The Protectors

by Dowell, Trey

  “How suitably paranoid of you, Mr. McAlister. Is Ms. Ravzi with you now?”

  “She’s in the room, but she says for you to piss off.”

  I looked up to see Lyla nodding emphatically in agreement.

  “That doesn’t sound like something she would say,” Tucker said.

  “I embellished. We’re both still irritated about being shot at by MI5.”

  “Bygones, Mr. McAlister—all in the past. I suggest you begin your mission as soon as possible. There are high-level eyes on this operation. Hopefully I don’t need to tell you how badly this will hurt your future if . . .”

  “We’re done. Mission accomplished.”

  His eyes bulged. “What? Repeat last . . . what did you say?”

  “I’m sorry. Did you want to threaten me more? If you worked out a whole routine ahead of time, by all means, feel free.”

  He gave an annoyed wave. “Please. Did you say you’re done? Already?”

  “Yes. All seven scientists have been compromised.”

  Tucker leaned back from the camera and mumbled, “Good Lord.” He sat there, dazed in his chair for a solid five-count. I’d never liked him so much as during those five seconds.

  I went on to describe most of the particulars, including Lyla’s idea to go up the military chain to find the perfect man to corral all the scientists at once. I wanted Tucker to know how much his “broken idealist” had come through for him. When I finished, he ran his fingers through short salt-and-pepper hair and scrubbed his scalp as if waking up from a trance. In the background, I heard a child’s voice yell, “Dinner!” Tucker’s gaze broke to the side. He walked away from his computer screen and I heard a door slam shut.

  “I apologize,” he told me after he’d returned. “It seems as though congratulations are in order.”

  “Thanks. And our deal? Lyla and I can walk away now . . . no pursuit. That was the bargain.”

  He exhaled hard enough to distort the speaker. Relief, disappointment, anger? Hard to tell on a three-inch screen. I waited for the inevitable screw job.

  “Very well.”

  He agreed. Easy as that. “Seriously?”

  “Yes, Mr. McAlister. That was the deal, and I honor my agreements. Of course, we’ll still need you to come in for a full debrief.”

  “Yeah, you should hold your breath waiting. Thanks for the memories, Tucker. Now go eat dinner.” I tapped the disconnect button before he could say another word. “Aaaaaand, we’re done.”

  Lyla looked decidedly less giddy. “Do you believe him?”

  I shrugged. “As much as any government puppet. Job’s finished, he’ll look like a genius to his bosses, and he’ll probably get promoted while riding on the coattails of our work. It’s the CIA way.”

  Lyla gathered her legs beneath her as she sat in the middle of her own bed. “You realize he’ll be back, correct? Eventually they’ll have a mission they need accomplished, and despite all promises, we’ll be forced to assist. That is also the CIA way.”

  “Tell me something I don’t know. The guy busted down my door last week. Point is, we’re not going to be around for him or anyone else to do the asking.”

  “Pray tell, where will we be, Strategic Genius?”

  I stood up and began my own process of stripping down. “One thing at a time, Aphrodite . . . one thing at a time.”

  We barely spoke during our separate rituals of showering, teeth brushing, and winding down . . . but it was clear that the only real “winding down” was being done by yours truly. The stress and high drama of the operation affected me far differently than Lyla. I seemed to wilt in the aftermath of the mission’s stress and pressure, but her energy and enthusiasm only amplified. She bounced from bathroom to balcony to bed like a superball. When I offered up her nightly knockout a little too readily, she declined.

  “I’d rather bask in this feeling awhile,” she said.

  “Fine. But I need sleep . . . my brain is fried.”

  She locked her mouth with an invisible key and tossed it away. When darkness finally settled over us both, I pushed the cotton sheet down to my waist and tried to relax despite the stifling heat. Lyla tossed and turned in her bed as I closed my eyes and tried like hell to live up to my own name.

  —

  Five minutes later, she came to me.

  I heard her slip free of her sheets but didn’t open my eyes until she straddled my hips. I managed a surprised “What . . .” but the protest died in my throat as my hands found her naked torso.

