Aftershock (3 page)

It was as if trying so hard not to wish for something
made
it happen. When she called, I didn’t waste the chance. I asked her if she would sit with me long enough for me to say what I wanted to
say. She didn’t bother with a bunch of questions, not even “Why?” She just told me where she was.

I didn’t tell her a story. I told her the truth. Not just about what I’d been, but what I wanted to be.

We had plenty of time then. Almost a week. Mostly, I listened. I found out that Dolly had seen too much war—too much pain, suffering, death. The worst had been right in Switzerland, in a place where they treated torture victims. She told me she’d had to get out before she became like one of them. I didn’t understand what she meant, not then.

Dolly’s dream was to live somewhere on the Oregon coast. She loved the idea of being so near the ocean. One day, she was going to buy a little cottage there. She had scouted around for a long time before coming to that decision. But now she was sure—all she wanted was to be in a place where she could live in peace.

The only part of what she said that I felt inside myself was what she wanted. True north. That had always been my dream, too. I’d never had another one. Not until Dolly.

B
y the time we parted, I had my mission statement. For a man like me, there was nothing more.
“La mission est sacrée”
had been drilled into me long ago.

It took longer than I’d hoped to settle all accounts. But I knew impatience could turn fatal in a heartbeat. So I painstakingly erased my back-trail, then I waited alongside it like a wounded Cape buffalo. After a full year went by without anyone following, I was ready.

I held the phone in my hand for a long time. I still remember watching my hands tremble. I stared at them as if they belonged to a stranger. My hands don’t tremble.

I managed to dial the number. The new one I’d memorized the
last time we met. She had been griping about her lousy cell phone, and I told her I could probably fix it, me being so handy with tools and all. Only took a few minutes.

“Please don’t be afraid” is all I could think of saying when I heard her voice.

“I’m not,” she said, very calm. “But there better be more to this call or I
will
be mad.”

I didn’t play around. I’m no good at it. I knew I had only a little slice of time. And only one round chambered, anyway. So I let it loose.

“I have the place,” I told her. “The one you wanted. I want to show it to you. I could pick you up wherever you are. Or, if you didn’t want me to do that, I could meet you at the airport. Eugene—Eugene, Oregon—that’s the closest airport to the place I found.”

“But—”

“I’ll do anything you want.” I stopped her from saying anything more. “Just tell me what it is, and I’ll do it. On my life.”

I
t took her a few more weeks, but she did take that flight. And even then she only stayed a couple of weeks at the cottage I’d found.

After that, it was almost six months before she could do the same thing with her last job that I’d done with mine.

“Before” doesn’t matter anymore. Not to me, not to Dolly. We both gave up our opposite pasts. I mean, Dolly gave up being a healer; I gave up being a killer for hire.

I was honest with her about that from the beginning. She’d have to start over, so she couldn’t transfer her credentials. She’d always be a nurse in her heart and with her hands, but she couldn’t work as one.

Giving up my past—for me, that was nothing. I’d done it
before. It was no more than shoveling coal into a furnace, waiting, then shoveling out the ashes into a wheelbarrow. Finally, carrying them to a place where the wind would scatter them.

I’d had to do that before. This time, I
wanted
to. Still, that wasn’t enough. It was Dolly who told me I could never really leave my past until I atoned for it. Otherwise, it would haunt me from inside—I could never be at peace.

I remembered those torture victims in Switzerland, so I knew what she said was true. I never wanted to go back. To my work, I mean. As it turned out, the price of leaving that work behind forever was to do one more job of it.

T
he man who created the paperwork for Dolly’s new life was a genius. Not like some guy on TV who’s good at answering questions—the real thing. He was the same caliber as the one who’d told me to put every penny I had stashed into gold back when it was under three hundred U.S. an ounce. I did that. When he told me it was time, I cashed it all out.

So, when he told me to put it all back into gold, and then pull it away again, I did that, too.

