by Roxy Harte
“Dear God, Jackie.” I fold and refold my napkin, getting more uncomfortable with each passing second. Where is that chocolate? “What does my age have to do with anything?”
“I’m just saying, if you are going to start a family, you aren’t getting any younger. Besides, you need to settle her down. The two of you fighting over her all the time, it isn’t good, whether all the attention goes straight to her head or causes her to have a nervous breakdown. Either way, it just isn’t good!”
“She is not going to have a breakdown,” I insist just as the waiter arrives with our dessert, this time not censoring my conversation with Jackie in front of him. “You’re the one who talked me out of trying to force her to marry me. You’re the one who convinced me a baby and suburbia were not in my and Kitten’s future. Can we just stop this conversation now?”
Jackie tilts her head and I know more grief is coming but she remains silent, lifting her empty aperitif glass, signaling she’ll have another as the waiter walks away. “As soon as you face the truth that something needs to change.”
“Everything is going to be fine. You will not convince me to take Thomas out of the picture.”
“We’ll see.” Jackie purses her lips and gives me a look that is all too knowing before directing her attention to the chocolate dessert-laden plate, pointing her fork between two choices before deciding to dig into the cake. She takes a bite and her eyes close in rapture. “Oh my! Oh my!”
“Try this,” she demands, and I laugh as she takes another bite. “Oh, oh, oh. Oh my Gggoooddd!”
* * * * *
The inky black sky is dotted with stars by the time I finally climb out of my car. I park and walk the short distance to the jet, which sits midway between hangar and tarmac, readied to fly. The steps are down and I hear Kitten crying before I even step inside the plane. I sigh heavily. Jackie was right about one thing, my life has gotten dramatically more complicated since taking Kitten back and adding Thomas to it.
“What are you doing, Celia?” I ask, walking in behind her.
She turns to me, mascara streaked, eyes red, nose puffy and reaches for me. “We have to bring him back!”
“I’m not going to force him to stay.”
“You don’t care… This is what you’ve wanted all along!” She sobs against me and I pull her tighter. She doesn’t pull away, merely sobs harder. “Why can’t he just be happy with us?”
“Celia?” I pull back from her. “As long as I’ve known Thomas, he comes and he goes. He’ll be back.”
“This is different! It’s Christmas and he should be here,” she insists, then her eyes go wide and her bottom lip pouts out. “Why are you calling me Celia?”
“Because Kitten would be at the Club, watching me onstage right now, or she might be at work finishing things up so she could at least join me for dinner at the Club, but Kitten would not be shanghaiing my pilot for a trip God knows where without asking my permission first.” I stroke her cheek, sadness filling my heart. “I really don’t think you want to be Kitten as much as you want to belong to Lord Fyre.”
A tear slides over her cheek. “I do want to be Kitten. I want to belong to both of you.”
“Then start acting like Kitten!”
Her lip quivers. “I had to try to stop him. Can’t you see how much I love him?”
I stand, running my hand through my hair, holding out my opposite hand for her to take. “Let’s talk about this at home.”
“What? No!” she screams. “I have to go, I have to find him. I have to bring him back before he ruins everything!”
I shake my head. “Not tonight, Kitten. We’re going home, and when we get there you are being punished.”
She pulls away, huddling in the corner of her chair, tucked tightly against the windowed wall, holding on to the arms of her chair with a death grip. “No, I’m not going home! I don’t want to go!”
She reminds me of an exhausted four-year-old who hasn’t had a nap, throwing a temper tantrum because she isn’t getting her way, making an unbidden image of a child with her eyes and smile appear in my mind. Damn Jackie for her foolishness. As if I could bring a child into this fiasco right now even if I wanted to. I shake away the image and pick Kitten up, tossing her over my shoulder so that her head is down and her bottom is in the air. She kicks and screams, but I don’t put her down.
“Master! Please, please! Let me go get him! Don’t you care?”
I start down the stairs and my driver, seeing us coming, pulls the car closer. He climbs out and rushes around the side of the car to open the back door so I can toss her into the rear seat, following after her to restrain her and buckle her in. Our driver has seen it all by now, so he doesn’t even give us a second glance as he drives us back to the penthouse. I wish I were as detached and calm. Once I was. Now? I care too damn much.
“What’s this really about?” I ask her.
