False Flag

by John Altman

  She released the breath.

  She went to talk with Homeland.

  It was starting to snow: light, tumbling flakes, just in time for a white Christmas. But after a few flurries, the slate-gray sky seemed to reconsider. And by the time Christina reached the East Plaza, the snow had stopped.

  A blond male staffer spoke into a radio, made a pass with the wand, and told her the visitors were waiting in the Crypt. She found them there in the windowless room directly below Statuary Hall, standing between two neoclassical Doric columns. The day’s last tour moved past, the guide chirping enthusiastically.

  A chubby man a couple of decades older than Christina flashed his shield. Straight out of Central Casting: an Irish type, paunchy, with dark circles underscoring sharp green eyes. His partner was a handsome Semitic type with an aquiline nose and cleft chin. Bad cop and good cop respectively, unless they got creative and swapped roles. Tagging inexplicably along was a stout woman with silver roots, an inexpensive pantsuit, and a small stain on one lapel, which Christina at first took for a pin.

  “Jim McConnell,” said the Irish type. “Washington Regional Threat and Analysis Center, Homeland.”

  “That’s a mouthful.” Christina found a smile. “What can I do for you?”

  “Just a moment of your time. You’re in charge of the State this year?”

  “I’m directing it, if that’s what you mean.”

  “Quite a responsibility.”

  For a woman, he meant. Patronizing, but then, he was hardly the first. “This will be my fifth year, Mr. McConnell. I’ve been director of Capitol Media for seven.”

  “Same personnel at the State every year?”

  “Few tweaks here and there, but I’ve got a team I depend on.”

  “OS-SAPs?” Operations and support special access programs.

  “No. Yankee White, category two.” Personnel working in direct support of POTUS: air crew, mess, communications and transportation, medical, Camp David, and contractors requiring regular unescorted access to presidential support areas.

  “Vets?”

  “Some. All cleared.”

  “So …” He consulted a pad. “We’ve got broadcast groups in gallery eleven. Ninety seats assigned to daily press, nine seats for periodical press, pool feed on the floor—”

  “Seventeen print photographers in the gallery, fifteen rotating, one designated pool photojournalist. I hate to be rude, Mr. McConnell, but this is my crunch time. Might I direct you to Bob Sykes, who’s handling presidential protection at the event?”

  “We’ll speak with him, too.”

  “That’s a lovely ring,” the stout older woman remarked. An accent—Italian, maybe?

  “Thank you.” Christina raised her left hand automatically. “It belonged to my husband’s mother.”

  “Platinum?”

  “White gold.”

  Michael Fletcher was passing by, lugging his kit. Shoulders and chest bulging, the definition visible even beneath his jacket. He put his eyes down and kept moving, but not before Christina noticed that his passing glance was touched with private contempt.

  The stout older woman had also registered the man’s scorn—perhaps only subconsciously, but her gaze followed as he moved past. “Who’s that?”

  “Pool feed, House floor.”

  McConnell cleared his throat, consulted his pad again. “Have you got children, Ms. Thompson?”

  “What does that have to do with anything?”

  “Indulge me.”

  “Two.” As a matter of habit, she did not mention her husband’s children, since it opened the un-Christian subject of the second marriage.

  He made a note. “So during the address, the Supreme Court comes in the Senate side, yes? Meanwhile, the diplomatic corps, Joint Chiefs, Cabinet, and Senate come in through the House side, then proceed to the Chamber in groups. I’ll need the names of every staffer they move past.”

  “Should I be scared?”

  “Ma’am?”

  “Did you get a tip? Should I be scared?”

  “Just covering our bases.”

  “Because of Paris?”

  He shrugged. “Every staffer, I was saying, that they move past …”

  Manassas, VA

  A green body bag lay on a porcelain embalming table.

  Bottles of chemicals lined the floor. In one corner, pink rubber tubing wound like a frozen snake from a waist-high steel canister. Shelves held absorbent pads, moisturizing cream, hair gel, Kerlix gauze rolls, Johnson’s baby oil, Revlon makeup, Vicks VapoRub. The scent of lavender, mingled with cool sharp menthol, hung in the air.

