The Gone World

by Tom Sweterlitsch

  “How’s your arm?” I asked. “I think the last time we were together, you left in an ambulance.”

  He touched his bicep, a gold band on his finger. Of course he might have been married here; it shouldn’t have stung. He rubbed the place where Jared Bietak’s bullet had passed through his arm. “Old wounds never heal,” he said.

  Nestor went to the bar for drinks while I waited in one of the crescent-shaped booths, the Courtyard Marriott’s lobby bar like an airport lounge, nightclub-sleek but comfortable only for as long as it took to get someplace else. A bachelorette party at a nearby table, gift bags, foil balloons. Nine women, but three sporadically flickered, momentary lapses, their audio and visual off sync whenever they laughed. Illusions, I realized, present only in the Ambience, and a poor connection at that. Some of them surveyed Nestor as he passed their table with our drinks, glanced my way to see who was with him.

  “I was at sea,” I told him when he asked about my life following Torgersen’s suicide, Brock’s death.

  “You never made it to the funeral,” he said. “I looked for you.”

  “I’m sorry about what I missed.”

  Nestor had been promoted, I knew, and when I asked about his career, he said, “We weren’t investigating much domestic terrorism after 9/11. Our focus was on international terrorism, Al-Qaeda. It wasn’t until the Stennis attack that we turned our attention back to homegrown psychopaths.”

  Stennis: SSC, the Stennis Space Center, a NASA facility that houses a field site of the Naval Research Lab. Publicly, NRL’s Stennis site conducted oceanography research, but there was a classified NSC/NASA collaboration as well, rocket-engine tests and experimental engines. The casual way he’d referenced Stennis, I figured most people would know what he meant. “That was connected to Buckhannon?” I asked, oblique.

  “We think so,” said Nestor. “Let me show you. Law enforcement. Philip Nestor, 55-828.”

  When he spoke his name, the seal of the FBI hovered between us, another illusion in the Ambience but as real as if I could reach out and touch it. Nestor asked that I speak my name, and when I did, the Ambience revealed data collected about domestic terrorist activity. Glyphs covered in text, pictures of wrecked commuter trains, mangled corpses, government buildings reduced to rubble.

  “They’ve been busy,” I said, scanning the images, the trajectory of what might happen. O’Connor’s instincts had been correct. What I was seeing lent credence to his idea that Hyldekrugger’s network was attacking government installations, especially Navy or federal law-enforcement targets.

  “They aren’t like other organizations,” said Nestor. “They don’t publicize their actions or take credit, so they don’t get the media coverage of an Al-Qaeda or ISIS. The media narrative has been ‘rampant lone-wolf terrorism,’ ‘antigovernment paranoia,’ maybe organized through networks in the militias. We think these attacks are related to Buckhannon, all of them—carried out by the same planners. And yes, they’ve been very busy.”

  I skimmed file titles: [2003] Stennis Attack, [2005] D.C. Metro Attack, [2007] United Nations General Assembly Attack, [2008] NSASP Attack, [2011] Pentagon Attack.

  “Show: Stennis Space Center,” said Nestor, and the file expanded, the table between us becoming a map of the facility in Mississippi, fire damage to the building that housed the Naval Research Lab.

  “We link this attack to Buckhannon primarily because of the modus operandi,” said Nestor, “their continuing ability to recruit personnel from within highly secure facilities.”

  “People with clearances,” I said, thinking, Echoes. “Who?”

  “A marine shot up the place, blew himself up when security turned their guns on him,” said Nestor. “But what the news couldn’t talk about was the similarity of style to the planned CJIS attack. You found the blueprints for the CJIS building with Brock, I believe. Recovered at Buckhannon.”

  “Sarin gas?” I asked.

  “The attacker detonated a bomb he had smuggled into the labs, sewn inside his rectum. His own body shielded most of the blast, which saved lives. A horror show, but his was the only fatality from the bomb. The fire-suppression system had been rigged with sarin, discovered in the resulting security sweep—but the actor’s body had dampened the explosion to such a degree that the fire system never triggered. The marine was a lone wolf.”

  “So he shot up the place, then detonated himself,” I said.

