by R. A. McGee
At any given time, the hundred or so employees were in various locations around the world. He rarely got involved with all the details anymore. He used to, when the group was still brand new, to ensure that his marching orders were followed to a T. Since then, he’d made sure to hire competent, well-trained operators, and they basically handled themselves, only coming to him when there was a large problem with another agency or government that they needed the elderly spymaster’s help with.
This freed McHenry up to work on some of his other projects.
After his bathroom visit, he took the long way around, to swing by Lucy Gordon’s office.
As expected, the young woman was sitting behind her bank of computer monitors.
He knocked at the door, and her head shot up, over the top of the monitors. Her tumbler of coffee fell to the floor and she scrambled after it.
“Lucy. Why so jumpy?”
“Ah, you know me,” the woman said, pushing her oversized black-framed glasses into place. “Too much coffee.”
McHenry stepped further into her office. “You do have quite the habit. If I tried to drink all that, I’d probably go into cardiac arrest.”
“Yeah,” Lucy said, laughing nervously.
“What are you working on?” McHenry said. He stepped around the three-monitor display, to the other side of the desk.
“Not much. Just… just running some phone numbers.”
“Anything good?”
“Just something Miri wanted me to look up,” she said.
McHenry watched the woman immediately clamp her mouth shut. “Miri? How is she doing in Mexico? Did she find Clark?”
“She told me she’s still looking for him. I hope she finds him soon.”
“Me too. So this number…”
“Uh… yeah. A number.”
“What’s it about?” McHenry said.
“I’m not really sure.”
“Did it seem important?” McHenry asked, watching Lucy squirm in her chair.
“Not really. It was some number that had a Brazilian country code. You don’t think she thinks Clark went down there, do you?”
McHenry studied Lucy’s face for several moments. Her eyes didn’t meet his and she went back to typing. “No. I wouldn’t imagine he went to Brazil.”
“Interesting,” Lucy said. “Well, I hope we’ll find out soon enough.”
“Me too, Lucy. I’ll be glad when they’re back home.”
“You think Clark’s coming back to work? He quit, remember?”
“Lucy, never underestimate what a motivated mind can accomplish. I think we’ll see Clark back in the fold before too long. He’s too valuable not to come back.”
“Yep, very valuable.” Lucy kept typing.
McHenry watched her for a few more moments, then walked out of her office, lingering in the doorway for a moment. “You’ll be sure to let me know if you come up with something, right? If Miri or Clark need help, I want to be sure they have all the tools at my disposal.”
“You’ll be the first person I let know.”
“Thanks, Lucy.” As McHenry turned away from the office, his smile was swiftly replaced by a scowl.
McHenry walked around the office for a while more, checking in with people along the way, but the interaction with Lucy Gordon was playing in his mind.
The girl from CalTech was a terrible liar. She was hiding something, and McHenry was trying to put the pieces together.
He didn’t like the picture that was forming.
Arriving at his office, he shut the door behind him and picked up his phone.
“Rita?”
“Yes, sir?”
“Could you please connect me to the Agency? I need to get on Director Brockman’s schedule. Tell them it’s important.”
Twenty-Eight
It had taken Clark nearly thirty minutes to find Mateo. The boy had sprinted from the area and was only coaxed back to his home by the offer of a twenty-dollar bill. It didn't help matters that Clark’s right sleeve was drenched in blood.
“Who was that?”
“You’ve probably seen him around,” Clark said. “If not him, definitely people like him.”
“Hombre de cartel?” Cartel man?
Clark nodded. “Sorry he hurt you.”
“He didn’t,” Mateo said with a brave face.
“You’re too tough to let something like that bother you, right?”
The boy shadowboxed the air in front of him and Clark clapped him on the back.
The pair walked in silence back toward the laundromat. Night was falling and it was mostly dark, only the occasional light from a building lighting the way.
“Are we gonna box again?”
“’Fraid not, bud. I gotta leave.”
“I thought so.”
“Listen. You be good for your mom, okay? I know how much she appreciates you.”
“I will. Someday, you come back. You need to teach me more. Savvy?”
Clark laughed and nodded. “Savvy.”
The pair walked into the waiting room of the laundromat, Clark shielding Mateo from the carnage on the floor. Sammy’s head was gone and the rest of him had leaked out all over the floor.
Clark turned the boy the long way, down an aisle of dryers, so he couldn’t see the blood. He shooed Mateo off to the back and joined Miri and Señora Iglesia.
“Thanks for finding him,” the older woman said.
“My fault he ran away. I’m sorry we brought this to your doorstep,” Clark said.
“Please. You didn’t. You were always careful. I know that. These things happen here. Can you hear that?” Señora Iglesias held her finger up to her ear.
Clark was still, straining his ear for any sound. He heard nothing.
“That’s right. There are no sirens or police officers. The navy isn’t coming. We are forgotten. No one will even care that this man is in my shop. If I opened the doors, people would come in and continue their laundry. You cannot blame yourself. You made sure my boy was okay. That’s all I could ask for.”