  Dr. Emmett Thorpe switched on the vent fan, then unzipped a body bag. Seventy-two years old, he was a thirty-year veteran of the Northern District Office of Virginia’s medical examiner system. The man on the embalming table was some years younger, redheaded, with freckles still visible on his parchment-like skin.

  Thorpe leaned close over shadowed eye hollows, pursing his lips as if preparing to steal a kiss. The inlet where they had found John Doe was hypoxic, which made it inhospitable to larger scavengers. Often, crustaceans would take a submerged body down to bone in a matter of days, but in this case the shrimp and crabs had been out of luck. Cold temperatures had conspired with low oxygen levels to preserve the body astonishingly well.

  He turned to a shelf, daubed VapoRub beneath his nostrils, pulled on surgical gloves, and took forceps from a black case. As he separated John Doe’s ribs, a wave of rank air slapped him. His nostrils twitched. After a moment, the fan whisked it away.

  Heart and liver were mostly intact, lungs mostly liquefied. Frowning, he withdrew the forceps and angled the harsh lamp hanging from the ceiling. The face was collapsing, so it was hard to be sure. But something … Very gently, following an intuition, he lifted the corpse’s head from the shallow wooden block. Beneath the sloughing skin and carroty hair, he searched in vain for exit wounds. He returned the head to the table.

  Using the forceps, he seized, after two tries, a flap of dangling white skin where the face had been. Usually, the brain was one of the first things to disintegrate—eager bacteria from the mouth chewed through the palate—but the icy water had retarded the process considerably. He poked through fibrous, spongy mass. After some fishing, he withdrew one, two, three .40-caliber pistol bullets. “Gotcha,” he murmured aloud. “Little bastards.”

  He inspected the arms and hands. “Substantial presence of adipocere.” He said it aloud—a habit from long-ago residency days. He bent closer. Again, hard to tell, but … “Substantial maceration of hands. Fingertips missing.” The technique was a favorite of Russian Mafia who wanted to conceal the identities of their victims.

  He found no evidence of defensive injuries to the ulnar borders of the arms. No soft tissue or skeletal damage consistent with propeller injuries. Though it would likely yield no results, he searched anyway for indications of drowning. He found no admixture of proteinaceous material, no pulmonary surfactant in the airways. He might test surviving organs for diatoms, but in his learned opinion—unlike those of some younger coworkers—even a positive result here would be inconclusive.

  The skin of the legs was the color and consistency of Japanese rice paper. Feet, a translucent blue. Toes, nearly intact.

  He straightened. The Virginia State Police’s missing-persons database contained three hundred twenty names. Two hundred eighty of those were children. Of the remaining forty, fully three-quarters were women. A middle-aged, redheaded, freckled man who had died within the past month … Thorpe liked very much the odds of tracking him down.

  A Christmas miracle, he thought. Good luck had conspired from every side. Had a parapet on the inlet’s bridge not collapsed last week, engineers would never have found cracks in the bridge’s support. The frogmen would never have gone down to inspect the foundations, and John
Doe’s weighted body would still be sleeping with the fishes. Instead, the man was on the table—and in relatively good condition, to boot.

  Thorpe started cleaning up, whistling a soft but cheery tune. All part of His divine plan. The Good Lord worked in mysterious ways.

  Ellicott Street NW,

  Washington, DC

  In eighteen days, Michael Fletcher would do his best to kill himself as near to the president of the United States as he could manage. But tonight, he sifted together flour and spices, then added the mixture to a bowl of sugar, egg, and vanilla.

  Silas mixed without restraint, somehow avoiding slopping ingredients all over the floor. The woman watched with a smile. They dusted the countertop with flour, rolled dough into a wide flat leaf that reminded Michael of sheet explosive, and used cookie cutters to make gingerbread soldiers, which they transferred, all in a line, to a baking sheet.

