by Tim Tigner
Before returning to the kitchen and his wife, Achilles struggled to dredge his most recent memories from the depths of his throbbing brain. Those memories weren’t in Hawaii, that was for sure. After a good minute of beating the bushes, he couldn’t dig up anything more recent than his trip to South Lake Tahoe, where he’d climbed Lover’s Leap.
“These are the last of the eggs,” Jas said, setting two-thirds of a steaming mushroom and Parmesan omelette down before him. “Let’s enjoy them.”
Achilles set his hand atop hers as she let go of the plate, in the tender way lovers do. He drew his hand along hers, stopping to study her diamond engagement ring, and matching platinum wedding band, hoping this would spark a memory. “You wear your rings on your left hand, the American way.”
“Right,” she said, drawing out the i to make it clear that she always had. “And you’re not wearing one at all, in the climbing tradition. How’s your head feeling?”
Achilles took a bite of his breakfast before responding. Delicious. Eggs browned but moist, the mushrooms flavorful, the cheese punchy. He followed the first bite with another big one before answering. He was ravenous. “It’s sore, but not screaming.”
He had dozens of big questions to answer, but his mind wasn’t ready for another major dump at the moment. Memory loss and a surprise wife were enough before breakfast. He didn’t want to talk about his health either, so he went with something lighter. “Why do I call you Jas?”
Achilles’ heart skipped a beat as she flashed a breathtaking smile. Wow! His marriage was making more sense by the minute.
“The first time we met, you said I reminded you of Princess Jasmine from Disney’s movie Aladdin. You’ve been calling me Jas ever since. I like it, even though I know it’s wishful thinking on both our parts.”
The nickname didn’t strike him as much of a stretch at all. But then he was stretching into the realm of the surreal by asking a stranger basic questions about himself, and getting revelations as answers. The next question slipped out. “And how long ago was that?”
She looked up for a sec to do the calculation. “About twenty months. We met New Year’s Day, 2018, in a Honolulu convenience store. It was about the only place open on the island. You needed trail mix, and I needed dramamine, and both were sold out. That spoiled each of our plans, and we ended up grabbing brunch at the Hilton on Waikiki Beach. You started talking about climbing, and I mentioned that I had a private cliff that nobody could possibly climb, and you ended up accepting my challenge.”
He could easily picture the scene she’d painted. A beautiful woman, a tropical hideaway, and a challenging cliff. He’d have jumped on that like Jack from a box.
But he didn’t remember it.
He was missing at least two years.
Chapter 27
The Revelation
Hawaii
“WHAT’S THE LAST THING YOU REMEMBER?” Jas asked, in what seemed to be her favorite refrain. She appeared to be taking it personally that he didn’t remember her.
Hard to fault your wife for that.
They’d spent the day taking it easy while waiting for the Coast Guard to show. It was almost like a normal vacation. They ate fruit salad for lunch, and Caesar salad with grilled fish for dinner, leading Achilles to understand how his wife maintained her enviable figure. They walked hand-in-hand on the beach and napped arm-in-arm on the hammock while Achilles enjoyed the experience of rediscovering why he’d fallen in love.
Jas was curious and clever and full of joie de vivre. She brought that love of life to her paintings, which captured couples at tender times in city settings. She kept the faces in her paintings out of sight and out of focus, to help the viewer step into the scene. Achilles also delighted in the way she rendered lights, giving the canvass great depth while bringing the background to life.
Over dinner, he discovered that she knew lines from all his favorite movies. His French girl even shared his love of the outdoors. Their bellies full, they were now snuggled up on a beach blanket beneath a bright canopy of stars, studying their fire pit’s flickering flames, in what Achilles hoped was a prelude to getting to know her as a woman.
He’d had to dig down through the woodpile to find dry kindling, but it was worth it to smell the sweet Koa smoke and hear the logs snapping away over the ocean’s rhythmic roar. While he’d been preparing the fire, she’d disappeared only to surprise him with a bottle of white Burgundy from her father’s wine store. Alcohol was probably contraindicated for head injury victims, but just what the doctor ordered following extreme emotional stress, so they generously called it a wash and promised to limit their alcohol consumption to a single bottle.
“It’s all there, you know,” she said. “Given that you’re not displaying other signs of cognitive malfunction, the blow to your head almost certainly didn’t destroy the neurons holding your memories. It just disrupted the synapse trail leading to them.”
“Were you a doctor before you became a painter?” Achilles asked, careful to get his intonation right.
Jas scrunched her face. “I keep forgetting all the things you’ve forgotten. My grandmother died of Alzheimer’s. It was horrible. My father worries that he’s next, so he does his research and shares it with me.”
“How does that help me? The neural pathway thing I mean.” He took a sip of wine, then snugged his glass into the sand and pulled a long glowing stick from the fire.
Jas flipped her hair out of the way. “If you think of your brain as a neighborhood, and your memories as houses, then the sidewalks are your synapses. The bump to your head likely crushed one or two paving stones, but the others are still there. All you need to do to access your lost memories is bridge the connection anew. Make sense?”
