Prism

by Rachel Moschell

  Alejo groaned and leaned back heavily in his chair. “I didn’t want anything to happen to you,” he ground out flatly, “but they were about to slit Wara’s throat. I had to leave with her.”

  “Thank God you did…” Pablo muttered, appearing to be still trying to take it all in. “So, you kill people as part of your job, but you decided to help Wara. And now you left that job…”

  “Dad.” Alejo cut him off, his whole body tense. “I can’t talk about all this now. I just can’t. I feel bad—it’s been a long time, and I just show up and ruin your lives. For that, you don’t know how sorry I am. Now, unfortunately, we’ve got to talk about getting you all out of here. I have more than enough money, and I’ll do whatever it takes.”

  Pablo seemed hurt by Alejo’s tone, and he stared at his son, maybe trying to find the skinny fourteen year old boy who had left his house in anger. Alejo shifted his eyes uncomfortably, refused to let his gaze ride to the floor.

  “Son,” Pastor Martir finally said, voice breaking a little, “where have you been? Your mother thought you must be dead. Or working for drug dealers, in prison…”

  “Well,” Alejo clipped, stomach tight, “as you can see, everything is so much better than you imagined.” He immediately regretted his sarcastic words as his father looked away.

  “Dad,” Alejo said with a sigh, “there’s nothing I can do to make this reunion a happy one for you.”

  His father looked dazed, then asked, “So this was all about Franco Salazar?”

  Alejo felt his heart leap into his chest, and the acid that rushed into his stomach told him that there was no way he could talk about this with his father, not now. “I told you, Dad, I just can’t talk about it,” he insisted, eyes dark. Pablo Martir’s face looked so pained that Alejo tried to soften his tone, ignoring the nausea. “Maybe someday we can talk. But not today. Right now the only thing that is important is getting you all out of here, so you can live.”

  The strong shoulders of Alejo’s father finally slanted as he crumpled back into the chair, desolate.

  Alejo’s footsteps dragged as he trudged down the narrow stairs, leaving his father alone on the hostel roof. Seeing his parents again still had the sheen of unreality. A dark, nightmare-ish unreality, in light of the situation he had put his entire family in.

  His mother was right. He was still confused about half of the kids downstairs, which face went with what name. He didn’t know them. But they were his brothers and sisters, for goodness sake!

  Alejo loosed a heavy sigh and waited outside the hostel room door, fighting the urge to find cigarettes and do some serious smoking. He’d quit years ago, after finding that wheezing while trying to outrun danger and bullets could be pretty inconvenient.

  And now, suddenly, that life was over. He, Alejo Martir, was no longer employed by the Prism, and he might never see his team, who were like brothers, again. And if he did ever see their faces, it could be behind the muzzle of a gun.

  Alejo blinked, startled, as the wooden door jerked open and he found himself facing Nazaret. “You shouldn’t have opened to me,” he scolded softly. “Ask first. You didn’t know who I was.”

  Nazaret’s round face waned exhausted. She met his eyes sadly, shattering him with a million memories of blanket forts under the dining room table and licking popsicles on the front porch. “I still don’t know who you are,” she said, then left him standing at the door and returned to flop onto an unmade bed. Alejo carefully closed the door then turned to his youngest siblings, trying a reassuring smile.

  “Your dad will be down in a minute,” he told them.

  They’re probably worried I left him dead up there on the roof. What kind of brother am I?

  Alejo forced his gaze from the wide-eyed little Martirs to his mother and Wara, sitting wearily together on one of the beds He was glad to see pills on the bedside table; the stuff he had ordered must have arrived from the pharmacy. Wara and Noly had obviously been in deep discussion just before Alejo interrupted them and his heart sunk three notches lower, easily imagining that little chat. There would be the part about how Alejo had smacked her in the face, then nearly slit her throat. And before that, how he had handcuffed her and kissed her. Alejo felt his face heat. No matter how highly he thought of himself and his problem-solving abilities, there really was no fixing this situation, was there?

  Alejo suddenly felt very tired and sank down onto a bed across from Wara. “We should call your family,” he said. Wara speared him with reddened eyes.

