Day Three

by Patricia Spencer

  After Sam closed the door on his way out, Daniel stood across from her in a thick silence.

  He had to admit she was striking. For one thing, she was tall—way tall. Just shy of his own height, and he was six-two. Chin up and shoulders back, she wore heels, not minimizing her height. She had stood in the middle of his office with an air of defiance—not just occupying space, but staking it out.

  When he entered, she had spun on him and nailed him with those astonishing eyes. Green, flecked with gray, they reminded him of sunlight in the pines. A man could get lost in eyes like that—in another woman. In Brenna Rease, they were too damned acute. She had a way of dissecting a person with her gaze. A companion piece to sticking a lens in someone’s face, he supposed.

  And surely if she thought nothing of intruding in her subjects’ personal space, then standing across a room and staring, as she was doing now, must hardly seem rude at all to her.

  He cleared his throat. “I was looking at your portfolio,” he said. “Do you mind if I finish?”

  She took her seat again and crossed one lovely knee over the other. He resumed his examination of the last few images, hoping he didn’t look as unnerved as he felt. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw her ankle tapping like a slow metronome. Even in silence, she dominated the room. He turned to the last page. Her most shocking picture.

  Her ankle froze in mid-action.

  He had seen the Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph before, of course—variously cropped because of the soldier’s unzipped pants and partial nudity. The subject was an Israeli colonel, eviscerated by a car bomb, his expression a mixture of agony and surprise. The rumor persisted that she had been having sex with him before he died.

  Daniel looked up in disbelief.

  She lifted a defiant brow. “Question?” she asked.

  Yeah. What kind of woman makes love to a man one minute, then takes a picture of him dead so she can get a prize? He closed the portfolio and slid it across the coffee table to her, keeping aside the DVD that served as her demo reel. “May I keep the DVD? I’d like to look at it later.”

  She nodded.

  “Does the project interest you?”

  “Can you afford me?” Her voice was smooth—the sort of voice that sounded good in a man’s ear.

  “How much are you asking?”

  She named her figure.

  His eyebrows popped up. “For the whole shoot?”

  “No. Per day. Plus expenses.”

  He blew out a soundless whistle. Sam’s ringer was going to cost him. “Negotiate for perks?” Maybe he could mitigate the damage.

  “Like what? A limo ride to the airport? A season’s pass to the Redskins games? I’m risking my life, Ellsworth.”

  He pulled a black-and-gold onyx fountain pen from his inside jacket pocket, picked up a yellow writing pad from the coffee table and jotted down her fee. “What else?”

  “I’ll work three days in Kavsak,” she said. “No more.”

  “But ... the cost of getting overseas, alone—”

  “It isn’t negotiable.”

  “Other requests?” It would be antagonistic to use the term demands.

  “Equipment. I have my own, but if it gets damaged, you repair or replace it.”

  “Anything more?”

  “If something happens, EBS ships me home. I’ll leave you my brother’s contact info in New York.”

  It took a second before he understood. In a casket, she meant. If she was killed, EBS returned her remains. It wasn’t a stipulation he’d ever contracted for before.

  She stretched her right leg out, apparently finished with the assault portion of the encounter. “Curiosity,” she said. “Who’s doing the words?”

  “Guy named Geoff Garrett.”

  Her expression froze.

  “You know him?”

  “Southeast Asia man,” she said, absently stroking the underside of her thigh. “Worked Rwanda and DR Congo during the troubles there. Used to work for the Associated Press, but freelances now.”

  “That’s him.” His eye strayed to her thigh and the unconsciously sensuous way she caressed it. Here, he thought. Let me do that. South of his belt his hormones raced to his dick. A few more seconds and it would start advertising.

  “Why Garrett?” she asked.

  He shifted his gaze to her face. “He’s good. Third in our class at Columbia.” Behind Aya and himself.

  “I see.”

