Cold Blooded Killer
Copyright© 2026 by Megumi Kashuahara
Chapter 14
The out-processing took four hours.
She sat in plastic chairs in fluorescent lit rooms and moved from desk to desk and signed what they put in front of her and answered the questions they asked and didn’t answer the ones they didn’t ask. A specialist with kind eyes and a checklist asked her about her mental health using the language the checklist provided and she gave the checklist answers and the specialist checked the boxes and moved on.
Nobody asked about Syria. Nobody asked about Iran. Nobody asked about Raqqa or the woman with the IED components in a doorway in Ramadi or a yellow dress at 1,566 meters or a waiter holding a cup of coffee on a sidewalk at fifty feet.
Nobody asked about any of it because none of it existed.
She signed the last form and a sergeant she’d never seen before shook her hand and said thank you for your service and she nodded and picked up her duffel and walked out of the building into the Afghan afternoon for the last time.
Paterson was leaning against the wall outside.
Not waiting — just there, the way he was always just there, coffee in hand, the economy of a man who had learned not to waste motion on things that didn’t require it. He looked at her the way he’d been looking at her for four years. Reading her. Taking in the full picture.
She stopped in front of him.
They stood in the Afghan afternoon and the base ran its routines around them and neither of them said anything for a moment that stretched longer than it should have.
“Four hours,” she said finally.
“They’re efficient.”
“They asked me if I was okay.”
“What did you tell them?”
“Yes.”
He nodded slowly. Looked at the folder under her arm — her discharge papers, her separation documents, the official record of Park Min-Ji that contained all the things she’d actually done and none of them.
“Three weeks,” he said.
“I know.”
She looked at him. At the face that had been the one constant thing across four years and three countries and a count she’d stopped being certain of somewhere between eighty-five and ninety-five. The face that had handed her coffee on tarmacs in the dark and said her name when rank wouldn’t carry what needed to be said and kept an unofficial record in the back of a notebook because someone needed to bear witness and nobody else was going to.
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