Jad Bell: Bravo Part 5

"Good to hear. Freddie says she was in his bed when you hit jackpot."

"Freddie wasn't in the room."

"So you're saying she wasn't in his bed?"

"Sergeant, we are not talking about this."

"I didn't think they existed. b.i.t.c.hes Incorporated, I mean."

"They exist."

Jorge thinks about that. "d.a.m.n. I thought we were hard-core."

"Yeah," Bell says. "Me, too."

Chapter Seven.

"I THINK YOU should get laid." Heath pours more Maker's Mark into the gla.s.s in front of Nessuno. "That's probably against doctor's advice, but then again, I think doctors are mostly full of s.h.i.t. I think you should get laid, sleep late, read a dozen books, eat out at restaurants that serve your favorite foods, see every movie you've missed, spend some of that money you've saved up on things you don't need but you certainly deserve, and then get laid again. So there you go."

Nessuno takes the drink, holding it from the top by her fingertips, tented, and she can feel the slight chill from the ice beneath her palm. The cubes knock together in near silence.

"Or get drunk," Heath says. "Blind falling down throwing-up until you think you'll turn inside out drunk. You talk to your parents yet?"

"I talked to my parents." The answer comes flat, and Nessuno tries to remedy that, adding, "They want me to come home for a bit."

"So maybe you should listen to your parents." Heath finishes refilling her own gla.s.s, sets the bottle down before picking up her drink and leaning back against the couch. The bottle is more than half empty. It was full when they started. They're sitting in the living room of Heath's small home in Montgomery Village, Maryland, and it's past midnight.

"Maybe I should."

"Chicago in August. Might be nice."

"Have you been to Chicago in August?"

Heath raises her drink in mock toast, takes a swallow. Nessuno rocks her gla.s.s from side to side, slightly, watching the plane of alcohol shift, then brings it to her lips and finishes most of the pour in two swallows. She's not tasting the bourbon so much as feeling it, the scorching race of alcohol through her breast. She looks out the window to her left again, out over the front yard of the comfortable house, into a neighborhood that is silent and still. It's been more than thirty minutes since she's seen anything moving outside. Not even a car since then. It all feels deceptively safe and rea.s.suring.

"The verbal debrief will hold," Heath says. "I'll stall the bra.s.s, you can take your time with the written. Seriously, take the time you need to get your head straight."

Nessuno tilts the gla.s.s, finds that it's empty.

"We need more ice," Heath says, rising and heading for the kitchen.

The Lear taxis straight into one of Hurlburt's hangars upon landing, and the doors close immediately behind them. The one called Steelriver is first down the stairs, with Nessuno coming second to last in the group of shooters, Warlock behind her. She's seen predawn creeping into the sky as they touched down, but once she's out of the light of the plane and into the hangar, everything here is sharp and bright, high halogens that bathe the cavernous interior blue-white and bounce a glare off the polished floor.

There are eleven men waiting, all in civvies. Nessuno casts her eyes over them in quick survey, trying to recognize faces and, failing that, duties. A black Chevy Blazer has been parked maybe ten meters away, and its motor is running, one man in a suit standing beside it and another visible behind the wheel. Something about them shouts federal to her rather than military. The others are all from the army, though, she's sure of that, even if she's not sure who they are or what they're here to do. Maybe a couple of MPs, she figures, and one or two counterintelligence agents. The shooters have humped their gear bags off the plane, and they drop them at their feet. Warlock peels off immediately for a quick consult with a stone-faced Latino whom Nessuno puts in his midforties. They start exchanging quick, quiet words that she cannot and does not try to overhear.

She's tired, still shaky, and there's a pressure behind her eyes that's either the start of one h.e.l.l of a headache or the demand of tears or both. The headache she can deal with, the way she dealt with the shakes and the vomiting, but she doesn't want tears, not here, not now. She knows they're coming, and she's willing to accept them later without complaint, the same way she saw Warlock accept his adrenaline crash. The price of doing business. But she will neither accept nor allow water from her eyes in front of these men.