  In the back of his mind, Michael saw the baking rack they had put the rabbit on, and the pebbles of shit it had dropped on its brief journey from the cage. The spoon heating up and turning red. The drop of pea soup spitting and popping. And behind that, the image of the redheaded cop. Sheriff: Loudoun County. Crawling klutzily, like Sandra Bullock trying to get onto her feet at the end of Gravity after finally falling back to earth; trying to protect his head and at the same time get his gun out of the holster. Then Michael’s mind had shut off. Not my fault, Judge; my mind shut off. Autopilot took over. Really, Judge, if you need to blame someone, blame Dr. Gross. Great name, huh? What’s it called when something sounds like what it is? Dr. Gross, who told me it’s not PTSD, it’s “combat stress.” He said combat stress is the prostate cancer of stress disorders—I swear, exact words. You watch and you wait and you see what develops. And while you’re at it, blame Sergeant Laforna, who—you can’t make this shit up—who had a good look at my record, my psych profile, my discharge orders, and decided there was no reason whatsoever to revoke Yankee White, category two. And while you’re still at it, blame the camel-fucking raghead who strapped on a belt filled with RDX and broken nails and ball bearings and nuts and bolts and climbed onto that bus and, for no good goddamn reason except the fact that he was surrounded by Jews, killed my big brother.

  They slid the sheet of gingerbread cookies into the oven, and Michael opened a bottle of red. In the living room, the television was playing the end of It’s a Wonderful Life.

  “A toast! To my big brother George: the richest man in town!”

  They settled onto the couch. Michael, the woman, Silas in the middle, Licorice jumping up to join them.

  “Every time a bell rings, an angel gets its wings.”

  As the credits rolled, Silas craned around. “Can I open a present now, Daddy?”

  It was a family custom: one present on Christmas Eve. Michael nodded. He had grown up in a home where Christmas was not celebrated. Instead they’d had Hanukkah. The first night had been great: big present, candles, dreidels spinning, latkes and chocolate gelt. But by the eighth night, money and inspiration had run low, and little Jewish boys and girls might receive for a gift a battery, a pencil, a pack of gum. The pacing of Hanukkah was inherently flawed. Christmas, by contrast, had a perfect dramatic arc. Anticipation leading up, building, building, building; the night before, one present, whetting the appetite; the morning of, pow! Stockings to get it going, then an orgy of tearing open packages. The afterglow: gingerbread cookies, Christmas goose.

  Silas scampered down, kneeling on the floor before the tree, relishing the moment, weighing his options. Michael sipped his wine and looked at the woman, who smiled in return.

  Looking back at his son, he thought, It’s not too late. You can still change your mind. Take Silas, scoop him up, hold him close, and run, run, run.

  I know that voice. Poe had a name for that. Imp of the Perverse, innit?

  Takes one to know one, thought Michael.

  Silas made his selection and tore open the wrapping paper. A Nerf sword. His face fell. “Can I open another?”

  “In the morning, champ. Go brush your teeth and change into your pj’s. I’ll come read.”

  “Can Kristen tuck me in?”

  Half an hour later, with Silas tucked in and the gingerbread men cooling on the rack (Michael saw the bunny again, eyes rolling, teeth gnashing), the living room dark except for the glowing tree, they poured more wine. Eighteen days, the voice editorialized. In the morning, seventeen.

  They made a desultory effort at sex. Farther down the block, carolers sang off-key. On the couch, it was hard to find a position that worked. And Michael had drunk too much wine. But perhaps the problem was not entirely his. Usually, the woman smelled good. Like ripe fruit with an undertone of something slightly tart, cutting the syrupy sweetness. But tonight, the tartness seemed to have come to the forefront. It came through her skin, her pores, sour and bitter. After a few minutes, they gave up, the act incomplete.

  They went upstairs. Soon she slept, breath flattening. Moonlight limned the faint scars on her cheek. Scents of gingerbread and wine lingered on the air. Michael lay awake, the wheels in his head grinding drunkenly.

  He had almost fourteen thousand dollars in a 360 Capital One savings account. Enough to get out of town, at least. Enough even to start again somewhere new. Down south, maybe. A dollar went further down there. Of course, there would be complications. Without papers, how would Silas go to kindergarten? Maybe somehow they could get forged documents. But how, exactly? This wasn’t the movies. In real life, how did you roll into a new town with your five-year-old and go about obtaining a fake Social Security number? He wouldn’t know where to start.

  And, of course, the Mossad would send its legendary assassins. Maybe even “Kristen” herself. Despite everything they had shared, she would show no mercy. Of that he had no doubt.

