Lois stood frozen for a long moment. “That’s not funny.”
“Do I look like I’m joking?” The older man shook his head. “I wouldn’t do that to you.”
Thomas White had been a friend of her father’s for as Long as Lois could remember. This wasn’t the sort of cruel joke he’d perpetrate intentionally.
“I don’t believe you,” Lois said.
“I didn’t believe it at first either,” he said. He pulled his cell phone from his pocket and flipped it open. A click of a button, and a short video began to play.
Lois stared at the picture for a moment. It was a still picture of a woman in a hospital gown sitting at a table in a blank cinderblock room. The face was older than the one she remembered; the Lucy of her memory had been fifteen and angry. This was the face Lucy might have grown into if she had lived.
Staring at Agent White, Lois said, “I want to see her.”
“You know how this works,” he said. “Give us the permission to exhume the body and we’ll find out what we can.”
“I’ll sign a non-disclosure form,” Lois said. “I won’t legally be able to use anything I see unless I get it from some other source.”
“You think we’d trust you with anything?”
“You trusted me enough to show me this.” Lois said, gesturing with the cell phone. “I was investigated before I was embedded in my first unit in Iraq. I’ve seen a lot of things I didn’t report, and I’ve been loyal.”
“This changes things a little,” Agent White said. “This calls some things into question about you?”
“You mean it makes people think I’m involved in some sort of conspiracy to fake my own sister’s death?” Lois scowled. “Why? What could I possibly gain?”
“That’s the question that needs to be answered.” He was silent for a moment. “You weren’t involved in this, were you?”
Lois shook her head. “I don’t even know what this is.”
“It might be possible for you to meet with her, under supervised conditions, but you would have to sign a non-disclosure form.”
“Would it be possible to have my lawyer look over everything?” Lois said, “Seeing as how I’m under investigation too.”
Lois had no desire to end up in a secret prison in Pakistan for something she had no part of. Susan might be able to help her with that.
“We’d have to limit her exposure to some of the specifics of the case,” he said. “We’d prefer for you not to discuss the issue with her in more than general terms.”
Preventing leaks in Washington was an incredibly difficult task, all things considered, especially given the nature of Congress.
Lois nodded. “Could I borrow your phone?”
He handed her the telephone again, and Lois flipped it open. She dialed the number from memory.
“Susan, it’s me. They served me the papers, but we might want to hold off on the protest.”
************
The darkness suited Lois’s mood. Taken to a nondescript warehouse, she and Susan Nygen had been placed in the back of a delivery van. Windowless, the only light came from a small crack at the base of the doors leading out the back. This left Lois sitting in the dark with Susan and a male guard.
She felt naked without her cell phone or other equipment. She hadn’t even been allowed to keep her purse, and being frisked had been unpleasant.
Given the number of turns they were taking, the van was taking a circuitous route around the city. Lois had already counted four left turns, which should have taken then back to their starting point, and she suspected that the vehicle would be making other unnecessary changes in direction.
Susan was uncharacteristically silent.
“Thanks for doing this,” Lois said. “Taking a Saturday off and everything.”
Susan shrugged. “Thank me when you get my bill. How much longer do you think it will be?”
“Given traffic, at least two hours, assuming she’s not actually being held in the city.”
“Are you sure this is something you want to do?” Susan asked “If you use anything you see in a story without clear documentation that you got the information from somewhere else, there won’t be a great deal I can do for you.”
“I have to do this,” Lois said.
Susan pursed her lips. “You never did listen to advice.”
“I listened,” Lois said. “I just didn’t follow it.”
“All right,” Susan said.
“Do you think they are agreeing to this to try to keep me away from the story?” Lois asked. It wouldn’t matter if it was true; this was something more important than any story. For a chance to see her sister again she’d have done almost anything.
If it turned out to be someone who just resembled her sister, Lois would be crushed.
“They need to establish whether or not she’s a U.S. citizen or not,” Susan said. “If she’s not, then they can hold her without habeas corpus relief.”
Lois glanced at her friend. In the darkness it was hard to tell, but it seemed as though her expression tightened.
“If she’s not a U.S. citizen, they can lock her away indefinitely. The way things are now, if they can define her as an unlawful enemy combatant, they can deny her counsel, a speedy trial or appeals.”
Lois nodded grimly. As bad as things could get for an American accused of terrorism, being a non-American was infinitely worse.
They were hoping that Lois would be able to expose Lucy as a fraud, which was one of the reasons they were undoubtedly letting her see her. Everything she said to Lucy would be recorded, with teams of experts looking for secret messages being passed back and forth.
Lois hadn’t been sure that Lucy was even one of the passengers on the plane; Agent White could be working on a dozen different cases at the same time. The secrecy involved convinced her that her early gut feelings were correct. Everything was somehow connected in a way that she couldn’t as yet see.
