I move; I can’t help it. The gunman is almost relieved. He’s got another excuse to scold or yell or take some sort of action. Anything to relieve the tedium.
We’re both brought up by an insistent roar. The sound of a boat has reached us, shattering the calm like a fist through a window. Its engine is enhanced for speed and power. The boat moves aggressively, bow thrust out of the water. There's nothing restrained about the vehicle. Whoever chose it wants to make his presence known.
My companion grins and points.
“There's Mr. Kemp now. He’s eager to do this in person.”
I don’t need to ask what “this” is. Discovery is not Kemp’s endgame, only death.
Minutes pass. I'm not sure how many. Three? Five? The henchman tracks the speedboat, shading his eyes even though he’s wearing those stupid mirrored sunglasses favored by muscled hitmen everywhere. He might be dreaming of a rich payday or an end to this nonsense that requires him to hold a gun to the head of a harmless-looking older woman. Maybe he’s a sadist (Kemp has no shortage of those in his employ), and he’s looking forward to a grisly show, one in which he might even get to participate.
I can make out five separate figures on the boat, including one who is both shorter and broader than the others. His improbably brown hair barely moves in the breeze. Kemp must be seventy by now, but he appears unchanged even at this distance.
Unchanged, unrepentant, and always one step ahead. He knew how ill-advised my choice of lover would prove to be long before I ever learned the truth.
~
Bad enough I was expected to spy on Brian. My employer’s veiled suggestions now caused me to doubt my lover. Was he keeping something from me? How would I know? Could I learn his truth without his ever learning mine?
Several weeks into my newly complicated life, I was sent to Bombay. Brian arranged to work with a corporate client at the same time, a situation I might at one time have considered lucky but now found to be suspicious. The stifling July heat couldn’t mask the jittery unease that enveloped the city. Not a month earlier, Air India Flight 192 had exploded on a transatlantic journey from Delhi to Montreal via London. Intelligence pointed to Sikh militants. Three hundred of the dead passengers were Canadian, prompting official protests from that country. While we were in India, a bomb intended for another Air India flight went off at Tokyo’s Narita International Airport. The Indian government was in an uproar, the country on edge.
As usual, I had two tasks to perform. My scheduled meeting was a cover for my real business. Kemp’s people had been using the services of a lower-level district administrator in order to get inside information on board members Kemp intended to blackmail. They discovered the man had also accepted money from a local criminal organization for the same purpose. His dossier hinted at other perversions. None of those warranted action. No, the singular sin in my employer’s mind was disloyalty. While Kemp had no intention of taking on the crooks that caused the conflict of interest, he wanted to send a message. My target was the greedy man playing both sides against the middle.
Brian and I booked adjoining rooms at the Taj Mahal Palace, a grand old establishment with a world-class collection of artifacts amassed over more than half a century. They were connected by a door he arranged to leave open. The space was obscenely luxurious. Its magic was lost on me. I was struggling under the weight of too many secrets.
I’d been given one of those close-up assignments I both feared and detested. It seemed the sheer number of people filling the streets of Bombay made a long-distance kill too difficult. I’d have to do a hit and run. I think Kemp gave me these jobs just to see how I’d do. No, that’s not it; he knew I’d succeed. He assigned them to me because he knew they made me unhappy. He wanted to remind me he ran every aspect of my life. I wasn’t simply an assassin; I was his assassin.
I argued forcefully against using a knife. I was given a syringe. I didn’t ask what it contained. On the appointed day, I walked head down in front of a government building at lunchtime. I’d dressed in a traditional sari and veil and held the hypodermic hidden in one hand. I’d practiced the routine in my head for hours. Brush past the target as he reaches the sidewalk. Pretend to stumble into him. Push the needle straight into his heart. Empty the syringe before pulling it out. Get away quickly.
It didn’t quite work as planned. Instead of clutching his chest, the victim surprised me by grabbing my wrist. Before I had a chance to yank my arm back, he fell to his knees and then backwards, nearly pulling me on top of him. The scrum of office workers should have provided adequate cover, assuming I wouldn’t end up straddling a dying man.
I spoke in Hindi. “Please help this gentleman!” The bureaucrats, businessmen, and passersby moved back. Not the reaction I wanted. I tried again in English. “He needs assistance!”
A young man in business attire stepped in and others followed suit, creating a tight circle. I pulled myself free of the man’s death grip and scurried away, back hunched and knees bent. I didn’t dare stand up straight until I’d put some distance between us. I looked back once to see a well-dressed middle-aged man with a black bag rush over. He issued commands in three languages.
“Excuse me. Step aside. I’m a doctor. Let me through.”
Eyes lowered, I continued to walk as slowly as I dared to the hotel. I’d had close calls before. None had affected me quite like this one. I splashed water on my face, checked myself for blood (there was none), and hurriedly changed. Back on the street again, I disposed of my disguise and went to the meeting I’d arranged with an executive management team. How I got through the afternoon without fainting I can’t imagine. I remember clasping my hands together so no one would notice they were shaking.
