When Shadows Come Page 20

  “I’m not sick,” I repeat as she removes the thermometer. I say it directly to Carbone.

  “You’ve been through a lot,” he says. “You passed out. Your eyes. Your nerves. You are here to recover. But all you have found is turmoil, threats, attacks, and now death. Rest here while we figure out our next move, Captain.”

  The nurse reads the thermometer, makes a note on my chart, which hangs on the end of the bed by a metal hook. Then she exits the room.

  “What’s our next move, Detective?”

  Carbone crosses arms over chest. I know he’s jonesing for a cigarette right about now. But you can’t smoke in the hospital. Not even in Italy.

  “Another Interpol agent will no doubt be assigned to this case. Perhaps even a team now that the situation has escalated. I must also worry about what could be a network of terrorists. Plus copycat attacks.”

  “Meanwhile, Grace is still out there. With him.”

  “She is alive. That’s what matters. Believe me, Captain, he will make contact with us again and it will be soon.” He gathers his coat and his hat. “I will let you get some rest for now. In a little while I will come back to check on you and perhaps have a plan in place for finding Grace.”

  “Please,” I say.

  “No more bombs,” he says, as he leaves the room.

  “No one else dies,” I say, closing my eyes.

  Chapter 67

  Maybe twenty feet separate me from the boy, but it’s not hard to make out the tears that are falling from his big brown eyes. He weeps as he bears the burden of the package not in his arms but strapped to his chest.

  That’s when the reality of the situation washes over me like a wave. The package—the thick black vest strapped to his shoulders and chest—is an IED and the boy is the delivery mechanism. As he steps toward me, I see his hand reach for a cord that dangles from the bomb. There’s a device attached to the end of the cord. A trigger mechanism.

  Shouldering my M4. “Don’t do it!” I scream. “Don’t you do it!”

  Pressure behind my eyeballs, beads of sweat coating my forehead, a brick lodged in my throat, adrenaline making my pulse pound in my temples. I don’t hesitate to kill. It’s an act as natural as breathing. I am conditioned to act and react. But this time, the reaction isn’t as automatic.

  I’ve never fired on a child before. But this child is a bomb. A living bomb.

  The boy comes closer, the sound of his weeping audible.

  “Don’t you do it. Please, don’t you do it.”

  His face is in the crosshairs; he is already dead.

  My index finger depresses the trigger and I don’t let go until the magazine is emptied out.

  I wake up, startled, breathing heavily. This dream is worse than all the others. There’s nothing surreal to pass off as the product of my subconscious. Only reality.

  Memory.

  The truth.

  I fall back to sleep after a time, and when I wake up again, it is full night. The room is dark, the only visible light coming from the space between the wooden door and the tile floor and from the small square glass embedded into it at the top. My mouth is pasty dry, a profound thirst making me feel like I’m back in the arid Afghan badlands instead of inside a Venetian hospital.

  I reach for the water cup on the table beside me, but I find I don’t have the strength to lift my arm. It’s then I realize I must be medicated. Sedated. Makes sense. I am already a casualty of war. The victim of severe PTSD. I suffer from an unexplainable temporary blindness. And now I have become the casualty of another kind of war.

  The door opens.

  Someone from the hospital support staff steps inside, closes the door behind him. Not all the way, but only partially, so as not to disturb my sleep by letting the hall light spill in. As he steps closer, I make out green scrubs, a matching green surgical mask covering his mouth, and a matching cap on his head. A gauze bandage covers his right eye. It’s slightly skewed, held in place with white surgical tape.

  He does not bother to see if I’m awake or not. He does not speak to me. He goes straight for the drip, unplugging it at the top and adding another clear vial to the line, and then reconnecting the line.

  “Hey,” I attempt to say. “Hey.” But my mouth is parched. I only manage to utter a pathetic grunt.

  His job completed, the man turns, goes for the door. Opening the door, he shoots me a look over his left shoulder. He smiles at me.

  “I see,” he whispers before disappearing from view.

