Interlude 4 Gwen, Under Attack #6
In 2010 they had sent King Sorrow to get a lawyer in the Congo with ties to a terrorist outfit called the Nyatura Militia.
The attorney served militia leaders in a legal and business capacity, ensuring money flowed in to arm and train their child soldiers.
Colin had intelligence that suggested his renumeration included nights with fresh twelve-year-old recruits.
That was all Donna needed to hear, never mind stories of villages burned or Hutus buried alive in mass graves.
Gwen had agreed easily enough herself after considering Colin’s bullet points, spreadsheet, and biographical file, which included intercepted emails and photos of the lawyer lunching with war criminals.
But three pages into her Google search results, Gwen saw the lawyer mentioned in quite a different capacity. He had also represented
an international charity looking to expose and end child labor. They had gone after half a dozen cobalt mines in the west of Congo, where children as young as eight often worked
ten-hour shifts in the hole. Several had died there, buried by collapses in caverns that skirted basic safety practices. What
troubled her was the list of tech companies that had used Congolese cobalt in their devices: Apple, Tesla . . . and Dragontooth,
a subsidiary of Colin Wren’s very own Dragonware.
“Why’s this lawyer guy care about children working in cobalt mines?” Gwen asked Arthur. “He defends men who employ child soldiers
for genocide. And he assaults the kids.”
“According to Colin’s intercepted intelligence,” Arthur said.
She didn’t like the way he said that, didn’t like the suggestion beneath Arthur’s blasé tone. He could be a goddamn smug conversational
partner for a dead man.
Gwen said, “Colin has access to intelligence gathered by the State Department, the CIA, all those guys. They give him reports . . .
but he also sees the stuff that isn’t in their reports. They use his software. He reads their emails. He sees their text messages. Satellite images. Social media
profiles. He sees it all.”
“He sees it. You don’t.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“So Colin shows you an email he says was written by a CIA field agent in Congo. This field agent has sources that swear the lawyer takes his payment in children. But do we know—do we know for sure—that Colin didn’t write that email himself?
How would you know? All of Colin’s sources are filtered through Colin himself. ”
“He wouldn’t do that,” she said—actually said it out loud, whispering it to herself in the library.
“Hey, girl, are you okay?” Allison Shiner asked, and Gwen blinked and looked up. Her friend of twenty-five years stood on
the other side of the table, holding a stack of books. At some point dusk had crept over the campus, and now the brightest
source of light was the lamp with the emerald shade, on the table between them.
“Yes? Yes,” Gwen said, her voice uncommonly small. “What are you doing here?”
“Had a study session with my seniors. You don’t look okay,” Allie said. “You look like you just saw a ghost.”
Arthur Oakes shook his head. “Can’t get anything by her.”
6.
On the second day of the new year, Gwen parked her daddy’s old pickup in the drive of The Briars. The front door opened before
she got to it, Colin standing in the entrance in one of his white waffle-knits and his concrete-colored skinny jeans. He smiled
as if she had arrived for a holiday party: good Scotch, little sausages on toothpicks, and Trivial Pursuit. But it wasn’t
a party. It was time to pick someone to die.
Allie and Donna were already there. Gwen sat down beside them, at the old card table, Colin behind it, prepared to symbolically
deal them a new hand. The empty stools, where Van and Arthur belonged, seemed to take up far more space than the occupied
ones. Odd to sit that way, Gwen thought, the three girls lumped together over to one side, to leave room for their dead.
Allie, who had always been thin, looked half-starved.
Her sweater hung off bony shoulders. She had the sort of frail, waifish look that had made Kate Moss one of the most famous models in the world, and Allie was no less stunning.
The last person Gwen had met who had looked so wasted, though, was an oxycodone addict who OD’d.
He didn’t make it to the hospital. There was a reason they called it heroin chic.
The booze wasn’t helping, and Allie always drank when she was with Donna. Donna insisted on it. It was morning, but there
was already only a splash of Scotch left in Allie’s glass.
While Allie had become gaunt, Donna had coarsened. She still had a hell of a figure and she dressed well, emerald silk blouse
falling off one shoulder to show the nice line of her collarbone. But her face had thickened, and her features were flushed
and blunt in a way that made Gwen think of a man in a bar, sick of waiting for the bartender to refill his drink and about
to make some ugly noise.
