“On the flight back to Rio all I could think about was Gerald handing me off to Angel. I couldn’t make sense of it. I had to see him. I remember being jumpy on the plane, my hands shaking and the flight attendants thinking I was sick, bringing me blankets. Hair dye staining the blankets when I started to sweat.
“Gerald wasn’t home when I got to his place eleven hours later. I called Roberto and Ray. No answer. Went to my place, took a shower to get that crap out of my hair, got my weapon and went looking for Gerald in the favelas. The minute his little friends saw me they got really antsy. Gerald was trying to talk them down but they were jabbering away at each other. Suddenly, one of them tackled Gerald, took him down. He was on the ground; they were running. One of them was whistling. And then the dogs came.”
Lewis took a breath. “Gerald was face down. The dogs went for his back. They were on me, too, but I shook them off long enough to get to my gun. Gunshots are extremely loud in a dark, quiet place like that, with no traffic, no lighting. We had to move. Gerald was out of it. Every place I touched him was wet. He screamed when I tried to roll him over, but I had to know why he’d sent me to New York. And why he was at a meet alone. He said he couldn’t find me or Roberto. I told him I’d been in New York, that I had orders. He said, ‘No boy, there were no orders.’ I just figured he was in shock.
“No hospital anywhere close, but the Carmelites had an infirmary at the mission and Ray was there. I picked Gerald up and started walking. The mission had high adobe walls with shuttered openings where the poor could leave their dead for the nuns to pray over and bury. I put Gerald in the wall, not knowing if he was dead or alive. Ray lived all the way around on the monastery side but he wasn’t in his room. I went into the cathedral and found him there, hanging from the gallery.
“I was looking for a way to get up there and cut him down when Sister Eleanor found me. She said, ‘We took your friend from the wall. He’s alive.’ She let me into the back, where they had Gerald face down on a table. In the light, I could see he was shredded. The nuns were pouring coca into his spine and down his throat to block the pain. He told me to call for evac.
“I started to ask Eleanor about Ray, but she said they’d take care of him when it was safe. The nuns had been warned to leave him there as a warning. The mission had no phone, but Seth and Roberto shared an apartment a few blocks away. Seth was dead on the kitchen floor, throat cut. Roberto the same, on the balcony. They hadn’t touched their guns. I used their phone to call in.
“DC told me Beige had a plane and evac crew on standby at the airport and they’d be dispatched. I gave them the details, where to find everyone. I wanted to wait with Gerald, but they weren’t having that. They told me to clear the area, get myself to the airport. I went looking for transport. My arm was a mess, blood on my clothes, cabs wouldn’t stop. Finally a limo pulled up to a restaurant. That was my ticket. I waited for it to make the drop.
“Angel got out of the limo with a male I didn’t know. She was dressed up like it was a date. Unbelievable. I watched them walk in, his hand on her ass. The contractor’s orders hit home. I was supposed to be dead by then; we all were. I went in the back door and waited for her near the bathrooms, followed her in. She was surprised, but nothing really fazed Angel.”
Again Lewis stood and went to the glass doors. When he turned, he spread his arms and looked down at the scars. “I’m covered in blood, I can hardly put a sentence together, but she’s all about fixing her hair. I shook her, made her look at me. Rattled her, got blood on her dress, and finally, I got through to her. She was furious. The more abuse she spit at me, the colder I got. She told me I was hard to kill but I didn’t matter. None of us mattered; she didn’t need the group any more. She wiped the blood off her arm and opened the door. I knew if I let her leave, she’d send someone to finish the job.
“I stopped her and shut off her noise while I dragged her down the hall and up a flight of stairs to the backdoor. I let go of her outside in the alley. She flopped down on top of the garbage like a fish. She didn’t stir, didn’t make a sound, no pulse. The limo was parked at the end of the alley. The driver was reading. I walked up to his window and showed him my gun. He put the book down and took me to the airport like that kind of thing happened to him every day. In Rio, at least in those days, it probably did.”
Lewis exhaled. “The evac crew brought us all home. They were working on Gerald all the way. When I woke up in the medical unit in DC, I found out they’d almost left without me.”
Suzanna had been immobile. She met his look without hiding her horror.
“That’s all of it,” he said softly.