“Sure. But how do I build that bridge?”
“We follow the sidewalk as far as we can and then try to jump to the other side.”
“I get the metaphor, but what do we actually do?”
“We retrace the path of your last memories again and again. We should find that we can push them a bit further each time. Before we know it, we’ll be on the other side.”
That sounded sensible enough to Achilles. “Thanks.”
“Don’t thank me, silly. Tell me the last thing you remember.”
“Climbing Lover’s Leap.”
“When? Do you remember the date?”
“August of 2017.”
“Good. Now give me the details. Why were you there?”
“I had just received a big assignment. A tough mission with what seemed to be an insurmountable problem. I’d gone home to Palo Alto to ponder it, but wasn’t getting anywhere. So I drove up to South Lake Tahoe to meditate on it — which as you know I do best while climbing.”
“What problem were you trying to solve?”
Achilles couldn’t go into specifics. Most of his adult life was classified for national security reasons. The bulk of what he knew was factoids that civilians couldn’t care less about, but the details of that particular assignment would make front page news around the world.
When he didn’t answer right away, Jas prompted him with, “Did you figure it out?”
Good question, he thought, grabbing his wine glass. “I don’t know. Not that I recall.”
“Focus on the fire, and try to remember.”
Her instincts were solid. The sound of the ocean and flicker of flames were classic hypnotic prompts.
He thought back to the meeting in Senator Collins’ DC home, his follow-up research with Foxley, and his subsequent solo attempt to puzzle it out at home. He tried to point his mind down the right path and set it free while the fire crackled and the ocean swished, but he couldn’t make the leap.
He was about to confess failure, when Jas said, “Wait a minute! Did you say August of 2017?”
“That’s right.
Her face lit up with excitement. “That’s when you were working on the Korovin assassination.”
Chapter 28
The Relief
Hawaii
ACHILLES FOUND Jas’s words no less startling than a sudden slap to the face, but he managed to keep hold of his wine. He took a sip to buy a second of thought. “I told you about the Korovin assassination?”
“Of course you did. I’m your wife. We agreed early on never to keep things from each other. Not the big things, anyway.” She raised her own wine glass. “Assassinating one head of state at the request of another is as big as things come.”
“Apparently. But, wow, I still can’t believe I told you something that inflammatory.”
Jas shook her head. “You’re forgetting what a marriage is. When they’re good — and ours is good — two people become one. We share everything, in good times and bad and all that.”
Achilles just nodded, unable to believe that he’d broken security protocol. Perhaps his experience with Katya had loosened him up? She had played a major role in his initial battle with Korovin. Had history repeated itself with Jas?
Jas continued while Achilles was still processing. “In fact, we wouldn’t have met if it weren’t for Korovin.”
“Really? How’s that?”
“You’d just completed that assignment when we first met. That was why you were in Hawaii. You were decompressing. Of course, I didn’t know that at the time. You didn’t tell me until after we were married.”
Achilles felt a wave of relief wash over him from head-to-toe, releasing tensions he didn’t know he’d had. For him to have told Jas about that, an assignment that was not only his deepest, darkest secret, but one of his nation’s, he must really trust her. Really love her.
Looking over at her sparkling eyes and the little shadows cast by her jaw and cheekbones in the firelight, he was overcome with a tremendous urge to make love to her. It burst forth from deep inside his core, like lava erupting from a volcano. Hot and steamy and irrepressible.
He had a lot of lava built up.
For the last three months of his active memory — the memory still synaptically accessible — he’d been cohabiting his Palo Alto home with another woman. A very special woman.
Katya Kozara was, without a doubt, the most amazing woman he’d met. At least before Jas. But of course there had been a twist in their relationship. A big twist. One of those gut-churning, conscience-grating, sleep-steeling twists that life tends to present — just to keep you from getting too comfortable.
Katya had been his brother’s fiancée.
Colin Achilles died the same night he proposed to Katya. Then Achilles and Katya grew close investigating the incident that killed Colin. That same incident left them both in need of housing, and Achilles in possession of a home not far from Katya’s job at Stanford. At the time, it would have felt odd for them not to cohabitate. But reflecting on it now, with the objectivity that only time can lend, Achilles’ home life struck him like the setup to a reality TV show.
Despite the confounding complications that tore his heart this way and that, he felt drawn to Katya at the molecular level. Genetically programmed to love her. And though they’d never openly discussed it, he’d sensed that she felt the same. But the ghost of Colin was ever present, complicating their feelings and confounding their emotions. So they had decided to give it time, and live platonically. Her postdoc at Stanford would only last a year. They’d make a decision when it was time for her to move on.
Now he knew where they’d landed on that question — and the decision both shocked and saddened him.
Mentally, a seemly period of grieving and reflection had suited Achilles. Physically, that decision had sentenced him to a state of sexual frustration. Looking over at Jas now, all that pent-up energy came crashing back against his sense of restraint like a horde of barbarians on a castle gate. Then enlightenment struck, and for the second time that day, Achilles enjoyed the sensation of relief washing over him. Although new to married life, he was pretty sure that matrimony meant he didn’t have to fight his natural urges.