  “Is there a problem with that?” Maybe Geoff and she were ex-lovers. Geoff had always been popular with the women. And Brenna Rease, as everyone knew, had seduced her share of men.

  “I wouldn’t hire him. He’s—”

  “It’s already arranged,” he said, cutting off further discussion.

  After Brenna left, Daniel realized his shoulders were knotted with tension. Blast Sam’s meddling! There were a dozen DP’s who could do the job just fine, thank you, and none of them would be this distasteful to work with.

  He slipped her DVD into the player on the wall unit and flipped on the monitor. Stills and video were two different skills. Just because she was good at still photography didn’t mean she could handle video. If she couldn’t handle the medium, Sam wouldn’t argue the assignment. He tapped the Play button on the remote control.

  Four minutes of the most spectacular combat footage he had ever seen blazed across his screen. The work was unflinching, hard-edged—and heart-rending. On the run, she was a demon, capturing impossible images through a combination of speed, courage, and talent. When she had more time, the results were cinematic. Notoriously two-dimensional as video was, she made digital images look like film.

  When the screen faded to black, Daniel discovered himself sitting slack-jawed on the edge of his seat.

  Oh my lord.

  She had a visual style as distinctive as a signature. Sam had been right. She was good. Damned good. Her pictures would transform an excellent documentary into an outstanding one. Now that he had seen her work, he agreed with Sam. He didn’t want anyone else to shoot his documentary, either. But Brenna Rease was a difficult and high-handed prima donna with a shocking personal reputation. She could make his life hell. Unless... Unless he kept her under strict contractual control. Define her obligations so tightly she couldn’t take a breath without EBS’ consent. He considered the notion at length, tapping the remote control unit against his fingertips, thinking about the paperwork.

  It was do-able.

  All he had to do was sign her, send her off, and stay as far away from those shimmering green eyes and endlessly long legs as he could.

  Brenna sat behind a bearded and turbaned taxi driver, looking out at the stately homes of the Maryland suburbs as she rode back to her place in the District. She asked the driver to take the longer, scenic route, through Bethesda, down Little River Parkway and Massachusetts Avenue, instead of 16th Street, which was more direct.

  She wanted to look at beautiful homes that hadn’t been shelled to the ground. And she was luxuriating in going the speed limit in a car without the doors roped on.

  She had come to D.C. to face her father—The Magnificent, as she privately thought of him. But after the little incident with the bayonet last week in Kavsak, it had crossed her mind that she should also put out some feelers for D.C.-based work while she was in town. To that end, she had dragged her tired butt down to the National Press Club and chatted up a few people.

  Which had led to Chisolm’s call.

  There were two time periods when journalists in war zones were most likely to get killed—when they first arrived, and when they had been there too long. She was in the latter category, only more so. Unlike her fellow-journalists, she didn’t drop in from the real world. She had lived in Kavsak for the past thirty months. On rare occasions, she flew over to Italy to re-supply.

  There was no question she had stayed too long in that tormented city. Her emotional stamina—her psychological stability—were precarious.

  She knew the clock was tick
ing.

  But she couldn’t turn her back on Kavsak. She hadn’t yet told its story. As a freelancer, she had sold ones and twos of images, and covered the usual firefights. What she really wanted to do, however, was to put the whole experience together as a unified piece, a documentary.

  If Sam Chisolm had placed a banquet before a starving man, he couldn’t have wanted it more than she wanted this job.

  And it was Chisolm who was making this offer, not Ellsworth. Executive producer or not, she sensed that Ellsworth was being dragged along. For one thing, he didn’t want to work with her. His hide-nothing, honest-man’s face confirmed that much. He thought she was a hussy, a woman of ill-repute. Which, granted, had at one time been more true than false.

  Well, so be it. Chisolm was further up the food chain.

  The second thing was, Ellsworth clearly wasn’t invested in the project. If he were, he wouldn’t have picked Geoff Garrett to write it. Garrett couldn’t put two words together. He was circling the drain, unable to pierce his haze of booze and drugs long enough to form a cogent thought. It was a shame Ellsworth had blown off her warning. He was throwing away good money.

