After the End Page 4

  “But why not go after Jack Zach himself?” she asks.

  Allison says, “Jack Zach is…Jack Zach. He’s not exactly going to turn himself in. We think we’d have a more successful outcome by talking to your husband directly.”

  “I see,” she says, one hand removing a bit of invisible lint from her left leg. “I also see what you’re up to. It’s pretty clear. I don’t know why you’re trying to get information from me about Walt and Jack, but I won’t do it. And I won’t put you in contact with my husband, either.”

  “Ma’am,” I say.

  “Let me finish.”

  “Of course.”

  Rachel holds her hands together. “I don’t know who you are and how you work, but my husband and Jack and his producers…they’re a very loyal, tight-knit team, always looking out for one another. Jack is a jerk, a blowhard, a prima donna, and frankly, a pain in the ass to be around. But he treats Walt right. And the rest of his team.”

  She stands up. “Please leave. And don’t bother me again. I wish you people knew the kind of loyalty I’m talking about.”

  Allison wants to talk but I interrupt her and say, “We completely understand, ma’am. Our apologies for disturbing you.”

  I really want to say something else but I keep my counsel. I’m in this nice living room, but for some reason, I’m hearing the whir-click of the respirator from Georgia. We walk out the front door and I poke around in my new suit, pull out a slip of paper describing the kind of cloth that went into making it, and I write a phone number on the back.

  “Here,” I say. “My cell. If you change your mind…or anything comes up, please call me.”

  “Don’t worry,” she says, “I won’t.”

  But she doesn’t toss the paper away in front of me, which I hope is a good sign.

  Allison and I treat ourselves to dinner that evening. For dessert, we split a rich, decadent chocolate mousse, and after three bites she says, “You were pushy back there, getting us out of the Coopers’ house.”

  “I didn’t want her to get mad at us,” I say, “and I didn’t want to get mad at her.”

  “Mad at us, I can understand. It’s always a good idea to leave room for cooperation down the road. But mad at her? For what?”

  “Because of what she said, about loyalty. I…I was afraid I was going to say something inappropriate, something that might have gotten back to Jack Zach.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like tell her that loyalty is what we’re doing for Ray and his wife Marilyn. The two of them suffering back there in Georgia. That’s loyalty…I wanted to tell her that we absolutely knew what that means.”

  I examine our bill and slide out cash to pay for it. Cash doesn’t leave easily accessible or traceable records.

  It’s late so we take the hotel’s glass elevator up to the thirty-fifth floor. I notice the presence of my SIG Sauer under my new suit. I go with Allison as she unlocks her door and she turns and says, “I’m all right.”

  “I know you are, but I still want to make sure.”

  So I pass by her and go into her room—modeled exactly like mine with a king-size bed and a cherrywood desk in the corner—and when I’ve checked the corners and turn toward my room, I see Allison sitting on the edge of her bed.

  Her blazer is off and there are no weapons visible but I’m sure they’re around.

  Her blouse fits her snugly and I can’t help but admire her body. It’s toned and lethal, from hours of training.

  Her hair looks loose and more relaxed than earlier. I don’t know what she did to it during my quick survey of her room, but I know that I like what I see.

  She looks up at me, gently crosses her legs at the ankles, drawing my attention to her high heels, which are still on her feet. Then she leans back on the bed, resting on her hands.

  She says, “Everything okay?”

  I’m standing in front of her, and I surprise myself when my hand traces her smooth cheek.

  “Everything’s fine,” I say.

  She closes her eyes. “Not that I need your protection, you understand.”

  My hand is still on that smooth skin. I wonder how it tastes.

  “I understand completely,” I say. “Until then…”

  She presses her cheek against my fingertips.

  “Until then,” she says, opening her eyes.

  Then I leave and close the door behind me.

  Chapter 13

  After showering, shaving, and getting dressed the next morning, I hear a knock at the door. SIG Sauer pistol in hand, I approach the door and say, “Yes?”

  “It’s Allison.”

  “Hold on.”

