The Break Line

by James Brabazon

  It wasn’t her at all.

  My stomach heaved. The unease in my guts spewed up into my mouth. I spat bile into the bathroom sink and ran the taps on my wrists, shaking. She’d been very close to never waking up again.

  But you knew, I reassured myself. You knew.

  Two hours and half a dozen Diplomático rums later and we both passed out.

  * * *

  • • •

  THUMP. THUMP. THUMP.

  I could hear the mortars before they landed. The air rips. Long, metallic screeches like sheets of black steel being shredded in the night sky. The first bombs landed in a cluster of three, creeping toward our position: one to the left, far out; one to the right, closer; then one behind—closer still. Rapid, deadly triangulation. Then the first white-hot shards of shrapnel hissed past at head height. Caught in the open. No cover. I dropped and balled up—fetal and braced for impact.

  Where was she? Where was Ana María?

  Around me, the elbows, chins, bootheels of other men grubbed in the dust. The slightest, shallowest groove you can plow just might make the difference between being shredded or not.

  Thump. Thump. Thump.

  The reports were hard, flat, close and rapid. Then the bombardment paused, and there was only ringing silence. My ears screamed.

  Thump. Thump. Thump.

  And then a bright white burst of light and a rush of air and sound wrenched me to my senses like a flood tide ripping stone from a storm-slapped beach.

  Ceiling fan. Slatted blinds. Running water.

  Caracas.

  Thump. Thump. Thump.

  “¿Señor?”

  Empty bed, sweat-soaked, twisted sheets. Alone.

  Ten a.m. and already the air was heavy, sticky.

  She must have left.

  “¡Servicio de habitación!”

  I reached over and patted the low bedside table, searching out the red and white package and the barrel of a plastic lighter.

  Three left.

  I drew a cigarette out, lit it and sucked the smoke down. The room pulled into focus as the reality of the dream receded. Sometimes it was Afghanistan, sometimes Iraq. Or Colombia. Uganda. Syria. London.

  Almost every day began like that, robbed of clarity by a night of searing dreams. It was easier waking up in the war. Any war. At least I knew where I was then.

  Thump. Thump. Thump.

  “¿Señor?”

  There were hotel staff in the corridor to deal with.

  “Su desayuno, señor.”

  “Yeah, yeah, I’m here. I’m just . . . Espérate.”

  Running water.

  The shower.

  I hadn’t ordered breakfast.

  I reached under the bed and tore free the stolen police Glock I’d taped beneath the mattress. Somewhere a Venezuelan cop was being framed for a hit that hadn’t happened.

  “¡Servicio de habitación!”

  A key rattled in the lock. Stopped by a sliding bolt, the door caught with a bang, opening less than an inch. The pressure in the room shifted, sucking at a loose pane in the window that overlooked a garden below.

  “OK,” I barked. I dropped the Marlboro into the dregs of her last rum and steadied myself at the foot of the bed, naked. This wasn’t going to be easy.

  “¿Qué tal?”

  I pulled the bedroom door open, free of its restraining bolt: pistol at waist height; muzzle jammed flat-on against the plywood paneling.

  Early twenties. Sunburned forehead. Neat, close-cut brown hair. White shirt, black tie. Black waistcoat. Shiny shoes.

  “Señor . . .”

  His left fist was clenched and held high as if in some mad Communist salute, poised to resume its drumming; his right hand was hidden under an unfolded napkin spread out on a service cart.

  MI6 peon.

  “Can we do this in English? It’s been a long night.”

  His right arm sagged. He looked deflated.

  “And you can take your hand off that SIG, too.” He stared at me, unblinking, alarmed. “Now.”

  “Mr. . . . Mr. McLean,” the peon whispered in English as his empty right hand emerged. “I’ve got orders to—”

  “Take me to the embassy, where I’ll receive new orders.”

  “Yes, and—”

  “My current assignment is terminated.”

  “Yes, and—”

  “I’m in deep shit.”

