by Greg Rucka
“Possibly. Above my pay grade.”
“Above mine.”
“That so?” She indicates Freddie with her chin, then tilts her head back slightly, toward Isaiah and Tom O’Day. “I get to know who you are?”
“Warlock,” Bell says. “Cardboard, Chaindragger, Steelriver.”
“Ah.” She takes another drink from her bottle. “What does that make me?”
“A breath of fresh air,” O’Day says, having given up on harassing Chaindragger and now half leaning over the back of his seat to face them. He’s giving Nessuno a smile that Bell imagines she gets an awful lot.
“Where do we touch down?” she asks.
“Ramstein to refuel, continuing to Hurlburt. Still sorting out the delivery. You’re on for the duration.”
“That on orders?”
“That is on orders, Chief.”
She shows no reaction at all, no displeasure, no emotion, and Bell thinks she must be very good at her job. Now that she’s stepping back into the light from her cover for the first time in more than two years, he wonders how long it will be before she doesn’t second-guess her every action and reaction. Bell has done undercover work himself, but only on short-term assignments, the longest just over four months, and always in service of a very directed op. His last placement, at the WilsonVille theme park, lasted just shy of two months, a preemptive move that failed in its initial goal but succeeded in its ultimate one. For Bell, that was a plenty long time to be under, and it hadn’t been in a hostile theater. What the chief has done he can accept without pause. How she has done it is beyond his imagining.
Bravo-Interdict is another of the many secrets that make up the Joint Special Operations Command, like SOAR and DEVGRU and all the rest. Whereas the Special Operations Aviation Regiment provides operational aircraft alongside the Air Force Tactical Equipment Group—this Learjet and its crew no doubt among them—and DEVGRU has its cadre of navy-trained shooters, Bravo-Interdict stands by itself. Not strictly shooters, though all of them know where to point the business end of a gun, but rather an intelligence unit that places its operators covertly, sometimes under very deep cover indeed. Indigo, Delta, and DEVGRU all do the same to a lesser extent. The differences are that this is Bravo-Interdict’s mandate, and Bravo-Interdict’s operators are all female.
Y chromosomes need not apply.
Politicians and the brass can argue about putting women on the front line all they like, but the fact is, war is and always has been driven by necessity. You use what you’ve got, the same way you go to war with the army you have, not the army you want. JSOC has been placing women behind the front lines for years now, and anyone who thinks that work has been bleach-clean and flower-print dresses is demonstrating a remarkable and willful naïveté. That CW2 Petra Nessuno was in Vosil Tohir’s bed when they hit the house and not in the clear means that either someone back home fucked up or she was working on a very long leash.
What she was doing in that bed Bell fully knows and doesn’t really care. The army gets the body, and to imply a moral difference between sleeping with someone and shooting that person in the face to achieve the mission’s objective is academic. The goal is the same. The goal is to successfully complete the mission. The goal is victory.
For the first time, Bell lets himself consider how close he came to killing the woman opposite him, and that opens the gates. The adrenaline crashes. Tension unlocks. Muscles relax. The trembling starts in his hands, and he keeps them below the line of the table, tries to relax his palms against his thighs, waiting for the reaction to pass. This is normal, a physiological response, one he has experienced too many times to count; it is the reason Cardboard goes inside after an op and why Chaindragger buries himself in a book and why Steelriver won’t shut up. Bell knew it was coming, but Nessuno’s presence makes it all the more fierce. She is still watching him, and Bell moves his eyes from her to the man strapped down on the couch, one who, he knows, cannot, at least for the moment, return the gaze.
It occurs to him that the chief was in the shitter for a long time. He didn’t hear her vomiting. Maybe he’s engaging in transference. Or maybe one of the things Bravo-Interdict teaches its operators is how to throw up in silence.
When he looks back to her, she’s staring out the window at black sky. The water bottle in her hand is empty, crushed. The knuckles on the holding hand are white from her grip.
