Last Man Standing

6

Six funerals. Web attended six funerals over three days. By the fourth one, he couldn’t muster a single tear. He walked into the church or the funeral home and listened to people he mostly didn’t know talk about fallen men he knew better than he understood himself in some ways. It was as though all of his nerves had been boiled away, along with part of his soul. In a way he felt incapable of reacting as he was supposed to. He was terrified he would start laughing when he should be mourning.

At the services half the caskets were open, the rest not. Some of the dead men had fared better with the size and placement of the wounds that had killed them and thus had open caskets. However, staring at pale, collapsed faces and rigid, shrunken bodies in metal boxes, inhaling flower fragrance and hearing the sobs of all those around him made Web wish he could just lie down in a box too and be put away in the ground to hide forever. The funeral of a hero; there were far worse ways to be remembered.

He had wrapped his hand back up in the layers of gauze because he felt guilty walking among the bereaved without a trace of a wound. It was a pathetic thing to be concerned with, he knew, yet he felt like a walking slap in the face to the survivors. All they really knew was that Web London had somehow gotten off with barely a scratch. Had he run? Had he left his comrades to die? He could see those questions in some of the people’s faces. Was that always the fate of the sole survivor?

The funeral processions had passed between endless lines of men and women in uniform and hundreds of others dressed in the neat suits and sensible shoes of the FBI. Motorcycles led the way, citizens lined the streets and flags everywhere flew at half mast. The President and most of his Cabinet came, along with many other VIPs. For a few days, the entire world talked of nothing else except the slaughter of six good men in an alley. Not much was said about the seventh man, and for that Web was mostly grateful. Still, he wondered how long that moratorium could possibly last for him.

The city of Washington was deeply stricken. And it was not entirely over the fate of the slain men, for the broader implications were troubling. Had criminals really become so brazen? Was society coming apart at the seams? Were the police not keeping pace? Was American law enforcement’s crown jewel, the FBI, losing its luster? The Middle Eastern and Chinese news services were having a particularly delicious time reporting yet another example of Western mayhem that would one day bring arrogant America to its soft knees. Cheers were no doubt racing up and down the streets of Baghdad, Teheran, Pyongyang and Beijing at the thought of the old USA falling apart one miserable media-fueled crisis at a time. The pundits on American soil were spouting so many absurd scenarios that Web no longer even opened a newspaper or turned on a TV or radio. If anyone had asked him, though, he would have said that the whole world, and not just the United States, had been screwed up for a long time.

There had been some relief from this crossfire, though its catalyst was another appalling tragedy. A Japanese commercial jetliner had crashed off the Pacific Coast, so the newsmongers had chased after that story and left the alley and its dead behind for now. A single news truck was still there, but scraps of three hundred bodies floating in the ocean was a far bigger draw than a days-old story about a team of dead FBI agents. And for that Web was also grateful. Leave us alone to grieve in peace.

He had been debriefed “uptown” at the Hoover Building and at the WFO on three different occasions, by several teams of investigators. They had their pads and pencils, their recorders and some of the younger agents even had laptops. They had asked Web many more questions than he had answers for. However, when he told each group that he didn’t know why he had frozen and then fallen, the pencils had stopped scribbling on paper, fingers had stopped clacking on keyboards.

“When you say you froze, did you see something? Hear something to make you do that?” The man spoke in a monotone, which, to Web, was one imperceptible inflection short of incredulity or, worse, outright disbelief.

“I don’t really know.”

“You really don’t know? You’re not sure if you froze?”

“I’m not sure. I mean, I did. I couldn’t move. It was like I was paralyzed.”

“But you moved after your team was killed?”

“Yes,” Web conceded.

“What had changed to allow you to do that?”

“I don’t know.”

“And when you got to the courtyard, you fell?”

“That’s right.”

“Right before the guns opened fire,” said another investigator. Web could barely hear his own answer. “Yes.”

The silence that followed these meager responses came close to dissolving Web’s already bludgeoned insides.

During each debriefing, Web had kept his hands on top of the table, his gaze steady on each questioner’s face, his posture in a slight forward lean. These men were all professional, seasoned inquisitors. Web knew that if he looked away, sat back, rubbed his head the wrong way or, worse yet, crossed his arms, they would instantly conclude he was a lying sack of shit. Web wasn’t being untruthful, but he wasn’t telling all of the truth either. Yet if Web started talking about how the vision of a little boy had had a weird effect on him, perhaps inexplicably caused him to freeze, thus saving his life—or about then feeling weighed down as though encased in concrete and then seconds later being able to freely move—he would be finished at the Bureau. The higher-ups tended to frown on field agents making insane comments. Yet he had one thing going for him. Those machine gun nests didn’t disintegrate by themselves. And his rifle rounds were embedded in all of them. And the snipers had seen everything, and he had warned Hotel Team and saved the boy on top of it. Web made sure he said that. He made sure all of them knew that. You can kick me while I’m down, friends, just not too hard. I’m a damn hero after all.

“I’ll be all right,” Web had told them. “I just need a little time. I’ll be all right.” And for one awful moment Web thought that might be the first actual lie he had told all day.

They would call him back in as needed, they told him. For now, they just wanted him to do nothing. He was to take plenty of time to get himself together. The Bureau had offered the assistance of a counselor, a mental health professional, in fact they had insisted on it, and Web said he would go, although there was still a stigma at the Bureau for those seeking such help. When things looked okay, Web was told, he would be assigned to another assaulter or sniper team, if he so desired, until Charlie could be rebuilt. If not, he could take another position within the Bureau. There was even talk of allowing him to burn an “office of preference” transfer that would allow him to proceed directly to “Go” in the form of an office he would retire from. That sort of treatment was usually reserved for senior-level agents and symbolized that the Bureau was really unsure of what to do with him. Officially, Web was in the middle of an administrative inquiry that might well blossom into a full investigation, depending on how things shook out. Well, no one had given Web his Miranda rights, which was both good and bad. Good because Web getting his Miranda warning would mean he was under arrest, bad in that anything he said during the inquiry could be used against him in civil or criminal proceedings. The only thing he had done wrong, apparently, was having survived. And yet that was a source of guilt far stronger than anything the Bureau could charge him with.

No, really, whatever he wanted, Web was told, he could have. They were all his friends. He had their full support.

Web asked how the investigation was going and didn’t get an answer in return. So much for their full support, Web thought.

“Get better,” another man had told him. “That’s all you need to focus on.”

As he was leaving from his last debriefing, he got one final question. “How’s the hand?” the man asked. Web didn’t know the guy, and although the question seemed innocent enough, there was something in the fellow’s eyes that made Web want to deck him. Instead, Web said it was just fine, thanked them all and left.

On the way out from the last session he had passed the FBI’s Wall of Honor, where hung plaques for each of the FBI personnel killed in the line of duty. There would be a major addition coming to the wall, the largest single one in the history of the Bureau, in fact. Web had sometimes wondered if he would ever end up on there, with his professional life compacted into a chunk of wood and brass hanging on a wall. He left Hoover and drove home, besieged by many more questions than he wanted to confront.

FBI also officially stood for Fidelity, Bravery and Integrity, and right now Web didn’t feel he possessed any of these qualities.