  He looked obliquely along the hallway. “Yes. And . . . Look, I’m sorry, but could I—”

  I shut the door on him and hooked the bolt back on. Either they’d let me get away with it or someone had fucked up. Passing out half-cut in bed with Ana María hadn’t been part of the plan. By rights they should have had the door off the hinges as soon as I’d walked through it. I listened carefully. No movement outside.

  And then I remembered. I didn’t have a plan.

  She was in the shower all right, planted like a statue under a fountain, staring into a white-tiled void. She turned silently when she saw me in the mirror, her eyes widening. I realized I was naked, and that I was carrying a gun.

  “¡Coño! Max, qué . . . ?”

  I put my fingers to my lips and held up the semiauto side-on, unthreatening. She turned around properly, and I pushed back the glass splash screen. Her eyes were dilated, carotid pulse fluttering.

  “Ana María.” She moved to stop the water. My left hand caught her wrist. “I have to go. Right now.”

  Thump. Thump. Thump.

  Her nostrils flared. I let go of her wrist and put my finger back to my lips.

  Muffled by the bathroom door and jets of water, the knocking outside was barely audible. She heard it nonetheless and relaxed.

  “Who’s that, your fucking wife?”

  “It’s complicated. You’re not who I thought you were.”

  “What? You are a fucking liar,” she hissed in English, her eyes moving between mine and the pistol. Fine spray misted the air between us. It was hard to see properly.

  “Wrong Cubana.”

  “Wrong Cubana? ¡Coño! You are like fucking unbelievable. You fucked the wrong woman? Eh?”

  Then in Russian. “Idi na khui! Mudak!” London had got that bit right at least. And I did feel like an asshole.

  “Caracas isn’t safe,” I replied in Russian. Of the many gifts my mother gave me, Moscow street slang was one of the greatest.

  “Not with maricones like you around.” She slipped back into Spanish, which was progress of sorts.

  “There are men outside who will kill you if they see you. Stay in here. In exactly five minutes ride the lift to the first floor, then take the fire stairs.” I was whispering in Spanish. “Leave through the restaurant out the back and into the children’s playground. Walk up to the tennis club and get them to call you a taxi. I’ve taken your phone.”

  “You stole my phone?”

  “No. Well, yes. It’s complicated. Don’t look over your shoulder and don’t come back. Do you understand?”

  She didn’t.

  “Listen. There’s money on the table. . . .”

  Her mouth pursed as if to spit at me.

  “No! Not for that. Ana María, please. Get out of the city. Take a week on the beach out of town and then go back to Havana, even Moscow. Take the money and go. They’d kill me, too. Trust me.”

  I tried to kiss her cheek, but she jerked her head away. I touched the back of my hand to her breast. She didn’t move.

  “I was supposed to . . .” I could barely get the words out. Training: it helped you to pull triggers and keep your trap shut. I wasn’t doing great at either right now. “People,” I struggled on, “very dangerous people, my people, think you are someone else. And they want that someone else dead.” She stared at me blankly. “Now you’ve seen my face. Y
ou know my name. That’s enough to get you killed, too. For real. I’m sorry.”

  “Sorry? Fuck, Max, you know what? So am I. ¡Coño!” She pinched the water out of her eyes. “Get out,” she whispered. “Go.”

  I stopped the shower and turned around, taking a towel off the back of the door to wipe my face as I left.

  She stood there shaking and spoke my name again. But she didn’t follow me. Her chances of making it out alive were slim. One way or another, I’d likely killed her anyway.

  I pulled my clothes on, tucked the pistol into my jeans and opened the door onto my chaperone, pushing him and the service cart he’d hijacked a couple of feet down the corridor.

  “Let’s go.”

  He was staring at the side of my face.

  “Sir?”

  I looked down at him as we clicked off along the parquet corridor.

  “How did you know I . . . I mean, do I . . .”

  “Because your bottom waistcoat button is undone. And please stop calling me ‘sir.’”

  2

  “Are you carrying?” Jim Jones, the local Team Commander at the British embassy, looked at me through his Oakleys.

