Bravo

by Greg Rucka

  We have a problem.

  Tell me and I will make it go away, dorogoy.

  You must do something for me.

  I will do anything for you.

  The Architect exhales, resolving himself. He sees no choice, not with this realization, not knowing that Tohir still lives. Everything is wrong now. He is acting in haste. He is putting her in jeopardy.

  He is breaking every one of his rules.

  First you will need a gun.

  Chapter Sixteen

  NESSUNO WAITS UNTIL they’re in the air, the Learjet wheels up out of Carroll County Regional Airport, then says, “I can get how you spoof the DNA, the prints, all of that. The dental records, easy, especially since I understand there wasn’t much in the way of teeth remaining. But the body, where’d you get the body?”

  “Afghanistan,” Bell says.

  “You just grabbed someone off the rack?”

  “There was a height and weight requirement,” Bell says. “Once they had one, they put it on ice and flew it out through Bagram.”

  “And that was Tohir?”

  “Close enough.”

  “We really are sick sons of bitches, aren’t we?”

  “Whatever it takes.”

  She shifts in the seat opposite him, glares at him with those dark eyes. It’s not too far from the look she gave him at the Palomar, when she found him sitting in her room.

  “Am I AWOL?” she asks.

  “How it’ll look,” Bell says. “But if it makes you feel any better, I’m supposed to be in custody right now.”

  “Dereliction of duty.”

  “That’s right.”

  “And other pending criminal charges in the investigation?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Why?”

  “To put us outside the chain.”

  She doesn’t say anything, continues to stare at him for a fistful of seconds longer, then twists in her seat to look out her window. There’s nothing but black night outside.

  “Can I trust you?” Nessuno asks.

  “I’m solid,” Bell says. “Whether you choose to, that’s your call, Chief. Now here’s my question: Can I trust you?”

  He doesn’t get an answer.

  They’re in Hailey before 2300 local, Bell’s pickup again waiting in the lot. He drives them out to his house, and she pauses on the way to the front door to look up at the sky and search the surroundings. He can hear a distant dog barking, the rustle of the boughs, and she doesn’t move, just standing there. He waits her out, and she heads inside through the door he holds for her.

  “Bedrooms,” Bell says, indicating their rough direction. “Take your pick.”

  “You don’t want me in yours?” she asks.

  He just looks at her.

  “That was sharper than I intended,” Nessuno says. “When you said you wanted to see me again, is this what you meant?”

  “You mean did I know this was how it would come down?”

  “Yes.”

  “I did not. There are three bedrooms. One of them is spoken for. That is all.”

  She nods, just barely. She makes two fists, brings them to her temples, closes her eyes. “I thought he was dead. And I was…fuck me, I was grieving, I was mourning him.”

  “And now?”

  The hands come down, and the eyes open. “And now instead of being glad he’s alive, instead of being happy, I’m scared again. I’m scared again, I’m fucking scared still. I love him, and I don’t, and you…you, I don’t even know what to think about you.”

  “Then at least it’s mutual.”

  “So I can trust you, but I can’t trust what you’re thinking?”

  “Call it the bends,” Bell says.

  “The bends,” Nessuno says.

  Jorge appears at midnight almost on the nose, coming up from the basement. Nessuno is taking a shower in one of the bathrooms, and Bell is making soup from the cans he’s found in the kitchen cabinets.

  “Isaiah and Freddie are on watch,” he tells Bell. “O’Day is crashing at my place. Heatdish is sleeping the sleep of a man who’s getting what he wants.”

  “His standards have fallen. He talking?”

  “Nothing worth repeating. He’s still in a lot of pain from the hip, too, and the transport took more out of him than he wanted to show.” Jorge inclines his head toward the sound of falling water. “Since you’re standing in front of me, I’m forced to ask who’s in your shower. You pull the stewardess?”

  “It’s the Chief.”

  Jorge arches an eyebrow.