His hand grazed the glass door behind him, as though for assurance, then fell to his side. “Are you all right?” he asked quietly. “I mean, do you feel sick?”
She came to stand beside him at the doors. Her shock had dissolved. She was crying silently. She glanced up at him and didn’t turn away when she saw him watching. When she found her voice, she surprised herself with its force. “I can’t believe any organization would recruit a young man and then set him up to go through something like that. I do feel sick; I’m disgusted. Beige shouldn’t even exist. They don’t deserve you, how hard you work, how loyal you are to them while they eat their young.”
“Suzanna,” he said, “this is not what I expected. I appreciate you taking my side, more than I have words for right now. Some would say Beige and I deserve each other.” She wrapped her arms around him and buried her face in his shirt. He held her cautiously.
“I feel sad and mad and broken,” she said. “Can it happen again? Is that what you’re telling me?”
“No,” he said. “It happened once. It won’t happen again. Come and sit down so I can tell you why you had to hear about it.”
She released him reluctantly, afraid to hear more. This time, he chose a place on the bed near her chair.
He took her hands. “I’ve never apologized for the way I treated you. I’m doing that now. I’m sorry for my actions and my words. I’ve had nightmares for years but you dealt with me while they were the worst in a long time. I’ve been told the dart should have killed me. Instead the drugs put me in overdrive, reliving history. Flashbacks trigger recall of fear and pain, making you believe you know what’s coming and slamming you with adrenaline. I realize this is overload, but an apology without an explanation is just words. I regret how I treated you. My past is my responsibility. Take time to think about this.”
She searched his face before replying. “I will think; of course I will. But the time we spent together in Phoenix before you left last time showed me the real you. I forgave you then. I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t trust you.” Her hands held his and her knees pressed against him. “I hate what happened to you, things that can’t be forgotten. You’re telling me there may always be an element of risk. I understand. Give me a week. Can you stop swimming the rip for a week? I want to come to terms with this, knowing you’re alive.”
“I swim it twice a day when I’m alone. Let the sea have me if she wants me.”
“The sea doesn’t want you. You survived. It must mean you’re meant to be here. Not for Beige and their cleverness at spinning evil into gold. They use people like you; people who are smart enough and strong enough to serve their ends while they monetize deception and double-dealing.” She took a breath and exhaled. “No wonder you’re always on guard. You’re their lifeblood. They’re heartless; that’s their brand.”
“Organizations don’t have hearts, none of them do. They’re not held to that standard.”
“Was the Brazilian contract typical? Their secrets and activities will come out someday.”
“Organizations can become too powerful, step on the wrong toes. But when a reckoning comes, it’s people who get subpoenas, men and women who are forced to testify and be judged. Beige has years of mercenary contracts but Beige itself is paperwork. It’s Beige people who engage in activities, and I’ve participated in my share. The Brazil project is a flashpoint, too many deaths to go unnoticed if the justice department comes for Beige. What happened in New York was rape as torture to extract information for profit. I accepted an order for rape. I stopped just short of it but I was still the Beige rep at the scene.”
“That’s not fair,” Suzanna said. “You did stop. It was planned deliberately to give you no time to think. You can’t play it backwards; isn’t that what you tell me?”
She put a hand on his shoulder to steady herself and went to wash her face. In front of the bathroom sink, she studied her reflection, searching for reassurance that she was the same person she’d been that morning, the woman who’d stood beside him at the rail of the ferry, as happy as she’d felt in a long time. She drank from the water bottle, closed her eyes and took slow breaths. When she could swallow without her throat feeling frozen, she looked again and knew her answer hadn’t changed.
She went to join him where he stood at the doors, looking out over the balcony. Across the street, the palms were casting long shadows now. She wanted to close the past, leave this room and go out there into the park and feel the sun.
“Can you stand it if I ask questions?” she asked.
“Of course,” he said.
“What did the Beige Group do about what happened? Was anyone held responsible?”
“By an internal review board, not in any external system.”
“Tell me.”
