She threw the clothes away. Couldn’t be entirely certain of the substance thrown at her, but understood the intent. She held up her hands and was surprised not to see them shaking.
When things happen, she told herself, as long as you’re not harmed, you have a choice over how you handle it. This meant nothing. It closed an episode, perhaps, but as an event it was unattached to anything else that was happening. Not everything connects.
* * *
The first explosion came an hour after Sutler’s departure. A hollow pop from the burn pits. Rem walked down the track and when the second explosion came he saw smoke rise from the Beach, not the burn pits.
He arrived as the third and fourth bursts broke above the dune in a hail of debris and sand that hissed as it fell — and saw Samuels standing on the Beach with grenades. Little remained of the boat, an outline, flats and scraps of fibreglass spread across the dune.
Rem asked what he was doing. ‘Did Sutler tell you to do this?’
Samuels looked at his watch and asked if it mattered. Anyway, he was done now.
* * *
The news of the assault on the regional government at their offices in Southern-CIPA was quickly followed by the news of Kiprowski’s and Sutler’s deaths.
A small convoy of military police arrived late in the afternoon and immediately cordoned off Pakosta’s and Clark’s cabins, and took Rem into the Quonset to answer questions. Southern-CIPA had come under mortar attack. The offices of the Deputy Administrator had taken a direct hit. The Deputy Administrator was in the adjoining office at the time and had suffered burns. The two men inside his office, Kiprowski and Sutler, were killed, and they would be identified by their DNA, there were specialists flying in from Germany who would assist.
Rem couldn’t see why Pakosta’s and Clark’s belongings were being taken, and the guards would not explain, except to say that both of them were unharmed, they were at the front of the building when it came under fire, and had suffered nothing more than a few scratches in their scramble to get clear. In Sutler’s cabin they found a mason jar with a number of red and black scorpions inside. The man who found them hurled the jar over the Quonset before Rem could stop him.
THE PLAINS
Rem kept a newspaper transcript of an interview with Paul Geezler.
In its way, he thought, it was a work of art.
On hindsight: We could see how things were going, I doubt anyone knew the scale exactly, but it was possible, early on, to see the circumstances, if you like, the pre-existing conditions, but none of us knew what would happen. The system was more vulnerable than any of us realized.
I can see why this has drawn the attention it has. We’re six weeks on from the assault, and we’re still finding out what happened. We’re coming up to an election and if there’s a new administration they’re going to want answers. I want answers, and we’re working hard to find them. Everyone wants to know why this happened and how it happened, and hopefully this is something the hearings can resolve next May.
On Sutler: We’re committed to finding this man, to bringing him to justice. Like everyone else the first I heard about him was the day Southern-CIPA was attacked. We have good people out there looking for him, and I’m confident he’ll be found. It’s only a matter of time.
On the burn pits: We know a lot more now than we did two, three weeks ago. New information is coming to light about these rogue operations. The pits at Camp Bravo were abandoned, and we’ve since learned about the illegal burnings there, and given that the same thing was happening at Camp Liberty it’s clear that projects like these were not appropriately monitored. More globally, it’s clear that the speed at which everything was ending wasn’t manageable. Anyone could see that the burn pits were a problem at a number of levels. You can’t close down an operation of that size in such a short time.
On his culpability: By the time we get to the hearings it will be almost a year after the fact. The enquiry is digging in all sorts of directions and we’ll have to see what comes up. Given the work I’ve done since, the responsibilities I’ve undertaken, and all of the changes HOSCO has undergone, it’s not a surprise that my name has come up. It’s after the fact. I have to accept that the work I’m doing will make me a target in some way. I did, it’s true, accompany the European Division Chief to Amrah. We were there one night. I think we made fourteen visits to other sites across Europe also in the same month. You have to look closely at the other testimonies, and how they say I was involved. I’m supposed to have spoken with Sutler on the phone. On the phone. There’s no record of those calls. More importantly, there’s no record in Southern-CIPA of any involvement from any of the staff from Europe. Southern-CIPA handled the money. Paul Howell was the man responsible for the funding, he’s the man to concentrate on. This, I hope, is where the enquiry will focus.
On the day of Geezler’s appointment as Deputy Director to the Middle East, Santo called Rem. ‘He stepped on our backs, he rode us the entire time.’
* * *
The Chicago train arrived early morning at Kansas City. Bound for Los Angeles, it paused in the station for several hours, and while this was Rem’s stop he decided to wait for the moment, sleep, get off the train before it departed. But when the heating clicked off the carriages quickly cooled and the dim light and bustle on the station kept him awake. It made little sense to him that the train would be so slow, that something so American could be so backward, so of another period. The trains in Europe were sleeker and faster.
He walked stiffly at first, and made his way through to the terminal, then set his cases beside a bench and decided to sleep sitting upright until a reasonable hour. Samuels lived in a town called Topeka several hours away. As he wasn’t expected, Rem imagined that any time between midday and late afternoon would be the best time to arrive, the best time to conduct the kind of conversation they needed to have.
* * *
He drove over the plains, the rising downs, a soft snow slipping into rain already settled in the bristled fields. The roads rode the backs of the hills, small and regular enough to suggest an endlessness. Little changed, and when he came to Topeka he thought it familiar: the Holiday Inns and motels bordering the highway, the closer lots of white clapboard houses, the train line skirting the centre, an unremarkable main street of coffee houses and closed-down stores. You’d fight hard to leave such a place, and it would live on in you in some way, a measure for every other town you’d visit.
At first he couldn’t imagine Samuels living here, and drove through the centre to see how far the town stretched. When he arrived at a golf course he turned about, and thought that the place was hollow, dropped down rather than evolved. This definition was Cathy’s. Having come from a small town herself, she had the belief that these smaller places followed one of two possibilities. Either they morphed out of the landscape and had a peculiar logic (grain stores at the railyard), or they were deposited, designed elsewhere and dumped. Much like Camp Liberty, Topeka could be erased by one strong wind. The evening before the trip Rem had sought out Camp Liberty on the internet, located the very spot identified by Watts by GPS and found nothing: in six weeks they’d wiped it clean, packed it up like it had never happened.
On his second approach he made a more direct route, and found the Samuels’ house without trouble. Sat on a corner lot, fenceless, slightly raised from the street on a small hill; the lawn rode up to the house, which, being raised and ringed with posts, gave the impression that it stood on tiptoes. A familiar variation on familiar features: a sunroom, an enclosed patio, a raised veranda, a separate garage.