Mind + Body, Aaron Dunlap [smart books to read TXT] 📗

breakfast.

“I forgot about that part,” I said. “It turns out all the suspicious stuff he was doing was because of all the suspicious stuff we were doing so he thought I was going to kill him. Well, not me, but his boss guys.” I was confident that all made sense.

Amy sat in a tall chair at the counter. She started to say something, blinked twice, then finally said, “What?”

I was trying to figure out how to get water hot.

Once I’d had two cups of hot tea and had moved to the couch in the living room, I told Amy about the trip. About the Marriott and the Ambassador, conning my way into the latter, then breaking my way in, the voice recorder, the bank, how the coffees tasted different than Starbucks. I didn’t tell her about a dead guy named Jens Nesimi, or about what one might call my harrowing escape from a slow-moving vehicle.

“So you didn’t find out who Comstock is keeping an eye on you for?” she said.

“What?”

“You didn’t— what I just said.”

“I thought I told you,” I said, confused. “It was an integral part of the story.”

“You didn’t say anything.”

“Oh. Weird.”

“So…?”

“Marines.”

“What?”

“Marines…. Marines-comma-‘the’.”

“What Marines? All of them?”

“I don’t know, all he said was, ‘I figured the Marine Corps could afford it’ or something. Or did he say ‘be good for it’ instead? I’m not sure; my brain was too busy exploding at the time.”

“So it could just be some Marine guy. It doesn’t have to be the whole Corps.”

“He didn’t say anything either way,” I said, “I think the larger issue is the fact that somebody affiliated with the Marines is or was paying Comstock to pretend to be a school administrator just so he could watch me and keep me out of trouble. Also, Comstock hired some guy named Dingan to ‘bring me in’ just because I stopped going to school for a day, and later I drove a car into Dingan.”

“That doesn’t make any sense,” Amy said.

“Put that to a tune and it could be the theme song for my life.”

“No, I mean… you had the fight on Thursday, right?”

“Last Thursday, yeah.”

“And Lorton was on Saturday. So you only missed school one day, on Friday, and he freaked out and hired a nutcase to bring you in?”

I leaned my head back and thought about it. “Friday was when I came in and we did the bank account thing, and I put a hammer through his car window for a distraction. When you called and said his bank card was stolen, and then his car was vandalized, he thought it was his ‘boss’ people — some Marine guys — trying to get to him. He thought they were upset about him asking for more money, or for letting me even get in the fight.”

“Okay,” she said, “what are our working theories regarding why you’re so special that people are paying people to watch you and to pay other people to bring you in?”

“I don’t know,” I said, “my money? No, that’s stupid. My boyish good looks?”

“Well, boyish—”

“So, yeah. ‘I don’t know’ is my working theory. Is this something I should be asking the FBI guys about?”

“I don’t know,” she said.

I crossed my arms and said, “Well this all sucks. I’m sick of sitting around and waiting for somebody to attack me so I can acquire another hint at what’s going on here. Maybe my mom knows something about this.”

“When does she get home?”

“Tomorrow or Sunday,” I said. “It doesn’t seem like she would have anything to do with this, but I think I’m in too deep now to keep this a secret.”

“What about your dad?” Amy asked.

“Him?” I said, “I think he might be dead.”

Amy sighed. “I know that. I mean maybe this has something to do with him. He did work for the Marines, after all.”

“So did yours,” I said, “and nobody’s chasing, shooting at, or trying to arrest you.”

“You don’t think this could have anything to do with your dad or what he did?”

“Of course I do, but I don’t like to think about it,” I said. “I was a lot happier when I thought this was all grief or denial and I was making this up to get attention. If the Marines really are behind all of this, and it’s connected to my dad and his work, then this is a lot bigger than I’d thought.”

“This seems like a situation where one would ask people for information,” Amy said, “You know two FBI agents. The ‘I’ stands for Information.”

“No it doesn’t.”

“It—oh, right.”

“Federal Bureau of Information?” I chuckled.

“Ex_cuse_ me, then,” she snipped back. “There’s also that guy from your dad’s work. Schumer?”

“Yeah, but I—” I suddenly remembered that there was a USB drive on my kitchen table potentially full of information copied from Schumer’s computer. I’d forgotten all about it.

My answers could be on the USB drive. I stood up and dashed to the kitchen. There it was, on the table. I picked it up, the innocuous hunk of plastic. Looking at it, the fear came back. If this whole mystery is as big as I thought, maybe I don’t want to find the answers. Maybe there are no answers, just more questions. I was afraid I might find out something about my father that I wouldn’t like, or I’d find something out that could get me killed. This area’s mantra kept repeating over and over in my head.

Don’t ask questions.

