Ambush

by Barbara Nickless

  I counted eight men in addition to Malik’s uncle. Seven of the men and the uncle helped move the boxes, their arms and shoulders straining, their steps slow. The eighth man appeared to be in charge, pointing at the others and directing them with his hands to move quickly.

  Ten crates in, one of the men lost his grip. His end crashed into the ground as both men leapt back with a shout. The crate splintered on impact and the man in charge yelled.

  Avi said, “He is telling them to fix it. To hurry with another box. And also a few other things I should not translate.”

  The two men who’d been carrying the box moved away, and the camera panned to the ground, then to the side of the truck. I caught a flash of a door handle.

  Malik, moving to a different spot.

  I glanced at Dougie. He was pensive, his index fingers pressed to his lips, a crease between his eyes. Then he leaned toward the screen and his hands came down.

  “There it is,” he said. “Pause it.”

  I looked back at the computer.

  The camera had zoomed in on the crate. Avi rewound a few seconds, then hit play. He paused the video just as the camera closed in on the shattered crate and two large cylinders with copper-lined concave faces sitting on the ground.

  Cohen drew a deep breath. “What are they?”

  “Warheads,” Dougie said. “For Explosively Formed Penetrators. The explosive is inside the case. The copper face becomes the actual weapon. Now look closer. You see the winged V on the side?”

  “Valor’s logo,” I said.

  On the video, the man in charge snapped out a command.

  Avi said, “He is asking for the boy. He wants the boy to help.”

  A few seconds later, the camera went dark.

  Around me, the room was utterly quiet. A clock ticked on the wall. The dogs next door had stopped barking, training done for the day.

  I placed my hands on the back of Avi’s chair and leaned into it, no longer trusting my legs to hold me.

  Avi broke the silence. “Clyde is the hero.”

  “And Rick Dalton,” Dougie said.

  I pulled out my phone. “You guys ready to call the Feds and loose the dogs of war?”

  “Do it,” Cohen said.

  I pulled up my contacts and dialed a friend at the FBI, Madeline McConnell.

  She answered with, “Sydney, where the hell have you been? It’s been weeks. We were supposed to have drinks.”

  “I need you to copy down something, Mac. It’s the access to a cloud account.”

  “This isn’t a joke, is it? Today has been long and frustrating.”

  “No joke. And your day is about to get brighter.” Or maybe darker. I gave her the name of the cloud company and read off Rick Dalton’s username and password.

  “Okay. Let me take a look.”

  There came a long silence. Then a whistle. “The hell is this? Emails. Videos.”

  “Just look at it.”

  Through the phone I heard Malik’s video play again as Mac started it up. I closed my eyes and thought about Marines and soldiers in Iraq. About Dougie’s shattered life and Cohen’s injuries, and Clyde’s. My mind pulled up pictures of those who had paid the ultimate price. Haifa and PFC Resenko. Jeremy Kane. Angelo Garcia. Sarge.

  Mac came back on the line. “Who took this video, Sydney? This is in Iraq? What does it mean?”

  I thought about Malik. A boy who’d lost everything.

  But who now, with this, might get a little bit of it back.

  “Justice,” I said. “What it means is justice.”

  ONE MONTH LATER

  CHAPTER 29

  Wisdom is earned trench by trench, street by street, from one battle line to the next.

  —Sydney Parnell. Personal journal.

  I stretched out my legs in the Mexico sun and watched Malik dribble a soccer ball down the grass at Parque Tezozómoc. The shouts of the other children echoed through the air as the game went back and forth across the grass.

  Malik was good with the ball. But maybe his greatest skill was his speed. He was a boy who knew how to run.

  At least now he was running toward something. Not away.

  Overhead, leaves rustled. Shadows stretched across the park. A squirrel darted across open ground and vanished up a trunk into the safety of high branches. Seven o’clock in the evening, and the light was long and low. But even with the approach of twilight, the sun held a warm embrace. In Denver, it was officially autumn, and the nighttime air would swirl with the promise of winter.

