Strictly Need to Know

by MB Austin

  Hannah pulled the runabout up to the swim platform twenty yards out from the estate next door to the Benedettis’. From there the boathouse was just visible. She surveyed the horizon with high-powered binoculars. Maji wished they could have waited to return until after dark, but she understood it would be best if they were back in the house when the Khodorovs arrived. She looked at Rose, also lying in the belly of the boat, and gave her a small smile. Rose flashed a grin back, her spirit of adventure apparently intact again.

  “All right,” Hannah said both for their benefit and for the guys covering them from inside the boathouse. “On our way.”

  In less than a minute, the boat bumped up against the end of the near dock protruding slightly from the edge of the boathouse. Dev gave them a quick hand out, and they scrambled for the rear of the building, in the depths of shadow. “Welcome home,” he said.

  Then he stood with binoculars up, scanning the Sound while Tom climbed down from the rafters, his rifle over his back.

  “Home sweet home,” Rose said dryly. So maybe it wasn’t such a grand adventure for her, after all. The sight of guns always seemed to erase whatever fun she found in the sneaking around. Maji couldn’t blame her.

  “We’re late to meet the caterer,” Tom said, powering by them on his short, sturdy legs.

  “Oh God, today?” Rose asked.

  “Not you, just us,” Maji answered.

  “Oh, okay.” Rose sounded both relieved and disappointed. “Which one did Angelo pick?”

  “Cuba Libre.”

  “Good! Music, cleaning, and the best food of the lot.”

  Also, Maji thought, the FBI’s way into the house. Time to start seeing Special Agent Martinez in action.

  “Smooth trip home?” Angelo asked as Maji and the guys reached the basement.

  “As silk. Did Frank make it to the market?”

  “Yeah. Got a trunk load of produce, and leads on the guys who tagged you.”

  “I could have had a team on-site within an hour, if you’d called me,” Rey said.

  “Sorry,” Angelo offered, though he wasn’t. The last thing he needed was a bunch of Feds poking around, if Sirko’s operatives had left anyone on watch to notice them.

  “Goldberg,” Dev said to Rey, not waiting to be introduced.

  Rey took his hand, shook, and moved on to Tom. “You’re Taylor?”

  “Yes, sir. And what are we calling you?”

  “Raul Machado. Here’s my card. Direct line’s on the back. I’ll answer as Cuba Libre Catering, but it’s secure. Call the number on the front only if you want food delivered.”

  “Got it,” Angelo confirmed for them. “Oh, and this is Sergeant Rios. She goes by Ri.”

  “Hey,” Maji said, not offering her hand. She did, however, take a card. Neither of them indicated that they had met before. The guys already knew now that Ri and Hannah were connected. A family tie to their FBI liaison was more than they needed to worry about.

  They had run through almost all the initial logistics for the Fourth when Frank’s voice said, via their comms, “Khodorov just pulled up. Here, not at the Big House.”

  “Time to see you out,” Angelo said to Rey, as the team hit the stairs.

  Angelo stepped out onto the front landing behind Rey, just in time to look surprised and give a friendly wave to Sander. He used his outside voice to send Rey off. “Email me your final quote tomorrow, Raul. I’ll send a guy by with the deposit Monday.”

  “Excelente,” Rey said, shaking his hand. He climbed into the Cuba Libre minivan with barely a glance at the notorious Russians.

  “Well,” Sander said, using his indoor voice as his father and their driver climbed out of the car, “I see why you picked that one.”

  “Hey, they had the best food, okay? All the girls agreed.”

  “And they all saw him, too, right?”

  “Yeah, but Rose ain’t swayed by any factors other than food.”

  “She’s gay?”

  “Queer as a three-dollar bill. I never mentioned that?”

  “No. How’s that for your straight-acting girlfriend?”

  “Like dieting in a candy store,” Angelo said.

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Rose heard music as she approached the kitchen—horns and fiddle as well as an electric guitar and drums, with a woman singing throaty Spanish. Rock? Zydeco? Hard to classify, but definitely engaging. The urge to dance hit her, and she saw as she peeked into the kitchen that she wasn’t alone in that. Tom and Maji were dancing, separately together like two friends at a party. When Maji caught her looking, she stopped cold. Tom crashed into her, and they both staggered sideways.

