Jad Bell: Bravo Part 9

The Honda eats another mile, both of them silent.

"So what do you think?" she asks, finally.

"I try not to."

"Shooter answer."

"Easier that way. I go through the door and try not to worry about why. I leave it to you brainy types to figure out what's really going on."

She almost laughs. "You think I'm management?"

"Wouldn't dare insult you like that, Chief."

"Then don't play the dumb grunt line on me."

"I think that Zein will lead to more questions, and that'll bring Wallford back to the table with Tohir, and Tohir will try to bargain for more."

"Everything Tohir was involved with came down to only one thing the whole time I was beside him," Nessuno says. "Just one thing. Money. No politics, no religion, no philosophy except long daddy green. That's all it was ever about. If Echo has an agenda beyond that, it's a mystery to me. These are criminals who've monetized terrorism."

"So they're both."

"Exactly. But if Echo's selling a service, who's buying it?"

Bell is silent for several seconds, and when he speaks again, Nessuno expects a theory, a guess, speculation, something, but he surprises her.

"I don't believe in much," he says. "I believe in loyalty. I believe in honor. I believe in this country, for all its many, many flaws. I'm a patriot to my peril, I suppose. I believe deeply in duty, and in self-sacrifice in the pursuit of something greater. Maybe because of that I can understand the mind of a jihadi, or of the enemy, or I can at least try to. I believe in myself. That's the framing."

"G.o.d?" she asks.

"How's it go? There's no such thing as an atheist in a foxhole?"

"And outside a foxhole?"

"Too dark to read?"

She laughs again.

"I don't know," Bell says quietly. "You travel the world, you see a lot of things, and some of them defy rational explanation. I believe in spirituality, how's that?"

"But personally?"

"Personally? If there is a G.o.d, he, she, or it has a lot of explaining to do."

She checks the mirrors again. The last daylight has gone, and everything is headlights now. The Saint Nicholas medal shifts against her skin when she moves, making her aware of it once more.

"Where am I taking you?" she asks.

"I just need a room for the night."

"Someplace with a bed and bathtub's all right?"

"And a deck of cards to play some solitaire, yeah. What about you?"

"I don't want to be alone," Nessuno says.

The management at the Courtyard by Marriott in Gaithersburg did not take kindly to the damage to the mirror in her room. Nessuno gathers her things, settles her bill, and then she and Bell take the Civic south again, back into D.C. and down Ma.s.sachusetts Avenue until they find the Hotel Palomar on P Street. It's expensive, and definitely above their combined pay grades, but Nessuno thinks that the salary she hasn't spent for two years might as well go to something she'll enjoy. They valet the car and Bell takes his duffel and she takes hers and she beats him to the front desk by a step. She sends him to find a table at the hotel restaurant, Urbana, where she joins him five minutes later. It's western Mediterranean fare, and goes with the style of the hotel, the food self-important and expensive and good. They share a bottle of wine and talk about anything they can think of that isn't work, and she's not surprised he played football, though he is surprised that she wanted to be a nun.

"Every good Catholic girl wants to be a nun at some point," Nessuno says.

"You were a good Catholic girl?"

"I was a very catholic Catholic girl. That's why I never became a nun."

They finish their meal and linger over coffee, and when the check comes, she's quicker.

"Stop doing that."

"I want to."

"I can get a room of my own," Bell says.

"Do you want to get a room of your own?"

He doesn't look away, silent for several seconds. There's a melancholy in his eyes, and it makes him all the more attractive to her.

"You still have the bends," he says.

She gets up from the table. "Like you don't?"

She heads for the lobby, the elevator, and their room without looking to see if he'll follow.

He does.

Another hotel room.

They start awkwardly, almost clumsily, each of them undressing without pretense or modesty or expectation, standing opposite one another. They've left the lights off, the curtains open, and the city glow shows her his body, his scars. She likes his shoulders, his arms, the slope of his hips. His legs are long and strong, like the rest of him, which is what she imagined when she had allowed herself to imagine them like this. She moves first, closing the s.p.a.ce between them, meeting his mouth with her own, tastes him tentatively, then again, and he kisses her in return just as gently.

