Twenty-four Days

by Jacqui Murray

  Fifty-nine minutes after they said goodbye, she rang his bell. When he opened the door, she greeted him wearing nothing but a raincoat and a grin.

  “I’m ready for dinner.”

  Mohammed gulped back the bile that burned his throat and invited her in, a heavy flashlight hidden at his side. Thirty minutes later, he loaded the bloody plastic sheet with her body, wrapped securely in a carpet purchased from Home Depot, into his car. How proud Allah must be of his servant.

  Chapter Ten

  Day Five, Friday, August 11th, early evening

  Columbia University

  Kali’s footsteps echoed through empty hallways. No phones rang, no people chattered, no elevator grinding as it took students to class, only the faint thrum of music from some party she hadn’t been invited to. Again, she felt as though someone watched her, but saw no one suspicious. She shook it off. Her son had moved across the country. Her best friend was still recovering from last year’s trauma, and after tonight, Zeke would probably dump her. There were three good reasons to be nervous.

  She signed out with the guard—Sharon, according to his name tag—and stepped outside. The day’s ninety-degree heat had bled off to a pleasant evening, but her mind was on her future. When she finished her PhD, she must find a job. Most candidates ended up working for contacts made during post-grad studies. Kali had no interest in the FBI.

  She glanced at the spot of light three stories up. Eitan would be here until midnight or later, sleep on the couch in his lab if he got tired, shower in the faculty lounge in the morning, and eat breakfast from the food stands. Kali had expected him to grieve, but not for two years. She encouraged him to date, but he refused. Why would he, he asked. No one got excited when the clock showed 14:22, or the odometer reached 36912. No one saw the scintillating patterns that pulsed from data or traced their finger along the landscape of sizes and colors. See the red one—how bright it is? Kali wondered if the memories of his wife offset the pain. It might be a worthy trade.

  Lost in her thoughts, she crashed full-bodied into a stranger. She flailed to regain her balance, flinging her purse in the process, exploding make-up and Kleenex and everything else around her feet. “Oh—excuse me!”

  He pranced around her sunglasses to keep from stepping on them, tried to grab a bouncing pill box and ended up batting it further down the sidewalk. “My fault,” and the stranger helped her stuff everything back into her bag. “I’m distracted. My wife… Well, there’s a long story. I’m sorry,” and he left, muttering about families and friends.

  His voice was familiar. Kali watched as he left. He would be handsome except for a ragged red cheek, as though burned and badly. Did he wear sunglasses because he was he blind?

  Kali shrugged. She had only forty-five minutes to shop, make dinner, and greet Zeke.

  Kali rushed down the market aisles. The chicken smelled fresh so she put it into her basket. Same with lettuce, Brussels sprouts, rolls, and Zeke’s beer. She handed over her last twenty and a handful of change and ended up putting half the beer back.

  Ten minutes later she arrived at her building, an old brick multi-story squashed between two high rises and backed into a narrow alley. She crossed the lobby, a generous name for the unmanned Spartan foyer with its scarred linoleum and chipped beige walls, fumbled her key into the lock, bumped the door open with her hip, and ordered, "Down, Sandy!"

  Undeterred, her fifty-pound yellow Lab clattered across the tile floor, planted his paws on her chest and swiped a wet tongue across her face while balancing on one leg.

  “Nice day, huh? You always have nice days."

  Kali rubbed under his neck and he sprinted to the bone shelf, wagging his entire backside in anticipation.

  “You want your good boy good dog good evening bone,” and she tossed him a treat which he swallowed whole, eyes begging for more.

  She shook the box. “All gone.”

  The voicemail blinked. It better not be Zeke. She listened as she put the chicken and vegetables next to the stove and the beer in the refrigerator. "Hello, Ms. Delamagente. My name is Special Agent Haster with MI-6.” She winced as his s’s whistled. “I have a proposition for you that’s already cleared with your SecNav and your friend, Special Agent Robert James. Please call when you get in."

  Dropping James’s name didn’t work as Special Agent Haster with MI-6 hoped: She deleted all six of his messages.

  Nothing from Zeke, which was OK. Nothing from Sean, which was not.

