by Fiona Quinn
As we stepped closer, I could see that Angel’s tombstone had been moved to the side. There was a mound of dirt under a draped carpet of green AstroTurf.
Two men lounged on the chairs in loose dress trousers and button-down shirts, laughing with each other.
I turned toward the crunch of gravel under tires. Father Julio, the priest who had performed Angel’s funeral, climbed from his car and headed toward us.
Surreal, I thought.
I hadn’t truly imagined what we were actually doing.
But here it was, all prepared for us.
I was close now and could see that the hole they dug around Angel’s coffin was large enough that someone had been able to get down and put the straps in place for the machine that lowers the coffin into its grave. This time they’d be pulling the box up. They’d unlock the coffin, lift the lid, and there would be the blown up remains of my husband.
My mind flashed back to the images of body parts of the researchers that had been eaten and scattered by animals in Nigeria.
A photo was one thing. Having remains lying there in front of me was another.
And Abuela Rosa had asked Miriam to touch them and gather insight.
Miriam was unphased. It was part of her job, just like it had been part of the FBI’s and Iniquus team’s job to find the researchers pieces, catalogue, identify, and care for them.
They’d had emotional distance from their task.
I most certainly did not.
While I wanted to focus on Abuela Rosa and make sure she was okay, I admitted to myself I was wigging out. I wanted this very badly. Wanted the closure for myself. It felt like the end of an era. The last steps on a three-year long marathon. I stumbled toward the finish line.
“My suggestion,” Miriam said. “Is that I move your chairs out of the tent once we’re ready to raise the lid. I’ll look first and describe what I’m seeing. And at that point you can decide if you want me to do my work and let Father bless Angel’s remains while you stay where you are, or if you might do better seeing it for yourself.”
Neither Abuela nor I responded.
“I can tell you that the remains of our fallen war heroes are cared for with honor,” she said. “I had a friend who went to Dover once. He saw the soldier buffing each of the buttons on the deceased’s uniform. He said, ‘The family will appreciate the care you’ve taken.’ The soldier answered, ‘They’ll never know. The sergeant has chosen to be cremated.’”
Abuela nodded. Leaning heavily on my arm, she rocked her body to get her stiff limbs to round to the other side of the tent wall.
The two men lifted chairs and brought them to us.
After a time, there was a whir of engine.
The people spoke reverently under their breaths.
I petted Abuela’s arm.
Miriam came out and crouched in front of us. “You should come and see. There is a boot, and two boxes. One holds a tooth. One holds his dog tags. There’s nothing grizzly to upset you.”
She stood and held out her hands to Abuela Rosa. The three of us moved under the tent. There, without the breeze, the temperature had started to rise. The respite from the bright sun and beating rays was still an improvement.
We stood at the coffin staring in. Silent. It wasn’t a whole boot. It was just the top part with the laces, scorched black. I tipped my head to see that the bright metal was Angel’s second dog tag laced into place.
They had told me that they had identified Angel by his dog tags and his dental records. They meant a single tooth with a filling. I had to assume there had been more of him out in the desert sand. Probably separating his pieces that came apart in the blast from his fellow Ranger’s pieces would have been difficult. Impossible. They probably sent a team in to gather what they could. The mere act of someone finding his tooth and piece of boot meant that other soldiers had put themselves in harm’s way to fulfill their obligation that no man be left behind.
I sent those men who had dug through the grizzly aftermath a gift of gold light. I wondered about how that had effected their minds and lives. How picking up Angel’s molar had changed them.
It had to have. How could you package a tooth to send home to a window and not think about it and the fragility of being as you brushed your teeth in the morning.
I had, anyway, after they told me they identified him with those dental records.
“Abuela shall I begin?” Miriam asked.
Abuela sat down with a nod.
I stood beside Abuela Rosa, holding her hand, not willing to take my eyes off the inside of the coffin and the little boxes.
“I’ll start with the tooth.” Miriam picked the tooth out of its box and placed it in the center of her hand. She ducked her chin and the wind rose around us, swirling her blonde curls into a wide halo and hiding her face.
“I am in the back of a vehicle. It’s dark and there is the smell of sweat and unwashed bodies. In the distance there’s gun fire. Angel feels anxious to get out of the truck and help. His brothers are in trouble. They’re pinned down.”
Doubt crept through my mind. This was nothing like the story I was told about Angel’s death. I had hoped so much to know. I had trusted Miriam to be able to see. This wasn’t right.
“The truck is picking up speed heading in. The men are readying their weapons, there’s a plan to get on site and jump out of the truck then run forward.”
No. That was all wrong.
“There’s a call over the radio. They need the PJs to come in. They’re saying some are dead some badly wounded.”
I wished Miriam would stop. My anger at this false picture she was painting for Abuela stomped angrily through my system.
“They’re standing. Jumping. Running. Angel was at the back of the truck and was the last to jump out. On the opposite side as the men were gathering an RPG hit. The concussion threw Angel down. He hit his jaw against the corner of a crate.” Miriam lifted her hands and gathered her hair out of her face and turned to us. “I’m sorry. The tooth was lost in the week before he died. It was knocked out. It had been lost in the truck. The truck later was exploded in the IED, but it wasn’t the truck Angel was in.”