The Learjet tires kiss the tarmac at Ramstein, come to a stop long enough for a ground crew to connect hoses and force-feed fuel, for the air crew to swap. Once they’re flying again Bell switches seats with Cardboard. He checks Vosil Tohir’s vitals, replaces the bag on the IV with a fresh one. Pulse, respiration, blood pressure all look good. Bell concludes that their prize is stable and will survive the journey intact and thus their mission will be deemed a success. Steelriver, Cardboard, and Chaindragger are all being smart soldiers, stealing sleep, but Nessuno, like Bell, remains awake, still pondering the unseen out her window. Bell glances at her every so often, but is careful to not do so too much or for too long.
Fatigue settles along with the silence, the constant thrum of the engines. It’s been a hard handful of days that culminated with breaking through Vosil Tohir’s door. Bell lacerated his right palm on a piece of broken glass four days earlier, took cuts across his lower back at the same time. Muscles in his left shoulder, strained in a nearly fatal fall, join the chorus of injuries. He has bruises along his left side, stitches on his left forearm closing a slash from a knife, innumerable scrapes and scratches, and for most of them he cannot remember the moment of acquisition. He was punched in the nose, and when he holds a tissue to it and blows he ends up with dried kernels of blood in his snot. How he was spared a break he can’t imagine. He hurts.
He knows his mind is drifting, tries to rope it back, and looks to Nessuno again, still showing her profile. He doesn’t see her. Instead, he sees Athena, his daughter, and the other hurt reawakens, one he’s had to put out of his mind to do the job at hand. She must feel him looking because she meets his eyes, and he sees her confusion and her anger and her loss. The deaf have a focus to make a sniper weep, and Athena is boring through him like she’s digging for a core sample in an ice sheet. Her hands move, quick, angry, signing to him, and he cannot understand what she’s trying to say. Carmine droplets mar his daughter’s fair skin, a fine mist that settles on her cheek. It’s the blood of the woman who saved her life, a CIA operative named Shoshana Nuri. Bell thinks his daughter looks more like her mother each time he sees her. He’s afraid she looks at him now the way Amy does, as something unfeeling and monstrous.
“Coffee.”
Nessuno is on the couch beside him, indicating two mugs resting on the tray she’s unfolded.
“I figured black,” she says.
Bell grunts assent, straightens against the couch, runs a hand over his eyes. It’s the lacerated palm; he catches a lingering whiff of antiseptic and nothing pungent underneath, and the dressing doesn’t seem to have slipped. Runs his other hand through his dark hair, leans back, sitting like a human once more. He takes the mug closest to him and inhales the unmistakable scent of instant. It tastes like thin charcoal. She drinks hers, and together they watch Vosil Tohir’s chest rise and fall in gentle rhythm.
“You were staring at me.”
“Apologies, Chief.”
“You were sleeping with your eyes open.”
This is news to Bell. There’s nothing in her tone to indicate she’s joking. There’s been no change in her tone at all.
“Trade secret,” he says. “Was I?”
“At first. They closed eventually.”
“I was seeing my daughter.”
Nessuno turns her head to study him. There’s more rust than amber now, a trick of the cabin lighting. “Strong resemblance?”
“None whatsoever.” He stops himself from adding “except that you both are beautiful.” He suspects it is the last thing the chief wants to hear, true or not. “I must have
been dreaming.”
“You’re married.”
“For almost twenty years. Ended about nine months ago.” Bell goes back to watching Tohir, the movement of his slumbering breast. He can feel Nessuno still staring at him, and it reminds him of Athena, and he wonders if that weren’t the fuel for his brief fugue.
“You must’ve been young.”
“Eighteen. Got married just after advanced individual training.”
Nessuno maybe nods. “Long time to be married.”
“I missed most of the last decade.”
She maybe nods again, joins him once more in watching Tohir sleep.
“You have people waiting?” Bell asks her.
She maybe shakes her head.
“Nobody?”
“It’s not ten years, but it’s long enough.”
“Can’t be easy.”
