End Times
A PERFECT HATRED: END TIMES
Book One
P. A. Duncan
Unexpected Paths
Copyright ©2018 P. A. Duncan, Phyllis A. Duncan
Published by Unexpected Paths
www.unexpectedpaths.com
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form, with the exception of brief excerpts for the purpose of review. To use excerpts for purposes other than a review, please contact the author at phyllisduncan52@gmail.com
to obtain written permission.
Thank you for respecting authors’ rights.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, and some locations and incidents are products of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual events, places, or persons, public figures notwithstanding, is coincidence.
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Edited by: Sylvan Echo Editing
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ISBN: 1976272734
ISBN-13: 978-1976272738
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Dedication
To those who work behind the scenes for justice
and the truth; in other words, Robert Mueller.
Epigraph
The glory of justice and the majesty of law are created not just by the Constitution - nor by the courts - nor by the officers of the law - nor by the lawyers - but by the men and women who constitute our society - who are the protectors of the law as they are themselves protected by the law.”
Robert F. Kennedy
Author’s Note
With the exception of the prologue, this work of fiction takes place in 1993. The events in Bosnia referred to on numerous occasions occur in my novella, The Yellow Scarf.
Allow me to add, End Times is book one of a four-book, serial series entitled, A Perfect Hatred. This means the books do not stand alone and have to be read in sequence. End Times opens threads and introduces characters for the entire series. No, this isn’t a clever ploy to get you to buy more books (but if you do, I won’t argue). Rather, this was a story I couldn’t contain in a single book.
Thank you for reading,
Contents
Author’s Note
Prologue
I. America’s Holocaust
1. The Life of a Suburban Spy
2. Complicated Social Situations
3. Unusual Professions
4. Cowboys and Red Flags
5. Commitment Issues
6. Obligations
7. Power of the People
8. An Explosive Mix
9. Neutrality
10. Sinful Messiah
11. Sweat, Cordite, and Blood
12. Prospects
13. Recruiting
14. Credible Opinions
15. Judgements
16. Bad Moon Rising
17. PrimItives
18. Bad Vibes and Bad Moves
19. Outlaw
20. Purpose and Meaning
21. Back Story
22. On Edge
23. Need to Know
24. Show Time
25. Respect for the Dead
26. Ashes, Ashes, We All Fall Down
27. Knowledge and Understanding
II. Profiling
28. A Lesson in Tradecraft
29. Unavoidably Detained
30. Damning Conclusions
31. Plausible Deniability
32. All American Boy
33. Crossing Lines
34. The Model Soldier
35. A Little Too Rambo
36. Opium of the People
37. Weaknesses
38. Secrets
39. Talking Dirty
40. Legions of the Already Dead
41. Freelancing
42. Fantasy and Reality
43. Death Machine
44. Mercenaries
45. Dark and Dangerous Roads
46. Survivors
47. First Meetings
48. Words into Deeds
49. Unintended Consequences
50. Getting Along
51. Betrayal
52. The Right Path
53. Useless
54. Paternalistic Protectiveness
55. Hope and Possibility
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Also by P. A. Duncan
Prologue
CONFESSIONS
June 11, 2001
Dwarfed by its large lawn, the ranch-style house stood out in the overcast night. A tiny slit of light emerged between curtains pulled across the front picture window and lit, quite by accident, the empty flagpole, its white paint applied that spring gleaming.
Her car situated well away from the house, a woman, dressed in black, walked in the dark so familiar to her to the front door, pausing to make certain no following footsteps sounded. She gave the wooden door the barest of taps.
The door opened at once, and she realized the man who answered must have waited at the threshold for her knock. He opened the door a sliver, focusing her attention on the haggard lines of his face. His tousled, salt-and-pepper hair made him look as if she’d roused him from sleep. He looked much older than the late fifties she knew him to be. When he recognized her, his eyes shifted away, but he opened the door wide enough for her to slip inside without leaving a lingering silhouette in the rectangle of light.
Inside, she took a quick look around. No threats. No danger. The house had changed little from the last time she’d seen it. The family picture wall still held photos of all the man’s children, two of his son the largest: a formal, high school graduation shot and an Army induction portrait. In spite of everything, he’d kept those pictures in full view.
“Can I get you something?” he asked.
She shook her head.
His watery, blue eyes narrowed at her. “Are you all right?” he asked, the tone that of a concerned father.
