THE LAKE APPEARS AS IT DID IN LEFORTZ’S SATELLITE IMAGERY, only darker – a sliver of azure in the granite. It has taken a five-hour hike for us to reach it from the empty camping ground where we left the Lexus.
Hetta raises her binoculars and places the cabin under observation for several minutes before passing them to me. It’s halfway between the lake and a jagged bluff that juts into the valley. Since the satellite pass that produced our imagery someone has carried out extensive repairs to it. The roof is newer than the walls; the lumber there has been freshly cut. The windows have been boarded over and the door seems to have been strengthened. I can see the last of the daylight glinting off the metal reinforcements.
It takes us another ten minutes to cross the valley. Hetta and I hunker down by a cluster of boulders. The cabin is now less than a hundred meters away.
The shrill cry of a night bird sounds from somewhere in the trees. The moon, three-quarters full, paints the lake and its surroundings blue, black and silver.
After ten minutes more of eyes-on, we’re satisfied we’re the only living souls out here beneath the crystal-clear star bed. But even though the cabin appears lifeless, we take the precaution of approaching in stealth mode.
From thirty meters away, there is an overpowering smell of creosote.
When I reach the door, I put my ear to it and run my hands over the reinforcements. A huge, industrial-size padlock hangs from a bolt that’s as thick as my wrist. There is no rust on the screws. The work has been done recently, perhaps within the past month.
Hetta pulls out her Beretta and chambers a shell. I stand back.
The lock is no match for a .357 round.
The sweet smell of rotting tissue is so thick it makes me gag.
Hetta is standing just inside the door, her back pressed to the wall. Her hand covers her mouth and nose.
Her flashlight cuts through the darkness, the beam bouncing off of the walls and things that don’t belong in a place that’s twenty miles from the nearest road.
I struggle to take in what I’m seeing.
The cabin is maybe ten meters by eight. Just one room. I expected to see bare lumber; not this.
There are thousands of them. On the walls, strewn across the floor. I look up. They are even pinned to the ceiling.
Pictures, photographs, sketches, printouts …
Hart shifts the beam to the left of the fireplace. She moves it to the right. Up. Down. It’s all the same. They’re everywhere.
Images: Of people, places, objects, things …
Hetta retches and drops the phone. She runs outside.
The light remains fixed on the ceiling.
I look up and see a burning building, a blindfolded hostage with a knife to his throat, a power station belching smoke, kids at a rock concert, a train station, a fisherman staring at a dried-up lake, a plane slamming into the World Trade Center …
Hitler and Stalin and John F. Kennedy …
A volcano, the Eiffel Tower, an overturned battleship at Pearl Harbor …
The Kremlin, the Beatles, the Taj Mahal, a machine that looks like the Large Hadron Collider …
The Golden Gate Bridge.
And these are just the things I can put names to. There are hundreds, thousands, I cannot, because they are so ordinary, so everyday.
People in cars, sitting at desks, asleep in bed, walking, reading, laughing, crying; adults, kids, black, white, tall, short.
Houses, office buildings, slums, churches, cars, computers, guns, planes, tables, rivers, meadows, fish, mammals, insects, trees.
Some of the images are clear; some are fuzzy, like the grainy video you see of state funerals or politicians at rallies in the fifties and sixties.
Some are taken from ground level; some are like ones I had access to when I was in Special Forces: drone-camera, spy-plane and satellite shots.
It’s like an exhibition of visual thought, at once random and connected.
Hetta walks back in. She picks up the phone. Neither of us says anything.
She swings the beam and it catches something to our right. The wall isn’t the solid surface I initially thought it was, but a drape, a length of dark cloth, strung across the full width of the cabin.
Hetta signals me, nods, and starts toward it, weapon extended.
There’s a moment during which she and I look at each other from both ends of the drape. Then, on her command, we throw it aside.
The inner sanctum is dominated by something red and oozing: a skinned carcass with a rope around its neck, tied to a butcher’s hook that’s bolted to a beam. It comes alive when I pan my flashlight along it, because it’s crawling with larvae. A deer, I think; strung up, I guess, because it’s food and Gapes had nowhere else to keep it from predators.
‘You know,’ Hetta says, her words muffled by her hand, ‘they should do crazy wall kits at Kmart or someplace, because they’d fucking clean up.’