“Every job is evaluated by a review board. It’s chaired by a senior Beige director and includes three others, usually reps from our sponsor agencies. Review boards produce a final report, essentially the stamp of approval on a job, but they also have power to administer disciplinary action. Gerald and I were both fined. He had three agents die on his watch and lost control of Angel. He would have paid a high price to stay. In my case, I was fined for my actions in New York and for flying back to Rio instead of reporting in, for engaging Angel instead of following orders to go straight to the airport after I’d requested evac. Extractions are risky and expensive; you don’t screw around with them. Rookie mistake.”
“What about Angel?”
“They never found her body. The Group doesn’t accept that she’s dead, but she’s never surfaced.”
“If Gerald didn’t even know you were in New York, where did your orders come from?”
“The order Angel showed me wasn’t in the database. It existed — I wouldn’t have made a move otherwise — but I had no proof. Angel had used her expense account to pay for my plane fare, so that showed she’d pulled me into it. But at first the airfare was all the evidence the board had to back up my testimony. That changed when they got the transcript of the fight between the woman and her husband in their apartment.
“They used a mix of languages and a lot of profanity and screaming. It took days for our staff linguists to translate it all. The woman accused her husband, insisted his bodyguard had kissed her and when she rebuffed him, his companion raped her. The husband swore his man had been with him all night. Naturally, that infuriated her. It’s why she killed him. Gerald and the board listened to the audio alongside the translation. It was a three-hour bloodbath but buried in there, in her own words, she backed up my statement.”
“What about the contractor’s orders?”
“I still had the paper copy of his orders and they weren’t in the database either. Those orders shocked the board, the whole organization. Understand, Suzanna, premeditated criminal assault would never be in the Beige playbook. The protocol for control of orders changed after Brazil.”
Suzanna shook her head impatiently. “Being shocked after the fact is the last resort of bad management. Did the review board treat you fairly, given the actual circumstances you were in?”
“My review was a shitshow. Being forced to explain everything, relive it, drill into the details —it was excruciating, but it defused it, too. The board asked what I did and why. Why is hard. When you can’t hide from yourself, you have to own it. Ego death, I’ve heard it called. My actions were judged fairly.”
“And their response was to fine you? How much?”
“A million two, give or take.”
She was shocked. “A million dollars? My God, how could they expect you to ever pay that?”
“It has to be a hard lesson, one you won’t repeat. You work it off. Or you leave.”
“How long did that take?”
“I gave back everything from the Brazil job, basic and bonus, plus the signing comp on my next job. Two years with nothing to show for it. Started over from scratch.”
Suzanna stared at him. “Not very long ago, when you were out of your mind, you offered me an account worth eight million dollars. What is that, play money?”
He frowned. “Not sure how that’s relevant. I don’t play with money.”
“Never mind. What happened to the woman in the elevator?”
“Executed in Peru.”
“In Peru? Tell me the rest. How does this end?”
He released a long breath. “Angel blew the job open by breaking that woman, using me and a contractor. Angel was a pro at that — using people, breaking people. The woman was only a few steps away from her apartment when we left her in that elevator. She went home and got on the phone. The surveillance Angel had set up recorded every word. When her husband showed up, she knifed the bodyguard as he came through the door. Then she started on her husband, torturing him with her knife because Angel’s contractor had told her repeatedly that the rape was her husband’s idea.”
Suzanna inhaled and realized she’d been holding her breath.
“She cut her husband up while he tried to bargain with the details of his arms business. Our surveillance team listened until he went dark, then they made an anonymous call to 911. In a few hours of surveillance on that apartment, we got everything we’d spent a year in Brazil trying to find. They were trading guns for drugs and girls. No money trail. Gerald wrote the report from his hospital room. The Peruvians learned how arms were getting in and how they were financed. Beige received full contract value.”
His expression was closed and remote. “We chalked it up as a win. The wife was arrested for double homicide, but she was psychotic, no chance of going to trial in New York. When the Peruvians got Gerald’s report, they requested her extradition. She was a Peruvian citizen, and their military made short work of her under their terrorism statutes.”
“You stayed with Beige. And you and Gerald remained close. Why?”
