“How did he die?” I asked in a whisper. “The real reason.”
“Heart failure, according to the official report. A blood clot which the original scans did not detect. As I said, complications.”
My gut cramped harder. Saúl had died because of me. The blood clot was merely the weapon. Someone, some set of people, had murdered Saúl. And for no more reason than I had sent him that damnable email Wednesday night.
I must have spoken that last out loud, because Sara said, “You can’t prove any connection between the two. Correlation is not cause.”
“Shut up,” I snapped back. “I know that.”
A soft exhalation—of frustration? of sympathy?—was her only answer. I crouched on the polished marble floor of our vestibule, rocking back and forth. Ten, fifteen minutes passed. Sara waited with me. Patient. Silent. She had that gift, knowing how to offer her presence without burdening a person with unwanted talk.
Eventually she reached over and laid a hand on my shoulder. “Come. I’ll help you to bed.”
“No. I’m fine.”
“You are not fine, and we both know it. Oh, my love, my furious love. You would not be Janet Watson if you did not rage against the world. But you can do that just as easily from your bedroom as you can here.”
She circled one arm around me. I tried to push her away, tried to tell her that I was nobody’s love, least of all hers. Sara refused to give way. “No more fighting me,” she told me as she helped me to stand. “I shall put you to bed. I shall brew a cup of tea. No drugs, this time. Unless you want them?”
“No drugs,” I said. “No tea.”
“Then you shall have none. Later, I might insist you take a hot shower. And possibly a glass of strong spirits. Later still, I shall cook you a meal and stand over you while you eat.”
As she spoke, she guided me down the hallway to my bedroom. I didn’t resist until I crossed the threshold and stumbled to a halt, overcome by a bout of shivering.
Sara withdrew a step and waited.
It was easier to close my eyes. To listen to the thrum of blood through my veins. To hear the ticking of hot water through the baseboard pipes, which beat in time with my pulse. My throat had twisted into a knot. I wanted to wrap myself in a tight hug, but I couldn’t, not with only one arm. I almost regretted my mad act of ripping off my device. Almost, but not entirely.
“I know better,” I said at last. “I know the dead will not cease to be dead because I am warm and alive and comfortable in my bed. I have watched too many soldiers die to believe that.”
“I never said you did.”
“No. You—” My breath caught on the word, a dry, ragged noise, as though I had forgotten the art of respiration. “You didn’t say that.”
“But you believe me capable of thinking such a thing.”
A longer silence followed. The baseboard ticking faded into silence, leaving only my steady breathing as I counted up and up to a hundred, then down and down to the number zero. I had reached zero for the second time and paused, as the therapist recommended, when Sara spoke.
“I lied.”
Now the room went utterly still, as though the air itself had vanished and we were in the soundless void of space.
“I lied,” she said again. “Or rather, I was inaccurate—deliberately so. Which counts as a different kind of lie. You see, when an agent is resting, they are rehabilitating their identity. Their mission is complete, for the most part, but they continue to visit the old haunts, chat with the usual contacts, to dispel any suspicions. In my case, I was a liaison to an organization that specialized in money laundering.”
You should not tell me this, I thought. Your people will not like it.
I didn’t bother to tell her that. Sara Holmes already knew what oaths she had violated.
After a moment, she went on. “I can’t and won’t tell you the specifics of that case. It’s not just a matter of security clearance. Knowing the details puts you in danger—more danger. What I can say—”
“Stop,” I said. “Don’t get me tangled up in your goddamned mission, Sara Holmes.”
She laughed softly. “Too late for that. Listen. The science of mechanics tells us that for every action, there must be an equal and opposite reaction. International politics is far more complicated, the consequences multiplied a hundredfold. Just so with this almost straightforward mission of mine. There are repercussions everywhere—among our enemies, among those with more ambiguous ties. We cannot close our books until all those ripples and reactions have played themselves out. Which brings us to the matter of our friends.”