I closed my eyes, trying to let my anger slide down my legs into my feet and deep into the ground.
Miriam’s story hadn’t been fabricated, after all.
Just before Angel died, Striker had gotten word that his unit had been pinned down in a firefight. There had been soldiers who had been killed and injured. Striker thought that I might be picking it up on my “psychic network,” and he’d been right. I had.
Striker had gotten confirmation that Angel had not been injured. And I knew from Angel’s shrapnel in the shoulder story, that Angel didn’t like to tell the powers that be about his injuries, lest they take him out of the fight, and he wasn’t there to support his buddies. Of course, Angel wouldn’t have reported losing a tooth.
The boot though, and the dog tag would be different.
I braced myself. Abuela clutched at me.
This time Miriam was silent. I guessed she thought that the last story she told us had taken a toll.
She put the dog tag back in the box, then put her hand onto the boot laces. She stood there for quite a while, moving back and forth between the impressions she was picking up from the two. She did this when she was trying to verify the impressions she was picking up in the ether. I’d also seen her do this when she needed a moment to gather her thoughts to share a story that she knew would be tragic for the family.
She wouldn’t lie. She’d tell the whole story. But word choice and inflection mattered.
One had to be sensitive when working with the families of crime victims.
I recalled the raw pain that Melody Foley had displayed in the conference room. Could that have been just two days ago? Crime did not affect one person but an entire community. A soldier’s death, Angel’s death, it affected so many, so much.
Miriam made her way over to us and dragged a chair arou
nd, so we were sitting in a circle.
“This is what I saw,” she said. “There was a woman sitting next to Angel in the back of the truck. They were in a truck with cloth walls. There was the metal truck with Angel’s tooth behind them.”
That would be right.
“They had been on a successful mission. But it wasn’t to kill anyone. It was to rescue the woman who was sitting next to Angel. She was important to a group. She had been taken. It was Angel who was tasked to get her back to her family group. This was supposed to help them get information that they needed for a different assignment. That assignment isn’t clear to me. There was talk in the truck of meeting someone at the crossroads and the men should go ahead and get ready. The woman covered her eyes with a cloth and Angel stripped down to naked. The clothes he put back on, I couldn’t see, but I got the sense that they were designed to allow Angel to blend in. Angel put his dog tags on top of his folded uniform, rolled them and shoved part of it into the top of his boot. There was more rumbling. Stop and go. Then the explosion.”
Abuela nodded. “Fast then.”
“I can only tell you what imprints were left with the objects I touched. I would like to tell you it was fast. That Angel didn’t suffer. That he had been there one moment and a free soul the next. But I can’t speak to that. I’m so sorry. I do know that the truck was moving, then there was a massive explosion. From my understanding of events like these, it is very unlikely, putting these two pieces of information together, that Angel suffered.”
I thought about Melody Foley and how they tried to put her sister’s memory to rest by putting photos and diaries into the coffin and burying it. I doubted that felt like closure to them.
This whole event wasn’t satisfying in the least.
“Father, would you?” Abuela said.
Father Julio came to the coffin and began his rites, praying for Angel and that his soul would find peace.
In my mind, I went over the story again. After every mission, Angel sought absolution from his chaplain. Miriam said this mission hadn’t been about killing people but rescuing someone.
If that was right, and Angel hadn’t killed anyone since he’d last confessed, why would he be in Hell?
I listened to Father Julio chanting his prayers. The stress on Abuela Rosa’s face had eased.
The last time I sat out here in this graveyard, they handed me the triangular-folded flag. “On behalf of the president of the United States, the United States Army and a grateful nation, please accept this flag as a symbol of our appreciation for your loved one’s honorable and faithful service.”
I watched as Father Julio stepped back and they lowered the lid and locked it.
The mission had been a success, the men with their hats in their hands had told me so.
I guessed they were right, in a way, the Rangers had captured the woman back. Was that better? I mean, she would have been in the truck and exploded, too. Was that the best thing that could have happened for her?
Sitting there, processing all of this, I thought of Kaylie and what Prescott had said to me at intake about pulling people out of situations so broken, he thought it might have been kinder had they not survived.
Chapter Twenty-Six
My flight from Puerto Rico to Atlanta was over in the blink of an eye. It was like that sci-fi book I’d read where the scientists had learned to fold Interstellar space, making their starting point and ending point side by side. In this way, ships didn’t have to traverse the entire expanse of a galaxy.
I was there kissing Abuela Rosa and Miriam good-bye; the next thing I knew, I was checking my ticket in Atlanta for my next gate.
It was a little shocking not to have any remembrance of events happening and time moving forward. I’d done this in my car but for minutes not hours. I called it driving on autopilot.
Then, it happened again between Atlanta and Wyoming.
I remembered walking toward gate twenty-four with my ticket in hand. Then the time-space continuum flexed and voila! Now, I was walking out of the secure area, dragging my carry-on behind me.