  From her perspective, though, Garrett was a hidden bonus. She didn’t need him. Kavsak pictures spoke for themselves. She could set two bottles of Scotch in front of him and leave him behind at the bar.

  Without him, she could do the story right. And this was her story to tell—everything in her recent life revolved around this theme. She’d been archiving extra footage for months. Between that footage and three killer days in Kavsak, she could drop a stack of P2 memory cards on Ellsworth’s desk and the material would practically assemble itself. Any good editor would take one look and know what to do.

  The voice-overs and transitions would be Ellsworth’s problem, his just desserts for half-assed management.

  The cabbie turned onto the Dalecarlia Parkway at Westmoreland Circle and took them down to MacArthur Boulevard. She stared out, pondering her lingering reaction to Ellsworth.

  She wanted to bed him.

  Not that she would, of course. Her wanton days were over.

  Still. She hadn’t felt attracted to anyone since Ari.

  Where MacArthur Boulevard forked at Reservoir Road, her gaze drifted across the rippling waters of the reservoir on her right. Look. Infrastructure. Washingtonians turned their taps and drinking water flowed out. No standing around with water jugs for three hours, getting shot at by snipers.

  The cab reached Georgetown and slowed. She loved the narrow colonial quarter for its heaving red brick sidewalks, secret alleyways, and ivy-covered townhouses. It was an intimate neighborhood, crammed with houses and history and too many cars. Parking was impossible here. A legal spot lasted only seconds. And ticketing was the only function the district government performed well. But she didn’t mind. She didn’t own a car. Normally, she walked everywhere.

  Home to senators and students alike, Georgetown had an unwavering sense of itself, a constancy that defied the city’s ever-changing politics. Over time, the people who trod these patchwork sidewalks and cobblestoned side streets disappeared, but the neighborhood timelessly remained. Soon the grand old trees towering above her would form lush green archways across the narrow streets, the old-fashioned street lamps would cast their golden light, and the magic would be complete.

  The driver slowed, looking for the house number she had given him. Seeing it, he stopped brazenly in the center of 34th street, heedless of the cars stuck behind him, and let her out in front of a trim two-story Federal-style house.

  Property values in Georgetown were high, but she had bought the house as an investment ten years before by negotiating a deal with the elderly couple who had owned it for nearly fifty years. The Simmons’, she had discovered, had no desire to leave their home, and had been forced by reduced financial circumstances to put the house on the market. Brenna agreed to let them live in the house until their deaths, in exchange for a sale price below market value. Meanwhile, her mortgage payments supplemented their fixed income. The Simmons’ looked after the property in her absence. The rare times she was in town, she stayed in the little carriage house in the back. The arrangement suited them all perfectly.

  The south wall of the house abutted a narrow cobblestone alleyway that from the street appeared to end at a garage at the rear. But the eight-foot high wall which continued where the side of the house left off, angled inward at the extreme end, concealing a black and brass wrought-iron gate set into an archway that accessed a private inner courtyard.

  She slid the latch and stepped inside the secret garden. Mr. Simmons’ prize roses lined the wall, while a serpentine flagstone path meandered past sunny benches, a small fountain which doubled as a birdbath, and two beds of perennials, one bursting with daffodils and crocuses, the other with herbs.

  She kept her house key in the pot with the rosemary. She loved the scent it released when she reached among its branches.

  Her home—if a place so rarely occupied could be called that—consisted of two small rooms, a tiny kitchen, and a bathroom. The living area was sparsely furnished with a few old pieces from her mother’s sitting room, including a tattered armchair that Brenna had snuggled in with her as a child. There was only one place to sit, but having more was unnecessary. Her space was utterly personal. No one was invited. No one visited.

