”Am I disturbing you?”
The woman
in the doorway had a higher, gentler voice than her tall, broad shouldered
frame suggested, something that immediately threw Ivanov off. It
almost felt like he had suddenly stumbled into a cartoon featuring a severely
miscast voice actress, and for far longer than was natural or polite, he simply
sat in his chair, looking up at her with a vacant expression on his face. “You are
detective Gary Ivanov, right? Or did the girl at the front desk send me to the
wrong office?”
“No, no,
I’m Ivanov,” he blurted out, got on his feet, shimmied around his desk with the
grace of a dump truck, and extended his hand to her. “Is it important? I was
actually heading home for the evening, miss…? ”
“Captain,”
she replied, and locked her hand around his, with a grip that made Ivanov feel
disturbingly less manly than he had a moment ago. “I’m captain Marina Rossi,
with the Agency for Internal Information and Security.”
She held up
a very official looking identity card for him.
“Agency for
intern…”
“Military
Intelligence, detective. I’m here about an information request you submitted to
my office on the…” Rossi fished a small notebook out of her pants pocket, and
quickly thumbed through it before continuing her sentence. “Fifteenth,
sixteenth, seventeenth, eighteenth and twenty-second of this month.”
“Ah,”
Ivanov said, with a cautious smile. “I see. To tell you the truth, I wasn’t
expecting you to come all the way out here just to tell me to mind my own
fucking business in person. I envisioned a rude e-mail or a covertly
threatening fax at best.”
“I assure
you, I am not here to tell you to mind your own fucking business,” Rossi
smiled. “May I sit?”
“Of
course,” Ivanov said, and gestured for Rossi to sit down in the chair in front
of his desk. He felt a swell of relief that she had taken his overly familiar
joke in stride. As he sank back in his own chair, he was starting to feel a
little more in control of the situation again, and thought for a moment of
quickly tidying the small sea of scattered papers from his desk, but decided
that the time to make a stronger first impression had passed.
“I believe
you sought information about a man called ‘William Warhurst’, correct?” Rossi
asked sternly.
“That’s
right.”
“May I ask
the reason why you wish to know more about this man?”
Ivanov
leaned forward, and interlocked his fingers, trying his very best to look like
he was about to say something profound.
“This is a
small community,” he said with a sigh. “As you probably gathered from the size
of our humble
police station. I like to take it upon myself to keep tabs on any
visitors who arrive in our humble town. A few weeks ago, I approached a man I
didn’t recognize to, politely, enquire about his business here. He introduced
himself as William Warhurst, and told me that he was just passing through. Fair
enough, I thought, even if there was something about him that didn’t sit right.
There was something wrong with his face, almost as if the skull shifted
underneath his skin when he moved. Like the different part of the skeleton
weren’t properly connected. It was a little unsettling. Naturally, I found it
hard to get it out of my mind. I asked him if he minded if I took a photo of
him, for future identification purposes. He had no objections.”
“So you
decided to do some research, am I right?”
“Yes. I ran
the name William Warhurst, but found nothing in the penal registry. I searched
for a driver’s license and a social security number, but nothing. None of the
databases I searched had any information on him what so ever. Maybe this seems
overly curious or paranoid, but I eventually decided to make a federal
information request. The thing is, my fax machine cut off the text on the
paper, meaning that only the picture I’d taken of him got through. Fifteen
minutes later, I got a file in return, with a picture of the man I’d met, but it
carried the name ‘Marcus Pierce’. All it contained was that name, and a date of
birth, which I knew couldn’t be right. He did look quite haggard, but I doubt
he was born in 1897.”
“That’s
odd,” Rossi said, and leaned back in her chair. Ivanov scratched his chin.
There wasn’t a hint of confusion or surprise on captain Rossi’s face.
“So the
snowball started rolling,” he continued. “I kept sending his file to anyone who
might have any information on him. Interpol returned with the name ‘Adrian
Gordon Brett’, while Europol, my personal favorite so far, gave his identity as
‘Camal Ibn Izz-Al-Din’. All of them contained a different name, a different
date of birth, but always the same face.”
“And so you
eventually sent a request, well, several requests, to us?”
