Том Светерлич - The Gone World

Then the bomber is employed at CJIS now , I thought. I might have passed him in the hallways, might have interacted with him. I didn’t recognize the photographs of the suicide bomber or his name: Ryan Wrigley Torgersen . “What happened?”

“April nineteenth, 1998,” he said. “Torgersen reported to work like any ordinary day, breezed through security—he had a bomb sewn inside his body, nasty stuff—and he’d spent some time planting other bombs in the building. The explosions themselves caused some damage, but he’d rigged the fire-suppression system with sarin.”

Sarin. Even a whiff of sarin gas was lethal within seconds. Imagining my colleagues in those narrow corridors, sarin spraying from ceiling sprinklers.

“Why did this happen?” I asked. “What was the motive?”

“Antigovernment paranoia,” said Njoku. “Inspired by Timothy McVeigh, more than likely. Torgersen had purchased blueprints of the CJIS facility from a militia member active in West Virginia. He must have figured that destroying CJIS would cripple government law enforcement.”

Njoku refilled our cups with tea, placed two manila envelopes on the table between us, both sealed. One envelope was marked MURSULT, PATRICK. The other, MURSULT, MARIAN.

Whatever hopes I harbored that Marian Mursult would have been found alive, safe, in the years between her disappearance and now dissolved at the sight of her name. I tore open the seal on Marian’s file, slid out the thin sheaf of papers, and wept when I saw a photograph of partially buried bone fragments, a rush of mourning that had pent up in my heart ever since learning that the girl was missing. Marian’s remains had been found in the summer of 2004, buried in the vast wilderness of the Blackwater Gorge. A photograph of the site showed a nondescript patch of mud in a verdant forest. Another showed bones in the earth. Despite the recovered remains, no suspects other than her father had ever emerged and no criminal charges were ever filed. Njoku had collected a few newspaper clippings from the time, the papers already yellowed. Another run of the familiar picture of Marian from the Amber Alert. A few quotes from Brock—reaffirming an already established narrative that Patrick Mursult had murdered his wife and children before killing himself. A confusion, there—Patrick Mursult had been executed, clearly a homicide. I scanned the news items, the obituary. Only an aunt and an uncle from Ohio to feel the relief at Marian’s discovery, to bear the public grief—and then it was over, the Mursult family filed away.

“The file’s wrong,” I said. “Patrick Mursult was murdered. He didn’t kill himself.”

“The decision was made by NCIS and the FBI to control the narrative to the public, the media. A story of murder/suicide helped close up outside inquiries. We continued to investigate Mursult’s murder, but nothing turned up. The trail ran cold.”

“Hikers found her,” I said.

“A fluke. Nothing stays buried,” said Njoku. “When her remains were discovered, one of our guys reconvened with the FBI, but nothing was discovered to warrant reopening the case.”

“She’s still alive. Marian might be still alive where I come from,” I told him, setting aside Marian’s file as if the pages themselves were fragile.

I opened the file MURSULT, PATRICK.

A swift-boat gunner in Vietnam, the connection to Elric Fleece confirmed. Pictures of the two men together on their boat, Fleece lean, almost unrecognizable from the obese body we’d cut down from the tree made of bones, younger. The file contained photographs of the mirrored room, the sculptures. The pictures of Kennedy, the Challenger , the swift boat covered in chips of fingernails.

“What about this?” I asked him. “Anything with the fingernails?”

“They were all Elric Fleece’s,” said Njoku. “No break there.”

“Any guess as to what the ‘ship made of nails to carry the dead’ is?”

“It should be in the notes. A Viking myth, something about the end of the world.”

I found the annotation: Naglfar—a ship constructed from the fingernails of the dead, sails the end of the world to wage war against the gods .

Another set of photographs, copies of the twenty-four explicit Polaroids we had found in Fleece’s house, in the duffel bag in his spare room: Nicole Onyongo .

“This woman was identified?” I asked. “Who is this?”

“A day or two after Patrick Mursult’s body was discovered,” said Njoku, “Special Agent Philip Nestor tracked her down, using license-plate information the lodge kept. Questioned her, but she wasn’t involved in our homicides beyond a sexual relationship with Mursult. She’d been having an affair with Mursult for a number of years but was shocked and saddened by what he was wrapped up in, what happened to his family. I remember she took the news of his death very hard.”

Nicole Onyongo , a registered nurse at the Donnell House, hospice care associated with a hospital in Washington, Pennsylvania. Her address was up to date, the Castle Tower apartments not far from her place of work—notes about her life, her routine. It looked like she spent most every day shift at the Donnell House before heading to a nearby bar, the May’rz Inn, where she drank until walking home at night. One of the pictures in the file was a copy of the woman’s work ID—she was stunning, almost intimidating. Her eyes were a light shade of hazel. I compared her work ID to the sex pictures, the same rich color of skin. How did she strike up a relationship with a man like Patrick Mursult?

“Nestor interviewed her? I’ll want to see any paperwork he kept about this woman,” I said.

“We can track him down,” said Njoku. “He was never briefed about Deep Waters, and he left the FBI some years ago. I think he sells guns.”

“Nestor?” I asked. Not uncommon for FBI agents to make the jump into a second career, parlay their leadership skills into higher-paying office jobs, but selling firearms was a surprise. I’m not sure why—I’d only worked with Nestor for an afternoon, I didn’t know him, but I’d thought of him since then, an infatuation. Soft-spoken, a photographer. I wanted to hold him apart from the jocks and gun geeks I met on the job, but maybe I was imagining Nestor as something he wasn’t. Or maybe something had happened to him since I’d known him, something that had changed him. Strange paths lives can take. I thought of Nestor’s story of his father, doorways in the forest that led to other forests. “Yeah, I’ll track him down. See what he can tell me.”

“Anyone else you’ll want to talk with, anyone associated with the investigation?” he asked. “We can reach out on your behalf.”

“The woman, Onyongo,” I said, and I considered speaking with Brock—but Brock was dangerous to me here. He had been briefed about Deep Waters, he’d known about Deep Space then, and it was possible he had learned about Deep Time in the intervening years. We were trained to avoid contact with government or military personnel who might understand the mechanics of time travel, who might understand that our appearance in their world meant their world would cease once we left . I knew an agent once, had known her as a twenty-four-year-old woman when she launched and saw her a few months later, after she’d returned to terra firma, deteriorated with weariness and old age. She had been imprisoned in her IFT by someone from the Department of Homeland Security, was kept as an inmate at Holman supermax for over fifty years. We called what she endured becoming a “butterfly in a bell jar,” a present danger to agents working in Deep Time. If Brock knew about time travel, he might capture me here and hold me for as long as I could be kept alive. “Only Nicole Onyongo and Nestor,” I said. “At least at first. But I’ll make contact with both of them on my own. I don’t want to approach them as law enforcement. They might clam up.”