by Derek Haas
“They knew you’d given up the game, and they hired Spilatro to bring you back. He’s the cat who came up with the kidnap plan, the ransom note, the bread crumb trail that would bring you out of hiding.”
“So these men could have revenge on me for killing their candidate, their puppet.”
Archie sets down his donut. “Not exactly.”
I wait for more.
“They want you to work for them.”
I shake my head, my mouth twisted in a frown. “Do I look like I have a bump on my head, Archie? Why would I buy that?”
“Because it’s the truth. They saw the job you pulled in Los Angeles and wanted to know the man who could execute like that and walk away clean. They got beat by you, and dark men like them do one of two things when they get beat. They either fix the problem by plugging it up, or they recruit the son-of-a-bitch over to their side. Except with you, they figured best to do both.”
I don’t think my head has stopped shaking.
Archie continues, undaunted, “They went to their best hitter inside the company and said, ‘here’s your assignment. You find this Columbus and you kill him.’ But what they were really saying was ‘let the best man win.’”
“A test?”
“Something like that. Competition’s a better word. They want to run a stable with the best horses. And you just proved again you’re the best in the game.”
“And you played along?”
“After the beatdown they put on me, they drove me to what they call a ‘secure location.’ Then the real players showed up and told me the what-all. They kept me fed, let me watch TV, but they made it clear they wasn’t fucking around. Wanted to keep me alive and kicking so I could broker a deal if you bested Spilatro. And so here we are.”
“And Smoke is dead.”
His eyes cloud over. “Yeah. It’s a fuckin’ shame Spilatro did him like that. Smoke was good people.”
I sit back and fold my arms. “Call ’em over here.”
Archie gets that look on his face I’ve seen before, the one that says he forgot who he was dealing with. He wipes his fingers carefully with a napkin, then leans back and lets loose a long sigh. Finally, he cranes his neck and nods at the corner booth.
Two men wearing charcoal suits rise from the booth as they try unsuccessfully to keep their faces blank.
Archie slides around next to me, and they sit opposite.
“And the third. Call him over.”
The shorter of the two men—the one with bushy, black eyebrows that seem too large for his face—calls out to a third suited man perched at the counter. “Grayson, you’re made.”
A man at the counter slumps his shoulders, turns around, and pulls over a chair to the end of the table. The three men look approximately the same age—late forties—and all have hard eyes that indicate they’ve seen a lot of shit most people reserve for nightmares.
“You’re the dark men, huh?”
Bushy Eyebrows speaks up. “I’m Mitchells. This is Vancill. And Grayson’s at the end there.”
“You ordered all this?”
Mitchells shrugs. “I ordered your elimination. You cost us a great deal of time, effort and expense when you put our candidate in a bodybag.”
“He set it up.”
“But you killed him.”
“And now you want me to work for you?”
He smiles. “We happen to have an opening.”
“Go fuck yourself.”
Mitchells sniffs the air like he just caught a whiff of something unpleasant.
“That’s warranted, so I’ll let it slide. But you’re a very smart man, Columbus, so I won’t let it slide twice. There are advantages to working for us that I know will be attractive to you. Namely, you’ll get to keep doing what you love doing the most.”
“I was out.”
“Were you?” He says this without a smile. “I’m trained to read people the way my colleagues are trained to crack code. I’ve watched your progress on this mission and before it . . . all over Europe for the preceding three years. Prague, Belgium, Spain, Paris. You’re a killer, you’re good at killing, and I’ll be damned if you don’t enjoy it. I don’t know any plainer way to say it.”
He doesn’t look like he’s a man who flatters as a matter of course, and if this is an attempt at flattery, it’s a clumsy one. Rather, he simply speaks the truth and says it plain. “I would’ve sought you out sooner, would’ve tried to pull you in, but you stepped off the grid after you fell for the bookstore owner in Rome. That made it difficult to find you, and it would’ve been irresponsible for me not to make sure you hadn’t lost a step once we did.”
He watches my eyes to see if his casual mention of Risina elicits a response.
“So this was all about pulling me in?”
“This was about making sure you were worth pulling in. My team here thinks you are. I think the jury’s out.”
He says it levelly, a challenge there. Then to emphasize the point, “You gonna ask about the girl?”
“You know her name. You can say it.”
“Risina Lorenzana. You gonna ask about her or you want to keep pretending she doesn’t matter?”
“You want to keep poking me until you find out the answer?” I try to match his expression, but I’m not sure I pull it off.
He settles back. The other two haven’t said a word and Archie just chews on his old-fashioned donut like it’s the only thing in the room.
“All right,” I say after a charged moment. “Let’s hear your offer.”
Mitchells folds his fingers together. “It’s simple. You take your assignments from us. You give us a break on your rate. You keep working through Archie if you want, but we’ll supplement his fieldwork with our intel. And if you get caught or captured, you put a bullet in your own head. Otherwise, your life won’t change much. You won’t be lying on a beach in a fishing village, but we won’t overwork you either.”