  “It’s too hot to sleep in here,” she said. “Can I interest you in some productive insomnia?” I could see the glowing outline of a smile above my head.

  The cynical bastard saw it, too, and whispered, Remember the cabin.

  “Um, this isn’t exactly the way to cool off.”

  “Are you complaining?”

  It’s not real, she’s just using you. Like before.

  “No, it’s just . . . I don’t know. With our history . . .”

  “You think too much. Trust me, we need this.”

  Trust her? Is she kidding?

  She lowered her face and kissed me. Long. Slow. Deep.

  The cynical bastard shook his head and headed for the door, You’re on your own, pal. Have fun.

  So I did.

  CHAPTER 34

  We had sex. A lot.

  At midnight, I thought I’d had enough. I was content to lie next to Lyla and run my fingertips over her stomach, exploring the shallow crevices of her abs and the deep hollow beneath her ribs. When my hand went north of the ribs and found hard nipples, well, it was game on.

  By one in the morning, I was convinced we were both done. Then Lyla went south of my ribs and I discovered reserves I didn’t think I had. I opened the balcony doors to welcome in the night breeze, and we experienced the chorus of city sounds below; babbling voices, motorcycles, car engines, the nightlife. We were only too happy to add a few moans to the symphony.

  By 2 a.m., we’d throttled down to the exhausted-cuddling stage. Neither of us had much left to offer, other than astonished gratitude. The room was still warm so we lay naked on top of the sheets, legs tangled together in postcoital bliss. I noticed Lyla staring at me while she nestled in the crook of my shoulder.

  “What?”

  “I wish I could read minds,” she said. “What are you thinking about right now—this very second?”

  I answered, “So very many things,” which could not possibly have been more accurate. She slapped her palm on my stomach, avoiding the tender sternum.

  “Be serious. I want to know.”

  I had a sudden, almost uncontrollable urge to tell her, right then and there, everything on my mind. Not just the usual half measure of truth, but all of it. The mix of sexual satisfaction and exhaustion, fear of discovery, fear that Tucker was lying through his Agency-perfected smile . . . hell, I even wanted to tell Lyla I was afraid of her, too. But, in that rare window of total clarity—the moment after, completely unclouded by passion—the emotion I experienced more than any other? Shame.

  Five YEARS. It takes five years to climb out of the wreckage of Lyla’s embrace, and five seconds of naked flirting leads you right back to the edge of the abyss. You wanna know what I’m thinking, Lyla? I’ve betrayed myself.

  Fear, shame, desire, and whatever posed as “love” in Aphrodite’s world—however good it might feel to surrender to complete honesty, sharing those feelings wasn’t the kind of truth bomb I wanted to drop in the middle of a mission. Complex relationships taught a lesson the CIA would be proud of: information conservation is your friend.

  “I’m thirsty,” was all I could come up with.

  This time, she hit the sternum. “That’s what’s on your mind? After what we just did?”

  “C’mon, I’m only kidding. I was thinking about how different i
t is.”

  “What’s different?”

  “The sex. It was never like that before.”

  She shifted her gaze to the ceiling fan and said, “No, it was not,” through a tired, satisfied smile.

  We lay there for a long time; me watching the ceiling fan and battling my various internal demons, and Lyla quietly biding her time until she could say the two pillow-talk words most proven to make men cringe:

  “What now?”

  If she meant “what-now-about-us-as-a-couple,” I sure as hell wasn’t gonna stroll down the middle of that minefield.

  “We’re both semi-officially out of the CIA’s clutches—free to cross international borders again, at least probably anywhere but England. What did you have in mind?”

  She sat up and sucked in a deep breath.

  I made her pause mid-suck. “Crap, you were just waiting for me to ask, weren’t you?”

  “Be quiet. Just listen. How many millions of people lie in bed like we’re doing now and talk about the future? Or life? How many conversations about making a difference?”

  “Lots, I’d imagine.”