  “I already did. From the street. I called the Bennesons, who work with my mission, too.”

  Alejo nodded once, admiring how she seemed to make good decisions even in stressful situations. “They must want you to come home, right away.”

  Noly Martir lowered her brows at her son, expression a mixture of love and annoyance. “Of course they do, Alejandro. Their daughter almost died. But she won’t go.” Alejo eyed Wara, whose jaw was set firmly. “She won’t go until she finds out if Noah is still alive.”

  Alejo remained silent, removing his gaze from his mother and sister and folding his arms across his chest. His mother and sister must think him a psychopath.

  And maybe I am.

  Keys jingled in the lock and Alejo tensed, then relaxed as Pablo Martir entered the room. It was time to leave this room, and quickly. He and Wara would be just on the other side of the thin wall, definitely within his ear shot in case of danger.

  Basically ignoring his wayward oldest son, Pastor Martir walked among his younger children, forcing a smile and patting them each on the head. Noly pulled little Naveli onto her lap and kissed her.

  “I’ve been talking with your brother,” Pablo addressed the whole family, “and he has some very good ideas of how to help us, which we’ll talk about tomorrow. Now it’s time for all of us to sleep, but first we’re going to pray. No matter what happens, God is always with us, and he keeps us all in the palm of his hand.”

  Strangling on the need to escape this little moment of Martir family prayer, Alejo quickly stood up and moved towards Wara. “Excuse me. I’ll get out of your way so you can take care of your family.”

  You sound so cold. As if they weren’t your family too.

  But it had been so long, an entire lifetime. Naveli peeped at Alejo from long-lashed hazel eyes, lips purple around a giant lollipop. Alejo stared at her, then tore his gaze away and motioned to Wara. “I’m sorry, but you’d better come with me.” Everyone started, and Alejo faced his parents. “I registered us downstairs together. Besides, I told her I’d take care of her. I’m not letting her out of my sight.”

  Alejo was surprised when Wara rolled out of bed without arguing and prepared to follow him. The zombie-like expression in her eyes, along with her lack of protest, actually worried him. Wara looked ready to collapse.

  Equally as worrying was the fact that no one in his family protested his orders, at least not with words.

  After all, I suppose you don’t argue with a man who’s just confessed to being a killer, even if he is your own son.

  Wara stumbled next to him towards the door. Alejo left his family locked in the room, more disgusted with himself than he had been in a long, long time.

  19

  transparent

  THE DOOR SLID OPEN BEFORE WARA AND Alejo with a mute whine. Alejo flipped on the light switch and Wara pushed past him into the room, identical to the Martirs’ except that it held only two single beds. Past the point of absolute exhaustion, Wara stumbled over to one of the beds and kicked off her white flip-flops. The wool blanket covered worn, striped sheets, and she ripped back the covers and fell inside.

  She forced her breathing to even, willing herself to sleep, just sleep. She was lying here in a hostel room with the man who tried to kill her and Noah. Only sleep would bring the blessed unconsciousness she craved.

  But sleep wouldn’t come. Her frayed mind whirled around a single thought, faster and faster, polishing it to a weighty obsession. Finally, she
flipped herself over on the lumpy bed to face Alejo, still visible in the dim light of the small bedside lamp. He was hunched over on the edge of the other bed, wearing the same gray t-shirt and cargo pants, head in his hands. For some reason, the thought crossed Wara’s mind that those were now his only clothes; Nazaret’s brother had literally left his old life with only the clothes on his back.

  He could probably never go back and get any of his stuff from wherever he had lived, because now he was in big trouble. Because he had saved Wara’s life.

  “Why did you do it?” she wondered out loud.

  Alejo twisted to face her, hazel eyes rimmed in red. “The bus?”

  “No—I mean yes. But first—why did you leave your group? You believed so much in what you were doing you were willing to even kill.” The words tasted bitter, like copper. “Why would you leave?”

  Alejo drew in a breath, and it was sharp, hurried. He took his time, swinging his legs over to the other side of the bed so he could face her, eyes flickering back and forth.