"Is this Petra?" he asks. "Or Elisabetta?"

"Elisabetta is better in bed." She grins.

"That's not what I mean."

She touches his face, traces the concern at his mouth. She takes hold of his hands, places them on her hips, moves them along her body.

"It's all right," she says. "I've had the shot. I'm not going to get knocked up."

"Don't mean that, either. I mean you."

"I'm not crazy, Jad. You know I'm not crazy. This isn't multiple personality disorder or schizophrenia or Stockholm syndrome or s.e.x addiction. Just us. It's just us."

One of his hands slips from hers, draws a line between her b.r.e.a.s.t.s. Touches the Saint Nicholas medal on its chain. Looks her in the eyes.

"It's all right," she says again.

She kisses him once more, and this time, he answers. She can feel a pa.s.sion in him warring with restraint, and she seizes it, draws upon it, returns it. His hands move, a caress, then a hold, then a grip that delights her. He lifts her, and she wraps herself around him, the stubble at his throat sc.r.a.ping her cheek. He sets her on the bed, lays her down, moves along her body, exploring, touching, and she pulls at him, hands at his arms, at his shoulders, at his hips.

When he goes down on her, she claws at his back, tears at the bedclothes, cries out with the sudden intensity of the pleasure. It's something Vosil Tohir never did, something he thought demeaning, servile, unmanning, and unbecoming; the source of his pleasure and hers was to be found in his c.o.c.k, no place else. Bell's pleasure is in her, and it takes her by surprise, and it delights her. She wonders if this is what Heath imagined, this shift from object to ident.i.ty. When she thinks she can bear it no more, she pushes him away, rolls to climb him. She tastes herself in his mouth. He is hard, and she is eager, and she does not look away, meeting his eyes as she guides him inside, as she mounts him. This, too, is welcome, and wonderful, and never what Tohir would allow; he was always on top, and so often behind, and while his hands could be gentle, they would always announce possession.

She bends to him, kisses him, riding him. His hands rise, and she almost flinches, imagining he is reaching for her throat, but instead they find her shoulders, describe a descent along her arms. Fingers lacing with hers, as if to steady her, and now the Saint Nicholas medal is swaying, rocking between them, and she feels him beginning to lose himself, and she wants to go with him, wants to climax as one. Her forehead touches his, her grip on him tightening, the sudden burst of urgency and that tremendous pulse building inside her until she can barely manage the word.

"Now," she tells him.

They lie together in the darkness, and she stays in his arms, postcoital, still coasting in shared pleasure. She moves first, slipping from his embrace, separating; yet another difference between the two men, Tohir always so anxious to rebuild the barriers eroded by their intimacy. Nessuno expects Bell to drop off into sleep after they separate, but instead he rolls on his side, his hand drawing lines on her flank.

"Tell me about Poland," Bell says.

"You don't want me to tell you how to keep a secret?" It's Elisabetta talking now, far more than Petra Nessuno, playful, teasing. The smile comes unbidden, the satisfaction of having shared this bed.

"I know how to keep a secret."

She laughs softly. "Not like he was talking about you don't."

"Sure I do. The way Heatdish keeps a secret? He kills everyone who knows it. That's posturing."

"Not how he saw it."

"You're still here."

"You know how to kill a moment." It's another evasion, another Elisabetta quip, and Nessuno feels herself struggling for equilibrium between two covers, between this person she wants to be here and now and the person she has had to be for so terribly long. She knows somewhere in the middle ground there's a truth, the amalgam, but it's out of reach, like the taillights ahead of them on the drive back from Leesburg, visible at steady distance but somehow impossible to close the gap.

He moves hair out of her eyes, tucks it behind her ear. Even in the darkness, she can make out his face, his expression, the concentration.

"This is your idea of pillow talk?" she asks.

He kisses her, softer than before.

"We had a lead, this Italian named Pallazzini," she says. "I-Elisabetta, I mean-met him in Dubai. He was moving antiquities, stolen art, like that. He'd done very well with the fall of Baghdad."

"Seems like a number of folks did."

She snorts, hates herself for doing it. Elisabetta never snorts; she laughs or she doesn't, but she never lets herself sound like a pig.

