The Last Good Man

Reunion

Their chartered jet touches down in early evening. They deplane down a stairway and cross the tarmac to a ground-floor terminal where their families and coworkers wait behind a glass wall, waving enthusiastically. No media are present. No journalists. This is a private airfield and a private reunion, though of course there are plenty of cameras.

Juliet reaches the door first. A cheer goes up when she pulls it open. Cries of greeting, hoo-yahs. The rest of the team crowds in. All but True. She lingers, watching through the glass, waiting for everyone else to get inside, giving Lincoln a chance to greet them.

Juliet throws herself into her husband’s arms. Miles is met by his weeping parents and his grinning sister. Cameras flash amid a swirl of kisses and hugs and handshakes and small children lifted joyously over the crowd, and teenagers on the periphery, hanging back with embarrassed half-grins. True slips in behind it all.

Alex is there, just inside the door. She warned him something was up, no details. He looks wary as they share a ritual kiss.

Lincoln is with him, wearing his typical uniform: tan ReqOps polo shirt, brown slacks, and a casual jacket. “I don’t want to talk here,” he says, his artificial eye contributing to his intimidating glare. “It’s not secure.”

“You want to go to headquarters?” she challenges him. “That’s fine with me. But I don’t want the team hearing about this from Miles.”

“About what?” Alex asks. “What does this have to do with me anyway?”

True turns a cold eye on Lincoln. He makes a good guess at what she’s thinking. “I did not lie to you, True.” He says it in an undertone, barely audible over the chatter around them. “I told you the truth. Shaw Walker was declared dead. That was the official conclusion.”

True turns to Alex. “You remember Shaw?”

“Of course,” he answers, cautious as a man circling an IED.

“He’s alive. Brooke confirmed it. Which means someone in the State Department already knew. Maybe it’s been known for years.”

“I don’t believe it,” Lincoln insists. “It’s a case of mistaken identity. I went to Nungsan. I went in with the forensics team, helped locate the bodies. I saw what was left of the structure where Shaw was held. It was incinerated. A smoking hole in the ground with the trace remains of at least three people. He did not survive.”

True shakes her head. No way will she accept that conclusion, not anymore, not when she has two sources telling her that Shaw is alive. “Were those trace remains enough for a DNA identification? If not, you can’t prove he was there, Lincoln.”

“Come on! You know he was there. You heard him on the video.”

“That was days before the village was targeted! That doesn’t tell us where he was when the missile hit.”

“True—”

“Hold on!” Alex interrupts. “God damn it, what are you saying?”

She turns to him, puts her hand on his arm. “There’s a black-hat mercenary working in the TEZ who goes by the name of Jon Helm. It’s a pseudonym, a nom de guerre. Miles picked him out of a photo lineup. It’s Shaw.”

Alex gives Lincoln a puzzled look. Then he returns his attention to True. “So what if it is Shaw?” he asks her.

She understands. He doesn’t want to deal with it. Just like her, he’s afraid of reliving the grief, the horror of that place and time when Diego’s death was raw and new. His reluctance is plain to see—but she needs him on her side. She tells him, “If it is Shaw, he is the last living man who saw our son alive and I want to talk to him, ask him why he’s alive, and what happened in that forest. What went wrong and what part he had in it and why he didn’t come home.”

Quickly, breathlessly, she sketches for Alex the story Hussam told of Jon Helm in Burma—how he killed his assailants when they tried to crucify him. “If the story is true, Shaw fought his way out of there. He could have come home. He should have, but he didn’t. Why?”

“Because the story’s not true,” Lincoln says.

That’s what he wants to believe. She tries to get him to reconsider. “When you were there, did you find the steel pipes of the cross they used?”

He presses his lips together. His living eye narrows. “Yeah,” he admits in a wary voice. “I saw that. It was knocked over by the blast that took out the building where Shaw was being held.”

“Did you find bodies near that cross?”

He glances around. Everyone else is clustered in front of the bar or alongside the buffet table, absorbed in their own conversations. His measuring gaze pauses on Alex before returning to True. “Two burned corpses. We don’t know who they were.”

“Saomong?” Alex asks.

“Yes.”

True says, “That supports the story. What did you determine as cause of death?”

He scowls. “Nungsan was hit by a cruise missile, True. When it took out the target building, debris was flung in every direction.”

She considers this for a few seconds. Leans in. “Sure. I know. Anyone in front of that building would have been pummeled by the debris. But were they dead before that happened?”

Seconds slide past as they glare at one another. Alex shifts restlessly, wondering, maybe, if he should intervene.

Lincoln breaks first. He tries to back out of the discussion, growling, “All of this is classified.”

“No,” True says. “No, you don’t get to go there.”

Lincoln has never been an expressive man. The burn scars and the artificial eye make him an even harder read, but True sees contrition on his face as he says, “Look, we can’t know what happened. There were different factions among the Saomong. They were probably at each others’ throats.”

“Maybe,” she allows. “Tell me what you saw. Tell us. I just want the truth.”

He eyes her for several seconds. She holds her breath.

He raises his hand, taps the side of his head with two fingers. “One had his skull caved in here.” He touches his forehead. “The other one, here. Like they’d been hit with a small sledgehammer.”

She turns away, struggling to hold on to a semblance of calm. Beyond the glass, a ground crew services the plane. She feels the weight and warmth of Alex’s hand on her shoulder.

Lincoln says in his habitual monotone, “We concluded that they’d been executed.”

She rounds on him. Alex’s hand falls away. “You want me to believe they were formally executed—with a hammer?”

“Yes.” He’s willing her to believe what he chose to believe eight years ago.

That is not a game she can play. “Let’s say Hussam’s story is true.”

“Okay! Fine. Let’s do it that way. Shaw killed those two, disappeared into the forest, and died there—because if he’d lived, he would have checked in. He would have let us know.”

“Let’s say all of Hussam’s story is true. Shaw lived, but he didn’t check in. He took off on his own.” She goes on to tell them about the tattoo Miles saw on Jon Helm’s arm. She touches her own forearm. Her throat feels thick. Her voice is low. “The epitaph read, Diego Delgado, The Last Good Man.”

Alex steps back, shaken. Lincoln reacts in contempt. “That motherfucker—if it is him—even back then, True, he was not the hero you imagine.”

This response is not what True expects. She didn’t know Shaw well, but she’s never before heard Lincoln say a word against him. “No man is perfect,” she says, surprised at her own desire to look back on Shaw in a clean light.

She’s stunned when Alex tells her, “Shaw wasn’t even close.” Certainty lies behind his words, an implication that he knows more than he should, that he’s kept things from her. She looks at him in shock, wanting the truth of it, but he doesn’t see her. She’s been sidelined. He trades a gaze with Lincoln as if they’re conspirators in some crime and says, “If the story is true, he’s sold his soul.”

Lincoln acknowledges this with a slow nod.

True looks from one to the other, unsure what’s going on, and that makes her angry. “I missed something,” she says. “But I’m putting you both on notice. I intend to find him. I need to find him. He was there with Diego at the end.”