Ashes (24 page)

“Don’t tell me I’m saying
aboot
and
eh.
Am I?”

“No. You sound happy. I haven’t heard you sound this way in a long time.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

Jennifer thought it over. Thought what so many people would say about her life now. Going nowhere. Maybe so.
I live in a small town in British Columbia, where I’m an assistant librarian. I putter around with books and have tea with my boss and we talk about what we’re reading. I have a cross-eyed cat and a tiny house with fish painted on the bathroom walls and a bedroom done in early San Francisco Whorehouse. I tutor a fisherman’s son. I hang out with my next-door neighbor and bake cookies. I’ve put on five pounds since New Year’s and my only valentines this year were from my sister and an eight-year-old kid. This is my life.

“You know something, Cin? I think you’re right.”

“...a
nd so the doctor says, 'Are you sexually active?' and I say, 'No, I just sort of lie there and let her do all the work!'”

Groans from around the table. Sean stared at his cards, a pair of kings and three junk cards. Dared not laugh, though the joke was one of Beatty’s better ones. Laughter would only encourage him, and they all knew where that would lead.

“Beatty, your jokes are like a bottle of Montrachet I once had,” Robert said, not taking his eyes off his own cards.

“Aged like fine wine?”

“Quite the contrary. Turned to vinegar upon decanting.”

Sean decided to chance it, hope he got something good to augment the kings. “I’m in.”

Junk cards handed in, Robert began to deal. “Here is Belladonna, the Lady of the Rocks, the lady of situations,” he said, distributing cards as the players requested. Clockwise around the table. Robert, Halsey, Beatty, himself. “Here is the man with three staves, and here the Wheel. And here is the one-eyed merchant, and this card, which is blank, is something he carries on his back, which I am forbidden to see.”

“I do not find The Hanged Man,” said Beatty rotely, bored.

“Fear death by water,” said Halsey.

Three cards waiting for him. Sean added them to his hand without looking at them.

“Irish? You in?” asked Beatty.

“Yes,” he replied. Still not looking at the cards.

“How much?” asked Robert.

“All of it. Everything.”

“Oh, Christ almighty,” Halsey said, glaring over his cards. “This is exactly the sort of thing I’ve been talking about. I mean, you honestly can’t expect us to excuse this level of risk. If I wanted you to think outside the box I wouldn’t have put you in the box to start with.”

“It worked for B. F. Skinner,” Robert said.

He looked at his cards. All five were blank.
Something he carries on his back, which I am forbidden to see.

“Who?” asked Halsey.

“Never mind,” replied Robert.

I do not find The Hanged Man.
“Finish the game without me,” he said. “I think I should go.”

“No need to rush off. Stick around, I’ll tell the one about the Jew, the Frenchman, and the nun.” Beatty leaned forward, rested his chin on his fists, grinned. “And besides, go where?”

“Florida.” The first thing he could think of.

Halsey snorted. “Florida’s
gone.”

“What do you mean?”

“What I said,
gone.
We went through that in your debriefing. You
were
there, weren’t you?” snarled Halsey.

“Don’t be mean to Irish. I didn’t know, either.”

“Beatty, you’ve been dead for three months. That gives you an excuse to be out of the loop.”

“Point taken.”

Sean stared at the blank cards. He wanted to raise his eyes from the cards, raise his body from the chair and leave, but could not. “I think I should go,” he said again, hoping that by saying it he could make it so. With an effort that brought sweat to his forehead he managed to put the cards down, put his palms flat on the table to push himself up. “I’ll see you later,” he said.

A hand shot out, caught hold of his left wrist, held it fast. “Not too much later, my friend,” said Robert.
“Tempus fugit.”
Robert’s grip was like iron, but the hand itself was emaciated, skin stretched tight over the bones, a sick man’s wasted claw.

Another hand caught hold of his right wrist. This hand was cold, very cold, slimy and gray and bloated. Yet the grip was iron-tight as well. “After all, what are friends for?” Beatty said, voice gurgling and brackish.