Clark nodded along as she talked, but still couldn’t brush off a pang of guilt. “Hold on a second.”
He walked out of the lobby and into the street.
“So… have you known him long?” Señora Iglesias asked Miri.
“It feels like forever.”
Iglesias nodded. “He seems troubled, but I know he’s good, in his heart.”
Miri didn’t answer.
“Are you two…”
“Are we what?”
“Together?” Señora Iglesias asked.
Miri shook her head. “No, not at all. We’re friends. Work partners, that’s all.”
“Oh?” Señora Iglesias said, her eyebrow raised. “Because I saw how you looked at—”
“You’re back,” Miri interrupted as Clark came through the doorway.
He shut it behind him and stepped carefully over Sammy’s remains. He had a shopping bag in his hands. He handed it to Señora Iglesia.
“I wanted to give you this. Same deal as before; make sure you hide it somewhere safe. Don’t let people know you have it, or they’ll come for you. Do you understand what I’m saying?”
The señora looked into the bag, then rolled the top back down. “It’s too much.”
“Just be smart with it. You can stay right here, in the town you love, and build a good life. I hope it brings you some happiness.”
Señora Iglesias leaned in and hugged Clark, careful not to hurt his wounded arm.
When she pulled back, Clark added, “Get Mateo boxing lessons too. He’s a natural.”
Miri waved politely and the pair moved to the exit. They stepped over Sammy as they went, Clark opening the door for Miri. He waited in the doorway. He looked around at the laundromat and the corpse on the floor.
“On second thought, maybe you should just move.”
Twenty-Nine
“I don’t understand why you won't sit still,” Miri said, tugging at a piece of th
read. “You’re gonna have to suck it up.”
“You’re like Dr. Mengele or something, treating me like an experiment.”
“Accusing a Jew of treating you like a Nazi is a little much, don’t you think? You want to stitch yourself up? Go for it, tough guy,” Miri said, not at all relinquishing control of the suture needle and wound-closing thread.
Clark took a small swig of a travel bottle of Jack from the corner store.
“This would be easier with some real medicine. A little lidocaine or something to numb it up.”
“We should have got some in Mexico. Pharmacies aren’t as cool here as they are down there,” Clark said.
“We should have gone to the safe house. You know it’s fully stocked.”
“Someone at Blackthorn may have set me up and you want to go to one of their safe houses? Not a chance. Besides, then we wouldn’t have all this ambiance.”
The room was old and had needed a renovation a decade ago. The carpet was brown and worn down to the floor on the paths between the bed and bathroom. The couch was green, and there were stains that Clark chose not to try to identify. The window unit air conditioner was loud, but worked well; the room was chilly.
“Your choice. I’ve slept in worse,” Miri said. She squeezed a trial pack of Bacitracin over Clark's arm and dabbed it in. She reached into the bag they'd gotten at the drugstore and pulled out a T-shirt, with the logo of the San Diego Zoo on the front.
“This is the best you could do?” Clark said, eyeing the screen print.
“It’s a drugstore, not a fashion show. At least it’s clean.”
Clark’s bloody shirt was shrugged off his right arm and still hung up on his neck. Miri helped him pull it the rest of the way over his head and off.
Shirtless, Clark stood and admired Miri’s work in the mirror. “The stitches aren’t that bad.”
Miri gave a mock flourish.
Clark washed his hands, and dabbed at the excess antiseptic gel on his arm and pulled the T-shirt on. He looked at himself in the mirror. “Really?”
The T-shirt was at least a size too small. Miri laughed uncontrollably. When she came up for air, she waved her hand in front of her face, fanning herself. “You look like you got into your little brother’s closet.”
Clark smiled and joined her at the tiny table. He dug through the bag of fast food they’d picked up and handed Miri hers, the pair falling into a comfortable silence as they ate. Eventually, Miri swallowed and spoke.
“I understand why we aren’t at a safe house. I was busting your balls.”
“I know,” Clark said.
“If what César said is true, this is a big deal.”
Clark picked through his fries. “I know.”
“If McHenry’s the one who gave you up to the cartel, what else has he done? Think about it. What if Butterfield isn’t the one who got me kidnapped in Costa Rica? What if that was McHenry too?”
“I can’t stand the prick, but Butterfield always said he was innocent,” Clark said.
“Not just that. Why did they say he turned on me?”
Clark took a drink of his soda. “Butterfield was working with the Russians. He told them you were in town to stop their little reindeer games and they paid him big-time. Then you got kidnapped and I saved you.”
Several weeks ago, Clark and Miri had stopped a plot to detonate an EMP in the heart of Costa Rica. The complicated scheme had been hatched by Ivan Petrovsky, a Russian oligarch, with fingers in a diverse array of criminal enterprises.
“I was with you until the part about you saving me,” Miri said.
“I flew all the way down there to find you, didn’t I?”
“Yeah, and you managed to show up after I’d already freed myself. You definitely didn’t save me.”
“Same difference,” Clark said.
“Think about it. If McHenry set you up, then maybe he set me up. If he did, then that means—”
“He’s working with Petrovsky and the Russians.”
