Going Grey

by Karen Traviss

  "If you meet the right girl, you'll be able to tell her eventually," Rob said. "Anyway, she'll guess when you buy a house near you-know-where."

  "Mike told me that Livvie went ballistic when she finally found out he was seriously minted."

  "Well, 'Hi, I'm a billionaire, fancy a shag?' isn't the most auspicious start to a romance, is it?"

  Tom extracted a piece of kiwi from his fruit tart and laid it on the side of the plate. "What do you tell women?"

  "I struggle, kiddo. I say security and they think mall guard. I say contractor, and they think I'm a Bob the Builder. I miss being able to just say Marine."

  "You blokes should reclaim the M word among yourselves. Mercenary. Stuff the legal definition. Make it cool again. Like the N word. Or Q word."

  "Ah, it all helps people to ignore the body bags, doesn't it?" Rob looked up as Ian's pash came over to clear the cups from their table. She gave Tom a long look. My boy. He's perfect. You noticed. And you were all over Ian the other week. He handed Tom the key card. "You want to drive?"

  "Ooh. Please."

  "Lush, innit?"

  "Nice motor."

  "You could have one. Remember Mike and Livvie want to get you something."

  "Yeah, and remember I'd have to park it in Newcastle." Tom looked extra-serious for a moment. "It's a shame Mike's having all this hassle. He's such a nice guy. Am I reading the runes right? Is Ian a permanent fixture now?"

  "Pretty well."

  "I'm glad. They certainly behave like a family. If it wasn't for the colouring, I'd think he was their biological son." Tom couldn't have known that Ian could match any colour swatch he fancied. "I don't ask questions, but from what Ian hints at, he's had the luckiest dog rescue in history. From whatever freaked him out so much to Mr and Mrs Perfect-Goldenballs."

  "There's got to be one happy-ish ending in the world," Rob said. "Let's go, kiddo."

  Rob picked up a couple of boxes of pastries to take home and basked in the warmth of Tom's delight at driving the Jag. This was when the trappings of money really mattered. Tom was never going to end up in a poxy bedsit or doing ten-hour shifts in a supermarket. This was what everything had been for.

  The police car was still parked up when Tom approached the entrance to the drive. "Pull over, kiddo," Rob said. "Hearts and minds time." He jumped out and handed a box of pastries to the trooper sitting behind the wheel. "There you go, mate. I'll bring down some coffee later. You must be freezing."

  He got back in, satisfied that he'd played it right. Tom carried on up the drive.

  "You're still a class act, Dad."

  "It doesn't do any harm to be affable. And you have to feel sorry for the poor sods on the front line."

  "This is the life, though. Preferably minus the homicide team."

  "Look, why don't we get hideously drunk tomorrow after Mrs Gobshite's gone home?"

  "Dru? Aww. I quite like her. She read psychology. Interesting woman."

  I'll bet. "She's had a profitable weekend."

  "She's very wary of you."

  "I'm losing my touch, then. I hoped she'd be fucking terrified."

  They laughed it off and Rob let the subject drop. He felt sorry for Dru, and he had to admire her guts. In different circumstances he might even have sidled up to her in a bar and tried his luck, but he wasn't going to turn his back on her in a hurry now. For the foreseeable future, she was a threat that had to be monitored.

  He found Mike looking a lot better than he had earlier. That might have been because he was asleep. He was stretched out on the sofa in the living room with his tie askew, both hands locked around a cut glass tumbler of Scotch balanced on his chest. It looked to be mostly melted ice. Livvie peeled his fingers off the glass and extracted it with slow care. He didn't stir.

  "Where's Dru, Mrs Mike?" Rob whispered.

  "She's in the den with Ian. He's showing her his gran's letter."

  "Oh, Christ. Bad idea."

  "No, reinforcement. She's very aware of what he's been through now. Shame can be as powerful as cash."

  "But not as powerful as a smack in the mouth."

  "True. But now she can't claim ignorance as a defence, either."

  "Okay. I'll keep my nose out of it."

  "Don't worry, he hasn't told her everything. He's not that naive."