  “And to them, changing the world is all about millions of people doing tiny things. If everyone donates to charity, if people ride bikes instead of drive cars, if everyone recycles—each personal action is a raindrop, but do it a billion times and you have an ocean.”

  “That’d make a good motivational poster.”

  “Funny. Let me ask you a question: why doesn’t it work? Why don’t people really change the world?”

  I propped up on my elbows. “I don’t know. I guess because it’s hard to maintain. People are lazy.”

  I recycled for a while. When the bin got full one weekend and I didn’t feel like taking it down to the recycling center, I threw a couple of Coke Zero cans in the regular trash. No buzzers went off, no eco-nazis stormed the cabin. Pretty soon my bin was recycling dust while the plastic and aluminum slept peacefully in the landfill.

  “Correct. Plus ‘small things’ are self-defeating in the long run. It’s too easy to write them off as insignificant. Real change fails because people lack conviction,” she said. “They just don’t have the stamina. Or the power.”

  “Ohhhh shit.”

  “No, no . . . stay with me. Before you spout the Prime Directive, I want to ask one final question.”

  “Because you had the good sense to use a Star Trek reference, I’ll allow it.”

  “If a billion people trying to change the world with tiny actions doesn’t work, why not try the opposite? A tiny group of people using huge actions to benefit everyone.”

  I groaned and rolled to face her. “The Time article.”

  “Don’t dismiss it. Just think about what we could do.”

  My disappointment was difficult to conceal. “You brought it up at St. Moritz but I thought it was the sleep deprivation talking.”

  A dueling editorial piece from the Time edition where the Protectors made their debut, the article had gone mostly unnoticed. “Mostly” didn’t include the people on the cover, though, newly branded super-beings who each bought fifty copies and read the entire issue cover to cover more than once. Titled “What a Wonderful World (It Could Be),” after the old Louie Armstrong song, the editorial debated military spending on a global scale. One person explained why it was necessary to spend more than one and a half trillion dollars a year to keep the world stable and people employed, while the other pointed out a few of the things even a fraction of that amount could pay for.

  Like, for $50 billion, you could develop enough agricultural infrastructure in Africa to feed every man, woman, and child.

  Or put a permanent colony on Mars for $200 billion.

  Or drop $400 billion and make college free. For everybody.

  Total pie-in-the-sky stuff. Except for Lyla, the one person with enough reach to grab the freaking pie.

  “I may have been on the edge of psychosis, but the idea is still valid,” she said.

  “And what I told you that night is still true. Just because you have the power to change the world doesn’t mean the world will let you. As soon as you—sorry, we—started dropping governmental mind-mojo bombs, every country on earth would hunt us down. They’d all be afraid we were coming after them next. That’s not helping the world, Lyla . . . that’s controlling it.”

  She waved her hand in front of her like she was erasing a chalkboard. “No, I don’t mean like that . . .”

  The activist bloom on Lyla’s cheeks was a little scary, so I cut her off. “Look, I get it. Being free of the CIA opens all kinds of possibilities, and you’re right—we can take an active role, but we have to be very careful. Anything we do, good or bad, can always be viewed as a threat by the Agency or anybody else in power. One misstep and we could spend the rest of our lives like we have the last week—running through every country on earth like it’s hostile territory. I don’t want to live like that. Do you?”

  She rolled to her back and exhaled hard. “Well, I am getting tired of running.”

  “I’ve only been looking over my shoulder for a week and it blooooows.”

  Lyla continued her unfocused stare.

  C’mon, McAlister. Bring Lyla back down to earth.

  “Why don’t we go to the Cayman Islands?” I said. “We’ll lie on the beach, look at the stars, eat seafood. We can have more naked discussions and figure out a lower-impact way to use our powers for good. One that doesn’t attract snipers. How’s that for a compromise?”

  She rolled back and kissed me; the slow, openmouthed kind that lasts forever and doesn’t feel long enough at the same time. When she finally pulled back, my lips wanted to chase her.