“Uh-huh,” Miri said.
Silence filled the room. Clark thought about what Miri had said. As usual, she was right.
“The real question is, what are we going to do about it?” Clark said. “All I wanted to do was take care of things in Mexico. But now…”
“If it really was McHenry, I can’t just let that go. Not a chance.”
“You? Hell, you’ll have to wait behind me in line. But the Old Man’s tricky. Allowing for the fact that we could be wrong, we can’t just drag him to a salt quarry and beat on him until he gives it up. You think he’d crack? He was a POW, for fuck’s sake.”
“It’s not going to be easy, but it needs to be done. At the very least, we need to rule him out.”
“How do we do that?”
“I’ve got Lucy looking into it,” Miri said. “She may be able to tell us something.”
“Make sure she keeps it on the hush.”
“It’s not my first rodeo, cowboy.”
They fell again into a comfortable silence. Clark’s arm throbbed at the site of his wound. He felt fortunate that the bullet had only torn a chunk of meat from his arm. It could have been far worse.
He retrieved a bottle of over-the-counter pills from the drugstore bag, pouring a random amount into his mouth and chewing them up. He winced at the taste but knew the medicine would enter his bloodstream quicker.
“I see you got a few more,” Miri said.
Clark turned to see her gesturing to his armful of tattoos. She was one of only two people on the planet who knew what all the keys meant, and she always took notice.
“Just got a couple. Getting tattooed in Mexico skeeved me out. I’ll wait for the rest until I get somewhere a little cleaner.”
“Still keeping track?”
Clark nodded.
“You’re a strange bird.”
“Can’t argue with that.”
The pair cleaned up and played paper-rock-scissors for the bed. Clark lost and pulled his pillow and a spare blanket off the bed and tossed them onto the couch.
Lying in the darkness, listening to the air conditioner clunk, Clark thought about the last several weeks. He wasn’t nearly drunk enough to sleep, so he tried to focus on something to take himself out of his own head.
Bypassing the A/C and the dripping faucet, he instead settled on Miri, who was asleep nearly as soon as her head hit the pillow. From across the room, he could hear her snoring softly. He listened to her rhythmic breathing until his eyes were too heavy to keep open.
Thirty
Clark watched as Samantha’s face melted into a skull, her perfect porcelain skin and flame-colored hair replaced by a stark white skull and actual flames.
“This is all your fault,” she said as the explosion from behind her obliterated everything in sight.
Clark woke up, panting. He breathed deeply, calming himself and trying to remember where he was.
“That’s the third time tonight,” Miri said from the bed. “I’m a light sleeper and you’re killing me.”
Clark didn’t say anything, instead focusing on the small sliver of moonlight that peeked through the curtains.
“Listen, if the couch isn’t working for you, take half the bed.”
“I don’t think that’s—”
“Something has to give, dummy. You keep falling asleep, waking up, making a ruckus, and doing it all over again. I don’t know what your issue is, but we have to change something up. I’m not moving to the couch; I won rock-paper-scissors, so fuck that. You either try the floor or share the bed.”
“The thing is—”
“We’ve shared a sleeping bag before, I think we can manage in a queen-sized bed.”
“That was different. Freezing to death in Tora Bora was a lousy option.”
“If you don’t be quiet and let me sleep, I’ll beat you to death. How’s that for an option?”
Clark got up and carried his pillow and blanket over to the bed, lying down on the open side.
Clark lay there, looking at the ceiling. Silence filled the room save for the air conditioner. “I’ve been having nightmares.”
“I know.”
“Not the normal ones.”
“I know.”
“They’re about Samantha.”
“I heard.”
“I’ve never told anyone about them,” Clark said. “I just… I don’t know what to do to make them stop.”
Miri didn’t answer.
The pair lay there for several more minutes.
“Thanks for coming to get me,” Clark said.
“You’re welcome.”
“I appreciate you.”
“I know you do,” Miri said softly.
Clark lay there until Miri fell asleep, her snoring softly humming along beside him. He closed his eyes until darkness overtook him.
For the first time in a long time, he dreamt of nothing.
Thirty-One
The pair dumped the stolen Escalade at the airport long-term parking lot. It would be weeks before someone noticed the car with the Mexican license plates hadn’t moved and looked into it. By then, they’d be long gone.
They picked a flight that got them back to Virginia as soon as possible and were fortunate to have just enough time to wipe down their pistols and discard them in the bottoms of their respective bathroom trash cans, then race through security and across the airport before the door of the plane shut.
Once the flight attendant gave the safety speech, she took a drink order from the people in first class. Miri ordered a ginger ale and Clark a vodka.
They sipped their drinks as the plane taxied and took off. Once the plane reached a cruising altitude, the flight attendant came by again.
“Anything for you, sir?”
Clark held up the empty travel bottle she’d given him before. “How many of these can you give me at once?”
“Airline policy is one at a time, sir.”
Clark leaned toward the woman, his voice low. “Here’s the thing. I imagine you’re pretty busy, what with running around back and forth, trying to make everyone happy, and keeping the pilots from doing anything stupid.”