She’s right. Every psycho, it seems, has to have one these days.
The light catches areas of meat missing from the deer’s haunches.
She shifts her beam onto the wall behind the carcass.
I find myself staring at a poster-sized reproduction of a painting – an Old Master of Christ on the cross. To its right is some of the same grainy imagery we saw when we walked in, but devoted exclusively to the President – on the campaign trail, smiling, laughing, waving.
There are photographs of him in stadiums and on soapboxes at rural rallies – sometimes on his own, sometimes with Jennifer and the kids. Some are taken from a long way off: Thompson and the First Family tiny against large, cheering crowds and thickets of blue campaign banners. Others are about as close to the President as I’ve ever been. Gapes, or whoever took them, must have been standing only a couple of meters away.
To their right is a sketch of a bearded man with long black hair and pale, watery eyes. They stare at me with an unsettling intensity. Is that anger or passion? Does he hate or love me? He is about thirty-five years old and looks intensely familiar.
It might be the face of a 9/11 hijacker, or the priest who officiated at my confirmation. I haven’t the first goddamn idea, although the script beneath the picture – in Arabic or Farsi – offers a clue.
Fuck.
Is this what a mind looks like when its switch trips?
I move on. At the far right side are images of an ancient and modern city, one with a familiar skyline: Jerusalem. They fill the circumference of the beam. But I’ve missed a section. I shift to the left, knowing, even before I do, what I am about to see.
‘Whoa!’ Hetta says. ‘That is fucking incredible.’
I guess it is. I have my very own stretch of wall, with shots I’ve never seen before. A class photo from elementary school, me standing next to the teacher. I can’t remember her name, but it’s her for sure. A sketch of an Army officer. A little crude, but recognizable as my father.
I stare at myself on the school football team. I’m about thirteen, because I’m missing a front tooth, thanks to some asshole – Bertelsky – who knocked it out during practice.
Nearby I’m graduating from the Air Force academy – proud in my blue uniform, bow tie and graduation medal, flanked on one side by my commandant and on the other by my mentor, Senior Sergeant Deakins, who always said I could do it – that I had officer stamped across my forehead.
And here I am at USU, with some undergraduates, clowning for the camera with a guy in a long black wig: Dayno. We were going to a seventies party, I think. I look again. Jesus, I hope we were.
And I know what’s next, because it’s growing at the periphery of my vision – a sketch of Hope and her mother. Next to it is a snap of us on our wedding day. We’re in the garden of the home – it must have been taken by one of the residents. Jack is holding Hope’s hand as he gives her away. There are tears in his eyes. I’m starting to feel them in mine.
I move on quickly and suddenly I’m in Iraq, on the floor of a Black Hawk, kitted for action with my rifle and my blood bags. I don’t remember anybody taking photos, but there I am giving them a thumbs-up. It was the night we went into Fallujah.
The next picture chills the shit out of me. Our backyard: a place that wasn’t just inaccessible to the outside world but also invisible to it, because Hope and I liked to keep it that way.
I haven’t seen it in fifteen years. There are the carved pieces of driftwood she used to collect, the ship’s lanterns with the scented candles she lit on still nights, and the things she called her Pollyanna crystals – pieces of glass and translucent stones strung between the trees so they could catch the sunset.
Nothing, though, prepares me for the sight of our Jeep Liberty. It is so utterly crushed by the force of the truck that it’s barely recognizable. The twisted wreckage is surrounded by flashing lights and a small army of first responders.
Somewhere behind them, I am fighting for my life.
And Hope is dead.
Outside, everything is as it was a second before we went in: the upturned bowl of black sky, the stars, the moon, the silence, and the bitterness of the creosote that manages to overcome the smell of death.
The world has continued to turn, but for me everything is different. I walk toward the lake. When I’m far enough away from the cabin, I settle on a log and breathe in the sharp air.
I have no idea how Gapes went about collecting his material. There’s no electricity here, no phone signal, no Wi-Fi. It’s as remote a spot as you’ll find on the planet, and yet up on my wall, in addition to everything else, was a portrait of Jack. Jack in his Shawnee blanket. Not the one in my apartment, but unbelievably like it, and unquestionably painted by Hope. But completed. I have never seen it before in my life.