  “Brickyard’s idea, not mine,” Bell says.

  “We can’t use her for guard,” Jorge says. “He’ll go after her.”

  “She’s here to talk to him.”

  “I get that. What I’m saying is that we’re light, boss. We want two on him at all times, and that gives us dick for perimeter, never mind sleep. We don’t know how long this’ll take.”

  “We’ll start in the morning.”

  Jorge nods, turns his head in the direction of the distant shower as they hear the water stop. Looks back at Bell. “I heard a rumor.”

  “Certainly actionable intelligence.”

  Jorge just looks at him. Bell waits.

  “Yeah,” Jorge finally says. “What I thought.”

  She doesn’t want any soup, moves past Bell in the kitchen, opens the refrigerator. Pulls out the carton of milk from the door, gives it a sniff.

  “I heard voices,” she says.

  “Bonebreaker with the sitrep,” Bell says. “Heatdish is sleeping; he’s under watch.”

  “I heard voices,” she says. “But I didn’t hear the door.”

  “He came up through the basement.” Bell indicates the backyard, through the kitchen window, the darkness outside, the stretch of lawn that runs to the trees, the fence. The light in the kitchen kicks off the glass, makes viewing anything in the darkness outside next to impossible. “His house is that way.”

  “Tunnels?”

  “The houses were prepped for us, yeah. We’ve got a run between, some storage for weapons and gear, range space, and a hard room about midway along. That’s where he’s staying.”

  “You’ve got a shooting range?”

  “Use it or lose it.”

  Nessuno opens a cupboard, then another. “Where are the drinking glasses?”

  “Your guess is as good as mine. This’ll be my second night spent here.”

  She drinks from the carton, replaces it in the door.

  “Good night,” she says.

  “Sleep well.”

  She doesn’t answer.

  When he opens his eyes out of sleep, he has no idea what time it is, only that the world is still dark. He drags himself up from a disjointed dream, something about his daughter and a shotgun and Amy, and he fights the urge to go for his weapon when he sees the figure standing in the doorway.

  “Friendly,” Nessuno says.

  “Problem?” His voice is hoarse with sleep. He clears his throat. “Problem?”

  She moves to the edge of the bed, opposite him, hesitates, then sits. The mattress shifts barely with her weight on it. She’s wearing the same shirt from the day and her underwear. Her hair is pulled back, tied in a ponytail. Ambient light barely gleams off the chain of that saint’s medal she wears. Bell sits himself upright, aware that he’s wearing shorts and nothing else.

  “I’m really pissed off at you,” she says.

  “I know.”

  “You’re asking me to do something tomorrow I don’t want to do.”

  “I know.”

  “I’ll fucking do my duty; I know my job. I’ll play him, all of that. I’ll do it. Don’t you doubt that.”

  “I never once have.”

  “Don’t lie to me.”

  Bell shakes his head. “Straight shit. Do I doubt your loyalty? If I did, you wouldn’t be here.”

  “Orders.”

  “I know how to disobey. You’re compromised, you’re not here. But you�
�re here, ergo not compromised.”

  “But I am compromised. My problem is, I don’t know what I’m feeling anymore.”

  “I have the same problem,” Bell says.

  Her fingers find the back of his hand, begin to trace his fingers with sudden intimacy. Bell doesn’t move.

  “There’s a part of me, the Elisabetta Villanova part of me, that’s still with him,” she says. “I’m trying so hard to untangle that, to get the threads sorted, like. But there’s a piece of me, this Stockholm syndrome bullshit piece of me, I can feel it, and I know what it is, you understand? The part of me that likes him, that loves him, that had to and still does. The part of me that made it okay to do what he wanted me to do. The part of me that needed him to want me. The part of me that made it okay to be in his bed, to have him inside me. That part.”

  She trails off, staring at him in the darkness, in the palpable silence of Hailey, Idaho, at night. She hasn’t moved once since sitting down except for her fingers, still tracing his.

