The two men exchanged glances.
“It’s more than just being blown,” Garrett said. “After Muller tipped off the Russians, they tried to assassinate Malone. That was almost three years ago, March. He was in Afghanistan as an interrogator attached to a black ops team. The Russkies lured him into an ambush. They had a bomb waiting. Malone barely survived it. His face in particular was a mess. We flew him back to Walter Reed. He underwent extensive reconstructive plastic surgery.” He looked at her, said quietly: “Your late friend, Dr. Copeland, did the surgery himself.”
“Arthur?” she said. “I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised. He was the best.”
“Imagine what that must have been like, Annie,” Kessler said. “Sure, we all take risks in this business. It’s part of the game. But you don’t expect to be betrayed by one of your own. You don’t expect to have your career, let alone your appearance, annihilated by a traitor.”
She stared at the face in the photo, hating the memory of James Muller even more. “So you’re sure he did it.”
“Malone is a stellar marksman. It all fits. No other explanation does.”
“We had it all wrong, then,” she said, sighing. She turned the photo around to face them. “You say he had plastic surgery, but this is an old shot. What does he look like now?”
Garrett shrugged. “I’d like to show you something more recent, but I can’t.”
“Why not?”
“There isn’t one.”
“But don’t we-”
“Not for him.” He leaned back and propped a foot against the edge of the coffee table. “There’s no file, either. We have nothing on him. Not even fingerprints. I’ll explain in a moment. In fact, it’s sheer dumb luck we have this single photo. It shouldn’t exist. It was taken surreptitiously by a Special Ops Group team member in Afghanistan. To impress his girlfriend, he admitted later. We canned the idiot for that; but he should consider himself lucky, because if Malone had known, he would’ve probably killed him. Anyway, it wound up at the bottom of the SOG guy’s file, and it turned up only after we began searching for anything that could help us find Malone.”
“Find him?”
Garrett said, “Two months after his admission to Walter Reed, he vanished from his hospital bed. That was the night before Dr. Copeland was going to remove the bandages from his final round of plastic surgery.”
THIRTY-TWO
Allegheny National Forest Tionesta, Pennsylvania
Thirty-one Months Earlier-May 15, 3:45 p.m.
“Who are you?”
The lips on the stranger’s face in the bathroom mirror moved, perfectly in synch with his own.
He stood frozen in place, unable to make sense of what he was seeing.
For weeks, he thought he’d accepted what had happened to him. With his usual cockiness, he figured he was prepared. In fact, he’d been eager for this moment.
But that was before he stared into this mirror-into the haunted eyes of a pale, swollen, bruised, unshaven face that he no longer recognized.
He exhaled loudly, suddenly aware that he’d been holding his breath. He shook his head-but stopped when the stranger shook his, too.
“Who the hell are you?” he demanded, louder.
The stranger’s lips had moved again. And this time the voice registered. Deeper than his own. Not quite raspy, but huskier. The same trauma that had done this to his face had done something funny to his vocal cords, too.
He stopped.
His face? His voice?
His heart was pounding and his head began to spin. He had to look away. He lurched to the bathroom doorway and leaned against the frame, stomach churning, fighting down the bitter taste rising in his throat.
The rustic living room swam before him dimly, gloomy from the towering oaks and pines that cloaked the cabin in perpetual shadow.
He noticed his duffle bag on the bare planks of the floor, where he’d dropped it a few minutes ago. Nearby, his worn leather jacket, draped over the back of an old wooden chair.
His eyes drifted to the double-barreled Mossberg he’d propped near the screen door that led onto the front porch.
Outside, the wind hissed through the leaves of the forest. Somewhere in the distance, a crow cawed.
A faint medicinal smell reminded him that he still gripped the remnants of the bandages he’d just cut from his face. He lifted the white tangle and noticed brown streaks of dried blood on it. Instinctively, he opened his hand to drop it, but the surgical tape stuck to his fingers. He waved his hand, but it still clung tightly. He shook his hand wildly, two, three times, grunting like an animal. The stained white wad finally spun off into the middle of the room, landing beneath the knotty-pine coffee table.
He was sweating now, and shivering. His tongue felt like a thick rag. He knew he was losing it. As he’d been trained, he closed his eyes, imagined himself on a puffy cloud, counted slowly as he struggled to control his breathing.
He wanted to step into the living room. But he couldn’t move. He knew he had to look again. Had to force himself to come to terms with what he had become.
He turned slowly. At first, he didn’t dare look into the mirror. He bent over the sink, propping himself on shaky arms. He remained that way for a moment, eyes down, staring at the rough floorboards beneath his boots. Until the knots and swirls in the wood grain arranged themselves into an Edvard Munch image of a distorted, howling face.
He clenched his teeth. Raised his gaze to the mirror.
The haunted stranger with the bruised jaw and swollen cheeks still stared back at him.
“Who am I?” the stranger whispered at him.
*
For several days after he arrived, he could barely muster the will to unpack necessities, which he left scattered around the cabin. He didn’t eat much or go out. Didn’t read or listen to the radio. Didn’t bother to clean up or shave, either. He didn’t want to look again into the bathroom mirror.
Each morning, he put on a pot of coffee. Wrapped in a gray flannel bathrobe, he sat on the porch in the old, creaking rocker. Sipped coffee in the morning, wine in the afternoon and evening.
Sipping. Rocking. Staring off into the Allegheny National Forest. Watching the oak leaves flail helplessly in the grip of the rising wind, as a cool low front moved in. Watching gray squirrels scramble and dig in last fall’s brown, rotting drifts. Watching flocks of black birds wheel under the gunmetal sky and scudding clouds.
Watching. Rocking. Trying to reconcile himself to the face in the mirror.
At dusk, sluggish from the wine, he limped up the stairs to the loft and stretched out under the scratchy olive Army blanket on the bed under the eaves. He slept without sheets, right on the bare mattress pad. He slept at least ten hours every night, his dreams haunted by images of violence.
*
Rocking on the porch and sipping Malbec during the afternoon of the fourth day, he thought about his first time here.
He was twelve years old when Dad-the tall, beefy man everyone else called “Big Mike”-brought him here for a week during deer-hunting season. They’d driven a couple of hours north of their sprawling home near Pittsburgh, taking the big Chevy pickup. Along the way, Dad revealed that the cabin was his private retreat; not even Mom knew about it. He went up here each November, he said, to get away from his high-pressure construction business and “recharge the batteries.”
The first day, Dad showed him how to clean and shoot his Remington “thirty-ought-six.” It was his first experience with guns. Dad patiently demonstrated how to safely carry, load, aim, fire, and clear the rifle. Then he set some empty soup cans out on the grass, with the slope of a steep hill as the backstop.
The first time he shot his father’s rifle from a standing position, the kick nearly knocked him down and left his ears ringing, despite the ear plugs he wore. But the blast sent a can tumbling.