by M. C. Cerny
“You’re just mad you got no warm pie to be sticking it in.” Eli teased.
“Ain’t that the God’s honest truth.” He laughed grabbing a beer.
“Hey you know what I missed the most about being gone?” Jordan fished around in his cargo pants that probably held more wires, nuts, and pliers than any tech first petty officer had a need for.
“What’s that J-man?”
“New fucking iPhone bitches!” He took out the phone turning it on. Bells and whistles cued up the new X-Gen phone and I thought about how I still hadn’t replaced mine with the crack in it, but I made sure Claudia had the newest one. Jordan might have a point.
“Dude let’s leave the newbie a little love note!”
“Yeah!” I shook my head as the crew got together leaving a video message for Eddie singing shit from the jukebox and instructing him not to do anything we wouldn’t do. I loved these assholes. Best crew I could have ever gotten messed up with.
“Boss get in here. Tell Eddie you love him! Don’t be shy!” James grabbed me around the neck and left a message. I was ready to get out of there and get home.
My own phone buzzed with a message. I slipped the phone from my pants turning it over to read the text. The Admiral was asking to see me. Donovan Perry wasn’t a man you said no to and I adjusted myself thinking it could be hours until I got to my girl. Duty called and I answered. I left Claudia a message before heading out letting her know I’d be running late. Our happy reunion and birthday celebration would need to be on pause a little longer.
“Welcome home soldier.” His smile didn’t exactly reach his face and something told me this wasn’t exactly a social call with Admiral Perry. The dust had barely settled on our last mission before they helo-lifted us out of there quick. He seemed distracted and shuffled through files on his desk picking one up in particular. He motioned for me to sit and I grabbed the chair directly in front of him fitting my overly large frame in the ridiculously cramped seat.
“Yes sir.” I sat and waited for him to start when he pushed the file over to me.
“Imagine my surprise when your face kept coming up in our facial recognition software, son.” He sat back in his chair. His arms folded over his middle paunch observing me.
“I’m not sure I understand what you mean?” Grabbing the file, I flipped it open to the first page. My hands shook pulling out a photograph comparison of the two men side by side. My eyes saw it, but my mind felt deceived.
It was uncanny and disturbing.
“He’s a dead ringer for you, isn’t he? Or maybe you’re a dead ringer for him.” The Admiral had a strange expression on his face I couldn’t place behind his glacial green eyes, nearly grey when he observed me. We were never close, but I had always felt like he watched out for my team with a special interest on deployments.
I regarded the file examining the angular jaws, high cheekbones, noses slightly different, his was nicer truth be told, but my eyes were a different shade of green. Our skin tone different, I was weathered whereas he tanned well, but something a summer outside would fix. My hair was definitely lighter from being in the sun even shorn close to my head. Smirking, I could tell right down to our muscle tone it would be hard to tell us a part by the way he filled out a suit. I would never be caught dead wearing one unless Claudia had her way for our wedding. The only thing between us was the one question I had yet to ask.
I hedged verbalizing the obvious. “It’s close.” I dismissed putting the file back on the edge of the desk curious. I’d rather the Admiral disclose answers instead of me guessing.
Admiral Perry leaned over the desk, “Do you know who he is?”
“Personally? No. We don’t exactly run in the same circles.” I shrugged my shoulders indifferent. How could we know each other? His photo screamed rich, and privileged.
The Admiral looked me over, his eyes hooded, and my chuckle dried up in my throat. Son of a bitch, he didn’t believe me.
I edged forward tapping the file with my pointer finger annoyed that this was the shit dragging me away from my girl. “No, I don’t know him.” I said with all the seriousness of the world.
I didn’t know him, but the man in the photo was in every newspaper and on every television because he was a criminal the feds couldn’t nail. I might have spent the better part of my adulthood deployed overseas, but everyone knew the drug runner and arms dealer with more money than God. That part wasn’t a secret. I’d just never given him a second look until now.
