Boon, Wildman, and I spent most of the day obtaining supplies and rigging our vehicles for the mission ahead. We’d split the $100,000 with our Kurd partners, as always, but there was plenty left over. Wildman had wanted to ditch them, but Boon and I disagreed. The Kurds had been helping us for eight weeks, with almost no pay. They were good fighters, dedicated to their people’s cause. They deserved to be cut in on the retainer.
The million if we succeeded? That was still to be determined.
“Where do you want to go?” Boon asked, as he strapped on our extra water.
“Morocco,” I said. “Nicest police state I’ve ever seen.”
“Beaches, booze, and naked bodies,” Wildman said, loading his C-4. Wildman was our explosives expert, the best in the world, in my humble opinion. It was a good thing when you enjoyed your work.
“I guess that rules out the Muslim world,” Boon said.
“Inshallah,” Wildman replied. Inshallah was Arabic for “God willing.” The only other Arabic word Wildman knew was mushkila, problem.
“What about you, Boon?”
Boon shrugged. “I’m comforted by the wisdom of Wildman.”
Wildman grunted approval.
I returned to our near-empty flat to pack my rucksack with combat essentials, then threw in whatever personal effects I had left: a pair of chopsticks, the I Ching, my ballistic humidor, the bottle of Woodford Reserve bourbon I’d been nursing since Ankara.
I looked at the bottle, wrapped in the blue bespoke sport coat I hadn’t worn since arriving in Kiev to save a Ukrainian oligarch’s family from murderous thugs. I drank, hung the coat on the shower rod—we didn’t have a curtain—and showered under a pathetic dribble of water. The rough shave took twenty minutes, but it turns out I was still there, under the beard. I donned my coat and sunglasses, and wheeled out a motorbike from our garage. Boon had traded loot for it, then fixed it up.
I got to the clinic around 1800, just after it officially closed. Outside a bearded man lay on a stretcher, clutching his bloodstained side. I leaned the motorcycle against the wall, stepped over the moaning man, and peeked inside the front door.
Kylah’s clinic was no-frills. She treated the indigent, the criminal, those with no other recourse. These days, that described half the people in Erbil. God knew who she swindled to get the medicine and pay her staff of three. Usually she worked after hours, and I thought she might still be there tonight. I was right. She sat in her back office, the glow of a laptop’s screen illuminating her face.
I banged on the door. She jumped, then smiled, then walked over and unlocked the door. I had to hand it to her. Kylah knew how to walk.
“What are you doing here?”
“Couldn’t sleep.”
“You clean up nice,” she said, eyeing my linen blazer and clean shave.
“You know there’s a guy dying outside,” I said as we walked through the tiny waiting room. On a table sat Arab magazines, three years old.
“He’s a jihadist,” she said, tossing her white lab coat over a chair. “He’ll just kill more people if I patch him up.”
“Isn’t that violating the Hippocratic oath or something?”
“If he’s alive tomorrow, I’ll save him.”
She bent over her desk (nice) and pulled out a bottle of whiskey, but I waved it away and put down the Woodford. “Get some ice,” I said.
“What’s the occasion?” she said, reaching into the medical fridge.
“I’m leaving.”
I poured two fingers of Kentucky’s finest into two plastic medical cups, the kind you pee in for a sample. The ice crackled when the warm liquor hit, the aroma of buttery bourbon perfuming the air. “That should pay our tab, with a generous tip,” I said, sliding an envelope across her desk.
Kylah peeked at the pile of dollars, but didn’t count them, so she didn’t know how very generous the tip was. “You’re a mystery, Tom Locke.”
“Just a drifter.”
She took a drink and nodded her satisfaction. “There’s more to you than that.”
I thought about the twenty years I’d spent in the line of fire, first U.S. Army Airborne, then Apollo. I thought about all the lives I’d taken: hundreds of men, and a few women and children, too. I balanced them against the lives I’d saved: hundreds of thousands when I stopped a genocide in Burundi, hundreds in Mosul, an entire village in northern Mali, and a busload of women on their way to a life of slavery and rape. Then I thought of the girl who didn’t make it off that sabaya bus and my best friend, Jimmy Miles, bleeding out in my arms. I still didn’t know what to do with that last one, so I buried it before it could grow on me. It’s what mercenaries do.
“Just a drifter with a gun,” I said.
“These young guys,” Kylah said, fingering the edge of the cup. “They come in once, usually after a knife fight outside the T-Top, they want to tell me everything they’ve done. Most of them haven’t done anything more than graduate from high school. Some of them haven’t even done that. You come in for months, you don’t say anything.”
Not much to say.
“The strong, silent type,” she laughed, when she saw I wasn’t going to answer. “A man with a past.”
“I’m tired, that’s all. It’s what happens when you get old.”
She chuckled. “I don’t really care about your story. I just like a man who has one.”
“The more you know about mine, the less impressed you’ll be.”
“Let me guess: deaths you can’t forget, mistakes you can’t let go, a career you walked away from for . . .” She was winding me up, so I waited. She had it right so far. “A woman.”
I thought about Alie MacFarlane, the woman I’d reconnected with in Ukraine after a decade apart. I’d fallen for her in Burundi, when she was a twenty-four-year-old ex-nun with legs that wouldn’t quit. I’d met her again in Ukraine, and a whole lot of trouble had gone down. Still, I couldn’t let her go. She was the love of my life. Maybe. She had made me realize what I’d given up—a family, a house, a normal life—but she hadn’t been the cause. I’d given those things up years ago, when I dropped out of graduate school at Harvard to put my boots on the ground for Apollo Outcomes and Brad Winters.