“And there’s no getting out?”
“You put a few years in and then we talk again. We’re not inflexible.”
“And what about Risina?”
If he says “what about her?” or cracks a smile, I’m going to leap across the table and kill him with my bare hands. But he must have told the truth when he said he was good at reading people because he adds no emotion to his voice when he says, “She’s free to go. You want to keep her in play, that’s your decision.”
“I want her to be my fence.”
Archie stops in mid-bite and looks at me out of the tops of his eyes.
“Fine,” says Mitchells.
“You trying to cut me out after all we been through? Let me tell you something . . .”
“Don’t get nervous. She’s going to need some better training than I could give her. I know how to close a contract but I don’t know shit about fence-work. I want you to show her the ropes.”
That seems to mollify Archie. He jabs his index finger into the table to make the point. “I’ll set her up square. I promise you that.”
I nod but I’m not ready to look him in the eye. It’ll have to be enough.
Mitchells unfolds his hands. “We have a deal then?”
“We have a deal.”
The dark men get up from the booth, including Archie, and start to shuffle away, satisfied.
Mitchells takes a step toward the door, then turns around and puts his hands on the table.
“And Columbus?”
“Yeah.”
“I also know your name,” he says.
EPILOGUE
I drive to a country house in rural Virginia, about twenty miles outside of Charlottesville. Mitchells gave me an address where Risina would be safe, and if he’s lying, I’m hard pressed to figure out his play. They could’ve killed me in the aftermath of the Spilatro climax instead of freeing a bullet from my chest and sewing me up, instead of making me whole. They don’t want me angry; there’s no benefit to it. Right?
Farms with red barns, with tin silos,
with white-post fences, with black cattle, with green grass in wide pastures pass outside my windshield like Ansel Adams photographs of a forgotten America. The sun hangs on the horizon and burns the clouds above it a malevolent red. The contrast between the farms and the sky is disquieting, as though doom hangs over placidity like a guillotine waiting to drop.
She is a tiger. She said it and she did the job and when the time came to pull the trigger, she fired the gun into a woman’s face at point-blank range. She didn’t shy away from the mess when it interfered with our life and everything she’s done since Smoke showed up has been smart and efficient.
This could work. This could be better than how I imagined it. She’ll have Archie to guide her and the intel of the Agency to supplement her, and I can’t discount her innate passion and quick mind. She could be a great fence, the best I’ve had since Pooley. She’ll surpass Archie in short order, I’m sure of it. I won’t just be a horse in a stable to her, I’ll be her only horse, and she’ll do whatever it takes to ensure my success, the way Pooley used to perform the job when I first started. It can work. It will work.
Did the bloodshed change her? Did the battle sour her stomach? Will she want to disappear again, now that she’s seen up close what a pistol can do to a human face? Will she want to run? Will she want to flee alone?
The road turns to gravel as the GPS tells me I have less than a mile to go. I’m nervous in a way I haven’t been for a long time. We’ve been driving forward since this started, no time to catch our breath, no time to reflect, and now that she’s had some moments apart, will she pull out of the spiral? Will she emerge like a repatriated prisoner, free from Stockholm Syndrome, with a fresh realization that this life was an illusion, a fantasy, and the reality is so much worse?
No. It can’t be that way. I know her. Everything we’ve shared since I walked into that bookstore in Rome has been real, permanent, fervid. We were already solid, but now that we’ve been through the trenches together, we’re unbreakable.
She can be a great fence. She proposed it and she meant it. She said I have to be all the way in with her and I am. I swear I am. We can do this together.
I reach a red mailbox with the address number stenciled in black on its side and turn the car through a gate, bump over a cattle guard, and head down a bumpy road through a forest. She proposed it. She knows my fearful symmetry. She always knew it.
The road clears and on a hill sits a simple white house.
She must hear me coming because she’s through the front door, blinking away tears as soon as I’m out of the driver’s side. We meet halfway up the sidewalk and are in each other’s arms and it’s as it was, as it will be. This can work. We can make it work. She can be my fence, and I’ll be her assassin and we’ll make it work.
She pulls back, her face wet, her eyes shiny.
“I’m pregnant,” she says.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
copyright © 2011 by Derek Haas
interior design by Maria Fernandez
978-1-4532-4717-4
Pegasus Books LLC
80 Broad Street, 5th Floor
New York, NY 10004
This 2012 edition distributed by Open Road Integrated Media
180 Varick Street
New York, NY 10014
www.openroadmedia.com
Videos, Archival Documents, and New Releases
Sign up for the Open Road Media newsletter and get news delivered straight to your inbox.
FOLLOW US:
@openroadmedia and
Facebook.com/OpenRoadMedia
SIGN UP NOW at
www.openroadmedia.com/newsletters