  There’s a peephole in the door but I know from experience and training that I shouldn’t use it. All it would take is someone with an ice pick to ruin your day. They might also open the door just enough to keep the security chain fastened, and get a shotgun barrel through the gap so the blast can cut you in half.

  Earlier, I had maneuvered a bathroom mirror to see out in the hallway when the door is open, and when I look, Allison is standing by herself, two dark-brown paper coffee cups in her hands.

  I undo the chain, put the SIG Sauer in my rear waistband, and let her in. She’s wearing what looks to be the same outfit as yesterday but is managing to do so without a single wrinkle or errant fold. As she comes in, I watch her long legs move nicely under the snug skirt, her calf muscles flexing as she walks.

  She passes a cup to me and I close the door behind her. Allison raises her cup in salute and says, “I know where Walt Cooper is, and therefore, Jack Zach.”

  “Where?”

  “The refugee camp in Karkamis, on the Turkey–Syria border. Jack’s there, filming a story, with his trusty cameraman Walt Cooper along.”

  “Good job,” I say, taking a satisfying sip and appreciating that Allison has ordered it the way I like it. “Where did you get that from?”

  She moves through my room to my cherrywood desk and matching chair. She sits down and says, “A nice, lengthy phone call between hubby and wife.”

  I go and sit on my bed, which I made out of military habit, and notice that the little spark I felt last night isn’t gone.

  It’s definitely not forgotten.

  And from the way she’s averting her gaze here and there, it’s not forgotten by Allison, either.

  I say, “I thought you folks weren’t supposed to spy on Americans.”

  She smiles, takes a sweet swallow from her coffee. “We don’t.”

  “Really?”

  “Uh-huh. We might read their emails, listen to their phone calls, intercept their overseas mail, but we never, ever spy on them. It’s against the law, you know.”

  “Yes, and in all our time together, I’ve always known how much you respect the law.”

  “Disrespect doesn’t mean I get to go AWOL,” she says.

  “Point taken.”

  I say, “So how long are Jack and Walt going to be at the refugee camp?”

  “Not sure,” she says. “There’s a big city nearby called Gaziantep. You’ll fly into the airport there, get transportation to the refugee camp, which is about seventy-four klicks away.”

  “Can you arrange the travel?”

  “Airlines, sure. On the ground…I’d prefer you to be on your own. If things go south…”

  “Yeah, no connection to you or Uncle Sam.”

  “But I can get you traveling with a disposable cover. That agreeable?”

  Traveling with no cover means you go as yourself and on your own, nothing there to back you up in a crisis. Going with a cover means that you’ve got papers and a passport saying you’re, let’s say, a wheat expert from the US Department of Agriculture, and the government will stick by you even if it makes them blue in the face.

  A disposable cover is similar, except under intense scrutiny from the bad guys (or good guys that are pissed at you), it can collapse. Your papers and passport will be held against you as the work of dark money and black chican
ery, and not the product of any official government system.

  Still, it’s better than nothing.

  “I’ll take it,” I say.

  “Good, because that’s all I got,” she says. “Except there’s one more thing. You got a pen on you?”

  “Aw, you giving me your personal number?”

  From her sidebag—never call it a purse—she tosses me a silver pen. Allison doesn’t take the bait. She says, “Use it when you have to.”

  I slip it into a pants pocket. “Yes ma’am.”

  I go to the end of bed, pick up my bag, and start to pack.

  “And if you run into Jack Zach over there, what’s your plan?” she asks.

  “To show him the error of his ways,” I say, zipping open side pockets.

  “Besides that,” she says.

  “Why don’t you come along and find out?”

  She shakes her head. “Can’t go.”

  “Good decision,” I say. “The border between Turkey and Syria can be a tricky and hairy place. Makes sense for you to stay behind.”

  Her eyes narrow so fast she almost looks feline…and one angry feline at that. “I’ll have you know that at four p.m. today, I’m taking part in an intelligence briefing at the White House. If it wasn’t for that, I’d be right next to you.”

  And like an angry cat, she spits out one last word: “Owen.”

