But Kealey was not prepared to just sit on the bench and watch his side, the reasonable side, continually lose lives and ground. He had been trained to do far more than the SANDF even knew to ask for. In the mentally tormenting months he was out there, Kealey ran personally sanctioned special ops-planting perspicacious residents across enemy lines to filter critical intel back to the good guys, or vriende, as it had to be explained to the locals-and Kealey used the information to personally direct small bands of troops to several previously undisclosed mass graves containing nearly five thousand African corpses in various states of butchered decay.
Despite Janjaweed leader Musa Hilal’s and President Omar al-Bashir’s repeated admissions that death was merely the path that war took, genocide was still the only word for it. And even the windblown sands couldn’t cover the killers’ scent. Kealey only wished he could follow the tracks all the way back to the maniacs’ doorsteps, kick in the doors, and do the same to their testicles. If they even had any.
Those intense desires to right terrible wrongs didn’t diminish easily, not without help. Giving it “time” didn’t relieve a warrior’s hardened beliefs; it only made them swell like a corpse left neglected. Some sights, some smells, some instincts weren’t meant to go away that simply. If ever, at all.
After returning home and renting a small house in Jesmond the previous winter, Kealey started to think about teaching again, about taking a break from conflict. Certainly, there was something about conveying critical information that was a passion of his. Besides letting him ventilate some of his painfully accrued wisdom, he liked the way people, especially students, reacted when their minds opened in new directions. Like the snaking vines that were steadily making their way up the sides of his rented quarters, he enjoyed watching them make progress, grow up, grow stronger.
And dealing with unfamiliar people was constantly a challenge for Kealey. People always asked questions and made him reassess his easily slung answers into more exigent responses. In a classroom setting, despite his deeply sympathetic almond-shaped eyes, he couldn’t get away with just surveillance; he had to inspire students, push them, make them understand ideas outside their assorted upbringings. And students often required from their teachers what they could not get from their parents. They needed a scholar, someone who had all the answers, or knew how and where to find them quickly. Someone who could keep all the blank, staring faces separate but could still get them to work together, no matter what the course, no matter what the assignment. No matter what the mission.
Unquestionably, there was concentrated pressure on being a teacher, and after considerable reflection, Kealey just wasn’t sure he was ready for that sort of pressure test yet. He had put the world’s humanity on the front line for years, and he didn’t think he could manage to “phone it in” for another 180-day school year, at least not as capably as the students really needed. Instead he booked some guest lectures on global issues at the University of Virginia. That was where he’d met Allison’s nineteen-year-old nephew Colin, who happened to attend school there.
Kealey was better adjusted than most special agents, but there were times when the deaths he’d caused and the risks he’d taken gripped his soul. He had said it himself once: “My life is like the old joke about the waiter who serves a matador burger at the restaurant in Vera Cruz one day apologizing to the patron, saying, ‘Sometimes the bull wins.’ ”
Thinking of Colin became an act of synchronicity. Allison reached into the small leather purse under her arm and pulled out her cell phone.
“Hold on a sec,” she said. “I want to see what’s going on with Colin.”
“Didn’t you just talk to him a half hour ago?”
“Yes, but I want to check his posts.”
“He’s blogging?”
“Blogging? You’re so twenty-ten,” she said as she browsed down her queue of updates. “He’s tweeting from the convention center for his student newspaper. It’s called ambient journalism.”
“I see. And how’s that different from reporting?”
“Anyone can do it,” she said.
“So the difference is it’s for amateurs.”
“That’s harsh.”
“Not at all,” Kealey said. “Where’s the editor, the veteran eyes?”
“It’s the public, Ryan. The process has been democratized.”
“Cheapened-no offense to Colin.”
“You’re wrong,” she said confidently. “The good journalists get repeated hits. The bad ones are relegated to Facebook. The worst ones are left to comment on what’s relegated to Facebook.”
“No fair,” Kealey said. “You lost me at ‘repeated hits.’ ”
“It’s no different than all the civilian eyes being used in the war on terror, watching for something unusual. Isn’t that how we recruit in Afghanistan, Iraq? Find the people who have a knack for observing, blending in, collecting images on cell phones?”
“It’s a good thing I’m retired,” he said, shaking his head.
“Why? Technology doesn’t scare you. You’ve used portable uplinks-”
“It’s not the technology,” he said. “It’s the lack of privacy. The exponential noise. What spy would welcome that?”
Allison smiled at something she read on her display. She started pecking out words of her own. “Sorry. As much as I’m enjoying your ‘poor us’ monologue, I have to respond to Col’s latest tweet.”
“My point is made,” he said confidently.
“Your point is beside the…,” she said, typing slowly with the sides of her thumbs, pausing once or twice to check for misspellings before she returned the phone to her purse. “Done,” she said.
“What’s the word from the front?”
“The red carpet is lined with local paparazzi and ready for the glitterati to begin arriving.”
Kealey glanced at his wristwatch. “It’s a quarter to four,” he said. “Why don’t we take a leisurely walk back to the car, get my sports jacket and your high heels, and head over to the center?”
“Sounds good.” She hooked her arm in Kealey’s and gave the creature in the tank a final look as they strolled away. The medusa tumbled through the water on an internal current, bumped up randomly, briefly, against another jellyfish, then spiraled away. It was a beautiful, functional life.
But hollow, she thought. You could sum them up in a brochure. They weren’t conflicted, the way Ryan Kealey was, yearning for peace but missing the thrill of the hunt, walking chastely beside her yet caring deeply and wanting more.
She hugged Kealey’s arm a little tighter, cherishing the prolonged contact, and quietly thanked God for the good that came with the bad. It didn’t make life easy, but they at least could actually hold each other.
And walk away from the fish tank.
The petite woman with short dark hair and Asian eyes approached room 306 of the Baltimore Hilton. There was a DO NOT DISTURB sign on the door handle. She ignored it and swiped her key card, entering the large, modern room with its panoramic view of the city’s Inner Harbor.
The harbor had come a long way since its taxpayer-paid restoration in the early eighties. Much like Times Square, prostitutes and crackheads were “relocated” or arrested, and their tainted syringes and condoms, which clung to the grates of gutters, were finally cleaned out. Warehouses, crack dens, rotting fuel tankers, and out-of-favor dog tracks were replaced by new shopping malls, fine dining, a world-class aquarium, and a new convention center. These improvements helped draw other corporate entities back into the suddenly decorous setting, bringing tourists and families back into the historic marina and closer to its famous “star-spangled” Fort McHenry. And thanks in part to hometown hero Cal Ripken, Jr.-and his just over 2,000 consecutive played games record, which was quickly sneaking up on record holder Lou Gehrig’s 2,130 games-the Baltimore Orioles got their new brick Camden Yards stadium in the early nineties, nearly completing the once-sagging city’s late twentieth-century facelift.