“I must
have,” Ivanov chuckled. “I may have been a bit overzealous in my curiosity.”
“Like I
said, this is a small community.”
“I believe
this is what you’re looking for,” Rossi said, as a worn old yellow folder
suddenly seemed to materialize out of thin air in her hand.” Slowly and
deliberately, she put the folder on Ivanov’s desk, keeping strict eye contact
with him as she did. Her face twitched as she took her hand off it, like it
actually pained her to let it go.
“I saw a
bottle of Jameson’s in that cupboard by the door when I came in,” she said and
turned her head, finally releasing his gaze. “Do you mind if I pour myself a
glass?”
“Be my
guest,” Ivanov said, barely registering the question. He looked intensely at
the faded folder, not quite sure if it was going to bite his hand off if he
tried to open it.
“Do you
want one?” Rossi’s voice sounded like it was coming from a mile away.
“Please.”
With a deep breath, Ivanov finally made a grab
for the folder. He opened it carefully, as if it was a door barely hanging off
its hinges. There was the face again. And another new name. At least, he was
pretty sure it was a name.
“His name
is Shields Francis McKloskey,” Rossi said, and put Ivanov’s glass down next to
him. “He was born on the sixteenth of May 1974, to Alisdair and Sigrun
McKloskey. Though he was born in Aberdeen, Scotland, he spent most of his
childhood in his mother’s native Iceland.
“Wait a
minute,” Ivanov interrupted. “Do you mean to tell me that his first name is
actually ‘Shields’!? What kind of parents name their kid Shields?”
“No
siblings,” Rossi continued, completely ignoring his question. “Parents died in
a freak archaeological accident when he was eight. Little Shields was sent to his uncle’s family
back in Scotland, where they lived for a few years, before immigrating here.
Shields got his citizenship four years after his arrival. Joined the army as
soon as he was able, served with distinction for two years, before signing up
for Special Forces selection.”
“Aha,”
Ivanov chuckled, and took a sip of the whiskey.
“I see why you’re here. All these different identities and the secrecy.
I’ve stumbled upon some kind of special agent, am I right?”
Rossi
stopped her story, and gave Ivanov a chilling, lingering look. He suddenly felt
like a field mouse which had stumbled upon a king cobra. He took another sip, and
swallowed it more loudly than he meant to, while a bead of sweat ran down his
back. If he only knew why this woman intimidated him so much.
“I was only
joking, captain Rossi,” he said, fighting against his bone dry throat. “I’m
sure you wouldn’t tell me all this if he actually was…”
“I first
met him about six years later, aboard a small frigate stationed out of Yokosuka,
Japan, patrolling the straight of Taiwan. I was the ship’s radio operator, and
we were retrieving a small group of commandos from the Chinese mainland.”
“Chinese
mainland?”
A bead of
sweat ran down Ivanov’s brow, and his throat got if possible even dryer. He felt
a twitch in his left knee, an old injury that usually acted up just to let him
know that one of his massive, stress-induced headaches was on the way. He took
a deep gulp from his glass in an effort to calm his heart that was beating
faster and faster, like a tiny little piston against his ribcage. He
desperately wanted to hear more, but was far from convinced that he should.
“His team
was taken aboard in the dead of night,” Rossi continued, and poured another
serving into her glass, and then a bigger one into Ivanov’s. “Mission accomplished, fist bumps and
backslaps all around. I’d been part of recovering Special Ops from dangerous
assignments before, and I knew how wired they would be as the adrenaline in
their veins started thinning out. Not Shields though. He simply sauntered past
everyone, stowed his gear, and walked away from the rest of them. I found him
later, sitting on the deck in one of the storage compartments, his back rested
against the bulkhead.”
Rossi ran
her fingers through her short, blonde hair at her temple, and seemed to
disappear into thought for a moment, which Ivanov took as the perfect
opportunity to get up and stretch his legs. He’d had time to walk around behind
her, and all the way over to his window, before she started talking again.
Night was falling outside, and the streetlights had already come on. In the
parking lot, piles of dead, brown leaves were throwing weak shadows on the wet
asphalt. It dawned on him that he’d already drank too much to be able to drive
home. He didn’t mind the walk though. It was a good time to think. And he was
pretty sure he’d have a lot to process by the time captain Rossi had finished
her story.