Achilles stood and helped Jas to her feet with an extended hand.
“What?” she asked, a knowing twinkle in her eye, but a bit of strain in her voice.
“Let’s go see if we can jog some memories loose.”
Chapter 29
The Struggle
Hawaii
ACHILLES LED HIS WIFE by the hand back to their bedroom. When they reached the foot of their bed, he pulled her toward him, wrapped his arms around the small of her back, and pulled her lips up to meet his. What a lucky man he was, to be able to kiss his beautiful wife — again — for the first time.
Jas was about six inches shorter than he, and although more model than centerfold, he expected to find her slim figure soft in all the right places. As their mouths met, and her flesh melted into his, the universe seemed to condense down to the place where their lips touched, like the birth of a star. Time stopped ticking and space stopped moving and Achilles felt himself utterly lost in the moment.
Then Jas pulled back.
“How about a hot bath?” She proposed. “Let me clean you up. Make sure everything looks alright before we raise your blood pressure.”
He wanted to say, How about after, but feared getting his marriage off on the wrong foot. He could hold out. They weren’t going anywhere. They were literally stranded on an island.
Yes, he thought, his situation was improving by the second. It was all a matter of perspective.
Jas squirted some soap and twisted the taps and warm water sluiced into the tiled tub from a silver spigot. Judging by the two-seater’s size, it would take a few minutes. “I’ll refresh our drinks and grab a couple candles,” Jas said. “Why don’t you go ahead and climb in.”
Achilles complied, but not before pausing to inspect his naked body in the mirror to see what it looked like at thirty-four years. No noticeable wear and tear, was his immediate conclusion. His hair was thick and dark, and there were no new scars on display. His body still looked pumped from the stint he’d spent in jail at the beginning of his thirty-second year, cranking out various calisthenics by the thousand each day. It was indeed a day to appreciate silver linings.
The lights went out as Achilles slid into the tub and he turned his head to see Jas in the doorway. She was holding a tray with their refreshed wine glasses and a pair of fat white candles, already aglow.
“How’s the water?”
“It’s missing something,” Achilles said with a wink.
Jas closed the gap and emptied her tray on the tub surround before leaning over him to hit a button. The spa’s jets whooshed to life, blowing bubbles and spreading the scent of honeysuckle.
“I meant someone. The water’s missing you.”
“Well here I am.”
And there she was — for all of a second or two. Jas stepped out of her clothes quicker than an ape could peel a banana. With a lithe move that afforded Achilles only a brief glimpse of her darker regions, and a murmured “Aaah,” she disappeared beneath a blanket of suds.
“I think we’ve got enough bubbles,” Achilles said, extinguishing the jets. “The hot water won’t damage your opal?”
“My great-grandmother’s good-luck charm? Nah. I never take it off.” Jas handed him his wine. “Now where were we? You were telling me about the Korovin job.”
“Actually, you may know more about it than I do. I don’t remember much. Was I successful?”
Jas raised her wine glass. “You were. Lukin is now Russia’s president.”
“Wow!” Achilles found himself plunged back into the thick of big-revelation day. “How did I do it?”
“Try to remember. Bridge the gap. What was the plan?”
He didn’t remember.
Frustrated by his inability to break through, Achilles reached under the water and found a leg. He pulled. Jas slid closer, but stopped his progress when her feet hit the back wall. Rather than folding her legs to come closer, she put her wine glass between them. “Ah ah ah. Work first, play later.”
Achilles took a long sip of wine
, and attempted to refocus. He tried to put his frontal lobe before his libido. It was a struggle. With the warm water and wonderful wine working their magic on his nervous system, and the profound relief he felt knowing that he’d justified his president’s faith, Achilles found himself fading. To say that it had been a big day would be like calling King Kong a big gorilla.
But he was still looking forward to the honeymoon.
Jas was watching him with a mischievous expression on her lovely lips. “I know what you need.” Before he could query her further, she was out of the tub.
She dried off with a plush white towel that contrasted nicely with her taught, tanned skin, then slipped into a matching white robe she conjured from thin air. For her next trick, Jas made his towel appear along with one of those small bottles of scented oil that cost as much as liquid gold. “Finish up your wine. It’s time for your massage.”
Chapter 30
Close Call
Seattle, Washington
MAX LOOKED at his watch for the fourth time in as many minutes. Two minutes to go. He wasn’t looking forward to Ignaty’s call.
Meanwhile, Wang was on Max’s mind. The Chinese spy had been unresponsive since learning that Vulcan Fisher was their target. Max was confident that Wang would eventually come around — $1.5 million buys a whole lot of forgiveness and understanding — but until he did, Max seemed stuck.
His own attempts to locate a crack in VF’s security had borne no fruit. In addition to researching everything from emergency response procedures to factory tours, he’d tried stoking his creative fires by running along the waterfront and meditating in a park. Nothing had helped. Normally, he’d experiment. But this was hardly a trial-and-error situation. The Americans took espionage seriously. A slip-up could be worse than death.