Page 16 of Freedom Fighters
The carousel clanked and groaned as it started up. Scattered cheers sounded from the passengers waiting around it.
Olivia sighed and moved in the direction Jerry indicated.
Nick moved up alongside. “It’ll save on cab fare,” he said philosophically, making her smile.
Yet her thoughts were runningahead to the meeting with her father and her smile faded quickly.
* * * * *
Carmen didn’t know what prompted her to do it. After breakfast she sat back on her sleeping bag and pulled out the laptop once more.
Garrett was nowhere to be seen. She figured he was sleeping off the mescal. He had been most of the way through the bottle. She had no doubt he finished it after she had left. That wasa lot of alcohol, especially Vistarian mescal. He wouldn’t be up until noon. That left her free and clear for a few hours.
Remembering the way Garrett had sneaked up on her the last time she had used the laptop, Carmen put her back against the wall and angled herself so she could see both directions of approach just by looking over the top edge of the screen.
Then she went surfing. The firstthing she did was type Garrett’s full name into Google and hit ‘enter’.
There were a lot of results for Garrett Blackburn that led to LinkedIn, YouTube, Facebook and the other social networks. She couldn’t imagine Garrett hanging out on any of them. He just wasn’t that sort of human.
On the next page there were half a dozen entries linking to Harvard Medical School. They were dated around thetime Garrett would have completed his medical degree. Even if he had gone straight into pre-med out of high school, then he was older than she had first thought. She clicked on one of the links. It was a simple listing of med students for that year. She shut down the tab and clicked back to Google.
On the third page, she came across an entry that didn’t seem to be related to Garrett at all. Itwas from the EnglishTimesnewspaper. The headline was bleak. “Bodies of Mother and Daughter Found Outside Baghdad.”
Her heart squeezed, as she moused down to the link and clicked on it.
The news article was short, although she didn’t need any more detail. There was enough in the three paragraphs to tell the whole story.
An American doctor working for the WHO, Garrett Edward Blackburn, hadbeen pulled from his home in the middle of the night by Iraqi soldiers, who claimed he was distributing black market drugs and food to locals. They took his wife and daughter, too.
While attempting to make Garrett talk, the soldiers had killed his family.
In front of him.
Garrett was turned loose three days later. He stumbled into the American Embassy, his feet and body raw from the caningand clubbing he had suffered. That had been four weeks before the bodies of his wife and daughter had been found outside Baghdad.
The article summarized the horror in neat Times Roman and concluded that the bodies were being flown back to the United States.
“Who are you talking to now?” Garrett asked.
Carmen barely held in her yelp of surprise. She dropped the lid on the laptop. “I’m just clearingthe cache and stuff. I forgot to do it last time.”
Garrett looked none the worse for his dive into the bottle last night. His gray eyes narrowed and he bent and snatched the laptop from her, sliding it out from under her hands. She couldn’t try to grab it back. That would make her look as guilty as she was.
She got to her feet, knowing she could do nothing to halt this. She felt beyond guiltynow. Her gut churned and her heart raced sickly. It didn’t help that she couldn’t get the image out of her mind of Garrett lying bloodied and beaten on some concrete floor somewhere, watching while his daughter…
She pushed the image away, as Garrett opened the laptop and waited for the image to reform on the screen.
His face darkened. “How dare you,” he breathed. Only, there wasn’t just angerthere. Pain showed in his eyes.
“I’m sorry,” Carmen said. “I know that doesn’t excuse it, but I am. I had no idea—”
“For a reason!” he shouted. “I didn’t fucking tell you,that’swhy you didn’t know!”
Heads turned.
Carmen held up her hand and wasn’t surprised to see it shake. “I don’t know anything about you at all. Nothing. I wanted to know more about the man who gives the orders around here.”
“No one else wants to know,” he pointed out. “Everyone except you is content to mind their own business.”
