Ghost Ship

FIVE

With a jolt, Kurt bolted upright in his bed. He was drenched in sweat and gasping for air, and his heart pounded as if he’d just run up a mountain. For a moment, he held still and stared into the darkness, trying to free himself from the grasp of the nightmare and the powerful emotions that lingered in the afterlife of a dream.

The process was always the same, a quick realization of where he was and then a brief moment of uncertainty as if the mind was torn deciding which world was reality and which was illusion.

Thunder rumbled outside, accompanied by a dim flash of lightning and the sound of the rain pelting his deck.

He was at home, in his own bedroom, in the boathouse he owned on the banks of the Potomac River. Not drowning in the failed rescue attempt that had taken place months earlier and half a world away.

“Are you all right?” a soothing female voice asked.

Kurt recognized the voice. Anna Ericsson, as kind as she was pretty. A natural blonde with striking green eyes, the fairest of eyebrows, and a perfect little nose that turned up at the end. For some reason, he wished she was somewhere else at this moment.

“No,” Kurt said, throwing the covers back. “I’m far from all right.”

He climbed out of bed and went to the window.

“It’s just a nightmare,” she said. “Repressed memories working their way out.”

Kurt could feel his head pounding, not just with a headache but at the back of his skull, where he’d sustained a hairline fracture as Joe had pulled him free of the sinking yacht. “They’re not repressed,” he said. “To be honest with you, I wish they were.”

She was calm. Not one to respond to his agitation. “Did you see them?” she asked.

Thunder crashed outside, and the rain rattled against the Arcadia door with renewed vigor. Kurt wondered if the rain had triggered the nightmare. Then again, he didn’t need anything to trigger them. They seemed to come almost nightly.

“Did you see them this time?” she asked again.

Kurt exhaled in frustration, waved her off, and made his way to the wet bar in the living room. Anna followed seconds later, wearing yoga pants and one of his T-shirts. He couldn’t help but admire how pretty she was. Even in the middle of the night. Even without a bit of makeup.

He switched on a light. It pained his eyes for a moment but allowed him to pluck a half-empty bottle of Jack Daniel’s off the tray. He noticed that his hand was shaking. He poured himself a double.

“You know it means something,” she prodded.

He gulped some of the whiskey. “Can we please keep the psychoanalyzing to office hours?”

She was supposed to be his therapist. In the aftermath of the concussion, he’d begun to have tremors and other issues. The nightmares came first, then memory problems and barely suppressed feelings of rage that those who knew him were right to consider out of character.

In response, NUMA had assigned Ms. Ericsson to act as his therapist and counselor. In a fit of spite against those who were trying to help him, Kurt had spent weeks playing the role of a curmudgeon. It hadn’t been enough to ward her off, and the two had ended up seeing each other on a more-than- professional basis.

Kurt swigged some more whiskey and winced at the pain. He noticed a container of aspirin beside the liquor bottles and reached for it. How many nights this week had he repeated this same routine? Four? Five? He tried to add them up but couldn’t honestly recall. It had become far too common.

“Have you been to work lately?” she said, plopping down on the edge of his couch.

Kurt shook his head. “I can’t go to work until you fix me, remember?”

“You’re not broken, Kurt. But you are in pain. No matter how much you want to pretend. You suffered a severe concussion, a fractured skull, and an emotional trauma all at the same time. For months, you displayed every symptom of a traumatic brain injury. And you’re continuing to have some of them. Beyond that, you’re a textbook case of survivor’s guilt.”

“I have nothing to feel guilty about,” he insisted. “I did the best I could.”

“I know that,” she said. “Everyone involved knows that. But you don’t believe it.”

He didn’t know what to believe. Literally.

“Even Brian Westgate knows what you tried to do was heroic.”

“Brian Westgate,” Kurt muttered with disdain.

She picked up on the tone in his voice, the one that signaled an uptick in his level of agitation, but she pushed anyway.

“He still wants to meet with you, you know. Shake your hand. Tell you thanks.” She paused. “Have you even returned his calls?”

Of course he hadn’t. “I’ve been a little busy.”

She was studying him, nodding slightly. “That’s it, isn’t it?”

“What’s it?”

“You were supposed to marry Sienna but you drove her away. If you hadn’t done that, she wouldn’t have met Westgate. No Westgate, no yacht. No yacht, no storm. No storm, no sinking. And no failed attempt to rescue her. That’s what you’re blaming yourself for.”

Survivor’s guilt was complicated. Kurt knew this. He had friends who’d come back from Iraq and Afghanistan. They’d done heroic things, more heroic than anything he’d done, and yet they blamed themselves for much of what went wrong.

