Outside, the night sky was like an expanse of black silk with pale gems strewn across it. The rust-colored moon high above the city. A scattering of lights along the horizon. Pennies and pearls, they were. One luminous stroke that marked the Washington Monument.
In her bedroom, Sara continued to play her variations, but softer now and slower. Give her another hour and I might knock on her bedroom door, but not yet.
The cramp in my hand eased. I picked up my pen once more but paused. What was there left to write?
Nothing, I thought. Nothing that would not lead to that damnable phrase Dead end.
I blew out a breath and touched my finger to the corner of one sheet. A spark of electricity bit my fingertip. The paper shivered, like a living thing, then evaporated into dust. Out of perversity, I did the same to six more sheets, until I had a heap of paper residue on the parlor table.
Twelve dead soldiers, I thought as I swept the dust into the waste bin. One dead surgeon. No, make that two dead surgeons and one company clerk in critical condition. It could be a coincidence. Soldiers die in war. Soldiers survive battle, only to come home carrying wounds that kill them later.
What about Sara’s theory that our own government was connected to this case? The only connection I could draw was to the election. Even so, that made no sense. Why not eliminate them under the cover of battle? Or later? The military hospital itself could provide a dozen different means to kill. A contaminated needle. An accidental overdose. Why wait until the survivors had left the service?
I let myself fall into the world of what if. What if our mystery had nothing to do with our elections or the federal government? What if . . . the outpost contained biological weapons, ones that left no ordinary traces? Gunfire might have set off an explosion, broken through the storage containers. One accident leading to another, leading to soldiers’ dying from a myriad of inexplicable causes.
Except they had not all died from medical causes. Heart failure, yes. An embolism, yes. But Molina and Walker had died from too many bullets. Besides, how did the New Confederacy track down these veterans? Unless these biological weapons came from a supplier outside the New Confederacy, perhaps a supplier from the Federal side who wanted to keep the connection a secret.
A possibility that took me back to square one. We could not prove the existence of biological weapons without an autopsy. No autopsies without a reason, no reason without an autopsy.
I retrieved my pen and a fresh sheet of Sara’s paper.
Dear Escher, I wrote. I hate you.
I pressed my thumb in the upper right corner to destroy the paper. Thirty pages were left of that enormous stack Sara had given me. Perhaps she guessed my propensity for destruction.
What if was doing me no good. Time to play if only.
I took another sheet and wrote:
If only we knew what the Red Squirrels saw. We don’t. We can’t. Even if we could interview them today, here in the secrecy of this apartment—which I am certain is secret and safe because Jenna Hudson is undoubtedly connected to the same organization Holmes reports to and why didn’t I realize that before . . . But I digress. We could ask them until the cows come home about what they saw on June 3, but they might not know. If it wasn’t painted with signs reading “Hello, Dangerous Shit,” how could they?
More ink. A brief pause to flex my hand.
Backing up. We know the Red Squirrels died and the Badgers lived. An oversimplification, but we’ll let that stand for now. If only we knew why the one staff sergeant ordered a retreat and the other one ordered an assault. We know
I paused and stared at the page. We knew very little, I thought. We had a list of who lived and who died that day in June. Nothing more.
If only we could talk to these soldiers in the moments before the attack. If only we could sit in the hospital tent, next to the survivors, listening to them as Saúl Martínez once listened to me as I babbled in a fever haze.
I closed my eyes and called up an image of Private Belinda Díaz. I recalled her emaciated face, skin drawn tight over her bones, that day of our last encounter. How she begged for help against the black dog of depression, her voice rough with tears.
Dr. Anderson gave me those pills, but they don’t do shit. They used to, back in Tennessee, but now? One isn’t enough. I tried two and that went better. I could breathe. I could . . . I could almost sleep a whole night. But I got scared because Dr. Turner said that wasn’t safe. The doctor back in Tennessee said the same thing. She said—
I flung down my pen. Abruptly the piano went silent. I was already on my feet when Sara appeared at the entry to the parlor. The brilliant light from the hallway cast her into a sharp shadow, but I could plainly see the tension in her stance.
“I have an idea,” I said. “About the survivors and what they remembered . . .” I gripped my left arm above the device. It ached, down my shoulder to the stump and into the ghost arm itself. I badly wanted a painkiller.
Sara reached my side in a few steps and clasped my left hand within hers. “Keep talking,” she told me. “Before you lose that lovely spark of inspiration.”
Her fingers intertwined with mine, her palm of flesh pressed against my metal one. Her touch was like a breath of electricity. The fog cleared from my brain.
“It’s your idea, really,” I said. “That our soldiers witnessed something during their mission. And I thought—” I felt that “lovely spark of inspiration,” as Sara called it, slipping into doubt, and spoke faster. “I thought they might not understand what they saw, but soldiers talk after a mission—especially the wounded. If we could find a nurse, an orderly—anyone who might have attended them. Díaz mentioned a doctor in Tennessee the last time I saw her. She said something about pills to help with her PTSD. The doctor might know more about that mission on June third. Or if not her, there might be others who talked to the survivors in the squad.”