Sean stared at his blank cards, at the hands that held him fast. He would not raise his eyes, would not look beyond their hands, would not look at their faces. Felt some force take him gently by the head and tilt it back, slowly and inexorably.
I won’t look, I won’t, I —

Opened his eyes. Saw the darkness of two a.m., felt the bed beneath him. A dream. So many years had passed since he had dreamed, he thought he had lost the ability. He let out his breath in a deep sigh, feeling a tremor in his chest.

He thought of a time about six years ago, at Monique’s apartment in D.C. She sitting up on the bed, wearing her glasses and one of his dress shirts and nothing else, something he always found tremendously sexy. He lay with his feet by her head, propped up on his elbows, painting her toenails. They enjoyed doing little favors like that for each other; favors that would have grown stale had they seen each other every day, year in and year out. He remembered the color of the nail polish, a dark burgundy called Paris Promenade, and the movie that was on her TV,
Casablanca.
Both of them had seen it so many times they no longer needed to give it their full attention, could recite the dialogue to each other if they were so inclined.

Monique was going to Europe on business; he’d written up a list of handy phrases for her in several languages, and now she read it over. “Not that I don’t trust you completely,” she’d said, “but when I tell the cab driver
Nehmen Sie mich zum Flughafen,
I’m not really saying ‘My hovercraft is full of eels’?”

“Certainly not,” he’d replied. “It means ‘Why not come back to my place? Bouncy-bouncy!’.”

“Yes, well. That puts my mind at ease.”

“Moni? Do you dream?”

“You know how to change a subject,” she said, taking off her glasses and looking at him. “Subtle, Flint.” Flint, as in
Our Man
and
In Like,
the nickname she’d given him when he’d told her, in a general sense, what he did for a living. “Everyone dreams.”

“I don’t seem to,” he said, applying the second coat of Paris Promenade to her right toes.

“You probably don’t remember them. Some people don’t, that’s all.”

“Do you?”

She nodded. “In fact, I keep a diary of my dreams. I’ve got a little book in my table here, and every morning when I wake up I write down what my dreams were. And no, you can’t read it.”

“You’re a tease. So, what was playing at the dream theater last night? At least tell me that.”

Monique put her hands back behind her head, leaned back and looked at the ceiling. “I was running up this grassy hill. It was at night, and the moon was out, but I could still see how green the grass was. And I came up over the hill, and I saw this little valley below it. Here’s where it gets weird. The valley was, oh, five feet deep in stuffed animals and plushy toys. Over the whole floor of the valley, as far as you could see. And it was like the grass, I could see all the colors even though it was night.” She closed her eyes, the better to see through memory’s veil. “So I went running down the hill, down into the valley. I was running over all the stuffed animals, bouncing along, doing cartwheels and somersaults and having a great time. And that’s it.” She looked at him, grinned. “Pretty silly, right?”

“No, it sounds like it was fun.” He was thinking that he would like to tell Robert about Monique’s dream. Robert had recently mentioned one of his own dreams, a very long and complicated one involving, among other things, Louis Armstrong coming to his door to sing a Christmas carol.
How come I never dream, and if I did I wouldn’t dream anything that neat?
he’d wondered, and that was why he’d asked Monique if she dreamed. “It's got a David Lynch feel to it. All you need is a dancing midget.”

She made a face. “Ugh. I dreamed about that damned midget once. Don’t remind me. And don’t feel bad, Flint.”

“I don’t.”

“You do, or you wouldn’t have asked me. Dreams are just the garbage disposal of the mind. They don’t mean anything.”

Six years later, he thought of that conversation and he hoped that she was right.

* * *

S
ean sat at the kitchen table, a tiny table but fine for his purposes. He’d lain for an hour after the dream, waiting for sleep to return, and when it did not, got up and went into the kitchen. He did not put on the light, though it was still hours before dawn. He knew the apartment as well as a prisoner knows his cell and needed no lights. With a cup of coffee before him, he sat. And waited.

Waiting. He thought of one of his first missions, he and Robert intercepting an arms shipment. The beginning and end of the mission were fine: the beginning with its challenge of gaining trust and establishing the plan, walking the tightrope; the end with its life-and-death fight, a rush of adrenaline that washed away fear. The middle, though. The waiting. That was different. He remembered pacing back and forth in the safe house, not so much fearful as desperate to do
something,
and mentioned this to Robert.

