by Titan Books
Henry shut the music off and marched up the dock to the booth outside the marina office. Yeah, Ms. Marine Biology was still on duty. She probably thought she was pretty slick, looking oh-so-innocent as she took out her earbuds and smiled like there was nothing going on. Maybe she was so young she really didn’t know what a pissed-off retired assassin looked like.
“Any luck?” she said brightly as he put the fiber-optic mic down on the counter in front of her. She stared at it for a moment, then looked up at him again, her smile tentative now. “Okay, most guys try flowers, or a playlist they think I’ll find romantic. But—”
Did she practice that ‘who, me?’ expression in the mirror? “Are you DIA?” he snapped.
“Um…that depends,” she said, still doing pleasant-but-bewildered. “What’s DIA?”
“Dance Instructors of America,” Henry told her. “Who sent you to surveil me? Was it Patterson?”
“‘Patterson?’” she said, frowning a little, like it was a word in a language she had never heard before.
The guileless child act was starting to get on his nerves. “Listen, you seem like a decent person,” Henry said, “but you’re burned. Your cover’s blown.”
She tilted her head to one side. “I was in the middle of a Marvin Gaye song, so I think I’ll just—”
“Name three buildings on the Darien Campus,” Henry said. “Come on, marine biologist, any three. Go ahead.”
“Really?” She looked at him dubiously.
“Really.”
She sighed. “Rhodes Hall, McWhorter Hall, Rooker Hall.”
“Now I know you’re DIA,” Henry said. “A civilian would have told me to piss off.”
“Not a polite civilian,” she said evenly.
“Damn, you’re good,” Henry said. “Keep it up, keep charming me—that’s straight out of the DIA playbook. Do you live near here?”
She blinked at him. “What?”
“Because I want to see your place—”
“Excuse me?” She drew back from him in alarm.
“—where I bet I won’t find a single textbook about marine biology, just a big ol’ file on Henry Brogan,” he finished, talking over her.
Suddenly she found her smile again, but not for him. Two fishermen were now standing behind Henry, patiently waiting their turn.
“This has been fun, really,” she said, “but I kinda have to do my job now. So if you don’t mind—”
“Okay, how about a drink, then?” Henry said. “Pelican Point?”
Her mouth fell open in genuine surprise. “Why? So you can keep interrogating me?”
“Maybe. Or maybe I’ll spend the whole time apologizing. Either way, they’ve got a great band on Mondays.”
Henry could almost see the wheels turning in her head like they had in Jack Willis. Should she say yes and then stand him up, should she drop the act and call for backup, were those two fishermen behind him going to start complaining, why the hell had she even gotten out of bed this morning.
“Seven o’clock,” she said finally. Her smile was hesitant and a bit wary. “But how about you leave the crazy at home? Please?”
Henry grinned without agreeing to anything.
* * *
Danny made a quick stop at her apartment to change into jeans and a UGA Darien t-shirt before going over to Pelican Point, getting there a little bit early so she could sit at the patio bar with a boilermaker and collect her thoughts. A couple of guys on the prowl tried their luck one after the other, a couple of minutes apart; to her relief, they didn’t try to change her mind when she made it clear she wasn’t interested. Some guys automatically approached any woman sitting alone in a bar; at least these two had taken no for an answer.
She was less certain about what she would say to Henry when he got here… if he got here. No, when, definitely. Henry wouldn’t stand her up, if for no other reason than to continue interrogating her. Or to apologize, although she had a feeling Henry didn’t do that a whole lot. Some people would not, others could not and they’d do anything to avoid it. Even ask someone out for a drink.
By contrast, she had seriously considered standing him up. She still wasn’t sure that having a drink with him was a good idea, not after the way he had treated her. What kind of person talked that way to someone they’d just met—especially a grad student on minimum wage? She knew what her father would have had to say about that. The two fishermen waiting behind Henry hadn’t heard the whole conversation, just enough that they had both given him a funny look as he walked away. They had given her a funny look, too. She’d just shrugged and said, “The customer’s always right,” and distracted them by getting right down to their business.
