Blood Echo

by Rice, Christopher

  “That depends.”

  “On what?”

  “What you want.”

  “It’s your hair, baby.”

  “Yeah, but they’re your fingers and the way you’re moving them right now is giving me chills, and let’s just say I’d like to have a head you enjoy touching now and then.”

  He sets the clippers down on the counter, bends down, and kisses her gently on the forehead. Since he’s got no idea what she’s been through over the past few weeks, he’s probably trying his best not to rush it. “Only now and then?” he whispers.

  “More than now and then.”

  This time he kisses her on the lips, and suddenly she’s rising up off the chair. His arms encircle her, and she feels a surge of desire she’s afraid she might not be able to control.

  Surviving, she tells herself, going into the belly of the beast and surviving—that’s the turn-on. But what if he knew? What if he knew that her actions had led to Davies’s death? What if he’d seen the rage she’d unleashed on the man, a rage that eventually caused him to bleed out?

  Would he still be gentle and hungry with me at the same time?

  Luke seems to sense these wandering thoughts during their kiss and pulls away slightly.

  “This is weird,” she says.

  “Making out in the bathroom when you’re covered in loose hairs?”

  “That’s . . . sort of weird, yeah. But no, I . . . I feel good, Luke.”

  “Of course you do. I’m here.”

  “Yeah, there’s that. But . . .”

  “But what?”

  “I kinda blew up.”

  Luke just stares at her, but he doesn’t pull away. Still, his serious expression is a bit much for her to stare at while they’re nose to nose.

  “Blew up how?”

  “There was a booby trap at the site. Where we were . . . working. And I walked into it and . . . boom.”

  For a while he doesn’t say anything, but he doesn’t let her go, either. She’s reminded of the first time he’d witnessed her power, reminded of the way he’d stumbled to the nearest trash can and emptied his stomach into it. Should she expect a similar reaction now? Or is this fear widening his eyes and tensing his mouth and making his chest rise and fall with breaths that look too shallow for his broad frame?

  She knows he wanted to be there, and she’s afraid he’ll try to make the case again now. What will she say? She’s probably already told him too much. What’s the difference between telling him about the explosion and telling him that Davies didn’t survive the night?

  Simple. One paints her as a miracle. The other, a murderer.

  “Jesus,” he whispers. “I wish . . .”

  “What?”

  “Nothing.”

  There it is, she thinks. He wishes he could have been there. But what would he have done? Sat in some control room, gradually seeing her as less than human.

  “But you’re OK.”

  Relieved they seem to be moving on from his unspoken question, she says, “I guess, yeah. They poked and prodded me for a day and ran all kinds of tests. But . . .”

  “All right, careful. I don’t want you to say anything that will earn you the wrath of Cole.”

  “I was on fire from head to toe. I passed out right away. But by the time the medics got to me, my wounds were closing. In any other circumstance, they would have been fatal.”

  For a while they just stare at each other, neither one moving, as they process the profound weirdness of yet another profoundly weird development.

  “And you feel . . . better?” Luke asks, eyes wide.

  “Healthier,” she says. “More energetic.”

  “You don’t think it’s because . . .”

  “Because what?”

  “You enjoyed it?”

  The question moves through her like the first chill from a fever.

  I didn’t enjoying hearing the news that Davies was dead, she thinks, but I didn’t actually shed a tear over him, either. It’s like an absence of feeling. Do I have to name it? Can I just let it be an absence?

  “I didn’t enjoy the blowing up part,” she finally says.

  “What was it like?”

  “Full system shutdown. I just blacked out.”

  “We can’t get some of the most powerful sedatives in the world to work on you when you’re triggered, but at the first sign of a major trauma, you just black out? How does that work?”

  “I wish I knew.”

  “I don’t suppose they told you.”

  “They shared some test results with me. They were general.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Their working theory is my whole body basically went through what a muscle goes through in the gym. It gets traumatized, and it grows back, possibly a little healthier, they’re not sure. Only thanks to Zypraxon it happened almost instantly and all over my body.”

  “Healthier . . . how?” he asks.

  “Red and white blood cell counts are a little better than they were before. Resting blood oxygen levels are improved, like I’ve done a bunch of cardio. Same with resting heart rate. Everything just . . . a little bit better. That’s how they put it.”

  “Well, if you factor in that all of those things should have been knocked way off-balance by your injuries, it’s more than just a little bit.”

  “True,” she says.

  He averts his eyes, releases her from his embrace. He starts cleaning the head of the clippers, a tense set to his jaw.

  “What?” she finally asks.

  “I guess we just have to trust them. I mean, that’s the deal you made, right?”

  “Yeah, it’s the deal I made. I’m sorry if I didn’t consult you first. I—”

  “No, no, Charley, I didn’t mean to sound like that. I just . . .”

  “What? You can tell me anything . . . right?”

  Even though I can’t tell you everything, she realizes. Wow. Walked right into that one. But he doesn’t take the opening.

  “Some things happened while you were gone. Not as big as what you went through, but . . .”

  “But what?”

  “They’re making me wonder about the deals Cole made to get all this stuff going.”

  “Which stuff?” she asks.