  Rob marvelled at how they'd all managed to last a couple of days at close quarters without anything leaking in the wrong direction. He wasn't sure if that degree of secrecy and need-to-know was a healthy sign or not. It was a skill each of them needed to perfect, though.

  Mike woke up just before dinner and padded around aimlessly from room to room, looking lost. Eventually he sidled up to Rob and jerked his head in the direction of his study. He wanted to talk. When he shut the door behind them, it was clear that this was going to be raw stuff.

  "I could use a confession," he said.

  "You haven't discussed whatever this is with Livvie, then."

  "No. And it might end up being a burden on you. So I won't be offended if you say no."

  "If you can't tell me, who can you tell?" Rob couldn't refuse. He didn't want to, anyway. This was the nuts and bolts of friendship. A bloke had to be prepared to share the load if a mate needed support. "You feel bad about jobbing Biker Boy, don't you? I told you to leave it to me."

  "It's more than that. Can I tell you why?"

  "Go ahead."

  Mike took out his burner. He held it gingerly like it was smeared with nuclear waste and cued something up. "Are you willing to listen to this?"

  "Delete it, whatever it is," Rob said. "I'll listen first, though. What is it?"

  Mike stopped, really stopped. It was the only way Rob could describe it. He just froze. He didn't breathe, he didn't blink, and he didn't even twitch for a few seconds. He was looking past Rob at a point on the carpet as if someone was standing there.

  Then he got up and opened the door. He didn't seem to want to hear it again. "I can't. Just play it."

  Rob took a few moments to work out that he was listening to ragged breathing and hoarse voices, Mike and the biker talking. The biker sounded as if he'd said seen it, which might have been about Ian, and then fucking guard, whatever that meant. Maybe he didn't know who Mike was and thought he was security, or maybe he knew a lot and was surprised that a National Guardsman had got the better of him. But he'd finally said Weaver. Mike thanked him. The breathing went on for a while, getting more wheezy until it stopped, and then there was a couple of seconds of rustling and clicking before the recording ended.

  Evidence. Good work, Zombie. I bet your dad's going use that wisely.

  It was never pretty watching someone gasp away the last few moments of their existence, but Mike, all titanium casing with a marshmallow core, must have found it bloody hard to stomach.

  Rob stuck his head out of the door. "I'm done. Are you going to give this to your dad? Good insurance."

  Mike frowned at him as if he'd played the wrong bit. "What?"

  "Okay, it's grim. But clear."

  Mike almost pushed him back into the room and shut the door. "Rob, I let a guy bleed out. I stood and watched. I didn't even have the grace to finish him off. And you think I'm going to let my father hear that?"

  Mike could be bloody tedious when he was set on blaming himself. It was hard to tell if he was just knackered or on the point of tears. Rob had to let him talk it out.

  "How much did you edit this?" Rob asked. "Is this the lot?"

  "Yes." Mike shook his head. It was hard to tell what he was rejecting. "I started recording when I went over to check him. Don't you get it? I questioned a guy who was dying, just to hear Weaver named."

  "Cops do that."

  "I don't. I have to be better than that."

  Sometimes Mike could be set straight with a pat on the back, but occasionally it took a hard kick up the arse. Rob plugged in his headphones so that Mike didn't have to suffer the audio again and replayed the section to time it. The clock on the scree
n showed just under two minutes to the point where the bloke sounded like he'd died. Rob had heard the first shots while he was waiting outside the house. The time between then and reaching Mike couldn't have been more than three minutes, maximum. Mike just needed to crunch the numbers and get a grip.

  And it was bloody good shooting. Rob decided not to point that out, but he'd managed to target the exposed spots around the body armour.

  "Mike, even if you'd had a helo standing by, he wouldn't have made it to a hospital in time," Rob said. "Look at the timings. What does he weigh, twelve stone? More? Say one-seventy pounds. Under tree cover. You pick him up to carry him out to an LZ and get him on the helo, and he's probably dead before they've got a line in him. Two, three minutes. He was as good as dead the moment you pulled the trigger."

  Rob was prepared to admit that it was probably tougher from Mike's perspective than his own. Mike didn't look convinced.

  "But I couldn't finish him off," he said.