Sara nodded slowly. “That is a possibility. Come. I’ll make tea and tell you my idea, which has several points in common with yours.”
In the kitchen, I settled on a stool in the dining nook, while Sara busied herself with the tea. She filled the kettle with fresh cold water and set it to boil. From one cabinet, she retrieved her favorite glass pot, then measured out several spoonfuls of leaves into its basket. All her movements were precise, contained. I waited, my pulse beating faster, for her to speak.
She measured out another spoonful, then laid the spoon to one side. Gently. Carefully. “There were more deaths. Several more.”
Her words, so quiet and soft, were like a punch to my gut. “Who? And how—”
“Staff Sergeant Miller committed suicide last night.”
Oh. Oh, god. Yes. The sergeant convicted of desertion. I felt another blow, as if I’d been struck under my ribs. The guards were trained to notice the ones who might suicide. They were supposed to safeguard them . . .
“Who else?” I demanded. “Who the fuck else died while you and I tippy-toed around?”
Sara flung the tea canister to one side and punched the teapot. Glass and ceramic shattered over the floor. When she rounded on me, I skittered back, but not in time. She grasped my wrist and pulled me close. “Too many and not enough to convince the lords of security. And yes, I am furious. Yes, I care. Are you happy now?”
Her eyes were bright with an anger that matched mine. Her breath grazed my cheeks. This, this was not the breath of a lover, but of a dragon.
Our gazes matched and locked. Sara nodded. She was trembling too. “Yes, there are others,” she said softly. “Our two friends in military prison died in a riot last week. But those are not the only ones who trouble me. You know about Jonesboro, Little Rock. Our victories after the so-called Shame of Alton. Well, there were other deaths, and none of them as glorious.”
The kettle whistled. Sara snapped off the burner and began to rummage through the cabinets. “Hush,” she told me when I made an impatient noise. “We shall have our tea in my bedroom. Not for your sake, but mi
ne. Please. I have . . . documents to show you.”
Documents. I let my breath trickle out. Another understatement, no doubt, but I had come to expect that from Sara Holmes.
Sara gathered the fragments of the teapot and deposited them in the trash. Her movements were slow and methodical as she prepared a second pot with fresh tea and boiling water. A new tray with another pair of cups, since the first had also fallen victim to her fury. Once everything was ready, she ushered me down the corridor to her bedroom.
Oh.
I stopped on the threshold at the sight of this bedroom, now utterly transformed over the past thirty-six hours. All those exquisite paintings? Gone. In their place were a dozen or more digital screens, most of them densely covered with text, the rest with maps showing various regions of the United States. DC. Florida. Michigan. The largest screen showed the Midwest and near western states, with a dark gray mass that represented the New Confederacy. The center, over Oklahoma, was like a thundercloud, and dotted lines showed how the mass had expanded over the years. A silver nimbus covered more territory within the Federal grounds, and I wondered if that indicated more ground that would fall to the enemy.
“How interesting,” I said faintly. “What do your other visitors think about these?”
“They don’t.” Sara tapped a few keys on her slate. The screens vanished. The paintings and watercolors blinked into view. Without thinking, I leaned close to the dark storm cloud of an oil painting. The brushstrokes were just as vivid as I remembered. I reached out to touch them . . .
The screens crackled and sprang back into view.
“Please do not touch,” Sara said.
“I won’t,” I breathed. My fingertips prickled, as though from an electric shock. I rubbed them over my T-shirt, trying to rid myself of the sensation. The paintings were genuine, and set in translucent frames with a black strip embedded into the material. When I leaned close, I could see the original through the haze of outer electronic image. I wondered what else hid in plain sight in this room.
Sara motioned for me to sit on the bed. She had poured out tea for us both and handed me a cup. I cradled the mug and let the heat flood through me.
“Won’t your people notice this research?” I asked.
“Of course they will, but not immediately. What I’ve done is set off hundreds of bots, most with requests for data about different cases—official ones—and wrapped our own unofficial research inside them. Do not ask the whys and wherefores. Let me only say that certain overlapping parameters between our missions make this possible. So I download the results, cut all external connections, and filter them locally. However, I cannot guarantee that someone might not get curious. Until then, here is what I’ve discovered.”
She tapped a sequence on her tablet and new images appeared on the screen. One showed casualties during the previous winter. Very few in January and February, as I recalled. We were all, Federal troops and rebels alike, sunk into frozen mud, crusted over with ice and sleet. Rum and whiskey had been in short supply, and our patience even shorter. Sara flicked her fingers across the tablet again. Pinpoints of light glanced off her lace gloves, and a secondary window opened over the first, showing a statement from President Sanches issued in March, about the necessity for a driving offense and a decisive end to the war.
“There were difficulties with funding,” Sara said. “Followed by the usual delays introduced by Texas and Arizona. However, Sanches managed to ram through the necessary legislation by making numerous promises to her allies, and even a few of the conservative opposition parties, in the House and Senate. Two weeks after that came Alton.”
Alton appeared as a series of troop movements, calculated after the fact. Half the screens flickered and regrouped into color-coded maps. The other half showed aerial images taken from drones. Through them I watched, as though from a vantage point in the skies, as the New Confederacy overran a complacent border and left blood and fire in its wake.
