Cold Fire

by Dustin Stevens

  In its place was anger. Rage. Hatred. Full-scale hostility that roiled through my system, bubbling just beneath the surface. To stand ten feet away and look at me, I would have appeared perfectly calm, sitting in the front seat, staring at the city of San Diego as Diaz followed the signs toward the base.

  To know me though, to look into my eyes, it was apparent that a tempest of adrenaline and acrimony was swirling beneath the surface.

  For five long years I had bit back the bitterness, forced it to stay down to keep from consuming me from within. Now it had found me, slapped me in the face, and demanded to be dealt with.

  Somehow, I had made it out of that room without sprinting across and smashing Manny Juarez into the wall. Something told me very few of the others involved would be so lucky.

  Diaz finished her third call beside me and dropped the cell phone into the middle console. She gripped the wheel in both hands and extended her bottom lip out, exhaling a puff of air over her face, a strand of air flying back off her forehead.

  “Bet you didn’t see this coming when you woke up this morning?” I muttered, my voice just audible over the sound of the engine whining.

  “You make one hell of an entrance, I’ll give you that,” Diaz said. By the tone of her voice I couldn’t tell if she was pissed I’d showed up and turned her world on its head, or just gearing up for what lay in store. I opted against responding, keeping my eyes narrowed as I stared out the window, as the city was just beginning to put itself to sleep for the night.

  “What happened to your wife?”

  The words surprised me, interrupting me midthought. My lips parted a half inch as I unconsciously turned toward her, silent.

  Hands still in a death grip on the wheel, she glanced over at me, pausing a moment before moving her attention back to the road. “That was our agreement. Before this was over, you’d tell me what happened.”

  I kept my face aimed toward her, though my gaze slid back through the front windshield to the road ahead.

  “That was our agreement,” I echoed.

  Five years had passed since that fateful night, though not once had I ever spoken of it. Not in its entirety, anyway. At moments I had alluded to it, maybe even acknowledged snippets of it, but never had I told the entire thing from start to finish. Not to Hutch after it happened, not to the appointed psychiatrists they made me talk to before accepting my resignation.

  Even my subconscious, lurking just beneath the surface every night when I closed my eyes, couldn’t bear the act of telling the entire story.

  “I’d been away for six weeks,” I said. “Myself and two guys from my squad, Diggs and Martin, both good guys, both out of the game now as well. We’d been tracking this known runner across most of Central America, starting in El Salvador, taking us through Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica. Finally caught up with him in Panama.”

  I flicked my gaze over to her to make sure she was listening, her face intent on the road as she drove. Halfway through a turn her eyes met mine, urging me forward, before returning to the task at hand.

  “Couldn’t have asked for a better bust. Panama, as close to an ally as we have in the region, with their beautiful extradition laws. Eight hours after finding his ass holed up in a shack on the edge of a cocaine field, we had him and the entire operation under custody, and we were headed home.

  “Up until that point, we’d had no idea how long the damn thing was going to take, so showing up back on American soil that night was a treat. We caught a one-way flight into NBSD, slapped each other on the back, and headed out.”

  I paused for just a moment, remembering the moment, the joy we had felt. In the parking lot we had toasted each other with a can of Natural Light, a more watered-down horse-piss beer having never existed. It was a big score for us, the kind of thing that would grant us a lot more agency leeway from then on.

  “I don’t know why, but I didn’t call my wife. At the time I thought it would be nice to surprise her, but looking back . . .”

  Again Diaz looked over, silently urging me to keep going. She avoided the freeway as she drove, sticking to city streets, pushing the straightaways as fast as she could, the engine revving and falling away each time.

  “Anyway, that night I was feeling good. I was back in my truck, I was going to go home and see my wife, my daughter, eat real food, sleep in an actual bed. You’ve been on the job before—I don’t have to explain it to you.”

  “Right,” Diaz managed, her voice showing she was a bit surprised by being brought into the story.

  “The first thing I remember was the smell. Even through my jacked-up, can-barely-notice-that-shit-Hutch-is-always-drinking nose, I picked up on the scent. Fire. Smoke. Charred wood. Roasted meat.”

  My voice cracked just a tiny bit on the last words, pure rage obstructing me from delivering them without alteration. I squeezed my left hand into a tight ball and held it above my thigh, keeping it there a long moment before dropping it back into place.

  “Next was the sight of it. I hadn’t seen it before because of the setting sun behind me, but once it blinked out beneath the horizon, I could see the orange glow to the south, undeniable against the darkening sky.

  “Even though I spent a large amount of time on the road, I knew the area well enough to put it together in my mind. I don’t know why, I had no reason to even think such a thing, but I just knew. I knew based on where the glow was coming from, I knew because of the feeling in my stomach, everything.

  “I just knew.”

  Once more I pushed out a long breath. This part I had replayed in my mind hundreds, thousands of times before. It came to me every night, sprang into my thoughts at least once a day.

  The easy part was over.

  “I tried calling then, but it went straight to voice mail. Not even a single ringtone. It only confirmed my initial thought. My family was in trouble.”

