The Terminals (12 page)

Chapter 18

The general hunched behind his
desk with Morph's laptop open in front of him. The light gave his eyes a lurid cast. “Sure took your time.” He glanced up from his watch and grinned knowingly at Attila. “Didn't think you gypsies dated outside your first cousins.”

I coughed, raking the back of my throat so much that I cried out.

“Becoming a pattern,” the general continued, shifting his attention to me. “How many men died this time?”

Attila stepped forward to my side. But I was immune to the general's attack. Little he could say would make me feel worse.

“Charlie was duped,” I responded.

“You were duped,” he said.

“You were drunk at your desk.”

Attila leaned over the desk to face the general, who stared at him with smug amazement. “Lay off,” Attila said.

The general slowly leaned forward to meet his gaze, noses inches apart. In a fluid motion, the general hooked Attila's arm behind his back and wrenched it upward driving his head into the desk with a crack.

“And why should I lay off?”

I started forward, but the general's expression warned me that Attila faced more pain should I step in.

Attila struggled, and the general tugged his arm so that the wrist reached the nape of his neck. When Attila spoke, his tone was nasal and muffled. “It was an accident, and you would have done the same thing.”

“Would I have?” the general asked and released him. Attila rolled off the desk and held his bleeding nose. The general motioned to me. “You should tell your friend here what happened to you? What you did? Or didn't do.”

I don't like being cornered. “What's all this passive-aggressive bullshit?”

The general slowly stood. He wasn't a tall man, but he was wide. His arms had the remembered strength of decades of calisthenics, the sort of power that isn't lost in years of inactivity. I had no doubt that he could kill with his bare hands despite the oxygen tank.

“There's a rank order here, Colonel, and it's not just military.” I held his gaze. “Guess where suicides rank?” I regretted my demand. “You're throwing away everything we seek. You're rejecting me … us.” He shook his head and seemed to gather himself. “You don't believe in life or the afterlife. How can we all not hate you?”

“Ah, so the more pitiable your situation, the higher your rank? Is that how you came by your stars?”

“Service got me my stars, and as head of this unit, I dole out the esteem.”

The general had a grin that told me he knew something I wouldn't want to hear.

“Then why recruit me?” I challenged.

“I didn't say you couldn't be useful—a terminal who isn't dying, that's ammo without a shelf life. You don't have to go quickly. Besides, you were a public relations disaster—a female colonel committing suicide?” He threw up his hands. “Everyone would assume big bad discrimination.”

Nothing remained to be said; he'd only confirmed my suspicion regarding the PR issues, and I didn't care. I could have explained that we're all dying, that he was already dead in every way but the halting of his dark heart. But he wouldn't have cared, or he would have agreed. When I failed to reply, his eyes read moral victory.

“We need Morph to find another Euth before she kicks the bucket.” He reverted to business. “Might need one if Charlie-boy can't come through.”

“Another Euth?” I asked. So this was to be my punishment: Failure led to more death, and with it, more guilt.

“Unless, of course, you possess a sudden hankering for gnosis.” The general stared until I looked away. His arguments held a sort of infallible logic. I wanted my knife, my gun. To go. “Didn't think so. If being pitiable was the bar, you'd be leading this thing, not me.” He spoke the words slowly so that they hung in the air. “Real soldiers can handle the consequences of the difficult choices they make.”

Attila lunged forward, but I had caught the general's posture and knew a baiting when I saw one. I grabbed Attila by the scruff of his shirt and hauled him back toward Purgatory.

“Hey, you gypped me,” the general called between bouts of laughter. “I wanted to rip those hoops out of his ears.”

“Let it go,” I said to Attila, drawing him in from the hallway.

Attila stared at me, his eyes difficult to read, but burning. I remembered the injustice of his being here. His mother's illness. His grandmother's deal with the devil. I could see the vast well of his rage.

“Thanks for standing up for me,” I said. “But—”

“But what?” He shoved my hand away. “What happened at the mill was no one's and everyone's fault. Us for sending in Charlie, Charlie for giving the wrong location, us again for believing it, the FBI for not being smart enough to figure out there might be a trap when he had already planted a bomb once …” He drew a deep breath before continuing. “But mostly it's Hillar's. This is his doing and I don't like being used by a serial killer. It sure as hell isn't your fault.”

I realized that Attila cared far more than his callous pretense had suggested. From his bed in Purgatory, Charlie looked on, blind eyes staring.

“Attila, the general's right.”

He peered at me. “If you're so suicidal, then why do you worry about these people dying?”

I looked down. “I'm not suicidal. Never was. At least not in the way you might think.” Confusion clouded his face. “I haven't lost the will to live. I still see meaning in some things. The fact is … I deserve to die.”

His lips thinned in disagreement. “No one deserves to die. Even here we make it a choice.”

“Ostensibly,” I said.

