Chapter 22
CALLEN
I LEAP FROM the car so fast I forget to put it in park.
I have to retreat two steps and push the damn P on the gearshift to keep it from rolling into the river.
I’ve been sitting in the car driving for twenty minutes since Vesper called me.
Sitting. Yet, my heart is racing, worried sick about Sylvie.
Breathless, I run toward the commotion. Judging by the broken fence about forty feet to my left, something drove right through it. I sprint the walking path, and I’m already through the gap in that fence with my badge in one hand and my sidearm in the other and no plan whatsoever.
I’m so fucking confused.
Vesper said twelve words on the phone.
Belai’s alive but gravely injured. Come to the Anacostia. Don’t call anyone.
That’s it. That’s all I’ve had for eighteen minutes. I’ve done ninety-five in a fifty the whole way here.
The dock is lit.
That’s the first wrong thing. Somebody’s put up work lights, two of them on stands, and the whole cracked concrete apron is washed with white light, highlighting every weed, crack, rust mark…
and bloodstain. Past the edge of the crime scene, the Anacostia sits black and enormous and takes the light without giving any of it back.
There’s a van. My destination.
Steel gray, unmarked, no plates I can read from here, back doors open.
No lettering. No lightbar. No stripe, no seal, no county, nothing that would make a passing car slow down.
Just a plain gray van with its doors open on a dead dock at midnight and a gurney beside it.
Four people in blue gloves are working over a body under a hanging bag of blood.
There’s Vesper. Standing just to the left of everything. She’s the only one who could get us a fully stocked, unmarked ambulance this quickly. Whatever is going on, she clearly doesn’t want the public authorities involved.
“Callen,” Vesper says as I approach, taking the final two steps to meet me.
“Is he alive?”
“Yes.”
“But is he okay—”
“Callen.” Both her hands come up. Not on me. Just up, flat, in the air between us. “He is alive. He’s going to be okay. Breathe.”
I stop for a few inhales to placate her but my hands won’t hold still and there’s a muscle jumping under my right eye. I can feel my pulse in my back teeth, and I stand on that dock in the work lights and I shake like a dog.
“He is stable,” Vesper says. “He has multiple stab wounds, but the most concerning one is a puncture above the right clavicle, and it opened an artery. If it had gone eleven millimeters medial, we would not be having this conversation.”
“But he’s—”
“They are running blood into him now and his pressure is coming up. He is going to be all right.” She holds my eyes. “I have never once lured you into a false sense of security. Trust me when I say he’s going to survive this.”
I look past her.
They’ve got him on the gurney under the lights, and there’s a woman kneeling on the concrete beside his head with her hands on his throat, and Belai’s face is turned toward the sky. Gray. He’s gray. His shirt’s been cut off him and discarded. It’s lying in a wet heap by the wheel.
It’s a nice shirt. A dress shirt.
He was coming to see me. He was trying to look his best. Fuck. What have I done?
“Where’s Sylvie? You said she’s okay?”
Vesper doesn’t answer. She draws in a deep inhale.
“Vesper? Please. What the fuck is going on? Sylvie’s phone is off. It goes straight to nothing. I’ve called her eleven times since you rang me and it doesn’t even ring, and if she was here, if she was on this dock when—”
“She’s here.”
“Is she hurt?”
“Yes.”
“How bad—”
“Callen.” Vesper puts her hand on my forearm. She wraps her fingers around my arm and holds on. “Breathe. Remember?”
I breathe again. This time deep, letting my lungs fill all the way, then releasing as much tension as I can. It works to an extent. At least the racing thoughts start to organize themselves into a single-file line.
“It’s my fault,” I admit.
“How is this—”
“It’s my fault. I answered him when he emailed me weeks ago.
” I’m looking at the gurney. I can’t stop looking at the blood-stained gurney.
“But I was clear. I was so goddamn clear with him, Vesper. I told him not to come. I told him not to move. I told him the manuscript and the box could never be in the same—”
“He didn’t come here to speak with you.”
The river keeps not moving.
“What?”
“He did not come here for you.” Her hand is still on my arm. “You are not the reason he is on that gurney.”
“That doesn’t…” My mouth won’t work properly. “That’s not possible. Nobody else knew about him. Nobody on this earth knows who that man really is except me and you—did Belai contact you?”
“No. Look, there are some things you need to hear, but you need to hear them standing still.”
I didn’t even realize I was still bouncing up and down, shifting foot to foot. Where is Sylvie? Where is Sylvie?