  The guy looked tortured. He raised his eyes to hers, slowly closed then opened them. “It started because of Jesus,” he said. “I realized that I can’t believe what I believe about him and be a Muslim. My group is made up of Muslims. But then there is Ishmael, our boss.” He hesitated, eyes flickering again as if seeing some painful scene across the back of his eyelids. Wara saw the exact moment he decided to go ahead with whatever it was he was going to tell her.

  “Ishmael and other powerful men don’t want the word to get out about what I saw in Pakistan,” he said. “On my last trip there, Ishmael took me to the Tribal Area near Afghanistan. That’s a place…”

  “I know where that is.”

  “Ok.” Wara enjoyed the moment of showing him she wasn’t as dumb as he might think. Alejo nodded with respect and continued. “We were way out in the middle of nowhere, visiting a five-house town near the fighting. And huddled inside one of the buildings where fighters crash when they’re not out shooting rockets at each other, I found about one hundred Bolivian teenagers, dressed like mujahedeen, waiting to go back to the skirmish.”

  Wara frowned, confused. “What…?”

  “That’s how I found out, Wara, that Ishmael’s foundation has been recruiting among the native peoples, especially in Bolivia. He explained to me that the recruiters visit small towns in the countryside and talk to the young guys. They recruit them for Islam, but in reality they exploit them, only telling them about an Islam that they can join to fight together against a common cause: Western Imperialism. They tell these converts that they are getting an expense-paid trip overseas to study for free. But they end up in the Tribal Area, or God knows where else.”

  “The missing!” Wara repeated the term the Quechua women had used on that trip to the Bible conference with Noah. “In the countryside, a lot of women told me that their sons have disappeared.”

  Alejo’s mouth pressed together in a firm line. “I don’t know how many Bolivians are over in Pakistan right now, or how many have already been killed. Their families will never know.” He shook his head and then sat up straighter. “Anyway, believing what I do about Jesus and finding that out meant it was just a matter of time til I left the Prism. When you…when I saw you…I had to leave right away.” Alejo’s voice faltered, and he cleared his throat.

  “But…” Wara found she couldn’t say the thought that had just run through her head. All she could come up with was, “Why did you have to kill us?”

  “Do you really want to know?” Alejo was quieter than Wara had expected. “It’s not going to make you feel any better, you know. I can’t fix it.”

  “Yes, I want to know. How could you do this?” She crossed her arms tighter across her chest and shivered.

  Alejo closed his eyes, then looked away. “The reason we targeted the bus you were on is because it was chartered by a guy named Franco Salazar. Salazar is…was…”Alejo winced but kept going “…not only a government official for the state of Cochabamba. He was also a child molester, and ran the largest child pornography ring in Bolivia and Paraguay.”

  Wara fought to keep her jaw from dropping and stared back at Alejo. That guy had been on her bus?

  “He was going to leave for Thailand, Wara, today, from La Paz. Did you know Thailand is a major center for child prostitution? This is not the first time Salazar has been to Thailand.” Alejo’s eyes radiated hurt and horror. Despite herself, Wara felt her heart twist with disgust for Franco Salazar—if all of this were really true.

  Why should I believe anything he says?

  “The police would never touch him,” Alejo continued, “because of bribes, high-up friendships. The man was protected from every angle you can imagine. How many more children would have their lives ruined, while I sat, a ‘good’ man, doing nothing?” Alejo raised his hands to make sarcastic quotation marks in the air around the word “good”, lips twisting cynically.

  He paused, then asked distractedly: “Did my parents ever tell you about Ruben Mamani? No, of course not.” Alejo caught Wara’s blank look and heaved a sigh. “They probably forgot. Anyway. Before Franco Salazar worked for the national government, he was the mayor of Quillacollo.” A medium-sized town on the outskirts of Cochabamba. “And before my family lived in Cochabamba, they lived in Quillacollo, where my dad pastored a really big, popular church.”

  Wara vaguely remembered hearing that years ago Pablo Martir had been senior pastor of a huge church in Quillacollo, with its own radio station, seminary, and everything. Alejo was still telling his story.