The flight crew disembarks, and Nessuno watches them make a silent beeline for the rear of the hangar, never once looking back. They don't know, and they know better than to want to know. Four of the waiting group go up the stairs, disappear inside the plane, come out again in just over a minute. They're carrying Tohir, strapped to a stretcher. He's still unconscious. They load him immediately into the back of the Blazer. The one in the suit watches without comment. Nessuno wonders how Tohir will be parceled up, if it'll be DIA or FBI or perhaps some other arm of Justice that takes possession. The man is a criminal as much as a terrorist. She wonders if someone, somewhere, imagines a trial.

It doesn't matter. In the end, everyone will get a piece of him.

She doesn't care.

Right now, she tells herself that she never wants to see Vosil Tohir's face again.

Someone opens the hangar doors, and she watches the Blazer roll away, speeding up and then turning out of sight. When she turns back, the stone-faced man is in front of her, offering his hand.

"Colonel Daniel Ruiz," he says. "Welcome home, Chief."

"Thank you, sir."

Ruiz shakes her hand as though he means what he says, then indicates two of the remaining men. The older of them is black, wearing blue jeans and a Red Sox sweatshirt, head shaved and glossy enough to kick light. The other looks a bit younger, midtwenties, perhaps, white, shorter, also blue jeans but no jacket, and he's made no attempt to hide the SIG riding at his hip or the cuffs in their case on his belt. He's got a haircut that hasn't quite forgotten regulation but is doing its best.

"These are Sergeants Danso and Harrington," Ruiz says. "You'll need to go with them."

"Yes, sir."

"Mind if I sit in?" Warlock asks.

The older sergeant, Danso, shrugs. "You missing the CI action, Jad?"

"I just want to make sure you haven't lost a step, Han."

"No objection. Chief?"

"No objection."

There are more words, Ruiz telling the shooters where they need to be and when. The one called Cardboard offers her his hand.

"Keep the shirt," he says.

She falls in with Danso on one side and Harrington on the other, Warlock walking a little behind, begins crossing the hangar, following the path of the flight crew. They're trying to keep it soft, but she can't escape the feeling of being guarded, of being watched.

"I was hoping you'd ask for it back," she hears Steelriver say.

Heath comes back with more ice. She's five years older than Nessuno, has crossed over into her thirties, blond hair cut short and neat, and a Laura Ingalls Wilder face that makes the people who meet her think words like sweet and innocent, an illusion that's shattered the moment she opens her mouth and begins to swear in a way that would make the entirety of the marine corps blush. Right now, she's not doing a very good job of hiding her concern.

Nessuno holds out her gla.s.s for ice.

"You need to reintegrate," Heath says.

Nessuno takes the bottle, refills her drink. "I thought that was what we're doing."

"No, we're getting drunk. This is off-the-record s.h.i.tface time."

"Unofficial."

"f.u.c.k official. I saw your medical, did I tell you? You're clean."

"You said."

"Did I? The bourbon must be working." Heath takes her seat on the couch again, tucking her feet beneath her. She swallows some of her drink. "So tell me."

"What?"

Heath indicates Nessuno with the gla.s.s in her hand, gesturing vaguely at her shoulder. "Scarring along the shoulder, consistent with bullet track or similar projectile injury whatever the f.u.c.k that means and which, I note, you failed to offer an adequate explanation of how you came to have such a mark when questioned by the examining physician for such and s.h.i.t I am drunk. You know how I know I'm drunk?"

"Run-on sentences."

"Run-on sentences," Heath says.

"You always talk in run-on sentences, ma'am."

"Call me ma'am again and I'll club you with this bottle. Tell me."

Nessuno shrugs. "He didn't do it, if that's what you're asking."

"That was kind of what I was asking, yes."

"I didn't duck fast enough."

"I thought Tohir didn't use you like that."

"Nice."

Heath winces. "Not what I meant."

Nessuno actually grins, is surprised by how good it feels. It pa.s.ses fast. "There was a deal-heroin-and he wanted me to go with him and look like arm candy. They were selling to some Italians."