  “So what did you do?” Diaz asked, a red light blazing in front of us, the car idling. I could feel her gaze turned to stare at me, though I couldn’t bring myself to meet it.

  “I prayed,” I said, the words tasting sour on my tongue, an act that to this day I’m not terribly proud of. “God, Buddha, Allah, Odin, Pele, the Great Spirit . . . I hit them all. Made every promise I could think of, tried every bargain known to man. Begged them, please, somehow, not to let me be right.

  “But I was.”

  My eyes slid closed as I remembered the details of that night. A tremor ran the length of my spine, goose bumps rising like chicken skin over my arms.

  “The fire had been going a while by the time I got there. The second story had already collapsed, most of the first floor was gone. Everything was charred black, nothing more than cinders.

  “I pulled up as close as I could, but had to stop a good fifty feet away. The heat was so sweltering it scorched the hair from my forearms, singed my eyebrows. Even in the late-evening sky I could see waves of it climbing high above, an invisible sheen rising into the night.

  “We didn’t live far from our neighbors, but somehow there was nobody on the scene. Someone must have had to have seen it burning bright, but not one single person called the fire department or the police.”

  “You’re kidding me,” Diaz whispered, her voice bearing the familiar lilt of sympathy, the same exact sound that I despised so much, that often served as the impetus for me avoiding the subject entirely.

  “I was a DEA agent on the wrong side of the line in a border town,” I replied. “It wasn’t until that moment that I realized just how dangerous everything about my life really was.”

  I could see Diaz nodding, though she remained silent.

  “By that point, it was obvious help wasn’t coming. A hundred different thoughts ran through my head, but there was nothing I could do. Instead, I called Hutch and told him to send everybody, then I sat my ass on the ground, the heat-scorched grass b
rittle beneath me, and I cried until they arrived.”

  Just like that night I could feel hot tears threatening to streak down my face. I could sense my eyes growing glassy, the anger within me so strong that, even years later, it was fighting to release itself in any way possible.

  “Two days later I tendered my resignation. At first Hutch didn’t believe me, said it was just a reaction to what had happened. He put me on administrative leave for a few months to see if I would come around, but all that did was subsidize a very dark time I’d rather not get into.”

  Diaz hooked one final turn and pulled off the road and onto the shoulder. In front of us a blue and silver sign welcomed us to the UNITED STATES NAVAL BASE—SAN DIEGO, a row of spotlights gleaming off it, a cadre of flags hanging limply behind it. She shoved the gear shift into neutral and folded her hands in her lap, keeping her attention facing forward.

  “How did you know your family . . . ?”

  My eyes squeezed tight, the body’s natural reaction to such a horrific trauma, even tucked away that long ago. It was the single part that I always tried to avoid, consciously or not, whenever the topic managed to surface in my thoughts.

  “They staked them out, right in front of the house.”

  There was so much more I wanted to add. Details such as trying to rush forward and take them down, but the heat driving me back, blistering my forehead and cheeks. The way their bodies had burnt far beyond recognition, their arms and legs blackened away to nothing, just brittle sticks extended out in every direction. That by the time I got them to the crematorium there wasn’t enough left to fill an entire urn, both bodies together.

  But I didn’t. I didn’t tell her that, or the way I spent two full months staring at a loaded service piece, wondering what a 9 mm slug tasted like. I didn’t mention that once they accepted my resignation and took back the gun, I got another one, with a large caliber, and stared at it for another four months.

  I didn’t mention the tattoo that now covered the entire left side of my chest in their memory, embedded in ink above my heart forever. I sure as hell didn’t mention the fact that to this day every other relative I have blames me for what happened, has let it be known that my presence is not wanted or needed at home.

  Even without all that, somehow, she seemed to understand. She waited a long moment to make sure my story was complete, that there was nothing left for me to add, before nodding. “After you left, it became something of a cautionary tale throughout the department. A warning to all incoming agents to minimize loved ones, to keep them far away at all times.”

  Never had I heard that, though it made sense. I doubt that I would have believed such a story if they’d told it to me when I signed up, being young and gung-ho, but I’d like to think it would have at least helped to hear it.

  Diaz exhaled through her nose and turned to face forward, resting the back of her head against the seat behind her. “You know, when you hear a story so many times, it starts to take on a mystique. After a while, you come to believe there’s no way it can be real, just the kind of thing old men romanticize while sitting around talking about the way things used to be.”

  I nodded. While not the most delicate response in the world, I couldn’t say I faulted her. There was no way of knowing how contorted that story had gotten over the years, the purposes it had been used to serve.

  “How far was what I told you from what you’ve heard before?” I asked, almost not wanting to know, fearing that I might have been martyred to serve the purposes of the agency.

  “No difference at all,” Diaz said, her voice barely a whisper. “Which is the most harrowing part. You hear something like that, you want to believe it to be bullshit, that there aren’t people on this planet capable of doing such things.”

  My focus grew fuzzy as I stared at the sign welcoming us into the naval base. “Hopefully after tonight there’ll be a few less of those people out there.”

  For a full moment neither of us said anything. Diaz reached up and dropped the gear shift back into “Drive,” easing the car forward toward the guardhouse ahead. The brakes moaned slightly as she kept them depressed halfway down, the car moving just an inch at a time.