  “The tunnel. The resort.”

  “Well, those are good things, right?”

  “Sure. But . . . So I brought in Jordy Clements last night because his girlfriend said he beat her up. Cole called my cell phone and told me to let him go. I’d only had the guy in holding for a few minutes.”

  “That isn’t petty. That’s . . . weird. Did he say why?”

  “He said I was making mountains out of molehills.”

  “OK. Did you point out that he’s currently developing a drug that could allow women to protect themselves against violence and meanwhile he’s telling you to let a guy free who just beat up his girlfriend?”

  “No.”

  “Why not? That’s exactly the kind of thing you’d say.”

  “The old me, maybe. The new me doesn’t want to make things worse for you. With him. He said you were recovering. I didn’t know what that meant. I just didn’t want to be an inconvenience.”

  “That’s not a word I’d ever use to describe you.”

  “You know what I mean. I’ve got a mouth on me,” he says quietly.

  She kisses the mouth in question. “Thank God.”

  “You’re using sex to distract me from my feelings.”

  “Do you mind?”

  “Not really, no.”

  He returns the gentle kiss she gives him with a more powerful one of his own. Then, just when she feels herself rocking forward onto the balls of her feet, he pulls away. “You think I could have said that to him?” he asks.

  “What? The irony thing?”

  “Yeah. I mean, am I allowed to say anything to him?”

  “He called you, right?”

  “To tell me you were OK and to give me an order. I mean, he
didn’t call to discuss sports.”

  “I don’t think he’s into sports.”

  “That’s homophobic.”

  “No, I just don’t think he’s into anything that doesn’t involve billions of dollars and some form of light world domination.”

  “Light world domination? That’s cute. Does it say that on the bottle?”

  “I’ve never seen his pantry. I’m assuming it’s spotless and white. Look, you’ve met him, all right? I have no idea what the guy does for fun besides . . .”

  “Run our lives.”

  “He doesn’t run our lives.”

  “Charley.”

  “He runs a few weeks of our lives out of every few months.”

  “A few weeks? You were gone for over a month.”

  “Yeah, well, most of that was prep.”

  “All right, careful. Don’t tell me too much that’s top secret.”

  Because you don’t want me in trouble with Cole, she thinks, or you don’t want to hear about the game unless you can play, too?

  “I’m just saying. When I’m on an operation, he runs our lives. When I’m home, we run each other’s lives.”

  “Good.”

  She pulls him close. It’s like he’s got a gravitational orbit around him, and she can’t stay out of it no matter how hard she tries. Maybe it’s because the bathroom’s tiny, or maybe it’s because she’s so glad to see him. Or maybe it’s because the energy surge she’s been feeling since she recovered from the explosion has intensified her desire.

  She doesn’t know. Right now, she doesn’t care. What she cares about is that he smells like that woodsy soap he uses, and his chest looks broad and solid enough for her to sleep against while he runs his fingers over her almost shaved head. And those things sound nice. Very nice.

  She’s still holding him when he says, “Charley, if he’s calling telling me who I can or can’t arrest, he’s running this town. And if he’s running this town, then he’s running our lives.”

  “You want me to talk to him?”

  “Not yet.”

  “What, then?” she asks.

  “I want us to pay attention to everything he does. Or doesn’t do.”

  “Deal.”

  “You’re not just saying that so you can kiss me some more?” he asks.

  “No, if I’m going to resort to deception, I’ll be after more than kissing.”

  “Well, you do kinda need a shower.”

  “What? I smell bad?”

  “No,” he says, “you’ve got hair all over you.”

  “Good point.”

  “You want me to step out?” He starts to pull away before she can answer. When she responds by grabbing him by one shoulder, he smiles in a way that makes her neck get hot.

  “That’s a no,” she says.

  “One second, then,” he says.

  He opens the door partway.

  “What are you doing?” she asks.

  “Hey, guys!” he shouts.

  “Yep?” comes Marty’s reply.

  “Go home!”

  Then he shuts the door before they can protest.

  24

  “Four weeks is a month,” Cole says.

  He’s been swiveling back and forth in his desk chair during Julia Crispin’s unnecessarily protracted lead-up to this announcement. Now he stops the chair with one foot, raises a hand to his earpiece as if he didn’t hear her right because it’s coming loose. It isn’t.

  “I’m aware of that, thank you,” she answers.

  Too many people play fast and loose with the definition of the word irony, but he’s pretty sure his late father’s mistress talking to him like she’s actually his mother qualifies. He’s always considered it a strange credit to his dad’s character that he married a piece of vapid arm candy and carried on a lengthy affair with an accomplished woman of substance. But of late, Julia Crispin has become a lot more to Cole than an old family secret.

  She’s the inventor of TruGlass, the device that allows him to monitor Charlotte Rowe’s every move during an op. She was also one of the original members of The Consortium, a secret alliance of defense industry contractors who pooled their resources so they could fund Project Bluebird 1.0 without traces of it showing up on the ledgers of their respective companies. Until Cole pulled the plug after the first four test subjects literally tore themselves apart.

  “Then why not just say a month?” he asks.

