by Nick Petrie
The Irishman put a strong arm around his shoulder and turned him. “We’re leavin’.” He spoke into Peter’s ear. “Tomorrow’s another day. Best we go before these eejits snap your photo and put you on social media. You want your mother to see you like this? Or worse yet, your wife?”
Peter tilted with the slope of the hill. Gravity pulled him down toward the bay, his mind blown wild with the winter wind.
By the time he found his car, most of the late-night tourists and party people had disappeared. The parking lot was nearly empty, and the still-falling snow had erased all footprints and tire tracks. The Mitsubishi loomed out of the darkness, snowclad like an old, rounded boulder.
The door was locked.
Peter reached for the key in his pants pocket, then remembered he’d lost his pants. That explained why his legs were so cold.
He patted his coat. No key. No wallet or phone, either. All in his pants. Shit. His brain definitely wasn’t working right. He was going to twist Bjarni’s head off his goddamn neck.
“Lad, you’ll stay with me, all right?” The Irishman put a hand on his shoulder. “Just the one night. No grab-arse, don’t worry. I can lend yeh some clothes. You’ll be warm and dry.”
Peter shrugged off the hand, then turned and slammed the back of his elbow into the Mitsubishi’s slightly-open rear passenger window. Dull pain bloomed. The glass cracked. He hit it again and it spiderwebbed. Once more and it buckled inward. “I’ll be fine.” He pushed his hand inside and unlocked the door. He cleared his throat. “Thanks. I owe you one.”
He climbed inside while the Irishman watched. Beads of melt gathered on the man’s raven-dark hair. His eyebrows furrowed. “You’re sleeping in your hire car?”
“You don’t know a goddamned thing about me.” Maybe said with more force than he’d intended.
The Irishman shook his head, then turned and walked away. Peter climbed into the back and shook out his new sleeping bag to let the down loft. An odd diffused light filtered through the film of clinging snow. Wind pushed more snow through the broken window.
His whole body ached. His eye throbbed. Shivering, he knelt and dug into his duffel for dry tops and bottoms. He told himself it was like changing his clothes in a tent. He told himself he was in a mountain meadow, and tomorrow the sun would come out. Stomach tight with tension and growling with hunger, he crawled into his sleeping bag and waited for his heat to fill the down.
He didn’t want to know what time it was. He didn’t want to close his eyes. He could feel them waiting for him in the darkness, the Iraqi family he’d killed in the dusty Baghdad street. His punishment. Maybe welcome for all that. Maybe he didn’t deserve to forget them, any of them.
His breath caught in his throat. What the hell had he been thinking? He was trapped in this godforsaken winter-bound land with no spring in sight, when his entire being screamed to be outside.
Fuck it. He found the pill bottle and shook two into his hand. Then two more.
He gulped them down dry.
For the pain.
7
TWELVE MONTHS EARLIER
They eat supper together like any other night, even if Sarah is unusually quiet and the food grows cold on their plates. Erik tries without success to wipe the video from his memory while Óskar tells his mother tall tales of their adventures in Rock Creek Park. Recitations of pi are not allowed at the dinner table.
After Óskar has cleared the plates, Erik and Sarah remain in the warm, flickering glow of the candles Erik lights at every evening meal. In the living room, Óskar sprawls on their big white couch, boneless as a squid and spellbound by a game on the family tablet. The tablet is a rare treat when there are Lego to play with and books to read. Óskar knows something is up but the game sucks him in anyway.
Quietly, Erik says, “Where did that video come from?”
Sarah gives Erik a tight shake of her head. Her lips are pale at the edges as she presses them together. The muscle below her right eye has begun to twitch. Sarah is trying to keep herself contained, but Erik is a dedicated student of her ways. He knows these signs.
“Sarah. Tell me what happened.”
“The Prince’s server got hacked last night. I spent the day up to my neck in it.”
“The video came from the hacker?”
She shakes her head.
Of course, Erik thinks. The video came from the Prince.
Most of Sarah’s clients are nonprofits, who get hacked nearly as often as for-profit corporations, although the crimes rarely make the news. The hacks are more often for ideological reasons than financial ones. The Women’s Reproductive Health Coalition and the National Voting Rights Initiative have more enemies than Erik ever imagined.
Sarah does, however, have one corporate client. Her first real client, the client who helped get her one-woman firm off the ground. Although she would like nothing more than to free herself from him, the client won’t let her go. He is too influential, too connected. A few quiet whispers in the right ears would ruin her business. Her career.
In private, when she talks about him, she refers to him as the Prince. A kind of shorthand.
The muscle in her cheek often twitches after she’s seen him.
Even now, Erik notices, Sarah deliberately avoids using the man’s true name. As if to speak it aloud would make this problem more real. Erik is eerily reminded of the old tales of summoning the midnight gods of the underworld, tales Erik is too intelligent, too rational, to take literally. Yet somehow he has adopted the same habit.
The Prince is the rare Washington power broker with no media presence, because he prefers to work in the darkness. He has no ideology or political affiliation, and is dedicated only to the cause of filling his pockets and broadening his reach. He has been investigated many times, but never indicted. He has somehow managed to avoid falling under the laws that regulate the lobbying industry. He’s an attorney and a consultant, so his clients remain secret.