  “You asked if you could trust me,” Bell says.

  “You said I could.”

  “You never answered my question.”

  “I am answering it now.” In the darkness, she looks down at their hands. Her fingers leave his. “You can’t.”

  “You turn or you face,” Bell says. “You either come up all the way or you stay under. You stay under, then you’re right—you’re compromised, and you’ll be his to the end. That’s your choice.”

  “It’s not as simple as that.”

  “It begins with the action. You’re trying to be either Petra or Elisabetta, thinking you can’t be both.”

  “One of them has to lead. That’s why I’m here, because you need me to be Elisabetta. I’m here now because she’s who you want.”

  “You’re here now because there’s a man who has information that will save American lives and you can get it from him. Petra or Elisabetta, it doesn’t matter. Your job is to get him to talk. Can you do that job, Chief?”

  She doesn’t answer.

  Bell pulls the blankets back on the side of the bed, shoves one of the pillows over. She turns, slides her legs beneath the covers, lies down stiffly. Bell makes sure there’s space between them, careful to avoid contact between their bodies. He is surprised when he feels her hand come to rest on his forearm, settle there.

  “Get some sleep,” he says.

  Chapter Seventeen

  ATHENA BELL THINKS she’s being followed.

  It’s not like it’s obvious, and it’s not like it’s any one thing in particular, because if it were, then she could be sure. Like, if she were seeing the same people in different places, faces she had never seen before but that kept reappearing. If she were positive it was the same car, the blue Toyota she saw parked down the street from the house and then, two hours later, at the curb outside Nunyuns on Champlain Street.

  But she’s not, and she thinks she’s being totally paranoid, and it’s not like that’s an unreasonable thing to be, given everything that happened when she and her friends from the Hollyoakes School for the Deaf went to California.

  It had been so good to see her dad that day he’d come and gone and brought her that stupid dragon—better than she wanted to admit. Just to have him for a few minutes so they could talk, so she could tell him how it felt. She was sixteen and she thought she should be too old for such things, but his hugs were still the best, and he almost always knew what to say to make her feel like she wasn’t just making shit up. He always treated her problems as real. He pissed her off, sure, but he was a dad, that was kind of what they did, and she knew that, and even after everything she had seen him do, she still thought he was more awesome than not.

  Athena also thought it was most decidedly a fucked-up thing that, since the divorce, she saw her father even less than before. If, as her mother said, one of the reasons for the split was because Dad was never around, this hadn’t exactly fixed the problem, y’know? It made her resent her mother, and it made her want to blame her mother for the divorce, though she knew it wasn’t rational or even fair.

  After the walk, Dad had brought Athena back to the house and had spoken just a little bit more with Mom. Athena caught, maybe, pieces of every third or fourth or fifth word. She was one of the best lip-readers she’d ever met, and still, if Athena understood 30 percent of what was being said, that was doing well. She’d seen television and movies in which deaf people and even people who had their hearing could lip-read from, like, fifty feet away, and they’d get every word, and every time it made her laugh. As if it were that easy.

  ___got to go, Dad had said.

  That one was clear enough.

  ___v c___ you do, Mom had said.

  A little harder. That v sound, that might’ve been an f, in which case maybe that was of. Of course you do—that would make sense.

  Mom and Dad had stared at each other for a moment, and then Dad sighed and his whole body had sort of shifted; his shoulders had dropped a little. He’d shaken his head.

  ___ ___ c___d get ___way, I wo___, he’d said. ___ ___ lot go___ ___ r___t now I c___ ju___.

  Most of that was a miss, but context is everything, and Athena had a good idea what he was saying. It wasn’t the first time he’d said it. He’s got work, he can’t get away, he would if he could, but he can’t.

  Th___ ___ways a lot go___ ___, Mom had said. Go. This ___ the s___ co__vers___n w___ ___ ___ th___d times. Nev___ m___d me nev___ m___d ___ job ___ve g___ ___ fucking duty. ___ go.

