The Resurrection Pact (Winston Casey Chronicles Book 1) Read online

  Jean-Paul didn't seem too concerned. "It is not something I control so I assure you I do not know."

  "This is starting to feel very Patrick McGoohan-y, Jean-Paul."

  "What, sir?"

  "Never mind. Another mystery to solve I guess."

  "Quite, Mr. Casey. Now, back to your interests: perhaps getting out in the air might be of interest? The Village is hosting an all-night festival celebrating the music of the 1990s. I understand a number of American musical acts will be playing for your entertainment."

  "Sounds ghastly like a high school reunion. And what about the wedding tomorrow morning at sunrise?"

  Jean-Paul froze a moment under his controlled expression before saying "Since the wedding was cancelled, there are no scheduled events for this party."

  "Cancelled?"

  "Yes, sir. This morning the bride announced the ceremony has been indefinitely delayed. Nadeim did not tell you?"

  I shook my head. "You know; she might have mentioned it. I wasn't feeling too well this morning."

  "I see, sir."

  Another horrifying thought tickled the back of my brain. "I must ask you a very important question, J.P. Do Lucy and Blake know I’m here?"

  Jean-Paul smiled. "As I said, sir. We have very high standards when protecting the privacy of our guests."

  ~

  One last lap through the office produced nothing so I decided to look for more pain killers and a beer. The porch chair looked like a great place to waste an entire day.

  In the kitchen cabinet, I found it.

  Why the kitchen cabinet, I don't know.

  The metal briefcase was the only object in the cabinet above the coffeemaker. It looked out of place from everything else and, on closer inspection, I realized it was a laptop case that took a few trips down long ride down a dirt road with scraped and pitted black metal with thick Teflon corners. I had seen them on the job, but never in such beaten condition. The same crossed pistol design found on the coffee mug, this one worn and faded from abuse, was applied to the top of the case. It was the out of place item we found in every room – the trap or treasure, perhaps both. At some level I knew Parker left it there for me for a reason and that reason likely had to do with this stupid adventure he set up. Unfortunately, being dead he wasn’t there to unlock the case.

  The gold tumbler lock under the black handle was set to four zeroes.

  "Okay, Parker. You've been real fucking quiet all morning. Want to help me out a little here?"

  A shadow blocked some of the sunlight pouring in the front window. I could smell the horrible plastic and meat smoke again.

  "You sure you want to risk talking to me on camera?"

  I kept looking at the laptop case. "Look, I know you're not real."

  "Not real?"

  "Well, you're not Parker. You know just as much as I know which is why you're useless here. Unless you want to prove otherwise."

  After a moment, Parker replied. "I have nothing to prove to you. I thought the point of this was for you to prove something. This one isn't too hard to solve on your own."

  "Asshole."

  Parker didn’t answer. But I felt him all around me, like his spirit enveloped the entire bungalow.

  The armored laptop case had a heavy, four-digit tumbler lock under the handle. That had to be why Park sent me a code number and put the case in such an obvious place.

  "Park wouldn’t make things unintentionally difficult for me," I said to myself. "But there’s something or someone he wants to keep out of our communications."

  I spun the lock tumblers to match the code given me on the phone. As I opened the briefcase a fine, cream-colored powder rose from the seam like a puff of baby powder, collecting on the countertop. I remembered Parker talking about the fine sand hanging in the air everywhere in Iraq and how it managed to get into everything, even the tight seam of a sealed case. The interior was clean and the case opened easily as did the black laptop inside. It powered up automatically.

  "See," Parker groaned. "You did it without my help."

  The Administrator Login screen appeared. The same four-digit password opened the account. This was more surprising than guessing the tumbler.

  A moment later, the image of a dozen men and women standing in front of a M2A3 Infantry Fighting Vehicle filled the desktop background. They all wore desert fatigues with the M.P. brassard around their forearms, combat helmets and black sunglasses. The desktop icons were arranged carefully around the photo so not to cover any of the soldiers.