  "He must call. He needs a ride from the airport.”

  How naïve she had been as a teenager, to think she could handle a baby. Between finishing high school, applying for college and finding a job, she struggled to bond with her son. Thankfully, grandma stepped in. By the time she passed, Kali and Sean had both grown up. Kali missed him every day. She wanted to visit, but he always said he was busy. Still, he promised to be there tomorrow for Man vs. Machine.

  She jumped in the shower and stood there, hands against the wall, as the water washed over her. This weekend was about change. She and Zeke would figure out if they shared more than the past. Otto would become mobile. Man vs. Machine would climax her dissertation, and she would meet her adult son.

  Cheered by a plan, she turned off the shower, thinking about the black tank dress that reached mid-thigh and the sixty-inch string of pearls she planned to wear this evening.

  And heard the end of Zeke's message. "Sorry to cancel. I’m working on a … project... See you tomorrow?"

  Kali stood naked, dripping on the carpet, eyes hot as she tried not to cry. Six weeks ago, under sparkling night skies, awash in the thrill of ancient mysteries, she believed Zeke when he promised to turn is back on James.

  “Damn you, Zeke! What gives you the right?”

  She sobbed so hard her whole body shook. Tears spilled down her cheeks, Sandy’s tail banging against her hope chest as he tried to figure out what to do. She blew her nose, threw on pajamas, shoved the chicken in the fridge and reheated soup which she ate standing up. She ended up throwing most of it out.

  Dishes washed, Kali collapsed onto the couch. Sandy plopped at her feet, nose on his paws and snored contentedly, disaster averted. She was about to tuck in for the night when a news story interrupted the broadcast.

  North Korea pressed ahead with final preparations. They warn any incursion into a 500-mile perimeter around the trajectory on launch day will be considered an Act of War. The highest ranking military officer, General Kim Soon Young, called this test more necessary than ever with the disappearance of two of the West’s nuclear subs.

  Missing subs—as in more than one? That’s how James snagged Zeke. She wound a rope of hair around her index finger as the announcer continued:

  In a show of support for a nation who has lately become a strategic partner, Iran called the western world out of control. “Islam is a peaceful religion who wishes to live in harmony with its neighbors, but we will defend ourselves as would the US and Britain if required.”

  She flipped the TV off. "How's anyone lose a sub, Sandy?"

  The Lab yawned and sprinted through the doggie door. As he sniffed for the perfect spot, her next door neighbor shuffled out dressed in pajamas and slippers.

  "Hey, Mr. Winters. Everything OK?"

  She met the retired Marine the day she moved in. He loved dogs, but considered himself too old to own one so offered to babysit Sandy. Since then, the Lab spent many sleepovers next door.

  "Oh, sure. Everything's great." His glistening white capped teeth, unlined face, and thick gray hair made him look fifty instead of eighty. "A friend of yours stopped by today. Said he’d find you on campus. Did you see him?”

  “Hunh. No. Who?”

  “Didn’t get his name. Nice looking guy, older than your usual, had a scar on his cheek like he was hit by a boiler blast—what’s wrong, Kitten? Did I say something?”

  It must be the man she’d run into.

  “No—I did see him. Did he say anything else?”

&n
bsp; “Like what?”

  Sweat broke out on Kali’s forehead. “Never mind.”

  “Sure, kitten. How's Sean? Doing OK in San Diego? That's a great town, San Diego. Lots of Navy people, decent folk. And what about Zeke? Sure miss talking shop with him. When's he coming by again? You two kids have fun in De-manisi?"

  Kali shared highlights of the paleoanthropological dig, but kept her dark thoughts about Zeke to herself.

  “I gotta go, Mr. Winters. Sandy, come!”

  Sandy bounded back through his doggie door and sprinted to her bedroom while Kali checked her phone. Still no call from Sean. She brushed her teeth, locked the doors, and touched a photo of her son. He held his acoustic bass in one hand, Pernambuco wood bow in the other, and wore a crooked grin, such a whimsical period in Sean’s life when his biggest decision was whether to study music at Julliard or science at MIT.

