Left Behind

2. Reconciliation

The smell of coffee was glorious after so much time, but the taste, the taste was divine. I couldn't stop smiling. I drank the first cup without even noticing it. Then, he poured me another one.

"That's the last one", he said, or you'll have a heart attack.

I nodded and held the cup to my mouth. The taste already diminished in flavour and the smell became rather acrid, just like I remembered the smell of instant coffee to be. I started crying, overwhelmed with so huge a palette of emotions. He ignored my sobs and started talking.

"You see", he said, "I knew about this plot for years. I just could not find the culprits. I lost seven men from my crew trying to get a hold of the terrorists, but the day the shuttle was to take off, still I had no idea who they were, where they planted the bombs or when they were going to be triggered. I knew there were bombs because some of my men followed the bombers for years. They kept track of the composition, the dosage, even the providers for the ingredients. However, these pieces of information came always a little too late. We could only find the workshops they used for constructing the bombs, but not the bomb makers. We never discovered their identities; this is how good they were. Nor could we find the bombs. As soon as we discovered anything about them, we completely lost track of them again."

He sipped his coffee. His look was very distant. He seemed to be looking somewhere beyond me, seeing things that weren't there.

"All but one" he continued after a brief pause. "They all eluded me, except the one I figured they would use to destroy the coms of the spacecraft. That I understood at the very end. This one was different, you see. They had to use a nanocomposite to keep it inactive. Otherwise, it would've exploded in mere hours. What I did was..."

Another sip. He gulped the coffee, then:

"I tracked the nanocomposite using its blockchain signature, or rather reconstructing it from pieces I could find. But eventually I lost that one too, probably when it was shipped to the spacecraft. I mean... they were all definitely sent there in the end. To the spacecrafts, Amanda, do you understand? Not the shuttles, the spacecrafts themselves. To all three of them. This is what they were built for. What I'm saying is, I lost track of them when they sent them up there. They had inside hands, too... Bastards."

My father was kicked out of the force when he started spending the department's money to find active terrorist cells that weren't there. The terrorist paradigm got eclipsed in the last decades before leaving the planet. Terrorists became that thing that only an obsessed guy could see. They were a myth, a thing of the past, in there with ninjas and the Hashishins. You needed to be a lunatic to believe in them. And my father was that lunatic. He followed some imaginary active cell around for almost an entire year before he was told to pull off. He refused, obviously, and predicted a huge attack on Christmas eve. He attracted a lot of media attention, the attack never materialised, no terrorists were apprehended, and my dad's carrier was over. 

All he could do now, was watch from afar. He found employment at a museum, a night guard, but he kept looking for his terrorists. I remember him having long, interminable talks with mom. She was desperate. Gone was the life she used to have, when her only worry was whether the both of us would dine alone, or dad would join us, when she and her friends, wives of other officers, would compete in who had the biggest car, the biggest garage or the largest garden. Now she worried whether we'd even have something to eat in the evening, or we'd just sip out tea and gone to bed. No more new clothes, haut couture or otherwise, no more cars and no more gardens. All she could think now was tomorrow. Will we have something to eat? Will we have a roof above our heads?

My mother killed herself eventually. I always thought she was exaggerating when she worried so much, and later father told me I was right, too, but by then I had stopped believing in him or taking seriously anything he would say. Her suicide opened a gaping wound, a chasm between dad and me, that could never be bridged. I blamed him for her demise. Him and his crazy theories, his demented crusade, and the stubbornness with which he pursued something that was better left unstirred. I was big enough to understand what has happened, and my mother's radical approach to the problem made me think, at the time, that he would stop. All those conspiracy theories, all those terrorists who populated his imagination, I thought he would renounce them. But he didn't. On the contrary, he became more determined with his accusations, pointing to one minister or another, or to some general or some other man of the moment. He became a very hated man, an unpopular figure. It didn't take long for the government to take hold of him and check him in a mental institution for some years.