  But here, in la ciudad de México, it still felt like summer.

  Beside me on the bench, Ehsan Zarif sat with his elbows on his knees, watching the game. When one of the opposing players knocked an elbow into Malik’s chest, Zarif leapt to his feet and shouted, “Foul!”

  No one looked over, and he sat down with a self-conscious smile. “It is just a practice match. I get carried away.”

  “It’s because you care. You can be forgiven.”

  He pulled out a pack of cigarettes and turned them around and around in his hands.

  “I am grateful for what you have done,” he said. “Malik is like a son to me. And now he has a life again.”

  I’d been in Mexico for three days. Time enough to visit with Jesús and take him and his friends out to dinner. To meet with Angelo’s widow and put her in contact with David Fuller, who had promised to help the family. And to give Señora Torres a check, courtesy of a fund-raiser I’d run in Denver. It wasn’t nearly enough to cover the lost tunnel. But it was a start.

  Mostly I’d spent the time with Malik, who was heartbreakingly relieved to see me. This time I hadn’t lied when I promised him I’d be back. His world was a little more stable.

  Zarif told me that Malik had been doing better, even in the few short weeks since I’d seen him. I’ve heard that our happiness level remains mostly stable throughout our lives, no matter what happens. Win the lottery, and whatever happiness the money brings will fade. Lose a loved one, and we bounce back. According to the psychologists, we have a happiness set point. We don’t deviate too far from it.

  Maybe trauma was the same way. If we are not continually retraumatized, perhaps we eventually claw our way back to normal. Start sleeping through the night again. Regain our optimism.

  Lose our ghosts.

  Across the way, the Sir gave me a nod.

  “This is the first time Malik has been outside a wall since he got here,” Zarif said.

  “Freedom looks good on him.”

  Zarif laughed, and I joined in. I pushed my sunglasses up on my head. “Did that sound theatrical?”

  “Normally, I would say yes.” He slid the cigarettes back in his breast pocket and draped an arm across the back of the bench. “But with Malik . . . maybe it sounds exactly right.” He let out a sigh. “I was worried you were coming to persuade him to go to America with you.”

  “I never wanted to claim him. I just wanted to give him a life.”

  “On that you have succeeded.” His gaze returned to the game. “I’ve been following the news.”

  The intel we’d provided the FBI had been a bombshell. A week after I picked up the phone and called Mac, Laura Almasi was arrested on what looked likely to be a long list of charges—kidnapping, torture, murder, money laundering, various tax crimes, conspiracy to defraud the United States, violations of the Arms Export Control Act and other statutes, acting as an agent of Iran, violating US sanctions, providing material support to terrorists, and conspiracy.

  Her brother, James Osborne, faced similar charges. Authorities were also investigating some of the men Osborne had associated with at the embassy in Baghdad.

  Whatever the Saudis had to do with Valor Industries, and whatever was sitting in the airplane hangar near Lindon, remained a secret. That, apparently, was information provided only on a need-to-know basis.

  Cohen and I didn’t make the cut.

  Cohen, Dougie, and I had been grilled for three full days. On the fourt
h day, Dougie hadn’t appeared at FBI headquarters. By noon the same day, Cohen and I were also cut loose. An investigation by the Denver Major Crimes Unit, led by Detective Gorman, was still ongoing, but looked certain to conclude that I had not used excessive force when I killed Fadden in self-defense or shot Almasi’s security guards while assisting in the investigation of Jeremy Kane’s murder. My interrogation had been brief. Bill Gorman was too busy basking in the applause he’d received for solving Kane’s murder and coordinating the investigation into Sarge’s death with the Nevada police. He stayed calm and matter-of-fact, even after I told him he was a self-aggrandizing cockroach who couldn’t solve a murder with a video of the deed and the killer’s signed confession. I’d withheld further opinion about his inability to tell his ass from a hole in the ground.