  Make a home, her mother had written in a note delivered to Brenna when she came into her trust. Fill it with love and laughter and tears—all the makings of a full life. She had bought the house with part of her mother’s bequest, and filled it with nothing.

  She set the key on top of the fireplace mantel and limped to the bedroom. Standing in front of the full-length mirror on the closet door, she carefully pulled off her cashmere top. She leaned forward and with a fingertip, traced a small red scab, a clean little slice at the base of her throat.

  Just the tip of the bayonet.

  She straightened and looked over her shoulder at the deep purple bruise on her shoulder. Spidery red lines—burst blood vessels—scribbled the interior of the contusion. She touched it gingerly. The whole area was swollen and the center felt hard. One of those bricks she fell back on. She unbuckled her belt, unzipped her slacks, and gingerly eased her pants over the matching bruise on the back of her thigh. She winced. They hurt every time she moved.

  Standing in her bra and panties, she regarded her reflection. That’s what you get for closing your eyes.

  She hung up her clothes, pulled open the top drawer of her chest of drawers and picked out an oversized Israeli Army shirt. She pulled the soft fabric over her head and sat at the side of her bed, facing the gallery of her photographs on the opposite wall. These were her private pictures, not found in any image bank or hung in any gallery.

  An intensely personal vertical album that she had never shared with anyone else, it was crowded with images of a life that scarcely felt like her own any more. Many were her first black and whites, taken before she had hit her teens—back when a camera still felt heavy in her hands.

  Her mother was there in multiple prints—face full of love, hands gentle, body portending its fragility. It was her mother who identified Brenna’s eye for photography, her mother who insisted she should have a real camera, not a kid’s throw-away toy. Her mom had been Brenna’s first and most willing model.

  Thinking of her made Brenna’s throat tighten. What would it have been like to have had a mother to guide her into womanhood?

  Her eyes shifted to the print of her father. She had stood behind him, readied her camera, and called out to him. He turned, looked over his shoulder at her, and glowered. She released the shutter, the moment of naked truth captured. She worked hard to make the print a perfect one, but once that instant was recorded, she never again photographed her famous father. That one image said it all.

  The picture beside his showed her six brothers, arms chained over each others’ shoulders, laughing, engrossed in each other. Brendan Jr., Ryan, Patrick,
Joseph, Christopher, and James, all much older, oblivious to her. Except for James. The family’s other black sheep.

  She curled up on her patchwork quilt, knees drawn up to her chest, and stuffed a feather pillow under her head. Her eyes slid to the photographs she had hung only days ago. The pictures were over three years old, but she hadn’t had the chance to hang them before now. This was her first trip back after Israel.

  There he was.

  Ari.

  At the piano. In the garden. In the nude. Alive, his face shining with love for her. God. What a mistake to think the only photograph of him she couldn’t bear to see was the one she had shared with the world.

  She shaped his name with silent lips. It had never occurred to her that Ari, the soldier, would die when he was with her. She closed her eyes, recalling the moment when his breath left him and he became forever irretrievable.

  That last lucid moment before she lost her mind.

  She glanced at her mother’s old wind-up Baby Ben ticking by the bedside. It was scarcely noon, but she was tired, bone tired. She needed a few hours sleep before her audience with The Magnificent tonight.

  It wasn’t going to be pretty.

  The last time she saw him she nearly ruined his career.

  Chapter 3

  Brenna sat in the back of a rattling D.C. Cab crossing town to her father’s compound in Spring Valley—an enclave of stunning homes later discovered to have been built over a World War I Army chemical dump.

  In ten days the Special Envoy was heading a mission to Vienna, where he would meet with Balkan military and political leaders to promote an ethnic partition of the region.

  The mission would be fraught. History was complex in the Balkans.

  At the crossroads of Europe and Asia, the region had been invaded, colonized, and counter-invaded since the Third Century B.C. Seven empires had swept through the mountainous terrain, each leaving cultural and religious legacies that would pit subsequent generations against each other for centuries to come.