“Jacob,” I said.
Sara nodded, an almost imperceptible movement on the edge of my vision. “Jacob is my friend. And yet I curse his curiosity that led him to investigate your whereabouts this weekend. He came to visit on Saturday, do you know, and spoke to the groundskeeper. There were rumors at work about your attack, about how I mistreated you.”
“That was your fault,” I said. “You made everyone think we’re lovers.”
“I did. It was . . . it should have been a suitable cover if other elements had not intruded. I created that fantasy because I needed to protect my friends and colleagues. My mistake was not protecting yours. I am now attempting to do just that.”
Oh, yes. A dozen clues shifted into place.
“Is that why you set up that pretty fight outside?” I asked.
Another nod. We had not yet faced each other, Sara and I, but I had become preternaturally aware of her every movement, of her every shift and change of emotion. Odd how she had seemed so opaque to me at first.
“I want him angry,” she said. “Honestly and unmistakably furious. I want him to tell everyone that you and I are complete shits. He could never pretend, our Jacob, but his righteous anger is most convincing. My hope is that anyone watching will believe him ignorant and innocent of any connection, and will therefore leave him alone. Which brings me to my next point. Tomorrow you must go to Bellaume—”
“No!” My paralysis broke, and I skittered over to the nearest wall. Only then could I face Sara and her demands. “No, Sara, I cannot—”
“You must,” Sara told me. Her face was obscured by the shadows in my bedroom, but as she lifted her chin, I caught the glitter of tears on her cheeks as well. “If you love your friends, you must go to the VA tomorrow. You must keep your appointment with Bellaume. Collect your belongings. Above all, you cannot let anyone see that I told you about your friend Saúl Martínez. Do you understand?”
A chill washed over me. Oh, yes, I understood. Our enemy had a name and a face, shadowed as yet. We would have to lure them into the sunlight.
“Who are they?” I asked. “Do you know?”
“No. Not with any certainty. There are a dozen lines of probability from the events of last Wednesday. Each one of those has another dozen possible outcomes, which leads us to a dozen different candidates. My chief has elected to pursue the most obvious course—that Wednesday night was a coincidence, and that the simplest and most obvious explanations are the correct ones. I disagree. However, I cannot promise anything.”
“Except the truth,” I said. “Promise you will always tell me the truth.”
“Always,” she replied.
* * *
Hello, Tuesday. Hello, seven thirty a.m.
Twenty hours are not enough to transform me into an undercover spy, but Sara tells me that competence is overrated. Plausible is our goal.
So. At seven thirty a.m. I present myself at the reception desk for mental health services in the VA Medical Center. Our shadow enemy has stripped away my job, and with it, my authorization to traverse the interior stairwells and elevators, but they have not yet taken away my honorable status and its benefits.
“Captain Janet Watson,” I say. “I have an appointment with Faith Bellaume.”
The receptionist taps her electronic pen over the screen with an expert air. Pauses and frowns. I can guess what she reads on that screen, so c
arefully tilted away from public view. Terminated with cause. Handle with caution. Those warnings, along with any notations from Faith Bellaume, would put anyone on their guard.
Sara has warned me about this moment. I attach a pleasant smile to my face and wait while she taps and reads, reads and taps the screen again. Eventually the woman glances up with an unconvincing smile of her own.
“Ms. Bellaume is waiting for you. Please go inside.”
A young woman escorts me to the next waiting room. I have just enough time to consider how much I wish to say, how much I cannot mention, before Faith herself appears.
“Janet,” she says. “I am glad to see you today. How have you been?”
I swallow against the sudden thickness in my throat. It’s the old tensions all over again. The sweet, soft formula of Southern courtesy, those meaningless phrases calculated to ease a visitor—or a patient—past any difficulties. Luckily those same patterns gave me the proper answer.
“As well as I can be,” I say. “I’m glad to be here.”