*************
The truck finally pulled to a stop, and the soldier beside her looked up. From a bag by his side he pulled two black hoods.
Lois wondered whether they were trying to be intentionally offensive, or whether this was a way of intimidating both Lois and her lawyer, a way of saying that neither of them was really safe.
In the war against terror, sometimes the lines were blurred and distinctions were lost.
Many of the nightmares she’d had in Iraq had involved just this sort of hood, and Lois found herself resenting the implication.
She hesitated, and Susan stared at her for a long moment. “If you don’t want to do this…”
Grimly, Lois shook her head. In three tours of Iraq she’d thought she’d earned the trust of the United States government. She’d reported what she’d seen, but anything that they deemed important she’d left out of the reports. She’d never stepped over the line, not once.
She reached out and took one of the hoods. At least they weren’t being handcuffed.
***********
“You aren’t allowed to hand her anything or receive anything from her. After the interview you will both be searched again.” The man wearing prison gray looked bored, as though he did this every day, but Lois could see the concealed curiosity in his expression.
She nodded impatiently; she’d heard it all before. It was all she could do to focus on her breathing. Her stomach was in knots and she felt a little sick. A part of her dared to hope, although the rest of her knew better. The letdown was going to be incredibly painful. As much as she needed this to be true, this was the real world and people just didn’t come back from the dead.
She’d learned that the hard way.
“All right,” the man said. Agent White was in another room behind a one way mirror sitting with Susan Nygen, which left Lois almost alone.
He slid a card through a reader by the side of the door, and then pushed a set of numbers, being careful to keep his body between the keyboard and Lois. A moment later the magnetic latches on the door opened, and he pushed the bar on one side of the door, opening it.
Lois stepped inside and the door slammed behind her with a resounding crash.
The room inside was bare; cinderblock walls, fluorescent lights set high in the ceiling and a small bunk attached to the wall to her left. In the center of the room was a table and two chairs; everything was bolted to the floor. It reminded Lois of prison cells she’d visited in the past, although the separate bathroom was an unexpected kindness.
A small door to the right presumably led to the bathroom and a picture window sized mirror was to Lois’s right.
There was a figure huddled under the blankets with its head facing the wall. IN the harsh glare of the fluorescent lights, all Lois could see was a small patch of hair on the pillow.
Lucy always had been a heavy sleeper.
“L…Lucy?” Lois said. Her throat was suddenly dry and it was hard to swallow.
She said it again, and finally the figure on the bed began to stir. It turned over, and Lois felt as though the world was tilting on its axis.
It was her. The face was older, the hair style was different, but this was the face of the sister Lois had loved and hated throughout her childhood.
Lucy blinked.
“Lois?”
Lucy scrambled out of the bunk and a moment later she was charging toward Lois. A moment later she was hugging her tightly.
Despite all the rules to the contrary, Lois felt herself wrapping her arms around her sister and not wanting to let go.
**********
“Where have you been all this time?” Lucy asked. “Everybody has been worried sick about you, vanishing like that.”
Sitting across from her in the glare of the fluorescent lights wearing nothing but a hospital gown with her hair uncombed and unkempt, Lucy still looked amazingly beautiful. She’d grown, and while there were traces of the angry teenager she’d once been, this was a mature, composed woman.
“I could ask the same question of you,” Lois said mildly. Finally seated, she couldn’t help but stare at this woman who was like the sister she’d lost, but all grown up.
“I’ve been traveling,” she said. For the first time she looked embarrassed. “Skipping from boyfriend to boyfriend. You know how it goes. I thought about coming home and staying with you until I found out what happened.”
“What exactly do you think happened to me?” Lois asked.
“You were doing that story in the Congo and you went missing,” Lucy said. “You have to call home. Mom and Dad are going to be worried sick!”
For the third time in one evening Lois felt her world begin to spin. “Mom, Dad?”
“I keep asking for my telephone call,” Lucy said. “They must be going crazy not knowing what happened. Do you think it will be very long before they let us out of here?”
“Lucy,” Lois said slowly. She held one hand tightly in the other in an effort to keep it from trembling. “Where do Mom and Dad live?”
“Here in Metropolis, where else?” Lucy stared at Lois for a long moment. “Are you all right?”
Lois felt her heart drop. Meeting her sister again should have been a gift, a blessing. She’d spent so many years blaming herself, regretting all the things that had been left unsaid between them. Yet staring into her sister’s absolutely sincere expression, Lois could come to only one conclusion.
Lucy wasn’t a terrorist or conspirator or whatever it was the government was trying to convince itself she was. The girl Lois had known would have been incapable of that, and she’d have been smart enough to some up with a more believable story.
Her sister was insane.