Flowers suddenly appeared on the bar in front of her, a colorful mix of blossoms not overly elaborate but more than something you’d grab at the last minute from a convenience store; definitely suitable for an apology. Henry Brogan sure knew how to do things, she had to give him that. As she turned to smile at him, she felt her face suddenly grow warm. Dear God, she was blushing like a kid, she thought, mortified, which only made her face grow even warmer.
“Aw,” she said, trying to think of some way to cover.
“Sorry about today,” Henry said, taking the stool on her right. “Old habit. I don’t trust easily. You probably don’t, either.”
Her heart sank; so much for her hopes that he was done being paranoid. “Why would you say that?”
He put a blank 8x11 sheet of white paper on the bar beside the flowers. She looked from it to him, shaking her head a little. “I don’t—”
Henry turned the paper over and there it was—her own face staring up at her from a color photocopy of her Defense Intelligence Agency ID badge. It was blown up to five times its normal size, so her full name—Danielle Zakarewski—was easily readable. So was her signature.
Danny slumped on her stool as all the energy she had marshaled for the evening drained out of her. She leaned an elbow on the bar, rested her forehead on her hand for a moment. “Where did you get that?”
“After twenty-five years of faithful service, you make a few friends,” Henry said. But his voice sounded gentle, not triumphant. He wasn’t gloating. It was one more way in which Henry Brogan had surprised her. Although maybe it shouldn’t have—all the information she had on him indicated he was a decent guy.
Danny finished her drink in one long pull and didn’t quite bang the mug down on the bar. “Well, now I’m burned,” she said, feeling herself sag a little more. “I’m toast. I’m burned toast.”
“Not your fault,” Henry assured her in the same kindly tone. “You were good. Buy you another boilermaker?”
She nodded glumly. A fine development this was, she thought. In the space of one day, her career had gone from on the rise with no end in sight to something you’d scoop up and bag while walking your dog.
“That’s a cop’s drink,” Henry said as the bartender put the mug and shot in front of her. “You got cops in your family?”
“My father was FBI.” In spite of everything, she couldn’t keep the pride out of her voice. “And pretty big on serving your country.”
“‘Was?’” Henry asked.
Nothing got by him, Danny thought. Whereas she hadn’t even noticed when he had taken the photocopy of her ID off the bar. This day just kept on getting better.
“He died off-duty,” she replied. “Trying to stop a bank robbery.”
“I’m sorry,” Henry said, and she could tell he meant it.
Before she could do something stupid like start choking up, Danny poured the whisky into the beer and picked up her mug. Henry picked up his own drink and clinked it against hers before having a sip.
“Your file says you were Navy,” he said. “Four years with the Fifth Fleet in Bahrain.”
“I did like the sea,” she told him. “What I didn’t love was living in a tin can with a couple hundred sailors.”
“That still beats a bunker in Mogadishu,” Henry said drily.
<
br /> “Yeah, I’ll give you that one,” she chuckled.
“After the Navy, you opted for the DIA, defense clandestine services,” Henry went on. “Recruiting and running assets. Not a single demerit. And then Internal Affairs put you on a dock to watch a guy who just wants to retire.” He gave her a sideways look. “That didn’t bother you?”
Danny smiled. Every agency had a lot of status-jockeying; it was as much a part of intelligence work as it was in the civilian corporate world. She decided to change the subject.
“You know what he loved most about the Bureau, my father?” she said, taking another sip of her boilermaker. “The letters: FBI. He said they stood for Fidelity, Bravery, Integrity. He talked about that a lot—in between boilermakers—” she lifted her mug slightly. “How the very name of the place reminded him every day how to behave. ‘Live up to these words,’ he’d say, ‘and I don’t care what you do for a living, I’ll be proud of you.’ I hope he is.”
“I don’t doubt it,” Henry said, as if he were actually in a position to know.