  "Course not. A close-range headshot at that angle wouldn't have looked too clever when the cops showed up, would it?"

  Rob didn't let himself think what would have happened if the bloke had survived. He hadn't. It was hypothetical, which was another word for unhelpful as far as he was concerned.

  Mike nodded and put one hand over his eyes as if he was rubbing them. "That's exactly what I thought at the time. And that's why I fucking hate myself. I went through all this callous calculation about what I could and couldn't do so that I left everything forensically tidy. Neat and tidy. Me and my tidy goddamn life."

  "You just won't let yourself win, will you?"

  "I went out armed." Mike sat down at his desk and slid back in the big green leather chair. "I executed him."

  "You might have missed. There's an element of luck in this."

  "I didn't go out thinking I was going to detain him."

  Rob had been here before with Mike. It just seemed to be part of his decompression process. "Jesus, Mike, what do you think he'd have done if you hadn't squeezed one off first? He'd have put one through you. He had a job to do – get Ian, nothing else. That means you, Livvie, me, Tom, we'd all be collateral damage, and God only knows where Ian would have ended up. So you think he'd have listened politely to your case and thought, 'What a decent bloke, he saves orphans, he's kind to animals, and he does a lot for charity, so I think I'd better apologize and be on my way.' Really?"

  "You know what I mean."

  "Would you have fired if you'd been sure he wasn't armed?"

  "No." Mike's answer was instant. "But I don't know if that's my morality talking, or the fact that it would have harder to justify to a court."

  "As far as he's concerned, it doesn't matter if you blew his lungs out after careful moral deliberation or a negligent discharge. He's still in the morgue."

  Rob needed to keep repeating the obvious to Mike until he started to believe it. Mike had shot an armed bastard planning to do harm. People wouldn't ask why he didn't rush to get the bloke medevacked. They'd applaud. All that mattered was that whenever the shit hit the fan, Mike's training always kicked in and he got the job done calmly and competently, even the dirty bits. He saved his angsting for later. It was bound to be harder when the enemy was literally in your back yard, a direct threat to your family, and you had to lie about the root cause of it all. But Mike would see that he'd done the only thing that he could. It would just take time.

  Anyway, the biker should have come back another day with a better plan and waited for reinforcements. But he hadn't. Rob might have done the same in his position. It was tough shit, and nothing personal, just the way things were.

  "I'm psyching myself up to tell Livvie," Mike said. "We've never had any secrets."

  Rob found a decanter of Scotch in the cabinet and poured Mike an extra-large one. "She won't bat an eyelash. Your dad won't either."

  "He'll have to filter it for Mom." Mike held the tumbler up to the desk lamp. "Damn, I'm drinking too much these days."

  "This is what drink's for, mate."

  "You know that four or five months ago, that guy was us?"

  "I don't recall tooling up to shoot anyone who got in our way and dragging some kid off to a lab to have needles stuck in him."

  "Actually, I remember it being pretty ambiguous until we hauled Ian back to the ranch and talked to him."

  Rob had run out of things to say for the moment. He poured himself a drink and sat with Mike to keep him company. Sometimes that was all he needed.

  "Call your dad. He needs a sitrep."

  "Yes, I have to find out what he wants to do about Weaver."

  "I don't think Dru's told him to ram his job yet. Have you got a script for her?"

  Mike looked sufficiently distracted from his anxiety to make Rob feel he'd achieved something, even if it was temporary. "She's a good liar, but I don't want to push my luck," he said. "I was thinking of getting her an attorney to do the leg work to extract her pension and so on."

  "Does she need it?"

  "It's hers. Why shouldn't she have it?"

  "Actually, I meant our problem, not hers. You know. Explaining why she came here."

  "Oh, right. Dad's best placed to broach the subject with Weaver. Then she can just coast in behind on the shockwave."

  "Your dad's got a PhD in Applied Bollocking. What's he going to tell Kinnery?"

  "The minimum he needs to stay out of trouble and not drop us in it, I expect."

  Mike didn't drain his glass. He stood up, took off his tie, and seemed to notice the creases in his shirt for the first time. "I ought to dress for dinner. I need to lavish attention on my very patient and perfect wife. Any other woman would have left me and dragged me through the courts years ago."