He took a breath and looked away. There was too much truth in what she’d said for him to argue, but for reasons he wasn’t willing to explain it didn’t help him much. He turned his attention back to the aspirin, pried the top off the bottle and popped a few of the pills into his mouth. He chased them down with more whiskey.

Feeling his headache was now being properly treated, he turned back to Anna and tried to be more civil. “Why does it matter?” he asked. “Why does it matter so much to you?”

“Because it’s my job,” she said. “And because like an idiot I chose to care about you as more than a patient.”

“No,” he said, correcting her. “Why does it matter whether I see them in the dream or not? You keep asking about that. Why does that matter to you?”

She paused and stared up at him. The look was a mix of kindness and frustration. “It doesn’t matter to me,” she said. “It matters to you.”

Kurt stared.

“Based on what you’ve told me, the dreams are all the same,” she pointed out. “Except in half of them, you see this blond Caucasian woman and one of her children, while in the rest you see nothing but debris and empty life jackets. You can’t even be sure the woman is Sienna. But either way, real or imagined, you couldn’t reach them, the ship went down, and, unfortunately, they’re gone. End of story.”

She tilted her head a bit. A look of empathy settled on her face. “To the rest of the world, it doesn’t make a difference because the outcome is the same. But these alternate dreams— these alternate realities — they must matter to you or you wouldn’t keep having them. The sooner you figure out why, the sooner you’ll begin to feel better.”

He could only stare. She was closer to the truth than she knew.

“I see” was all he could say.

She sighed. “I shouldn’t have come over,” she said, reaching for her sneakers and slipping them on. “For that matter, I shouldn’t have kissed you. But I’m glad I did.”

She stood up and grabbed her coat off a rack by the door. “I’m going home,” she said. “Go back to work, Kurt. It might do you some good. In fact, go see Westgate. He’s actually in Washington. He’s making some big announcement tomorrow on the steps of the Smithsonian. He’s probably not the bastard you think he is. And it might give you some closure.”

She pulled her coat on, opened the door to the sound of rain on the driveway, then stepped through and shut it behind her. Seconds later, the engine of her Ford Explorer rumbled to life, followed by the sound of her backing out and up the hill onto River Road.

Kurt stared at the empty space for a minute. With a gulp, he finished the drink and wavered on whether to pour himself another. He put the tumbler down. It didn’t help much anyway.

Instead of another drink, he walked through the living room and slid open the Arcadia door that led out onto the deck. The rain was relentless, beading up on the freshly stained wood like quicksilver in a lab tray. The river was covered in dancing droplets just like the sea in his dream.

Why did it matter?

He walked to the railing. As the rain soaked him, it seemed to draw some of the agony out. Far to the left he saw the red taillights of Anna’s Ford as she drove off.

Why did he try harder and harder to see the truth each time the dream started?

He knew the answer to this mystery, it had come to him weeks ago, but he kept it to himself. He couldn’t tell anyone, certainly not his therapist.

Soaking wet, he stepped back inside, grabbed a towel to dry his hands and face, and dropped into the chair at his desk.

Tossing the towel aside, he flicked on the computer and waited as the screen lit up. After typing in his main password, he clicked an icon that required a second password. It brought up a series of encrypted e-mails.

The latest had been sent by a former Mossad agent whom Kurt knew through a third party. Money had been wired and received, and the man agreed to investigate a rumor.

The e-mail read rather matter-of-factly.

Mashhad was a city in northern Iran, suspected of being the headquarters of a new technical group working for the Iranian military. No one was certain just what they were up to, but the Iranians were believed to be desperately upgrading their cybersecurity and attack force. Embittered that the U.S. had somehow gotten a virus known as Stuxnet into their nuclear-processing facilities and caused a thousand high-priced centrifuges to spin out of control until they exploded, the Iranians were not only looking to protect themselves, they were planning to hit back.

Part of that effort seemed to involve foreigners who’d been spotted shuffling in and out of Mashhad, sometimes under guard.

Kurt read the rest of the e-mail.

Kurt closed the file.

Why did it matter what he saw in the dreams? Because, despite all evidence to the contrary, he’d become convinced that Sienna was alive. And if she was alive, he could think of only one reason she’d be doing work for the Iranians: her children, Tanner and Elise. Someone had to be holding them hostage and using them as leverage against her.

He knew it was a stretch of logic, supposition piled upon supposition. Considering the facts, it was irrational and unreasonable, and yet he felt it with every fiber of his being. Only the dreams made him doubt.

If the empty salon and the abandoned yacht were the true memories, then he had reason to believe, to hope, and to trust his instincts.

But if he had witnessed Sienna and her daughter drown—and was trying subconsciously to rewrite his memories and replace what he knew with what he wanted reality to be — then he was balancing on the very edge of madness, one misstep from tumbling into the abyss.