The Letter Keeper Read online

  Evidently I’d missed lesson number one, but I kept that to myself.

  He took my pack from my shoulders, emptied the contents onto the ground beneath a rock shelter, and told me to make a fire. Given the subfreezing temperatures, I acted quickly. He pointed at the spread before us. “Thanks for hauling our lunch up here.”

  “Glad I could help.”

  He took a bite of his sandwich. “Tell me about Marie.”

  I swallowed hard. “Sir, can I ask you a question first?”

  Before he answered, he pulled out a small bottle of wine and poured himself a few ounces. Then he sipped and nodded. “Sure.”

  “I’m pretty confused right now.”

  Another sip. “That’s a statement. Not a question.”

  “Who are you?”

  “My name is Ezekiel Walker. My friends call me Bones.”

  I was surprised that he had friends, but that, too, I kept to myself. As he spoke, I noticed that his cross dangled beneath his shirt. “How do you know so much about me?”

  He weighed his head side to side and pointed at the fire. “Might need more wood for that conversation.”

  I scratched my head. “Sir, I—”

  He held up a hand, and we watched in silence as a bald eagle floated effortlessly on the updrafts below us. A minute later, it disappeared over our heads. He continued, “I come up here sometimes. To make sense of what I can’t make sense of.”

  “What doesn’t make sense?”

  He sipped, and when he spoke, he stared through me. “Love in an evil world.” He poked the fire and added wood. He chewed on his words before he spoke them. “If you want to transfer, I’ll help you get into any school of your choice. You’re free to go.”

  “How can you do that?”

  He smiled without looking at me. “I know people.”

  I pressed him. “You’ve got to do better than that.”

  “I was once a lot like you.” He waved his hand across the academy spread below us. “Didn’t fit in too well. But I was good at a few things so they kept me around. One summer break I was camping my way across the west. Just me, my truck, and a skinny dog I picked up on a beach in Louisiana. One night, about 1 a.m. at a truck stop in Montana, I was putting gas in the tank when a greasy fat man backhanded a scared kid, sent him rolling head over butt, and then threw him into the cab of an eighteen-wheeler. Something in me didn’t like it. So I started listening. And with nothing better to do, I followed that truck. To a hotel in Idaho. When the driver disappeared into a back door of the hotel, I climbed into his cab, where I found the kid had been tied up and gagged. I carried him to my truck. He had his share of bruises, but it was the fear in his eyes I couldn’t shake. I fed that kid a burger and watched from across the parking lot as the driver returned. Finding his cab empty, he raged and screamed—but he couldn’t go anywhere because of the flashing blue lights surrounding him.

  “A few hours later, that kid’s mother hugged her son while the father cried so hard his shoulders shook. Eight days they’d been looking for him—from California to New York and Miami. Eight days of torment that had split their souls down the middle.” He paused and sipped again. “That father is now one of the heads of our government. You’ve seen him on TV. And . . .” This time he turned, and when he looked at me, there was a tear in his eye. “That boy is a cadet in your class. You know him.”

  “I do?”

  “You helped him cross the line. Something he could not have done without you. So when I tell you I know people,” he said, chuckling, “I know people.”

  I swallowed. Even more confused now than before. “But how’d you get from here to—” I pointed at his clothing—“the robes.”

  He poured more wine and stared across Colorado and maybe into Canada. When he spoke, his voice was a whisper. “I also priest.”

  It was the first time I ever heard him use that word as a verb.

  We sat in silence several minutes. The fire warming our backs. “Sir?”

  “Yes.”

  “Who was the other one?”

  “Other one?”

  I pointed at the obstacle course winding through the hills below us. “To turn back.”

  “You’re not going to let that go, are you?”

  “In case you haven’t noticed, I’m alone here.”

  “So what good is the answer to that question?”

  I shrugged. “Might help me feel not so alone.”

  He sipped without looking at me. “You just shrugged again.”

  “You dragged me up this mountain and made me carry our lunch without much explanation, so until you start answering my questions and stop speaking in riddles, you can get used to my shrugging.”

  A long smile, and then he stared into what I could only guess was memory. “Me.”

  “I had a feeling you were going to say that.”

  “That surprise you?”

  “Can I ask you another question?”

  “You do that a lot.”

  “What? Ask questions?”

  “Well, that too, but you normally start by asking if you can ask another question first.”

  “Well, can I?”

  “Sure.”

  “Why’d you do it?”

  “I’ve already answered that.”

  “When?”

  “That was lesson number one.”

  “Must have missed that one.”

  “Nope, you didn’t.”

  We were perched at about ten thousand feet where the air was a bit thin. “You mind telling me again?”

  “No need to.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “You carry the answer in your pocket.”

  When he said that, a giant unseen hand lifted the veil that hung between us. The veil of mystery he had used to disguise himself. As it lifted, I saw the mysterious, riddle-speaking man who sat across from me at the Seagull Saloon. Then, to remove any doubt, he turned around and pointed to the granite wall behind us where someone—no doubt him years ago—had scratched into the stone the same eleven words that had echoed in my mind since he’d slid that coin across the table:

  Because the needs of the one outweigh those of the many.