I hear a noise behind me.
‘Colonel?’ There is a surprising tenderness to her voice. She sits beside me.
I’m so cold that I feel the warmth of her body through the fleece of my jacket.
‘How are you doing?’
‘Needed a little oxygen. Sorry.’
‘I guess that was your whole life back there.’
‘The best bits. And the absolute worst.’
She passes me her bottle of water.
I turn to her. ‘One to ten.’
‘I’m sorry, I—’
‘Crazy walls. On a scale of one to ten, where’s that one figure?’
She doesn’t answer. I guess we’ve had our Oprah moment.
A minute goes by. Then: ‘Colonel?’
‘Yes.’
‘Did you notice the ordering? If you read the wall left to right – the Christ painting, the President, Jerusalem?’
It clicks. It follows the flow of our discussion in the tower and the words they found on the remnant of the note: God, Threat, Proof, Mac, Jerusalem.
‘From the ordering and the content of the imagery, “Mac” must refer to you. You ever been called Mac? Anything like that?’
I shake my head.
‘Your wife?’
‘Her name was Hope.’
‘I know.’
Of course she does.
She waits a moment. ‘Could Mac have been a friend of hers? Somebody she worked with? There’s a lot of pictures of her up there – more than anybody else, in fact. Here.’ She takes out her phone and starts scrolling.
Aside from the photo of our wedding day, there’s one of Hope as a little girl – it must have been taken while she, her mom and her father were still living in California. She’s giving the camera a gap-toothed smile and holding up a little china rabbit – her only possession to survive the west–east journey.
There’s a picture of her and her mom sitting on the end of the bed of one of the old folk residents at the home, the three of them laughing over something Pam has said. But the one that pulls me up short is of Hope and the placard.
She’s posing with it outside a cafe called the Artiste, a place where I used to study at weekends with my med-student friends. In the odd moments I’d looked up from my notes, I’d found myself drawn to one of the paintings on the wall. A painting of a beach. There was something magnetic about it. Something haunting.
‘And I’d got you down as more of a Hopper or a Rockwell kind of a guy,’ the waitress had said.
I’d looked up to find myself gazing into the most beautiful eyes I’d ever seen.
When I looked down, I noticed that she had paint on her hands.
The color of the sea.
I’d seen her before – once, a glimpse only, and from a distance: walking across the USU campus with an easel under her arm.
When she returned with my change, I asked her what she’d been doing at a military hospital.
She told me she was an art therapist.
I was twenty-three at the time and had no idea what that was.
She’d glanced toward a group of people outside. Some of them were holding placards. A couple of them stamped their feet against the cold. One of them, an old guy in a beanie, beckoned.
‘Who are they?’
‘They’re protesting the invasion. You want to come?’
I’d laughed and pointed to my ‘high and tight’, my military grade crew cut. It was a couple of months after 9/11 and we’d recently invaded Afghanistan. ‘I happen to believe in my country,’ I said grandly.
She nodded. ‘So do they.’
I peered a little closer. I recognized a few of them. I’d seen them on campus too. The university shared space with the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, home to a number of outpatient clinics dedicated to the treatment of veterans.
Earle, the guy in the beanie, had defended a hill single-handed against hundreds of Viet Cong and received the Distinguished Service Cross.
Ralph, a Navy navigator, had been put through a double mock-execution after he was shot down over Basra in ’91.
Keith, the youngest, still in his twenties, had driven his colleagues to safety, despite losing his right leg below the knee in an ambush outside Mogadishu.
‘They’re your patients?’
‘I’m not a doctor, Josh.’ She smiled. ‘I’m an art therapist.’
She was halfway to the door when I realized I hadn’t told her my name.
‘How do you—?’
‘Are you coming?’ she called to me over her shoulder.
When I hesitated, she stopped and turned. ‘I want to show you all the people who are going to live because of you.’
‘Colonel?’
I look up. A cloud has begun to creep across the face of the moon. I return Hetta’s cell.
She pulls out the sat-phone.
‘Wait—’
‘It’s encrypted.’ She dials a number, gets to her feet and walks back toward the cabin. Five minutes later, she’s back to tell me that Lefortz is sending a helicopter and a PIAD forensics team. He’s told her to stay and help secure the site, but I must go back.