“His name is Adam Huntley.” Admiral Perry said with the unspoken acknowledgement that he was unmistakably my doppelgänger if I stood in the right light.
“Sir, I’m confused. Are you asking me if I know him or questioning something else?” My anger was on a slow boil, but it would flip this fucking desk if he called my loyalty to America in to question. I wasn’t fucking around.
“I’m sorry, Henderson.” The Admiral got up from his desk and turned around no longer facing me.
Over his shoulder he continued to speak and I wished I had still been holding the file I was pretending to have no interest in. “Before you were granted security clearance into the Infiniti Alpha Squad, everyone is thoroughly vetted.”
“I know. I gave my consent for that. Full background check and everything.” I rubbed my finger over the fatigues covering my knee. It was less a nervous gesture and more out of irritation which was close enough. I certainly wasn’t prepared for what he would tell me next.
“Adam Huntley is your brother–biologically speaking.”
My silence echoed in the office reverberating off the walls like a freshly detonated IED.
“Sir?”
I reached for the file flipping it back open but finding nothing of that information.
“Your mother was in the system. Young. Prostitution charges, drugs, you name it. Your adoption file was sealed up until now.” He didn’t look at me saying these things and I wondered if he somehow thought less of me. The realization stung. I considered this man a sort of father figure given his rank and involvement on our missions.
I knew those facts about my mother already, those weren’t a secret. What I didn’t like was him knowing and prying into a past I had closed the book on.
“My mother died giving birth to me in a hospital. I was put up for adoption just hours old. I have parents, but you know this already.” My adoptive parents, the ones who raised me didn’t hide things or shelter me. When I was sixteen, the Hendersons sat me down and gave me what information they could. A file they kept of everything they knew, precious little, but enough I didn’t want to pursue looking for a headstone of a woman who merely carried me for eight months before birthing me early and hemorrhaging to death. In some ways, I was luckier than the kids who formed an attachment and then ended up in the system with a black trash bag filled with broken memories. I enlisted in the service at eighteen so I wouldn’t feel guilty for them paying for college. Part of me wanted to atone for her wastefulness, for forcing the burden of my care onto someone else.
The brother, well that part, I didn’t know about him.
I wasn’t sure I even believed it.
“Yes, but this was before and not included in the sealed records.”
I leaned over in the chair to catch my breath, my head between my knees. The shock was bitter tasting and bile turned the beer in my stomach making me dizzy.
I looked up, “What are you saying?”
“Adam is your older brother by six year years. The couple that adopted you didn’t want a toddler so they took you, a baby.” I hadn’t been told that part, the part where they rejected him. The part where we might have spent even a moment together breathing the same air, possibly loved by the same woman.
I guess what they told me had been a sanitized version not in the file, if this was all true, and that was a big if. My mother Anna made Mother Theresa look like a sinner and my father Marlon never had so much as a parking ticket in his life. It was hard to believe those two God feari
ng people would have lied to me about anything, even a lie of omission.
“I’m still confused what the hell this has to do with me right now. I’ve never met him. I’m not a fucking sleeper agent or a gangster with a reality television show.” He laughed shaking his head and I missed the punch line.
“We know that, shit if you were a sleeper agent, you’d be a fucking nightmare to ferret out. No son, it’s your uncanny bone structure that is so similar you keep coming up in the blocked searches because you have a military profile. It’s become quite the joke with Interpol every time we get a damn inquiry from the facial recognition, except for that nose of yours.” He smirked waving.
I touched the bridge feeling the slight crooked tilt thanks to a football game a decade ago. “Football.” I murmured like I was reminding myself I really did have a life before this moment of revelation.
He nodded.
“We can’t exactly tell them what you’re doing in a Tel Aviv market place looking for caches of weapons when he’s abroad watching a Manchester United football game.”
“Nice life.” I muttered.
“The fucker is on so many watchlists he pings more often than an arcade game.”