  Chapter 14

  It took nearly a full day of travel and eventually, I’m on a bus from Gaziantep to the refugee camp. It’s mostly a four-lane road with signs in Arabic and English. We pass through a landscape of barren hills, low brush, and trees.

  It’s been a long day, which I’ve spent planning, because through Allison’s work, I found out that I had a contact waiting for me at the Karkamis refugee camp. It’s someone I’d known in my previous life.

  When we’re about thirty minutes out from Karkamis, I see the Turkish military keeping a wary eye on their neighbors just to the south, because usually, they like to tear each other into bloody pieces. There are small contingents of troops near the highway’s exits and a number of Turkish-made AVC-15 armored combat vehicles.

  Aboard the bus are a very few tourists, camera crews from Japan and Australia, some UN relief officials, and two guys with ill-fitting civilian clothes and close-cropped blond hair speaking Russian. They took note of me when I got on the bus. I did the same of them, and we acknowledged each other’s background with the briefest of nods. We silently said, “You stay out of my way, I’ll stay out of yours,” which was agreeable.

  As we get closer to Karkamis, the traffic slows. There are white tents all around us as far as you can see, stretching out to the horizons. Our bus wheezes to a halt at a temporary shelter made of concrete blocks and metal roofs. We step into the mild December temperatures, surrounded by the sound of engines and horns, and people talking and shouting. Over everything, the smell of diesel, cigarette smoke, and despair exudes from tens of thousands of people living on the edge.

  Following the directions supplied by Allison, I walk past another collection of white tents with the blue UN seal and the letters UNHCR stenciled on each. I continue along full clotheslines, outdoor cooking fires tended by exhausted-looking women, kids playing soccer, men in chairs playing dominoes, drinking coffee, and smoking. It’s the most chaotic thing I’ve ever seen.

  I’m carrying an overnight bag and my SIG Sauer is in a waist holster, and my identification says I’m a member of the US State Department’s Bureau of Security. If things go badly, my fake ID will be my first line of defense and my SIG Sauer will be my second and last.

  A white trailer is at the end of one narrow lane near a collection of tents, with lettering on the side in both English and Arabic that says “Hands and Hearts for Syria.” There’s a white canvas tarp hanging over the rear of the trailer, where a tired-looking man in khaki pants and a white T-shirt washes his hands under a dribbling faucet. He’s wearing wire-rimmed glasses and he’s bald, save for a frizzy fringe of white hair that circles his bare head.

  I step under the tarp and say, “Spare a prayer, Padre?”

  He looks up, startled. Peter “Padre” Picard, former US Army Ranger, is a good guy to have at your back during a firefight or a bar brawl. He looks at me and says, “The day I say a prayer over you, Mister Taylor, a bolt of lightning will smoke your ass.”

  He takes off his glasses, wipes the lenses with his T-shirt, puts them back on. Then he says, “What brings you to this newest circle of hell, Dante?”

  “On a job.”

  “I see. Want a drink?”

  “What do you have?”

  “Right now, warm bottled water or cold bottled water.”

  “Second sounds great.”

  He steps into the trailer, comes back out and hands me a plastic bottle. We sit down at the picnic table and we both take long swallows. I say, “How long have you been here?”

  “Six months that feels like six years.”

  “Doing any good?”

  “Lots,” he says, “though truth be told, sometimes I feel like I’m shoveling against the goddamn tide, the tide being ignorance, tribes, disease, and Russian-made weapons from land mines to AK-47s.”

  “Then why stick around?”

  He shrugs, takes another swig from the plastic bottle. “A number of reasons. Me and my little group, we do make a difference. You can look back and say you saved that kid from cholera, saved that family from starving, saved that teen girl from being raped. Little victories. But to tell you the truth, I’m here to atone for my sins.”

  “Padre…”

  “Let me finish, you heathen,” he says with a tired smile. “I look back on what I’ve done in this world, and at the end of the day, it’s dead bodies. That’s all.”

  “For a purpose, for a mission.”

  He peers at me and says, “That’s where we’re different, old friend. You lean toward black and white, I lean toward shades of gray. Nothing wrong with that, that’s how we’re wired. But that’s why I’m here. To make penance.” I swallow some more water and he goes on. “Now you know my sad story. What’s yours? What’s your job?”