  “Don’t stop on my account,” Rose said, when the pair had righted themselves.

  Maji punched a finger into the CD player, and stillness reigned. “Sorry if we woke you.”

  “You didn’t.” Why Maji was embarrassed, Rose couldn’t imagine. “Why haven’t I heard this band before? They’re so infectious.” She picked up the CD case before Maji could stop her—surely the one Maji had received at Hannah’s. The inscription on the back was similar to Spanish, but not Spanish.

  “Erlea’s more of a European sensation,” Tom responded.

  Rose handed the case to Maji. “You have a lot of friends in music.” At Maji’s uncomfortable look, she handed the CD case back. “Sorry. I noticed the inscription on the Ani poster, too.”

  Maji didn’t provide any more information, just took the case and removed the CD from the player.

  “Oh no, really. I’d love to hear the rest. Even if you’re too shy to dance.”

  So the music filled the kitchen like sunlight, brightening the overcast morning. Rose even caught Maji singing along when she thought no one was paying attention.

  Angelo stumbled into the kitchen as they were finishing breakfast, looking like he’d been up half the night. Rose worried about the hours he was keeping, the stress. “Loud,” he said, as if he was hungover. “Too loud.”

  Tom hopped up and turned the volume down. He handed the case to Angelo, who squinted at it. “Friend of Ri’s,” he said with a touch of pride. “Made it big in the Eurozone.”

  Angelo squinted at the front and seemed to be struggling with the writing on the back. He waved it at Maji, frowning.

  “It’s a Basque slogan,” Maji said, retrieving it from Angelo and slipping the CD in. She rose and headed for the living room. “Get some coffee, and come see me.” She nearly collided with Frank as he entered, carrying the Sunday paper. She didn’t greet him, just stepped aside to let him pass, then disappeared upstairs.

  Rose watched her go, wondering at the mood change from apparently carefree dancing to near sullenness. What was she afraid of today?

  Angelo’s knock on her door—shave and a haircut—didn’t lift Maji’s spirits any. There was too much he wasn’t telling her, and today it bugged the hell out of her. On a normal mission, each player knew only as much as they needed to. But this op hadn’t been normal from day one. “Al-bayt baytkum,” she called out. Literally, The house is your house; colloquially, but not this time, Make yourself at home.

  Angelo slipped in and closed the door behind him, and pointedly took off his shoes, like a good guest. “So it’s like that, is it?” He sipped his coffee, standing away from the desk where she sat. “What’s eating you?”

  She continued using Arabic. “Yesterday. Who knew we were going to the farmers’ market besides Frank?”

  “I see,” he responded in Arabic. “I already told you, he’s trustworthy. He said nothing to Gino until I instructed him to. After you and Rose were safe at Hannah’s.”

  “So who else knew where we were?” Maji asked.

  He winced. “Seems Sienna’s been bugging Rose to go out and play together. Daddy’s girl still wants to play with the big kids. So Rose told her she could tag along to the market, if she was willing to get up early enough. ’Course she wasn’t, which is why Rose offered. But Sienna whined about it to Ricky.”
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br />   “And you didn’t warn us?” Maji hopped off the bed and put her face inches from his. He didn’t flinch.

  “I’m not getting audio on Ricky anymore,” Angelo explained. “So I’m sorry. I’m doing my best.”

  “Do better.”

  Rose took her time reading the Sunday paper, rotating finished sections with Frank. When Jackie finally came down and settled in with coffee, Rose waited for her to speak first. Like Angelo, she was more lucid after coffee.

  “Hey,” Jackie said, tapping the paper shielding Rose’s face from view.

  Rose lowered the section. “Good morning.”

  “Sure,” Jackie said, sounding unconvinced. More coffee would be needed. “Ang give you the safe house talk?”

  “Yes,” Rose said. “Complete with what to pack in a go bag.”

  “So you’re ready, then.”