I would have been shocked at how much money I ended up with, except that the genius never said anything he didn’t know. Which meant that most of the time he didn’t say anything.

I’m the same way, except for the genius part.

The ID man, he was so smart that he even said to my face that he wouldn’t want his daughter to be with anyone like me. And this was
after
I got her back from the man who had taken her.

It hadn’t been a kidnap thing. Not a grab, I mean. She went with this guy willingly. That was what he did, get girls to go with him.

“I never paid any attention to her,” the genius told me. “She
was my … daughter, I suppose. But she was really only her mother’s child, and her mother was too busy spending the money she extorted from me to spend time with her. It couldn’t have been too difficult for that
fils de pute
to convince my daughter that she wasn’t wanted. Not by me, not by anyone.”

“Except him.”

“
Oui
, except him. Except for that vulture. My Dominique was not … gifted in any way. She was not beautiful, she was not talented. She was just—and this I admit I could know only from reports—a good, decent girl. So when … ah, it must have been
so
easy for him.”

“What is it you want me to do?”

“Je veux la récupérer.”
Before I could ask him what “I want her back” meant to him, he switched to English, like he was downshifting to help him climb a steep hill: “No! Damn it! I don’t want her ‘back.’ She was never with me. Truth? I don’t want her at all. I just want her to have what she deserves. And no girl deserves …”

I switched to English, too. I was more comfortable saying certain things in that language—it must have been my native tongue. When I ran from that hospital, it was all I spoke.

I learned a few words of French on the street. More from Luc. And still more from La Légion. But now I use it only when I must reach back into my past.

“With all the information you have already gathered, I could … remove the vulture. But you have to know that your daughter will only return to the same—”

“Not if a message is left,” the man said in response to my unspoken statement that any abandoned child will go to the foulest flesh-peddler if she believes she is wanted. This I knew to be true.

He wanted more than death for that vulture—he wanted his skull on a stake, for all those of his tribe to see.

“He does his work alone, you said?”

“Yes, I said that! And, yes, he deserves the fate I wish for him. Just tell me the price.”

That’s when I spoke with Dolly’s voice. “There is only one price, payable on delivery.”

“Yes, yes. Just name it and—”

“Penance, that is the price.”

“Vous êtes dingue ou quoi?!”

“No, I’m not insane. I am saying this to you: If all you want is to remove an enemy, and perhaps leave behind a warning for others, I am no longer the man for such a job. But if you want to recover your daughter, if you want to atone for your abandonment that made her such easy prey, that I will attempt. And if you accept my terms, I will succeed or I will die.”

“I asked those in my employ to inquire. And your name came up, again and again.
C’est un tueur que je veux engager, tu piges? Pas un prêtre
.”

I translated the words easily enough: “I want to hire a killer, not a damn priest.” And I answered only: “I am no priest.”

“Yet you demand—”

“I demand nothing. I ask, I plead for an opportunity. I have much to atone for myself. This would be my chance as well as yours.”

He looked at me with the amoral measuring gaze of a buyer evaluating a blood diamond.

“Be clear” is all he said. “Be
very
clear, now.”

“I will remove the vulture. And any of his comrades necessary for me to complete that task. I will leave behind a warning that any who approach your daughter again will meet the same fate. I will return your daughter to you. What you will do is provide all the identifications I need. For that, I will pay you. For returning your daughter, you will pay
her
. You will pay what you owe her.”

“And you will succeed or you will die?”

“If you looked for me as you said you did, this you already know.”

He closed his eyes for a long moment. Then he nodded.

T
he vulture wasn’t hard to find. A young, light-skinned black man, not much older than the girls he pulled. I told him that I understood he had merchandise for sale, and that I represented a buyer. A wealthy buyer.

“Who told you where to find me, man?”

I broke into the rapid-fire, guttural Corsican French I had learned years before. I could see he didn’t understand a word, but the foreign language convinced him that the buyer was the kind of internationalist he’d probably been trying to connect with since he went into business. Putting teenage girls on the street was a small-profit deal. Between the emotionally anesthetic drugs always tempting the girls, and predators who only wanted to use the goods once, he couldn’t expect any of them to last long.