  Yeah, I was surfing the edge of the abyss, but dammit, until we were out of Iran—and all the way beyond the Agency’s grip—it was a risk I had to take.

  CHAPTER 35

  For a guy called Knockout, I don’t sleep much. Five, six hours a night, tops—and usually no more than a couple of hours at a time. I’ve tried to push my own consciousness button on many sleepless nights, but every time I do, I get woozy and can’t focus enough to press down that final inch. And lemme tell ya, at 3 a.m., that’s the only power I wish I had.

  Listening to Lyla’s soft, rhythmic breathing didn’t help, either. When I couldn’t take it anymore, I sat up and turned to the balcony doors. Now closed, they muted the sounds of the streets below. Quite a bit louder were the chaotic thoughts bouncing around my head, given voice by the events of the last few hours. Either way, I wasn’t going to be getting a lot of sleep tonight.

  Might as well take a walk, I thought. Clear your head, get a plan together for tomorrow. Productive insomnia.

  I assumed the Grand Bazaar would be a ghost town this late, but I heard activity filtering up from below. When I stepped out onto the terrace and peeked over the railing, the source was easy to spot.

  Two security guards framed the back entrance of the hotel. Hotel guests, some half dressed and fumbling with their belongings, streamed past them and down the street. The guards kept fingers to their lips, hushing the patrons as they ushered them out into the bazaar. I jerked back from the railing and retreated into the room.

  They’re evacuating. Why didn’t we hear the alarm? Oh shit.

  I wheeled to face the door just as the frame exploded inward. Reflex brought my arms up in a defensive X, and a sharp pain struck right in the middle of my left forearm. Lyla woke with a scream. In the moment the angry shouting began, with my eyes closed I could see a dozen beacons of consciousness, all huddled by our door and down the hall. I panicked and a blanket drop pulsed over our floor of the hotel. Everybody in range dropped, Lyla included. When I opened my eyes, I saw the unconscious remnants of an assault team, now collapsed in the entryway. Tactical squad, black uniforms, ski masks, no outer markings. These weren’t police.

  The s
ting in my arm was replaced with a cold throbbing, and I looked down expecting to find shrapnel or a bullet wound. What I found was worse: a tranquilizer dart.

  “Fuck!” I yelled, ripping the dart out of my arm. It had hit near the bone of my elbow and wasn’t able to sink deep; I didn’t think I’d gotten the full load of whatever nastiness the dart contained. Still, judging from the numbness creeping up my arm, I was moments from being a useless pile on the floor. With Lyla unconscious as well, we’d be defenseless against the entry team’s backup.

  I grabbed my belt from the floor and wrapped it around my upper arm, pulling as tight as I could manage before tying it off. A poor man’s tourniquet wouldn’t last long, but it’d slow the barbiturate’s progress toward my brain. Depending on how much of the full dose I’d gotten, I had ten, maybe fifteen minutes—which wasn’t much.

  I woke Lyla fairly easily; the tough part was getting her to understand how screwed we were.

  “They found us. We gotta get out of here, c’mon!” I draped her arm over my shoulder and hefted her out of the bed. Helping her stand, we paused beside a shattered doorway filled with unconscious, heavily armed men.

  “Wha . . . why are you . . . what’s happening?” She was groggy and only supporting about a third of her weight.

  “Bad guys, guns, impending death,” I said, shuffling us around the corner of the bed.

  I guided her to a pile of discarded clothes and stooped to grab her pants. When I held them up, Lyla stared at me like I was handing her a potbellied pig.

  “How . . . what?”

  Goddammit. No time for this. I dropped the pants and slapped her across the face.

  The loud smack was like hitting a reset button. Lyla’s wandering, unfocused eyes snapped back to me and the gold spirals began to twist. Her weak legs rediscovered the floor and she jerked away.

  “Easy!” I raised both hands. “We are in some serious shit—I need you to focus.”

  She did a full 360 and truly saw the room for the first time since waking. Without further prompting, she dove for her clothes.