  The sound in my mind as this realization settled in was akin to driving eighty on the interstate and throwing the gear shift into park. Stuff was exploding beneath the surface. The connection that Bones had been the man to rescue eleven-year-old me out of Jack’s death grip, and then sit across from me at the Seagull Saloon, sparked more questions than it answered. Why? How? I had no answers for any of this.

  I reached in my pocket and pulled out the hand-polished and well-worn coin. “You’re him?”

  He eyed it affectionately and nodded. Then he reached in my pack, pulled out his Nikon, and snapped a picture of me with that realization plastered across my face and all of Colorado behind me.

  “But—” I protested.

  He held up a hand. “In time.” He eyed his watch and the airport in the distance. “Right now I’ve got to catch a plane.” He threw snow on the fire and looked at me with a smile I would later come to love. “Race you down.”

  Following that run up the mountain, my experience at the academy changed. A lot. In almost every way. On the surface, I lived the life of a cadet. Responsible for everything my class did and studied. Beneath the surface, I was anything but a cadet. Like Bones, I learned to live a double life. When my class earned a forty-eight-hour pass, Bones would blindfold me, drive me hours into the mountains, drop me with what I carried in my pockets, and say, “Find your way home. Without asking for help.” Sometimes he’d wake me at 2:00 a.m., drive me to a truck stop, order eggs and coffee, and then ask me the color of the waitress’s eyes and what the tattoo on her ankle said. Then there were afternoons when he’d take me far into the dungeon that comprised his world, and he’d teach me weapons systems. Loading. Unloading. Aiming. Trigger reset. Malfunctions and how to fix them. If it breathed fire and went boom, he made me learn what allowed it t
o do that. Every piece. And how to make it work to my benefit.

  One afternoon he handed me a fifty-year-old rifle with ammunition that didn’t come close to fitting it and shut me in a supply closet, telling me, “You can come out when you fire that thing.” The lesson taught me to look outside the box and use what was available. Somewhere toward midnight, I shot a segment of copper tubing through the two-way glass through which he watched me.

  Late in my sophomore year I broke the course obstacle record, which had stood since he’d set it ten years earlier.

  And then in what was possibly the strangest turn of events, Bones walked into the weapons closet of the dungeon where I was cleaning a rifle and handed me a stack of strange-looking books. “Congratulations. You’ve been accepted. Class starts Monday. Tests every Friday. First two years are online. Get the requirements out of the way. Last two you attend on campus, which shouldn’t be a problem.”

  I glanced at the titles. “What are you talking about?”

  “Seminary.”

  “You must be joking.”

  Bones considered this. “I seldom joke and I never kid.” Both of which were lies.

  “But I don’t want to—”

  “And,” he cut me off, “you can’t be enrolled there and here simultaneously, so I changed your name.”

  “What?”

  “To God, you’ll be known as Murphy Shepherd.”

  “Stupid name.”

  “Maybe, but it’s yours, so get used to it.”

  “It’s still stupid.”

  He didn’t let me finish, which was his way of saying I had no say in this matter. “One day soon, you’re going to encounter people in prison. And often the bars that hold them will be of their own making. It’s one thing to unlock someone’s prison door—it’s another thing entirely to loose the chains that bind their heart.” He tapped the barrel of the rifle. “To do that, you’re going to need to know how to do more than just poke holes in them.”

  Thus began my first day of seminary.

  Bones’s seminary was as much a mystery as he. Called by an obscure Greek name, Google produced a website and pictures of a campus in Spain with satellites in Italy, Austria, France, South Africa, and, you guessed it, Colorado. Having been founded or chartered by the Catholic Church nearly a millennium ago, the college—if you can call it that—didn’t follow standard academic protocol whatsoever. They had no desire at all to allow for accreditation of any kind. They couldn’t care less. Also unique to the school was the one-to-one professor-to-student ratio. Throughout the course of his study, each student worked with one professor. A priest. Don’t like your professor? Tough. Don’t like your course of study? Too bad. And while administrative offices with a physical address did exist in Italy, Spain, and France, the institution had no formal classrooms. Class location was determined by the priest.

  About three months in, having not slept for much of that time, I asked him, “Just when am I supposed to sleep?”

  He shrugged. “Beats me.”

  “You do realize that the human body needs sleep.”

  He shook his head. “Overrated.”

  More often than not, our “classroom” was our lookout atop the mountain, which became a welcome break from the sterile instruction of the academy. Strangely, and despite my initial protests, I enjoyed the seminary assignments and found myself engrossed in the writers, thinkers, and philosophers we read. What I noticed throughout my course of study was that, while the academy taught me to calculate, and to do so effectively, efficiently, and with relative speed, Bones was teaching me how to think outside that well-defined box. Both were needed, but each was made stronger by the other. While my fellow cadets accepted deployments throughout their summers, I was attached at the hip to a white-robed, riddle-speaking, wine-sipping priest who was not-so-quietly disdained by his colleagues, more often rogue than team player, and—while older than me—the strongest human being I’d ever met.

  The contradictions were glaring.

