Late in the Day

by Mary Calmes

  I was given a choice: be tried and court-martialed, then transferred to Leavenworth to await execution by lethal injection, or… door number two. I could leave immediately and serve my country in an altogether different capacity.

  “And what would that be?’

  I listened as he outlined the job in that quick-and-dirty way military men had, told me the worst and got it out of the way, no beating around the bush, instead cutting to the heart of the matter instead.

  “You want me to train to be an assassin?” I summarized when he was done, still unsure that I’d heard him right, as farfetched as it sounded.

  “You killed five people in seconds, Moss, and as far as I can tell from what Barnes and your boyfriend said, you didn’t even break a sweat.”

  “No, that’s—”

  “Do you feel any remorse?” he asked, his voice low, husky, the sound soothing at the moment as my life unraveled.

  I glared at him. “Why would I feel any remorse? They came to rape Efrem and kill me.”

  “As I said before, Barnes says no, that he was tasked with scaring you by Davidson, nothing else.”

  “And what, he just gets away with what he did?”

  “No one is getting away with anything, I assure you.”

  “What about Davidson?”

  “He’s done” were his simple words, and I could tell he meant it.

  “But if you know that I’m innocent then—”

  “You’re not innocent,” he objected. “You didn’t need to kill the men who had Lieutenant Lahm. They were both giving up.”

  “You kill them so they can’t come back and get you later.”

  “Agreed,” Cerreto said with a nod. “You eliminate all threats, that’s what we’re taught. But that’s not what this was.”

  “The hell it wasn’t.”

  “No,” he said implacably. “They threatened the man you love, so you put them down.”

  “They broke into the house!” I yelled. “Take me to court, I know that—”

  “You’re a soldier,” he reminded me. “There won’t be any civilian court for you.”

  “I refuse to believe that—”

  “This isn’t A Few Good Men, sergeant,” he reminded me. “That’s not how this works.”

  I stared into all the dark, inky blue made almost black under the fluorescent lights.

  “You will be tried by possibly homophobic white middle-aged men who will not like the idea of a black man getting away with what you’re charged with.”

  He was right, of course, but I was not ready to concede.

  “If you agree to come with me, Efrem Lahm will be safe with a clean record and no mention of this incident.”

  “You’re telling me that you’re going to trade his future for mine?”

  “I’m telling you that you could keep his record spotless.”

  “Because, what, he’s worth more because he’s white?”

  He squinted at me like I was nuts, that I’d somehow disappointed him with my assessment. “I don’t give a shit about him, Moss. He could be anyone, any race, any color, any creed. He could be a she for all I care, your partner is only important as leverage because you love him, that’s all.”

  I absorbed that.

  “He’s important if he gives you to us and meaningless the second after that,” he explained. “What we do isn’t about anything but the best, and because my boss has had his eye on you, I’m here making you a once-in-a-lifetime offer. But never for a second believe that he is more valuable than you because it’s very clearly the reverse.”

  I took a breath. “Assassins, trained killers. You’re talking about black ops.”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re talking about the CIA.”

  “I am. Yes.”

  “Would I still be in the Army?”

  “Yes.”

  “What’s the difference?”

  “New name, new everything, and you never see Efrem Lahm again, because if you agree, you die right here, right now.”

  I concentrated on keeping my breathing even. “You work for the agency?”

  “I do.”

  “You’re out of the military now?”

  “For quite some time, yes.”

  I studied his face. “Have you killed a lot of people, Cerreto?”

  “Yes, I have, but I’m about ready to cut ties myself. It’s time for a family for me. I already have the guy, just waiting to see if we got the kid.”

  The words, so matter-of-factly spoken, floored me. “They—the agency—they don’t care about the gay thing?”

  “They don’t ask, as you know.”

  I swallowed hard. “I want it in writing that Efrem will be safe.”

  “Of course.”

  “Am I allowed to say goodbye?”

  “No,” he replied quickly, and I could hear the catch in his voice like maybe that was hard for him to say. “Once you say yes to me, Lahm is on the next plane to California.”

  “He’ll just come right back here; he’ll never stop looking for me.”

  “He won’t have a choice.”

  I understood. This was the military, the government, after all. When they wanted you gone, as well as all trace of you, they could make that happen.

  “Darius!” Efrem broke into my memories, and I was faced with his ragged gaze. He was caught somewhere between anger and sadness.

  “What do you want me to tell you?”

  “Everything!” he yelled. “One minute you were there, in my life, the next you were gone.”

  “How else did you see that playing out?” I asked gently.

  “I could have been discharged,” he rasped. “We both could have.”

  “And then what? What would that have served?”

  His eyes narrowed. “You made a deal.”

  It was so easy for me to lie. My career—my life—was based on being able to talk or shoot my way out of danger. But Efrem was different. The one lie I’d ever told him—my name—I had come clean on. Just looking at him made me want to start from when I’d last seen him and bring him up to speed on everything I’d ever done. My past was, at the least, disconcerting; at the most, horrifying. My biggest concern, though, was that our time was ticking down. I didn’t want to leave him. I didn’t want to go.

