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  And now he’s hit a snag, and it’s time to regroup.

  After he pays the cabbie and gets out, Davis spots Mouse in the shadows at the back of the restaurant’s parking lot, leaning against his six-year-old gray Outback and unwrapping a Snickers bar. He’s a pudgy man with a screen pallor whose chief form of exercise is clicking his index finger—hence his nickname. He’s undercover in shapeless khakis and an ancient Trekkie T-shirt, and he doesn’t look real happy when Davis walks up and tosses his duffel on the pavement.

  “They took my gun,” Davis says.

  “I’ll get you another one,” Mouse says by way of greeting. He pauses to study the play of shadow caught in the ripple of scars on Davis’ face. “You know you blew two months of preparation going after the Ramil thing too straight-ahead. That’s what got you bounced out of the country. Somebody big had skin in the Ramil buy, and you pissed them off, and they sandbagged your skinny ass.”

  “Nice seeing you too, Mouse,” Davis says. “And you have it wrong. Ramil was cool. It was what happened on the way to Ramil that fucked me up.”

  “I agree with the fucked-up part, but your grasp of motivation is skewed if you’re gonna persist in that Turmar crap. I ran diagnostics on everybody—all the Iraqi ministries, their army, their cops . . . our army and special ops. Nobody was anywhere near that place. No drones. Not even worth a satellite flyover. It’s like the after-action report says—a meeting engagement. You bumbled into a low-rent bandit raid on some scrap contractor who is now listed among the missing.”

  “You check him out?”

  “Yeah. He had some speeding tickets in Memphis. When his construction firm failed, he filed bankruptcy and got divorced. When he left his wife and kids in Memphis, he was in arrears on his child support. Like a lot of people, he went to the sandbox to seek his fortune. Give it up, Joey, he was a glorified junk dealer, a sheeny man.”

  “What about the girl? The pilot? Anything new on her?”

  “Absolutely. Now she’s staring at the walls across town at Walter Reed instead of Landstuhl, Germany.”

  Davis turns toward the dome of light that glows over Washington, D.C. “Just over there?”

  “She really got to you, huh?”

  “I put her in this. I made the call to use the Guard . . .”

  “So put yourself on her visitors list. Take flowers. You’re no good to me as long as you got her stuck in your craw.” Mouse exhales, crumples the Snickers wrapper, and tosses it into the open window of his car. “I’m serious, take flowers.”

  “It sucks, you know. I thought the rough stuff was finished. I thought I was over there just cleaning up the garbage,” Davis says.

  Mouse steps forward and places his hands on Davis’ shoulders. “Welcome home, Joey. You don’t look so hot. You been out there way too long. It’s time for you to come in and take some downtime.”

  “Maybe,” Davis speculates, and all the while his eyes are still fixed on the lights of Washington in the distance.

  ***

  He doesn’t take flowers. The next afternoon Davis finds a few white crosses to medicate the insomnia and the jet lag and drives the government Crown Victoria that Mouse provided across D.C. to Walter Reed Medical Center on NW Georgia Avenue. He knows the way because he’s been there himself in 2005 after a stairway blew up in his face in Fallujah. The Reed campus sprawls about the size of a Big Ten university and seems more orderly and low-key now, less the feel of a galloping meat-processing plant. Most of the guys he sees in the hall are older, from other wars.

  Mouse has given him specific directions and made some calls to arrange the visit. Davis locates Kraig in the neurology compound on a fifth-floor ward where she shares a room with another female soldier. He doesn’t enter the room because, as he approaches the doorway, he sees her sitting upright in bed, propped by pillows, wearing a blue skullcap. Two nurses are affixing electrodes to the cap one at a time. As more and more of the electric leads are fastened to her head, she starts to take on the aspect of young Medusa whose golden hair has been replaced by menacing dreadlocks. He stands there as the nurses finish attaching the connections, then he watches them fiddle with a remote, adjusting a computer monitor.

  Davis understands the object of the exercise: the electric leads connect to an EEG monitor. The electroencephalogram measures brain waves and is used to evaluate brain disorders. They’re checking for brain damage.