  Lieutenant Parker stood in the center, surrounded by his command. They all looked more intimidating than the light tank they stood in front of. Park’s pose seemed to call attention to the pain on the track armor that read "TWILIGHT: 2012"

  Those were his troops; his extended family.

  Park used to say "Between the dust and heaven we have the family we’re given and the one we earn." Looking at the men and women in the ruddy waste of Afghanistan under a gorgeous blue sky, they represented the one he earned.

  I looked over his computer. The OS predated Windows 8 so all the important shortcuts were on the Desktop. The SATCOM icon looked like the crossed pistols and likely linked his computer to someone in the Army, so I avoided using that.

  Microsoft Office.

  A version of The Sims.

  A folder full of strategy games.

  Another folder with document files marked only by number. A folder with video clips. These were also numbered in sequence except one named "8972.MP4"

  I closed it up and returned to the Desktop. At the bottom, right corner, almost hidden in the photo, was an icon marked AETERNUS ONLINE similar to the books on the shelf written by the author who gave Park his Wyatt Earp’s badge.

  I double-clicked the icon on the desktop and watched a red progress bar fill up with text explaining the components being loaded or activated in the background. The laptop started humming and buzzing as it made harder use of its resources. Haunting fantasy music, drums and horns before sweeping strings that sounded a little too much like a synthesizer for my taste, accompanied the loading, building anticipation for the next screen…which turned out to be a big red title splash THE REALM AETERNUS (based on the worlds of Alan Horus). The word ONLINE faded into view under the main title along with some tiny print explaining the version and server information.

  The screen turned black and the music softened into a dull hum like an electronic wind rolling across a digital wasteland. An old scroll unfurled across the screen showing me the kind of aged parchment map you find in all fantasy worlds. Here was the Land of Ook bordering the Realm of Agh and the Forests of Whatever…I couldn’t read the tiny print but it looked very official and epic. A call to adventure rose form the soundtrack, an anthem that stole from every good movie soundtrack all the way back to the age of DeMille.

  I predicted the map would burst into flames about a half second before a glowing hole opened in the middle transforming the screen into a lush forest environment where armored knights engaged elfish archers for no good reason. Barbarians on mammoths charged in lines a hundred wide across a tundra toward some unseen enemy massed at the horizon. Dragons - Jesus Christ hundreds of dragons - darkened the sun as they soared over jagged mountains spreading horizon to horizon. Fireworks rose from a tiny city below bursting between mighty wingspans. A dragon’s wing wiped the scene from the monitor, transporting us to a deep, dark dungeon and a robed wizard with a fat spell book in one hand and a ball of fire in the other. Another wizard in green robes approached from the dark, his ancient, wrinkled features glowing in the light of his flaming sword. The screen burst into brilliance as the fireball and sword collided mid-screen.

  From there the flash settled into a sunrise and a time lapse of a young, strapping farmer standing before an open field, transforming it seemingly by his own two hands, first into a single cabin and a small field or crops and then into a manor house surrounded by vast tracts of farmland populated by dozens of hands, a barn with l
ivestock and finally we pull back to see the town that was born from the farm growing and expanding along with the manor that made it all possible. Cutaway to blacksmiths, soldiers, barmaids, elves, dwarf miners, strange beasts assailing ordinary humans, even some odd shots of families growing and changing over the course of generations.

  And in some vast, alabaster city far away we sweep through the skyline of bell towers and parapets through merchant streets and mystical alleyways, fire brigades at work and black-garbed thieves scaling city walls, to a central castle and its highest tower, through a single window into a dark chamber lit by a single, bright shaft of light. On a worn, stone throne sat a man deep in thought with long black hair and beard framing eyes of ice that seemed to be gazing into infinity. Knuckles to his nose, the weight of the universe on his shoulders I had no idea who I was watching as the title page returned to the climax of the theme…

  THE ADVENTURE IS YOURS. THE REALM AETERNUS.