As far as the home office was concerned, the trip had been productive. The message waiting for me at the Taj’s front desk read, “Well done. Victor.”
At the hotel bar, I knocked back two Scotches, neat. Then I sat with a glass of tonic water in one of the lounge chairs with a view to the entrance. Brian arrived a little later without seeing me. I waited until he picked up the keys and headed upstairs, allowed several minutes to pass, and followed.
I heard the shower running when I came in. Kicking off my shoes, I threw myself on the bed with an arm flung across my face. Though I’d tried to slip in unnoticed, nothing got past Brian. The water stopped. He called through the door to inquire about my day. We swapped our short stories about horrific clients. Apparently satisfied, he went back to his business while I questioned my ability to neatly pack away this latest incident.
A couple of minutes later, he walked out of the bathroom, a towel at his waist. He regarded me with sympathy.
“You had a particularly rough time, didn’t you?”
I sat up and pasted on a smile. “You know how it goes in my world . . .” I let the words float away. Maybe Brian would take the hint.
“It must be hard to work for Victor Kemp.”
It wasn’t what he said. He knew I worked for Kemp; he’d been hired by the man, for heaven’s sake. It was how he said it that set off the flashing red lights and the whooping alarm sounds in my head. Warning: get out now! I pretended a nonchalance I didn’t feel.
“It’s not always easy.”
“Maybe it’s time we talked about a few things. Let me dry off and get into some clothes. Stay right where you are.”
Brian turned back into the bathroom without closing the door. Steam filled the bedroom. I fell back, pinned to the bed like the heroine in a horror movie. Something was coming, something very bad, and I couldn’t do anything to stop it.
When my lover emerged with his pants on, his blue chambray shirt half buttoned, I hadn’t shifted so much as a muscle. After a couple of seconds of awkward silence, he walked over, took me by the arms, and pulled me to a sitting position. Then he stepped all the way across the room and began talking.
As my employer suspected, Brian had indeed been hiding something—the fact that he worked for MI6, Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service. He’d been on loan for years to an Interpol task force assigned specifically to bring down one of the largest global criminal enterprises the agency had ever encountered, the one run by none other than Victor Kemp. My employer’s activities made him a high-value target. His connections with so many well-placed people made him a difficult one on which to hang any charges. Brian became a roving inside man. He contracted with Kemp’s partners, allies, and subsidiaries, collecting what insight and information he could before moving on. This latest assignment had put him directly into Kemp’s headquarters and into my life.
Somewhere in the middle of his revealing speech, it occurred to me that I was safe. No one at SIS, including Brian, apparently suspected me of anything. I was simply another well-placed lead, someone who might be persuaded to help identify suspicious activities behind the legitimate-looking ventures. Brian was supposed to add extra incentive by being his charmingly persuasive self.
“I couldn’t tell you before now. I didn’t want to frighten you.” Brian walked back to the bed and looked down at me. “I didn’t want to fall in love with you, either. Ah, well. No turning back now, is there?”
I stood up too quickly and felt lightheaded. Brian reached for me. I folded my arms across my chest and looked down. My mind went into overdrive trying to sort out the truths from the lies. I thought I might sink into the floor or explode like one of those inflatable dolls. He watched me silently, waiting for me to look up. I did. In his eyes, I saw compassion and yes, love. Then, to his surprise and mine, I burst into tears.
I can’t remember ever crying. Not as a baby or a young girl, not when I was hurt, not when my father was in the midst of a drug-fueled rant or when I learned he died, not when I was molested and then kicked out of the house. Not even when Victor Kemp took control of my life. Now I wept as if to make up for a decades-old drought. I gulped, gasped, bawled, and yelped like a wounded animal.
To Brian’s great credit, he said nothing. He took me in his arms and rocked me.
When the worst of my outburst had passed, I took a deep breath and said, “My turn.”
Brian had already heard quite a bit about my lonely childhood. He knew I was the daughter of self-involved parents stranded between the Beat and Flower Power generations. I’d told him my birth name was Suzanne Brooks and that my parents, Mo and Lisette, had never married. I’d even shared a few of the more horrifying examples of their monumental neglect, which I tried to spin as amusing life lessons.
Now I filled him in on the rest of it. He learned how and when I went from university student to security manager and Victor Kemp’s handpicked on-call killer. That last bit of information was harder for me to put on the table than all the fictions I’d invented up to that point.
“So,” Brian said when I’d finished. “Victor Kemp's assassin.”
As emotionally drained as I was, I couldn’t protest or come up with a phrase that would turn my profession into a kinder, gentler version of itself.
He pulled back and looked me in the face, his green eyes full. “Suzanne,” he said, “this may be hard to believe, but what you’ve told me doesn’t change how I feel about you.”
In that moment, I became his, always and forever.
We left Bombay a half-day early. We made a stop in Brussels and traveled to Bruges. There we were married in a tiny chapel in front of his mother, his sister, her husband, and their two small boys. We spent much of our twelve-hour honeymoon trying to figure out how we would beat Victor Kemp.
I still had one more surprise to share with Brian: I was three-and-a-half months pregnant.