  “Yeah,” she agreed, pulling her head forward off the seat back. “We’ll get the bastards.”

  “Not we,” I said, watching the sign slide by beside us. “You.”

  The car came to an abrupt stop as she snapped her head over to look at me, her eyes wide. “What the hell do you mean ‘not we’? Where are you going?”

  With every bit of composure I could muster I turned to match her gaze, hoping she didn’t see everything clashing together behind my eyes.

  “I’m going to Russia.”

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Steam rose up from the plate of pirozhki situated in the middle of Sergey Blok’s desk, little white threads streaming upward before dissipating into nothing. With it came the familiar scent of baked bread and melted butter, one that had filled the office no less than twice a week for thirty years.

  The recipe was a hand-me-down from his mother-in-law, a gift that was presented more as a directive. It was the first dish his wife, Anya, had learned to make upon their marriage, a meal she had reconstituted with total faithfulness, with not even the slightest bit of experimentation, for decades.

  Sergey had returned to his office from a trip down the hall to the restroom to find his lunch waiting for him, the meal and the dish it was served on both warm. He had no idea how or when Anya had managed to slip it by him, but he allowed the left corner of his mouth to curl up in a smile just the same.

  Three bites into the meal his food-induced euphoria was shattered by his cell phone buzzing beside him, the growling visage of Pavel staring up from the screen. Sergey allowed it to ring a moment as he pulled the cloth napkin from his lap and wiped his face. He tossed it down atop the nearly untouched pirozhki and pushed it away, certain he would no longer be hungry once the call was finished.

  Contact from Pavel had not been expected. Several hours before, he had given explicit instructions on how things were to unfold. The fact that his most trusted employee was now calling could only mean something had gone awry.

  The twisted feeling he felt deep in his stomach wasn’t because something had occurred, but that he had a good idea of what it was.

  “Hello?” Sergey asked, trying to mask any animosity from his voice. There was a chance that the call was nothing more than courtesy, a perfunctory explanation of where things stood.

  “Mr. Blok? Pavel,” Pavel began, the same exact way he did every phone conversation they ever had. “We have a problem.”

  Sergey twisted his mouth up into a sneer and nodded his head, confirming what he had already suspected. “How bad is it?”

  “Not Chernobyl, but bad enough,” Pavel said, drawing another wince from his employer.

  “I’m listening.”

  A long moment passed, the sound of an ocean breeze, the distant burst of a ship’s horn sounding out. Sergey could sense Pavel pausing to find the right words, uncertain of how to approach it. Such a delay could only mean one thing, the same way it did every time Pavel acted unsure of anything.

  “What the hell did that nephew of mine do now?” Sergey growled.

  Never had Pavel directly stated there was a conflict, though it wasn’t hard for Sergey to piece together. In the past twelve months he had sensed a growing impunity in Viktor, a self-righteousness based in his status as a Blok. His life on the upper echelon of a poverty-stricken country had embodied him with a rather full opinion of himself. Sergey more than once had gotten the impression that the young man thought he actually had something to do with the lofty status the family had attained.

  On several occasions he had seen Viktor exert that sort of high-handed mentality on others, often those in his direct employ. There was little doubt he had done the same to Pavel in their time
working together in Mexico, despite the fact that Pavel was a greater asset to the family than the young Blok would ever be.

  Such tensions had made for an uneasy working environment. Viktor knew Pavel was a trusted ally of Sergey’s and was careful never to openly speak ill of him, despite making no effort to hide his true feelings. Pavel respected Sergey and the Blok family too much to ever speak out of turn.

  Still, there was little doubt that Viktor and Pavel both would eliminate the other without thinking twice if it came down to it.

  “It’s not what he did, it’s what he won’t do,” Pavel said. “He is drunk, and he refuses to leave.”

  Sergey’s eyes grew wide, revulsion on his face. His nostrils curled upward as he stared out the window in front of him, gaze hardened on the bare branches of a tree outside. “He what?”

  “He’s holed himself up in his office and says he isn’t going anywhere.”

  “And you told him that agents are en route as we speak?” Sergey asked, his voice low and graveled, his free hand balled into a fist atop his desk.

  “He said to let them come, we will fight,” Pavel replied. His voice was even, neutral. It was not his first encounter with Viktor’s antics; his response was to hand it over to Sergey and do as instructed.

  Sergey dropped the phone onto the desk and looked away a moment, pushing an angry breath out through his nose. He passed a hand over his face and rested it along his jaw, five o’clock stubble already noticeable against his skin.

  Viktor would think to do something like standing and fighting. In his head, he would have built it up to be a Hollywood blockbuster, with helicopters in the air and boats in the water. Spotlights would be showcasing him on the veranda, a gun in each hand, screaming as he took out a torrent of faceless intruders, all dressed in black, firing but hitting nothing.

  The truth would be that he and everybody with him would either be shot or arrested. Anybody that so much as raised a weapon in opposition would be cut down. The others would be put in a holding chamber, every bit of knowledge they had extracted from them painfully and meticulously.