“I sat down
next to him,” she continued. “Though I may as well have been made out of air.
He didn’t even acknowledge me. Just kept whispering the same phrase over and
over.”
“What was
he saying?”
Rossi
smiled to herself, and turned her chair around to get eye contact again.
“It’s a
passage I’ve heard a million times since then, and one it took me some time to
start making sense of. He said: ‘You have become famous, so far from your deeds
of strength, but henceforth, outlawry and man-slayings will be your lot. And
most of your deeds will end in bad luck, and lack of fortune. You will be made an outlaw, and will be
forced to live outdoors, on your own. And this I lay on you: that these eyes
which I’ve cast on you will always be before you, and it will be torture for
you to be alone, and torture for others to be in your company. And that will
drag you to your death.’”
“What’s
that from?” Ivanov wondered. “A book or a movie or something?”
“I have no
idea. I just sat with him for more than an hour, during which he would
alternate between chanting that same line, and complete silence. I was nearly
asleep when he suddenly pulled his sidearm from the holster on his thigh, and
put the barrel of the gun between his teeth. “
“What?”
Ivanov was
mesmerized. He thought he had seen something off in the man’s eyes when he had
spoken to him, something he found it hard to put his finger on, no matter how
much he prided himself as good judge of character.
“I didn’t
have time to think,” Rossi said. “I just grabbed hold of his wrist, and pulled
it back out again. He didn’t struggle much; he just looked at me with the
strangest expression on his face. To this day, I don’t know if I saw anger,
fear or surprise on him. Eventually, he just holstered his pistol, got up and
walked away.”
“What did
you do then? Report him?”
“No. The
next day I got to talking to one of his teammates. Apparently, what I’d walked
in on the night before happened every time he was supposed to ship back to the
world. So far at least, he’d never pulled the trigger.”
“Why would
he…”
Rossi
sighed and leaned forward, resting her elbow on the desk. In a flash, Ivanov
was back in his chair, on the edge of his seat, waiting for what was coming
next.
“When we
got back to dock, I called on a friend of mine in archives to pull his service
record for me. Of course I didn’t have access to information about him after he
passed special ops selection, but his regular file was telling enough. Three
months after joining the army, he was involved in a horrific helicopter
accident during maneuvers. The pilot and three of his fellow recruits died in
the crash, while Shields walked away without a scratch. Weeks later, his bunk
mate accidentally shot himself on the shooting range. The following year, the
company priest, who Shields had spent a lot of time with following these
deaths, was run over by an armoured
vehicle, and killed. A the same time, his therapist hung himself in his own
apartment, and his commanding officer died of an undiagnosed heart disease.”
“That’s…
terrible.”
“Instead of
shrugging it off, and thinking: ‘wow, that is one unlucky guy,’ I decided to
dig deeper. Whatever free time I had, I spent buried in old newspaper articles,
public registries and the craziest conspiracy websites you’re ever likely to
see. And I learned everything I could about Shields McKloskey.”
“Why did
you do that?” Ivanov wondered.
“Probably
for the same reason you’re doing it right now.”
As Rossi
began laying the entire miserable tale on the table, Ivanov felt the expected
headache begin to crawl inside his skull. Something felt very wrong about this
conversation, but there was no way that he was about to stop her. For weeks,
the encounter with the strange, haggard man who had called himself William
Warhurst had been on his mind practically every free minute that he had, and
far too often when he had better things to do. He had no idea what it was about
this man that made him so hard to put out of his mind. Even as Rossi told him
about how his foster mother had drowned
a few years after they took him in, how his foster father drank himself to
death by the time he was eighteen and his new siblings had shunned him as if he
was somehow responsible, he could not get the image of the man out of his head.
There was something with his eyes, a cold, world-weary yet intense gaze that
threatened to scorch your retinas out of your skull if you dared to try to
stare him down. There was so much hidden behind them, and the tidbits Rossi was
feeding him would probably only be able to sustain him for so long.
