Outside Washington, DC
USA
Jon Smith opened the cardboard container and scooped an unidentifiable tangle of Chinese food onto his plate. Across the coffee table from him, Randi was gnawing on an egg roll with one hand and compulsively spinning a chopstick across the backs of her fingers with the other.
“I’m empty,” Smith said. “You want another beer?”
“I’ll get them.”
He managed to stand before she did and started toward the kitchen. “No, it’s good for me to get up and move around.”
“Doctor’s orders?” she said sarcastically.
He ignored her and dug around in the fridge, finding a couple of Fat Tires at the back.
“Thanks again for putting me up,” he said, popping the tops and starting back for the living room.
“Mi casa es su casa.”
She was wearing an old Columbia University sweatshirt and a pair of military-issue boxer shorts that he suspected had belonged to her late husband. Her bare feet were propped on a fossil stone coffee table—one of the many expensive upgrades Klein had signed off on out of guilt for getting her shot in the back.
“Interesting choice of cuisine,” he said, easing back onto the couch and shoveling some noodles into his mouth.
“Don’t get Freudian on me, Jon. I was in the mood, okay?”
“Absolutely.”
They ate in silence for a while, him trying to find a comfortable position on the sofa and her staring off into space. She’d hardly said anything on the drive over from their meeting with Klein, which was unusual. When in the throes of an operation, she was usually a ball of nervous energy.
“You okay, Randi?”
The sound of his voice snapped her back into the present. “Why wouldn’t I be?”
“I don’t know. You seem a little…detached.”
“Maybe being stuck in the middle of something that could turn into World War Three has me a little on edge.”
Doubtful, he knew. She thrived on this kind of thing. The bigger and uglier the better.
“It’s Kaito, isn’t it?”
The egg roll stopped short on its way to her mouth. “Yoshima? What about him?”
“He’s dead.”
“I’m aware of that.”
Smith went back to eating. Pushing would just piss her off. And he was in no condition to deal with a pissed-off Randi Russell.
She was the first to break the silence. “Maybe going to see him wasn’t such a great idea.”
Smith shrugged. “Sometimes you just have to close your eyes and charge.”
“I guess.” She scooped some food from the carton onto her plate. “As much as I hate to admit it, I kind of liked the guy. He wasn’t a scumbag like a lot of them. I honestly don’t know what he was.”
“Bat-shit insane as near as I could ever tell.”
“Yeah. But who wouldn’t be if they’d grown up like that?” She kicked her feet back up onto the table. “Klein was stuck for the first time I’ve ever seen and I had an angle. I keep asking myself if I was just showing off. If I dived in without completely thinking through what I was doing.”
Smith chewed thoughtfully. Her willingness to throw herself at things full guns was her greatest strength. In truth, though, sometimes a hammer wasn’t the right tool for the job.
“He wasn’t involved in Fukushima,” she said. “So I got him killed for nothing.”
“Jesus, Randi. You’re acting like he was the pope or something. On top of everything else he’s done in his career, he just tried to assassinate the head of Japan’s military and managed to take out a lot of innocent people in the process.”
“Yeah. But I’m guessing a bunch of Chinese politicians came up with the bomb idea. Not his style. And I’m not sure Takahashi doesn’t need killing. All he seems interested in doing is throwing gas on this thing.”
Smith shrugged. “Are you even sure you got Kaito killed? He botched the assassination. You might have just been in the wrong place at the wrong time. Another blonde bimbo holed up in his apartment when the Chinese government decided he’d outlived his usefulness.”
She threw a fortune cookie at him, bouncing it off his chest. “Bimbo, huh?”
“I meant that in the most positive way possible.”
“I have a bad feeling about all this, Jon. You know how these things can go: one minute everyone’s flipping each other the bird from the deck of their ship, and the next a million people are dead. Delicate situations just aren’t my forte.”
When he laughed, the pain wasn’t quite as bad as it had been over the last few days. “You said a mouthful there.”