  Chapter 68

  Black sky fills my eyes. Black sky filled with brilliant stars. I wonder if I have died and this is what traveling to heaven looks like. It’s precisely the way I imagined it as a child. Leaving my earthly body and becoming an angel who soars through time and space on a pair of wings made of white feathers.

  But I am not traveling through space and I am not dead.

  I am instead lying flat on my back, all one hundred eighty pounds of my body pressed against the flat bottom of a wood boat powered by what sounds like an outboard motor. Wrists duct taped together. Ankles bound in the same manner. A duct-tape gag covering my mouth.

  I am the newest hostage of the man controlling this boat. Looking up at him, I see him plain enough in the dim, bow-mounted red and green lights. He is tall and bearded, his right hand gripping a black steering wheel that looks like it’s been yanked off an old pickup truck. His black hair is cut close to the scalp. He wears a long overcoat, which has become his trademark. Wears it in direct defiance of the police who by now must have memorized his physical description.

  He is the overcoat man.

  His name is Hakeemullah.

  I bombed his village and killed a boy who was trying to kill me and my men.

  He took Grace.

  Now, he has taken me.

  The water beneath the boat is rough. Choppy.

  I’m straining to get a bearing. But for the time being, all I see is night sky. I do my best to gather up some clues, make a logical determination as to my position relative to Venice. We seem to be riding on open water. Unsettled open water. The basin comes immediately to mind. Makes sense too. The overcoat man would want to drug me, sneak me out of the hospital under the apparent blind eyes of police security, then transport me off the main island as quickly and efficiently as possible.

  Precisely which of the smaller islands he’s taking me to is a mystery. Darkness surrounds me like a cool wet blanket. But after a few minutes, the darkness is interrupted by illumination. Forcing my head up off the boat floor barely half an inch, I’m able to see something in the near distance. It’s the top of a tower made of brick. A tower that’s lit with lamps from top to bottom.

  The church tower of San Giorgio Maggiore.

  For now anyway, I’m heading in that direction.

  Toward an ancient island dedicated to a saint.

  Still we proceed slowly for a while more, until the overcoat man drifts up to a dock, the water never still.

  Two men are there to greet him.

  One of them jumps down into the boat. He drapes a thick black cloth hood around my head so that I am once more blinded. He and the other man lift me out of the boat and set me down on a wood plank that serves as a crude stretcher. They quickly carry me the length of the dock and into an old island settlement that’s made up of small wood and stone houses and shops. That is, if my memory serves me right. They do not speak, but I make out the thick soles on their boots slapping against cobbles. We travel like this for what seems an hour, but what must constitute only a few minutes.

  The island is asleep at this hour. The only people awake will be the bums and the drunks. Even the fishermen will still be asleep.

  We stop.

  I recognize the sound of tumblers dropping, a mechanical bolt releasing, and the squeak of old hinges forced to survive in salty sea air and to bear the burden of a heavy wooden door. Quickly I am shoved through an opening so narrow both my arms rub up against the door frame.

&
nbsp; As soon as I’ve cleared the opening, the door slams shut behind me.

  For the first time, someone speaks.

  I do not know what he is saying, but I recognize the language. It’s Tajik. These are northern Afghans. Survivors from the hot village I was forced to neutralize, no doubt. I’m not aware of precisely how many of them survived the bombing run. But the Tajiks know how to hide underground. They know how to survive in tunnels and caves. They know how to survive the centuries of invaders.

  Now, the sound of a padlock being unlocked, and a heavy chain being pulled out from steel rings. Next comes the squeal of more hinges. I’m moving again, this time at an incline. I’m being transported down a flight of stone stairs into a basement. A basement that immediately surrounds me with cold damp and the smell of mold. Most of Venice can’t support basements because of the high water table and the constant flooding. But this island must offer some high ground, at least enough for this partial basement or crawl space.