  “Stupid question.”

  “Fuck, McLean.” He addressed me like a father exasperated with a naughty child. “OK, what are you carrying?”

  “Very stupid question.”

  We were pulling through Caracas traffic, already close to the safe house.

  “McLean, are you or are you not armed?” His bald head showed a throbbing vein in bas-relief. I smiled at him as I dropped the black-market 9mm into his lap, hamming up my Irish accent for good measure.

  “Dere ye go, liddle fella. An’ don’t ye go hurtin’ y’self wi’ dat, now.”

  Jim had spent more time in the SBS lying in ditches in Armagh than he had in boats. He wasn’t exactly a fan of my fellow countrymen.

  “Prick,” he sighed. He would have had orders to kill me if I’d run.

  “And there was me thinking that sergeant majors still call their superiors ‘sir’ in the army.”

  “It’s a good job I’m in the fucking navy, then, isn’t it? Sir.”

  We both laughed. The MI6 peon laughed, too, but stopped when Jim took his Oakleys off and looked at him. We climbed out at Calle el Vigía. The villa was tucked up on the side of a hill, looking down over the inner-city air base.

  “McLean,” Jones cautioned as we turned our backs on the SUV, “word to the wise before you meet the gaffer. You stink of pussy.” He cracked a broad smile. “Sir.”

  * * *

  • • •

  HE WAS CLEAN-SHAVEN now, and his trademark Savile Row suit was a little tighter round the waist, but in most respects Commander Frank Knight didn’t seem to have been touched by the years that stretched between the chilly dawn on the firing line at Raven Hill when I’d first seen him and that sweaty morning in Caracas.

  Twenty-three years of sheer, bloody mayhem. I’d seen him grow old; he’d watched me grow up. Without him I’d have had blood on my saddle a long time back. And without me, he was fond of reminding me, he’d have taken early retirement.

  “If it isn’t the big fella himself.” He took my hand firmly as if to shake it, but just held it fast, gripping the top of my right arm with his left hand as he did so. He looked over my shoulder and then straight at me.

  “You fucked up, Max.”

  “I fucked up?”

  “Oh, yes. Goddamn, blast, confound and fuck the Office, but you should have killed her.” He was speaking quickly and quietly. Like everyone else who was in it, he always referred to MI6 as “the Office.”

  “Frank—”

  “No, Max. No. Do not fucking speak.” His voice rose. “You had one job. One kill. Not question. Not think. Not fuck. I mean, fuck her and then kill her if you must. Christ in heaven! Kill her and then fuck her for all I care. But please do actually kill your fucking target, McLean.”

  By the end he was shouting my name, his voice deadened by the soft seventies furnishings that dulled the room.

  “It was the wrong woman, Frank. You want a murderer? Then pay a sicario.”

  His shoulders sagged.

  “You are the sicario, Max.”

  He sounded tired. But that was the truth. I was the hit man. Right woman, wrong woman: obey orders. Boom.

  “What happens now?”

  “You’re going back to London. King is livid, of course.”

  Out the window I could see Jones’s silhouette circling the SUV; he was getting ready to chaperone me to the airport.

  “Max?”

  My eyes flicked back toward his.

  “Will I face a court-martial?”

  “Absolutely not. You will face King. Court-martial? Have you gone stark raving mad? You are not a schoolboy going to the headmaster’s office. You have just spectacularly fucked up a very black, black op. Which is ironic, because . . .” Frank paused, as if weighing carefully the words that came next. “Because, believe it or not, King’s going to propose you take command of Raven Hill. Or at least he was. Who knows after this cock-up?” I didn’t speak. Frank continued. “Colonel Ellard should have retired five years ago. Longer, actually. And the truth is—the very bloody irritating truth is—that there just isn’t anyone else who can do it. But . . . after this . . .” He spread his hands wide as if everything that had happened in the last twelve hours had somehow unfolded in the room we stood in. “The Yanks are bloody pissed off, of course. And so am I, McLean. So am I.”