Herman Trudy stood with his shoulder pressed against the wall, watching me progress up the ramp.
He checked his watch. “And there she is, three-forty, right on time.”
According to my ticket, I was supposed to have arrived at three-ten. That was the closest ticket that I could find to match up to the time frame that the general had noted on his calendar.
I checked my phone. Sure enough, three-forty on the dot mountain time. “You’re remarkable,” I said, falling into an easy walk beside him, leaving Herman the extra personal space that helped him stay comfortable.
He slid his hands in his camo pants pockets. “Before you say anything. You shouldn’t.”
“I shouldn’t what?”
“Say anything. You’re here to figure something out. We knew that. But what it is, we don’t want to know. You don’t want to mess up the double blind. So keep it to yourself.”
“How are you?” I goosed my stride to keep up with Herman.
“World of difference last time we talked until now. After that whole mess with Indigo, I took your check, and the money I got from selling my house, it was enough money to buy a piece of land. I built close to General Coleridge and put some of the rest of it in the bank for a rainy day. The general hired me to work for him doing research. The pay’s better than when I was flipping burgers, for sure. We have a grant from a group that wants to fund solutions to stop and even reverse climate change. It’s interesting to try to take a look at various projects and see if we can’t remote view outcomes. Like this one project we just looked at. They wanted to know whether or not to allocate funds to the Great Green Wall across Africa. Heard of that?”
“The shelterbelt of trees that extends fifteen kilometers wide and goes from the east coast of Africa all the way to the west coast in Tanzania. Yes. The goal is to slow the winds and help preserve topsoil, providing shade as well as homes to diversify the animals and bird populations.”
He looked down at me. “I don’t want you to tell me how you know that. I don’t want to know.”
“I guess as far as conversation goes that leaves us with, how’s the weather?” I smiled.
I almost got a chuckle out of him.
***
Mrs. Coleridge was bustling around the kitchen where she loved to be. I was in the den with Herman and the general in front of a crackling wood fire.
“Okay, how did you know I was coming today at three-forty?” I asked.
“I tasked it when we met,” Herman said.
I had my hands wrapped around a ceramic owl mug of chamomile tea. “What was your task?”
“Next time?” he said.
“I love how cryptically you write these tasks. Broad and yet, when you know what they refer to, very specific. I’ve noticed since we worked together, that’s a lot like the knowings I get. They are so broad as to be all but useless. In the end, they’re as clear as clear can be. Getting them at least tunes me into the idea that I needed a warning.”
“You have a warning brewing now?” the general asked. He was leaned back in a recliner that looked like a child’s chair under his height. His legs dangled over the footrest.
“I do actually. ‘As I was going to St. Ives, I met a man with seven wives,’” I chanted.
“Yup,” the general said. “That could be a task. I’m assuming since you said it aloud, you don’t want us to look at that.”
“I have other priorities.” I set the mug on the wooden floor, pulled out my phone, and scrolled through the pictures. “Herman did you know that Indigo had a dog named Daisy?”
“It was a Great Dane. Nice dog. She got hit by a car, and Indigo had her euthanized. It happened when you were in the prison.”
I showed them the photo of what Indigo had written about his dog being spayed into his lab notes. “Does that mean anything to either of you? I know that before your team was defunded and disbanded the operatives
in the Galaxy Project were working on the idea of hiding a name or a story to make it unsearchable in the ether, was there anything else your team was trying to work out?”
The general frowned down at the phone then handed it off to Herman with a shake of his head.
“That doesn’t ring any bells with me,” Herman said.
I took the phone back and swiped. “How about this. Can either of you read this writing?”
I handed the photo showing the squiggled writing on lined paper to Herman.
“That’s the Galaxy alphabet,” he said. “When we’re developing the protocol for something new, we’d write it like this. All the squiggles in the lettering are supposed to give it a doorknob effect, the kind of thing that would distract an enemy if they became proficient enough to read our work off a page. I’m a bit rusty, but I can work on this and get you a transcription.”
“I’d be interested to read it.” I accepted the phone back. “It’s not all the pages from Indigo’s notebooks. Just the ones that had to do with my reason for being here. I—”
Both men brought their hands up and their chins down as if they were holding off a barreling car.
I stopped. “I wasn’t going to tell you. Geesh,” I said under my breath.
The general stood to his full height, reaching out his arm. He reminded me of Baloo from the animated Jungle Book, and I was the thin-limbed awkward Mowgli in this moment.
I slid into his bear hug.
“Awesome, Lexi. We’ll have fun with this. I’ll tell you what, Herman and I’ll go over to the office out back. The Mrs. can point out the way for you. While we get set up, why don’t you go in the kitchen. I can smell the cobbler coming out of the oven now. Have yourself a bowlful with some ice cream, by the time you’re done eating, we should be ready. And you can talk over the best way to get the viewing tasks worded with her. Get the envelopes all numbered up. The Mrs. knows what to do. Then come slide the tasks through the mail slot. That way we don’t have any clue what’s going on. We’ll go see what there is to see.” He stopped to grin. “With a more or less sixty-five percent chance we aren’t handing you a load of hooey.”