Chapter 22 #2
“No,” I shout, the word ripping out of me from a newly broken place. “No. There’s nothing—”
My throat tries to close. I force words through it.
“She was here to get him robbed.” My hand goes out toward the gurney, toward the cut-off shirt, toward the man with a bag of somebody else’s blood going into his arm.
“She brought a man onto this dock and pointed him at a sixty-eight-year-old and he jumped him and he gutted him and he took the only evidence we had. She’s a fucking monster, and she is sitting over there in the dark with her feet in the water like she’s on holiday—”
“Callen.”
“I have nothing to say to her.” I’m shaking so hard now that my voice is doing it too. “Nothing. Not one word. Let her leave. Let her go wherever the hell people like that go, I don’t care, I genuinely do not care—”
“She saved his life.”
Silence.
“He would be dead, Callen. I’m sure of that.
The only reason Belai is still here is because Sylvie, with a snapped rib and a ruined leg, pulled herself out of that river, limped twenty feet, put a fist in the hole, and did not let go until the medics got here.
It was like watching a mother bear protect her cub. ”
I look out at the water.
“If Sylvie hadn’t been here, he wouldn’t have been in harm’s way in the first place,” I reason.
Vesper doesn’t answer that.
There’s no answer to it. It’s true.
“I knew.” My eyes are burning and I don’t wipe them.
“That’s what I can’t—Vesper, I knew. Some part of me knew from the first night and I chose not to look.
” My jaw hurts. “She was here with an agenda. She was here with an agenda the whole time and I let her, and did Cricket know? Is Cricket a traitor too—”
“Stop.”
“Did Cricket know?” I demand.
“Stop.”
Vesper steps into me.
She is a foot shorter than I am, yet I stop like I’ve hit a brick wall.
“There will be time for your anger,” she says in a murmur.
“I promise you that. You will have all of it and I will not take one minute of it from you, and when you are ready to be angry at me I will sit in a room and let you be angry for as long as it takes.” Her eyes don’t move.
“But it is not now. Right now I need you to do something.”
“I’m not—”
“Convince her not to go.”
I laugh. It’s an ugly sound and it echoes all around us. Manic and disgusted all glopped into one.
“You’re joking.”
“I’m not.”
“You want me to go over there and ask her to stay?”
“Yes.”
“After—” My hand goes out again at the gurney, and my voice breaks in half. “After that?”
“I am not asking you to love her, Callen.” Vesper’s face is stone. “I’m asking you to find a way to tolerate her. Because she’s one of us.”
“You’ve lost your damn mind, Vesper. She’s not one of us. This is not PALADIN. She is not family.”
Vesper is quiet for a moment. “She is to me because of a covenant I made long ago. Sylvie will disappear into the night unless you ask her to stay.”
“Tell me I’ve got this wrong. Tell me she wasn’t sent here.”
Vesper sighs. “That’s not mine to tell. But I will say this. Sylvie arrived as one thing and has become another.”
I turn my back. “If you want her to stay, it’s your mission, not mine. I never want to see her again.”
“Callen, please.” Vesper’s eyes soften. I think it’s the first time in my life I’ve ever heard her beg.
“Take it from me, people regret the things they don’t say just as much as the things they do.
Sometimes more.” She looks up at me. “This is the closest thing to closure you are going to be offered. Take it. While you can.”
The lights hum. The river doesn’t move. Behind me a woman in blue gloves says a number out loud and somebody answers her with another number.
“Fine. If Belai comes to, tell him I’ll be right back.” My voice sounds alien, like it belongs to somebody else. Like something else deep inside me has taken control because I’ve lost it. “Tell him I’m coming. Where are you taking him?”
“Hospital. There’s a private suite. We’ll bring him in through the service level to avoid any exposure.” She’s already turning. “He’s under PALADIN’s protection now. Linc is running security.”
I stop. “Why not me?”
“Because I’m giving you the night off.”
“He’s my contact, Vesper.” It comes out too loud. “He’s my friend. He saved my life, you know that. You were there. How can you be so callous?”
“Because the next part might break you…and I want to give you space to come apart if you need it.”
“I have worked double agents before.” I’m breathing hard. “I’ve been lied to by professionals. This is not new to me and I will survive it. I want that room.”
Vesper looks at me for a long moment.
“When you have finished over there, we’ll discuss it.” She turns back toward the van.
“Vesper.”
She stops, angling her body in a half turn. The river breathes around us, and the silence is blaring.
“What’s the next part that you mentioned?”
Vesper exhales so hard it looks like it hurts. “Sylvie didn’t come to D.C. for Belai. She didn’t even know his name until the two of you became close.”
I don’t move.
The work lights are behind me now and my shadow goes out long and thin across the concrete, ahead of me, all the way toward the place where a woman is sitting with her legs over the water.
Sylvie did not know Belai existed until the two of you became close.
She wasn’t sent for Belai.
Belai is a consequence. Belai is something she found, in my apartment, in my inbox, on my machine, while she was doing whatever she actually came to do.
She was already there. She was already in the bar. She was in the bar before there was a manuscript, before there was a letter, before there was any of it, on a Tuesday, in a place I never go.
Somebody sent her.
For me.
My knees don’t buckle. I’d have understood it if they had, and they don’t. Nothing happens at all. I stand on a dock in the middle of the night and my whole life gets quietly rearranged behind my eyes and my body does not do one single thing about it.
I was the job.
Every hour of it. The bar. The drinks. The laughing. The four a.m. drives with her bare feet on my dash. I’m not in the past, I’m in your future. Her hand on my face. Her mouth on my knuckles. The cat we swore to get.
I look down the dock.
She hasn’t moved. Still sitting out there in the dark by a filthy river with a broken rib and a leg she can’t stand on, waiting for me, in a lake of her own blood.
Take it, Vesper said. While you can.
Pulling my gun from its holster, I head toward the edge of the dock. Toward…
Closure.