In spite of everything, Danny felt surprised and touched. For a moment, she wanted to tell him that meant a lot coming from him, and then caught herself. She was still on the job even if she was toast, and she had to behave accordingly. She was professional toast.
But that didn’t mean she couldn’t have another boilermaker.
* * *
Night had fallen by the time she and Henry left Pelican Point. Despite the less-than-optimal circumstances, she had found herself enjoying the evening immensely, trading stories with a man who was pretty much a DIA legend. Of course, she had been careful to edit what she told him and she knew he must have done the same. Still, this had been more fun than the last few dates she’d had. Maybe most of the dates she’d had. Or all of them.
“Well, I guess this is goodbye, Henry,” she said, hoping she didn’t sound quite as sorry about it as she felt. “It was nice surveilling you. And thanks for the flowers.” She held them up. “But I’ll probably be off to somewhere else tomorrow.”
“ Need a lift home?” he asked.
Danny shook her head. “My building’s right here.” She gestured at the apartment house barely fifty yards from where they were standing. She liked Savannah with its Historic District and riverboat cruises and the lively City Market, and she loved living near the ocean. But she sure wasn’t going to miss this place. The agency had insisted that she live there—it was so close to the marina she could see the parking lot from her living room—but the paper-thin walls and the lousy Wi-Fi had been the bane of her existence.
She offered him her hand for a goodbye shake, then held onto him for a few extra moments. “Henry…why are you retiring?”
He hesitated and she knew he wasn’t deciding which lie to tell.
“I found myself avoiding mirrors lately. I decided to take that as a sign.”
That would be Integrity, Danny thought; it went with his Fidelity and Bravery.
“You watch your six out there,” Henry told her.
“You too,” she said, laughing a little, turning toward her apartment house.
“Goodnight, Toast,” he added.
She laughed again but she couldn’t help feeling a little melancholy, too, as she headed for her front door. Every so often, she had one of those moments of clarity when she realized what a lonely way of life this was. The job required her to be among people but never as one of them, never with them. Not even other agents, not really; you always had to keep a bit of a remove between yourself and your co-workers, not get too attached to anyone emotionally. If they got killed, if they changed sides or turned out to be a double agent, an emotional reaction could screw up your thinking, make you hesitate or do the wrong thing. That was a great way to get yourself and everyone else on the job killed, or worse.
When you were off the clock, it wasn’t like you could just reset yourself to start connecting with other people the way a civilian would. And if you were connecting and enjoying the kind of social life regular people had, you couldn’t just flip a switch and turn it off when your handler called to say you were going to Savannah to keep a legendary agent under surveillance because he wanted to quit killing people. So you lived a separate life, kept yourself apart from everyone else. It was like being an air-gapped computer in a world where everyone else was online.
But once in a while—not often, almost never—you met someone and despite your best intentions, you couldn’t help connecting with them. You would get a glimpse of what it was like to have a relationship with another human being—a personal relationship of any kind, romantic or not. It happened to civilians all the time. They had the luxury of taking that stuff for granted; agents had to shake it off like a hangover.
And that was why this evening with Henry had definitely not been a date.
* * *
“Hey, Jack, you ever think about history?” Kitty asked from where she was standing outside at the rail.
Behind the bar, Jack Willis glanced up from the drinks he was mixing and laughed a little, not unkindly. He was a lifelong admirer of beautiful women; his wife was one of the most beautiful women he had ever met. In recent years, however, he had discovered that a woman who wanted to talk to him more than she wanted to go shopping had an extra special loveliness that went beyond big bright eyes, exquisite bone structure, or a killer body, all of which Kitty was also blessed with.
“That’s what I think about when I look up at the stars,” Kitty went on. “I think, cavemen looked up at those stars. Cleopatra looked up at them. Shakespeare. And they were the same stars. I mean, a couple hundred years is nothing to a star. That comforts me. I don’t know why.”
Jack didn’t know why, either. It was hard for him to imagine why a beautiful woman would need comforting unless she was in an accident or a war zone. He glanced out at her again and started slicing up a lime.
