The Soldier's Snitch

Chapter 12

CALLEN

I DIDN’T GO in today. I haven’t gone in all week.

There’s a version of me that still craves the structure of a real job.

Hard work and discipline have always gotten me to where I wanted to go.

I was the man who showed up early and left late, and treated headquarters like a sanctuary, and his orders as if they were the ten commandments themselves. But now how do I do that?

How do I measure my success? By how many bodies are in the ground?

How many plots we’ve foiled? After I left my desk job at the FBI and committed to PALADIN, Vesper put an obscene amount of money in my bank account.

More than I could ever spend. More than I’d make in a lifetime as a SEAL or desk rider with the feds. In a way, I lost my purpose.

It’s not like anyone’s sending me into the field. I do logistics. Logistics can wait a day. Logistics can wait forever, apparently, because it’s Thursday and I haven’t been to the PALADIN compound since last Friday, and nobody, I mean nobody has pressured me to come back.

Eden sent a text on Tuesday and asked if I’d eaten.

I replied with a thumbs-up. She didn’t respond, which means, knowing her intuition and how it’s probably flaring out of control, Vesper told everyone to leave me alone.

Everybody is probably distracted by Sylvie—and yeah, she’s distracting.

Stunningly, gorgeously, dangerously distracting.

I’m angry. But I can’t quite pinpoint at what.

That’s the thing I keep circling. I don’t run hot.

I was trained to keep my head level, even with bullets flying over my shoulder.

Especially then. I was raised to accept discipline, verbal berating, physical torture like a statue, with my hands neatly folded.

But the last few weeks have stacked up on me like bricks, and tonight I can feel every one of them.

Melissa, and the truth she shouldn’t have told me.

The years she gave me out of pity. My insignificance at PALADIN.

The loneliness. The intrigue of a stranger who betrayed me before I even knew her real name.

And under all of it, always, the low constant gnaw I’ve carried for a decade: five men in the ground on the other side of the world, restless, waiting, their tombstones cloaked in the wrong story.

It never gets quieter. Some nights I can almost ignore it. Tonight, it’s a roar.

I can’t take it, so I do what I never allow myself to do, and I get out the old laptop.

It’s a hunk of junk. Ten years old, slow as cold syrup, the letters worn off half the keys, and I keep it for exactly one reason.

There’s a folder on it. A photo album I’ve never moved to the cloud because putting it anywhere else feels like letting it free, and I’m not ready to free the hurt, and I don’t think I ever will be.

I open it and I scroll.

Daisy and Lola, gap-toothed, buried up to their necks in sand at some beach in a summer I can’t quite place.

Taylor behind them, sunburned, flipping off the camera with a beer in his other hand.

Another shot—Ferro’s little boy, maybe five in this picture, riding my shoulders at a Fourth of July cookout, both of us squinting into the light.

I remember his weight. I remember how he grabbed my ears to steer.

I’m scrolling so fast through the memories, pictures begin to look like video montages.

Until one photo stops me in my tracks. Me and Melissa, years and years ago, back when it felt so good to love her—the two of us holding sparklers, her laughing at something just off-frame, both of us so young, it’s obscene.

It’s the only picture I kept of us. I don’t know why.

My thumb hovers over the delete button, but I can’t do it.

Not because I want to stare at my ex-wife for an eternity, it’s simply because I’ve never seen the sky that pink before. I keep Melissa in the forefront, just so I keep the background and pretend like once upon a time, I had a full life.

I sit there in the dark with the screen glowing on my face, scrolling through a life that’s mostly ghosts now, and I let myself feel it.

All of it. It isn’t anger, only the grief I usually keep in a locked box.

Eden was right, that day in my office—you have to go all the way through it, not around. So, I go through it.

It hurts like it’s supposed to.

And that’s when I notice the corner of the screen. A notification pops through as my dinosaur of a laptop automatically connects to the internet. My old email account. I’m still logged in apparently. I sink like quicksand into the curiosity.

There’s an email that isn’t spam. Bold. Unread.

One message. Received about six weeks ago.

My heart stops. It can’t be.

Belai.

Silence is the deal. Silence is what keeps them breathing.

I set them up as refugees, new names, new country, a whole invented past—Belai, Nuria, and their son, Sameen, were no more.

That was the price of that safety. They had to vanish completely.

No contact. Not ever. They are the sole remaining witnesses to a hostile takeover disguised as mediation.

I have channels if they need something. I have resources buried three layers deep. But this account, direct to me, is the one line that must never light up, because a line that lights up is a line that can be traced.

I know I shouldn’t open it.

Every instinct I have, every hour of training, every rule I wrote myself in blood says: don’t. Leave it. Whatever it is, opening it changes nothing except the risk. The smart move, the only move, is to delete the account and walk away and be grateful nothing’s come of it in a month and a half.

But smart is overrated. I give in to the recklessness.

I open it because I’m weak tonight. Because I’m lonely in a way I don’t have words for.

Because about a week ago, I lost the one new person who made me feel a flicker of life, and now I’m sitting in the dark with a laptop full of dead men, and a message from Belai.

Opening this email is the closest thing to a hand reaching back into the past, into that full life I thought I once had.

It loads slow on the old machine. And then it’s there.

