But I didn’t find a reason, and with each passing day I only became more bewildered and felt more and more lost in a deep, confusing maze of unanswerable questions.
I wanted to hate Rachel for murdering my sons — and for murdering herself — but as hard as I tried, I couldn’t do it. Love is a mysterious thing, and even after her unthinkable act, I never found a way to love her any less.
I should have seen something.
Should have been there to stop it.
That’s what I told myself.
These days questions and pain still loom there, staring at me coldly, perched on the crest of my past, but at least I’m starting to move on. I’m with Charlene now. We’re taking things slowly in our relationship, but at least it feels like a doorway has opened up and a new future is dawning with it.
But right now, in this cemetery with the corpse of my friend lying before me, all of the renewed hope is dimmed in the reality of his death.
Looking down at Emilio, I notice a curl of a delicate chain just below his neck, and when I pull the sheet back a little more I see that Charlene has laid her cross necklace on his chest. It’s her most treasured piece of jewelry, and it just reiterates how much Emilio meant to her, to both of us.
I spend some time there with him and find that my thoughts have shifted into a kind of prayer.
He grew up in an orphanage here on this island. He was single, never married, had no children, and honestly, as far as I know, there are no next of kin to notify. So in the end, I don’t pray for his surviving family members as much as I end up praying for myself and Emilio’s other friends.
Before attempting escapes that can end up being fatal, all conscientious escape artists make plans for the possibility that they might not succeed, and I know that in the event that he didn’t make it, Emilio desired to be buried here, near the jungle he learned to love as a child.
I’m no expert on how to talk to God, but I suppose sometimes the most eloquent prayers are those that aren’t spoken at all but that rise to heaven directly from the fractures in our hearts, the places where words become superfluous, and now that’s the kind of prayer I find myself praying.
Emilio was a man of faith, raised Catholic, but he’d recently joined a small conservative church — Baptist, I think. In any case, he was unquestionably more ready to face eternity than I’ve ever been, and that seems to bring me a small sense of peace — but it’s nowhere near the peace I would be feeling if he were still alive.
At last I cover his head again and leave to find Charlene.
As I enter the hut, I see Xavier is waiting with her. They both look my way, and when he speaks his voice is soft yet intense. “I found something in Emilio’s things.”
“Tell me.”
He shows me a scratched and well-used portable USB flash drive. It has the symbol for RixoTray Pharmaceuticals imprinted on the side.
I feel my hand forming into a fist. “Not those guys again.”
“Yeah. Those guys again.”
While She Sleeps
We first encountered RixoTray last fall while we were investigating a controversial mind-to-mind communication research program for a television show I had at the time. In each episode I would debunk the tricks of a different psychic or medium by using mentalism, illusions, and sleight of hand, then I’d demonstrate how the person faked his or her seemingly miraculous feats.
In the process of exploring how the RixoTray research might’ve been faked, Charlene and I stumbled onto a conspiracy involving the company’s CEO and an assassin known as Akinsanya.
In the end, RixoTray’s CEO was apprehended, but this guy Akinsanya was still out there somewhere. The FBI had interviewed us at the time and since then has continued to follow up with us every few weeks to see if he has contacted us.
Nothing so far.
Now, as Xavier hands me the USB drive, I ask him, “Do you have any idea what Emilio was doing with this?”
He shakes his head. “No. But I plugged it in my laptop. It’s a 4 gig drive, but no files came up and only 2.7 gigs appear as available.”
“So somehow there are 1.3 gigs of hidden data on the drive?”
“That’s what it looks like. Yes.”
I consider that. “It could be nothing.”
“True.” But the way he says that, it’s clear he doesn’t believe it. “But Emilio getting murdered with something like this from RixoTray in his things seems like an awfully big coincidence.”
I evaluate what we know. It might be a stretch, but I throw it out there anyway. “You don’t think Tomás could be Akinsanya?”
“Who knows. Maybe.” Xavier rubs his chin thoughtfully. “In either case, Emilio is brutally killed as it’s being filmed and watched by millions of people around the globe? Someone wanted to make a statement here.”
There’s no way to tell for certain, and speculating too much right now probably isn’t going to move us any closer to finding out what happened here, but still, I find myself agreeing with him. I pass the drive back to him. “Did you find anything else in his things?”
“Nothing that struck me as unusual.”
Charlene indicates toward the first aid supplies she has set out on the table, and I take a seat. She unwraps the shirt encircling my arm, shakes her head concernedly, and takes out some antiseptic.
“We need to find out what those files are,” I say.
“Yes, we do,” Xavier agrees.
“I think it’s time to make a call.”
“To who?”
“Fionna.”
“Hmm.” He nods. “I’ll be right back.”
He slips out the door and into the night.
The adrenaline must finally be draining from my system because the more Charlene works on my arm, the more it starts to really hurt, but I do my best to hold back from letting her see how much it’s bothering me.
“How are you doing?” she asks.
“I’m good.”
“It hurts like the dickens, doesn’t it?”
“That’s one way to put it.”
She’s being gentle, but as she spreads antibiotics on the sore, another sharp burst of pain shoots up my arm, and I tighten my jaw, try to distract myself.
For the time being, though, the discomfort in my arm is keeping me from thinking too much about my banged-up leg.
So at least there’s that.
She’s finishing bandaging my arm when Xavier returns with the satellite hookup that his team was using to transmit Emilio’s escape live on the Internet. He runs the connect cord to his laptop and places a video call through to Fionna.
Fionna McClury is a single, stay-at-home mom who runs a cybersecurity consulting company out of her basement. Tech firms hire her to see if she can get past their firewalls, and she and her associates — who the companies don’t realize are really her four homeschooled kids — rarely come up short. She makes reasonably good money, but two painful divorces cost her dearly, and these days she barely manages to sock enough away for the kids’ college funds and keep the minivan filled up with gas and the fridge stocked — which is no easy task with two teenage boys.
I do my best to pay her what she’s worth, and she’s never let me down ever since she started doing projects for me a couple years ago.
Fionna answers the video chat request right away. Her frizzled red hair seems to have paused in the middle of an explosion.
Last week her five-year-old daughter Mandie informed me that her mommy’s eyes were viridian. It was an impressive word for a kindergartner — I would have just said green—but as dedicated as Fionna is to homeschooling her kids, Mandie’s vocabulary didn’t exactly surprise me.