After her initial shakiness, Victoria had recovered quickly. Talking about how scared she’d been the next day before Chelsea left for work, she’d compared it to the time she’d faced down a boyfriend holding a shotgun on her.
“Not quite as scared as that, but almost,” she’d said breezily. “There’s so much evil in this world.”
To Chelsea, the cliché at the end seemed to make light of what they’d gone through, and she told her aunt she was trivializing murder.
“Come on, dear,” said Victoria. “Of course I’m not trivializing it. We certainly could have died.”
Though she loved her aunt, she was happy when Victoria left for home Tuesday afternoon, having changed her plans.
The scratches and bruises Chelsea had suffered during her ordeal were minuscule, the sort she might have gotten from falling while running on a sidewalk. She’d been extremely lucky.
Had the man meant to rape her or kill her? Probably both, she thought.
She replayed the tragedy in the hotel obsessively. It crowded into her thoughts while she tried to work, forced its way into her calculations, even elbowed away her attempts to solve sudoku puzzles. The men being lined up, the kid, the AR-15…
Jin Chiang stuck his head through the open doorway of the lab.
“Chelsea, come down the hall and look at this,” said the software engineer, bobbing away. “Hurry!”
Chelsea closed down her workstation and locked the door before following Chiang to his lab. There, rather than finding him and one or two protégés staring at a workstation screen, she saw over two dozen Smart Metal employees watching the oversize presentation monitor at the front of the room.
Just as surprising, it was tuned to a cable news network.
“What’s going on?” she asked as she came into the room.
Some shushed her. Chiang pointed at the screen.
What she saw first was nothing — literally, just blackness. As she stared, she could make out some boxy shapes; buildings maybe.
Then there was a flash. Several. White and yellow.
Then a red hand rising. But not a hand — flames.
Words scrolled across the bottom of the screen:
U.S. attacking ISIS cell responsible for Boston attacks
Up in his office, Massina flipped back and forth between the different channels carrying the news reports. The U.S. had launched a wave of attacks in Libya against different ISIS cells. Targets in at least three different cities were being hit. The commentator speculated that there were probably a dozen others targeted, but at the moment the military was refusing to comment. All the news reports were coming from people on the scene, mostly via cell-phone uploads to sites like YouTube.
One hearty CNN reporter had climbed onto a roof in Tobruk — shades of Peter Arnett in the First Gulf War — and was giving a live commentary as the missiles struck a building about a half mile away.
“I know that building,” he told the anchor back home. “It’s just a school. Thank God it’s night and all the students are at home.”
At that point, the “school” erupted in a series of fireballs as the missiles hit a store of ammunition and explosives.
“I suppose those are their pencils igniting,” said Massina caustically.
Bozzone, standing near the desk, laughed.
Massina flipped through the channels again, settling this time on Fox. They were replaying an earlier, extremely shaky cell-phone video from Misrata.
“What do you think?” he asked Bozzone.
Bozzone shrugged.
“At least they’re doing something,” offered Massina.
“True,” said Bozzone. “But how do we know these are the guys? It looks more like they’re targeting a guerilla movement. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but it’s almost beside the point, at least as far as Boston is concerned. Despite what these guys are claiming.”
Yes, thought Massina. It wasn’t retribution.
Chelsea stared at the others as the broadcast continued. They were smiling, cheering each explosion.
She felt as if she should be doing the same. Yet for some reason, the explosions didn’t make her feel any better. Not that she was sorry for the terrorists who were dying; on the contrary, she knew they deserved to die, and if she’d been piloting the bombers or commanding the missiles, or even pointing a gun at one of them, she would have no hesitation pulling the trigger.
But that wasn’t the same as feeling satisfied, let alone elated.
She didn’t feel anything. Not joy, not sorrow.
Pain?
No.
Pleasure?
No.
Satisfaction?
Not even close.
Nothing?
Nothing.
“I’m going back to work,” she said, leaving the lab.
20
Tolevi had just sat down to watch television with his daughter, Borya, when the American assault on the ISIS bases in Libya began. His first impulse was to change the channel, but all that did was bring a slightly less fuzzy image of exploding bombs to the screen.
“Do you want to watch this?” he asked.
“Yes. Don’t you?”
“Not particularly. But all right.”
“Why don’t you want to see it?” Borya leaned forward on the couch, her head tilted slightly, a mannerism he thought she’d inherited from her mother. “Does it scare you?”
“How could it scare me?” answered Tolevi. He was genuinely surprised — what did his daughter think of him?
“Maybe you think the bombs will come here.”
“We’ve already been attacked. This is simply the response.” He studied her face, as if there were some clue there that would reveal the secret workings of her teenage mind. “And are you scared?”
“Of course not.”
“What about the other day, downtown,” he asked. “Were you scared then?”
“No.”
He actually believed her. The child had a very high threat tolerance, something that often got her in trouble.
“You would have been scared if one of them had pointed a gun at you,” said Tolevi. “Then.”
“Has that happened to you? I know it has,” she added. “I know people have shot at you. That’s why you only have half an ear, right? When you were with Chelsea.”
“Only a little was cut off,” he said defensively. About a third had been sliced, mostly the lobe, by an overzealous Russian prick of an officer.
“They cut it because you wouldn’t give up your friends, I bet.”
“Where do you get these ideas?” asked Tolevi, rising. He decided he would have a drink.
“Can you get me some chips?” she asked. “If you’re going into the kitchen.”
“Potato chips give you pimples,” he said. But he got the bag out anyway, and also a glass of orange juice — in his mind a balance to the chips — and was bringing them into the living room for her when the doorbell rang.
“You’re not expecting anyone, right?” Tolevi asked.
“I doubt it.”
That was a no.
“Stay here,” he said, setting down her snacks.
Tolevi went back to the kitchen, out into the hall, and checked the video monitor, which showed the front door.
Maarav Medved. A Russian mobster with whom he occasionally did business. He was alone, the street behind him empty.