  She flipped on her favorite Edgar Meyers recording—a duet with Yo-yo Ma—and opened a Robert Parker novel. Only 10 pm and already tucked into bed. Maybe she should join a chess club or attend a poetry reading. She liked poetry when she was a child.

  Chapter Eleven

  Day Five, Friday evening, August 11th

  Little Italy, San Diego CA, Apartment of Sean Delamagente

  Sean Delamagente rubbed a hand over his greasy hair and caught a whiff of old sweat. Yeah. I’ll have to shower tonight before leaving or change clothes. He sniffed again. Or both.

  He slouched in front of his computer set-up, wearing black jeans and a Quicksilver t-shirt as he did every day and many nights to bed. He purchased ten-packs so dressing was a snap. Fashion didn't matter. He had no girlfriend.

  A crash blurted from his speakers. He’d built a subroutine to locate the source of noise and zoomed in on it. Apartment 140, Harmon—drunk again. He emailed a screenshot to the landlord so he knew who broke the chair. Apartment 420 and 533 were back from TGI Fridays with doggie bags. Sean was surprised they were still dating as much as they fought. Then Apartment 310 slipped into the frame. Ankour Mohammed. He always dipped his head as though hiding from the cameras.

  Sean leaned back and gazed around his bachelor unit—wrinkled clothes piled on the floor, spreadsheets and diagrams on the walls. Others might call it disorganized, but not Sean. Yeah. He rubbed his temples, worried he’d inherited his mother’s headaches.

  Or maybe it was stress. Probably stress. All senior year, after being kidnapped by Salah al-Zahrawi, he looked over his shoulder. If he took the subway to class events, he’d cut through two or three cars, and as the doors slammed shut, jumped off and board the next one. As he walked, he checked his reflection in storefronts. Sometimes, he started running, full speed, and then ducked behind a building. He never found anyone, but couldn’t stop himself from doing it again the next time.

  He never told his mom. She had enough going on with a new boyfriend, her PhD thesis, and Dean Porter. If his mother’s experiences represented academia, Sean wanted nothing to do with it. He liked what Eitan did—play computers all day.

  He liked what Zeke did, too, but could never be that person. First off, he had no muscles. Except in his fingers. He could type all day. No problem-o. Yeah.

  When he graduated last June, he moved to California because UC San Diego had given him a scholarship. At first, his landlord rejected the idea of a sixteen-year-old living alone, but when Sean nabbed two employees stealing money, the manager hired him as Security Director, the pay: free rent. That worked for Sean. His scholarship covered tuition and books. His mom paid for food. Eitan funded the spy cams. The boy needed nothing else.

  He pressed the heels of his hands into his gritty eyes and rubbed. Classes were way easy so he spent all his free time studying hackers, crackers, backhacks, traffic analysis, cryptanalysis, keyloggers, web crawlers, web spiders, and everything to do with cybersurveillance. When he moved in here, he set up cameras in the building and adjacent areas like the Dog Park. Yeah. He found three lost dogs already which made everyone happy, but Sean needed to find bad guys before they found him. Not like last year. Yeah. He was smarter each day. He almost wished al-Zahrawi was alive so he could beat him.

  But today, his cone of safety had cracked. Someone had been killed and Sean was pretty sure the murderer lived in his building.

  It started two weeks ago when one of his web crawlers logged that Ankour Mohammed in 310 spent a lot of time talking about the San Diego Naval Base. Yeah. Most people only did that if they worked there. Sean planted video cams in an industrial park catty-corner to the Naval Base and waited.

  Today—this afternoon—his spy cam recorded Mohammed on his cell talking in Farsi. Sean got only one word when he ran it through his translator: Parisher. It would have been meaningless except for a news story about dead bodies thought to be Parisher trainees.

  Was this the same Parisher? His throat tightened and a chill ran through his body. He tagged fifteen instances of Mohammed’s voice in his library of surveillance tapes. To eliminate background noises, he used a free program called Waves X-Noise to block frequencies below one-hundred ten Hz and above five kHz—the range of human speech—and then erase common sounds like cars, machinery, and dog barks. He got two matches. The first was Mohammed talking to an American in Seaport Village. Yeah. Wrong location, but Sean filed it.

  Before he could click on the second, something moved to his left.

