Chapter 5 Black Envelope

The sound of footsteps and tires on the asphalt faded into the distance as the last of the mourners departed.

The cemetery emptied gradually leaving Van alone at the grave site. The freshly turned earth was still dark and the black envelope still resting besides Laura's headstone.

Van looked around the now empty cemetery. He wouldn't be surprised if he saw something strange because everything from his wife and son's death had been strange. The suspicious explosion, the shrapnel in his pocket, the rushed autopsy, the strange lady under the withering tree, the weird photographer and now, the envelope.

He looked from the ridges to the treeline. From the gates to the far corners of the cemetery. He saw nothing out of the ordinary.

He turned his attention to the envelope. He bent and picked it up while feeling it for a letter bomb. It was made of rich, high-quality card stock paper. Satisfied that it looked clean, he focused on the exterior. Something that would indicate a sender. It was blank. No name or logo. No stamp or seal. Just the weight of it carrying something inside.

Van didn't open the envelope right away. He looked around the cemetery once more to see if anybody was watching him. Probably the person that sent the envelope. He still saw no one. Maybe they were watching him and he couldn't see them.

He used his body to block the wind. With his finger under the flap, he ripped the envelope open in a clean snap of his thumb.

Inside, was a photograph.

Van stared at it with a mixture of disbelief and inquisition.

It was a hi-res shot of his street, taken from an elevated vantage point across the avenue.

He could see his brown truck captured in perfect clarity, stopping at the red light of the intersection a short distance from his home. But the true focus of the camera's lens wasn't the truck. It was the building in the background.

This was not the aftermath. It was moments before.

No, the photo was captured the moment the destruction happened.

The building was already burning a bright orange of a signature military-grade accelerant expanding outward from the front door. This was before the blast.

It confirmed what he knew.

Every detail was to the minute. The streetlights reflecting off the pavement, the darkened window of Noah's bedroom, the displacement of the air rippling across the concrete. The camera used to capture this moment had been carefully calibrated and positioned well in advance. Like they knew what was going to happen.

Who were they? Van thought.

They were there right when it happened. His mind went to the phone call he received during the explosion.

‘Your house just exploded'

Were they the same person?

Whoever it was had timed the detonation perfectly. They had watched him watch his world burn.

No he didn't watch his world. It was already destroyed by the time he got there but he could see it burning now. In the photograph he was holding.

His eyes were glued to the image that it seemed to move, like a live video. Etching every pixel of the destruction into his memory, but his hands remained steady.

No grief.

He didn't squeeze the photo in a fit of rage. He didn't scream at the empty graveyard. He simply flipped it over.

The back of the photo was blank too.

There were no long texts claiming responsibility. There was no list of demands. There was no confession or details pointing to a sender either. Just three words, typed dead center in red ink.

“We Remember Sig”

He read it once. Then again.

“Sig?”

It didn't make any sense.

And then, it did.

Sigmar.

Sig was short for Sigmar

His call sign in the military.

Twelve years ago. Task Force Nexus. It was classified. The unit they buried in the desert and told the world it never existed.

He clenched his jaw, his muscles tightening under his suit.

It wasn't just any generic call sign known by ordinary infantry grunts. Not even one of his mates during the continental wars knew it. It was only familiar to people who had a high clearance level.

Sigmar was a ghost. A dead man, buried beneath a decade of falsified government records. A man with a quiet life in an auto garage on the outskirts of town.

If they knew that name, then they weren't common people. They had to have unrestricted access to the most secure military archives in the nation.

Only a handful of people alive even knew General Zero had survived the war, let alone retired to become a civilian mechanic in this part of the country.

If they knew his name, they should know his operational history. They should know his service records. They should know exactly what he was capable of doing.

Was this a provocation?A summons?

They had orchestrated the murder of his wife and child using evidence he could identify. The shrapnel, the accelerant.

Wait a minute, the military SUVs he saw twice. At the traffic and at the wreckage.

It was all starting to make sense now.

His cover was gone. He was completely exposed. By whom? He did not know.

Van shifted his focus back to the object in his hand. He held the envelope up to the sky.

He checked the flap under the light. He rubbed the edges between his fingers.

The paper was chemically treated, smooth and designed specifically to repel moisture and resist tearing.

He tilted the photograph, checking the surface for any imperfections.

The seam was machine cut. No fiber. No residue. Whoever sent this wore gloves, probably double. Professional. No careless mistake for him to exploit.

He put the photo back inside the envelope and tucked it into the inner breast pocket of his suit, resting it right next to the shrapnel he had taken from the morgue.

He moved away from the grave. The weather was still damp like it had been during the funeral procession. He had nothing else to do in the cemetery. The funeral was over, his family laid to rest. Now he just had to head home, whatever that meant now.

He turned towards the gate and he felt something whip past his ears.

A bird? An insect? He thought.

The headstone beside him cracked. It wasn't Laura's or Noah's. Someone else.

He recognised the crack and instinctively he fell low.

He couldn't hear the sounds until they made an impact around him. Dust from cracked marbles fell on his back. Dirt hit his cheek.

He rolled and came up on one knee behind a gravestone.

He didn't have to look around and search the distant rooftops for the telltale reflection of a glass scope. He looked straight down.

Right over his heart against the dark fabric of his suit, rested a single, steady red dot.

Van exhaled. He shifted his weight.

The wind moved the leaves.

The red dot didn't move with them.