Chapter 20 #2
“He won’t. I’ll make sure of it.” I close my eyes.
“And if he won’t kill it entirely, he publishes it as fiction.
A novel. A tragic story about a made-up village in a made-up country, and it wins a prize, and he gets to be an author, and nobody in the world can prosecute a novel.
” My throat’s dry. “I’ll make him promise. ”
The pause goes on so long I check the screen.
“Let me be certain I understand you.” Salisbrie stretches out the syllables so a sentence feels like a whole paragraph. “Your entire plan—the plan on which my confirmation, my career, and your continued respiration all depend—hinges on a witness keeping a promise?”
“Yes.”
“Tell me you are not that stupid. I don’t know what kind of playground politics you think you’re fucking around with, but that’s not how the world works.”
“I can do it.” I hear my own voice climb in desperation and I hate it. “I have leverage on him. He trusts me, he doesn’t know who I am, but I can get him to do it. Just trust me. I will personally ensure that you become this country’s next Secretary of Defense.”
Okay, not really.
Here’s the part I’m not openly offering on this phone call: the second Belai is safe, the second that box is in the water and that old man is on a plane and Callen never has to know any of it—I go to Vesper.
I lay it all out. Every dirty piece of it, the contract, the deposit, the bar, all of it, and I take whatever she gives me.
Then I point Vesper at Salisbrie and let her Vesper the shit out of the former admiral. I’ll pop popcorn and watch Vesper rip this woman’s throat out.
“I don’t like it.”
“Salisbrie—”
“Stick to the original plan.” She’s clipped now, done with me. “Destroy the evidence. Bury the witnesses. All of them. You are this close to being finished, Saoirse, and you’re going to hedge now? Over a silly little crush?”
Something goes cold and flat in my chest. “I have the upper hand here.”
“You have nothing.”
“I have the location of the witness and the location of the black box, and you have neither. I am not telling you until you agree to my terms.” I let that tidbit sit.
“I’ll hand the box over to you personally if it makes you feel better.
You can hold it. You can put it in a fire yourself.
But those are my terms, and if you don’t like them, I will expose every part of this to the public. ”
“And tell your sweetheart how the two of you really met?” Her smile is audible. “You want to risk that, do you?”
The night grows extra hot, actual hell on earth when I picture Callen’s face, stunned at my betrayal.
“You want to risk the nomination?” I volley.
“Because there is no version of this country where the public confirms a Secretary of Defense who treated the annihilation of an entire people like a schoolyard turf war. You know what it’s like out there right now.
It’s a tinderbox. It won’t be a hearing, Salisbrie, it’ll be a stoning, and the second it breaks, whoever you’ve been protecting will start protecting themselves. From your downfall.”
“Are you threatening me, Saoirse? Is that how you want to play this?”
I feel it down the phone. Three thousand miles, a garden party on the West Coast, a cake somewhere and a nephew in a gown. Right through all of it, I feel the exact temperature of the thing I’m talking to. Ice. Fucking. Cold.
I take a breath, and I soften, because I’m not an idiot.
“There is a version of this where you get everything you want. Your seat. Your legacy. Your name on a plaque bigger than your sibling’s. And nobody else has to die for it.” I close my eyes. “Can you please just see reason? Or do you enjoy the brutality that much?”
Nothing. For a long moment there’s only the sound of a party in California probably, faint, behind a closed door.
“Fine.”
I nearly drop the phone in surprise.
“We’ll try it your way. But I don’t trust you. Not now. Not after that little speech. So you’ll take my guy with you.”
“No,” I reply like a reflex. “I work alone.”
“You have your terms. I have mine. You misbehaved, and now you require a babysitter. He’s an insurance policy, nothing more.
You don’t know that this witness of yours isn’t walking you into something, and if he is, you’ll be glad of the company.
” A pause. “Get rid of my guy afterward, if he offends you. I genuinely don’t care. ”
Get rid of him? She says it the way you’d talk about a rental car.
“Fine,” I hear myself say. “But your guy meets me at a separate location first. Somewhere public, somewhere of my choosing. I vet him. I look him in the eye. And then we go and get the package.”
“Fine. Whatever gets this done.” There’s a rustle and then a door squealing as it swings open. She’s moving, going back to her party, back to her nephew and his cake. “I’ll send a number to that phone. Call it when you have details. You know what I like.”
“Efficiency.”
“Make it snappy.”
The line goes dead.
I stay very still with the phone against my ear for another four or five seconds, listening to nothing before I find my chair again. Something’s wrong. I can’t name it. That’s the maddening part. I got everything I asked for. She folded. Bridget Salisbrie folded, and people like that do not fold.
But just maybe, she’s tired of this. As tired as I am.
I can make a version of happily-ever-after out of this, I fucking have to.
I fucking can. That’s what I keep telling myself, sitting on a concrete balcony in the wet dark with my heart going like a bird’s.
I just stood up to one of the most powerful women in this country and made her think.
Nobody has to die, and Callen never has to know, and Belai gets to tell his story.
Every single thing I want. All of it, on the table, and all I have to do is reach out and take it.
So why do I feel like I’ve just agreed to something darker than I started with?
I blow out a breath as the patio door slides open behind me.
“I’m surprised you haven’t snuck out to your man-whore’s house.”
I don’t turn around. “Man-whore? That’s a new nickname. Vast improvement on ‘dead man,’ though. Callen will be delighted.”
She smirks. Then she looks at the hookah. Cricket proceeds to flop into the chair beside me, all elbows and knees, wearing a T-shirt that says “GYM HAIR, DON’T CARE” and no bra. Yet, she wears an expression of extreme moral superiority.
“I’m warming up to it,” she admits. “The idea. I guess.” She wrinkles her nose. “It’s just that Callen is sort of, like. Dad, to us? He’s the dad. You’re dating our dad, Saoirse. It’s revolting.”
She’s waiting for me to laugh.
I don’t.
“Not even close,” I say.
She looks over at me, tilts her head before taking a drag from the hose.
“Callen is kind and considerate.” I watch the smoke go out over the railing. “He’s warm. There wasn’t a flicker of that in Papa.”
Cricket goes quiet and takes another pull before blowing out a perfect O like a professional smoker.
“I haven’t smoked hookah in forever. Where’d you even find this?” she asks.
“In your ammo closet.”
“And why were you in my ammo closet?”
“Looking for shoes, obviously.”
She laughs. It’s a good laugh, hoarse and dirty. It fills up the balcony, and I want to hold it in both hands.
“We’re so much alike,” she says. “You know that? It’s actually unsettling.”
“Agreed.”
She takes a long pull and blows it at the sky.
“Then why do we remember it so differently?” she asks to the sky.
“What differently?”
“Our childhood. I never thought Papa was a monster. Not once. Not until Vesper sat me down and told me what he was, and even then I—” She stops. “Even then, I stayed in disbelief for a long time.”