  As was my continued lack of sleep. While my fellow classmates snored in their bunks up and down the hall, I slept—at best—one or two hours a night. Several nights a week I slept not at all. Meaning I constantly bordered on sleep deprivation. Weeks felt like one long day. Much of my waking hours felt like an out-of-body experience, leaving me a little edgy.

  A few months later, when the reality of my workload hit me, I threw one of the books at his head and asked him, “Why on earth do I need to know any of this?”

  He looked at me as if the answer were self-explanatory. “Because you can’t fake it.”

  “Fake what?”

  “Priesting.”

  All told, ninety-nine percent of my time and experience at the academy was dictated by Bones. When I asked him how he got away with such a singular existence amid such a military mindset, he just smiled. “I know people.”

  What I discovered was that Bones was something of a genius. Given his experience saving the son of the then vice president and former head of intelligence for all U.S. government operations, he had been given broad latitude to develop a program with hand-picked people who were a lot like him. Bones was in the elite business of finding people. Specifically, lost people. He didn’t bother with a large organization and lots of people. His singular aim was finding one person at a time. He kept staff to a minimum, and most worked intelligence behind computers.

  When Bones explained this to me, I said, “So you work for the CIA.”

  He shook his head. “No, but they often work for me.”

  When he wasn’t dropping me off in the middle of nowhere or dragging me through the mud and snow, he sometimes disappeared for a few days. And sometimes when he returned, he’d be nursing an injury. Protecting some part of his body. Later that year he returned from a week’s absence with an obvious problem in his shoulder.

  I said, “Cut yourself shaving?”

  He didn’t respond.

  “You want to talk about it?”

  He reached into his pocket and held out a bullet. Not the cartridge that contained the shell casing plus the bullet. Just the bullet. The spent projectile, with emphasis on spent. When he dropped it in the palm of my hand, I picked up on the fact that Bones was playing for keeps and this whole clandestine training thing ended somewhere other than a grammar school playground.

  He stared at it. “Life is not a video game, and there is no do-over.”

  Around the academy, Bones was known as Father B, and as a general rule of thumb, he was looked down upon by most everyone else. People thought of him as a token spiritual advisor who’d been given some plush, no-responsibility assignment because he knew somebody somewhere—although no one could say just who. Seldom seen without a Nikon camera around his neck, he wore nerdy-looking glasses and occasionally taught a class when it didn’t interfere with his schedule of torturing me.

  Given the mystery, rumors swirled about his backstory. The most popular suggested that twenty-five years earlier he’d been a cadet who dropped out after his first love shunned him for another. Adding insult to injury, she accepted a career on the Vegas strip, which now explained his self-imposed life of celibacy. The second theory bubbled up from the “Coexist” bumper sticker on his Prius and centered on the idea that an undisclosed experience in the summer of his junior year caused him to dig into his soul. When he did, finally getting in touch with his real self, he discovered—to no one’s surprise save his own—that he didn’t believe in war and violence. Of any kind. True to his conviction, he quit wearing leather, refused to fire a weapon, and went completely vegan. The academy didn’t know what to do with him, so they politely showed him the door.

  Whatever the case, and however it had happened, he was dishonorably excused from the academy whereupon he backpacked to Italy or Spain or some such place to study something other than war. Following his foreign education in all things pertaining to God, he responded to a “calling” and returned here by invitation to sway other misguided souls like his own fro
m a wayward life of war-mongering because someone somewhere thought it a good idea that the cadets have a well-rounded academic education free from bias and bigotry. If nothing else, he would serve as the voice of the opposition.

  In other words, general consensus agreed that Bones was completely useless.

  Which was exactly what he wanted.

  Yet during my time in the academy, I knew of twenty-seven high-profile abductions and subsequent rescues that took place in sixteen countries—about which Bones never spoke a word and yet for which I knew he was singularly responsible. Somehow he did all that with astounding secrecy. Everyone around me thought him the court jester while I knew him to be viceroy for the king.

  Thanksgiving break of my senior year I’d been granted a ninety-six-hour pass, and my only desire was to get home to Marie. Waiting at the gate for my plane to board, Bones sat down next to me and handed me a picture of a little girl. Ponytails. Not yet ten. “We have forty-eight hours before they transfer her across the border and she disappears.”

  I tried not to look at the picture. “Bones, not now . . .”

  He waved the picture in front of me.

  “What do you want me to do?”

  “Bring her back.”

  “I’m . . . ,” I stammered, “not you. I’m not qualified. I don’t know anything about how to—”

  “Experience is not transferrable.”

  Another riddle. The flight attendants were calling my seat. “What’s that mean?”

  “Some things I can’t teach you in a classroom. Some things you have to learn on your own.” He pointed through the huge glass windows of the terminal. “Out there.”

  “Why don’t you go?”

  He showed me a second picture. “Can’t be in two places at once.”

  I held her picture in my hand.

  Three days later, as I sat exhausted in the driver’s seat of a cattle truck departing from a Mexico border town in Texas, having never seen Florida or Marie, I found I had learned a good deal. First, this line of work—if you could call it that—required not only the ability but the willingness to pivot on a dime without thought. To change plans at the drop of a hat. No matter the emotional connection or damage. Second, this line of work cost far more than it paid.