  "As long as you remember that, mate. Go and grovel."

  Dinner was some of the gourmet freezer lasagne Livvie had stashed away. Rob watched her holding forth at the table, entertaining everybody with stories and generally being a charming hostess while Mike sat and listened, looking distracted. Rob couldn't work out if everyone was secretly relieved but felt guilty for showing it, or if they were quietly horrified by what had gone on a couple of hundred yards from the dinner table and were just trying to put a brave face on it.

  Livvie seemed a lot more gregarious than she'd ever admitted. It was clear she liked company. She'd given up that and a hell of a lot more for Mike. Despite the money, it must have been bloody miserable for a clever woman to be holed up here on her own for weeks on end, doing a job she didn't seem to like very much and worrying what was happening to Mike in hostile places.

  Now she'd seen for herself some of the things he actually did. Rob couldn't detect any signs of shock. Livvie was definitely nails.

  She even managed to get Dru talking about Clare. All the time Dru was talking about her kid, she wasn't in danger of letting Ian's secret slip out, but Rob still had a sense of an anvil dangling on a fraying thread above him.

  "You okay, Dad?" Tom asked.

  "Hoofing, kiddo. Never better." If anyone had walked in now and tried to guess who was who, and how they'd arrived at this point in life to have a meal together, they wouldn't even have come to close to the real answer. "When I've done my errands tomorrow, why don't we hit the cinema in Porton?"

  "Good idea," Tom said. "We don't have to watch the security cams all night now."

  "Yeah, we've seen that one before."

  Rob would still keep an eye on the feeds via his phone, but not obsessively. He'd just make sure he stayed alert. Weaver would find out fairly soon what had happened to his hired help, and there was no way of knowing which way he'd jump when he did.

  EN ROUTE TO BANGOR AIRPORT

  MONDAY.

  "It's not the Gulfstream," Rob said, obviously enjoying the chance to get out in his Jaguar, "but it's better than zoo class on a scheduled flight. No little screaming bastards kicking the back of your seat."

  Ian sat in the back, watching Dru's reactions as they headed for the airport. Mik
e had laid on a private flight and limo back to Lansing for her. It was hard to tell if she was happy with the way things had worked out, or if she was still trying to make sense of the bomb that had shattered her life in the last week. There was nothing left of her old existence except her daughter and her house. Ian knew that roller-coaster all too well.

  "Larry's going to be a pain in the ass about this," Dru said. "He always cross-examines me, like he still has a say in my life."

  "Just tell him ram it," Rob said airily, like they were old buddies. This was a conversation they couldn't have in front of Tom. "I don't tell my ex anything since she remarried. Least of all about Mike."

  "How does Tom handle being in the middle of that? Larry uses Clare like a proxy message service."

  "Tom's a diplomat. He never talks about me to her, and vice versa."

  "He's an intelligent guy. You must be very proud of him."

  "I am. He's my life. I'd kill for him."

  It was just a phrase Rob used a lot. It happened to be true as well, but it probably wasn't what Dru needed to hear right then. Ian thought she seemed uneasy. She'd been paid off; the biker guy was dead. Maybe she was wondering whether it could have been the other way around. Win big or lose big, Mike had said.

  Rob carried on, oblivious, reminding Dru to make herself known to the security team who'd keep a discreet eye on her until Mike was sure there were no further problems. In the meantime, Brayne staffers were rebuilding her world around her. Mike was very good at tidying up people's lives.

  "You'll get a call in a few days from one of Mike's people," Rob said. "They'll arrange everything for you. Any problems, call Mike or me direct. If your old man starts making trouble – definitely call me."

  "I know I should sound more grateful, but I'm still reeling from the last few days."

  "Well, don't lose your nerve," Rob said. "You're home and dry. Weaver's heading up Shit Creek, though. Just trust Mike and follow the instructions."

  "Okay." She managed a smile. "I think Larry would need CPR if you showed up on his doorstep."

  Ian thought she was trying really hard with Rob, but he wasn't sure if Rob could tell. By the time they pulled in to the short-term parking at the airport, she seemed to have given up.