  That’s when Kraig looks up at him standing in the doorway and he has the distinct impression that if he doesn’t remove himself immediately, her fixed, empty stare will indeed turn him to stone. So Joe Davis, who’s never really run from anything in his life, pivots on his heel and hurries from the ward and goes down the elevator and exits the hospital and gets in his government car and drives until he picks a tavern at random.

  Six hours later, when it becomes clear that all the Jack Daniel’s in the joint will not ease the memory of looking directly into Jesse Kraig’s dead eyes—and when the loud patrons start getting on his nerves—he calls Maury the Mouse at his home in Silver Springs and informs him, yeah, he probably does need some downtime and would Maury come collect him before his ace undercover boy goes off on a bunch of oblivious civilians and wrecks the place.

  And Mouse says, “Stand by, Joey. I’m on the way.”

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Late on a Sunday night Jesse trudges behind her walker down the poly-trauma ward corridor. She has been granted some leeway to exercise because the violent freakouts have receded. She avoids sleep whenever possible because the wormhole terrors lie in wait in her dreams. Dragging herself from bed was not a conscious decision. Pure muscle memory forced her to plant her hands on the tubular strut of the four-pod. She doesn’t really understand that her muscles are the only part of her that still reliably work.

  Ka-thump. She scoots the walker forward then pulls up her good left leg. Then she drags the stiff injured right knee and gingerly tests her weight. The pain diffuses through the Seroquel. Beneath this antipsychotic straightjacket, an unknown invader still lurks in her fatty tissues, and occasionally, when her liver burns some lipids for energy, residues of the PCP release into her sluggish blood and it’s freakout time again. But that hasn’t happened for more than a week.

  So she walkers the hall.

  She doesn’t want to go clunk up and down the ward.

  But she isn’t driving.

  Her body feels an imperative to practice walking erect. And it’s her metabolism that orders her liver and kidneys to keep scrubbing away in an effort to restore the chemical balance in her brain.

  Ka-thump. She starts her crab-scuttle turn at the end of the hall. An orderly trails her, makes a quick assessment and decides to let her pursue her solo walkathon.

  Ka-thump. Shuffle shuffle.

  Attracted by a surge in sound and flashing light, she veers to the side and approaches a crowd of patients and staff who assemble by a wall-mounted TV.

  One guy, like her, leans on a walker. He wears a patch over an empty eye socket, and a concave scoop is missing from the left side of his skull. A double and a quadruple amputee crane forward in their wheelchairs. Now more nurses and orderlies surge down the hall to join the increasingly animated group. Voices rise in a crescendo, and she feels a sensation, like sudden rain, pelt her face. She peers up at the television and can’t separate out the sounds, not sure which parts originate with people next to her and which parts emanate from the flat-screen.

  This tall guy in a dark suit and a red tie stands at a podium. There’s more red behind him. A carpet. And on the left there’s a cascade of red and white stripes. He’s a black guy with close-cropped hair who looks vaguely familiar, and slowly she realizes it’s the guy she works for. And now the people all around her are cheering. The ones who have hands pump them in the air. A patient standing beside her spontaneously turns and gives her a hug.

  Yesterday she would have reacted violently to another’s touch. But something has changed in the space of her w
alk down the hall. And now she enjoys the feel of his encircling arms. She wishes he’d do it again.

  She blinks and concentrates on the screen, where letters crawl along the bottom. The B she gets right off, but the I and the N escape her. Okay. Next group. That’s an L, and the next one is an A. Then there’s a D. She misses that one, along with the E and another N. The next group hits her eyes like a handful of rocks: D-E-A-D.

  The general excitement swirling around her resonates inside the passages of her skull. Her ears and eyes pop. The muscles of her neck and jaw throb and strum. Giddy, she teeters, pitching off her feet, and immediately hands are there on either side to lift her and steady her. She does not shrink from the contact.

  Her central orienting principle—fear—is still present. But now it has company. She senses something confusing—some factor of ranging, of ordering—that, after the newness wears off, she perceives as depth perception. Slowly she rediscovers how it works. Her skin is a boundary, and the people and the TV are on the outside and the snare drum beating in her chest is on the inside. The suffocating, encompassing worm world has flamed out. No crawly stars. No choking on dirt. She staggers and steels her grip on the walker and experiences a manageable fear of falling that is followed by a buoyant distribution of her weight.