  “He killed five, wounded eight before he set off the bomb,” said Nestor. “Shooting randomly, he killed a number of researchers. I thought you and I might cross paths on this case.”

  “You must have worked jointly with NCIS,” I said, a frisson of déjà vu at Nestor’s words.

  “Yes, but more specifically: we tracked the gun the marine used in the shooting,” he said. “Ran a ballistics check but came up with false positives. The ballistics report matched a gun that we already had in our possession, the nine-millimeter we recovered from the shooting death of Patrick Mursult. It turns out the bullets also matched bullets tested from Ryan Wrigley Torgersen’s weapon following the events at his residence, the explosion.”

  “The ballistics report matched all three guns?” I asked.

  “I wanted to call you in,” said Nestor. “I tried to reach out to you, see if you could testify that these matches were false positives, but I couldn’t find you. And then there were others.”

  “Other matches?” I asked.

  “Judges tend to throw out these ballistics reports in cases where we have this issue. But yes, there were other matches, too. We earmark the cases, figure a possible connection between Mursult and Torgersen, the Stennis Space Center, but the matches might just be errors in the database.”

  “They’ve got to be connected,” I said.

  “We keep tabs on these matches as they develop,” said Nestor. “We just don’t keep the individual cases open. Many of these investigations are strictly local, things the Bureau wasn’t involved in, and the authorities and politicians want closed cases, convictions, so we let them proceed. Stennis was a PR nightmare as it was, a marine attacking his own country. We didn’t want these ballistics matches in the news.”

  What was it Nestor had once told me? In our other future, a moment of intimacy, he’d hoped to cross paths with me over the years, he’d hoped to consult me on an investigation. There had been false positives on a ballistics report he’d worked with then, too, in that other future, a report that matched the bullets pulled from Mursult’s body, just like now. I felt as if I’d discovered a new doorway in a house I’d lived in for years, opening onto a hallway I’d never noticed before. A Beretta M9 in the FBI’s possession from the killing of Patrick Mursult, an M9 recovered from Torgersen, an M9 a marine used during a killing spree at the Stennis Space Center—the same Beretta M9, again and again. Echoes, echoed guns.

  “Tell me more about those false positives,” I said. “I’m interested in that detail.”

  “The FBI has built up a database of ballistic profiles from recovered weapons, and we have access to local law-enforcement databases as well—with a few exceptions,” he said.

  “When did you start using the database?”

  “It’s new, maybe ten years ago, give or take.”

  “So the ballistics matches wouldn’t have been discovered until, what—2005 or so?”

  “About that time, yeah, but maybe later, because they added older reports to the database only after they were up and running.”

  “Can I see a list?”

  “Of the false positives? The database hasn’t been as helpful as we would like, because we get so many of them, but as I said, we keep track.”

  Nestor asked the Ambient System for false positive ballistics matches relating to the Stennis Space Center shooting. Specks of light emerged, enlarging into facsimiles of summary reports. The first report was the ballistics test of the bullets recovered from Patrick Mursult’s body in March 1997. There were other matches to those bullets: the Stennis Space Cent
er shooting, Torgersen’s gun, another homicide in 2009, however my attention caught on a homicide in 1997, March 26—only a few weeks following Mursult’s death, but a shooting that hadn’t happened yet in terra firma.

  “What about this one?” I asked, pointing to a file in the Ambient light between us. “Durr?”

  “Carla Durr, a lawyer,” said Nestor. “Shot to death in the food court of the Tysons Corner mall in Virginia.”

  A lawyer. Marian had mentioned that her father was preoccupied with a lawyer in the weeks before his death. “I need to see this case file,” I told him. “Carla Durr. I need everything relating to the death of this woman. How long would it take you to get me this file?”

  “We can look at it right now,” said Nestor. “We’ll be able to view the crime scene, but it wouldn’t work well here, too much light. I’ll book a room, pay for an Ambient system. We can take a look.”

  “I have a room,” I said.

  A similar attraction as the first time I knew him. Nestor seemed to glow under the overhead elevator lights as we rode to my floor. Confidence, ease, a scent of aftershave—nothing like the unkempt beard and warm flannels of the broken man I’d known. When I’d known him before, he was unfinished in the same ways that I still feel unfinished, and together we’d hoped to make some sort of whole, but here he was a puzzle already solved, no opening where I would fit.