“He was attacked for the black box he was carrying. The man who did this ran away with it.”
Fuck.
“Why would he even—” I stop. “He brought it? He brought it here? To a dock?”
“Yes.”
“I told him never—” I hear my own voice crack and go up into a register I don’t recognize.
I told him. Don’t bring the box. Don’t put them in the same room.
The book and the box are jumper cables, Belai, they’ll explode.
You’ll put yourself in danger. I wrote that.
I swear I wrote that to him. Why didn’t he listen?
“Why in God’s name would he—”
Then it happens.
It comes down in little puzzle pieces snapping into place. A clear picture, being built coincidence by coincidence.
A woman in a bar. A bar I never go to, on a night I never go out, and she was already there, and she found me.
I don’t drink whiskey, but I’ll pretend to.
Your desk is very sad.
The nicks on her hands. Three in one week, and I never asked. The way her eyes went dark and clouded when a question got too near. I catalogued it, I built a whole taxonomy of her tells and I never once opened the file.
If it’s hard, then don’t read it. Tell him you did. No need to hurt yourself to help a friend.
Don’t go back. I’m not in the past. I’m in your future.
She said that with her hand on my face.
Loose ends. She said she needed space to handle loose ends.
My computer. Sitting open on my coffee table vulnerable with all the secrets buried in Belai’s manuscript. I never thought to guard it, because I didn’t know I was sleeping with a fucking threat. Except she never slept much, did she?
Every time I opened my eyes and felt for her in the middle of the night, she was somewhere. Always an excuse—water, a snack, restless legs. No, this woman worked while I was asleep. She worked me over like a job all night, and then I drove her home like a buffoon every morning.
Cricket, in the hall outside the conference room, three days after the wedding…
She just showed up, Callen. In a room she had no business being in. It was perfect timing. We got lucky.
Except nothing is that lucky…
Nothing in this world is a coincidence, Vesper.
I said that. Out loud. In my own office. Then I took the thought and put it in a drawer and closed the drawer. On purpose. Knowing. Because I was happy.
“Oh my God.” I have to put a hand on my own knee.
I’m bent over on a dock in front of my superior officer with my ears ringing and my mouth full of spit, and I’m going to be sick.
“Callen.”
“Give me a second.” I suck in air, trying to control the nausea.
“Callen, listen to me. There is more and you need it. I know enough now. We are going to hold former Admiral Bridget Salisbrie accountable for what she did to you, and to your brothers, and to that village.” Her voice never changes. “I have already begun making calls.”
Salisbrie? “She’s just a signature on a document. Most of the senior officers get a brief about the mission. She couldn’t have… I don’t get it. Calls for what?”
“To hunt her down. She had the power to arrange this, Callen. She did. She signed your lives away. I know that now.”
The work lights hum.
“She’s under consideration for Secretary of Defense,” Vesper says.
“She will not be confirmed. I will see to that personally, and then I am going to put her in a cold steel box, and I am going to keep her there.” She pauses, adding the next part with a little remorse on her face.
“It will take time. Kesara is the tip of it. Her crimes are extensive, and they are very well buried, and this will be the work of a long while. But I swear to you, Callen—we’ll see it through. ”
I can’t breathe right because while my brain logs the data, my heart is screaming one question louder than all the others. “How do you know all this?”
I already know. I’m asking anyway, and I press on it, and it hurts, but I press again.
“How do you know any of this, Vesper?”
She turns her head.
She doesn’t point. Just turns her head, and I follow it, all the way down that sixty feet of white-lit concrete to the far end of the dock, past the lights, past the van, out where it goes dark again.
There’s a figure sitting on the edge with her legs hanging over the water.
She looks so small. One arm braced behind her. Her left leg is stuck out in front of her at an angle a leg does not go, and even from here I can see the dark shine spreading down the outside of it.
She isn’t looking at us. She’s looking at the river.
“Sylvie called me for help,” Vesper says.
The wind moves for the first time all night and the whole dock smells like iron.
“She’s badly hurt but refused treatment.
” Vesper’s tone is very even. “She has a broken rib, three lacerations, and she went in the dirty water so I’m assuming infections are festering.
She won’t let anyone touch her until she’s spoken with you.
” Vesper stops. Swallows. “When I arrived, she only asked me for two things. One was a trauma team for Belai. The other was you. That’s why I called. ”
I’m shaking my head before my answer is out. “No.”
“Callen.”