“I got that, Mama. And that’s why I think we need to do it off the books. Do it mean. Ensure the threat is neutralized.”
She shakes her head. “You heard Tamara. This can’t be a vigilante action. He has ties to the State Department. You don’t think they’d notice?”
“They might thank us.”
This is about his kids. She makes herself remember that and adopts a conciliatory tone. “Let’s see how it plays out. Nothing we can do anyway until we know where he is.”
“Yeah. Until then, we are targets in his scope.”
Khalid spent two years in the TEZ, listening to gossip and chasing rumors. Jon Helm was one of those rumors. It was generally agreed he was an American mercenary and you did not want to be in a conflict if he was hired by the other side. But Khalid had never gotten anyone to admit that they’d met Jon Helm. Rumor insisted he was an American but nothing else was certain. He was a black guy or a white guy. He was a drunk, he was disciplined. He lived in Sudan, Algeria, Chad, maybe Mali. Somewhere far away, but he could turn up without warning and make warlords disappear.
Khalid had assumed Jon Helm was a story, the kind used to scare your rivals. Only when he heard Hussam El-Hashem’s description of Jon Helm did he begin to think the man might be real. So he listened attentively when True explained what was known of Jon Helm, and he chided himself for not following up on the rumors he’d heard.
It doesn’t have to be too late.
He takes a few minutes to consider and compose a plan. Then he goes to see True in her office—but Jameson is there ahead of him. When the door closes, he moves on to knock on Lincoln’s door.
He half-expects to be ignored. After all, he’s the new guy, bottom of the hierarchy, and Lincoln is busy. But the door unlocks.
Lincoln is seated behind his desk, a laptop open in front of him. “What’s up?” he asks gruffly. “Did Chris give you all the employment forms?”
“Yes, sir.”
He met Lincoln last night at the reception. When Chris introduced him, he stood there like an idiot, frozen in surprise, taking in the fire-scarred face with its artificial eye, the weird, semitranslucent prosthetic hand with its fingers rippling in nervous motion, and the violent colors of the tattoos on his arms, so unnatural they suggested his arms might be artificial too.
Khalid was used to seeing scarred and disfigured men in the TEZ, but there, war was a way of life. He hadn’t expected the scars to be so visible at home where war was distant—although here, too, it’s a way of life for some.
The scars no longer command Khalid’s attention, but he still hesitates before he speaks—a few seconds spent trying to read the mood behind that ravaged face. It’s not easy. He’s got a feeling Lincoln was hard to read even before his injuries.
Finally, Khalid says, “I wanted to talk to you about Jon Helm, sir. Or Shaw Walker, if that’s what it is.”
“Go ahead. You know anything about him?”
“Nothing solid. I heard rumors in the TEZ, though. I could make inquiries.”
Lincoln nods thoughtfully. “You don’t need to do this face to face?”
“No, sir. I know a couple of guys I trust pretty far. They trust me. I won’t need to tell them why I’m looking or mention ReqOps at all.”
“You’ll need a budget,” Lincoln says.
Khalid nods. “A couple grand?” he suggests. “It could be dangerous work for them.”
“Set it up. I’ll arrange for the money.”
No Moral Argument
Miles sits at a desk in the guest room of his parents’ house in Seattle, an old keyboard and tablet in front of him. He is typing swiftly, steadily. He’s been typing for most of the twenty hours since he’s been back, pouring out every memory of the past two months, first in broad strokes but then revisiting his narrative, over and over, filling in the finer details of his experiences: textures, scents, sounds; the words that were spoken—brutal, commanding, mocking, misleading—rendered as exactly as he can remember them; harsh gallows humor among the prisoners and desperate promises; the absurdities he witnessed, and the agonies; the lofty philosophies spawned out of hopelessness and terror.
Alongside the keyboard is a phone. It’s been activated with the number he’s used since he was a kid. When he turned the phone on, a call rang through. A harbinger of the myriad to come. So he turned the phone off again, letting his parents field the calls—calls from mediots, from news agencies, from publishers who never before showed an interest in his work. Calls from friends.
He answered none. He wasn’t ready to talk. Not even to the State Department officials who visited the house.
“Tell them I’m asleep.”
It wasn’t the truth, but it wasn’t entirely a lie either. He was hardly conscious of himself, of the room, the house, his worried parents. Instead, for most of that time, he existed within his memories—not as himself, but as a disembodied observer wandering through the hours of his captivity, reviewing it all with what felt like perfect recall.
But at last his mind is winding down, his fingers slowing, new words no longer appearing on the screen.
He is nodding in exhaustion, hardly able to hold himself up when a man’s voice speaks from out of nowhere, low, rough, regretful. “You shouldn’t have come here, Dushane.”
The voice doesn’t frighten him because he knows it’s a dream. And because it is a dream, his dream, he gets to ask a question that he didn’t know to ask when he first heard those words. “Why are you here?”
The mercenary—Jon Helm, Shaw Walker, whatever the fuck his name is—ignores the question, if he hears it at all. He moves off to supervise the execution of the Iraqi laborers who’d been heading home from the western desert and who’d given Miles a ride.
Worst mistake of their lives.
Last mistake.
No point in holding on to them. None will fetch a worthwhile ransom. No point even trying to collect. “Why the fuck don’t you just let them go?” Miles screams, but this too is a revisionary memory. He only wishes he’d said that.
The reality of that day is that Miles said nothing.
Slide it back. Play it through again, more detail.
He is on his knees. The thick fabric of his trousers fails to stop the bite of small stones against his flesh. His feet are numb, his back aches, his eyes burn with dust and the glare of the sun against the gray desert grit. His mouth is dry, throat swollen, and not just from the fear that his blood and brains are about to be redistributed in a spray pattern, a transient marker of his presence written on sand, but also because the afternoon temperature has climbed to one hundred eighteen degrees Fahrenheit and he’s been kneeling for some immeasurable period, and if it gets any hotter he fully expects the air to ignite and maybe that wouldn’t be a bad thing. Maybe this fucking world deserves it.
By the time the mercenary stops to look at him, Miles has given up on moral argument. He recognizes that there is no moral argument that can save him when the men who were kneeling on either side of him are already dead. The best he can do is look up to meet death’s gaze, a last act of defiance.
The mercenary is tall and lean. A long face, narrow nose, light-colored eyes just visible behind the tinted lenses of his sunglasses. His skin is burned dark by the sun but lightened again by dust caked in his sweat. His brown beard is frosted by dust. He wears combat fatigues, an armored vest, a helmet. The sleeves of his combat jacket are rolled up. He holds an assault rifle in his right hand. The fingers of his left hand are long and thin and contorted—half-curled—around a mass of scar tissue. There is a multicolored tattoo on his left forearm.