“No, more than that. I think it's an easy trade. People commit suicide because they've lost hope. And they're sick,” Attila said, face shining with a passion I hadn't seen in him. Regardless of the moral ambiguity, he believed in the Terminals.

“Did you know there's an African tribe whose queen's job it is to make it rain?” I licked my cracked lips. “Their reward is to choose when they die.” I held his gaze. “I think it's one of the attractions to the Terminals, you see? You're able to choose when you die. It's about control.”

“This isn't Africa and you can't make it rain.” Anger smoldered in his eyes. “So explain why you deserve to choose when you die.”

He reminded me of the heat of the sun, the burn of the acid. And I saw how the stakes were so high. Everything here was life and death; a maze navigated by a fragile moral thread.

“Did you know that the heat can reach as high as one hundred and thirty degrees in the sands?” I asked, and he stood watching me, waiting. “In full body armor and lugging fifty-pound packs. That's hot.”

He crossed his arms.

“So whatever it is happened while you were on tour,” he said.

“I shouldn't have even been outside the perimeter. I commanded a thousand soldiers. But I liked to stay in touch with my men, right? As a woman I proved myself every day, so I needed to venture beyond the razor wire and blast walls. Putting myself in harm's way was what earned me the Medal of Honor, too.”

He gave a nod of understanding, but he couldn't really do so. Finally, I told him.

That day, the temperature was about one hundred and twenty, I explained, and my men were sweltering. We'd spent the morning on patrol. The local police were with us. A lot of our time was spent training them so that they could maintain the peace after we were gone. Boys mostly, but they were growing older the longer we stayed. We worked well with the locals, even without a translator, even with a female commander. When the heat became too much, the sun too high, we stopped. It was in a village of a few thousand. We'd never met any resistance. But resistance was in the eyes of an old man, a veiled woman, in the zeal of a brainwashed child … I trailed off with my eyes shut and then drew a breath before continuing.

A small brick factory pumped oily smoke from a chimney. I remembered the cloying smell, and the nearby school, whose students waved through windows as we passed. I wondered now if it had been an Islamist
madrassa
. We'd driven our Humvees into the shade of a building and parked. An alley climbed deeper into the village, but the village was small, only encompassing a rugged hill.

As my men made camp, I asked one of the police to help me find a place to pee. We went back into the village, and I recall how cool it felt in the shade of the brick walls. Often when we reached a village we're met by children. This was a regular route, and these kids were pretty used to us. And maybe we were too used to them because on my way back, when I found the alley crowded with them, I sensed nothing wrong.

And it
was
unusual; they weren't making a sound. They moved in a large group down the broad steps toward my men. They were focused on the terrain before them and hadn't seen or heard me. The policeman pointed at the back of the group and asked me a sharp question about a boy. The sun was in my eyes, and it placed the child in deeper shadow, but I could see the boy was bulkier, and when I ducked into the shade and my eyes adjusted, I saw the bricks strapped to him. They looked like the gray bricks of explosive.

A girl cried alarm as the policeman shouted again. I pulled my weapon, but he was
just a boy
. Not a terrorist. But I knew these radicalized children were torn from their families and listened to twisted translations of the Qur'an for months until their only escape was to paradise, and the only route they were allowed through sacrifice. I knew all of this. Other children zigzagged in the path of my shot. I didn't even call for my men to run and maybe I couldn't spare the breath, that breach of concentration. Not if I was going to take that shot.

But I didn't take it.

Not to kill a child whose only fault was to be poor.

“Eleven soldiers died,” I told Attila. “With them, six police officers and nine children. And almost all of the survivors were burned like me or worse. In retrospect, the shot should have been automatic. Easy to take.

“A few weeks later, after they'd decided they weren't willing to court-martial me, after the report in which I announced my guilt was filed and accepted and buried, without stripping me of rank or command …” I clenched my eyes and squeezed out the tears hiding there. “On the day they returned me to duty, I committed suicide. Deep, sure cuts along my wrists. A bottle of Tylenol and aspirin. I was alone and it was night. I had arranged it to be sure no one would find me until the next morning. But when the shower ran long, someone investigated. They managed to save me. I wasn't surprised when they sent a general to talk to me. I mean, I was a female lieutenant colonel in the Army. This was high profile.

“He convinced me of the Terminals' existence at least enough to give it a chance. It didn't really matter. For those truly committed to it, death is never far away.” I shook my head and looked up at Attila again, meeting his gaze for the first time since I began the story. “I wonder; if I had pulled the trigger then, would those men and women in Iowa still live now? The consequences of our choices accumulate and my life is now a boulder rolling downhill.” I stretched my hands out in supplication. “You see? A month ago, my hesitation caused twenty-six deaths,” I said. The fire was gone from his eyes, but I would have preferred it to the piteous gaze that replaced it. “And now more …”

“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.

“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.