  “You’re married?” I asked.

  “Shannon,” he said. But then, “Yeah, fifteen years in a few months. Ginny.”

  “Virginia?”

  “We met at a retreat,” said Nestor. “Through the church. She leads the contemporary music, she’s a singer.”

  Imagining them, maybe the cool couple at their church even as they aged, a singer and an FBI agent, hosting barbecues and Bible study at their beautiful house, beers on the back patio while he regaled the other middle-aged men with stories about his arrests, how he was injured in a shoot-out twenty years ago. I wondered what she looked like.

  “I remember you were religious,” I said, thinking of that other version of him, alone in that living room in Buckhannon, surrounded by fields of death and old murder, contemplating a painting of the dead Christ. I wanted to laugh, the vagaries of fate. There is no essence, there is no core. “You used to ask me if I believed in eternal life. What was it? The resurrection of the body?”

  “Ah, I’m sorry if that’s true,” he said. “That sounds like something I might have said back then. I’m sorry that’s what you remember about me. That’s kind of embarrassing, isn’t it?”

  “It’s nice you found someone.”

  “Things are good,” he said. “We have a ten-year-old, Kayla. She keeps us busy.”

  “You sound happy.”

  “You never . . . ?”

  “No,” I said, exiting the elevator before him. “I never found anyone to keep up with me.”

  I’d been in the habit of leaving the Do Not Disturb tag on the door handle, but the condition of my room suffered for it, the bathroom carpeted with damp towels, the bedding sliding off the mattress from fitful sleep. I hurried to clean up as best I could, pulling my clothes from the backs of chairs, stuffing underwear into my gym bag. The controls of the Ambient system were near the thermostat, a panel of buttons I never fiddled with. Nestor turned on the system, and the air vents hummed as the room was filled with nanotech on a breath of warm air, a whiff of ozone. An itching sensation tickled my nose.

  “A lot of dust,” he said. “We’ll have to look out for your bed, it will be in the way—ah, here we go. Ninety-six percent, excellent.”

  Ninety-six percent was the saturation rate, I knew at least that much even if I didn’t know what it meant specifically. Ninety-six percent of the air was filled with nanotech? Or 96 percent of the optimal level for the system to work? I was breathing them, I knew, machines in my lungs, my blood—too many hours of saturation would turn my piss orange. I’d read longform about people who breathed so much Ambience that their lungs looked wrapped in silver leaf. Nestor took off his blazer, the air close now, rolled his sleeves to his forearms. “Can you hit the lights?” he asked, and I drew the blackout blinds and switched the lights off, but the room was still lit. It seemed to glow from within, as if the air itself were illuminated, yet there were no shadows, soft light emanating from every direction at once. The first image that materialized was an image of the hotel exterior and the beach, women in bathing suits drinking chartreuse cocktails by the waterfall pool, Courtyard Marriott logos and room-service specials, opportunities to “rate” and “share.”

  “Hello, and welcome to the Courtyard Marriott Phasal Ambient System,” a perky woman’s voice. “We are locating two new users. We offer a stunning array of award-winning environments to enhance your—”

  “Law enforcement 55-828,” said Nestor. “Nestor, Philip.”

  The room changed, no longer the hotel and beach with suntanned women but rather the rotating FBI seal, National Crime Information Center.

  “I’m looking for a case from 1997,” said Nestor. “A homicide, Fairfax County, Virginia. Victim’s name: D-U-R-R, Carla.”

  A hovering icon of a spinning globe, replaced by a hovering file number and the name “CARLA DURR.” Reading her name was like reading a reflection, in reverse until I crossed the room to stand near Nestor, passing through the illusion.

  “That’s the one,” said Nestor. Other images appeared in the room, an array of glyphs. “Actual size,” he said, and the glyphs resized to eight-and-a-half-by-eleven, the room a flurry of paper. Nestor reached out to pluck one of the sheets from the air, and the image reacted, like he was holding a sheet of real paper and not just a rectangle of light, even though it was an orchestration of thousands—millions, maybe—of robotic pixels.