Sarah keeps a private catalog of his sins, gathering ammunition for the day when she might slip his grasp. But this sin is of an entirely different magnitude.
That video confirms every unpleasant suspicion Erik might have had about the Prince. And worse. He thinks about how the lens panned across the moving bodies, how it zoomed in on the faces. Somebody was behind the camera. The same person who set up the whole thing. Erik can only imagine its value, evidence of a public figure’s crimes. The ways it might be used.
He says, “Did you catch the hacker, at least?”
She shakes her head. “Lost him in the Maldives.” She means the hacker came in through a series of proxy servers, hiding his tracks with each step.
“Did the hacker find the video?”
“I don’t think so,” she says. “He didn’t even get past my secondary firewall. The file was on a hidden drive I found when cleaning up the mess.” She looks at Erik. “Although, if the video got out, that wouldn’t be so bad, would it?”
“You’re not considering—”
“I am.”
“We need to think about this, Sarah.”
“You think I’m not?” Her voice is low but fierce. The twitch in her cheek has reached her lower eyelid. She is furious. “That video should be in the hands of the police.”
Through the door to the living room, Óskar looks up from the tablet.
“It’s more complicated than that,” Erik says. “You have a nondisclosure agreement. You’ll be exposed. Your business will be ruined. We’ll be ruined. The lawsuit alone will kill us, even if we win.”
“Are you kidding me?” Sarah can no longer contain herself. Her glare could spit a lamb and roast it. Her hair, fallen from its ponytail, rises on the electricity in the dry winter air. “That man goes on television every night and tells half of America what to think. What to believe. What’s moral. That’s reason enough. But to know that th
e Prince has it? And what he might do with it?”
Sarah’s emotions are contagious. This is part of why Erik loves her, the deep currents of her passion. It is easy to get swept away. Nonetheless, he requires himself to keep his voice calm. He puts his hand in hers. “I’m saying, there’s a lot at stake.” He angles his head at the living room. “It’s not just us.”
She squeezes his hand. Her grip is astonishing. He watches her face. The twitching becomes more pronounced. When the upper eyelid begins to spasm, the likelihood grows that she will throw something. There are two sides to passion, after all.
“I’m with you,” he says. “We want the same thing, okay? To do the right thing. Now we just talk about how to achieve it. Before we do anything rash, we need to talk with an attorney, someone who specializes in these things. Agreed?”
He glances at the living room. Óskar’s eyes are glued to his parents.
The boy has been listening, of course. Óskar is only seven, but he misses nothing.
“Why don’t you go for a walk,” Erik tells Sarah. “While I put the tiny Viking in the bath, and to bed.”
Óskar speaks up. “I don’t want to take a bath.”
Erik smiles at the boy. “Tomorrow is Monday, yes?”
“Yes,” Óskar admits.
“Monday means school, yes?”
“Yes,” Óskar says grudgingly. Despite the fact that he’s skipped two grades because of his photographic memory, he still finds school boring beyond belief.
“Then tonight, a bath,” Erik says. “And in bed, I will read you the story of Thor and the sea serpent.”
Sarah squeezes Erik’s hand again, but more gently. The tremor in her cheek has subsided. “A walk is a good idea,” she says. “I’ll do bedtime tomorrow.”
But, of course, she won’t.
Because by ten the next morning, she will be dead.
8
PRESENT DAY
For Peter, it began three days before, when Tom Wetzel had called, looking for a favor. Peter’s first question was how Wetzel had found him.
Wetzel answered, “I won’t ask your secrets, you don’t ask mine.”
Peter and Wetzel had been new lieutenants together in Afghanistan. Wetzel was capable enough, but hard for Peter to respect because he twisted himself into knots finding reasons to stay inside the wire. It wasn’t enough to protect him, though, and he got sent to Germany with mortar fragments in his ass. An undiscovered knack for paperwork manifested during his recovery, and he ended up commanding a desk at Pendleton for the rest of his tour. Now he was some kind of corporate hotshot and he wouldn’t tell Peter what the favor was, not until he’d signed a nondisclosure agreement.
It was sensitive, Wetzel said. Peter would have to travel internationally. There might be some heavy lifting, but nothing Peter couldn’t handle. He’d be on the side of the angels. The money would be better than good.
Peter didn’t care about the money.
* * *
—
When he’d left Memphis the summer before, returning with June Cassidy to her home in Washington State, he’d begun running the valley perimeter again, seven miles of steep, narrow trails with a forty-pound ruck on his back. The dreams had punished him every night. He’d added the waterfall climb, a thousand vertical feet of spray-slick granite, then another two miles through the high grassy meadow above. The rest of the day was spent weeding the big garden or repairing one of the valley’s many old buildings. Working until his muscles ached and he stumbled with exhaustion.
It still wasn’t enough to let him sleep without dreaming.
His subconscious kept reminding him of his many failures and bad decisions.
He knew, rationally, that the decisions were impossible. Made under pressure, in the heat of the fight, with lives other than his own at risk. He told himself this again and again. He couldn’t make the right choice every time. Failure was inevitable.