  When we come to the bottom of the stairs, I am carted another few feet into the interior of the musty room. I am dropped onto my back on a wet gravel floor. I collide with the packed earth so violently, it takes my breath away. A fist grabs hold of the top of my hood and it is suddenly yanked off. It takes a moment for my eyes to adjust and, for a brief few seconds, I’m convinced I’m about to once more lose my eyesight. But I don’t lose my eyesight.

  I see clearly.

  The room is dimly lit with only a bare lightbulb dangling overhead by an exposed electrical wire. The two men who carried me down here work as a team, lifting the plank while setting a cinder block beneath it so that I am no longer parallel to the floor but instead set at an angle, my feet elevated and my head lowered, the blood rushing to my brain.

  The two men strap me to the board tightly with more duct tape. Fast and efficiently, like they’re no strangers to the process. I’ve been drugged and the result is paralysis. But now there’s no chance of moving my limbs at all once the drug wears off.

  Whispering a spattering of words to one another in Tajik, they pull a plastic supermarket bag over my head. Just as the men step away, the painful squeak of rusted hinges fills the room and sets an ominous tone for what’s to come. The bag has blinded me, but it does not interfere with my sense of smell. When I make out the odor of incense, I know that the man who’s come in the door is him. The overcoat man.

  Hakeemullah.

  I want to shout, “Grace!” But the tape gag silences me.

  Words are spoken between the three men, and then comes the sound of water being poured from an open spigot, filling an aluminum bucket. This is what I’m picturing in my overheated brain.

  My chest is heavy, like my lungs have been filled with concrete.

  “Hello, Nick,” speaks the voice I’ve come to recognize from the phone, from the hospital room. “We are not strangers, you and I. We knew one another in a former war. Now we can get to know one another even better in another land. In Venice.”

  He might be talking in riddles, but his English is nearly perfect, almost without accent. He’s referring to me by my first name, like we’re not strangers or enemies.

  “I don’t expect you to remember me from all those years ago,” he says. “After all, the purpose of the program was that we forget everything, no matter how dreadful. Like waterboarding, for instance. Do you remember the first time you were waterboarded?”

  Click . . . On my back on a table in a basement . . . A tall, dark-eyed, dark-haired young man standing over me. A second man has shoved a board in my mouth, forcing it open. The second man is baby faced, brown eyed, and always smiling. They are both my friends. My friends pour the water into my open mouth . . .

  I sense something being lifted, held over my head. When several drops of water slap me on the forehead and chin, I know for certain it’s the water bucket.

  “Here’s another question, Captain. Why did you bomb my village?”

  A slight commotion follows.

  The bucket being tipped.

  When the water slaps me on the face, it doesn’t simply pour off the plastic bag and onto the floor. Rather, the water feels as if it’s penetrating the plastic, filling my mouth, running down my windpipe, entering into my lungs and stomach. I’m drowning. Lungs filling with filthy water.

  My reflex is to gag violently. To convulse against the tape that binds me until one of two things happens: the tape splits or my bones break. Again, I’m screaming but no sound is coming out other than something horrible and guttural deep down inside of me.

  “You were fucking killing us,” I want to spit in answer to his question. “You were shooting us and mortaring us night after night. Killing us.”

  The flow of water stops, and I suddenly realize it hasn’t violated my mouth and lungs but only given me the sensation that it has.

  “Tell me again, Captain,” Hakeemullah goes on, “what makes a man insult God by killing so many innocent souls inside a small village? Or perhaps God has nothing to do with it. Perhaps man wasn’t formed in God’s image at all, but something else. Something evil. Isn’t that what we were taught all those years ago? What value was there in capturing my village? The hill it was situated on? What strategic value in destroying it?”

  The water pours again and once more I’m drowning, my world going from light to dark to light again as consciousness begins to take its leave while my brain is fooled into believing it is being deprived of oxygen.

  The water stops.

  “You fucking tried to kill us first,” I say against the tape. But no words can be heard.

  I inhale through my nostrils. That’s when I discover that the torture is not all psychological. Some of the water has breached the bag and penetrated my nostrils. Water has entered my lungs and stomach and I am now regurgitating it. Vomiting. But the gag is preventing the filth from leaving my system. I’m choking on my own vomit. If he doesn’t remove the gag, I will die.