Brother,

It has been too long. I know I am not to write to you. I know, and I am sorry, and I ask your forgiveness for the danger of these words. But I could not keep this from you…

I am almost finished with my book.

I stop breathing.

You remember I always said I would write it. The whole history of Teret—our people, our lineage, the old songs, the way the light fell on the hills before all of it was taken. It is not an angry book, Mr. Jeff. I want you to know that.

I was angry for many years, but anger is a poor thing to create from. This is a reflection. A record. A piece of a people, preserved, so that when the last of us is gone the world cannot pretend we were never here.

But there is a piece missing. I sat down to write the ending and I found that I did not know it: the story of the lone sailor, the one the sea gave back. I did not want to invent it. I did not want your part to be fiction when everything else is true.

I read it twice. Three times. My eyes are going in and out of focus.

I will publish under another name, for safety.

But it tells our story—how we found you half dead in the rocks, how we hid you, how you, a man they told us was the enemy, turned out to be the bravest and most noble of them all.

We were both fed lies about each other, were we not?

Two sheep told the other was a wolf. I am glad that by the end I saw you for what you truly are. A hero. A friend.

I think of you often, brother. Sameen asks after you still. What became of Mr. Jeff? He is nineteen now. Taller than me, if you can believe it. He is at university, under the name Henry, studying to be an engineer. I have attached photographs.

I have also attached the manuscript as it stands, in case you wish to read what I have made of us. If you’d be kind enough to help me finish it…

Tell me, are you happy? I would like to write that you got your happy ending. That the sea gave you back to a good life.

May we see you, someday, or is it still too dangerous?

To you, and to Vesper: thank you. Thank you for giving my son a future when we should have had none. We would have died in that place if the world had not sent us you. An angel with a broken wing and a golden heart.

Please tell me your story ends with a full belly, a full heart, and full of good company.

Your brother always,

Belai

I sit with it for a long time. The apartment is silent around me. The fan of the old laptop kicks on, its tired hum, near defeaning in the dark. I open the attached photos with a shaking hand. I was wrong to open this email. It’s even riskier to click on the attachments.

But…

Sameen. God. The last time I saw this boy, he was small enough to carry, all huge dark eyes and knees, clinging to his father’s leg in the back of a truck as I sent them into the dark toward a new life.

And here he is now—nineteen, tall, grinning at a camera in front of some school building, a backpack over one shoulder, healthy and whole and alive, with a future stretched out in front of him that he was never promised.

He’s alive. He’s alive, and he’s going to build bridges or engines or God knows what smart people do. And I’m so fucking proud of him. Proud like he’s my own son. Like I did something worthy to contribute to that smile on his face.

I should not reply.

A reply is a second-line lit. A reply is confirmation, on a traceable account, that the dead-drop address is live.

But it’s been quiet for a decade. Fuck.

I open a new message, then type slowly, choosing every word.

Belai,

I hope you’re well when you read this. You’re right that you shouldn’t have written. But I can’t help feeling glad you did.

I download the manuscript next, save it to the old machine, and lock it into the folder with the secret photos where I can keep it, but not share it.

Then I download the pictures of Sameen and add them to the album.

The boy grown tall among all my ghosts, the one story on this whole hard drive that ends in alive and well.

I go back to the reply.

Yes, I write. I’m happy.

It’s a lie. It’s the kindest lie I’ve ever told and I don’t hesitate for a second.

But we can’t meet yet. It’s still too dangerous. I need you to trust me on that the way you trusted me before. Keep your heads down. Keep the new names.

And Belai…protect the black box. Whatever you do, keep it safe and keep it hidden, and don’t ever let the manuscript and the box be in the same place. They’re like the ends of jumper cables. Click them together and they will explode.

Finish your book. I mean that. Finish it and keep it somewhere no one will find it, because there’s going to come a day when the world needs to read it—and I think that day is closer than it’s been in ten years.

I’m going to try to make it right. All of it.

The thing I should have done a decade ago and was too much of a coward to do.

I don’t know how yet. But I’m done being silent, brother.

I’m going to finish what I started, and when the coast is clear, when it’s safe to tell the truth, I’ll find you. And we’ll tell it together.

Give the boy my love. Tell him Mr. Jeff is so proud of him. Prouder than he’ll ever know.

Your brother,

J. Callen

I read it over once. My thumb hovers over send.

And as every rule I’ve ever lived by tells me to delete it—I send it.

I close the laptop and sit back in the dark with my chest cracked wide open, but surprisingly, it’s not grief bleeding out.

It’s something thicker…resolve, I think?

Maybe hope. Or perhaps it is the senseless courage of a man with nothing left to lose.

Tomorrow I’ll go to Vesper. Tomorrow, I’ll tell her it’s time.

Tomorrow, I stop being the man who folds his hands and takes it.

That’s when the knock comes. Knock, knock, knock.

Three soft raps on my door, like a delivery that doesn’t want to bother me.

It’s past midnight, and nobody knocks on my door past midnight, nobody who knows this address and would come at this hour, except—

Oh. I already know. Before I’m even off the couch, before my hand finds the knob, some traitorous part of me already knows exactly who’s standing on the other side of that door, and exactly how much trouble I’m in.

I open it and I hate the way my heart lurches. How suddenly behind her silhouette my brain fictionalizes picturesque pink skies.

Sylvie.