  “This is amazing,” I said, genuinely boggled by the realism of the Ambient System. Most effects in the Ambience were something like three-dimensional television. I could understand that sort of illusion intuitively—the Health Mode stopwatch, a personal trainer—but this . . .

  “Scale model,” said Nestor. “Stitch photographs 3 through 355.”

  No longer a room filled with sheets of paper, no longer a hotel room at all, but rather a mall food court in midafternoon, police tape roping off the counter and cash register of a Five Guys burger place. The illusion was perfect except for faint outlines of my bed and the other furniture in the room, the shopping mall expansive in every direction, the other restaurants, the other corridors of stores, like I could start walking, weave between tables, take an escalator down . . .

  I was seeing a three-dimensional rendering of Carla Durr’s crime scene, several hundred crime-scene photographs stitched together to make this perfect simulation. The body was facedown near the hamburger counter, a woman in her upper middle age, her ankles and knees marbled with varicose veins that showed through nude-colored pantyhose. She wore a royal-blue skirt and jacket, her head a tangle of orange. She’d been shot multiple times in her torso, another time in her temple, a head shot that had surely pierced her brain. She’d been buying hamburgers when she was gunned down, french fries scattered around her, blood like she’d spilled a tub of ketchup over her face. I went for a closer look at the body, but hit the edge of the queen-size bed.

  “She was shot in her back,” I said. “Standing at the cash register when someone walked up behind her, shot her through the back several times.”

  “Carla Durr, attorney-at-law practicing in Canonsburg, Pennsylvania,” said Nestor.

  “Canonsburg?” I said. “She must be Patrick Mursult’s lawyer.”

  “Mursult’s lawyer?” asked Nestor. “Interesting. We flagged the connection to Canonsburg, I remember, but had nothing specific linking her to Mursult. Durr was killed at Tysons Corner mall on a Monday afternoon, 3:40 p.m., approximately. March twenty-fourth, 1997. That was close to when Mursult was killed.”

  “Just a few weeks after,” I said. I’ll have time to stop this. “And who was the actor? Who killed her?�
� I asked.

  “Cold case,” said Nestor. “Witnesses describe a Caucasian male, black fatigues. No arrest was made.”

  “Unsolved, but you said the gun was the same?”

  “No, not the gun. The bullets we recovered from the shooting at the Stennis Space Center match the seven bullets that were recovered from Durr’s body.”

  “And also the bullets from the Mursult killing?” I asked. “And Torgersen’s gun?”

  “That’s right. Torgersen’s match came later, after one of the technicians fired some test rounds and logged them into the system.”

  “But why wasn’t the Mursult killing matched with Durr’s right away?” I asked. “Those two homicides were only weeks apart.”

  “True, they were, but remember that the match wasn’t made until we tested the gun used in the Stennis shooting, years after Mursult and Durr were killed,” said Nestor. “Only once the national database was up and running and someone had the time and funding to enter these older, closed, and cold cases. These two homicides were only weeks apart, but we didn’t know about the ballistics match until years later. We assumed that the false positives were a mistake at first, bugs in a new system.”

  Mistakes, echoed guns—linked shooting deaths. Hyldekrugger might seem invisible, but his network had inadvertently left a pattern of killings as visible as cross-stitch.

  The room changed around us, the food court disappearing, replaced by a photograph of Carla Durr hovering above my bed. A professional head shot, an ugly woman, fleshy lips and toady eyes that seemed on the brink of popping from her sockets.

  “What else do we have on this woman? Anything?”

  “She specialized in contract negotiations,” said Nestor. “Practiced in Canonsburg, like I said. Shannon, how is she connected to these domestic-terrorism cases? Buckhannon? You said she was Patrick Mursult’s personal lawyer? How do you know that?”

  “I don’t,” I said. “Nothing concrete anyway. But she’s from Canonsburg, like you said, and we have the ballistics match—that’s connection enough for me to hazard a guess as to who she is. Patrick Mursult had been meeting with a lawyer before he died. This might be her. I don’t know why they were meeting. And this might not even be his lawyer. It might just be a coincidence she’s from Canonsburg, but I doubt it.”