  “Would you also like me to say it in French?”

  “You speak French?”

  “No,” Julia answers, “I’m implying, in plain English, that I don’t think it’s the number of days or weeks that’s bothering you here.”

  “It’s a while.”

  “These are busy men with companies to run. Philip has meetings in Zurich and Dubai, and Stephen can’t get out of the UK for two weeks at the earliest. In four weeks, also known as a month, everyone will be free and we’ll all sit down at Philip’s ranch in Whitefish and discuss what’s in front of us.”

  Cole doesn’t say anything. He wants to spin the chair around again, but then he’ll catch his reflection in the wall of glass behind his desk, which might confirm his suspicion that he’s currently pouting. He’d hoped his former business partners would be more impressed by the footage he shared of Charley’s takedown of Pemberton and now her overpowering of Richard Davies. If Julia presented it to them with the fire of the newly reconverted, so much the better.

  And yet they’re making him wait a month.

  “Perhaps you could thank me in French,” Julia finally says.

  “I thought you said they were impressed.”

  “They were. The explosive finale gave them some pause, even though I tried telling them that was all part of the test.”

  “It wasn’t.”

  “I know. And they weren’t convinced, so it’s a moot point.”

  “Fine. A month.”

  “Still no thank-you?”

  “I was hoping for more excitement,” he says.

  “They’re excited.”

  “Then why aren’t they calling me?”

  “You hate Philip. You actually want to talk to him on the phone?”

  “Philip hates me because he thinks anyone who doesn’t kill, skin, and cook their own lunch every day is soft. And personally, I think men who shoot deer for fun are trying to hide the fact that they have tiny corkscrew penises.”

  “Don’t ever tell him that.”

  “Too late. Stephen and I get along. Why doesn’t he call?”

  “You asked me to be your representative in this. If you want to talk to them, call them yourself.”

  “I just figured they’d be more impressed.”

  “They’re impressed, and guess what? So am I. The operation, the size of it. The resources. You impressed me. So no matter what happens, you can count on me, for sure.”

  This is, perhaps, the most agreeable exchange he’s ever had with Julia Crispin, and he’s not quite sure how to bring it to a close. Neither is she, apparently. Because after they both mutter a few more thank-yous, she hangs up without saying goodbye.

  By day, the glass and steel interior of Graydon’s headquarters feels clinical and stark. Around this time of night, however, when most of the overhead lights are off and there’s little to reflect off the walls of glass, the offices feel vaporous and limitless.

  Cole could enter any room at will, rifle through any drawer he wants, and nobody could do a thing about it. These urges are childish and petty, and he’s never once given in to them. But once, at around this hour, he did have sex with Dylan Cody—it’s hard to think of him as Noah in his memories—on the carpeted floor of his office, a few feet from where he’s sitting now.

  He wishes they’d left a scuff mark or a stain. Some tiny artifact of a moment when Cole thought Dylan was a mad genius and their relationship might blossom into an unconventional marriage defined by mutual ambition and the devastating expertise with which Dylan catered to Cole’s darker appetites
.

  But the carpet’s immaculate, and the man walking toward Cole’s office now has never been a lover. He’s no longer what Cole would even consider an ally.

  Ed Baker steps through the open door and goes still a few feet from the empty chair on the other side of Cole’s glass desk.

  So he’s figured it out, Cole thinks, which isn’t a surprise given I haven’t told him a word about how the Davies operation concluded after I threw him out of the control center.

  “I guess I’m not here for an update on Davies,” Ed says.

  “There were complications. Your insistence that we not sweep his property in advance turned out to have consequences. Bad ones. I should have overruled you.”

  “Well, you’ve been real busy these days, haven’t you?” It sounds like a taunt. Ed’s entwined his hands behind his back, his shoulders rigid. The surrounding desk lamps are too low to give his bald dome its usual shine. “So what’s it gonna be? You moving me to some lab that doesn’t exist?”

  “You’re retiring,” Cole says.

  For what feels to Cole like a long time, Ed doesn’t blink.

  “For telling you the truth?” he asks.

  “The truth? About what, exactly?”

  “You’re letting that woman run the show, and it’s going to end in disaster.”

  “I’m sorry. When did you tell me that? And when would I have ever asked for your opinion?”

  “I was keeping her in check.”

  “You were drawing her attention to how badly we violated her privacy after one of our former employees slipped her a drug that could have torn her to pieces. And you were doing it at the very moment when we needed her complete participation in an operation we’d been planning for months.”

  “I disagree.”

  “Who gives a fuck? You’re fired!”

  “I thought I was retiring.”

  “I’m spinning it. For your sake, so don’t push it.”

  “And if I do . . . push it?”

  Cole opens his desk drawer, extends a file folder in one hand. It’s bulging with pages still warm from the laser printer. Ed forces a dead look into his eyes as he takes it. He leafs through its contents while he stands. Whether he’s scanning them or reading them in depth, Cole can’t tell. Surely he doesn’t need to absorb the details. The figures are impossible to forget. Ed made considerable money selling confiscated guns back to street criminals during his time as a patrol cop on the LAPD, before he vaulted up its power structure later in life.