaken, that ennobled the one she now inhabited. She saw the woman who had raised her as a container with no purpose other than giving her life. Temporary. Discardable. When she turned her back on her mother and strode away for what she knew would be the last time, she felt no more emotion than she had when she had left the sterility of her dormitory room.

  She and Mujaahida spent the summer in a training camp in Yemen, learning methods of weaponry, infiltration, and propaganda. But the university term loomed, and with each day, her dread intensified at the disgust of returning to the sewer she had come to despise. She sought out her chief advisor and asked to be allowed to stay, to teach others, to serve the cause in any way possible. Anything but leave the home she had discovered, the cause she had come to honor, and the mission she had embraced. But the response was not what she had expected. Her advisor had said to her and Mujaahida, “Your devotion to our cause is great, and I know you will bring glory to us all. But how devoted are you?”

  “Have I given cause for your concern?” Faiza had pleaded.

  “Far from it. Your dedication and hard work have earned my respect and that of all our leaders.” He bowed to her and said, “You wish to serve us. We are honored. But what form might that service take? The easiest path would be for you to remain here helping us to train other brothers and sisters. A harder path, but one that would still not challenge you, would be to return to your homes wearing the clothes of your faith and practicing that faith among those who mock it. But there is a more difficult way in which you can serve us, one that will demand more discipline than most of our followers can offer. I have observed you, and I believe that both of you could be among these chosen.”

  “What do you want us to do?”

  “Return to your homes as Westerners. Wear their clothes. Practice their religion. Engage yourselves in their meaningless pursuit of pleasure. And wait.”

  “Wait? For what?”

  “For a signal. For instructions to serve us as only those who appear to be part of our enemy’s cultu
re ever could.”

  “You want us to become moles?”

  “No, my child. Moles are espionage agents who work for the enemy. You would not make credible agents. The correct term for what I am asking you to become is sleeper. To everyone else, you will seem like just another citizen, which makes you valuable for us.”

  “You want us to plant bombs or—”

  “No, no,” he had interrupted. “We have specialists to do things like that. We use our sleepers to provide us with information and sometimes to do other tasks that are important to us. It is not a role with the joy of struggle, nor is it filled with the honor of battle or martyrdom, but without it, our goals are not achievable, our glory no more than a dream. Our sleepers are like the cogs and gears in a motor. Unseen, unappreciated, but essential. However, before you say yes, remember that what we are asking of you demands more discipline than any other role we offer. You will be alone in their culture, without even the strength and support of one another. You will be exposed to the mindlessness of their music and entertainment, the propaganda of the superiority of their way of life. All but the best will be seduced away from the true path. I do believe the two of you are among the best.”

  So Julia Dennison, Faiza, returned home, her new name, Sherry Trepanier, emblazoned on a diploma in office administration. It was faked, but with her looks and the intercession of another sleeper, it was enough for her to get a job as a receptionist at an insurance company. She socialized little, and when someone tried to steer the conversation away from trivia to politics or world affairs, she would whine something like, “Oh, I don’t know.” Yes, they thought she was an airhead. Just what she needed them to think.

  She had asked why she was to return to her home, to a city where people knew her instead of to some place she had never been and where nobody would recognize her. Her teachers told her that her knowledge of the city would be more valuable than the risk that she might be exposed. She managed to avoid her mother and her former classmates by staying away from the neighborhoods they frequented. When she met someone from her past, she either ignored them or pretended to be someone else. No doubt they considered her rude, but had they known the depth of her loathing, they would not so easily have been able to forget they had seen her.