The Terminals Page 13
“Even if you did the wrong thing, suicide does not reverse time,” he replied. “Who made you judge and jury?”
“No one would judge me.” His brow furrowed, so I continued. “They didn’t court-martial me. Maybe they didn’t want a female officer that they’d touted for so long as a rising star to be given a dishonourable discharge, or worse. The Terminals are a safe option for everyone, even if they don’t know where I went.”
The grim smile that spread across Attila’s face made me uncomfortable. “So this is about presumed guilt?”
“What?” I asked, but I didn’t really want the answer. “Why are you smiling?”
“Who should be on the jury?”
“What? Other soldiers, a jury of my peers. I guess, but it wouldn’t matter. The politics are too important. Why does that matter now?” I folded my arms over my chest.
“Well, the people who would best know whether or not you are guilty would be those you think you killed. They’d be the toughest to convince of your innocence, right?”
“I suppose so.”
“Well?” His fingers ran through his hair and interlaced against the back of his head. “I can bring them together. Maybe not all at once, but you’ll have your trial.”
“You’re serious.”
“You’re hanging yourself when you don’t need to. At the time, you thought suicide was your only option because no one else would condemn you. Fine. But not anymore. Not when you know someone who can talk to the dead.”
When someone has grown accustomed to hopelessness, they don’t like hope when it stirs in them. To me, it felt like a knife twisting in my intestines.
Chapter 19
Attila’s already swarthy complexion deepened. “Five thousand dollars a person and no guarantee that I can reach most of them. It’s been a month already and they won’t know I’m coming.”
“You’re joking.” I backed up a step. “You want money?”
He wrung his hands. “Do you realize how much I could clear if I went corporate?”
“Then why don’t you? Why don’t you go public? You’d make the money you need for your mother.”
His flush went purple, and I didn’t think we were talking about money anymore. It was my turn to grin at his expense. “You believe you’re doing something good here, don’t you?” I shook my head. “Don’t mistake a desire for power with altruism. The only thing this place is, is above the law. That’s why you’re attracted to it.”
“No, Colonel,” he replied and I hated how he called me colonel; he was the one asking for money. “If I went public, I’d have corporations paying me to learn competitor secrets. I’d be used to solve every murder where the answer wasn’t clear cut—and it seldom is. They’d need to rewrite the laws for me to exist. If they’d let me exist at all.”
“If we can’t have you, no one will?” Even as my fingers pointed a mock gun at him, I realized he was right. People would kill for him. Or kill him.
“I’d never be left alone. I can trust the U.S. government to keep my secret because it will always serve their purpose to keep me here, happy and working for them. I am safe as long as we all stay friends.” He moved toward the espresso machine.
Where did Attila’s money go? Even if his mom needed fulltime nursing, surely he could demand more than the general and I combined. I looked over to Charlie and shuddered. Charlie was gone, at least he no longer remained in the glassy eyes, and he could offer no advice.
“All right, Attila,” I said. “One of the soldiers. Let’s see how this goes.” I did have cash. Colonels are paid about six thousand a month and, while working overseas, I never spent much. Even now in New York City, I had few living expenses, exiled in a hospital room as I was. Fifty-five thousand to apologize to my soldiers. To deliver their verdict. It seemed pretty reasonable considering the alternative.
Attila strode over, took me by the hands, and gazed into my eyes as if he were communing with the dead right then.
“Who is first?” he asked.
“Now?”
“Why not?”
I stared back. “Captain Domingo. We called him Dom.”
Attila nodded, and shut his eyes. “Tell me more.”
“Dom was a joker, humor tended toward the morbid.” I smiled. “We all knew what it was; he did, too. Nerves. Covering up the hell of what we were doing. He’s the type that would giggle at a funeral.”
“Religious affiliation?”
I didn’t know. “Christian, if I hazard a guess. We didn’t talk about it.”
Attila opened his eyes, frowned, took up his doorknob and peered into it.
“Charlie?” I asked.
After a minute, he shook his head, not taking his eyes off of the crystal. “It’s the proverbial needle in a haystack.”
“Dom had no one at home,” I added.
“That might explain it.”
“Explain what?”
“Why I can’t reach him, that there’s nothing tying him here.”
“I’m not paying five grand for this.”
Attila took my hand again and clenched his eyes back shut. “Picture him. Describe him. I can do this,” he said. “It’s not about the money. I just need the money.”
His desperation made me think of an addict’s plea to a pharmacist for methadone. Please, man, I just need the juice to get off the brown.
Someone cleared their throat, and we dropped hands.
“Sorry to interrupt …” Morph smiled at us. She wore long white robes and a headscarf that accentuated her jaundice. “General said you need another Euth?”
I shook my head. “I don’t know, Morph.”
“Well, Charlie’s gone, right?”
“Yes, but,” I sighed. “How do you find another Euth?”
Morph shrugged as if to say it was easy. “Transplant lists, major diagnoses—they’re all tracked. Insurance companies need the info at their fingertips.” She stumbled a step and went to the wall before continuing. “Cross reference these to education, religious affiliation, Army service records, and charitable donation databases, and it works pretty good. People who are dying always start giving.”
