CHAPTER 9
The boarding gate at Reagan National Airport was crowded when Grace arrived. She was late, delayed by the last minute arrangements to close her house and settle things at work. She wasn’t looking forward to the lengthy trip, which promised to be enervating.
The first leg, between Washington and Rome—via Logan in Boston—would take fifteen hours.
After landing in Rome, they had a three-hour layover, then an hour-long flight to the Adriatic seaport city of Ancona.
There, they would take a taxi to the cargo terminal where the multi-force United Nations humanitarian airlift operation was based, and use their UN Protection Force international press cards to board an hour-and-twenty-minute-long flight into Kav?ak.
If it had space for passengers.
The layover time in Ancona was unpredictable. It could be hours, or days, depending on the severity of the ground fighting in Kav?ak. Once, she’d read, after one of the flights had been shot down and the entire crew killed, the airlift had been cancelled for four months.
Grace scanned the waiting area, looking for Brenna.
There she was, standing apart from the rest of the travelers, leaning against a far wall, wearing a black turtleneck, wool cargo pants, and boots.
Two bruised travel bags sat on the floor at her feet with a black leather jacket draped over them.
She was surveying the lounge with what Grace could only describe as detached intensity.
A swift dart of lust pricked Grace as she walked toward her. Brenna Rease was an arresting woman, alluring the way a flame was to a moth.
Brenna’s eyes shifted and tracked her. She didn’t so much as nod.
“Hey,” Grace said, letting her bag slide off her shoulder onto the floor. Up close Brenna looked taut. “Sorry I’m late. It took longer than expected to get my house in order.” She smiled at her small play on words.
Brenna slid her an unamused look, followed by a full-body scan.
Grace was wearing jeans, a long-sleeved cotton shirt, and a tweed jacket.
It was an uneasy compromise. She hadn’t known what to wear, so she’d split the difference, opting for part practical, part presentable.
Just in case, she had warmer tops and hardier woolen slacks in her bag.
“How about you?” she continued, though Brenna hadn’t actually replied.
“Been waiting long?” She was aiming for cordiality.
If they were obligated to work together, at least they could be civil.
Brenna pinned her with her striking green eyes. “I don’t chitchat, Alcott. You want to stand there, fine. You want to sit down—go sit. But don’t bloody chat me up.” She unhooked the pair of dark glasses on her collar and slid them on, edict issued.
Her bluntness shook Grace. She debated whether to address it. It certainly wasn’t a tone she wanted to set for the trip. But there was an indefinable brittleness in the way Brenna held herself that made Grace think she should leave it alone.
The speaker crackled overhead and called their flight.
Grace shouldered her bag and reached for the closest of Brenna’s. “Can I help you with—”
“Don’t organize me, Alcott. I know how to get on a plane.”
Grace turned toward the growing line without another word. God help me, she thought. Three days—plus travel time—with this woman.
Although they were flying business class, Brenna boarded after last call.
Grace had taken the window seat, figuring that if she was saddled with a sullen traveling companion, the least she could get was the view.
She said nothing when Brenna arrived, but her eyes were drawn involuntarily away from the in-flight magazine to watch Brenna’s breasts float above her as she stuffed her jacket and her bags into the overhead compartment.
She swallowed the lump in her throat, quickly looking out the window at the ground crew.
Settling wordlessly into her seat, Brenna buckled the belt.
The jet lifted off. Soon, she was 30,000 feet up, heading into a war zone with a beautiful, cold-hearted stranger who promised to abandon her if she got in the way.
They arrived at the Leonardo Da Vinci Airport in Rome at one a.m. Brenna was bleary-eyed and exhausted from long hours of confinement and machine noise. Only eight more hours to go—assuming the connector to Ancona left Rome on time, and the C-130 Hercules cargo plane had space for passengers.
Though a free twenty-four hour shuttle service was available to transport passengers between international arrivals and the domestic departures terminal where they would later board the flight to Ancona, Brenna couldn’t bear the idea of sitting in a moving machine again.
