“Don’t you have any gloves?” Jan said.
“Did,” the man said. “Don’t.”
Jan pulled off her bright red ski mittens and proffered them. “Here.”
His scraggly eyebrows went up. “Seriously?”
“Sure. I can get another pair.”
Eric put his arm around her shoulder.
The man took them with his left hand andwith his right he grasped Jan’s now-naked hand and shook it. “Thank you, miss. Thank you.”
Jan didn’t flinch; she didn’t pull away from the contact. She let him hold her hand for a few seconds. “You’re welcome.”
“Well,” he said, looking again at the wreckage, “just wanted to see how the cleanup was going. Gotta get back to my usual spot.”
Eric looked at Jan just in time to see her eyebrows go up. “The Vietnam Veterans Memorial,” she said.
“Yup. I was one of the last to go over there. Just eighteen.”
Eric was intrigued. “And you’re there every day?”
The old man nodded. “With my friends.”
“Other vets?”
“No,” he said. “My friends. On the wall. Their names. I point ’em out to people, tell ’em stories about them—those that need to hear ’em. Young folk, folk that don’t know what it was like. Can’t let people forget.”
“Darby,” said Jan. “And David. And Bob.”
The man looked just as surprised as Eric felt. “And Jimbo,” he said. “Don’t forget big Jimbo.”
Jan nodded. “And Jimbo, too.”
The old man looked like he wanted to ask her a million questions—but then his face changed, and he nodded, as if the questions had been answered. “You’re a good person, miss.”
“So are you,” she said, and then Eric’s heart skipped a beat when she added one more word, a name—his name: “Jack.”
Jack looked startled, but then an almost beatific calm came over his face. He smiled, put on his new mittens, and started shuffling away.
“You’ve never met him,” Eric said. He’d formulated it in his mind as a question but it came out as a statement.
She shook her head.
“But you know him now.”
“As well as you know me.”
Eric turned and looked back across the Ellipse, toward the Washington Monument. Jack was getting further away.
“Why do you suppose that happened?” he asked.
Jan put her hands in her coat pockets, presumably to keep them warm, but then she pulled them out again and looked them over, turning them palm up then palm down. “He touched me,” she said. And then: “I touched him.”
Eric frowned. “When Josh Latimer died, the chain was broken. I was connected to you, but you weren’t connected to anyone. And so—”
“And so my mind sought a new connection,” said Jan.
“But he wasn’t the first person to touch you since Latimer died,” Eric said.
Jan frowned, considering this, and Eric frowned, too, recalling her memories, and then they both said, simultaneously, “No, he wasn’t.”
And Jan went on: “But he was the first unlinked person. Everyone else who touched me—you, Nikki Van Hausen, and Professor Singh—was already linked to somebody.”
“What about the MRI technician?”
“He was wearing blue latex gloves. And, anyway, I’m not sure he touched me.”
“We should go after Jack,” Eric said and he started to walk south.
Jan reached out with her arm—the one with the tiger tattoo hidden beneath her clothes, although they both knew it was there—and stopped him. “No,” she said, turning to look at where the White House had been, “we shouldn’t.”
Chapter 44
Marine One—the president’s helicopter—landed on LT’s rooftop helipad. Seth was strapped to a gurney and loaded on board for the flight to Camp David. He was accompanied by Dr. Alyssa Snow and Secret Service agent Susan Dawson, and was met by a Marine honor guard upon landing.
Mrs. Jerrison was already at Camp David. Seth insisted on being taken to Aspen Lodge—the presidential residence—rather than the infirmary, and was gently transferred to the king-sized four-poster bed there. A roaring fire was already going in the bedroom’s fireplace. The large window had its curtains drawn back, giving a magnificent view of the countryside, even if most of the trees—poplars and birches and maples—had long since lost their leaves.
Seth lay in the bed, his head propped up enough that he could stare into the flames, thinking about the speech he was going to give later today.
One must learn from history, Seth had often told his students—and sometimes not even from American history. In 1963, a terrorist group called the Front de Libération du Québec planted bombs in several Canadian military facilities and in an English-language neighborhood of Montreal. Later FLQ attacks included bombings at McGill University, the Montreal Stock Exchange, and the home of Montreal Mayor Jean Drapeau. Then, in October 1970, the FLQ kidnapped the British trade commissioner, James Cross, and the Québec minister of labor, Pierre Laporte.
Pierre Trudeau, Canada’s charismatic prime minister—who had been a thorn in the side of Johnson and Nixon—had finally had enough. When asked how far he’d go to put down the terrorists, he said, “Just watch me.” And the world did, as he invoked Canada’s War Measures Act, rolled out tanks and troops, suspended civil liberties, and arrested 465 people without charge or trial.
Laporte was ultimately found dead: the FLQ had slashed his wrists, put a bullet through his skull, and strangled him—in the first political assassination in Canada since 1868. But it never happened again: in all the decades since, there’d never been another significant terrorist event on Canadian soil. Lone crazed gunmen, yes, but organized acts by terrorists cells, no.
Just watch me.
Seth continued to stare into the flames.
Jack was back at his station, back at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. The place’s name was the one thing that bothered him about it: you usually think of vets as soldiers who survived a battle, but the 58,272 names engraved here were the Americans who had died in that swampy nation, fighting a pointless war.
Jack was grateful for the nice new ski mittens that pretty woman had given him, and he was wearing them now. He didn’t know why she had his memories, but he was glad she did. The dead soldiers named here understood, and so did those who’d survived, and, he imagined, many of those who’d been to Afghanistan or Iraq or Libya understood, too—but it was so hard to share what it had been like with those who had never seen combat, those who had never tasted war. At least that woman, Janis, understood now, too.
There were always people on the Mall, but Jack imagined fewer would stop at the Vietnam Memorial today. Instead, just as he himself had earlier, they’d hang around the places that had been in the news lately: the Lincoln Memorial and the charred rubble that had been the White House.
The main part of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial consisted of two polished black stone walls that joined at an oblique angle. The west wall pointed to the Lincoln Memorial and the east one to the Washington Monument. The walls were only eight inches high at their ends but rose along their 250-foot lengths to be over ten feet tall where they met.
Someone was approaching now. Jack always waited to see what each person needed. Some people knew how the wall worked—the soldiers were listed chronologically by date of death—and could find their loved one’s name incised in the stone. Others needed help, and if they seemed lost, he’d show them how to use the index books that told you which of the 144 panels had a particular name on it. Others still needed someone to listen, or someone to talk to. Whatever they needed, Jack tried to provide it. And for those who didn’t know, who didn’t understand, he told stories.