“Gerald was the only person I could talk to. We were in the medical unit across the hall from each other for weeks. I wanted to quit. If he’d let me go, I doubt I’d be alive. He put me back together and testified at my review. He convinced me that quitting would be turning my back on Ray, Roberto, Seth and wouldn’t change anything. It’s hard to describe him, but Gerald could just about restart the clock. The way he saw it, the world is barbaric, but Beige has the high ground. While you’re breathing, you have to keep making choices, keep trying to move the ball down the field in the right direction. Before that job blew up, I’d thought I’d found my perfect fit. That sense of belonging came back, slowly at first, but then one day, I was back in the flow and I never looked back.
“I stayed because of Gerald and because I had nowhere better to go. More to the point, I like the work. These days I choose my contracts and my teams, call my own shots in an organization that offers the best of the best. I’m well compensated. I earn it, of course, but for the most part, I earn it running my own show, in a style of combat that comes naturally to me. I’m satisfied, though lately, I can feel my center of gravity shifting. Life has to progress. The money is the exit plan.
“I’m not downplaying my part in New York and Brazil. Gerald influenced the review but the board was ultimately judge and jury. They cleared me, leaving the door open so I had the option to square up. I don’t think about that job often, but as long as I’m with the Group I’ll wear it like a shadow over my shoulder.”
He turned to her. “I can’t fairly ask you to spend time with me without full disclosure. I’m not a stock broker or a dentist, not a golfer — you know that but do you believe it? I’m unlikely to change. I’ll understand if you decide to pass. Gerald would have softened this, but it’s better plain and raw.”
“Why do you think anyone else would ever tell me this?”
“It happened with Christine when she first joined my team. Someone told her the worst bits — well intentioned or malicious, doesn’t really matter. It upset her, but she thought about it and went to Gerald, asking him to lay out the facts for her. A bold move, given her rank then. Christine has nerve and judgment. She could have just taken it at face value and asked for a transfer out of my section. Instead, she got her answers, then met with me, told me she knew about it and how and why she’d looked into it. She wanted to stay, but she gave me a very clear picture of how it felt getting hit with it cold.”
“I wish I could have met Gerald,” Suzanna said. “I was with you a few days ago when you poured his ashes into the ocean. I saw how hard that was for you, letting go of him. Was it because you finally forgave each other?”
“I don’t know about that. It’s a bit late to worry about Gerald now.”
“Did you have counseling or any kind of therapy?”
“It was required. I wasn’t keen, but even giving it minimal attention it was an outlet to talk without feeling judged. The same counselor, a woman, was assigned to Gerald. Talking to both of us, even separately, probably helped her. She wouldn’t have accomplished much in the time she had otherwise. I was the only one to walk away from that job. She gave me a heads up about survivor’s guilt.”
Suzanna thought about that concept and the burden it described. She said slowly, “I understand why you feel separated from the world. The facts are disturbing but I know it’s all true, and it wasn’t hidden, it was documented and investigated long ago. I’m just getting to know you. I don’t want to stop now.”
His attention hadn’t wavered, but he didn’t respond. She wondered if he was reconsidering seeing her again. Had dredging up all that horror dissuaded him? Or being face-to-face with the responsibility of connection? The thought brought a pang of disappointment, but he’d started by asking for clarity, and she owed him that whether they had a future or not.
“I’m not your judge,” she said. “I took advantage of a man who was hurt, desperate, out of his mind and too far gone to knowingly consent or object.” She made a small gesture with her shoulder, a shrug of admission. “I broke my marriage vows without a second thought. Not a big sin, but important to me.”
Lewis felt a release of tension like a tremor. He checked his impulse to reach for her. Her face was calm now, the deep blue of her eyes untroubled and absorbing his expression.
“And why did you do that?” he asked, almost sure she would tell him now.
She hesitated for the flicker of a moment. “Because I wanted to,” she said. “I’ve tried giving you longer answers. You like as few words as possible, but you have no trouble with complicated ideas. Maybe I’ve used too many words before, so here it is, as short as I can make it: At first, I just wanted you to stay alive. Then I wanted to see what you would do next, and then I wanted you — in my tent, at my fire, magnetic alignment.”
“Do you believe in that?”
“Yes, I do. Now I do. I’m not sure when I came to it, but there it is.”
“Should we test it with a walk in the park and dinner?”
“Yes. And afterwards, we should trust it and be together tonight, in my room, at my hotel. We’ve spent too much time in this one.”
* * * * *