“You come back, it’s like having been at deep ocean depths.” Nothing in her voice has changed, though she’s picking her words with obvious care. She holds her mug of instant in both hands, and Bell can see the color draining from her fingers as her grip tightens. “You have to come back up slowly or you get the bends. Decompression. I can feel it now. I keep looking at him, afraid he’ll wake up and see me on this plane, with all of you, and then he’ll know I lied to him. He’ll know I betrayed him. I’ll be blown, and he’ll kill me. It’s not rational. It’s over now. But I keep feeling it.”
“He’s not going to wake up before we land.”
“I know. It’s not rational, I said. I’m not rational. I think I’ve got the bends.”
Bell smiles. “You’re going to be okay, Chief.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Because right now you know you’re not.”
She considers that for a long time before asking, “I hope that’s true. I hope that’s all it takes. What about you?”
Bell can’t find it in himself to answer at first. He’s thinking about Athena again, all that his daughter saw, all that his daughter must’ve felt. He thinks about how she must be struggling to process the murders she witnessed and the pain she experienced, all the helplessness and confusion and fear. He thinks about her courage and her brilliance. He thinks about the WilsonVille theme park, with its many magical characters and many magical stories, and how all of them end happily ever after.
“I don’t know,” Bell says.
Chapter Five
SHE HAD WANTED to be a dancer. She’d been pretty good, too. Once. But she was poor, from a desperately poor family, and that poverty brought the worst out in those around her in word and deed. If it hadn’t been for her Lover, she would never have escaped, and if it hadn’t been for her genes, her Lover would never have discovered her at all. She was smart, and she was lovely, and while she was still too young, certain men took a fancy to her. It was with one of those men her Lover had seen her, and it was from those men her Lover had taken her, and she had been gratefully, gladly his ever since.
Sometimes, against all protocol, she would dance. Late at night and alone, without the soldier or any of the others who so often came to call, her iPod strapped to her upper arm and her noise-canceling headphones over her ears, she would be the prima ballerina she’d dreamed of becoming, the shining star held aloft. She would lose herself in imagination, falling back into childhood fantasy and out of this life. She would blend steps and styles, and in the end, she would always see her Lover, the man who had made her. Her fantasy would focus, and memory would reinvent details, and the imagined audience would disappear—the stage, the lights, all of it—would vanish, and she would be in her expensive condo in Washington, D.C.’s, West End, dancing just for him. He would see again her devotion, and know how much she loved him, and she would feel once more how much he loved her.
There was very little in her life that she believed without restraint or suspicion. The men and women who came to her, that she had carefully seduced—and that was the only word for it, she knew—she viewed with an ever-present caution. The nature of her relationship with each and every one of them was the same, changed only in the details. The soldier, the sailor, the financier, the lawmaker, the expert, the analyst, it didn’t matter. The frame of any affair is deceit, after all. She would’ve understood that anyway, even if her Lover hadn’t made it clear.
“They are targets, Zoya,” her Lover told her. “They will want you because you are forbidden. They will want you because they should not want you, and your task will be to use that desire, without their knowing, to bring them close, and once they take that step into your arms, you will be everything they need you to be. If you do that, if you give them that, they will come back again and again and again.”
“So I am to be a prostitute,” she said, unwilling to keep the bitterness from her voice. She was sixteen at the time and already had lost her illusions.
He took her chin in his hand. He kissed her lips gently.
“You think that is how I see you, Zoyenka? That I could think so little of you? No. You are an artist, body and soul.”
She had needed to believe him, had needed the validation, but in the way that all lies told by lovers ultimately ring hollow, it had been his actions more than his words that proved him right. He spent money, so much money, on her. So many classes, so many instructors, traveling from one city to another as her Lover directed, sent to meet this man or this woman. At every door, greeted as if she were expected, as if whoever this teacher was, they were delighted by her presence, by the opportunity to share knowledge with her. She would go days or weeks or even a month or more without hearing from him, only to be surprised by a message passed along by her tutor du jour that her Lover was at the Portobello, or the Cipriani, or the Kempinski, or wherever, and that he was waiting to see her.