“You are,” Robert replied. “You’re waiting.”

On an intellectual level he knew — as they all did — that waiting was necessary. To move too soon could lose the entire mission, not to mention your life (the latter was an acceptable loss, the former was not). He’d learned to live with it, if not enjoy it. So why did he sit here now in his dark apartment, drinking coffee and feeling something gnaw away at his insides? It was not the usual sense of impatience, wanting to see some action.

No. Not impatience he felt but uncertainty. The uncertainty was not about the mission — that was clear to him. When the time was right, snatch Blaine. Though he felt fairly certain that with the head dead, the body would also perish, he might have to eliminate anyone capable of carrying out the next bombing in Blaine’s absence. Take Blaine to Jennifer Thomson. Give her a gun. Beatty’s .38 perhaps, the grip was a good size and the kick not bad. After that was done, go to see Robert and find out how he fared, tell him how the mission had gone.

That wasn’t the problem.

What would happen after that?

For the first time, he didn’t know. No return trip to D.C. No debriefing. No R&R when he could play poker with Robert and Beatty, or take Monique to movies and to restaurants and to bed. No time simply to relax at home, for where was home, now? Florida? No, Florida
was
gone, in all the ways that mattered. He had no desire to return to the place of his exile, and besides, they would be waiting for him.

Never mind where he would go. What would he do?

For the first time since he turned his back on Halsey in the D.C. coffee shop, he realized that there truly was no going back. Especially after Beatty. Before, there was still a chance that he could have gone back. It would have been on hands and knees, begging, saying his
mea culpas,
but it could have been done. But now, having turned rogue and killed one of his own, that chance was lost. As lost as Beatty.

As lost as himself. For that’s what he was. Adrift. No land in sight, and he hated to admit it, but he was tired of squinting for the horizon. His arm ached from holding his hand up to shield his eyes, his head ached from the strain of watching out, everywhere, constantly. There was weight on his shoulders like a heavy stone. The weight of uncertainty, of looking over his shoulder to see who was behind him, of wondering which old compatriot he might have to kill next. The weight of the past, of wondering about other paths that might have been taken, of the growing suspicion that Robert was right and that they had been used. The weight of the future, and where that path might lead. If anywhere.

He took a sip of coffee, surprised to find it was cold. Outside the window, gray dawn was coming, soon to be blue morning sky. Good. The weather was warming, the crocuses were poking their heads up in Anna Blaine’s flowerbeds, and he was glad to see the last of the winter’s gray chill.

Sean watched the sun come up, felt the weight ease off his shoulders as daylight came. But not entirely. Somehow, somewhere, he had lost that old ability to throw off the weight.

* * *

D
own in Richard’s den, the radio was tuned to a 24-hour news broadcast. The volume was low, but all ears there were sharpened to hear one thing. If, as the one-year anniversary of the Los Angeles bombing neared, there was any hint of the perpetrator being anything other than Middle East crazies. By now all the men present at meetings, the core group and whichever messenger boys and minions might be needed, knew the rhythms of the news station and were attuned to listening for what mattered to them.

Sean sat with them, wondering when the time would be right to make the grab. Whether it was latent mistrust, general precaution, or dumb luck, he had never been alone with Richard. Oh, he supposed he could have whipped out the Mini-14 he’d taken from Henry Connolly’s truck, blown away everyone but Richard and made his escape. He could have, but he wouldn’t. He wasn’t like them.

There was something else, something not purely necessary to the mission but an added incentive. Sauce for the goose, as Robert would say. Sean wanted to enmesh himself in the group and gain Richard’s full trust and confidence, so Richard would be repaid the full measure of betrayal. For Richard was a traitor to his country, had betrayed 361 lives. Even the survivors, like Jennifer, would have to live with that betrayal, with the fact that one of their own countrymen had condemned them to death for no greater crime than working a government job.

Yes, Richard was a traitor, and the penalty for treason was well-known. The only difference was instead of judge, jury, and executioner, one person would mete out justice. Wasn’t that what every victim longed for? Justice?