  I was asked only a couple of times about the deaths of several guards both in and out of the complex and about the explosions that had rocked Almasi’s compound. When I said the details were fuzzy, that line of questioning petered out and then stopped.

  As they say, it’s who you know. And Dougie, apparently, knew the right people.

  Cohen and I were hailed as heroes in the media storm that broke after the arrests. And even as the military machine revved up to look into leveling charges against me for my actions in Iraq, I was assured in private that I would not face trial. If pushed, they’d play the “only following the orders of a superior officer” card. What it meant, reading between the lines, was they had bigger issues than a former Marine corporal to worry about.

  I was okay with that.

  Dougie had retrieved the rancher’s truck from the copse of trees where we’d stashed it. He told me the man never asked any questions. But with the story splashed all over the news, he didn’t have to. All he’d said to Dougie was, “I’ve never been wrong about a fellow.”

  Dougie had also phoned Dalton’s half sister in Nevada and told her that her brother was a hero. He mentioned she might want to check the postal box, and left it at that. We didn’t know where the money came from. But Dougie said Rick would want his sister to have it.

  Two weeks after my phone call to the FBI, Arvin Almasi was arrested in Mexico City. Two days after that, he was found dead in his cell, an apparent suicide. I’d considered asking Zarif if he’d played a role in finding Arvin, but decided some stones were better left unturned.

  Some questions better left unanswered.

  Now, in the park beside me, Zarif pumped his fist as Malik approached the end of the makeshift field and kicked the ball neatly past the goalie.

  “He has a future, that boy,” Zarif said.

  Indeed he did.

  I stood. “I should get going.”

  Zarif also rose. “You want to say good-bye to Malik?”

  I shaded my eyes and watched his teammates crowd around him. “Don’t interrupt him. I’ll be back. And you’ve promised you’ll bring him to Denver.”

  “I will.” He held out a hand. “It is a pleasure knowing you, Sydney Parnell.”

  I looked at him. “You aren’t going to stab me again, are you?”

  He laughed and kissed my cheek.

  I carried my sandals in my hand and strolled barefoot through the grass, enjoying the quiet breeze and the soft shift of light from gold to purple.

  I had one more person to see before I flew home.

  He was standing near the park’s lake. I didn’t see him until he stepped out from beneath the trees.

  When I drew near, he held out his hands and took mine. We stood that way for a few moments, my fingers soft in his calloused palms. I studied the back of his hands, the life written there in overlapping scars.

  Then he released me and stepped back. We started walking.

  “Clyde’s doing good?” he asked.

  “He’s doing great. He misses you.”

  “He had my back for a long time.”

  “Dougie—”

  “It’s okay, Rosie. You two are partners now. Much as I miss him, I’d never break that up. Plus, it wouldn’t be fair to him. Like I said, I go into some rough places. And he’s not getting younger.”

  “Don’t say that. Clyde has a lot of good years left in him.”

  I stopped, then Dougie did, and we gazed across the lake. A flock of geese was coming in for the night, their great wings sweeping inches above the water, their white bodies reflected like puffs of cloud in the deep green of the lake.

  I nudged his shoulder. “So what’s next for you? Still dark ops?”

  “A few days on a beach. Then, yeah, back to work.” His gaze went soft, focused on something I couldn’t see. “It’s what I know.”

  I tried to make my voice light. Failed. “I probably shouldn’t ask where you’re going.”

  “I probably wouldn’t tell you.”

  “I half expected Laura to have committed suicide.” It was a question. As close as I would come to asking him about extrajudicial execution.

  “Unless I’m very wrong about the afterlife, Laura will be far more miserable alive than dead.”

  I had to agree. As she had predicted, she’d lost everything. Career, reputation, the family business, her brother. Her freedom. I didn’t know Miriam’s fate, but I had to assume that with her stepfather dead, she was free to continue with her own life on her own path. I wished her luck.

  On the far side of the lake, the geese settled on the shore, their quiet honks drifting over the water like sleepy goodnights.