“There’s a shuttle,” she told Alcott. “But I’m walking over.”
“God, yes,” Grace replied, mistaking the declaration as an invitation to accompany her.
She walked without speaking, stretching her cramped legs, glad of the solid ground beneath her feet.
The airport had a middle-of-the-night echoing silence that pleased her.
Reaching the domestic departure terminal.
She and Grace checked through security but didn’t go to the gate.
It was still too early. Wandering down the broad concourse, they passed Hermés, Bulgari, and Ferragamo boutiques.
The shops were closed, but even if they had been open, they would not have interested her.
Those boutiques seemed frivolous—sinful, even—in a world where people were starving.
Grace stopped, her eye caught by the contents of a jewelry-store window.
Brenna walked ahead a few yards, then waited. Grace was peering at something, a wistful look on her face. Intrigued, Brenna returned and tilted her head to look into the display imbedded in the wall. “What?” she asked.
Grace gave a small, dismissive shrug.
“No, really.”
She pressed her index finger against the glass, pointing at a pendant with two diamond-encrusted five-pointed flowers in the center, each trailing sparkly-yellow diamonds like a fireworks burst.
Handed over to the right people, Brenna thought, it could buy a whole family safe passage out of Kav?ak.
“Just… my partner would have admired it.”
After poking at the press corps grapevine, Brenna had learned about Grace’s mate—how she was killed on the Beltway, eight months pregnant at the time.
It hadn’t been possible to save the baby, either.
Brenna shifted her gaze from the jewels to Grace’s somber face.
This was sorrow, unexpectedly ambushing a surviving spouse.
She tipped her head in acknowledgement and walked away.
At the departure gate, Brenna took a seat across from Grace’s and openly studied her.
She liked the way Grace carried herself.
With backbone. Dignified. Present. She had the face of a woman with a clear conscience, of a person who did the decent thing no matter the discipline it required.
Her eyes were kind and had a fine tracery of lines at their corners.
How long had it been, she wondered, since Grace Alcott had truly laughed?
Her gaze moved down over her breasts and hips.
Grace was attractive, her damned contracts notwithstanding.
Years ago, Brenna would have blatantly suggested sex.
But it had been a long time since she’d intimately touched a woman.
Women were placid-looking waters with deep undercurrents that had to be navigated.
Sex with men, by contrast, was like rugby—muscular and competitive.
The objectives were clear: score the goals, have a beer or two afterwards, then go your way.
Until Ari, that’d been how she’d kept things: simple. Under control.
But Ari had snuck up on her, floated her into deep waters before she’d realized he was playing by different rules.
Ari was the first—the only—man who’d noticed that her heart was hidden.
He was the first man who’d actually made love to her and shown her what it meant to be cherished instead of used.
After Ari, much as she sometimes yearned for sexual release, she couldn’t bring herself to intimacy.
The act had become inextricably entwined with her deepest emotions.
And those were strictly locked down.
Enough. She gave herself a mental shake. She had work to do. She didn’t need these feelings. She cleared her throat. “What do you want, Alcott?” Her question came out intimately, like a private thought inadvertently expressed.
“Excuse me?”
Brenna brisked-up her voice. “Why are you here in this place, at this time? What makes a corporate suit decide to leave the safety of nature shows and mingle with the grunts? If you were the field type, you would have done it right out of J-School, not waited ’til now.
So what makes this story so compelling? What are you after?”
The barrage bushwhacked Grace. Brenna had accelerated from mute observation to acute exploration in a thousandth of a second.
Do you always do this? she wondered. Sit there, detached-looking, while a million questions race through your head?
In the instant the question crossed her mind, she understood the relationship between Brenna’s work and her personality.
This was what she did—stand apart, watch intently, not affect the outcome of the unfolding events until she decided the moment was right.
Then she tore into it with her lens, examined the details, established the relationship between the constituent parts.
And she did it frankly, honestly, unconstrained by tact or social niceties.
No wonder this woman didn’t chat. Chatting was wasted frames.