“I don’t think so,” I said.
Kylah wasn’t convinced. She leaned on the desk and smiled. Her tank top fell open, and it was an effort to keep my eyes from drifting down. The effort failed. She wasn’t wearing a bra.
“Then what broke you?” she asked.
Failure, I wanted to tell her. The deeply personal kind. The kind that gets your best friend killed and makes you question everything you’ve ever done, and all the things you’ve ever believed, both about yourself and the world.
But I wasn’t sure that was the right answer, and I didn’t know how to tell her that anyway. So instead I touched her hand.
“I don’t think so, cowboy,” she said. “I’m not a one-night kind of girl.”
Good, it’s probably better that way, I thought, even though I didn’t believe it.
“And this isn’t what you want.”
She was wrong. Right now, it was the only thing I wanted.
“We’ve a good friendship going, Tommy, and that’s not easy to find. Why ruin it for a roll? Especially when I’m not what you’re looking for.”
“You’re wrong, Kylah.”
“You didn’t shave that mangy beard for me, Tommy, and we both know it.”
Alie? I thought, and the memory came to me: her creamy skin in the hot bed in Amsterdam, and the surprising darkness of her nipples, and the way she screamed. The way she forgave me for what I’d done.
“You’re looking for yourself under all that shit,” Kylah said. “Believe me, I’ve seen it, and you’re not going to find it here.” It’s only sex, I almost said, but she wasn’t finished. “Besides,” she continued as a sly smile started to touch her pretty face, “I’ve had a man for a while now, and I don’t think it would be right to sleep with his boss.”
My jaw dropped. “Wildman!? You’ve been fucking Wildman?”
“Hell no,” she said. “Do you even know your friends?”
“Boon?”
She shrugged, and I could tell she was enjoying my surprise. “I like a man with a story,” she said. “And he’s got one. Besides, he’s sexy as hell.”
“He’s a Buddhist!”
“Well then, he’s the dirtiest damn Buddhist I’ve ever met,” she said. I didn’t know if she was being serious or pulling my leg with that last sentence, but I knew the image was going to haunt me.
We arrived at the T-Top as the sun disappeared behind the edge of the world, Kylah clinging to me on the back of the motorcycle. I loved Erbil at dusk; it had a desert swank to it. We zoomed through its empty streets, me still in sunglasses as I had no goggles or helmet, and Kylah with her fiery hair in the wind. I wanted to be happy, and mostly I was. She was a good friend; we understood each other. But I couldn’t get the image of her with that dirty little Buddhist I called my running partner out of my head.
I pulled up next to a row of technicals: modified pickup trucks, each with a heavy-caliber machine gun mounted on the bed. They were modern warfare’s ubiquitous cavalry, and a tool of the trade in my line of work.
The bar was crowded, but I spotted Wildman right away. His outsize laugh and burly frame were hard to miss. He was playing darts with throwing knives, his version of a drinking game. He smiled when he saw me with Kylah, then laughed when she put her arm around Boon.
“He’s a killer,” Wildman said, slapping me on the back and ordering me a double Jack straight up.
I thought of replying, but I didn’t have anything to say. I finished my drink and told him I was hitting the head. On the way back, I passed the empty stage. There was a cheap Yamaha keyboard in the corner. I plugged it in, set the program to concert piano, and started playing Chopin’s third Étude, called “The Farewell.” Of all his music, Chopin thought this piece his most poignant. It begins simple enough but ends in a maelstrom of emotion, which suited my mood.
The piano wasn’t my instrument. I’d been a violin virtuoso until I gave it up at fourteen, after I realized I’d never be the best in the world. I had the work ethic, but not the innate talent. I could never play Carnegie Hall, but I had the talent to impress someone like Kylah, and that was what I wanted tonight. I wanted to show her I was more than a drifter with a gun.
I guess I wanted to lose myself, too. Music can do that, just like a slug of high-end bourbon or a two-week walkabout in the ISIS-infested mountains. Running my fingers along that keyboard could take me to any moment in my life, or anywhere else I wanted to go. But at the T-Top, all it took me to was my regret.
I lifted my fingers, letting the music crescendo around me. The Yamaha was tinny and the T-Top a bunker, but the chords lingered, buzzing around me, until my revelry was interrupted by yelling from the bar. It was the war tourists. I thought for sure they were barking at me to play Lynyrd Skynyrd.
I turned, but nobody was even looking my way. Everyone was focused on the television above the bar. An American was on his knees in front of a masked man, who was reading a prepared message. He was wearing an orange jumpsuit, like the ones at Guantanamo Bay. The executioner was in black. The desert was empty behind them. I looked away, but I knew it was done when the squaddies exploded with anger, smashing their glasses on the bar. Someone’s beer hit the television set and shattered. I walked out without another word, my heart in my shoes.
Wildman caught up to me two blocks later. “I’ll cut their cocks off and feed them to the dogs,” he said. “They’ll fucking pay.”
“We’re leaving,” I said. “Tell the Kurds. And where the hell is Boon?”
“He had already left,” Wildman said. He didn’t need to stay with Kylah. “Give him an hour.”
I didn’t want to. I really didn’t want to. But I did.