"December." Heath nods. "I remember the report."

"So Tohir wanted me there to look good, but also to listen in on what was being said in Italian because his Italian is s.h.i.t. We finish up, and I'm being a pretty hostess and clearing the drinks, and I overhear one of these guys saying they're going to f.u.c.k us over. So I told Tohir."

"And?"

"Bullets were employed." She says each word clearly, aware that she, too, is now quite drunk. She looks into her gla.s.s. There's a fingernail's depth of bourbon remaining, but she thinks it's less, because of the displacement from the ice.

"You left that part out."

"What were you going to do, ma'am? Come take me home? Kiss it all better?" Nessuno empties her gla.s.s and sets it down, harder than she intends to, and it knocks loudly on the surface of the coffee table. "Yeah, I'm drunk, too."

"You f.u.c.king well better be, you just called me ma'am again. And you killed the f.u.c.king bottle. That bottle was full when we started, Chief."

Nessuno is staring at the empty gla.s.s, the ice cubes slowly melting. The wave of sudden self-pity she feels is followed by a surge of anger that she suspects is directed, more than anything, at herself but that she points at Heath instead.

"That's not my f.u.c.king name," Nessuno says.

They end up in a briefing room attached to the hangar, with Nessuno seated at one side of a long table and Danso and Harrington opposite. Warlock stands. On the table is a pitcher of water, three plastic cups in a stack, a cardboard box about the right size for shoes, and a thick envelope, catalog size, stamped with declarations of secrecy and warnings of exactly how much trouble your a.s.s will be in if you open it and aren't authorized to do so. There's a routing sequence on the envelope, and four signatures, arranged by date, ending with the most recent. Reading upside down, she's pretty sure the last signature is H. DANSO. The first one, she knows, is A. HEATH. There's also a small monitorlike unit that resembles nothing so much as a View-Master, except it's molded ballistic black plastic and probably costs a hundred times as much as the toy.

"We're going to ask you some questions, Chief," Danso says, breaking the seal on Nessuno's proof-of-life envelope without ceremony and pulling a sheaf of papers free. He hands the envelope off to Harrington, who empties the rest of the contents on the table, a set of eight-by-ten photographs, and begins laying them out in front of her.

"CI?" Nessuno asks.

She knows the answer already, knows she's asking only to buy herself time, though she's had the entirety of the flight in to get her head straight. It hasn't been enough, and while she knows absolutely that nothing in what she has said so far, in anything that she has done, has betrayed the fact, she is scared. She is as afraid as she ever was in the past sixteen months, as frightened here in Florida as she was in Tashkent, or Vienna, or Moscow, that she will be revealed as an impostor, as a fraud, as a spy. She knows, absolutely, that she shouldn't feel these things. She knows that she is home, that she is safe.

But she cannot make herself stop feeling what she feels, and that, in turn, makes her feel all the more adrift.

"We are counterintel, that is correct." Danso pats his pockets for a moment, and Harrington stops moving the photos around long enough to shake his head and produce a ballpoint, handing it over. Danso clicks the pen alive, begins running down the first sheet, and Warlock takes the opportunity to reach in for the pitcher and pour. He sets one of the cups in front of her, takes another for himself. She's oddly touched by the act, tries to find a smile to give him, but by then he's already backed off, and Danso is ready to begin.

"What's your name?" Danso asks.

"Nessuno," she says. "Petra Graziella."

"Rank?"

"CWO Two."

"DOB?"

She needs a moment before she can tell him.

"And where were you born?"

This comes a little faster. "Philly, Thomas Jefferson University Hospital."

"Your father's name?"

She tells him.

"Your mother's maiden name?"

She tells him, feeling marginally more confident. All the answers are there, waiting in the back of her mind. Covered in dust, hidden in corners, but there. She just needs to stay calm, she thinks, and it'll all come back.

"Your mother's place of birth?"

"Palermo."

"Name of your first DI?"

"Sergeant Mendoza."

"Where did you have your first kiss?"