The silicone hand was put over the socket and the hand securely attached. When that was done, they took the man through some simple exercises.
The engineer said, “When you push your wrist muscles upward, the hand opens. When you relax your wrist muscles, the hand closes. Practice that.”
The man did so about a dozen times while the men watched closely. Each time, he became more comfortable with the manipulations.
The chemist nodded approvingly. “That is good. You are getting it. But you must keep practicing. Soon you will be able to do it without thinking. It will feel natural.”
The man in the chair rubbed the fake hand with the steel hook that constituted his other hand. “Does it feel real?” he asked. “I can’t tell.”
The engineer said, “Someone shaking hands with you will be able to tell it’s not real, simply by the texture and the colder temperature of the skin, but in all other respects it will look very real.”
The man seemed disappointed by this explanation and stopped looking at his new hand.
“You can never be what you were,” the chemist said bluntly. “But it is better than what you had, and we can do your other hand too, if you want.”
The man shook his head and held up his hook. “I want to keep this one. I don’t want to forget what happened to me.”
“You have your uniform?” the engineer asked.
The man nodded as he rose from the chair, still opening and closing his new hand. “That’s another memory, not that I need it.”
“What was your rank?”
“Sergeant. National Guard.” He flexed his new hand again. “And after it’s over?”
“You will be taken care of, as agreed,” the engineer answered.
“It’s nice, to be finally taken care of.”
“We will be in touch, in the usual way.”
They shook hands.
“Feels good to finally be able to do that,” the ex-National Guardsman said.
After he had left, the two men went back to work. There was another box on the table that was marked in Arabic. One of the men opened it. Inside wrapped in plastic was a stainless-steel canister. Inside the canister was a bottle filled with liquid. He lifted out the bottle and held it up to the light.
He well knew that, according to the FBI, the three deadliest substances in the world were, in descending order of lethality, plutonium, botulism toxin and ricin. The liquid in the glass vial was not nearly as deadly as any of those poisons. However, in its own way the substance was still very effective.
The hand he had just placed on the former National Guardsman had a pouch inside. When a tiny release button built into the skin was pushed and the wristbone was flexed a very special way, the pouch opened and any liquid inside it would be secreted through the artificial pores.
As they worked away, the chemist said, “He is bitter, that National Guardsman.”
“Wouldn’t you be?” the other answered.
CHAPTER
13
And then he had sat down and looked at his options, and a plan had slowly coalesced. There were many who would have looked at what he intended and called him hopelessly naive. That was not the way the world worked, they would have argued. You are doomed to pitiful failure, they would have pronounced. And yet these were the same people who had performed atrocities in certain parts of the world under the pretense of helping them. They committed these “crimes” for reasons as crude as money and power and expected to have their own way without ever being seriously challenged by those they had so clearly wronged. Now who was the naive one? Hemingway thought.
His “official” occupation had allowed him to crisscross the Middle East over the last few years. During that time he slowly formed the pieces to his puzzle, meeting with people he needed assistance from. He found skeptics aplenty, but then one man, someone he deeply respected and a longtime friend of his father’s, agreed to help. The man gave Hemingway not only access to people but the necessary funds to construct an elaborate operation. Hemingway did not believe for an instant that this gentleman didn’t have reasons of his own to do so. However, Tom Hemingway, American-born and -bred, even with all his contacts in that region and familiarity with its language and culture, couldn’t have possibly pulled off something this monumental on his own. And if he suffered from a certain idealism that bordered on naiveté, he was brutally realistic about how best his plan could be successfully carried out.
He often wished his father were still alive so that he could ask for his advice. He knew, though, what Franklin Hemingway would say: It is wrong. Don’t do it. But the son was going to do it.
And what was his true motivation? Hemingway had asked himself that question often as the process was unfolding. He had come up with different answers at times. He had finally concluded that he was not doing this for his country, and he was not doing this for the Middle East. He was doing this for a planet that was quickly running out of second chances. And perhaps also as a tribute for a father who was a man of peace but who died a violent death, because people patently refused to understand each other.
Perhaps it was as simple, and complex, as that.