by P A Duncan
“She doesn’t love me.” Terrell looked from Lubova to Bukharin. “If I’m going to pay for this with my life, you do it. Not the Communist pig who works for you.”
Alexei pushed himself to his feet. He had a look about him, one Terrell had first seen in ‘Nam, the look men had when they’d seen death, been too close it, and come back from it. Lubova moved to Alexei’s side, not to protect him but to catch him if he passed out.
“I didn’t kill John Carroll because Mai wouldn’t have forgiven me,” Alexei said. “So, you get to live. Don’t ever contact Mai again. Don’t come when she calls. Don’t call her. If you do, I will kill you.”
“Do you think you could have stopped her if you’d known?”
“No, but I would have risked her anger and done it myself.”
“Yeah, I get it. I should have done it. Is she going to be all right?”
“That’s not your concern. Don’t make me say it again.” Bukharin limped to the door and let himself out.
Lubova tossed Terrell’s guns and knife on the sofa. “I hope you disobey him, and I get to kill you, piece of shit,” Olga said, smiling.
“Does he know you helped?”
Olga stopped smiling, and for a moment, Terrell thought he was dead here and now.
“Fuck you,” she said and followed Alexei.
“You wish,” Terrell muttered to her back.
He looked around his condo, more an apartment and never a home. Time for a change of scenery.
65
In the Context of the Mission
Bethesda Naval Medical Center
Bethesda, Maryland
Alexei opened the door to Mai’s quarters at Bethesda. More like a dormitory room than a hospital room, except the window glass was wire-reinforced. He was happy the walls weren’t padded.
Mai sat at a desk, reading. She looked at him when he entered. No emotion other than curiosity. He sat in a chair beside the desk.
“You’re not supposed to be here,” she said, her voice soft and more normal than he expected.
“Not too many places in this organization are beyond my clearance level,” he replied. He wanted to touch her but stopped himself.
“Is Natalia all right?” she asked.
He was happy she’d thought of Natalia first.
“She’s confused, and the diagnosis of ‘a dissociative event whose causal factors reside in a previous diagnosis of post-traumatic stress’ is a bit much for her to handle. Exhaustion is what I told her. I suppose where our work is concerned, the explanations are running thin.”
“She’s old enough for a carefully worded explanation.”
Mai looked away from him and back, her eyes showing a hint of fear. “I don’t want her to know why I’m here.”
No, he thought, she doesn’t need to know the woman she loves like a mother is a cold-blooded killer. Or that he was, too.
“Are you eating properly, getting enough sleep?” Mai asked.
He’d mimed her recent behavior: sleeping too little, drinking too much, playing glum and depressing music on his piano, and growing angrier. The week he’d been unable to see her, at the psychiatrist’s recommendation, seemed like a year. He said, “Eating when I remember to. Sleeping, not well. Sound familiar?”
She looked away again, but when she looked back, she smiled. “I’m glad to see you.”
“Save that for after you hear what I have to say.”
“I know you’re angry.”
“You can’t know how angry, disappointed, disillusioned I am.”
“No more than I am with myself.”
That answer was too pat. “Your killing Fitzgerald isn’t why I’m angry. You let yourself become John Carroll.”
She gave a slight head-shake, and he wondered what it was she couldn’t accept. “I tried to pull him up,” she said, “but I let him drag me down. That’s never happened to me before.”
“Was that Fitzgerald’s fault?”
“Give me credit for what I’m undergoing here. I made a rash and stupid decision. I crossed a line even the greenest operative knows not to. I related too much with my subject and lost objectivity. Instead of turning him or stopping him when I had the chance, I used him to bait you. Because I did that…” Her voice broke, but she recovered, too quickly. “Nearly two hundred people died.”
Anger blinded him. She was saying things she thought he wanted to hear. She looked at his hands on the desktop. He hadn’t realized he’d drawn them into fists.
“Are you the reason I can’t reach Snake?” she asked.
He leaned closer so she couldn’t miss his anger. “I’m denied contact with you for a fucking week, but you tried to talk to him?”
“Not too many things are beyond my clearance level either. I wanted to let him know you might be on a tear.”
“Mai, confronting him over his covering up a murder isn’t being ‘on a tear.’”
“Then, this is about my going to him for help and not you?”
Much like him, she’d had too many sessions with shrinks; her insight was well-honed.
“You would have talked me out of it,” she added.
“Of course.”
“I turned to someone who wouldn’t question me.”
“That I would talk you out of killing a man I’d have killed for you should tell you something.”
Her eyes narrowed. “This is about my keeping you out of it.”
“No, Mai, it isn’t about me. It’s about what this mission did to us. You let me think I’d rebuilt your trust, but you went to Terrell. You give me logic and reason about why. I want emotion.”
“Terrell is my friend who never judges. I said I didn’t want to analyze this. Yes, I know had I analyzed it, I wouldn’t have done it.”
“He’s not your friend. He’s the man who wants to fuck you. Given that, he should have stopped you or told me. As usual, when it comes to you, he was thinking with his dick.”