  “Seems to me that I’m working for a bunch of amateurs.” I shook the last Marlboro out of the pack and struck a match. “That we are working for a bunch of amateurs.” The smoke soothed and cloyed by turn in the thick, wet air. “You want me to take command of Raven Hill? That’s fucking news, isn’t it? So tell me, Frank, please tell me so I can tell all those bright-eyed boys and girls, how I—I—fucked up by not killing the wrong woman. I don’t know who the madman is here, but right now I’m feeling pretty sane.”

  “Because—do I really have to spell this out after all these years?—because she saw your bloody face. It’s just that simple. Forget everything else. You’re valuable because you’re one of the best damned shots that’s probably ever lived. You’re priceless because you don’t exist—at least not outside of our mob.”

  We stared at each other across the room, but I wasn’t seeing anything but Ana María: her hair wild, her breasts under my palms, the tang of her still on my fingers, mingling with the cigarette smoke. This woman, this unknown woman to whom I’d told my name and who should be dead, still lingered like a ghost on my skin.

  “Do you know who she is?”

  “Your target. Period.”

  “Oh, do fuck off. Let me guess: you have no idea and nothing to say other than, ‘You fucked up.’”

  “Yup, that’s about the size of it. And we shouldn’t be having this conversation. And you know why we shouldn’t be? Because she’s supposed to be dead. Christ, man, what were you thinking?”

  He was roaring at me. I drew hard on the cigarette and waited. The color and excitement drained from his face until he was as beige as the walls that enclosed us.

  “King wants to make you a lieutenant colonel. A commissioned lieutenant colonel. That’s not just rare. It’s unheard of.” He spoke calmly. Deliberately. “There’d be a one-year probationary period. And then Raven Hill would be yours, and with it, if you want it, an identity, any identity. You’d get your life back. A proper life. No more killing. No more running. Fuck, Max McLean would even get a pension.”

  “I don’t have a life to get back, Frank.” I looked around the room. “I mean here I am, right?”

  He must have known I’d have considered what it would be like taking over from Ellard—not that anyone could ever replace the old man. In fact we’d even spoken about it briefly once
, after I’d been shot up in an ambush outside Algiers. There would come a point, and sooner rather than later at this rate, when I would have to stop. Maybe letting Ana María go had been my way of putting the brakes on. But then what? Indefinite gardening leave wasn’t exactly tempting, or even an option, given how hard it would be to tend roses while looking constantly over my shoulder. No, I knew full well, and had done before I passed out at Raven Hill, that I would either have to be tethered to them forever or vanish.

  I’d disappeared once already. And this was where it had got me.

  “Well, maybe you’d better start thinking about what sort of life you do want,” Frank continued. “It’s damned hard to stop being unknown and not get killed doing it.”

  “Have you found her?” There was everywhere to look but at him. I didn’t know whether to tell him to shove his job or thank him from the bottom of my heart. My weakness made me angry. Still, it surprised me that my hands were shaking. “Frank, we’ve done lots of jobs together. But this . . .”

  “This is what? Murder?” A fringe of sweat was eating into the fold of his shirt collar: a dark blue, spreading necklace. I looked him in the face, blankly. “No,” he continued, “she wasn’t the target you thought she was. But she was your target. And you don’t get to choose which targets you kill and which you don’t. Most forty-two-year-old assassins have worked at least that much out by now. And if you don’t like it, be my guest to try to change it from the top down. But not now, not while you’re still bloody operational, for God’s sake. This is madness.”

  “Have you found her?”

  “There are always consequences, Max. Always. And you know when it goes wrong? Really wrong? When you second-guess what those consequences might be.”

  “You haven’t, have you?” I permitted myself a smile then, pointing at Frank with the lit cigarette. “You haven’t found her. And you aren’t going to. Fuck. You really fucked it, didn’t you?” I could see him grit his teeth. He craned his face toward the unmoving ceiling fan as if willing it to turn. Maybe he was searching for inspiration.