Knox
“Beware that, when fighting monsters, you yourself do not become a monster.”
―Barry Eisler
HE SHOULDN’T HAVE let her come along.
He doesn’t need the distraction.
For the majority of the drive into downtown DC, he again uses music as an excuse for them not to talk. But at some point, she reaches over and turns it down. “What was it like being a SEAL?”
He glances at her, expecting to see casual interest on her face, but she is looking at him with serious eyes, and he resists the urge to be sarcastic. He considers the question and then says, “Every day is another opportunity to probe your weak points. SEAL candidates undergo six months of training by professionals whose mission is to find any weakness that might make you inferior when it comes to serving your country at the highest imaginable levels. They basically try to throw more challenges at you in six months than they believe a normal human being can handle.”
“But you handled it?”
He shrugs. “Sometimes, that still surprises me. My class started with one hundred and forty-eight men. After six weeks, we were down to thirty-seven.”
“And I’m assuming those are some of the country’s most qualified young guys?”
“The competition is stiff.”
“How did you survive it?”
He’s quiet for a few moments, and then, “There have been accounts of soldiers who were shot multiple times, but weren’t aware of it until the fight was over and the danger had passed. That’s the power the brain has to adapt. You can train the brain to prepare for survival. The military calls it battle-proofing. Using the mind to visualize scenes of survival to produce psychological strength. It’s sort of like meditation, I guess. Developing the ability to see in your mind a scene that you might have to live through. Like a firefight. You think of all the details you imagine you would experience. The sound of the gunfire. The smell of a nearby explosion. The screams of frightened women and children. The idea is that if the brain imagines something in extreme detail, it’s as if you’ve lived through the experience, and if you have something similar happen to you, your brain has already conditioned itself to surviving it. So, during some of our make-or-break exercises, like riding out a night in shark-infested ocean waters, I had already lived through that night in my mind. I would lie in my bunk, imagining a shark brushing past my leg while I barely managed to stay afloat. I felt my heart thudding in my chest, prayed the shark wouldn’t feel the pulse of fear. I made my brain accept that the fact that I would not move any more than I had to, to stay afloat. I wouldn’t try to swim away or shove the shark away from me.”
Emory studies him, shaking her head a little. “That’s the opposite of what most of us humans do. We wait for the lightning bolt to strike before we understand what our response will be. So we are reliant on our most basic instincts. Fear, the irresistible urge to flee the danger rather than face it.”
He nods, left hand on the steering wheel, his right thumb digging into the scar on his thigh where a bullet had once been lodged. “And you have to create a trigger.”
“What kind of trigger?”
“Your ultimate reason for living. The thing you go to when giving up seems like a good option.”
“What was yours?”
“In training, it was my parents. I knew how proud of me they would be if I made it as a SEAL. I would picture the look on my dad’s face if I could tell him that I’d made it. I wanted them to be proud of me like that. And then later, when I actually got on a SEAL team and had to fight for my own life and the lives of my team, my trigger was the determination that we would all return home alive. I would envision each one of us greeting our families at the airport. I made myself see their smiles and happiness instead of flag-draped coffins and grief.”
She nods once, looking out her window. “I wonder if Mia is envisioning coming home. Living for the moment when I open the door, and there she stands. When she can scoop Pounce up in her arms and hug him tight. What if she gives up? What if she can’t imagine ever coming home?”
Tears break in her voice, and he looks across at her, wishing for a moment that he hadn’t given her such a comparison to make. “If she’s anything like you,” he says quietly, “she’s mentally tough.”
Emory wipes a hand across her eyes, staring through the windshield. “I don’t feel very mentally tough right now.”
“Think about the things you’ve taught her, though, just by being who you are. How many eighteen-year-olds could take over the role of parent to an eight-year-old? She’s absorbed strength with you as a role model.”
“You’re kind,” she says in a barely audible voice.
“That’s not something I often get accused of.”
“What do you get accused of?” she asks, looking at him now.
“Getting the job done. Being efficient. Knowing what the end goal is. But kindness isn’t usually necessary to get those things done.”
“You care about how I feel right now. That’s kind.”
He shifts in his seat, switches hands on the steering wheel. Continuing to declare the label as ill-fitting seems like drawing attention to something he’d rather not draw attention to, so he chooses silence as the best option.
“What was the hardest training mission? The one you thought you might not endure?”
“Hell week and staying awake for five days straight. I always took sleep for granted. I could grab three or four hours and be fine if I had an exam in college or stayed out half the night partying and had to get up for class the next morning. But you go that long without any, and reality takes on a new meaning. You’re seeing stoplights in the middle of the ocean. Think you see a whale float by.”
“Hallucinations?”
“Yeah. Your buddy next to you is seeing things too, so you resist the urge to feel like you’re going crazy.”
“How did you stay awake? Caffeine?”
“No. That stopped working on day two. Moving was the biggest thing. If you stood still, you would fall asleep instantly. Moving was the only thing that kept you awake.”
“Why did they make you stay awake so long?”
“To make sure you can do it in a war zone. Seventy-two hours awake on a mission happens. You can’t stop and sleep. You’ve got to be able to complete what you’re there to do.”
“Working as a detective must seem simple compared to that.”
“Both jobs require you to deal with war. It’s dressed up a little differently, but some of the things I’ve seen in domestic situations have been a lot harder to process than what I saw over there.”
“How so?”
“In a war, you have a declared enemy, and, once identified, your job is to take them out. Here, when you get a call to a house where a husband has just shot and killed his wife and children, and he’s sitting in his living room holding the gun he used, you don’t get to finish the job and take out the enemy who just wiped out an entire family. You have to cuff him with restraint, read him his rights, and escort him to the legal system that might or might not fully hold him accountable.”
“That’s hard for you,” she says in a voice that tells him she doesn’t need him to agree. “Do you believe in vigilante justice?”
“The correct answer is no,” he says.
“You don’t believe there’s ever any justification in a person taking the law into his own hands?”
“There shouldn’t be.”
“You think our legal system works perfectly and the guilty are always punished?”
“No.”
She considers this for a moment. “I once read about a mother who worked late shifts as a policewoman. She let her daughter sleep over at her best friend’s house when she had to work nights. When her daughter was twelve, she told her mother that the husband had molested her several times when she stayed there. The mother reported this to the police, but didn’t get what she thought was a fast-enough response. She thought other children might be in danger. So she abducted the man and drove him to a wooded area where she made him take off his clothes and tell the truth about what he’d done. After he got cold enough, he confessed, and she drove him back to the police station so that he could confess there also. He was arrested for rape, but the mother was also arrested for kidnapping with intent to commit murder. She was facing five years in prison but ended up getting probation. He went to prison for four years. Do you think she should have gone to prison?”
“No,” he says instantly.
“Me either.”
“So we’re both of the vigilante mindset, I guess,” he says.
“I don’t know that I want the label, but I do know that the world doesn’t always work as it should. I do know that if I have the opportunity to punish whoever took my sister from me, I won’t take it lightly.”
He glances at her, sees the set of her jaw and realizes she might be even tougher than he’s given her credit for.
Their exit comes up off the Capital Beltway, and he lets off the gas, rolling to a stop at the light, then pulling out behind the traffic. “We’re almost there. Not sure it’s a good idea for you to get out.”
“I’d rather go with you than wait in the Jeep.”
“Okay, but let me do the talking. I don’t want to set off any unnecessary alarm bells.”
“You’re in charge,” she says. “My lips are sealed.”
He glances at her, notices the smile, and then comes the unsummoned thought that they are indeed nice lips.