Water to Burn (50 page)

Authors: Katharine Kerr

BOOK: Water to Burn

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“Who else goes in for our line of work?” He turned on the couch to look directly at me. “How many normal family men or career women do you see in your agency? I can’t think of any in mine. There’s too much lying, too much danger, the tedious kind of danger that’s mostly waiting for the worst to happen. Only a misfit would take the job.”

“That’s true.” I looked away and listened to my heart pounding in fear. “But I just don’t see how we can make any kind of commitment to each other. Your country’s always going to come first to you. I’ll always be waiting for you to leave me. Not for another woman, I mean, but for Israel’s sake.”

“If I go, I’ll take you with me.”

“But I don’t want to leave here. I’ve got my family to consider, and now, come to think of it, so do you. They’ve taken you in lock, stock, and barrel.”

Ari smiled as if he was about to make a smart remark, then let the smile fade. “That could present a problem.”

“It’s not the only one, either. What am I supposed to do? Sit in some flat in Tel Aviv and worry myself sick while you’re gone?”

“Gone?” He blinked at me in fake innocence.

“Yeah, gone! Wandering around the hill country pretending to be Iranian. What’s your cover? Just a simple tribesman herding goats? What do you look for out there? Military installations? Missile emplacements?”

Ari whistled under his breath. “You do puzzle things out, don’t you?”

“Hey, it’s part of my job. What would happen if the Iranian military caught you? I bet you wouldn’t live to reach a court of law.”

“Probably not, no.”

“Would I ever even know what had happened to you?”

“Probably not, though I assume you could guess.” He grinned at me. “After all, you are psychic.”

“Oh, great! And so one night I’ll have a nightmare where I watch you get shot or beheaded. Only it won’t be a dream. It’ll be true. No, Ari. I won’t live like that.”

The grin disappeared. He sat silently for a couple of minutes, weighing things out in his mind, or so his SPP indicated. “Well,” he said eventually, “I suppose I could compromise on my career choice.”

“Career choice. What a phrase to use!”

He laughed. He actually laughed. “True,” he said. “How about mission assignment, then? I can turn it down in the future. No one forces that kind of assignment on an operative. I’ve always volunteered for it.”

“Know something? You’re an adrenaline junkie.”

“What?”

“Someone who’s addicted to their own adrenaline, which starts flowing when they’re doing something dangerous.”

“I’ve never thought of it that way before.” Ari paused in contemplation. “But it’s a fair evaluation. Why else would I want to marry you?”

I decided that I must be psychotic to care so much about a man like him. He caught my hands in his and pulled me a little closer. His touch made me feel like melting. No, I realized that I’d already melted. Psychotic, I told myself. O’Grady, you actually love this guy. How could you?

“Nola?” he said. “Think of the Roadrunner cartoons. The coyote runs off the edge of the cliff, but as long as he doesn’t look down, he doesn’t fall. He can walk on the air. That’s what our marriage is going to be like. Just don’t look down, and we’ll do splendidly.”

“That’s absolutely nuts!”

He raised my hands to his mouth and kissed each of them in turn. “No, it’s a metaphor. It makes perfect sense.”

“I’m not going to marry you. I’m not going to marry anyone.”

“Oh?” He smiled his tiger’s smile. “We’ll just see about that.”

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AGENCY TALENTS AND ACRONYMS

ASTA
Automatic survival threat awareness

CDEP
Chaos diagnotic emergency procedure

CW
Chaos wards

CDS
Collective Data Stream

CEV
Conscious evasion procedure

DEI
Deliberately extruded images (visible only to psychics)