“Don’t tell me you’ve killed him.”
“I’m not a hypocrite, Mai. He’s alive, but I told him—and now I’m telling you—he’s off limits from now on.”
“Alexei, he’s my friend.”
“Choose. Him or me.”
Her eyes still slitted at him, she leaned back in her chair. “That’s an easy choice. Alexei, I couldn’t ask you for this. Once I made up my mind, I didn’t want you involved.”
“How could you do this to Fitzgerald and not to John Carroll?”
“By the way, Snake did ask that, and you know why.”
“I don’t.”
Her fist thumped the desk. “Because I’d already killed someone I cared about. I couldn’t do it again.”
The fucking IRA’s Declan Monaghan, someone he thought they’d put out of mind long ago.
“Alexei, Fitzgerald was never going to be held accountable. What he did to our home, what he almost did to you, was unforgivable. He could’ve taken you and Natalia from me.”
“John Carroll almost did.”
“The difference in motive is marked.”
“All these years, Mai, you had that principle that defined you. At first, I thought it naive and unrealistic, but you proved yourself. Not killing except in self-defense set you above the rest of us reprobates. That anchored me, in my work, in our relationship. Now, I’m adrift.”
“It was something as intangible as a principle?”
“Yes.”
“That sort of talk will not help get my head back together.”
“I’m speaking of the partnership. What you’ve done has added a new factor to consider.”
Her expression hardened again. “I’m certain a senior operative of your experience will find some way to exploit it.”
“Mai…”
“I don’t want to do this again. The toll is too high.” This time her hands reached for his and pulled back. “Alexei, I need you. Do you understand what it takes for me to admit that?”
Fucking at last, he thought. Almost too late.
> “Yes,” he said.
Without hesitation, her hands closed around his, their first physical contact since that morning they’d made love.
“Alexei, I can’t explain what I did, other than it was something inside me that had to be sated. Someone had to pay, and I set aside the key principle of my life. Yes, like John Carroll, but I couldn’t see that either.” Her fingers tightened on his hands. “I shouldn’t have done it, but I can’t change that. I’ll take what punishment Nelson prescribes.”
“After what happened at our house, Nelson issued an extreme prejudice sanction on Fitzgerald. Officially, it’s suicide, but the memo removes you from culpability.”
“How so?”
“Nelson distributed it outside the U.S., offering a significant bonus. Any operative who saw it could have done it.”
“Why?”
“What do you want, Mai? The FBI to arrest you?”
“God, no. Why is he covering this up?”
“As stated in the sanction, Fitzgerald endangered an operative and threatened exposure of The Directorate. Further, The Directorate cannot afford to lose the services of a skilled and experienced operative, who had a temporary lapse in judgement because of re-aggravated PTSD. But the real reason is the one you’ve always hated. He protected you.”
The anger-borne adrenaline had left his system, rendering him weary. He wanted to lie on the small bed in the room and sleep.
“Fitzgerald got what he deserved,” Alexei said. “He was a duly sworn officer of the law who abused his authority. People died because of it.”
“Ah, that motivation is nobler than mine.”
“I would have done this. All you had to do was ask.”
She shook her head, releasing his hands. “That sounds like some perverse declaration of love.”
“I’d die for you, Mai. You know that. You also know I’d kill for you, but that’s not the point. I never wanted the darkness of this business to change you, but it did because I let you down. I drove a personal wedge between us at a critical point in the mission.”
“Alexei, don’t transfer the blame from me.”
For the first time since he’d entered the room, she sounded sincere. Using the table for leverage, he stood, and she rose, too, leaning against him.
“Fitzgerald will not reach from the grave and push us apart,” Alexei said. “The mission is over, Mai. I don’t want to hear his name or John Carroll’s again except for the after-action debrief.”
“No argument from me.”
He looked into her eyes and saw the possibility she’d come through this whole.
“Alexei, I held what happened in Patriot City over you too long,” she said. “I played the wronged woman like some chit in a romance novel. That morning in the motel in Arizona when you said I should have fucked Carroll to keep him there—”
“No, Mai. Don’t.”
“I snapped back I left that up to you, but I was the hypocrite. That night, I’d decided in the context of the mission I would—”
“I don’t want to hear this.”
“It would have had nothing to do with you and me.”
“I said I don’t want to hear this.”
She smiled at him. “Don’t worry. Before I could act on the courage I’d screwed up, no pun intended, Prophet entered the picture.”
“I have Prophet to thank for you not sleeping with another man?”
“Ironic, yes?”
He embraced and kissed her. He would have let it take them to the bed, but she pulled back.
“You better go home before the doctor finds out we’re breaking her rules,” Mai said. “If you stay, I won’t be responsible for my actions.”
“Be irresponsible.”
“A few more days, I’ll be home, and we’ll make up for lost time.”
At the door, he said goodbye with a kiss on her cheek.
“Alexei?”
In the doorway, he turned back to her, alarmed when he saw vulnerability. “Yes?”
He thought she might cry, and he wanted to tell her to do so, that she didn’t always have to be so strong.