“Show me what you’ve learned,” he would say, and, nervously, she would. When she did it well, displayed some new facet to her Art, his delight would shine, and her heart would sing. When she fumbled, misspoke, or in some other way faltered, he would chide her, tell her that art was a journey, not a destination, that what she did would require a lifetime of work. She was so smart; he made a point of telling her this again and again. He assured her that her mind far more than her body was what had captured him. As she learned to display her wit, she learned she could make him laugh, and he told her she was the only one to do that, and that he loved her for it all the more.
“Beauty is made common,” he said one night in Copenhagen. “Beauty can be bought off the shelf in Zurich or London or New York; everywhere you look, it’s on sale. And sex, you know already. Sex is easy, there for the taking. You keep your beauty uncommon, Zoyenka. Let it be your own. Your beauty is gravity, and it will draw others into your orbit just as it has drawn me. But who you are will capture and keep them.”
“You’re not jealous, dorogoy? Of the things that I will do with them? The ways they will touch me?”
“I am terribly jealous,” her Lover said, his honesty delighting her. “Already I am, and I will always be. Jealous that others are with you when I cannot be. Jealous that I spend so much of my life away from you already, and not with you. I would be with you always, Zoya, all day, every day, if I could. But we are remaking the world, and if the sacrifice required means I must suffer without you, if I must suffer another’s hands upon you until the work is done, then that is my burden, and I shall carry it. And I will take heart that you are with me, that we are working together, and that one day, we will have our victory, and our reward.”
They would part, and she would return to her studies, to mastering her Art, and sometimes she would think that if any other man spoke to her like that, spoke about remaking the world, she would’ve thought him insane. But her Lover was the most rational, thoughtful man she had ever known, and she suspected it was genius rather than madness she saw in him. Surely it took genius to do what he did, to live so invisibly and yet to have such power, and as her studies advanced with her years, she became more and more certain of this.
/> When he had first found her, he had been a man others feared. Now, a decade gone, he had become a ghost and a god, a guiding, invisible hand that could move her across dozens of borders under dozens of names and she would never once earn a second glance in her passing. He was a secret to be whispered into the ears of men like the soldier in the breathless moments postclimax, a name that could shatter the world at a command. She knew this. She knew what had happened in California, the terrorists and the theme park, and she knew it had been her Lover who had made it happen on behalf of the soldier and his friends.
It had been a decade since he had discovered her, changed her, claimed her. It had been ten years since he had brought her to life, and given her his love, and she never, not for a moment, doubted the sincerity of his devotion to her. He had done for her everything he had promised and more. Never once had a door been barred, let alone closed. Never once, since he found her, had she wanted for anything.
Except him.
This is what made her moments of doubt so much worse. In the beginning, they had been few and far between, but as time wore on, as the distance between her and her Lover seemed to expand, they came more frequently. They would steal in upon her, always when she was alone, always when she was passive, waiting between rendezvous for one lover or the next. She would be idling, browsing in a bookstore or playing tourist along the Mall or gazing at the displays at the Smithsonian or at Air and Space, or she would be in the cool chill of a movie theater while voices boomed from speakers on every side.
Then she would feel the desire to simply abandon everything. To get up and walk out and drop the things that made her Jordan Webber-Hayden in the nearest trash can and to just keep walking until everything was left behind; every pretense, every artifice, every deception, divesting herself of all of it.
She could do it. She knew she could. She knew how; her Lover had made certain of that. He had given her the training and the skills to make such a disappearance not only viable but also relatively simple. A quick stop by one of the handful of caches that dotted the area around D.C. and she could pick up cash, fake ID—everything was there in carefully loaded go bags. Everything from a change of name to a change of clothes. She could leave it all, with only unanswered questions in her wake and a handful of lovers who would wonder what happened, where she went, but who would never dare search for her for fear of revealing their own indiscretions.
