by Allen Zadoff
“You knew, but you moved forward with our relationship anyway?”
“I knew something, but I didn’t know what you were here for. Not exactly. I needed to keep you close until I could find out.”
“So that’s that. It was all a game for you.”
“No,” she says. “It was real for me.”
She comes around the statue until we’re facing each other across the plaza.
“What was it for you?” she says.
“An assignment.”
“That’s all?”
I want to tell her everything. How it began as an assignment, how I hesitated and it became something else.
I want to tell her, but I don’t.
I say, “I needed to be close to you so I could get to your father.”
“He was your target?”
“Originally, yes.”
“And now?”
I look at her face in the moonlight. She is more beautiful than when I first saw her, but she is something else, too. Something darker. Something like me.
“You committed espionage,” I say. “You put your father and the entire country at risk.”
“Is that why you’re here, Ben? You’re some kind of spy hunter?”
“I’m a soldier.”
“And I suppose right and wrong don’t matter?”
I shrug. “I do what I’m told,” I say.
I’m supposed to. I didn’t complete this assignment because of her. But I don’t tell her that.
“Oh, I remember,” she says. “You’re the boy who doesn’t believe in anything. We’re different that way. I not only believe, I’m willing to back it up with action.”
“That’s how you justify treason?”
“The Israelis are U.S. allies. If you share secrets with a friend, that’s not treason.”
“Is that what Gideon told you?”
“Gideon,” she says.
She looks around the empty plaza.
“He won’t be coming,” I say.
Her face changes. Her eyes turn cold.
The same look I saw from Gideon, from Mike. The same thing I see in the mirror when I look at myself.
“You’re not who I hoped you would be,” she says.
“Neither are you.”
I step toward her.
I’m expecting her to run. I’m ready for it, another chase through the park. Like the first time, but with a much different intent.
But she doesn’t run. She starts to cry.
Maybe she’s crying for Gideon, maybe for herself. I want to think it’s for me, but I don’t know.
I’ve seen women cry before—women and men—and it doesn’t move me.
This is different.
When I see Sam crying, I want to comfort her. I want to put my arms around her one last time, even if just for a moment. I reach for her—
And she turns on me, snarling.
Not the Sam I know, the girl I met in AP European class at school.
Someone else.
A beast, furious and dangerous.
She comes at me with a barrage of kicks and punches. I recognize elements of jujitsu and Krav Maga. I recognize them only briefly, because then there is contact, and we are in the fight.
It’s obvious that Sam was trained at some point, but also obvious that it was a long time ago. She’s got more potential than skill. She tries to make up for it with rage.
Rage can be effective in short bursts, even deadly. But not over multiple attacks, and not against a well-matched opponent.
Not against me.
When she comes at me with a roar followed by a series of vicious kicks, it looks impressive, but she is exerting too much energy.
It’s a primary lesson of combat. By fighting too hard, she is fighting herself. And when you fight yourself, you always lose.
I stay in close and make myself an available target. A final flurry of punches, and her performance degrades quickly. She’s tired.
That’s when I strike.
I use my body as a fulcrum, and I take her down, flat on her back.
She tries to get up, and I take her down again.
I think of Gideon with his hand on her cheek, the way they looked at each other in the basement.
She comes up a third time, and I slam her down hard. She is panting and exhausted, her energy spent.
I stand over her.
I stay out of arm’s reach. I don’t take unnecessary risks with her, not anymore.
“You don’t have to do this, Ben,” she says.
She uses my name. I know this trick. Personalize the conflict, create a bond with your attacker, then plead for mercy.
It sounds heartfelt, but it does not move me.
“My name is not Ben,” I say.
She looks up at me.
“Whoever you are,” she says, “you don’t have to do it.”
“I have no choice,” I say.
“There’s always a choice,” she says.
She made a choice. To betray her father and betray her country.
But there is no choice for me. Not really.
I slip the pen from my pocket. She looks at it, her eyes wide.
“It doesn’t hurt,” I say.
“How do you know?” she says.
I turn the pen cap to the right, click it once, and feel the soft pop between my fingers as the fluid is released into the point. An idea comes to mind. A new thought, irritating, like an itch in a place you can’t reach.
I’ll push the point into myself instead of Sam.
Nothing dramatic. I’ll press it into the soft skin at my wrist.
It will be quick. Even with my conditioning, I will have, what? Seven seconds instead of three? An extra breath or two. No more.
I should press the point into myself. That’s what I’m thinking. Then I will know how it feels, I will know whether or not it hurts, and Sam will walk away.
The idea gives me peace. Until I think of Mike.
Because this will not stand. Mother will not let it stand.
Perhaps Mike is still here, and they will let him out of his cage. Mother will tell him to make a lesson of it.