  Finally, the login fields popped up over the titles asking for my Username and Password. The music settled down into a steady heartbeat as the game awaited my entrance to adventure.

  "The least you could have done was save your login information, Park."

  ~

  Parker's office was stuffy, even after turning on the ceiling fan which disturbed the papers around his desk more than helping me. I took a bottle of beer and the laptop out onto the porch, figuring it was important to appreciate the luxury and beauty of my surroundings while trying to figure out why the fuck I was there in the first place.

  My cell phone buzzed in my pocket. Nadeim, who somehow got my personal number, texted me to say that Lucy and Blake wanted to "meet with you urgently" and, by the way, "their sunrise wedding has been indefinitely postponed freeing your schedule until departure on Monday."

  I did not reply. A cool breeze took the sun's bite off my shoulders and I sat back in the wooden rocker to snoop Parker's laptop some more.

  What interested me most was Parker's image gallery documenting his life overseas. He took many photos of his company but also of the villages he visited and sometimes served as unelected Mayor.

  Park's job was to sow positive relationships between communities and the coalition military. Initially this was an easy thing to do because the Corps. Of Engineers followed up bombings and invasions with new and improved infrastructure for irrigation, farming, roads, schools, and hospitals. Park used to report that some towns looked better than American ones. But this happy liberation eroded over time as military forces stuck around and the war to liberate Iraqis turned into an occupation that used the hunt for terrorists as an excuse to carry out knock-knock raids on private homes and midnight assaults on locations suspected of participating in illegal activities. Sowing positive relationships was difficult.

  A few years ago, Park shared a story over drinks. "My first two years back on active duty, I was a traffic cop in Kabul. It was not fun, but I got paid the same those days as the one where a town elder stood up from a casual information meeting and shot my interpreter in the head. I still don't get that one. We were just sitting at an open-air café talking about training the local police and – BLAM – this seventeen-year-old Iraqi civilian's head bursts in my lap. What I also didn't know was that I was being covered by a sniper. I found this out when the elder's head popped about two seconds later. The rest of the afternoon was just a live shit show."

  He talked about rolling into villages and towns that, as far as he knew, had no connection to Saddam Hussein or al Qaeda but had been reduced to a state that no one could say a town still existed. Livestock outnumbered the people and the only people were the ones who were physically unable to make the twenty-mile hike across the desert to the next patch of civilization.

  I asked him, "That's gotta be tough leveling a place and then showing up to make nice."

  He shrugged. "Old people were the easiest to get along with. They've seen so much war that they think it's routine. The young and angry ones – the kids who lost their families and friends – they are the ones to watch. They have Klishniks and frags but they also knew that there was a lot of rubble and fuel lying around to start making IEDs. I always went in, open arms and with gifts. I told command I didn't want to go in to tell them what's what. I wanted to go in with my team and do an assessment of needs, bring doctors and engineers. That worked for the same amount of time that the war kept the media's interest back home. I thought we were on a roll until I got north of Baghdad and all I had were my police officers, a medic – for us – and infantry support. That's when I started meeting people who would risk a bullet to the face just to spit on us."

  From the pictures, it was easy to see how four tours in both frontiers of the war aged Park. It wasn't as bad as some of his soldiers who stood under WELCOME banners looking like proud high school grads and showed up in later photos looking like career alcoholics posing for a DUI mug shot.

  I could see why Park took the time to come to Ebetha. He had to escape the madness into an illusion of royalty with his own servants, presiding over a village of idle rich. I also understood why it was important for him to bring troops here. It wasn't as though Park was special. Shit, he should have been a Captain at that stage of his career, maybe even a Major. But his dedication to his mission and the people of Afghanistan and Iraq kept him back.

  In fact, it was his confrontational attitude with commanders about how locals were treated that landed him on a stateside recruiting tour for 24 months.

  That tour intersected with his meeting Nadeim somehow and that meeting intrigued me.