  “Darius!” he barked. “Tell me!”

  I coughed, shifting around in my seat. “What is it that you want to know about Eastman?”

  “Eastman,” he repeated, like the name was something in his mouth he wanted to spit out. “I want to know about you!”

  “But legally you’re holding me about Eastman, right?”

  “I’m holding you for whatever reason I deem fit.”

  “Are we being recorded?” I had to ask.

  “No, we’re not being recorded. Now answer the goddamn question!”

  “Legally you’re required to be recording this,” I reminded him.

  “Oh, am I?” he asked snidely.

  I’d been in my share of nonrecorded interviews that ended in torture, and since I was confident that wasn’t about to happen, a flicker of worry—for him—seeped into me.

  “You should turn on the recording,” I apprised him. “You don’t want to do anything to jeopardize your standing with—”

  “Tell me where you’ve been,” he demanded under his breath, from the way he was huffing, barely holding it together.

  “This is not the time or place for—”

  “Oh, I think it is,” he snarled, indicating the cuffs on my wrists with a tip of his head. “You’re not going anywhere until I get my answers.”

  But I was, and too soon at that. I wanted to talk to him just as much as he wanted me to, but I couldn’t, and that was the truth.

  “Tell me what happened that night,” he insisted, his voice cracking with the strain. “I need to know!”

  “It’s not—”

  “If you say it’s not important, I’ll shoot you right here.”

  I couldn’t help th
e grin; it came too fast. The very idea that Efrem Lahm would ever hurt me on purpose was laughable. Preposterous.

  “Don’t you dare laugh!”

  “Shoot me?” I repeated his words, squinting at him. “Really?”

  “I want answers.”

  I shook my head. The separation had been painful enough. I didn’t need to talk about what had really happened, where I’d gone to get ready for a new phase in my life.

  He took a breath. “You owe me an explanation.”

  “Not me,” I corrected. “I could tell you, but I’m not the one who separated us.”

  “Don’t you think I know that?” he said, his voice thready and sharp. I could hear the pain in it clear as day. “I just want to know why.”

  Some pieces I could tell because I didn’t work for the agency anymore. There would never be repercussions because no one could prove a thing. “I had a choice.”

  “To save me.”

  “There’s more to it than that.”

  “I’m sure there is, but why did you get a choice in the first place?”

  “You know why.”

  He shook his head. “I don’t.”

  “You do if you think about it a second.”

  “You weren’t—we weren’t on anybody’s radar.” I stared at him until he threw up his hands in defeat. “Fine, I knew they were watching you. I would have had to be blind to miss it.”

  “It wasn’t overt,” I granted, “but with my training, what they were having me do, it made sense. I just didn’t know the signs then, didn’t know what to look out for. That night, what happened, that was all they needed to get all the way interested in recruiting me.”

  He considered that, scowling, searching his memory, I was certain, piecing through the details of that night. “You mean how you did it, not what you did,” he said, not saying the actual words: how fast I’d killed five men.

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t—”

  “Yes, you do.”

  “You’re saying that the—”

  “They wanted me,” I said, stopping him from saying the agency or the company or coming right out and saying CIA. He’d been safe a long time; I didn’t need him jeopardizing anything this late in the game.

  “I know that,” he whispered. “How could I not?”

  He was a very smart man, keen judge of character, of happenings, of the why and the ins and outs. Of course he’d seen the agenda for what it was.

  “The base commander had us watched. Torian, my friend, who I trusted—” He choked on the words. “He told them when we’d be together, and so they caught us there, that night, on purpose, and after everything, they got to take you away.”

  “There was only one choice to be made, and I made it,” I confessed.

  “You gave up your freedom and our plans to keep me safe.”

  I lifted my head. “With how things happened, there was no happy ending there, no ‘everyone walks.’ It wasn’t going to go that way.”

  “Yes, but I could have gone with you.”

  “No, no, you had your whole life to—”

  “My life was you!”

  I couldn’t look at him, so I concentrated on the table instead, and the cuffs, realizing how easily I could get out of them if I wanted.

  “Darius!”

  My head snapped up, and my gaze hit his, crashed into all the gorgeous rich color. “They didn’t want you,” I explained hesitantly. “The deal on the table was to leave you alone, not take you as well.”

  “Which makes sense,” he admitted, biting his bottom lip before he went on. “I was never good at split-second decisions, not like you, and I knew what was happening with your training, I’m not stupid. The upper brass, they always wanted you. Everyone noticed, everyone saw.”

  They had, it was stupid to deny. I excelled in areas that kept me on their radar: close-quarters training, shooting, hunting, hiding, and most of all, last-minute tactical maneuvers where I left my team to complete a mission. The objective was the most important outcome, and I knew when to detach from my team, to send them on while I remained behind.

  “I knew your CO wanted you to step up to black ops, to take a different path from being a soldier to being an assassin.”