“Do you
mind?” Rossi asked suddenly, and held up a small, aluminum case containing five
cigarettes.
“Go ahead,”
Ivanov said, just realizing that she had reached the end of her bullet point
list. A million questions were racing through his head as she lit up, and took
that first, deep inhale.
“That’s a
lot for one man to deal with,” he said eventually, hoping to get her to pick up
the thread herself.
“Six months
after I’d first met him, I was back home on leave, and I was walking back to my
apartment. As I reached my door, I suddenly heard a voice behind me. I wasn’t
as startled as you’d think, because I recognized the voice immediately.”
“Shields,
right?”
“Yes. He’d
been drinking, I could smell it on his breath, but he was still surprisingly
lucid. He walked up to me, and tried to put his arms around me, but I
immediately pushed him away. He looked at me for a moment, before he said:
‘you’re immune. You’re the one I’ve been looking for. My own personal Deus Ex
Machina.’”
Ivanov’s
head shot up in surprise, and a look of confusion passed across his face.
“What did
he mean by that?”
Rossi took
a deep, hungry drag from her cigarette, and sighed a thick cloud of smoke into
the room. She
looked hesitant, taking the time to look around the room and
scratch her neck before speaking again.
“You have
to understand,” she began. “Shields has seen a lot of death in his life. A lot
of it. He has taken lives, and he has lost many of his loved ones. And it has
marked him, as you can probably understand. He is a deeply troubled man.”
“It sounds
like you are stalling, Captain Rossi,” Ivanov said, suddenly feeling a little
on top of the conversation again.
“Shields
believes that he is cursed,” Rossi said reluctantly.
“Don’t we
all…”
“I think
you misunderstand. Shields genuinely believes it. Like he has a literal curse
on his head. He thinks that everyone who gets too close to him will see their
death, or at least grave misfortune because of it.”
Ivanov
broke out in a hearty, impulsive laughter, expecting Rossi to do the same. As
he began pouring himself another drink however, he noticed that Rossi’s stony
expression hadn’t changed.
“What,
really? Like a gypsy curse?”
“He’s never
been more specific, but having known him for years now, I know that he is
completely serious about it.”
“Is he
insane?” Ivanov asked with disbelief shining from his eyes.
“He has
never been diagnosed with any serious mental illness,” Rossi replied quickly,
almost robotically. “Like I said, he is a deeply troubled man.”
Ivanov
tried his best to stifle his smile, but this was too much. After years with the
police department, he had heard a lot of bullshit, but this was a step further.
“What did
he want with you?” he asked.
“Word had
reached him that someone had been checking up on him, and by the time he had
found out who I was, I was already too deep, as he said. So he’d kept an eye on
me, waiting for the curse to set in. But it didn’t. So in Shields’ mind, this
could only mean that he had finally found someone he did not have to withdraw
from, someone he could talk to.”
“Wait. You
mean that he thinks this curse affects people he hasn’t even met?” Ivanov
asked, and looked down at the yellow folder lying on his desk, before
immediately feeling like a complete idiot for asking that question. The alcohol
in his blood was probably to blame. Definitely.
“We spoke
for a while,” Rossi continued. “And over a staggeringly brief period of time,
he filled in most of the blanks my research had left. I think he was just glad
to be able to talk about himself without worrying about this imaginary curse.”
“I can’t
believe a grown man actually believes in curses.”
“It goes
far deeper than that, I’m afraid,” Rossi said calmly, swishing the last drops
of the Jameson’s around in the bottom of her glass. “We bonded on a certain
level. He finally had someone to talk to, and I had found a dangerous and
fascinating man who was interested in me.”
“That
sounds really clinical,” Ivanov chuckled. “Were you involved with each other?”
“We had a brief
and quite meaningless physical relationship. As it turned out, it wasn’t what
either of us wanted. Eventually though, he made me an offer. My tour of duty
was coming to an end, and I wasn’t on track for what you’d call a sparkling
naval career, so I was resigned to go back into civilian life. That is until he
offered to use his considerable clout with MI to get me a spot in their
recruitment program.”
“And that’s
how you got your job?”
“Yes,”
Rossi said, and sat up in her chair, demanding eye contact with Ivanov again.