  Rose set the paper aside. Everyone in the house seemed to be on edge, or grumpy, or both. “Not yet. I’ll go pack now.” She rose to go.

  Jackie reached out for her hand. “Hon. I’m sorry. This ain’t the side of the family you should have to see.”

  “I’m all grown up, Aunt Jackie. No need to protect my delicate sensibilities.” She patted her aunt’s hand to take some of the sting out of her words and headed for her room, and solitude.

  Upstairs, Rose passed the open door to Angelo’s room, the closed one to Carlo’s. What secret business were they up to now? If they were even in there. Maybe they’d gone down to the boathouse again, their favorite place to be alone.

  Rose looked around her room, the room she had thought of as her own since her first summer visit at nine. It held none of the signs of her personality, unlike the little room with the bunk beds shared by Bubbles and Maji in their younger years. Clearly Maji had planned to spend her vacation on Long Island there.

  Rose looked at the stack of books on the bedside table—all the nonfiction works relating to traditional foods, the movement against GMOs and the corporatization of farming, and ethnological field research methods. Today, none of them spoke to her. Neither did the paperbacks she’d brought, though they did bring to mind the discussion by the pool where Maji had revealed a surprising discernment in lesbian romance.

  Rose sighed. If she couldn’t get Maji off her mind, maybe she could find the answer to one of her many questions. She fished her laptop from the closet shelf and booted it up. She typed in a search for Erlea, the name of the band on the mysterious CD. A Wikipedia article in Spanish came up. She worked her way through it, discovered that Erlea was a woman, not a band. Rose was relieved that she could understand so much without using a translator—either mechanical, or in the next room over. At the bottom, there were links to news articles. One was in English and led to a story about the Spanish Guardia Civil and Interpol working together to foil a murder attempt on the singer and secure her father’s safe entry into peace talks on behalf of the Basque separatists. The events fell between when Maji would have left the hospital in Germany and her return home—the missing months.

  Rose closed the laptop, feeling as though she had trespassed. Now Iris’s speculation about Maji working for Hannah’s company didn’t seem so far-fetched at all. Still, having an autographed CD didn’t prove she had somehow helped to save the life of a Europop diva. Maybe she had just been on vacation.

  Feeling oddly disloyal, Rose opened the laptop back up, and went to YouTube. She entered a search for Erlea and found a host of bootleg concert clips. Those didn’t help, though the music was lively, even with poor sound quality. Finally, she stumbled onto the official Erlea channel, and a series of professionally produced music videos. The last she watched, over and over, used a mix of Spanish and Basque, like many of Erlea’s songs. But it showed Erlea struggling with herself—literally. Two Erleas circled each other, sparring. When she watched on full screen and froze certain frames, Rose could tell that the twin Erleas weren’t just a special effects trick—they were two very similar but not identical women. And she was ninety-nine percent sure who the Erlea body double was, in makeup and hair styling and even tattoos that matched the real Erlea’s look so closely it would be hard to distinguish the two. “It’s what I do,” Rose heard Maji say again, so casually, in her memory. Some vacation.

  Sunday dinner with the Benedettis was always a bit like watching three Ping-Pong matches going on at the table. Maji didn’t even try to follow the conversations competing with each other. Normally the chaos didn’t bother her, but yesterday’s crack on the head was affecting her more than she’d admitted to Hannah. The headache itself was gone, but bright light bothered her and she just couldn’t weed out all the voices. It was too much.

  “’Scuse me,” she said, heading for the kitchen. Conversation didn’t stop. As the swinging door shushed closed behind her, the relative quiet immediately soothed her.

  “Ri?” Rose’s voice was soft against the tumble of voices that cut off again when the door closed, providing them a moment of privacy. “Are you all right?”

  “I’ll be fine. Anybody asks, tell them I’m PMSing.”

  Rose filled a glass with ice from the refrigerator door, the crunching sound unusually loud to Maji’s ears. She added water, a mercifully quieter act.

  “I’ll tell them whatever you want, but I want the truth. Sit.”