Lefortz has no choice. He’s told Hart that he has to let Reuben know that I’m here. He and Thompson are meeting with the Mayor of New York, then flying back into D.C. tonight.
‘You want to know something?’ Hetta says. ‘Something weird …’
I am barely listening. For a moment, the idea of something weird in that cabin makes me want to laugh.
‘I just calculated the number of images back there – five thousand, maybe, give or take a hundred.’
‘And?’
‘One of them is different.’
‘In what way?’
‘It’s upside down.’
We start with the inner sanctum. I’ve tied strips of my shirt around my mouth and nose; Hetta has too. The rope holding the deer creaks.
Hetta shines her light. Christ, front and center, is nailed to the cross, skin so white against black storm clouds it’s like his body is lit from within. Soldiers lift the cross upright.
The camera on Hetta’s phone flashes. I set mine to record and start speaking.
‘The Christ painting. We need to know everything about it: the artist, exactly what it depicts, if it’s privately or publicly owned, what it means …’
I glance to the left and shine my flashlight onto a photograph of Thompson.
He’s speaking to reporters. His plane is behind him. I recognize Hartsfield–Jackson Atlanta’s terminal building and control tower.
I flick to another image: Thompson at the Iowa caucus. In another, he’s shaking the hand of the Pope in Dallas – their much-publicized first meeting. Senator Abnarth, Reuben’s first boss, is standing beside them. Gray and foxlike, Abnarth is wearing the smile of a man who knows that this is what will get his protégé into the White House.
I stand in the center of my section and avoid directing the flashlight at the image of the crushed Jeep. I scan the pictures. Move closer. A whole lot of people from my past, but none of them called Mac.
I focus instead on the portrait of Jack: old and at peace as he sat out under the big white oak in front of Hope’s mom’s home.
‘Who is that?’
‘Hard to explain. He was kind of like my wife’s dad.’
‘And him?’
I glance at the priest-cum-hijacker. I have no idea. I turn to the Jerusalem montage. I’ve never been to Israel, so it says little to me. But the fact that Jerusalem featured in Gapes’s note and the President’s dream is inescapable. The short hairs on the back of my neck stand up.
I don’t need to ask her to take pictures of everything. She’s already there. Superior autobiographical memory is often seen as a curse. Some people affected by it remember everything that ever happened to them. Hetta’s is aligned to patterns in objects, which I suspect relates to something that once happened to her. In any case, she processed thousands of images in this section of the cabin in a beat, and determined one of them was different – low down and to the right of the fireplace: a print of an engraving, sixteenth century, maybe older; an old man at a desk.
I squat, hold the flashlight steady and tilt my head.
He has long hair and a beard. He’s wearing a gown and a cap. I resist the urge to turn him the right way up.
He’s writing something. And there’s an inscription, in Latin.
The breeze drops. I get to my feet.
‘Tell me what else you see.’
She looks at the wall again.
‘There’s something different about those images …’ She points to a football team, a car license plate, a guy holding a lottery ticket, two or three others. They all contain numbers.
When we’ve finished recording them, I step outside to get some more air. Hart suddenly calls me back.
‘What do you make of that?’
I follow her fingertip. To the left of the fireplace, an Auschwitz survivor has raised her hand so the camera can capture the six-figure ID tattooed on her forearm, but all I can see is the pain behind her eyes.
‘Not that one, Colonel. The sketch to its left.’
Framed by an arch, it has the precision of a photograph. An office building, reaching into the night sky.
‘It’s the place beyond the labor union. The one Gapes kept glancing at when we were at the church.’
The viewpoint is almost exactly where I was standing, next to the trapdoor, looking over his shoulder, out of the bell tower.
I lean closer. There’s a blur of light in one of the blacked-out windows. I point to it.
She nods. ‘A muzzle flash.’ Her face is a mask. ‘Marine Sergeant Gapes knew how his mission was going to end.’
I remember Misty telling us about the people who showed up without warning to ask questions about her nephew. The ones who carried no identification and wouldn’t say where they were from.
My mouth has gone dry. When I try and swallow, I can taste something metallic at the back of my throat. Something, until my encounter in the tower, I hadn’t tasted since Fallujah.