  It was all fantasy anyway. He would not uproot Silas, who, considering the rocky past few months, had been doing exceptionally well. Few tantrums, no nightmares. The kid had wet himself a few times, but now even these accidents seemed to be tapering off. Stacy had been right: the split was for the best. Moving Silas south in the middle of the night, to a strange town, telling him to use a strange name, always looking over their shoulders … That would be no life for the boy.

  On the other hand, having a father who committed suicide and, in the process, became the most notorious American traitor since Benedict Arnold—that would be no bed of roses, either.

  Slowly, Michael became aware of a presence standing over the bed. When he thought back on it in the following days, he guessed it had been a dream. But it didn’t feel like a dream. Or a drunken hallucination. He was lying awake, and the woman was breathing evenly beside him, and Silas was sleeping down the hall, and the carolers outside were calling it a night, and down in the living room the tree still glowed, fire hazard be damned, and on the air a trace of gingerbread still lingered, and in the upstairs bedroom a presence stood looming over the bed. A vision, a visitation, a revenant.

  Seth.

  Remember that time, Mikey, with Frank Wexler?

  And Michael did remember.

  He had forgotten but now it came back, not in a flood but as a taste, fleeting like honeysuckle on the tongue. They had been in high school. Michael was a freshman, Seth a junior. They were on a Young Judaea field trip. To a play, a museum—that part was lost. But the bus ride home, Michael remembered.

  Dark, late. Little kids in bed by now. But in the back of the bus, young Jews, girls and boys, aged fourteen to seventeen, still awake. Both the chaperone and the driver, Michael remembered, had been immensely fat men. Up at the front, a world away. They could not move quickly enough to catch anyone back here. Here in the back of the bus, cloaked by shadows, kids were getting up to mischief. A girl and a boy were making out. The girl’s face was dusted with glitter that sparkled in the headlights of passing cars on the highway. Glitter on her cheeks, her eyelids. He
avy breathing. In a nearby seat, a sharp sniff—not cocaine, Seth had told Michael later, but snuff. Seth had been sitting next to his little brother. And then Frank Wexler had craned around from the seat in front of them. Pressing something into Michael’s hand. A cigarette. Yet not a cigarette. This had been before e-cigarettes, before vape pens, and Michael had not understood what it was, until Frank whispered, “It’s a bat.” And when Michael still looked at him blankly, “A one-hitter.”

  “It’s for smoking pot,” Seth had murmured.

  The memory was giving itself to him now. The taste becoming a gulp, filling his mouth. He could smell Frank’s breath, tinged with bacon cheeseburger. (Only two of the twelve members of the Young Judaea group conformed to the laws of kashruth.) He could see the strange smear of amber light behind passing factories on the highway, and feel the air stir as an eighteen-wheeler rumbled past. The bus had been rickety, practically open to the elements. He could hear Ariella Abramovitz moaning in a way she probably thought sexy, as Ben Schoenberg worked his hand under her panties. Frank Wexler was leaning over, flicking a butane lighter. In the sudden flare, Frank’s face, all arched eyebrows and widow’s peak and shadows, looked downright satanic. The flame went out. Michael put the one-hitter against his lips. The lighter flicked again, and he tried to inhale. He got a mouthful of nothing. Ariella moaned again. The lighter flared again. Glitter sparkled. Michael tried again to inhale. Then Seth was saying, “Fuck, he’s coming.”

  And suddenly, there in the aisle beside them stood their chaperone. Faster, lighter on his feet than anyone could have imagined. Frank Wexler was gone, mysteriously and completely. And Michael was busted, holding the one-hitter in his hand, his mouth full of smoke. The chaperone extended a flattened palm like someone offering bites of carrot to a horse. Rocking back and forth as the rickety bus moved swiftly down the highway. Michael froze. Busted. Finished. And then Seth turned up his face and said, loud and clear and firm, “It’s mine. I double-dared him. It’s my fault.” He snatched the one-hitter from Michael’s unresisting fingers. And that did the trick, possession being nine-tenths of the law. The chaperone hauled Seth up—at least, in Michael’s suddenly vivid memory—by the nape of his neck, like a mother cat lifting its kitten, and dragged him toward the front of the bus. Michael turned his head and let out the sweet-sour puff of smoke he’d been holding. The cracks in the bus whisked it away, dispersing it above the highway, into the obliging night.