Amy soon followed me into the kitchen and stood at my side. “What’s on that?” she asked.

I closed the drive in my fist. “Nothing,” I said, turning toward her. “Have you eaten yet?”

+ + + +

It was nearly dark when we came back from a locally owned bar & grill-type place. Besides needing to catch up on sleep, I also had a lot of eating to make up for. I couldn’t remember eating a full meal during my stay in Vienna. I missed out on a lot of sausage. I’d put on pants before we’d gone out, and the USB drive was tucked in my pocket. The same pocket as my knife, which I’d fished from my suitcase. I didn’t know why, but it just felt good to have it on me. If I ever came across a letter that needed opening, or a Ugandan rebel that needed opening, I liked to know I’d be covered.

It had been nice to spend an hour not thinking or talking about the elephant in the room or the monkey on my back or whichever proximity-based animal analogy applies. When we got back to my place, though, they went right to my mind. I sighed, knowing that I’d eventually look at the files on this USB drive, if there were any, so I might as well get it over with. Maybe it had a nice, two-paragraph story that explained everything and pointed out that this was all one big misunderstanding.

I kicked my shoes off and went straight up to my room, Amy followed without a word. I sat down at my computer and plugged the USB drive into a port on the front of the PC tower. Amy set her purse on my desk, then crossed the room and sat down on my bed. I glanced over, again trying not to freak out about the girl-on-my-bed phenomenon. She didn’t ask what I was doing; probably assuming I was going to check the webcam outside Comstock’s house. She looked down at my open suitcase on the floor with my clothes spewed out.

“So,” she said, “Did you get me anything?” She was playfully dangling her legs over the side of the bed.

Something sharp stuck into the side of my brain. Shoot. I was going to get her something but I never got around to it. Trying to think of something to say, I opened the USB drive’s contents on my computer and clicked the first thing I saw, and then spun the chair sideways to look around the room.

“Umm,” I started, grabbing my backpack and fishing through it. There were two passports, an envelope with anonymous Austrian bank account credentials inside, my computer, two books, and, well…

I tossed Amy a small paper book of matches. She caught it and turned it around in her hand. “The Marriott?”

I stood up and walked over to her. “The Marriott Vienna,” I said, pointing at the word. “How often do you see matches from Western Europe?”

“Personally?” she asked, with a grin.

“All right,” I said, “I didn’t have time to get anything. I left in a bit of a hurry.”

“It’s fine,” she said, looking at the matches in her hand.

“No, really, I was going to get you something. Something amazing, I’m sure.”

She looked up, smiling. “No, really,” she said, “you didn’t have to. You weren’t there for sightseeing, I know.”

The silence was peppered with the sound of a truck driving down the road.

“You’re still supposed to buy stuff when you go to another country,” I said.

“Don’t worry about it,” she said softly, “we can pick something out when we go somewhere together.”

I noticed my heart was beating just a bit faster than normal. I sat down beside her on my bed, looking at the matches in her hand. “Like where?” I asked.

She rolled her eyes in a circle. “I don’t know,” she said, “I’ve always wanted to see Paris.”

Neither of us said anything for a few seconds. My guard lowered and voice low, I said, “You know there are drugs that can mimic a heart attack?”

Her eyes went from the matches to me. “Did Comstock say that?”

I looked down at my knees. “No, I… I read it somewhere.”

“Do you think that’s how your dad died? The heart attack wasn’t real?”

My eyes traced my legs down to the floor, then over to the wall, and up to the ceiling. I tried to look through it, through the sky, and into the heavens, where all my answers must be. “I don’t know,” I said. “Just something else to complicate my life, something I can rail against.”

I looked at her, she looked at me. It sounded like the truck on the street wasn’t moving, but that might have been my brain thumping in my ears.

There was a slight sadness in her eyes, like a painful memory that kept creeping up. The side of my hand on the bed was barely touching hers. Her other hand was holding the book of matches, spinning them around, her eyes following. She smiled, then stood up and walked over to my desk and put the matches in her purse. She glanced at my computer’s monitor once, then twice. Her eyes widened a bit and her mouth opened slightly.

I thought I heard a car door opening.

“That’s you,” she said, still looking at the screen.

“What?” I asked, sliding off the bed and walking around the desk.

A soundless video file was playing in Media Player. It must have been the file on the USB drive I opened without paying attention. The video was black and white, taken from an awkward over-the-head angle. It showed an empty-looking room, and me sitting at a desk directly in the center of the frame. It was definitely me, wearing my clothes. I was looking at someone or something outside the frame, and occasionally looking down at a piece of paper in front of me on the desk.

I stepped closer to my computer and sat down in the chair, watching the video frame closely.

“When is this?” Amy asked, over my shoulder.

“I don’t know,” I said,