  “I’m looking for Jack Zach,” I say. “I hear he’s in this camp.”

  Pete laughs. “Yeah. He was. For three days. But he’s gone now.”

  Damn.

  “Did he go back to the States?”

  “No idea,” he says.

  Damn again.

  I hear the honk of horns, the many scared voices, smell of fire and trash. I can’t even see the sky with all the white canvas around us.

  “Well, maybe he did good,” I say. “Coming here and doing a story about your camp. Show the world what’s really going on.”

  Padre laughs so hard he has to take off his glasses to wipe his eyes. When he’s done, he says, “Sure, old Jack Zach did a story here…he was with a group of European lingerie models who were doing a charity stunt. Jack got a lot of footage of them tossing out boxes of meals, and bending over to show off their butts and cleavage. Care to guess what got the most attention from Jack Zach?”

  Chapter 15

  Later some of Padre’s staff comes dribbling in and there’s conversation in Turkish, English, and French. The fire is at full roar and there’s a dinner of rice, flatbread, spicy kebab, and hummus. I sit at the picnic table with Padre and we laugh and talk some, but there’s no talk of our past. It would seem out of place here, in this place of rescue and healing.

  I feel tired, jet-lagged, and discouraged, but when I help wash the dinner dishes and metal pots, that all changes.

  “Hey mister?” a young man asks. He’s twenty or so, wearing gray sweatpants, dirty sneakers, and a New York Yankees T-shirt. He’s standing next to me and is vigorously drying the dishes with a dirty cotton towel.

  “Yeah, what’s up?” I ask. He’s slim, with dark eyes, wispy beard, thick black hair.

  “My name is Yusuf,” he says. “I hear you talking about Jack, the camera reporter from America?” />
  I stop washing and wipe my hands on a spare towel. “Go on.”

  “I know where he is.” He smiles. “You pay me, I take you to him. You see, Jack Zach, he went across the border…he’s in Syria now. Doing a bang-bang story.” He slaps his chest. “You pay me, I take you to him.”

  “Can you prove it?” I ask. “That you know where he is? That you know Jack Zach?”

  A hand dives into a baggy pocket of his sweatpants, comes out with a photograph of the one and only.

  With his still-damp fingers, Yusuf points out a scrawl that I can make out in the light of the fire:

  To my friend Yusuf, all best, Jack Zach.

  I give him his photograph back.

  “You have a deal.”

  Two hours later, I’m with Yusuf and an older man who says he’s Nazim, his cousin, and we’re walking on a rocky trail to the south of the refugee camp. Yusuf and Nazim are both carrying AK-47s and web belting, and I’m making do with my SIG Sauer and a Kevlar vest.

  Other armed men are out there in small groups. We ignore them and they ignore us. The place is littered with white trash bags and mounds of crumpled shipping containers. We approach a chain-link fence. A large gap has been cut in one section, and we each go in. Yusuf whispers to me, “Welcome to Syria.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Jack Zach,” he whispers. “Not too far away. He…how you say? He is playing at being deep in Syria with the bad men…But he’s really at a tent site…relaxing…a quick walk away.”

  I say, “Sounds good to me.”

  Nazim—who has a thick mustache and blank eyes that reveal nothing—says, “You stay with us. You stay on trail. Go off trail…boom! Land mines. Very bad.”

  “Agreed,” I say, remembering land mines from my past. “Very bad.”

  The way is mostly rocks, grass, and scrub brush, and the lights of the camp are bright and bold. I make note of little landmarks as we move along: the pile of broken bottles, the discarded RPG launcher, the clump of white plastic bags stuck in some brush. Other trails go off to the left and right, and way off to the west, there’s the rattle of automatic weapons fire. I can see orange tracers dance in long flickering lines. A familiar sight but not a familiar place. I’m all alone, not working with a multibillion-dollar defense agency behind me, and I’m only thinking about the shattered friend of mine who had been betrayed, the one who’s now lying in a bed in Georgia.