  Almost a total miss, but fucking was clear. Athena had learned to identify most profanity early. So the argument, this was the same argument. He has to go and stop Bad Guys, something that, to Athena, has much greater immediacy following everything that happened at the theme park, where she’d actually seen him do it. Before the trip, his work, what he did for the army, for their country, that was abstract. Now, though, she knew. She’d seen the gun in his hand. She’d seen the people dead.

  Amy ___n. Be ___ful o___? Please?

  Chot___ ___ful? ___ that what you m___ Jad?

  Athena can’t think of a ch word, revises. Shot. Shotgun?

  Dad shook his head again, tried not to sigh, Athena could see it. Then he turned to her.

  You be good Gray Eyes, he’d signed. You take care I’ll be in touch when I can.

  Better.

  That got him to smile, and he’d given her another one of those hugs and kissed her forehead, and then he’d left. Mom had gone back to fussing in the kitchen, and Athena had gone back to her room and opened her laptop and had found Lynne and Gail both online, so they chatted for a bit. They’d all been in the park together, though Gail and Lynne hadn’t been there when the woman died, the woman who’d saved Athena’s life.

  Sup?

  Just saw my dad. He brought me this.

  Athena used the laptop camera to take a picture of herself with the purple dragon. She took a couple, one of them with her biting its felt wing.

  awww

  Athena thought it was kinda typical that her father had been worried she didn’t have people to talk to. She didn’t have adults she was talking to, but there hadn’t been a day since they’d all come back from California when Athena hadn’t talked with Gail or Lynne or Leon or Miguel or Joel.

  Things had been a little crazy when they all first got home. Everyone’s parents had been in total freak-out, not unreasonably. Any parent who didn’t freak out wasn’t much of a parent as far as Athena was concerned. Gail, Lynne, and Miguel all had visits scheduled with a counselor, now, too—the same counselor, in fact, because he was the only guy any of their parents could find who was able to work with adolescents and was also fluent in ASL. Mom had asked if Athena wanted to talk to him, too. Athena had said no.

  It was better, talking to friends, even if at first they didn’t talk about what had happened at all. It was on the news all around them, on the television’s closed-captioning and in the newspapers. You could see it on the street, too, if you wer
e paying attention; there were more police around, and even the people who weren’t the police, they were tense, edgy. It was a small thing, but it was everywhere, and to Athena and her friends, it was hard to miss.

  It was Joel who got them talking, actually, after he got out of the hospital. He’d popped onto chat while all the rest of them had been online, and it turned out he couldn’t remember much of what had happened. One of the Bad Guys had kicked him really hard in the stomach, hard enough to cause bleeding inside, and from that point on, Joel said, he was hurting too much to pay close attention.

  When they did talk about it, Athena thought it was funny how each of them recalled different things, or sometimes the same things, but in different ways. All of them were having bad dreams, even Miguel, who totally didn’t like to admit things like that. That was also when Athena had told them all about what had happened in the tunnels underneath the park, and about the woman who had saved her life.

  No one ever asked her about her dad. Everyone but Joel had seen him, and Athena was sure that Miguel or Leon had told Joel by now. Everyone knew.

  But nobody asked.

  Today—the day she thinks that maybe someone is following her—Athena gets up and checks her e-mail, is surfing the Web, when Mom comes in, already dressed for work. It’s her first day going back to the real estate agency since they returned from California, and Athena can tell Mom is looking to sell some property today from the way she’s dressed. The skirt is just above her knee, and she’s put on makeup, and she’s wearing her low heels.

  Heading out be home by five, Mom signs. Text if you need me you behave yourself.

  Athena sticks out her tongue and spells out P-A-R-T-Y with her hands.

  Mom grins. Going to see Joel?

  Athena’s stomach does a little flip, and she can feel heat in her cheeks. She wonders how her mother can read her mind, wonders how she can read such truth into a joke.