  Balance.

  “Ha!” she forces a hoarse, jubilant croak though dry vocal chords.

  Then an image—not a sensation—causes her to start trembling and pouring sweat. It’s an old wooden shed with uneven, weatherbeaten boards and jutting rusty nails. Gotta be early spring because the rutted ground is turning mushy and catches pools of snow melt. An eight-year-old girl braces herself to enter the low doorway. Spiders in there. Other critters. Coons, maybe even an early snake. Gruff male voice, not unkind. “Go on, girl. Go in there and bring out that old hose. Do it now. Git.”

  In there is full of cobwebs and rusty saws and crowbars and pitchforks hanging on the walls and piles of rakes and shovels that are shriven by lingering frost, and way in the back in the dark there’s the old garden hose, which is hopelessly tangled up and still stiff and frozen. And she’s got to go in there and grab it and drag it out into the light. This fat leopard spider scurries from behind a roll of barbed wire, and she stomps it flat with her muddy tennis shoe. And then she has to take the dirty, knotted, impossible hose in both of her bare hands and yank. She blinks and finds herself back in the present, not real sure where the picture in her head went or where it came from or, at first, who the little girl was. And then she realizes that the girl was her and she’s just experienced a memory.

  So I’m back, slowly the notion forms. In my body.

  The memory prompts a fresh idea: Got to untangle the dead freakin’ worms.

  A flicker of hallucination follows on the thought like errant lightning. When it rears up, she stamps her good foot. Get back. Squish your ass!Ha!

  The effort drenches her gown with sweat, and the loose hospital pajama bottoms cling, damp, to her legs, and her knuckles that grip the walker blanch white. It takes a full minute to accept that the runaway drum in her chest is connected to her rapidly expanding and contracting lungs. Air. Breath. Heart.

  “Walk,” they command.

  Laboriously, she sidesteps, braced on her forearms, and turns the walker. Doubling back now, she makes toward the nurses’ station. One last clunk, and the walker bangs against the desk. She grits her teeth, and the pressure in her cheeks threatens to bust the stitches in her jaw.

  “What’s she up to?” the nurse behind the desk asks the orderly who shadows Jesse.

  “I’m on it,” he says, hovering. He’d noticed her accept the hug from another patient in front of the TV and has accompanied her step by step on the way back. “Looks to me like Capt’n Kraig is trying to smile.”

  When her breath backs off to a manageable pant, she steadies herself with her left hand and reaches out with her right and tries to grasp a ballpoint pen that lays on a stack of printouts on the desk.

  “Easy there, Captain,” the orderly gently guides her hand away from the pen. “That’s a no-no in your case.”

  “Ha!” Making eye contact with the orderly, she more slowly, deliberately extends her fingers toward the pen.

  The orderly raises an eyebrow and exchanges glances with the nurse. “What the hell . . .” He stays his hand and watches closely to see what she’ll do next.

  Slowly, awkwardly, she touches the pen and then curls her fingers around the slim cylinder. In a clumsy movement she experiments with mapping shapes on the paper. What happens looks like a game of Hangman the cat got.

  Deep furrows crease her stitched forehead, and again she grits her teeth. Now several more of the staff have torn themselves away from the president’s announcement and gather around the desk.

  Jesse takes a deep breath and looks past her nonsense scribble to the block of type on the sheet. For several long minutes she studies the thicket of black Caslon characters. The concentration prompts another crooked flash from the new time machine in her head, and she sees a cloud of ravens rising over the stubble of a winter wheat field.

  Her palm is damp with sweat and smudges the page, blurring the type, as she positions the pen and bears down, drawing the tip in an erratic loop around a letter B. Rest. Exhale. Blink sweat.

  Then she forces her hand further across the type and makes another scraggly circle around the letter T. Shaking with exertion, she trundles her palsied hand to one last letter. Almost cross-eyed with exertion, she manages to capture an R.

  “Bee Tee Are,” the orderly pronounces.