  Maji sat, smiling weakly at how much Rose sounded like her grandmother when she got bossy. “Thanks.” She drank the cold water slowly, wincing at the brain freeze that followed.

  “Hannah says you spent months in neurological rehab. She asked me to keep an eye on you. I think you have her worried.”

  Neuro rehab. Crawling, walking, and eventually running obstacle drills, until the Army was satisfied she could perform in the field again. She’d been an asshole to every medic who tried to help her, the first couple months. Only the speech pathologist had seemed to understand how frustrated she felt, how furious it made her to find everything so damn difficult, and every little improvement so hard-won. Would it have been easier, she wondered now, if she hadn’t been beating herself up during that time for the things she thought she’d done? The fight between wanting her mind and body back and believing she didn’t deserve it had been the hardest part.

  “Hey,” Rose said, cradling her against her shoulder.

  Maji let herself be held. She hadn’t realized until then that the tears had started again. If the fugue was back, how would she make it through the next few weeks? Fuck it anyway, she didn’t have time for this! She pulled back, out of Rose’s gentle hold. “Let me get a good night’s sleep, and if I’m an asshole again tomorrow, tell me. Deal?”

  “Sure. Do you want to come back in?”

  Maji shook her head. One conversation was hard enough. The thought of three or four at once made her slightly nauseous. “Maybe by dessert.”

  Rose slid the tray of cannoli out of Maji’s reach and refilled her water glass. Then she set a half glass of red wine near Maji and dabbed a little on her collar. “There. Imbibing, Angelo style. That’s a stress reliever my family can understand.”

  Maji tilted her head, looking up at Rose’s twinkling eyes. “You’re a saint like your mother, hon. A real saint.” It was a poor impression of Jackie, but at least she’d had the will to try.

  Rose’s laugh gave her the first warm feeling of the day. Maji stared after the closing door and wished anew for a rewind.

  “There’s my girl,” Angelo said, opening his hands wide. Gino, right behind him, grunted his greeting to Maji, who only nodded back at them, raising her wineglass.

  “Sorry to be poor company, Mr. B,” she said. “Is dinner over already?”

  “Plenty left if you’re hungry,” he said. “But first, why don’t you join us outside a minute.”

  Maji rose and followed them onto the veranda. Angelo hoped she wasn’t too far off her game. Rose seemed worried, though she had played it off well when she rejoined the family in the dining room. The woman who married an operator had to be able to play-act with f
amily, friends, and the whole world outside their insular unit. Angelo could see Rose doing that, to protect Maji and the unit. He hoped Maji could see that potential in her, too.

  Gino leaned back on the patio rail, missing the view of the sunset. “I’m going to say this to you directly, because you don’t seem to listen to Ang here so well.”

  Maji nodded, ignoring the sunset as she faced the capo. Angelo kept his hand protectively on the small of her back, like a good boyfriend.

  “You go outside these walls on your own again, you’re on your own. Nobody’s coming to get you, and nobody’s giving anything up to get you back. Are we clear?”

  “Yes, sir. And Rose?”

  “She won’t go out again,” Angelo said. “Not after today.”

  “But if she did? I mean, I tried to talk her out of our stupid trip this morning. Practically got killed, for what? Basil.” Angelo felt Maji’s back flex as she talked, her Ri attitude charging back up.

  “You make it very clear to her,” Gino said to Angelo, as if he’d raised the point, “same goes for her.”

  “But G—she’s family. No offense, babe.”

  “Family lives here,” Gino replied. “My sister wanted that girl to be raised right, she’d have stayed here and married the guy who knocked her up. You don’t run away and change your name if you want your Family’s protection. And look how the girl turned out, coming up in Califrootie.”

  “Ow,” Angelo said. “That’s harsh, even for you.”

  “Harsh? What do you know from harsh? We’re talking about a guy who thinks you crossed him, he kills your whole Family, and you last of all.”

  “I’ve heard those stories about Khodorov all my life,” Maji said. She gave Gino one of those little half shrugs. “Brooklyn. But he’s on your team, right? I thought we were worried about this Sirko asshole, not him.”