She brings me into one of the now-familiar sets of therapy rooms, and we settle into our accustomed places, both in overstuffed chairs covered in pastel painted fabric. There is a pitcher of ice water on the table between us and two cups. Both the cups and the pitcher were plastic. A signal that they trust me not to bash my therapist over the head, but also they do not trust me with breakable objects.
Bellaume pours me a cup and waits for me to drink.
“You lost your job,” she says.
I take a second sip of the water. It’s cold and sharp against my tongue. It spurs me into the necessary anger. “I did not lose my job. Those bastards took it.”
Good, Sara would tell me. Very good. You are angry, as you should be.
The angry black woman. A trope, a symbol, a hero. A threat.
Meanwhile, Faith Bellaume, another black woman, faces me. She has her own obstacles, her own history with this nation. She says, “You are angry. You have cause. We can examine that in our next session, if you like. For today, I want to talk about Angela.”
My stomach gives a sudden lurch. I bend over and press my palms against my face. Do not fight your distress, Sara warned me. It is both your weapon and your weakness.
I weep, and while I weep, I hold the image of Jacob in my mind. Jacob who loves me as a friend and who, for no reason I can fathom, loves Sara Holmes as well. I must keep him safe. Keeping him safe also guards Faith and all the others I have touched with my prickly unlovable self.
But Angela, too, is alive and in danger.
“I can’t,” I say. “Not today.”
Faith watches me. “Perhaps not today,” she agrees. “But you will need to face what happened with her.”
“Next week,” I promise.
Faith is nothing if not patient. “Next week,” she says. “I shall hold you to that. But what about today? What shall we talk about today?”
During the long hours of yesterday afternoon, Sara and I have worked this out between us. It must be a subject that will distract Faith Bellaume, and yet it must be the truth as well. She is a trained observer, as Sara noted, and therefore more dangerous than many a casual witness. I do not distrust her, but I understand that others might question her about this session. The absolute truth, Sara tells me, is not always our friend.
I lock my fingers together, the metal and the flesh, and let them twist a few moments before I answer.
“I want . . . to talk about Alton.”
* * *
It was noon before I returned to 2809 Q Street.
There was the session itself. The recovery. Oh, god, the recovery. I spent an hour in the recovery room, drinking cup after cup of cold lemon water. Bellaume’s assistant was patient with me, silently appearing at intervals to refill the water carafe or to bring a fresh box of tissues. Once I had regained control, she came back one last time to confirm my next appointment. Yes, Thursday, I told her. No, I don’t want a different time slot. I’m fine. Thank you for asking.
Onward to the front desk, where I dropped off two sets of scrubs and collected my personal items. There were only a few—my coffee mug, a bottle of Advil, a brightly painted carving that Hicks had brought back from her vacation in Mexico. Someone had wrapped them all carefully in old newsprint and packed them into a small cardboard box. Thompson, most likely, though Antonelli was my second bet.
I did not return to the apartment at once. As Sara had suggested, I spent an hour at the diner on U Street, drinking bitter coffee while I read a printout from a Help Wanted newsfeed I’d bought from a vending machine. After that, I took a circuitous route back to Georgetown, with a stop here and stop there to collect newsfeed printouts or books or candies. Sara’s chief believed there was no connection between me, Belinda Díaz, and Sara’s official mission, but she had promised Sara a surveillance team to keep watch over me for the next week.
For my protection? Or the protection of their own secrets?
I had wanted to ask Sara, but I found I did not care to hear the answer.
If I had any shadows, they had a damp and tedious morning, tracking me from the VA Medical Center, through the streets of the inner city, and into the National Gallery of Art, where I sat for two hours, damp and shivering and staring at Dalí’s Last Supper like a mad person. Luckily for us the city and the museum were routinely filled by the mad.
Eventually, at last, I returned to 2809 Q Street.
I thumbed the security panel of our building. A few moments later, Sara took off my rain-soaked jacket and led me into the kitchen, where she handed me a mug of hot tea. “Put down that box, my love. You were utterly convincing but stupid, or perhaps you were convincing because you were stupid. Like many other agents I have known.”