  “Are you aware that waterboarding was invented in Italy during the time of the Renaissance? How interesting that the creators of such magnificent works of art and architecture could give us something so frightening and destructive.”

  Why the hell is he telling me about the origins of waterboarding? I’ve never waterboarded anyone in my twenty years as a soldier. Not once.

  Or am I lying to myself?

  The flash of memory invades my brain in brief, rapid snippets. Me standing over a man strapped to a table. A man with dark eyes and dark hair. A tall young man who was my friend. It’s the same table I was once strapped to. I’m pouring water into his open mouth and I have no guilt over my actions, no compassion for the pain he is enduring. I am following orders I’ve been conditioned to follow. If my friend dies, well then he dies . . .

  The bucket is lifted over my head once more. Tears fill my eyes, run in reverse down off my brow, collect inside the waterlogged plastic bag.

  Son of a bitch . . . You Tajik son of a bitch . . . Why didn’t I kill you when I had the chance?

  “Why did you kill my dear one when you could have shot his legs out from under him?” he says. “Shot his shoulders? Why did you shoot his head off?”

  The heavy stream of dirty water immediately follows. The flow never seems to stop and as I struggle for a breath through my nostrils, I only manage to swallow more water, like a boat that’s sinking fast.

  “Why did you kill my son, Captain Angel?” Hakeemullah screams as something inside my body snaps, and the hell I am living gives way to nothingness.

  Chapter 69

  I might be dead, if not for my dreams.

  I’m lying on my back inside a hole that’s been dug out of the ground. The hole is rectangular and maybe six feet deep. It only takes a second or two before I realize I’m lying inside my own grave. A number of people are standing along the edges of the grave, peering down at me. I look up into their faces. I see Detective Carbone and Heath Lowrance, and I see David Graham and Anna Laiti. I see men from my squad, all of them dressed
for battle, M4 Carbines slung around their shoulders. I see Karen, her hair and clothing still wet from the river.

  And three more people.

  Hakeemullah. He’s wearing his wool overcoat, his beard trimmed, his dark eyes wet and angry. Standing beside him is Grace. Cradled in her arms is a child. A toddler. A little boy whose face has been blown away so that it no longer resembles a face.

  “Don’t fight it,” Grace whispers.

  Tears pour out of Hakeemullah’s eyes. But soon the tears turn to streams of water that are as powerful as a fireman’s hoses. The water shoots down upon me in the grave. I begin to gag, choke, drown . . .

  When I come to, I can still see. The two men who carried me from the boat into this building have removed my gag, and cut away the duct tape that bound me. Doesn’t matter much, since I can hardly move a muscle. As they carry me into an adjoining room, I can only wonder how long I’ve been out.

  Two minutes or two hours.

  I’ve been transferred to a second basement room surrounded by old walls of stacked stone. Ancient stone. The room is as barren as an old woman’s womb and just as cold. But it is not empty. Sitting up against the far wall, her knees pressed up against her chest, is Grace.

  My Grace.

  Dressed only in her underwear.

  Duct tape covers her mouth and binds her wrists. She’s awake, staring at me with wide eyes, her filthy hair draping her face like a veil. I can tell she’s trying to say something to me. But she can’t possibly speak through that gag. My stomach is still sickened, my lungs aching, my limbs feeling as if they weigh five hundred pounds apiece. My heart pounds, but not for me. It pounds because my Grace is alive.

  Grace is alive.

  Chapter 70

  Footsteps. Coming from above. Pounding on the floorboards. Then, a door opening. Footsteps descending a second stone staircase into the basement.

  It’s him. Hakeemullah.

  He’s holding a long blade in his right hand. It’s not exactly long enough to be a sword, but it’s too long to be a knife. The blade is wide, shiny, and curved at the end in the shape of a crescent moon. The weapon of a horse-mounted warrior maybe. A mullah.