“I love you,” she said. “That’s my anchor.”
And they’d gone through hell for her to admit it.
66
Honors
Bethesda Naval Medical Center
You want me to do what?”
Maybe I’m crazy after all, Mai thought, because she couldn’t have said what I think she said.
“Apologize to your victim,” said the psychiatrist. “I think you heard me the first time.”
“Short of a séance, how do I do that?”
“Go to his grave. Have a chat. Here’s the plot number in Arlington.” The shrink handed Mai a slip of paper.
“What possible good would this do?”
“It’s called closure, and you don’t get my endorsement to return to field work until you do it.”
“I believe that’s blackmail.”
The psychiatrist smiled, a truly unnerving expression, and said, “I thought you called it tradecraft.”
“One day, I’ll explain why spies don’t like having our tools used against us.”
Arlington National Cemetery
Fort Myer, Virginia
Mai parked but let the Suburban idle so she could soak up the air conditioning. Summer was not yet ten days old, but triple-digit temperatures had settled in. Ahead of her, endless rows of white markers spread over the hills.
Stronger than her disapproval of the psychiatrist’s order was Mai’s desire to work again. That and arguing with psychiatrists accomplished nothing. So, she was here.
Hollis Fitzgerald’s grave wasn’t her first stop. Like all the graves, for the upcoming July Fourth weekend Evan Cutter’s grave bore a small American flag, exactly one boot-length from the headstone. Most of the nearby headstones had flower arrangements, too, but the grave of the wannabe mercenary who’d put Alexei onto Patriot City was bare but for the flag.
The psychiatrist would have wondered why Mai could come here when she’d argued about visiting Fitzgerald’s grave. Simple. Mai had promised Cutter safety. He’d died in her care. She owed the failed soldier the apology, which she gave.
When she found Fitzgerald’s plot, Mai studied the headstone. Hollis O’Meara Fitzgerald. She’d thought the Irish surname a fluke, but he was another in a long line of Irish cops, good and bad.
Captain, U.S. Army, Vietnam.
Against the headstone rested a small flower arrangement, a circle of red, white, and blue carnations. The attached ribbon read, “For Daddy.” Mai looked away. Someday, she’d account for her actions to Fitzgerald’s child.
Mai looked around to find few visitors in this section, but she adopted a reverent posture, head lowered, hands clasped.
“Hollis, here we are again,” she murmured. “This was my shrink’s idea. She made apologizing to you a condition of my reinstatement. I’m not sorry you’re dead, but I am sorry I did it. The shrink says to let go my anger—they always say that, don’t they? This is me, letting go of anger. You anal prick, you made me violate the driving principle of my life for a millisecond of satisfaction seeing your brains splattered about. I should have killed you before Killeen. Without Killeen, we’d have had no Kansas City.”
Despite what psychiatrists insisted upon, sometimes you shouldn’t let go of anger; you needed it accessible.
“Alexei once asked who was more guilty: the person who lit the fuse or the person who delivered the bomb. Hollis, your need for revenge guided the hands that lit the fuse and drove the truck, but your death isn’t worth my personal self-destruction. I have closure.”
Again, she looked at the flowers.
“I will, however, find a way to make restitution to your daughter. She didn’t pick her father, after all. Sleep well in hell, Hollis. I don’t believe in it, so you won’t see me there.”
The Irish in her wanted to spit on the grave. Instead, she strolled back down the pathway and left it all beh
ind her.
Someone leaned against the Suburban, and she recognized the familiar pose: casual but poised for action. As her temporary madness flaked away, she’d also lost the last of her ambivalence.
When she reached Alexei, he gave her that reticent, Russian smile.
“When I left you this morning, you still had a beard,” Mai said.
He rubbed his shaven face. “A beard and summer temperatures are not compatible,” Alexei replied.
“What are you doing here?” she asked.
“I met with Nelson this morning. He mentioned what the shrink wanted you to do.”
“You’re checking up on me?”
“No. I thought it was an idiotic suggestion. How did it go?”
“It was…cathartic.”
“And you did what she said?”
“More or less.”
The smile again. “Less rather than more, I suspect.”
“But I was here. She’ll be satisfied.”
“Do me a favor,” Alexei said, eying people arriving with floral tributes. “When I die, I don’t want cheap, plastic flower arrangements on my grave.”
In the overpowering heat, she shivered.
“Only fresh-cut ones from the most expensive hot houses. I’ll hire someone whose full-time job will be to refresh the bouquets daily.”
“Save your money. I’m not planning on dying. We have a meeting we shouldn’t be late for.”
Mai unlocked the Suburban with the key fob. “Don’t worry. If I smile at President Randolph, he’ll forgive our tardiness.” She moved to go to the driver’s side, and he stopped her with a hand on her arm.
“Are you all right?” he asked.
“Yes. I am.”
“I love you.”
“I love you, too.” She backed away. “However, at some point, we’re having a deeper discussion about that vasectomy.”
67
Ideology and Weapons
White House Situation Room
Washington, D.C.