But the back of his mind felt differently. The conflict between what he knew was right, and the wrong things he’d done. The things he’d had to do. To save himself, to save his people. He’d saved some. But so many others had died. Bystanders. Victims.
A married couple and their young children, in a car without brakes. Just trying to get someplace safe.
Collateral damage, my ass.
* * *
—
In December, he’d sat with June on the sleeping porch he’d built onto the back of her farmhouse. Since Memphis, when the static had gotten worse again, they didn’t sleep together there, although they still did the other things they used to do. The unmade bed was a tangle of sheets.
Outside the floor-to-ceiling windows, it was clear and cold. The ground was almost frozen, and soon the snow would start to pile up. June wore a fleece vest and a wool hat and thermal leggings and two pairs of socks. Peter wore a threadbare T-shirt and faded mountain pants gone thin at the knees. He could see the high valley walls from every spot on the porch. He’d designed it that way. The walls had felt sheltering, once. They didn’t feel that way anymore.
“Tell me you’re not going to do it.” June wouldn’t look at him.
“I’m not going to do it.”
“But you want to.”
He felt the spring wound too tight inside him, the same old urge toward action. “I want a lot of things,” he said. “World peace. The Packers in the Super Bowl. The perfect breakfast burrito. Will I get them? Maybe, maybe not.”
“Peter, what the hell are you going to do?”
He didn’t answer. It was a conversation they’d been having for too many months. June had been after Peter to find work outside the valley. “Start roofing houses,” she’d said. “That’ll let you stay outdoors. Or find a job with one of the local outfitters, take people on backcountry expeditions. Get back to a normal life. Make some new memories.”
How to explain to her that none of those ideas felt much like living. Nothing could compare to the relentless, dread-filled thrill of a firefight. But the addictive, overwhelming dopamine rush of combat was inextricably tied to the suffocating guilt of surviving it, not to mention all the things he’d done to keep his men alive. And the fact that he’d failed at that basic task, many times over. It was an ugly feedback loop, and he was stuck in it.
“You’re not talking to me,” she said, “not like you used to, not about real things. That’s what worries me the most. You’re locking it down when you need to be letting it out. I’m afraid you’re going to explode.”
“That’s why I went to Memphis,” he said. “A kind of atonement. For the war.”
“Atonement for what? Doing your goddamn job?”
“I know you’re right,” he said. “Intellectually, I know it. But it doesn’t feel that way. I don’t know that it ever will.”
“That’s why you need to move your life forward,” she said. “Please. Just take the first few steps. Let me help.”
He wished she was mad at him. Anger he could deal with. Hell, he was good at anger, especially lately. Instead she felt sorry for him. And there was nothing worse than pity.
He didn’t tell her that he’d started thinking about going back. Despite the drawdown, there was plenty of overseas contract work for someone with Peter’s experience. Executive protection, corporate mercenary stuff. He knew a lot of guys who had gone that route. Maybe he should stop fighting it. Maybe armed conflict was in his blood. Maybe it was all he had left.
He found himself standing on the cold plank floor without any recollection of getting to his feet, big hands twitching on bony wrists. He felt her eyes on him. As always, when June looked at him, he knew she was really seeing him. More clearly than anyone ever had. He wondered if that was a good thing.
Early that morning, she’d watched through the kitchen window as he packed his truck.
She reached out to him now. “Pe
ter, please. Sit with me. Just a few minutes.”
The long muscles in his legs ached with the need to move.
She got to her knees and crossed the bed toward him. “It’s cold out here.” She bunched his T-shirt in her fist and pulled him toward her. “Why don’t you warm me up before you leave?”
He could feel the heat radiating from her skin. “Are you using sex to bend me to your will?”
“Maybe.” She smiled and unzipped her fleece. Beneath it she wore a creamy button-up sweater that hugged her curves. “Think it’ll work?”
“Only one way to find out.” He leaned in and kissed the side of her neck. Worked his way slowly, gently, down to her collarbone.
She made a soft sound. She undid the top button on her sweater, then the next, and the next. He leaned in to kiss the freckles on her shoulders. She wore no perfume. Her own scent was more than enough, mysterious and intoxicating and utterly addictive.
Her voice was husky. “Are you going to visit Lewis?”
“No,” he said. “Death Valley.” Peter helped with the buttons. Beneath the sweater, she wore a simple cotton camisole. “Just for a few weeks. Maybe the desert will remind me of Iraq and knock something loose.”
“Is that really a good idea? To spend all that time in your own head? You don’t always have to go right at something, you know.”
“I’ll be stuck with myself anyway,” he said. “You’re leaving for Washington the day after tomorrow.”
June was an investigative reporter, and she was working a side angle on the bombings in Venezuela and everything that had followed. Peter couldn’t believe they were actually talking about a new war. Maybe that’s why the static had gotten so bad.
June slid one strap of the camisole down her arm and Peter reminded himself to focus. When she dropped the other strap, her arm across her breasts was the only thing holding the fabric in place. She gave him a smile halfway between sweet and wicked.
“Let’s recap,” she said. “You’re not meeting that corporate guy, Wetzel.”