“Guess he keeps Interpol on their toes.” I muttered.
“When he’s not making deals with the Murphy and the Perez gangs or tormenting the Russians with art forgeries, sure.” Admiral Perry waved off the comment.
The Murphy gang was big time Irish mafia who recently bombed a bus in Edinburgh killing a half dozen people including an English parliament member. The Perez gang owned Newark, NJ. The latter I knew from living the next town over in Montclair with my family as a kid. These weren’t state secrets, but they were a kind of secret, wrapped up tight in pretty wrapping paper on the shittiest birthday ever. Yet another thing we shared even six years apart, as if our mother had planned our conception.
“Pardon me for failing to find the humor in this, sir. Are you saying that when agencies investigate him, they keep finding me?”
“Yes. Despite your level five clearance and lack of social media presence, try telling Interpol you can’t pull a deep-cover SEAL off a mission for questioning. It brews quite an international fiasco.”
“Fuck.”
“Exactly, but I’d like to use this to our advantage.”
My commander’s face showed excitement glinting in his eyes. I wasn’t sure what he meant or how I could help my country bring down one badass mother fucking arms dealer who shared a portion of my unfortunate biological DNA. The shock hadn’t worn off, but I knew better than to show my hand by reacting to this. Considering my adoptive parents weren’t around to ask why they sanitized my origins I didn’t exactly have full faith in the Admiral reciprocating the same.
“How?” If we were bringing him down, I wanted in.
“A mission. Off the books of course.”
“How long?” I wanted to know what kind of time I had before my life was no longer mine again.
“Long enough to secure a cache of weapons he’s been supplying rogue governments. With the way you look, we might be able to get you on the inside.”
“So, we take him out and recover the weapons.”
Admiral Perry grunted. “He’s got global contacts we can’t touch, son.”
My mind calculated the implications of this. Even one warhead had the capability to end the world. “Are we talking like World War III?”
“We’re already there, this is more like damage control in the Middle East.” He grabbed the file and secured it in his desk. This wasn’t over by a long shot even if my head was spinning. “We can talk logistics before leave is over.” He said, but I had a feeling my month was steadily ticking away like sand in glass, grain by grain.
How the hell would I explain this to Claudia?
If I even could.
5
Elizabeth
“May I have this dance?”
I turned from my small group making idle chat to the voice at my side. An older gentleman, in a suit smiled brazenly under the candlelight. He looked to be in his forties, more weathered than Adam, but happier, an unusual emotion to me.
After the pomp and circumstance in the church, I was eager to get through tonight. Survive until morning. Endure the brunch or whatever it was we had to do in the morning with an intimate group of fifty or so onlookers judging my post-sex blush. Adam said he had to take care of business before we left for our honeymoon and my nerves were frayed to the max.
“Have we met?” I asked, taking in his stone-grey eyes and russet hair that greyed in dignified wing tips from his temple. I’d never seen him before. He reminded me of a real-life Dr. Strange, though I knew there was no way this man could bend time and save me from this nightmare. I thought for sure Adam had hobnobbed me to everyone he deemed important already.
His lips quirked upward as if I’d made a joke. Whatever it was, I missed the punch line.
“No, I’m afraid Adam hasn’t given me the pleasure, though your husband does talk quite a bit about you.” He beamed at me kindly with his hand held out. I didn’t get that itchy feeling in my gut warning me off, but that didn’t mean this man wasn’t in the same league as Adam.
Adam would say, be careful little bird, but since he wasn’t here, I took the stranger’s lead.
“Does he...” I murmured taking the man’s hand. I scanned the ballroom for Adam, but he seemed suspiciously absent. I was certain that fact wouldn’t last long and I shivered thinking how angry he might be with me. I wasn’t supposed to be talking with persons unknown to me which made for an awkward wedding reception. All I could see were suited men and lavishly dressed women. This felt more like a who’s who of the criminal underworld at a charity event, one being the end of my life if I was lucky.