Sam will lie to him at first, say that we fought, say she got the upper hand.
But eventually the truth will come out.
She’ll tell him how in the last moment I flip-flopped and pressed the pen point into myself. She’ll say that I chose myself over her because we were in a relationship.
In the back of his mind, he’ll know she’s telling the truth, but he won’t let it end like that. Mother won’t allow it to end like that.
That’s what I realize as I’m standing over Sam. Pressing the point into myself won’t change anything.
Correction: It will change everything for me. But for Sam, nothing at all. For her, it will likely make things worse.
I adjust the angle of the pen, the point now exposed and facing its true target.
“Where are you?” Sam says.
“Far away,” I say.
She reaches for my ankle, and I pull it back.
She looks up at me, startled. Maybe she wasn’t trying to hurt me. Maybe she wants to connect with me. Even in this last moment.
I cannot allow it.
“Please tell me your name,” she says.
“Why?”
“I want to know who you really are.”
“I’m nobody,” I say.
And I lean over and press the point of the pen into the side of her neck.
It takes three seconds, no more. Her eyes flutter and close.
And it’s done.
I lean over to make sure. My wrists brush the sides of her breasts. They are soft. Too soft.
“Does it hurt?” I say.
I say it to myself. I’m the only one left.
And then her lips part. I think I’m imagining it, but when I look closer, her lips are moving. She’s trying to speak. I lean down toward her.
“You were right,” she whispers. “It doesn’t hur
t.”
I step back, surprised.
Did I click the pen once or twice?
I made a mistake. This is what I think. I’ve injected the coma drug by mistake. Sam will keep breathing, and the choice I have made will be undone.
There will be another choice, a better choice, a choice I didn’t have the courage to make.
We will run away. Start over in a new place. We will make a home together in a distant city where nobody knows who we are, and where we will never be found.
A sensation passes through my chest.
Not a sensation. Something else. A feeling.
Love.
“Samara,” I say.
She doesn’t answer.
I press an ear to her lips, check the pulse point in her neck.
Nothing.
I didn’t make a mistake with the pen. I don’t make mistakes.
Sam is like everyone else I’ve met.
Dead.
A twig snaps across the plaza. A police officer is standing at the edge of the clearing, watching me.
Not a police officer. Mike, dressed in a police uniform.
“Welcome back,” he says.
“Back?”
“Back home. To the family.”
His face is obscured by darkness.
“You made the right choice,” Mike says.
Did I?
I look down at Sam’s body at my feet.
“You’ll let Mother know I finished the assignment,” I say.
“She already knows.”
But was it enough? I didn’t prevent the attack at Gracie or the threat on the prime minister’s life.
I watch Mike’s center mass. That’s how you know which way a person is going to move. Not their arms or hands or legs—those can trick you. But his stomach. That moves in only one direction—the direction he’s going to go.
If he comes toward me, then I will know it wasn’t enough.
We will fight for the second time in our lives.
I will not let him get the upper hand this time. I will subdue him and ask him some questions.
I want to know about my father.
And then I want to punish him.
Him and The Program. Mother. I want to take them all down.
For my father, for Sam.
For stealing my life from me.
I watch his center mass, but it does not approach. It recedes, withdrawing deeper into shadow.
It was enough. For now.
“Maybe we’ll see each other again,” Mike says.
“I hope so,” I say.
“It’s not up to us.”
“It’s never up to us.”
“Good luck, Zach,” he says, and he disappears.
I could follow him. Track him like an animal in the park. Settle this thing between us.
I don’t.
Not today.
CHAPTER SEVENTY-FIVE
THE NEWS SWEEPS ACROSS THE CITY THE NEXT DAY.
Not the news of an attack at Gracie Mansion. Instead there is a story about a gas line explosion on the Upper East Side. Neighbors heard two large booms, and Gracie Mansion had to be evacuated in the middle of an event.
That’s at the bottom of the front page, but it’s the lead article that matters most. The story of the untimely death of the mayor’s daughter. Of natural causes.
There will be an inquiry. That’s what the papers say. Teens are not supposed to die for no reason at all, but it happens. A football player collapses. An otherwise healthy girl keels over from a rare defect in a blood vessel.
Accidents, illness, genetics, bad luck.
There are a thousand ways to die.
The mayor appears at a news conference, his face twisted by grief.
I watch it on television in the New York hotel room where I am temporarily staying. I stand close to the screen and turn down the sound. I follow the mayor’s eyes as he speaks, looking for any signs of falsehood.
There are none.
Sam was right. Her father is a great actor.
Not when it comes to his grief. That seems genuine.
But he has no problem lying about the rest of the story. What he was doing with the prime minister, and what happened afterward. The powers that be have decided to keep the real story of the Gracie Mansion attack a secret.