“I’m fine.” She hoped she hadn’t snapped at him.
He smiled at her and motioned to the couch. “Sit down. You look worn out.”
She sat on the sofa, where, no doubt, this man and his son had sat thousands of times. Hoping for some sense of the younger man’s essence, she slid her hand along a cushion, fingers skimming the surface, but she felt nothing more than the weave of the upholstery. Whatever energy had made the son a human being had already exited this earth.
The image of a cold, stark white room pressed in on her, threatening to remove her from this place of relative comfort. She grounded herself in reality by clutching the large envelope she’d brought with her.
The older man sat beside her, on the edge of the seat cushion, and leaned forward, elbows braced on knees, a familiar posture. She’d seen his son do that more than once.
“I didn’t watch the news or listen to the radio today,” he said. “My neighbors knew to leave me alone.” A series of hard swallows, and he asked, “Was it quick? Did he suffer?”
“Four minutes perhaps, from start to finish.” She didn’t answer his second question, but he didn’t seem to notice.
“And you stayed with him after?” He pushed the words out, perhaps evincing they were as painful to say as to keep inside.
“Yes.”
“They didn’t cut him up, did they? I know they said they wouldn’t, but everyone hated him so much…”
Those words were harder to get out, a deeper struggle, ending with a catch in his throat. She laid a hand on his shoulder. Such a gesture of compassion was unusual for her, and she withdrew her hand almost too soon for him to realize she’d touched him.
“No, it was an external examination to assure there’d been no abuse while he was in prison,” she answered.
“Is he…”
Several more bobs of his Adam’s apple and he started again. “Did he look okay?”
This time the full image of his thin, yellowed body came to her, the blue lips, staring sunken eyes, and she couldn’t will it away.
“He looked fine,” she lied.
She stood in a cold place where the juxtaposition of light and steel made every angle a sharpened scalpel. Light flashed as the coroner’s assistant took picture after picture of the naked body. The coroner herself droned into a hidden tape recorder every blemish and childhood scar, height and weight, detailed physical descriptions of the dead man’s anatomy.
All the weeks and months of contact with him, all the brief near-intimacies shared, and she’d never seen him without his clothes until he lay dead before her, a slab of so much flaccid meat on an aluminum table.
Certainly not her first dead body. She’d seen plenty before and since, some dead by her hand, but for this one, she’d almost retreated to a corner of the room to vomit.
The echo of that nausea returned her to the house. The older man still stared at the floor. He hadn’t noticed her detachment.
One day, she knew, this father would reach the point where he’d want to know how his son died, all the excruciating, intricate details supplied in print, audio, and video by the witnesses to the execution. He would know then she’d lied, and all she could hope for was his understanding: A father should be spared the intimate details of his son’s forced death.
“You have the ashes?” he asked, a step above a whisper.
“Yes.”
“And you know where he wants…wanted them scattered?”
“Yes.”
“He doesn’t…didn’t want me to know?”
“No. I’m sorry. He said he knew it might give you comfort, but he didn’t want his grave to be a shrine, nor did he want you hurt if someone were to desecrate it.”
The man squeezed his eyes shut and nodded.
“I will tell you it’s a place meaningful to him, but it’s not Killeen or Kansas City.”
He looked at her, eyes shiny with tears. “You know, people said he would do that, but I knew he wouldn’t. That wasn’t him.” The man rubbed his eyes with the forefinger and thumb of his right hand. He looked again at her. This time the gleam in his eyes was defiance. “That one thing he did was cold-blooded, but that wasn’t him, not really. That’s what I tried to say at his trial, but I couldn’t get it across. I wanted them to look at the whole of his life… Not just the end.”
“I know.”
The man nodded, showed her what might be gratitude, and stared once more at the floor. “I know you understand,” he murmured. “I’m glad you were with him. I know it must have been hard for you, but I’m glad he had your face to look at before he died, someone he knew cared for him, despite…”
The voice finally broke completely, but he shed no tears.
“I don’t understand who you are. I mean, I know you’re not who you said you were, and you had something to do with trying to stop him, but you cared for him. You weren’t like the people who wanted him dead. To them, he was a monster. To you, he was a man.”
She said nothing. To give into his emotion would bring hers to the surface, and the last thing she wanted was for this man to think he needed to comfort her. He was the man with the dead son.
“I have some things to tell you,” she said. “Nothing graphic. Things I know would be meaningful to you.”
