Chapter 36
Thirty-Six
Tristan
The rest of the day passes in a bustle and blur of prep.
The cards are put away, the gossip stops, and we watch digital walkthroughs of the dentist’s office, discuss contingency plans, rehearse over and over again the infiltration and the sweep.
At some point, Mark gets a phone call from Lox and paces in the cobbled courtyard for over an hour while they talk.
Isolde leaves too, not because she gets a call but for her own unknowable reasons, and I find her eventually on the terraced roof of the house, staring out over the lake.
It’s still winter, but the sun makes the day gentle and kind, and our long sleeves are enough to keep us warm.
I pull her back against my chest and wrap my arms around her anyway. Just because I want to.
“Mark still on the phone?” she asks. A breeze waves the sedate, eternal boughs of the pines between the sleeping oaks and beeches. The air is so clean up here, so new and fresh. It’s not Morois, but after the damp air of the church in Albany and the fetid Roman warehouse, this smells like heaven.
“Yes,” I say. “He’s agitated by whatever it is. You should see the state of his hair right now.”
She puffs a small laugh, which makes me swell a little with pride. She doesn’t give those easily.
“Do the Armorica people know you’re safe?”
“They do.”
“What—what happens after this?” she asks. She asks it quietly, like she doesn’t want to, like she’s dreading the answer, like she resents her own weakness. “Will you still work at Armorica?”
“If your safety no longer depends on my distance, then I will be at your feet with my heart held aloft in my hands for you,” I whisper into her ear. I feel her draw in a shivering breath, and I kiss her neck. “I love you, Isolde. I would only ever stay away to keep you safe.”
She nods and turns into me. “I promise I won’t always be this jealous of Isabella,” she mumbles into my chest.
“I like it,” I admit. “It makes me feel wanted.” Matches the sickness inside myself, the one that loves too quickly, that loves too much. It’s not healthy for us to feel and crave jealousy and possession like this, and yet…
It’s hard to sleep that night, and something’s shifted inside Mark since the countdown began.
I don’t entirely know what it is—when we fuck, he is as wicked and enticing as ever, luring us into fresh depravity as we both use Isolde’s cunt at the same time, frotting slickly against each other while she shivers and pants between us—but there is a bruising yearning in his touch, something that feels like resignation, that feels…
grim almost. Mark stares at both of us as he comes, eyes flicking between Isolde and me, and even his final grunt of pleasure has a bleak, bitten-off edge to it.
I fall asleep next to him with Isolde in my arms and a knot growing just under my rib cage, a knot that’s there in my dreams and there the moment I wake with a stretch of cold bedding at my back.
He’s already up.
It’s already time to go.
I can see why Mark goes to such trouble to collect favors as our paramilitary friends stage themselves around the dentist’s office and, with a quiet signal via our earpieces, begin to work their way into the building with oblique grace.
They use the building next door to access the roof and the terraced street below to access the lowest level.
They come in through the front door, Mark, Isolde, and myself with them.
Mortimer has security, as we knew he would, a layer of hired muscle and a handful of saints, but it’s not nearly enough for a team of the agency’s best plus the three of us.
Within fifteen minutes, we have the building secured, the dentist, hygienist, and office manager escorted away.
Bullet casings litter the floor, bodies are everywhere, and Isolde is flicking blood impatiently off the edge of her knife.
Palmer and Ferguson share a few quiet words with Mark, and then we take the stairs to the dentist’s actual office, where Mortimer Cashel has been brought.
He’s sitting on a chair near a window overlooking the lake, blood spattering his white shirt and face.
He’s not wearing ecclesiastical clothing today, perhaps trying to blend in, but I notice he’s still wearing the piscatory ring on his pinkie finger.
His jaw does look a little swollen, and there’s a red splotch of fever at the corner near his ear.
He’d waited too long to take care of that infected tooth, it would seem.
“Thirty minutes,” Palmer reminds us. The prearranged amount of time we have with Mortimer before we need to clear the scene. Murdering a pope and making it look like an accident is complicated business, even for a team like this, and they’ll need to get started as quickly as possible.
Mark thanks him, and Palmer shuts the door. It’s only the three of us and Mortimer now, and while the office is spacious, furnished with a slender minimalist desk and only two narrow armchairs, it abruptly feels like there’s no room at all in here.