“You okay?” I took her by the elbow and she nodded.
“I’m fasting, low on energy and off the meds.”
I considered the difference between Francis, who prepared for death by gorging on whatever delicacies he could find, and Morph’s fasting and spiritual focus. I wasn’t sure I fell into either camp.
“Before I die, all I want is a big burger with fried mushrooms and onions, bacon and cheese …” I trailed off, seeing Morph frown. “Sorry.”
“Should be. You don’t talk to a fasting person about food. Don’t you think I wouldn’t love to bite into something like that right now? Halal, of course.” She smiled. “Any more questions on the searching out of Euths? It’s not like figuring out the next Dalai Lama.”
“No, just invading multiple databases to search for intensely private information without permission from anyone,” I said.
The smile vanished from Morph’s face and the loss deepened the bags saddling her eyes. “Listen, I’m dead in three hours or so. You can search the databases yourself, it’s straightforward and I … I’d rather not help right now.”
She looked down, and I couldn’t help but think she was asking me for a kindness. The ease at which she found terminals begged the question: Why me for a handler? Surely there were closer, less belligerent choices? I could buy the PR issues, but that didn’t seem enough and my being suicidal had to present issues for Deeth.
“Can I just send you the login codes?” Morph added. “You can even do it on your iPhone.”
I looked to the mirrored window and nodded. With the codes I could do more than find another Euth. I could figure out what was really going on here. I’d have access to Siam’s file.
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“You’re a saint,” I told her and the smile returned, although more weary than before.
“I’ll take all the votes I can get,” Morph said. “And do me a favor and change those sheets.”
I must have paled because Attila smirked at me.
“I’ll take care of Charlie,” he said as Morph exited. “Sorry. He has to go.”
It was odd, but I did feel sorry. It was as if Charlie wasn’t truly gone until he was removed from the room. Even Attila said it was easier to talk to the dead with the physical body near, just like it’s easier to say goodbye at an open casket funeral. Perhaps it was giving up on him for lost that upset me. It struck me what an advantage it must be to believe in an afterlife, where the dead live on, waiting for you with open arms rather than the cold embrace of oblivion. But oblivion had its advantages. The trials hadn’t ended for Charlie; they had only just begun.
Attila pulled another shot of espresso and when the machine began to rumble with effort, he turned back to me.
“Tell me about another one, Christine; give me something more to work with.” He palmed his crystal doorknob.
“Where’d you come by your talisman?”
He held the orb up to the glow of a pot light. “It was the doorknob from my bedroom. I talked to the first person through it.”
“Who was it?”
“My grandmother, I think.”
“You think?”
“It’s not like I can really know for sure and besides, the connection fades in time. I’ve never spoken with anyone so long dead since. She must have really wanted to wait around to deliver her message.”
“What did she say?”
He stiffened, his gaze darkening.
“Didn’t mean to press,” I said.
He pocketed the doorknob.
“So how did you get in?” I asked.
“What do you mean?”
“Your bedroom.”
“Oh,” he chuckled. “I told my parents the knobs fell off and broke and my dad put brass ones on.” There was an intervening silence while the machine pressed out the crema.
“Corporal Brant,” I said as it finished spluttering.
“One of the men you killed.” He tensed, pulling his shoulders up about his neck. “Who died, sorry, I’m apologizing a lot lately.”
“Yes, Attila, he was one of the eleven.”
He leaned forward, eyes gleaming, doorknob encased in his palm again. “Tell me about him. What did he look like? Favorite foods, color, hopes and dreams, whatever you’ve got.”
“I’m not paying if you don’t find him.”
He threw back the coffee shot. “Go ahead.”
“Edison E. Brant. His dog tags said he was from Salem, West Virginia, but he was born in New Orleans. A small African-American man, with long, slender fingers. I think he must have played the piano because I’d catch him tapping his fingertips against his thighs like keys. Got him into trouble.” I smiled in reminiscence. “Once we were scouting out a suspected weapons cache and his fingers started tapping away … I don’t know what his favorite food was. We ate pretty much the same things at the mess hall, MREs in the field, and you stop complaining about the food after a while. I do know his hope and dream, though.” A swelling knot in my throat hindered talking and I swallowed the urge to stop.
“We were twelve months into a fifteen-month tour. His daughter was born one month after his deployment. His dream was to be home with his baby daughter. He never stopped talking about his baby daughter.” I went and sat beside Charlie’s cold comfort. My father had died without knowing me, too; perhaps it was the parallel that caused me to feel most guilty about Brant.
The iPhone buzzed, and I knew I had the keys to the terminal database. Attila was nodding with his eyes closed. He clutched the doorknob in both hands and held it to his mouth as if he prayed to it.
“Colonel Kurzow has asked for your forgiveness,” he said.
Was that really what I asked? I leaned forward on the edge of the bed, not ready for the verdict, not so soon, not so quickly.
I listened.
Corporal Edison E. Brant was a Christian, but he was not in heaven or hell. In his dress blues, he hung by his fingertips to his self-inflicted exile at 1919 Salisbury Park Purgatory.