Gwen had read somewhere that at fifty you had the face you finally deserved. Was that Orwell? They were all creeping up on
fifty and could no longer disguise who they were or what they had made of themselves.
It’s not age, Gwen thought. This is what killing does to you. You harden to it, like Donna, and it shows in a hard and unkind face, the face of someone
who steps over a beggar without a glance. Or you spend your life trying to find an escape from it, and you wind up with the
bright scared eyes of a junkie, the shaky hands of an addict.
And what about you, Gwen? What has nearly thirty years of this done to you?
Only Colin seemed unchanged, unlined, unworn. He might still have been twenty. He had the pink, scrubbed, healthy look of
a college athlete, captain of the swim team maybe.
She glanced at him and wondered if he had been smiling when he sank the knife into Arthur’s kidneys. She had to look away.
He mustn’t know she was afraid of him now. He mustn’t guess what was in her mind.
He loved Arthur, she thought. You really think he could do that to him? But of course he could kill him. When it came to murder, they all had plenty of practice.
Colin gave them each a folder. Gwen dreaded opening it. Instead, she looked idly around the room. She tried not to let her
gaze rest on the locked cabinet for too long.
“Good luck with the new semester, college kid,” Donna said. She raised her glass in a toast. “Try and get some studying done
in between the all-night raves.”
“I went to a rave just a couple months ago,” Gwen said.
Donna blinked. “No shit?”
“Yeah, I went in the ambulance. A kid had a convulsion after he popped some molly laced with fentanyl.”
Allie finished her Scotch and Donna reached for the bottle to pour her a refill. Allie shook her head. “No more, please.”
“Drink it,” Donna said, and spilled another finger in her glass. “You know you can’t do this sober.”
“You don’t have to drink it,” Gwen said.
“She does and she will.”
“It’s all right, Gwen. I really did want another glass.”
Gwen turned her face away from both of them.
“I know things didn’t work out with you and Arthur,” Colin said. “But I’m sure it would’ve made him happy to know you went
to Rackham and were just as brilliant as he always thought you could be.”
“She’s never had a single semester when she hasn’t been on the dean’s list,” Allie piped up suddenly.
“Funny,” Donna said, “Van never had a single semester when he wasn’t on academic probation.” Her breath caught and she looked
at one of the empty stools. “I used to hassle him about it, but he knew better than I did. Why kill himself to make A’s? He
was going to be dead in ten years anyway. Did you know mayflies are born without mouths? No point in eating. They die too
quickly.” She drained the rest of her own Scotch.
“He was a good writer,” Allie said. “A fun writer. His book has been reprinted forty times. Robin suggested maybe I could write an afterword for the twenty-fifth-anniversary edition—”
“Have you talked to Robin lately?” Gwen asked.
Allie opened her mouth, but Donna spoke first. “Allie had to tell Robin to stop bothering her. Well. I told her she needed
to draw a line, and if she couldn’t do it, I would. It was getting weird, Robin always asking about her love life, her drinking,
prying at things, telling her we don’t have a healthy friendship.”
“I’m sure Robin wasn’t trying to say that,” Gwen said, although, in fact, she was sure Robin had been trying to tell Allie
exactly that.
And why hadn’t Robin told Allie about the troll? For the same reason Gwen hadn’t told her. Allie couldn’t keep anything from
Donna, and once Donna knew, Colin would know too. If he had murdered Arthur, Gwen only had one edge: Colin’s certainty that
he had got away with it. If he found out what she knew, she was doomed. Robin too, probably.
“Are you in touch with Robin?” Colin asked, gazing at Gwen with bright, amused eyes. He looked like he had a very clever joke to tell.
Gwen said, “We talk now and then.”
“What about?”
“Arthur.”
“Yes,” Colin said, nodding. “It broke her heart when he was finally declared dead. But it was time. We all needed to move
on.”
“Was that what you needed?” Gwen asked. “You needed him to be dead so you could move on?”
“Sorry, say again?”
“Was it a relief for you—when he was declared dead?”
“I was surprised at how much it lightened my heart. I didn’t know that a part of me was still holding on to him. And I was
glad for you. Because you finally had the money to go to school. Honestly, I always thought it was going to be you and him
forever.”
“It is you and me forever,” Arthur said to her, there on the stool that had always been his. “Even when you find someone else. I’ll
be cheering you on.”
No one else, she promised herself.