Mortimer looks serene. Isolde is pale, entirely shuttered.
And Mark…looks like Mark. Casual, predatory, his proprietary fusion of cold disdain and magnetic charm dripping from his handsome features.
“At last, I get to meet Brittany Hill,” Mark greets, crossing his arms and leaning against the glass of the window. He has the sleeves of his black tactical shirt pushed up, and I can see the swollen red wound along his tattooed forearm.
Mortimer folds his hands in his lap, a busy gentleman being mildly inconvenienced. “I suppose I should ask how that name came across your desk.”
Mark smiles. “ My desk . I like that. In this case, my desk is a drafty spot in Manhattan where I occasionally interview new friends. You remember Filip Drobny, obviously, and how he had Isolde followed? I caught up with one of those followers the day of Isolde’s dress fitting, and we had a nice conversation.
He shared the name Brittany Hill with me.
I did tell you my theory, about trouble in paradise? ”
Mortimer nods benignly, gesturing for Mark to continue, which he does with good cheer.
“At first, I thought Brittany was the name of a mistress or a secret child. It didn’t fit with anything I knew about you, but then maybe you were more ordinary than I’d grown to believe, with an ordinary man’s flaws.
But then I learned that you had a far more ordinary flaw than even a broken vow or two—bad teeth.
Worse than bad teeth: bad luck. Bad luck that a tooth should give you trouble right before the conclave.
Bad luck that a dentist’s chair was destined to be one of the few times you’d be truly powerless—and worse luck still that if you used the Vatican’s dentist, everyone from Rome to Reno would know when you’d be vulnerable to attack. ”
Isolde’s uncle looks at his hands, sighs. “I hate admitting you were right, but perhaps I should have taken men like Drobny more seriously. Clearly, their discontentments had consequences. Trouble in paradise, as you say.”
Mark smiles at him. It’s not a nice smile.
“It’s funny, Cashel, all these years I’ve been trying to find a way to kill you—wooing, seducing, hacking, spying—and all it took was going back to my roots and hitting someone tied to a chair.
I did scuff the bottom of my favorite shoes doing it though,” he finishes and then adds, like it’s a crucial detail: “They were Ferragamo.”
“So you have found me, and now you plan to kill me,” states Mortimer.
“And you’ve brought my niece with you and your little shared pet.
Who shouldn’t even be here, really. He should be transitioning to civilian life and maybe meeting some nice elementary school teacher and settling down to dabble in raising chickens and growing tomatoes.
And yet you’ve made sure he can never escape this small accident, this one understandable trespass, of killing your husband. ”
I’m irritated at being talked about like a pet—and irritated at my irritation, because I know that’s the point, that Mortimer is trying to fuck with our heads—so it takes me a minute to process his mistake.
“I guess you don’t know everything,” I say with some scorn.
I’ve come to stand in front of the long, low desk so I can see Mortimer’s face better; Isolde has done the same thing but in front of the window near Mark.
The sunlight makes their hair glow, haloes of violent angels.
“Mark’s husband died in Ko?ice. I’ve never been to Ko?ice. ”
Mortimer laughs, a real laugh, his eyebrows lifting and a dimple digging itself into his cheek. “Oh, you don’t know at all! How unexpected.”
My irritation has returned. “I saw the newspaper article about his death. Eliot died in Ko?ice. In Slovakia. Tell him, sir.”
Mark is staring at Mortimer, his face hard.
“Sir, tell him. Tell him he’s wrong.”
He doesn’t look at me when he says, almost gently, “I cannot.”
I can’t trust my own memories, my own mind. I saw the clipping, I heard Mark talk about Eliot’s death, I know I did. But the look on Mark’s face…
“The CIA does that,” says Mortimer in the wise and benevolent tones of a teacher sharing an important lesson with a favorite student.
He’s still smiling. “You believed what they wanted you—and the entire world—to believe. You understand, surely: it’s extremely awkward when an American soldier shoots a fellow American, especially when said fellow American is meeting with a known arms dealer at the time. ”
This is a lie, a blatant fiction. I would know if I killed a CIA officer, much less one who was married to the man I now love.
But Mark isn’t disagreeing with Mortimer. He isn’t scoffing or smiling or treating it like some kind of verbal ploy. He’s merely watching Mortimer like a man watching an opponent slide a piece across a chessboard.
Fear trickles down my spine.