Edison stood slowly, brushing dirt from the gold braid that ran along the seam of his pants. His daughter Alisa, with her feet spread wide, toddled to the steps leading to the top of the kiddie slide. She loosed a joyous giggle, so pleased to be doing it all alone. Edison straightened the collar of his shirt, tugged at the arms of the uniform jacket, and then looked up into the cloudless sky.
“Colonel?” he asked the clear blue and looked back over his shoulder to where his wife of six years lounged on a lawn chair beside the other man. The other man had his arm across his wife’s shoulders and some sort of notebook on his lap. It could have been a prayer book, but Edison didn’t care. What he cared about was the single rose and its stem that Camilla fondled, and the teeth she showed whenever she looked to the other man.
Alisa wobbled at the top of the slide.
“These tours,” the other man said. “They were so long. The stress and loneliness must have been phenomenal.”
“I think I always knew he wouldn’t come back.”
Edison tried to shut them out, to embrace the moment with his daughter.
The weird voice came into his head again. “Colonel Kurzow would like to ask you a question.”
Alisa face-planted down the slide and Camilla shot forward, but by the time she’d taken a couple of strides, Alisa was up again and grinning and taking her stumbling steps back to the stairs. Her mother shook her head, picked the fallen rose off the sun-burnt lawn, and sat back down.
“My name is Attila and I’m with Colonel Kurzow.”
“A psychic?” Edison frowned, but his death and the existence of an afterlife had made the concept of a psychic somewhat easier to swallow. After all, he was standing before his daughter.
“Colonel Kurzow has explained to me that she could have saved your life had she killed the suicide bomber, a young boy. Her hesitation cost you your life and the Colonel is willing to kill herself as punishment.”
Edison knelt so that he could better see Alisa’s face as she slipped down the Dora the Explorer slide. As she slid, she gurgled happily, slowing at the base before twisting to slip off backwards. She was going to be a little athlete; Edison could already tell. This time, instead of hurrying off to the stairs, she looked straight at Edison. Not through him. At him.
The psychic continued. “Are you willing to forgive the colonel? Can you help her to see that her mistake doesn’t need to mean her death?”
Edison swore that Alisa could see him. His lungs pumped rapid, shallow breaths as adrenalin surged through his veins more powerful than anything he’d experienced in combat. What the rocket launchers could never overwhelm, the sparkling eyes of his child could. She toddled, arms stretching out to meet his. And he moaned in anticipation of this long-awaited embrace.
“Colonel Kurzow wishes to ask your forgiveness for what happened to you.” The voice came again.
Alisa walked forward and through Edison’s chest, toddling over to balance her hand on the knee of the other man.
“Oh, baby,” Camilla cooed as she reached down and collected Edison’s daughter. The explosion had taken Edison’s scalp and scooped most of his brain with it. It had been quick, but not painless, and terribly disorientating.
“Forgiveness?” He looked back to where his daughter was now in the arms of the other man. Would the Colonel’s life or death allow him to kiss Alisa’s skinned knee? Would she remember his face when she thought of her daddy?
Alisa settled in the lap of the other man and her eyes fixed on Edison. His dark brown eyes.
“Never,” he whispered.
“Never,” he whispered.
I buried my face in my hands. I smelled the residue gun oil.
“You want to try for another?” Attila asked.
I shook my head without looking up; the tinder of hope snuffed.
“It only takes one to hang a jury,” he said.
One guilty verdict, one missing, nine undetermined. But I didn’t care anymore. The murderer who convinces the jury of her innocence, she still knows she’s a murderer.
Chapter 20
Charlie grimaced as he took the shank of the hook between his thumb and forefinger and tugged to remove it from his palm. The tip twisted beneath his skin so that whichever way he jerked, its barbs caught. With a roar of exasperation, he wrenched it out, together with a triangular flap of himself. Blood welled in the hole.
Even free of the hook, pain seeped through his veins as if the barbs had delivered venom. He turned his attention to the next hook, but as he shifted his weight another four slipped under his skin. He sank into a pool of hooks. Already he stood chest deep, with his arms held up over his head.
Slowly lowering an arm on to the hooks to brace himself so that he wouldn’t sink deeper, barbs immediately snared his forearm. Lifting it pulled and stretched the skin; the hooks anchored by yet more hooks. Each would take their allotment of blood, muscle, and sinew. Tines that failed to pierce him left burning welts.
If he didn’t move, he would soon be submerged. He needed to swim.
Reaching out, he dipped his fingers into the hooks and swung his head back and forth as he screamed. He hauled, losing part of his hand, part of his mind. He leaned forward now and pressed his chest down. Another stroke. To swim slowly was misery. He drew his hand back sharp and quick and gained a foot forward. Engulfed in agony, he paused.
He was never beyond pain. To drown would have been preferable, or to lose consciousness; here, however, consciousness was a bright hell that refused to loosen its lucid grip. He sank amongst the poisoned, barbed tines, having lost what little momentum he’d gained. He drew a breath, feeling the hooks catch on his robe as he inhaled, and tear as he exhaled. Blood shook from his fingers as he reached over his head for another stroke.