  Again Jesse grits her teeth and strains her cheeks as she hugs the pen protectively to her chest in her fist.

  “Bee Tee Are,” the orderly repeats.

  Jesse attempts a vigorous nod that comes off in slow motion, but she manages to raise the hand with the pen and points her index finger at her head.

  “BTR. Better, get it?” the nurse says in a hushed voice.

  The orderly drops his jaw and exclaims, “Well, no shit, girl. No shit!”

  The second celebration that erupts at the desk is tempered by Jesse’s refusal to give up the pen. When the orderly patiently attempts to extract it from her hand, she clutches it possessively and a defensive snarl comes to her lips. He has to pry it away digit by digit.

  That’s when they all look around and see the doctor watching with a frown on his tired face. “What the hell’s Kraig doing with a pen? She tried to stab Christine Morel with a pen, for Christ’s sake.”

  They try to explain.

  “Okay, great. But no pens. Get her back to speech therapy in the morning. Flash cards good. Pens not good.”

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Joe Davis knows about the Serenity Prayer because, once, back before 9/11, when he was a precocious baby cop doing undercover in Bangor, Maine, he became enamored of a stripper who was working a serious meth jones and tried to get her into rehab. She passed on the program and on him but not before he took her to a few meetings, so he remembered the Alcoholics Anonymous prayer, particularly the part about accepting the things you cannot change.

  And now that’s where Mouse, whose bullshit detector is wired into NSA’s multibillion-dollar satellite grid, has filed away the fiasco at Turmar.

  Davis disagrees after his face-to-face with Jesse Kraig at Walter Reed. So he’s sitting in his broom closet–sized office at the back end of a subbasement in a National Security Agency outbuilding at Ft. Meade, Maryland, talking on a secure phone to Mouse. He’s trying to get him to turn over his file on Richard Noland.

  “You’re taking a vacation, right?” Mouse says.

  “For sure, going up to Maine to see my folks,” Davis says, glancing at his packed travel bag that sits next to the door. In fact, before talking to Mouse, he’d just gotten off the phone with a travel agent who’d booked him onto a flight to Memphis later this morning and signed him into a hotel and arranged for a rental car. He’d Googled Richard Noland and scanned the articles
on his kidnapping from the cable stations and the major dailies. All of them regurgitated the conventional wisdom. Then he found a brief CNN interview with his former wife—Sally Noland—that was recorded by the Memphis CNN affiliate. He pulled a photo-grab of her, a hard-edged blonde who went heavy on the mascara, wasn’t beneath displaying some serious cleavage on national TV, and appeared determined to carry her pinched good looks well into her forties. But mainly what peaked his interest was her flat, dead-eyed delivery when she said, “Like, me and Dickie are divorced and all, but what happened to him shouldn’t have happened to a dog, you know . . .”

  He replayed the clip several times. As a seasoned investigator, he knew how to connect the dots. He’d grown up tracking and hunting whitetails in the Maine outback, and he’d been to sniper school. He could hit a dot at a thousand yards. But in the end he usually went with his gut. It was part subjective, part a memory of his days on the streets of Bangor. Every copper remembers a Sally Noland whose thorny charms curve inward. Some guys can’t resist going back after the impossible to forget roses and get sliced up on the way out.

  Davis figured the ex-wife was a good place to start untangling “the things you cannot change.” And he was willing to pop for a round-trip ticket to follow his hunch that Sally Noland was one of the last people her ex-husband had talked to in this world. What he needed from Mouse was her address and vitals.

  “And you’re sober, right?”

  “Absolutely.” In fact Davis has a hangover along with a bad case of the Toenail Polish Blues. Jesse Kraig has taken up permanent residence in the Rorschach water rings left by his tumbler of Jack Daniel’s that he tries to interpret on numerous barroom counters.

  “Okay, I’ll send you an encryption package with the stuff I pulled on Noland. Just reading material, right?”

  “You got it, boss.”

  Five minutes later Davis prints out the email and finds Sally Noland’s address in east Memphis, under “next of kin” in the bio workup. Instinct tells him the lady with the attitude and the telegenic chest is his best informant. Always thorough, Mouse has listed Sally’s last known place of employment, also on the east side.