She waited for his consent. He nodded, eyes still on the floor.
“I know this sounds overly bureaucratic,” she began, “but the official death certificate had a block for occupation, and the coroner asked what she should enter there. Soldier. I told her soldier.”
The man’s gaze went to the photo of his son in uniform, a smile gracing his face, making him seem more relaxed.
“That was the only job he had he truly was meant for,” he said. “Soldier. That’s good. He would like that. They took his medals from his records…” He looked at her again, frowning now. “You know, I got a letter from someone in the Army, asking me if I had them and if I did, would I return them for destruction?”
“What did you do?”
“I tore the damned thing up.”
Good for you, she thought.
“But what you did, it’s on an official piece of paper now. One day people will know there was a part of him that was good and decent.”
She’d let him think “soldier” in the obvious, military sense and not how his son thought of himself: a soldier of a misguided revolution. That was her truth to keep.
“The other thing is, he asked to see a priest,” she said.
The man’s smile returned, and this time it was full of hope. “A Catholic priest?”
“Yes.”
“Did he confess?”
“The priest told me your son received the anointing of the sick in his last rites.”
The man nodded as though confirming something to himself. “He was sorry. I know he was sorry for the people who died. If he asked for a priest, he acknowledged his sins. God has forgiven him, and that’s all that matters.”
Such certainty for a man of faith. For a moment she wished she could believe, but she’d lost her faith long ago. Nothing in the past day offered any basis for renewing it.
She handed him the envelope. “This is something he asked me to give you. Most of his personal possessions he gave to other death row inmates, but these are some things he didn’t want to give away.”
The man opened the envelope and spilled its contents into his hand. Family photos, which brought tears to his eyes. One photo, however, was of her and the man’s son. She never allowed her picture to be taken, but when the son had asked for a picture of her, she’d had this one taken by a guard. She’d sent a printed copy later.
They sat side-by-side in the secure room where they’d always had their visits. She’d cropped the photo so the inmate number stenciled on the pocket of his shirt and his prison identification card couldn’t be seen. Their heads had leaned toward each other but hadn’t touched. That wasn’t allowed. His smile was broad and bright, where hers was almost demure. Like tonight, she’d dressed all in black. He wore the khaki prison outfit, and they posed a contrast in dark and light and maybe gradations of evil.
Each death row inmate could have only five, unframed photos, and when the warden had given her the envelope, she’d examined them all. On the back of the picture of the two of them, the inmate had written, “Siobhan and me, 2000.” A small heart dotted the “i” in Siobhan.
The father flipped over that photo and saw the message. He held the picture toward her.
“You should have this one.”
She almost didn’t take it because the smiling image was such a contrast to her last view of him. She wouldn’t, however, dismiss this man’s gesture. Murmuring a thank you, she hid the photo in her jacket pocket.
“Is there anything you need?” she asked and thought she sounded crass and unfeeling. “Any security?”
“No, no. This is a good neighborhood. Folks’ll look out for me. The town police chief already told me his guys would keep the media away for a few days.”
“If you change your mind, you can reach me at the number I gave you before, but I’ll understand if you don’t want to hear from me again.”
“I hold nothing against you. I know you tried to stop him, and you couldn’t.”
Were she an honest person, she’d tell him the truth about his son, but she held the words in and took the father’s silence as an invitation to leave.
Once she got her car moving, it went to the nearby Catholic church almost as if on its own, but when she was a child, the interior of a church, with its quiet and austere aura, comforted her.
She went inside, where it was warm, the air stifling. Candles flickered near the font of Holy Water. She dipped her fingers in the water and crossed herself. Old habits died hard.
Superstitious nonsense.
She picked a pew about h
alfway up the center aisle and sat, after genuflecting and crossing herself again. Unlike the perverse Christian Identity places of worship she’d learned too much about, this church’s altarpiece wasn’t a tortured Christ, but it was one without blood, except for precisely placed drops on his forehead, hands, feet, and side. His uplifted face shone with rapture.
Christ had been thirty-three when he was crucified, the same age as the man executed almost twenty-four hours ago.
That’s a fine thing, she thought, in a church after so long and thinking blasphemous thoughts about Jesus and a domestic terrorist.
She heard measured footsteps, and, even though she could reasonably assume the priest approached, in reflex her hand slipped behind her back, beneath her jacket. Her fist closed on the butt of her familiar gun.