“I sold my soul to particularly unstable devil, and in doing so, I got pulled
into a world I’d never had any desire to enter. All for a bit more money every
month, and a level of security clearance I’d never even heard of.”
“You sound
like you want out.”
“That’s not
an option,” Rossi replied. “Shields continued doing what he did, and he made
sure I was kept at hand, if you get my meaning. It took me a while to realize
that it wasn’t my razor sharp wit that had landed me my new job. I was a
glorified assistant for that man for years. Until he finally went over the
edge.”
“What
happened?”
“Shields
couldn’t handle people laughing at him behind his back, and not believing him
about this supposed curse. So one day he’d finally had enough, and decided to
prove it to everyone.”
Ivanov
folded his hands beneath his chin, resting his elbows on the desk. This was it;
this was what he’d been waiting for.
“While
scouting and preparing a strike against an opium lord in Afghanistan, Shields
allowed himself to be captured.”
“You mean
he got captured?” Ivanov interrupted.
“I mean, he
allowed himself to be captured,” Rossi replied gravely. “For two and a half
weeks, he was brutally tortured. Even now, a million debriefs and interviews
later, no-one has been able to get to the bottom of exactly what was done to
him, during those eighteen days, but as he said himself, during those days, he
told them everything. It took us
agonizingly long, but eventually we finally had the intel we needed to strike.
The rest of Shields’ team went in to the caves expecting to find considerable resistance.
Instead, they found nothing but dead bodies, strewn across the entirety of the
complex. Everyone inside those caves, more than a dozen bodies in total, dead.
Everyone, apart from one man.”
“Shields,”
Ivanov gasped.
“As we
later found out, someone had poured gasoline into the tank of a generator meant
for use with kerosene, and a small leak in the exhaust tube had distributed the
carbon-monoxide throughout the caves and killed them all without them even
realizing what was happening. Except for one man being held in a small cage in
the deepest corner of the cave complex, right underneath a tiny ventilation
shaft. He didn’t have any fingernails left when he was found. Practically all
his fingers had been broken, his right femur shattered, both his collar bones.
He had several fractures in his skull and jaw. Battered trachea, severely
impaired eyesight on his left eye due to several cuts into the eyeball.”
Rossi
stopped herself, coughed into her fist, and looked away for a moment.
“There was
more, but you get the idea. We eventually established that his captors had been
dead for at least four days by the time we found him. He’d survived by sucking
the moisture from a small stream running down the cave wall in his cell. He was
taken back to the world, and given the best medical care we could provide, and
after a year of rehabilitation, physical therapy and about two dozen surgeries
both medical and cosmetic, he was almost human again. But you can’t recover
entirely from something like that, and after it was clear that he’d done it on
purpose, there was no way he could be kept in active duty. Despite all this,
Shields thought he had been vindicated, that he had proved that he had been
right all along. When he realized that no-one believed him still, in spite of
what had happened, he broke down. He cut all ties, and disappeared. The only
time we hear from him, is when he uses one of his old cover names, like he did
with you.”
“Why does
he do that?” Ivanov wondered.
“Because he
knows I will come after him,” Rossi said. Her voice was suddenly low, raspy,
tired. “Because he knows…”
Rossi
suddenly got up, and swiftly grabbed the yellow folder off the table, putting
it under her arm. Ivanov was on his feet in a flash, and only partially able to
conceal the fact that he had drunk quite a bit more than he had intended to.
“I’ve taken
up far too much of your time, detective. I’m sure you’re eager to get home for
the night,” Rossi said, as she turned towards the door.
“Wait,”
Ivanov protested. Why did you come all the way here to tell me this story?”
She looked
at him with the eyes of someone who had been given the world, but had crumbled
under the weight of it.
“I’ve stood
where you’re standing now, detective,” she said. “I’ve been at the cross-roads
where you find yourself, and I picked the wrong path. I’m here, because I hope
you will choose the right one. Do not enter this world. What you find will not
be pleasant.”
“If I was
sober, I’d say that was a threat,” Ivanov quipped.
“Nothing of
the kind detective Ivanov. Enjoy your walk.”
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