“The people in the past, they were looking up at the sky just like I am,” Kitty was saying. “And they felt just what I’m feeling—wonder. Which is the same thing people a hundred years from now are going to feel. It—”
Jack waited; the silence stretched and he knew even before he looked that Kitty was no longer at the rail feeling wonder about the stars. He drew his gun from the back of his waistband and moved out onto the deck, careful not to make a sound. Still no Kitty. He remembered what Henry Brogan had said once about how disappearing without a trace was a super-power all beautiful women shared. It’s how they ditch us for the cool rich guys.
If only that were true this time, Jack thought, his heart sinking. He had not reckoned anyone would dare take a run at him while he was still in US waters. There should have been enough time for him to offload Kitty at some safe haven, dammit—
He spotted the scuba tanks and swim fins on the deck just as a shadow in his peripheral vision moved toward him, becoming a figure with a gun. Jack lunged forward to meet him and the two of them struggled together, each trying to get the upper hand. It had been some years since Jack had gone hand-to-hand with anyone and he could feel the other man was stronger and probably younger. He had to finish this quickly or be overpowered.
Jack was still trying to force the barrel of his gun against his opponent’s chest when a shot rang out right beside his ear. Deafened, he fought harder, not knowing if he was hit, relying on adrenaline to keep him going. He almost had the gun against the other guy’s belly when an arm reached around from behind and put him in a headlock.
Damn, he’d have heard a second attacker sneaking up on him if that damned gun hadn’t gone off, he thought, and then everything went black.
* * *
The team of two worked quickly, moving in a deadly choreography that ended with the bodies of the primary target and his female companion trussed up, weighted down, and dumped off the stern. Neither of them had expected the job to be so easy; the woman was nobody but Willis was supposed to be a black ops badass. Obviously retirement hadn’t done him any favors because he’d gon
e down so fast, it was anticlimactic—disappointing, even.
They really hoped the rest of the jobs weren’t as easy. How were they supposed to maintain the high level of skill expected of them if the targets barely put up a fight?
CHAPTER 6
Henry Brogan was in a municipal outdoor pool in Philadelphia and he was drowning.
All around him, kids were kicking their legs, stirring the water into a bubbling froth, laughing like this was actually fun. And it was—for them. They weren’t drowning. Why? Why was he the only one drowning and everyone else who jumped into the water had fun?
Just when he was sure he was going to die, two strong hands grabbed him under the arms and pulled him out of the water into the bright, chlorine-scented air. Henry blinked the water out of his eyes, choking and gasping while his father grinned at him. His face was so enormous that it blocked out the whole world, even the sky. It was all Henry could see, that big grinning face and the mirrored sunglasses his father always wore; the lenses showed him twin reflections of his terrified five-year-old self, skinny in a pair of oversized trunks that needed extra ties to keep them from slipping off, gasping and squirming, desperate to get away because he knew what was coming next, what always came next.
We have to work on your kick! his father laughed, his voice bigger than the sound of kids shrieking and splashing. Concentrate, Henry! You’re five now—this isn’t hard! Now try again!
The two Henrys in the mirrored lenses flailed helplessly, then shrank as his father tossed him back, like a fish that was too small. His father’s shimmering shadow loomed over the water while Henry sank and kept on sinking down, down, down. The sound of that big booming laugh became muffled.
Panic hit Henry like an electric shock. He tried to scream and managed only a muted, high-pitched burble he could barely hear. Above him, the bright rectangle of the surface receded. No matter how hard he tried to kick and wave his arms, he couldn’t push his way upward; the water wouldn’t let him. His legs had become so heavy, too heavy, like there were enormous weights attached to them. He could feel them on his ankles, pulling him farther down, deeper than he had ever been, so deep he would never, never, never be able to reach the surface. Darkness was closing in now. The sound of his father’s laughter, of kids yelling and splashing and playing had died away, and soon he would, too.