“Oh, he does, and quite fondly.”
I snorted and then coughed to cover it up. I couldn’t picture Adam fond about anything except maybe the dogs. I missed Beau, Bear, and Gus terribly.
“You have me at a disadvantage.” I said seeing my brother and Fi at the edge of the ballroom dancing together. Worst case, I’d excuse myself and make my way over toward them through the sea of finely suited sharks. The man followed my gaze and nodded as if he knew the source of my unease had left me here without a life preserver.
“I’m Jonas Kildare, a longtime acquaintance of Adam’s.” He said filling in the gaps.
“My husband is…” I didn’t get to finish as he interrupted me.
“He’s gone off to a meeting, not that he would have told you, m’dear. He’s always been tight lipped I’m afraid.” The gaze he gave me this time was sadder, pensive, like he knew our marriage was something unorthodox. I wanted to scan the ballroom again, but I didn’t want to give away my hesitation. Adam trained me to be a queen at his side, and I couldn’t forget that ever, especially on a night like this.
“His business is important to him. I respect that.”
Jonas Kildare nodded and guided me out to the center of the dance floor. I felt the eyes of the room turn my way and forced my smile on a less than brave façade.
“About that dance?”
“Sure.” I placed my hand in his and he whirled me into the crowd of dancers. Eyes hawked our movements and my stomach lurched. Where the fuck was my husband? We twirled passed a Russian pakhan who held a buxom blonde in his arms. The Santorini brothers were doing shots at the open bar laughing. The Irish couple from Boston I met earlier grinned at me as if I were enjoying the attention.
And was it odd that in moments like this, feeling lost and alone I sought him out? It was clear Adam Huntley was the least responsible party in offering comfort, but I took his promises seriously as I did his vows. This wasn’t a love and cherish you, kind of moment, it was one of panic and sinking ships with carnage and impending doom.
Jonas Kildare spun me through a waltz as other couple elegantly twirled by us. His pace kept me steady as I focused on the steps.
One. Two. Three. Four.
/> Turn.
One. Two. Three. Four.
Turn again.
I didn’t know what his agenda was, I almost didn’t want to, and I hated how his fingers gripped my wrist as if he were measuring my heartbeats to see how unnerved he made me. Courtesy and saving public image prevented me from snapping my wrist out of his clinical grasp.
He leaned in to speak as the music continued playing and sweat pebbled between my corset and silk. “I do believe he cares for you, honestly. In his own Adam-ish way.”
One. Two. Three. Four.
Turn.
One. Two. Three. Four.
Turn again.
I felt dizzy.
I gulped back my need to scream and thrash. Anything Adam-ish was likely twisted and depraved. I only had a few more hours to confirm that truth, but I knew it already.
Grinning toward the crowd and Eddie who toasted me with his glass of bubbly champagne I said, “He is a devoted man to the things he holds dear.”
Kildare tipped his head back and chuckled loud enough to draw attention to us.
“Oh m’dear, you have no idea.” He continued to struggle maintaining his mirth which covered my quaking steps.
One. Two. Three. Four.
Turn.
One. Two. Three. Four.
Turn again.
A hand snaked around my middle, hot and wanting. I breathed in the essence of Adam immediately and calm washed over my pounding heart. His absolute control and my utter lack of was something I would have to hone and quickly.
“Elizabeth.” He practically growled against my curls spinning me into his arms and out of Kildare’s clutches. “I don’t think you’ll mind me stealing my bride back.” His hands stroked down my arms rubbing up and down. I stopped shaking and found myself curled against his tuxedo clad chest. If he were anyone else and this were some other place, I might have found comfort in his overprotective embrace.
“Of course not, Adam. She’s a lovely girl and you’re very lucky. I wish you both many years of happiness and health.” Kildare smiled, the last said with a pause before resuming. “I’ll see you when you return? Same schedule?”