"Pallazzini led to Heatdish?" Bell asks.

Nessuno nods, wets her lips. She's finding this harder to talk about than she imagined, but now that she's offered it, she cannot turn back. She needs Elisabetta's voice, her distance, her remove. It was Elisabetta who did these things, she tells herself, not Petra.

"I knew Tohir was a mover," she says. "When Pallazzini brought me to meet him, it wasn't obvious, he wasn't flashy-he was never flashy-but I knew it. I mean, he didn't even give me his name at that first meeting. And I was f.u.c.king brilliant, I have to tell you. I was gorgeous, and I was s.e.xy, and I was smart, and I made sure he saw all of it, and it worked. Moved the first piece-it was a painting-flawlessly."

"With a little help, I'm sure."

This time, she doesn't snort. It's a gentle laugh, exactly what it needs to be.

"Just a little," she says. "He contacted me twice after that over the next few months, had me move two more pieces. I did those flawlessly, too."

"And all the time, he's checking you out."

"Oh, yes. The full exam, t.i.t to toe. Had me followed. My finances were a mess, credit maxed, straining the limits of my lifestyle. Everything to make me look ideal but not too ideal. I was living in Rome, and I'm almost positive he had the place searched on two different occasions while I was away."

"You were living in Rome?"

"I was. What's the matter, you don't like Rome?"

"I like Rome fine. Go on."

She shifts, lays her head against his breast, and Bell lies back. It's easier this way; she doesn't have to look at him.

"I ended up in London on, quote, business, unquote, and he contacted me there. Everything prior had been intermediaries, but this time he wanted to meet in person. We met, and he told me he had more work if I was willing. I was willing. I spent the next couple months acting as courier, sometimes as translator, sometimes as arm candy. By that point we were lovers."

She hesitates, waiting for Bell to make some comment, some acknowledgment that he's heard. She can hear his heart beat in his chest, steady, regular.

"After a few more months, we met up in Prague. Beautiful hotel, like this one, but cla.s.sic. We had dinner, went back to the room, made love. The middle of the night he pulls me out of bed, says we're going for a drive. His manner was different, he was...anxious, I couldn't read him. All the alarms were going off. I had Petra's voice in my head, just screaming warnings at me."

"He tested you," Bell says.

"Final exam," Nessuno says. "We ended up at a farmhouse about two hours out of town. The kind of middle of nowhere where you know nothing good ever happens."

"And there were two men."

"There were two men. And Tohir told me that he wanted me to be beside him, because he loved me, and we could do great things together. But he had to be certain, there could be no doubt. That if I were to go further with him, he had to be sure. The first one, it was Pallazzini, of course. They'd beaten him, not as bad as some I'd seen, but he'd been worked over. Vosil put the gun in my hand, and I did it, I killed him. He thought that was the hard one, you know? Because he knew I knew Pallazzini, he thought we'd been lovers, too. We hadn't, but he believed it. He thought that was the anguish."

Bell, beneath her, makes no move, makes no sound.

"The other one, he couldn't have known," she says. "They'd tortured him. The full works, he was missing teeth, fingers, they'd savaged one eye."

"You knew him," Bell says.

"Tohir couldn't have known. If he had known, he'd have killed me, too. He couldn't have known. But Petra Nessuno knew him, this second one. They really had been lovers, you see? He was...they'd done language training together. It was just dumb fate. And he recognized me, even that far gone, I could see it in his last eye."

Bell's hand moves, climbs along her back, settles, palm broad and warm, and she realizes she is shaking. The words, for her, for Elisabetta, are hard to break free.

"He was going to say my name," she says.

The phone wakes them both while it's still dark, and there's a moment of confusion before she realizes it's his and not hers demanding the attention. She pulls hair out of her face and sees the clock saying it's eighteen minutes past three in the morning. She can't hear what's being said on the other end of the line, but she doesn't need to; everything in his body shifts as the last shreds of his sleep vanish.

"Five minutes," he says. He gives the hotel's address.

Nessuno reaches for the lamp, switches it on, flinches. He's out of bed and pulling on his clothes already. She watches the way he moves, watches him dress, sees again the scars both old and new that she discovered on him the night before.