I yielded the box to Sara, accepted the mug, and collapsed onto the nearest stool. It was easier to follow her directions at the moment. Perhaps later I would argue. About her willingness to issue orders. About that uncalled-for endearment that was no endearment at all.
“I have a meal ready,” Sara continued. “We eat, then talk.” She touched me—a light, impersonal touch—above my device. “How was it?”
I shivered. How to describe the morning? How I had used the truth of Alton to hide our lies. Yes, we had agreed on every detail of my interview with Faith Bellaume—details intended to protect Bellaume as much as ourselves—but the aftermath of those lies had left me shaken.
Sara nodded, a brief acknowledgment of my distress. “I have been looking. Quietly. I will show you after we eat.”
I drank my tea while Sara laid out dishes and cutlery and glasses of fine red wine. We ate in silence, with only the pattering of rain, and the hiss of fire, to accompany our meal. Once I had finished, Sara cleared away our dishes.
“Come with me,” she said.
There are moments when a lover reveals herself. Angela did, that day she lost a patient after a long and difficult procedure. I’d found her drunk and weeping in the bathroom, holding a scalpel to her wrist, and I saw, for the first time, that she had not yet achieved that immunity to death and suffering a surgeon needs.
Whatever the rest of the world thought, Sara Holmes was not my lover, nor did I mistake her words for an invitation to passion. We had come to a moment of trust, and if the world did not understand, I did. So when she took hold of my hand and drew me into her bedroom, I did not resist.
The room had changed very little since that first day. At the same time, it had been transformed. The floors remained bare. The only furniture besides the enormous bed and piano were a desk and its stool. But now a cascade of golden lace spilled over the piano’s closed lid, like a waterfall of sunlight on this dreary day. And now the many bare walls were covered with a host of paintings—one bold and dark, with a luminous face at its center, others watercolors of women, of mountains wrapped in mist, of tigers on the hunt, all decorated in gold leaf and painted with delicacy and power.
Sara clucked her tongue over the lack of chairs. “Sit o
n the bed,” she told me. “We can make do with that.”
She produced a wafer-thin device from the desk and tossed it onto the bed. Then she ran her fingertips over a recessed panel by the door. I felt a crackle of tension in the air, then a smothering quiet enveloped the room. I could still hear the traffic from Q Street, but muffled, as though someone had dropped a blanket over number 2809.
Right. So. More secrets uncovered that I was happier not to know.
I maneuvered myself onto the bed and picked up the device—it was one of the newest tablets. Very expensive. Very sleek. It had no power cords, nor any obvious input slots. The tech feeds said these things ran on special batteries, which could recharge from ambient power sources in the city. I ran a finger over the black screen. It sent a ripple of electricity over my skin, then went dead.
“You need the right password,” Holmes said.
She settled onto the bed next to me. I twitched away and she laughed, but this time I did not take the laugh amiss. Sara pressed her index finger against a mesh pad next to the keyboard. The screen hummed and clicked. “Welcome, benevolent overlord,” it said. “How may I serve you?”
The voice was low and mellifluent, that of a senior male senator with patronage to spare.
“Is that your idea of a joke?” I asked.
“A very poor one,” she agreed. “Let me show you what I’ve discovered so far.”
She tapped the keypad, and the screen resolved into a map of the world, which rotated around and shrank to a different viewpoint.
Next to the map was a list in bullet points, in a style I had come to recognize as Sara’s. Belinda Díaz’s four visits to the VA Medical Center, marked by date, time, doctor’s name, medical technician’s name, were embellished with an increasing number of question marks. The date of her death went into finer detail: when she collapsed, the exact time of death according to the EMT’s report, the approximate time I launched each search, the exact hour and minute I emailed Saúl, and the moment of that abortive attack.
A Study in Honor Page 18