This was motor drive, each frame in focus, each shot aimed at a target.
And despite the apparent extroversion, she revealed nothing about herself beyond what could be inferred by her choice of subject.
“I want to know what you want,” Brenna continued.
“Not deliverables. Concept. Ideas. Story. Goals. Is this an exploration of something you don’t understand? Or an expression of something you do? Was there an image or an event that triggered this idea for you? What other materials have you got? Stock footage? Interviews? Research?
Who do you want to reach with this, and how?”
Brenna was a pit bull and she’d just clamped her jaws on Grace.
“I want to know what brings you here,” Brenna continued. “This isn’t you.”
“Oh?” Grace straightened, aiming for calm she didn’t feel. Drag the wing. It was none of Brenna’s business that Grace was doing this for Aya. “What do you think is me?”
Brenna sat back and dropped her palms on her thighs. “You’re a desk jockey, Alcott. An executive, not a newswoman. Not one of your awards has been for news, has it? Current issues, sure—but urbane, intellectual. Nothing so rude or gritty as hard news.”
“First I’m a suit. Now I’m a desk jockey?” she said. “Do you always call people names?”
She lifted an eyebrow. “Nothing in my contract says I can’t.”
Grace chuckled, dropped her forehead into the palm of her hand, and shook her head. Brenna Rease was still pissed off.
“You aren’t answering.”
Grace lifted her head again. “Sam Chisolm thinks we could turn in a prize-winner on this.”
Brenna flinched at the mention of a prize. “Well, now I know Chisolm’s motive,” she said. “What about yours? And stop prevaricating. You can’t hide shit behind that honest face of yours.”
It was true. Prizes didn’t mean much to Grace any more. And, no, she’d never had the stomach for hard news like Aya had. She didn’t have it in her to call the bereaved and ask how they were feeling, never had the effrontery to pry into people’s personal affairs as Brenna was doing now.
Brenna waited.
At last, Grace relented. Brenna was finally talking to her. “My partner was working on this project before she died.”
Brenna’s lips puckered thoughtfully. “Everyone dies in the middle of something,” she said. “Why not leave it be?”
Not wanting to answer that personal question, Grace began responding to the earlier ones Brenna had posed about the work. To Grace’s surprise, Brenna didn’t push her on the issue of Aya.
While the gray dawn grudgingly bleached the horizon and the waiting area slowly came to life around them, Brenna poked at the topic from every possible angle—philosophical, moral, intellectual, practical—trying to gauge Grace’s relationship to it.
Once Brenna slowed, she was a consummate interviewer, establishing basic premises, making no assumptions, covering the topic point by point.
Grace saw her lose herself in thought for moments at a time, then come back with a whole new generation of questions that took the previous replies to their next level of complexity.
Even without notes in which to moor their conversation, she pulled Grace’s scattered replies back to related core concepts, relentlessly fashioning order from the chaos of her tired brain.
Brenna asked her how she pictured things, what visual images came to her mind when she thought about the story.
Photography wasn’t just the way she made a living, Grace realized.
Brenna interpreted the world visually. She thought about how theories, ideas, philosophies could be conveyed visually in the context of real events.
Images crossed the boundaries of culture and age and education.
They were a universal language, and she spoke it fluently.
“I’m sorry.” Grace removed her glasses and rubbed her eyes. “What was that last question, again?”
“Never mind,” Brenna said. “You’re tired. Let’s stop.”
“I am,” she agreed. “But you understand now, don’t you?”
“Oh, I understand, all right.” Brenna strolled to the plate glass window and gazed out for a long time.
“You see the world in black and white, good or bad, and have never encountered the evil in yourself. You believe violence lives in the hearts of other people—lesser souls, unlike yourself. You want to look at this analytically, from an antiseptic distance that won’t offend viewer sensibilities.”
Grace opened her mouth, then soundlessly closed it again, confused by the undercurrent in Brenna’s voice.
“I know what you want,” Brenna said, turning to fully face her. “But I’ll be damned if that’s what I’ll give you.”