CHAPTER 2
BALTIMORE, MARYLAND
Allison Dearborn looked spellbound at the medusa as it parachuted through the large tank of the aquarium. She had just told Ryan Kealey she loved the colors of the jellyfish, and he said he understood. Then, suddenly, Kealey turned his back to the curved glass of the aquarium tank.
“You okay?” she asked, her blue eyes following him.
He nodded. She wasn’t convinced.
“What are you thinking?” she asked.
“Just random-”
“Ryan? Don’t try to smoke me.”
He smirked. “It isn’t that… I don’t know if I can explain,” he told her. “It might sound a little crazy.”
Allison shrugged. “I’m a psychotherapist. Without craziness, I’d be unemployed.”
His smile broadened, but he remained silent.
“We’ve got nearly an hour before Julie’s dinner at the convention center.” She hooked her arm in his. “Come on. Give it a shot. I want to know.”
Kealey patted her hand and glanced back at the tank. Allison took a moment to admire this man, who was not only a good friend but also an exemplary patient. Lean and of medium height, his dark hair nearly reaching his collar, Kealey had dressed for the banquet in a Caribbean-blue collared golf shirt, navy Dockers, and loafers. He looked good, and he looked healthy, relaxed. He was certainly in a much better place than when they had first met. There was a long way to go, but he was making progress.
The creature was hovering now, barely drifting, its bell expanding and contracting with slow, rhythmical pulsations.
“The medusa could be at rest right now or hunting its prey,” Kealey said. “You can’t tell the difference by looking at it.”
“Fascinating and deflecting. What’s that got to do with-”
“Bear with me,” he said.
“Fine. How do you know this?”
He raised the brochure he’d picked up at the exhibit’s Pier 4 entrance. “I read this while you were on the phone. It describes the creature’s survival mechanisms, like those venomous tentacles. It doesn’t wait for its enemies to mature. It eats their eggs. It’s a perfect biological machine. Tell me, how would you go about injecting humanity into something like that?”
“I wouldn’t try. It’s not a human being.”
“Exactly,” he said. “It’s the same with some people. People who watch other people and hover and kill for a living-they’re not quite human beings, either. I was thinking, How do you instill that, or if lost, how do you get that back?”
“There are numerous approaches to rehabilitation-”
“On the surface,” he said. “You acclimatize someone. Do you really change them?”
“You mean brainwash?”
“That’s a little harsher than I meant,” Kealey said. “You scrub out so much in the process. I’m thinking more along the lines of, how do you integrate new ideas with old to make a better person?”
“That may be more a job for a priest than a shrink,” she said.
“Maybe.” He smiled. “I told you it was kind of nutty.”
“Only the part about equating yourself to a jellyfish,” she said. “That is what you were doing.”
“Maybe,” he admitted.
“Do you know what I was thinking? How its beautiful orange and violet stripes match my bracelets.”
“Perfectly understandable.”
“Why? Because it’s girl-brain stuff?”
“No,” he replied. “Because you’ve never carried a gun.”
His hand was still on hers. She gave it a loving squeeze. “Self-awareness is the cornerstone of psychological healing. I don’t think that’s crazy at all.”
She looked back at the tank, caught a glimpse of herself in the glass. A tall, lithe blonde in her midthirties, she was dressed in her banquet attire, a brief, sleeveless black dress with box pleats, gold drop earrings, and the vintage Lucite bangles on her wrists. They looked good together, but that was as far as it went. She had met Kealey at a party thrown by Julie and her husband, Jon Harper, in D.C., and they’d gone on a long, rambling moonlit stroll that wound through Georgetown’s cobblestone streets to the Mall and, eventually, to his hotel. But their instant attraction had been counterbalanced by her strong professional ethic; Allison, a former CIA trauma counselor, had thought she was being introduced to a likely patient and had reluctantly stayed in the lobby while he went up. For his part, Kealey later admitted he hadn’t been sure what to think when she left. He did say he was glad she took control. His romantic history was spotty at best, deadly at worst, and he might have scared her away before getting to know her as a dear and trusted friend.
Allison continued to watch the medusa in the cool radiance of the hall. “So,” she said. “Flotation is groovy, huh?”
He gave her a questioning glance.
“A line from a Hendrix song,” she said.
“I see. I was more of a Peter, Paul and Mary kind of guy.”
“I didn’t know that about you.” She smiled. “Folksingers, eh?”
“Apple pie and peace, that’s me,” Kealey said without a trace of irony. “I’m the product of their vision. Or, more accurately, trying to protect that vision.”
Allison stared at him in silence. She recognized the monotone, the distant look. It was the hint of post-traumatic stress that many soldiers and virtually every field operative acquired at some point. Kealey was no exception. He had been relaxed, sociable since he returned from his last mission in Darfur and South Africa, which was anything but.
Sent in as part of a “peacekeeping” tactic, Kealey had been on the ground to assist in ending the ten-year rebellion between the Eritrean government and a group of former eastern Sudan rebels that had united as the Eastern Front. Kealey had convinced both divisions that a peace treaty between them was their only option. Either that or get disintegrated, one way or another. But unfortunately, the deal had kept the Federal Alliance of Eastern Sudan, a fragment of the former eastern Sudan rebels, out of the picture, and Kealey feared a possible merging of the Justice and Equality Movement and the FAES, which would only prolong the peoples’ unremitting penury and extreme economic downturn due to an impossibly dense “national vision.” Not to mention the illicit guidance of their capital city, Khartoum, whose feelings toward its bordering African Nuba people was holocaustic.
But America did it once, balanced peace, Kealey thought. Why not Sudan? Was our revolution, our own civil war so different? Yes. Because our leaders weren’t insane. America had erudite leaders then, on both sides of the battlefield. And this unmatchable lunacy is what’s causing the political collapse. The inescapable massacres. The contagious spread of demise. But learning that human nature is the ultimate technology, that will be the key to releasing their ancient manacles, and the beginning of their modernized advancement.
When the deployment of a thousand South African troops to the western front of Sudan had been delayed due to elaborate passport and visa oversights-allowing the Janjaweed militia to raid a dozen more villages, killing hundreds more residents-Kealey was redeployed to inspect, scrutinize, and inform Washington about the sufficiency of the refugee camp outside the North Darfur city of Al-Fashir, which housed more than fifty thousand expatriates. Reporting first to the South African National Defence Force, to comply with their awkwardly strict regulations, Kealey observed firsthand the SANDF’s vast gaps of inexperience in dealing with the fallout of these radical wars, realizing further that foreign assistance was going to be insurmountably crucial to the survival of these people and their region. Being short on supplies and munitions notwithstanding, the numerous Islamic taboos and the South Africans’ critical views toward refugee women only increased tensions among gathering allies, which split the allied tribes into even more jagged, irreparable shards.