  “My best friend Ruben was a year younger than me, and he was from a poorer family, Quechua. He loved to come over to my house because we had cable and a big yard, and he lived in a little house with one room. We always played cars and war and everything you can imagine. And,” Alejo’s eyes darkened dangerously, “we also went together to play basketball at the community center, which was set up so nicely for the boys from the neighborhood by the friendly local mayor, Franco Salazar.”

  Wara’s gut began to tell her this story was not going to have a pleasant ending.

  “When I was thirteen,” Alejo said in a strangled voice, “Ruben told me that Salazar had been abusing him for three years. I told my parents, because I thought they would do something. My dad had a lot of influence in the community. They had a school, and three or four hundred people coming to their church. My dad even had his own radio program. I told them, thinking they would tell the police, that they would help my friend and put Salazar in jail. I was thirteen…I didn’t know what to do without their help. Well, my parents listened to me, and then they looked at each other with this look. My father told me that we had to keep this to ourselves. And, of course, my mother agreed. Biblical submission to your husband and all that.”

  Alejo’s tanned face had paled in the light of the lamp, and Wara frowned deeply, scandalized. Alejo was saying the Martirs told him not to report child abuse?

  “My parents told me that if we put ourselves on Salazar’s bad side,” Alejo said, “we would lose our permission to have the church in the town. And who would be the light of the gospel to the community then? They said, if they got involved in this situation, they would lose all their influence for Christ.”

  A long pause and then, in a more composed voice, “One month later, Ruben ended up in a ditch, dead.” Alejo shrugged, as if all he had said were suddenly of no importance. “I went to live with my uncle, in Santa Cruz and went to a high school built by the Iranian government. Life as a pastor’s kid suddenly just didn’t seem palatable to me anymore.”

  Alejo finished the last sentence of his story in a rush, and then jumped up from the bed, uncomfortable. “Whatever has happened in the past, it can’t bring back the people who died,” he was saying, knuckles white, when Wara thrust herself up on one elbow and hissed, “Not ‘people’. It wasn’t ‘people’ who died. They had names! Noah Hearst died! May have died!”

  Wara ignored how Alejo looked away miserabl
y, probably because she didn’t want to give up hope that Noah could still have survived. “They all had names,” Wara found herself rambling, while at the same time thinking about Ruben Mamani, Alejo’s little friend, thrown away like trash into the mud. By a horrible man who abused little children while pretending to be a leader who cared about the people, a benefactor. Who built a beautiful community center for desperately poor children to come play basketball, only to lure them into his clutches.

  It was good he was dead.

  But why couldn’t only he be dead! Wara felt like sobbing.

  Now Alejo did look physically sick, and he turned towards the door as if to go, then stumbled trying to turn around to again face Wara.

  “Salazar was a monster, Wara, but what I did is still wrong! I am a murderer. But I did what seemed right in the moment. I had to stop it… it was the best I could do!”

  With actual tears running out of the corners of his eyes, Alejo whirled away and was at the door of their hostel room in two steps, out of it in three.

  Alejo Martir had left the room crying.

  Wara covered her head with the blanket and cried too, for Noah.

  And maybe for Ruben.

  20

  red white and blue

  SOMETIME WHILE ALEJO WAS STILL UP ON THE ROOF, Wara fell asleep under the faded sheets and heavy blanket. She was startled, when her eyes cracked open, to see that the hostel room was filled with gray light, filtering through the sheer fabric of the cream curtains. A few fiery rays of sun poked out from behind a tall red brick building.

  It was morning.

  Wara jerked into a sitting position, flipping her gaze over to Alejo’s bed, half-expecting it to still be empty. His body was tucked under the covers, however, back towards Wara. At the sound of Wara’s movement, Alejo inhaled sharply and shot up on one elbow, rolling over onto his back at lightning speed.

  He seemed relieved to see it was only her. Alejo groaned and sank back onto the pillow on his back, black hair sticking up wildly in all directions. He scrubbed both fists across his eyes, then swung his legs over the side of the bed, sitting up to look at her.