Whatever element hatched the assassination plot against the PM has failed. The peace process will move forward, perhaps with the mayor attached after his term ends.
My phone vibrates in its cradle, the double vibrations of the Poker app.
I turn off the television, and I take Mother’s call.
“We’ve made arrangements at school,” she says.
The cover story: My father has been transferred for work, so I must transfer. Another rich kid drifting into school and out, caught up in the vagaries of influential parents’ lives.
Nothing unusual about that. Not at our school.
Their school, I should say.
Not mine.
“You’ll put in an appearance on Monday,” Mother says. “Give you a chance to say your good-byes.”
Normally I’m gone immediately after an assignment, but because of the high-profile nature of this assignment and my exposure during it, it’s been decided that I should linger briefly. Let attention fade for a day or two.
“You did a lot of work this time out,” Mother says. “A lot of unassigned work.”
“Proof,” I say.
“What is that?”
“That’s what I was working on in trigonometry.”
“Proof. Is that part of the syllabus?” Mother says.
“Not exactly.”
“You’ve never deviated from the syllabus before,” she says. “Was it really necessary?”
I should be extremely careful with Mother now. I should back down, play timid, be apologetic.
I think of Sam’s lifeless body at my feet in the park.
Suddenly I am angry at Mother, at the assignments she doles out so casually and from a distance. I’m angry at myself for always doing what I’m told. Too angry for business as usual.
“This time it was necessary,” I say.
“Couldn’t you have finished the assignment without proof?” she says.
No anger in her voice. Only curiosity.
“If I had finished at the beginning, I would have turned in the wrong solution,” I say. “Even you have to acknowledge that. You changed the assignment in midcourse.”
“True,” she says. “But think it through. Puzzle it out.”
Puzzle It Out.
One of the games we played in the house when I was training.
Mother would raise a question that seemed to have an obvious solution. As soon as I had the answer, I’d shout it out, thinking I was brilliant.
Then Mother would take me deeper. Show me paths I couldn’t see on my own.
Puzzle It Out.
“The original assignment,” Mother says. “Didn’t you have the solution at the very beginning?”
The mayor. He was my original target, and I was in his office on day one.
I say, “If I’d finished the assignment that first day, I would have been making a mistake.”
Because the mayor was not guilty of anything more than loving his daughter, perhaps giving her too much leeway. I would have killed an innocent person.
The Program made the mistake, not me.
It was my investigation that revealed the guilty party.
Unless—
I take a moment to puzzle it out.
If I had removed the mayor, there would have been no need for the PM to visit.
No meeting at Gracie.
Nothing for Gideon to accomplish.
And Sam?
With her father dead, she would have been neutralized, her access to information gone. There would have been no target adjustment. Sam would still be alive, and the mayor would be dead.
And the problem, such as it was, would be gone.
If I’d act
ed on that first day, it would have been over. Quickly and easily.
So I took the wrong path.
“It’s because you waited that new information was revealed,” Mother says. “That’s why we had to adjust the assignment. If you had acted, there would have been no need.”
Like she’s in my head. Like she’s always been there, ten steps ahead of me, plotting.
“Your old mom is not so stupid,” she says. “Maybe you’ll trust her the next time she tells you what to do.”
Ten steps ahead, but not all-seeing. Because how did I get the proof?
She hasn’t asked me about it. Which means she doesn’t know about Howard.
Not yet.
She may or may not know that Mike gave me a second chance.
And what Mike told me about my father?
“You said that after I was finished we could talk about my coming home.”
“I did say that.”
“I’d like to see you and Dad.”
“We’d like to see you, too. But with the move going on, it’s not the right time.”
“You’re moving?” I say.
“In a manner of speaking.”
“Could you make some time for me?”
“I’m sorry, honey. Our hands are tied,” she says.
Tied.
I think of myself taped to a chair in a dark warehouse, Mike looming over me.
Sent by Mother.
I think of my father taped to a chair in our living room, a trickle of blood running down his face. Mike stands over him.
Sent by Mother.
“There’s a lot more we need to talk about,” I say.
“Oh, yes,” Mother says. “We will.”
I hear her typing on a keyboard in the background. Is she writing a report about what happened here? Putting everything in neat boxes?
Maybe this was just another assignment to her, another task checked off the list. An operative deviated slightly from the plan, but he’s back now.
Zach Abram is back in the family.
Mission accomplished.
She says, “By the way, keep your eye out for an e-mail. Your father is sending you something.”
“I’ll look forward to it,” I say. “I have to go now, Mom. There’s a lot to do before I leave.”
“Love you,” she says.
I start to speak, but I cannot. My throat is dry.
I take a breath. I swallow. And I stick to the script.
“Love you. Talk to you soon,” I say.