When he turned his head and yelled, “Neek, get your ass out here,” he didn’t know he had just closed his own coffin. By the time the girl stumbled into the room, struggling with the four-inch heels that were to be her working shoes, her “man” was under the same couch he’d been sitting on.

“Where’s D-mand?”

“He had to run out,” I said, holding up a pager to indicate that the dead man was taking care of business. “I’m the one who drives you to Seattle.”

“Seattle?”

“I just do what I’m paid for. And D-man—”

“—D
-mand
,” she corrected my error.

“I thought that was what I said. Anyway, you ready to go? He told me he had all new stuff for you waiting, so don’t worry about packing.”

“T
his isn’t the way to Seattle.”

“I know,” I said, switching my voice to everything she hadn’t been trained to expect: polite, educated, and respectful. “And I apologize for deceiving you. But it had to be done. D-mand sold you. To me, he thought. But, actually, it was your father who hired me to bring you home.”

“Home? My
father—
”

“I understand. But now … at least, give him a chance. He took some big risks, and spent a lot of money to make this happen. A lot of money to make you see the truth about that vulture—the one who just sold you like a used car. Your father knows that nothing he could say would persuade you that he did all this because he loves you. He only wants the chance to try. If you don’t like what you see, if you don’t want to be treated as he intends, he won’t stop you from leaving again.”

I didn’t have to immobilize her. The twin shocks of being sold like a piece of meat and her father actually wanting her were too much for her fragile system.

T
he new ID papers were waiting when I returned the girl. They were “start from scratch,” so the genius probably thought I needed American citizenship—he already knew I was a legal citizen of France.

What he didn’t know was that the ID he changed was itself legitimate. I’d been an American citizen for a long time. That was part of the price for some work I’d done in the Cambodia-Laos region.

I hadn’t been the only ex-legionnaire in the area. For some of
the older ones, the loss to the Viet Minh was still burning a hole in their guts. Some were just going back to familiar territory, drawing extra pay because they knew the terrain so well.

My job was different. The Americans wanted to know the truth of the “live sightings” of POWs being reported ever since a guy named Garwood walked up to a man in Hanoi and said he was a U.S. Marine who’d just escaped captivity.

Not many believed him—most thought he’d just gone over and the Viet Cong had kicked him loose when they had no more use for him. But his story had enough supporters to make the American government need “confirm or deny” info that would stand up if it was ever needed.

I understood that didn’t mean they’d ever tell the truth, no matter what I turned up. And they understood my backstory—so they knew I’d never say anything. To anybody, ever.

Nobody under the name they’d given me was ever going to come to anyone’s attention. I hadn’t worked since then. I’d never work under that name or any other. I was done with all that.

D
ominique is still with her father. Over the years, he’s helped me in many ways, refusing payment as if I had insulted him.

And he’s been true to his word. Never would he allow what is now the most precious part of his life to waste hers in a desperate search for love. Whether he ever believed anything else I’d told him made no difference. Not then, and certainly not now.

I
n the stretched-out moment when I heard the door open, I had plenty of time to make a decision before the first footstep creaked.

Time enough to slide the silenced pistol back into its compartment. Time enough not to push the button that would make the last five steps disappear. Any intruders who got this far might walk ninja-soft, but they wouldn’t be weightless. Easier to make the whole stairway disappear in a soft explosion, but the last thing I wanted to do was attract attention. That’s why the pistol was silenced. Even a fall from the stairs onto a concrete floor wouldn’t necessarily kill, and I had to seize any chance to learn how anyone had gotten so close.

How they had gotten past the only person on earth whose life mattered to me.

Inside that rocket-blast of thought was another one—no one could ever get that far unless Dolly had betrayed me. And if she had done that, my life was over no matter how this played out.