  I glanced at Dougie. His face was carefully carved into an expression that gave away absolutely nothing.

  I said, “Are you haunted?”

  “By the people I’ve loved? Or by the people I’ve hated?”

  “Both.”

  His gaze stayed on the lake. “I see my brothers from Iraq every night. The men who lost their lives in that ambush. Men like Rick Dalton.”

  “In your dreams, you mean?”

  “Yes.”

  “What about the people you’ve killed? Do you see them?”

  “Never.” He looked at me. “You?”

  “I see those I processed in MA. And those whose lives I’ve taken. But not—” I stopped, wondering how much of my madness to share. “I don’t see them just at night.”

  “Ghosts.” He nodded. “The fallout of war.”

  “My therapist says they’re manifestations of my anger and fear.”

  “I think the poets would say something different.” He turned to me, and his face softened. “If I’m lucky, someday I will see ghosts as well. You took what happened to you and used it to become a better person. But me . . . I survive by walling off everything. I’m not haunted. But maybe I should be.”

  There was something tight in Dougie, a part of him that withheld things he might never be able to let go of. A man of violence both suffered and meted out. He seemed meant for solitude now.

  But I said, “The Dougie I knew is still in there.”

  “Maybe. Like Han Solo, frozen in carbonite.”

  I toed a stone and kicked it toward the water.

  Dougie asked, “Have you told your detective much?”

  “Some. What happened. But not how it felt.”

  “It’s hard with civilians. Even cops.” He found his own stone and scooped it up, putting all of his arm into the throw. Across the lake, the geese rustled when the rock hit the water. “When I was in that village in Iraq, close to death, one of the things that kept me going was what I needed to say to people. The things I hadn’t said yet. Things that seemed important.”

  I turned to him. His eyes were far away. As blue as ever, but with a distance in them that told me he would never fully be back.

  My throat tightened. “What did you want to tell them?”

  “In some ways, I wanted them to understand. But that wasn’t reasonable. Mostly I just wanted to tell them I loved them.” He turned to me finally, his gaze—for the moment—very present. He raised his fingers to my face. “It’s not too late, Rosie.”

  I sucked in a
ragged breath.

  “With him, I mean.”

  I exhaled. “I know.”

  I turned, and we began walking back in the other direction. I said, “When will I see you again?”

  “Maybe soon.” A shrug. “Maybe never. We had . . .” He looked past me, seeing something I couldn’t share.

  I nodded. “I know. Our time.”

  “And that’s forever.”

  When he moved away, it was with his old, familiar walk. Tall. Confident. A man who could steer the world. He headed toward the trees, his dark clothing blending with the growing night. At the last moment, he stopped, and our eyes met across the distance.

  He raised a hand and gave me a small wave.

  We had our forever.

  My hand was still up when he disappeared into the shadows.

  As I headed back in the direction of the car that Zarif had arranged for the airport, my phone pinged. A text from Cohen.

  You still coming home tonight?

  Home. A beautiful concept. I typed, Yes. Howz Clyde?

  Little thief ate my burger

  I smiled. See you soon

  We will be at the airport

  I stared at the phone, the screen swimming in front of me.

  Some things will not do themselves.

  Some things you have to do yourself.

  I typed the hardest seven letters of my life: Love you

  Then I prayed the phone would die before I did.

  Ping.

  Love you too. Now get your ass home.

  So that was that. I smiled and slid my phone into my pocket. Cohen and I still had plenty to figure out. But he hadn’t kicked me out. And I hadn’t left.

  Bad happens to all of us, of course. But if we are fortunate, the good in life balances those things we might wish to forget. We are able to pick ourselves up and brush ourselves off. We carry on.

  We’re still good.

  The last light of the sun turned the grass into emeralds. I walked back through the park, behind Zarif still on the bench, past the soccer game. I paused for a moment, watching as Malik kicked the ball. It soared into the heavens in an arc that seemed long enough to reach from Iraq to Mexico. From one side of the world to the other.