  "Oh—yeah, I missed your dinner.” Itui, a species of electric eel called Itui Cavala, was often hungry. The snake-like creature bumped again against the wall of a six-foot aquarium, one luminous eye staring at the boy while its shining tail swished through the water, as though to ask how he had forgotten.

  “Here, your favorite,” and Sean dropped five pinches of brown flakes into the water, then five more while he chatted about Mohammed and Parishers and asked the fish what it thought was going on.

  Itui proved good company, but Sean had purchased him for other reasons. Every day, Sean harvested its electricity. If anyone broke into Sean’s unit, a device powered by this invisible energy source silently collected data which it automatically uploaded to the cloud. Yeah. If Sean failed to access it within a day, Eitan Sun received an email link to the files.

  Itui satisfied, Sean opened the second file, recorded five days ago. Mohammed had been with British and Middle Eastern individuals judging by the accents. Sean identified a name—Triumph—as the group disappeared into a building. When they reappeared thirty minutes later, the British accents had disappeared. This time, his translator picked up '38 44 90' and cruiser. Was it a code? He googled them and found nothing. He got only one more sentence—Why kill them?

  His eyes glazed over and his hands trembled on the keyboard. He gulped, trying to slow his breathing, stroked the keys, listened to the hum of the drives, let the familiarity calm him. He stuffed a handful of Tostitos from a half-full bag into his mouth as he checked his email. No word from Eitan. Sean had to get ready for his flight, but his brain wouldn’t stop whirring through everything he’d seen. There was a connection he couldn’t quite see.

  As he was about to give up for the evening, he found something unusual. A week ago, Mohammed in Apartment 310 entertained one of the most beautiful women Sean had ever seen—deep green eyes framed by lustrous blue-black hair, skin so smooth not even pores marred the perfection. She stared into his camera as though she knew he watched. She and Mohammed left in beach clothes and returned hours later, but she never exited Mohammed’s apartment. He ran an open-ended search, but found nothing. He widened it to include cars around the building the day she arrived and then compared those to the ones he logged in today.

  One car stood out, in the same spot. It even had a ticket.

  Where had she gone? And who was the woman now in Mohammed’s apartment?

  Sean would have to miss his flight.

  Chapter Twelve

  Day Five, Friday evening, August 11th

  Imperial College, London, Lab of Dr. John Penbury

  Only thirty-eight
, but Oliver Najafian was already stooped under the weight of worry. His hair clung flat and dull to his skull and grey streaked the temples. Stress. It must be. His father retained rich dark hair into his sixties.

  The Iranian immigrant trudged down Prince Consort Road's wide tiled sidewalk and entered the double glass doors of Imperial College’s Blackett Laboratory, Physics Department. He wiggled through the stream of people rushing home, shoved his backpack into a file cabinet, and began to clean up after students who cared little for the physics Oliver had loved passionately until the world turned it into a grenade with the pin out. Tonight, he would change that.

  With a doctorate in physics, Najafian had wanted to use it to better the lives of his countrymen. Iranian leaders, though, had other ideas, all focused on nuclear weapons. Najafian hastily immigrated to Britain. A future was important to him.

  But there was a problem transferring his degrees. The British Education Ministry gave him a file number and promised to call. Najafian did not trust government so every Monday, he walked 2.8 meandering miles along Hyde Park, skirting Buckingham Palace Gardens, wound from Strutton Ground to Old Pye Street to St. Ann's and Great Peter Street, until he reached Marsham Street #2, home of the immigration office. There he asked about progress on his case. They always promised to tell him when they had word and he returned home.

  Thanks to the intercession of his long-time colleague, Dr. John Penbury, Najafian found this job as a lab assistant while he awaited the disposition of his case. Penbury was one of two top world scholars in an area of theoretic physics called metamaterials, Najafian the other. Penbury’s inquiry focused on using metamaterials to hide objects from view, not unlike Harry Potter’s cloak in the famous movie. Often they chatted about the concept—refracting light rays so they flowed around an object rather than bouncing off. People saw the distraction, not the reality. They theorized that adaptations of the process would divert other rays such as shock waves or sound. Always, they focused on peaceful uses.