John Miller - Side by Side

Fast-moving clouds were mirrored in the puddles of standing water left by a late afternoon rainstorm. Halogen fixtures set on tall poles spaced fifty feet apart painted the landscape an unholy orange-blue.

A solitary figure dressed entirely in black slipped through a vertical slit in the tall hurricane fencing topped with loops of concertina wire. The fence surrounded a forty-acre lot beside a train yard where several hundred steel containers had been stacked and ordered with Mondrian-like precision. Here and there the painted steel skins of some of the boxes showed brown fingers of rust from years of exposure to the weather.

The man dressed in black, a thirty-year-old whose name was Patrick Taylor, slipped a hand-drawn diagram from inside his jacket and checked the inventory numbers on the closest container, then moved swiftly to the next one. Hours earlier, he had copied the coordinates from a scrap of paper he’d found secreted in Colonel Bryce’s safe. Opening his cell phone, he dialed a number he called only when he was alone and in a secure location. As he waited for the number to be answered he inspected the padlock using a small Mag-Lite. The lock was substantial; it would take some coaxing to defeat.

When his handler didn’t answer, Taylor assumed he must be on another call, and allowed himself to be routed to a voice mailbox. At the request to leave a message, he said, “This is Dog. I’m hooking up the thumper now. Just going to take a peek to make sure it’s all in this box, then I’m leaving it up to you guys.” He closed the phone and pocketed it.

He attached the GPS tracker to the steel foundation by means of a magnet. The tracker would allow the special task force to follow the shipment to its destination. Maybe that team would grab the receiving parties when they took possession, or perhaps they’d follow the cargo to the end users-terrorists all over the world and homegrown militias with the resources to buy the latest devices of death and destruction. Taylor’s sole responsibility was to stay close to the colonel, to collect the names of people the man met with, then report to his handler. Locating the first shipment of high-tech weaponry was a godsend-icing on the cake.

Taylor had been undercover for eight long years, most of those spent building a faultless background and credentials for an operation like this. Eight years of being someone he wasn’t just so he could be of use to his government. He had spent the last three of those eight years getting close to one man and gaining his trust. Three years to find out Colonel Hunter Bryce, a decorated hero, could actually betray his country for money.

Flashlight between his teeth so he could see, Taylor used his lock picks to open the padlock. As soon as he opened the door, he saw that the container was empty. Well, empty except for a sheet of plastic, which had been laid out like carpeting over the rough plywood floor.

The sound of breathing alerted Taylor to the fact that someone was standing just off his left shoulder, at his seven o’clock.

“Lieutenant Taylor?” a familiar voice asked. “What are you doing here?”

Ice filled Taylor’s stomach. He turned, already deciding what his next words were going to be. He had not expected to run into Colonel Bryce, but nobody could think faster on his feet than Patrick Taylor. The colonel’s face was lit with ambient light from the halogen fixtures, so Taylor could see the quizzical smile the colonel was wearing. Taylor put on a confident smile and started. “Colonel Bryce, I know you’re-”

The razor-sharp blade of the survival knife Colonel Bryce had carried during his years in the field severed Taylor’s windpipe, his jugular vein and carotid artery. Taylor crumpled, landing hard on the floor of the empty container, the thud of his body echoing within the space.

Colonel Hunter Bryce used his gloved left hand to wipe the fine droplets of blood from his face. He cleaned his blade on Taylor’s pant leg before he replaced the weapon in its nylon scabbard.

The colonel retrieved the GPS tracker that Taylor had placed and put it in his victim’s open mouth. Then he grabbed Taylor’s collar and dragged him deeper into the steel container.

Before Bryce left, he stopped and spit on Taylor’s face. Every man the colonel killed won his mark of disdain. Then he walked off into the shadows, whistling softly.

Two hours later, the ATF and FBI agents followed the GPS signal to the locked container. They noticed the fresh blood leaking from the closed door, pooling on the ground, so they opened it.

The night watchman told the agents he’d heard someone whistling in the darkness out beyond the fence.

“I think it was what the seven dwarfs in Snow White sang,” he told them. “‘Whistle While You Work.’?”

Charlotte, North Carolina

Eleven months later

Twelve across.

Five-letter word for good-bye.

ADIEU

Lucy Dockery put the paper and pencil down on the bedside table. She liked solving crossword puzzles, but filling in words from clues was too easy. She loved better to build them from scratch, putting her thoughts and feelings into short clues. After she constructed a puzzle, she would file it away in her cabinet, unsolved. The inch-deep stack of pages was a journal of Lucy’s life for the past year.

From her earliest memories, her parents always seemed to be working the crossword puzzles in The New York Times, other newspapers and magazines. Much to their delight, Lucy had begun crafting her own puzzles at an early age to entertain them. Their praise helped her build her self-confidence to bridge a painful shyness.

Later she made crosswords for Walter. She designed them so that he had to first solve the puzzle and then play with the order of the words until they made up a coherent message. She remembered the one that worked out to say, Congratulations sir after many fun years of playing around with that wand comma a baby is growing inside Lucy. Eight down was in the sky with diamonds. Although Walter loved a challenge, Lucy felt no need to make them complicated or too difficult.

She still wrote puzzle-grams to Walter, but he was no longer able to solve them.

As a child, she’d been told that any time you say good-bye to somebody it could be the last good-bye. She had never really believed that something that happened in a fraction of a second could change everything in her life forever. You automatically tell a loved one to “be careful” until it becomes as meaningless as “see you later.” Walter would often reply with, “But dear, I was looking forward to being reckless.”

Lucy was bone-weary. Looking back, it seemed to her that her energy and enthusiasm for life had been boundless before the accident. And while Walter was beside her, she had felt invincible and filled to the brim with anticipation of a future-an ideal family nestled in a perfect world.

She knew other mothers of small children complained of tiredness due to washing, cooking, cleaning, and all the million things you had to do daily, but the weakness Lucy felt was different. Lucy didn’t have to cook, or clean, or even watch her own child if she didn’t feel like it. And when did she feel like it? How many times had she-while propped up in her bed, or lying on the couch-watched like a member of an audience while her son interacted with one of his sitters, her father, or the maid?

Lucy and her father shared the services of a woman who cleaned their houses three times a week. She had a list of competent babysitters to choose from. She subscribed to a gourmet service and once a week a chef prepared all of Lucy’s and her father’s main meals and put them into the refrigerator or the freezer, labeled.