  “You make it sound so cool,” I said wistfully, wishing it had been so dramatic or heroic or anything but the chilling display of indifference that it had been. No one cared about the individual, only the objective, only the bigger picture. There was no concern for a singular cog in the machine. “But it doesn’t matter how I served, just that I did.”

  “Of course it matters,” he hissed, eyes narrowed, muscles in his jaw working. “One way, the way we planned, saw us out in four years and together and the other way… how things happened… that broke us apart.”

  I gestured at him. “But it turned out all right. You’ve done well.”

  He scoffed, almost a choke. “I was a mediocre soldier, and I’ve been a mediocre agent,” he conceded. “There was nothing ever remotely amazing about me.”

  “That’s categorically untrue,” I stated, daring him to argue with me. “You’re amazing.”

  His eyes filled fast, and he wiped at them roughly, taking a breath, trying to settle himself. “No, that’s you, always were perfect in every way.”

  “You’re deluded and—”

  “It was easy to see. You were so bright, like a beacon, and that’s why they saw you. No way to miss you.”

  I shook my head slowly, swallowing before I spoke, but still my voice came out crackly. “I would never have traded—”

  “Your life, your plans, your freedom—”

  “Shut up,” I ordered him. “It wasn’t like that.”

  “It was exactly that, and we both know it.” Efrem took a shuddering breath. “They wanted you, and because of me, because I trusted my friend even though you said not to, because of Davidson we—”

  “They pressured him,” I defended. Torian Black, his friend, was a guy who would have never thought twice about laying himself over a tripwire for Efrem. “I found that out later. It wasn’t his fault. You need to let that go.”

  “Oh?”

  “His wife was Iraqi, right? You remember that.”

  He jolted and was suddenly staring at me, mouth open, stunned.

  “He’s fine, so is she. They live in Paris, and they have three kids. But don’t think for a second that he didn’t have a dog in that fight too.”

  “I forgot about—I—”

  “He did what he had to, I did what I had to. Your part was only to live your life.”

  “So you think, what, I had it easy?”

  “That’s not what I’m saying. What I’m saying is that we all had to deal with the fallout from that night, and we all made choices based on what we could live with.”

  “Not all of us,” he retorted. “I had no choice. Because if I had, it certainly would not have been to lose my best friend and the love of my life.”

  I’d been stabbed many times over the course of my career, but that jab hurt more than any one of them.

  “And I don’t mean Torian when I say best friend. I mean you on both counts.”

  I knew that, I didn’t need him to tell me.

  “I have not missed one day without a thought of you in all this time.”

  Neither had I. “Not just you,” I murmured.

  We sat there, staring, neither moving.

  “I missed your eyes,” he mused, taking a breath. “I’ve never met anyone else with spring green eyes with gold in them.”

  I had so much to say, but our time was getting shorter, I was certain of it. “Efrem—”

  “Explain things to me like I haven’t seen you in sixteen years, ten months, nine hours, and three minutes.”

  But who was counting. “I’m not a contract killer,” I responded.

  “Oh yes you—”

  “I mean,” I offered, putting one cuffed hand on the top of the file—my file—he’d obviously been reading from and
moving it from one side of the table to where he now sat. “I was up until very recently, but I’m not now.”

  “What the hell does that mean?”

  I grimaced.

  “Tell me,” he demanded, balling his hands into fists so ostensibly I couldn’t see them shake, staring at me like he was trying to memorize my face.

  “Ef, I—”

  “I want to know everything that happened to you since I saw you last.”

  My chuckle was soft. “That would take days.”

  “We’ve got time for you to start.”

  “Hardly,” I replied, hearing the sadness in my voice. I wanted to stay there and sit with him for no earthly reason other than pure selfishness. I used to miss him so much that my bones ached with it, but that had finally dissipated a bit over time. Seeing him now was like a punch in the gut. But still, he couldn’t be a part of my life, and that revelation was painful. He was with Homeland, and I was on the other side. He could never be with me and retain his career or his life as he knew it. Being with me would change everything, and I wasn’t stupid. I knew the difference between reality and fairy tales. It wasn’t possible, so opening up to him was a waste of time.

  He tilted forward. “I don’t think you understand the precarious position you’re in. We have you and your partner on—”

  “He’s a friend.”

  “Pardon me?”

  “Trevan Bean,” I clarified. “He’s a friend, nothing more, and I was there to watch his back and make sure no one tried to kill him.”

  “And I care that the world would be free of one more gun-smuggling—”

  “He’s not moving guns,” I stated, almost letting it slip that Trevan had already dismantled that operation. But being reformed would still get him thrown into prison for the rest of his natural life. “He’s not doing anything you think he is, and when I walk out of here, he’s coming with me.”

  “Oh, baby, we’re the government.”

  I smiled, and he jerked like an electrical current zipped through him, realizing, I was certain, from the stricken look on his face, what he’d said.

  “Jesus.” His voice was gruff with emotion, and he had to put his hand on the table, seemingly for balance. “I… where did—”