  A few minutes more, and I found something even more interesting: A folder marked "NADEIM" buried in a folder of personal and legal documents. Actually, it wasn't the folder itself that made me spit out my Red Stripe all over the white patio railing.

  It was the subfolder marked "Nadeim Parker."

  Chapter Four

  Nadeim was not her real name.

  When the United States Army went looking for a very bad man in the northern part of Iraq in 2008, they accidentally stumbled on a mail order bride service specializing in an international offering of very young virgin girls. Among them was a young woman called Jamilah, who claimed to be from a neighborhood of Mogadishu, Somalia but had lived for a time in a small, private girl's school west of the city. She claimed to have been part of a mass abduction and lived the previous nine years as a slave to traffickers associated with an extremist al Qaeda cell run by a man called Kaiju the Cruel.

  Jamilah claimed to be eighteen but she seemed younger. She spoke Arabic, English, and some French. Attempts were made to locate her family but after three months the evidence strongly suggested they had been killed in the ongoing civil war.

  When Parker returned home in 2010 for Christmas he was alone. Claire tried to set him up with someone so he didn't feel so alone.

  "I'm seeing someone," he said absently.

  "Seriously?" Claire said and I falsetto'd.

  "She can't come to the states right now," he said, which I took to mean she was still on tour. Given how the military frowns on fraternization, I didn't want to pry and give Claire gossip material that might come back to bite Park. I let it go and we got so caught up in holiday shit that the matter vanished.

  ~

  Stunned, I stopped reading. The details were hard to process, but the result was that Grant Parker married a woman named Jamilah who legally changed her name to Nadeim. Why? Who the fuck knows? They married in Ebetha and Nadeim immigrated to the nation-state because her circumstances made American citizenship somewhat problematic.

  There were no wedding photos in his gallery, not even a single picture of Nadeim in his Ebetha photos. None of this made sense.

  I checked my phone again because I faintly remembered it buzzing in my pocket. It was a text from "The Service" on my personal phone confirming "Western Air Flight 42 from Harrisburg International Airport to McCarran International Airport leaving 7am Monday morning."

  It was Saturday. If
I were to go on this fool's errand, I had some things to prepare. I had to go home before I could go to Vegas. That left very little time for paradise.

  Fumbling with the wall-mounted interface I managed to work out how to contact Nadeim.

  "Yes, Mr. Casey?"

  "Hey. Nadeim. I need your help. Can you come back here, like, now?"

  ~

  Nadeim returned fifteen minutes later, arms full of groceries. It was the first time I saw a look of concern on her face. I took a bag from her and helped her in the kitchen where she helped start the conversation still forming in my head.

  "What can I do for you, Mr. Casey?"

  "Well, I found Park's laptop which he intended me to find by leaving the passcodes in his message from The Service."

  Nadeim left the bag on the counter and offered me her full attention, pretty eyes wide.

  "If I'm going to do this thing, I have to leave from home Monday in the morning. I can't change it. So, I have to go home, explain all this to my wife who will absolutely not understand and to my bosses who have already stretched the definition of "accommodating" by letting me add this little vacation on top of the six months I spent on extended medical leave. I have no control over this situation. I've never been a fan of being spontaneous and never good at…" I took a breath. "A LOT of things. I need to know a couple of things."

  Nadeim was perplexed but attentive. "How can I help?"

  "I need you to tell me WHY the fuck I should do this? And if Grant Parker can't tell me, I suspect his wife would at least be able to share some helpful insight with me."

  Nadeim's chin hit her chest.

  "Sorry, it was in his notes. There's a shit ton of stuff in his laptop. I need Cliff's Notes because this makes no sense to me."

  Nadeim nodded. "We needed to keep the relationship secret. I'm sorry I did not tell you."

  "I'm sorry Park didn't tell me. You said you didn't know about this trip but the documents I read say you chose the name Nadeim from a list of names you read on the Aeternus Online game site."