My vision blurred into red and gray. I could hear the drumbeat that signaled the approach of helicopters, and I was trembling.
Sara laid a hand on my shoulder. I flinched away and she sighed. “Alton,” she repeated. “A bloody mess that left both armies immobilized for a period. Our government went into overdrive to counteract the PR disaster. The New Confederacy also suffered setbacks when the news came out about their treatment of our wounded. Oh, there was a reconnaissance mission here, a few tentative drives there. None with casualties outside the standard deviation. But then we come to the end of May.”
She tapped more virtual keys on her tablet, pointed to the next screen. The aerial drone shots vanished, replaced by new maps that marked confrontations ranging from skirmishes to organized battle. Green dots represented victories, Sara told me. Red meant defeat. Nearly half the dots were gray, meaning an undecided outcome.
“And June,” she said.
The screens shifted. Green dots outnumbered the red and gray.
A steady advancement of our Federal troops—that much was clear.
“What about the deaths?” I repeated.
“All in good time. Here are a few other statistics. All the squads connected to these victories came from the First Infantry Division. More important, they all came from the Dragon Brigade. Nearly two hundred had died in combat or shortly afterward. Several dozen more received medical discharges directly related to those missions. And here are the ones who died later.”
She gestured toward the largest screen. I saw a series of bright yellow bars. Death rates. Deaths ranked by date. The highest totals were centered around the skirmishes Sara had named, but others came later—weeks or months later.
“I have their medical reports,” she said. “Unadulterated, as far as I can tell.”
She had handed over her tablet, with the relevant files already loaded and set to maximize. I managed not to drop it, though my hands were shaking. Sara’s hands trembled as well—a detail I would no doubt find important later. For now . . .
The list of dead and injured came from seven different missions. Two hundred and twelve casualties. Twenty-seven died later from their injuries. All very straightforward, at least on the surface. The reports for those who died later were less so. A handful had died of heart failure or stroke, including Díaz. Twice that number had died from drug overdoses. There were two suicides. Geller’s was the only recorded embolism.
“I did some research,” Sara said. “Geller was Jewish. Specifically, she listed her religion as Reform Judaism, though her parents follow Orthodox teachings. It’s not impossible that a Reform Jew would have requested cremation. But her parents would never have allowed it, and indeed, the hospital received a complaint from them about the matter. Even so, the evidence so far is circumstantial. What we need are eyewitness accounts, or failing those, accounts directly related to these events. Which brings us to your idea.”
She entered a new set of commands. One by one, the maps vanished, to be replaced by lists of service personnel, which scrolled from one screen to the next. Here and there, the names went gray; others changed from ordinary black text to brighter blue or green. Sara typed faster, humming to herself. Appassionata again. The pulsing of the electronic screens seemed to echo the music.
“Yes. There we have it.”
Sara hit a key. All the screens except one went dark.
“Look,” she said.
The screen held one very short list—just five names.
“These are medical personnel formerly assigned to the Dragon Brigade, and who left the service after June. Not very many, you see.” She tapped again, and the lines of plain black text became a pattern of colors. “We have one nurse, one physical therapist, two medical technicians, and a doctor.”
“Can you find these people?” I asked.
“Ah. That is the interesting point.”
She tapped her tablet’s screen. The screen on the wall blinked and the short list became five separate tiles, each of them filled with text.
> “Our nurse and physical therapist returned to their home states and their original employment. One medical technician has enrolled in a training school for computers. The other is currently unemployed, which I find curious. But our doctor . . . has disappeared.”
Her name was Katherine Anne Calloway. Age fifty-seven. Most recent civilian address was Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. Back in August, she was a senior medical officer in Tennessee. Duties included supervising a staff of nurses and medical technicians, performing medical exams for mid- to senior-level officers. Oversight of standard inoculations for both officers and enlisted.
Sara tapped her screen again. The other tiles vanished, and Calloway’s expanded to fill the screen. Calloway’s image occupied one low-res square off to one side. Pale blond hair streaked with gray. Equally pale eyes that dominated her narrow face.
“No current spouse, no children,” Holmes said. “An ex-husband who absconded with all their savings to Canada, which is when he became the ex-husband. That is the same year she volunteered for the army. But here is what intrigues me.”
A series of text windows sorted themselves like so many cards in a deck. One leaped into the foreground and I skimmed through a summary of our doctor’s background. Graduated from Columbia University. Completed her residency there as well. She had the usual number of offers for someone with a top-tier education but chose to enter research instead. She held a series of positions at different universities, followed by a long stint at a commercial pharmaceutical company, which ended at the same time as her divorce. When I read the name of that company, I jumped.
Livvy Pharmaceuticals. The same company that provided so many drugs to the VA Medical Center. I was certain LP#2024016 had not killed Díaz, at least not directly, but was there another connection? Livvy had other contracts for the military, and LP#2024016 was not the only drug they supplied. Saúl had mentioned a VIP from a pharmaceutical company in our very last conversation. Was this our clue?
“When did she disappear?” I asked. “And how?”
A Study in Honor Page 21