She closes her eyes, shutting me out, and my heart breaks but not with sadness, with fury. I regret ever sharing her with him. I regret letting him back into my heart as well. God, what have you done to us, Thomas?
“I feel certain his tale is true. Feeling that certainty, I befriend him. As long as that certainty shall last, I will befriend him. And if any consideration could shake me in this resolve, I should be so ashamed…no good opinion so gained, could compensate me…”
Charles Dickens, The Mystery of Edwin Drood
Chapter Seven
Thomas
December 25
Lyon, France
Interpol Secretariat’s Office Building
“I’m not going to ask you again, Henri, where is my brother?” I ask him in French, the language belonging to the soil I stand on, though I could have just as easily asked in English, German or Russian, giving us at least four languages in which to converse. It’s been a long time, I wonder if his Greek has improved over the years. I attempted teaching him during our weekly chess matches a long time ago, when he, looking out for Interpol, would manage to confer with me, Head of Operations for the World Office on Drugs and Crime. An unrecognized organization, it is otherwise known as The Agency, the darker side of world law enforcement, more covert. Although liaison to both Interpol and the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime and janitor for GPAT, the Global Programme against Trafficking in Human Beings, it doesn’t exist as far as documentation goes.
“He’s dead. Just accept it.”
“He’s as dead as I am. Now tell me where he is.”
Henri, once considered my oldest and dearest friend, is entirely too predictable. I’ve scolded him sorely for it in the past. He is an easy target for his enemies. He assured me he had no enemies.
He overestimates the power of our friendship.
He is behind his desk, just as I knew I’d find him. It doesn’t matter that it is three a.m. on Christmas morning. He has been married to this life of servitude for almost fifty years, and if he has ever had a real-time wife, girlfriend, lover, I have never been privy to such a fact. Once, a long time ago, he fought in a war alongside my grandfather. Then, according to my grandfather, he saw right and wrong as very black and white. Today his view tinges on gray and I wonder, at times, when this transformation happened.
He had been against the operation from the beginning, and originally I was to be planted into a group of traffickers. My idea. I had been deemed too hot by The Agency, my enemies becoming too many and too great in number. I had become a liability. By going deep undercover on an assignment that would span years, The Agency would be safe.
It didn’t work out that way though. In a horrible turn of events, several agents died and Nikos, who had been merely my backup, had been mistaken for me and had gone with the traffickers. That isn’t the way it appeared. With everyone else dead and my brother missing, it soon became obvious that The Agency’s intent was to try me as a traitor, then keep me caged and at their bidding. But I am no one’s puppet. Henri made it possible for me to disappear permanently by staging my death.
Dying in Eva’s arms was an extreme attempt to tie up all the loose ends in the personal life I wasn’t supposed to have while several governments were shown my death and The Agency that no longer wanted my liability was free of me.
“I know it’s hard to accept, Ari.” My grandfather and Henri are the only two people alive who still call me by my childhood nickname. It’s nice to hear. “But your brother is dead. It’s hard now, but with the passage of time, you will come to accept the truth.”
“Is that what you told Eva?” I growl, past the point of niceties. “When you held her at the funeral and whispered in her ear?”
He looks at me as if I’ve grown a second head.
“Yes, Henri, I was there. I watched how you tried to console her with your hand wrapped around her ass. Did you think I would leave without going to my own funeral? She believes I’m dead. But here I stand, very alive. Just like Nikos is someplace—very alive.” I end my tirade with my hand wrapped in his collar, daring him with my eyes to let me break his neck.
“If I knew anything, I would tell you. Like you…he is dead,” he sputters out, trying to get more air than I’m allowing him. “Jesus, you’re a ghost… Go live your life. No one is watching you!”
“But someone is watching Nikos. Someone very powerful,” I offer, tightening his collar so that his eyes start to bulge. “And now, it is my job to find him and protect him from whatever comes.”
I drop him back into his chair and he fights to refill his lungs.
“I wasn’t going to let them hunt you down like an animal, my friend.” His voice is rougher but he seems no worse for the wear. “What good would that have done, I ask? I believe in your innocence. I know you were not responsible for what happened to those agents.”
I nod, his affirmation meaning little. “You’re a good friend. That’s why you are going to tell me what I need to know to find him.”
Henri sits quietly, adjusting his shirt and tie before standing. Without a word, he walks across the room to pick up his coat, hat and briefcase. He pauses at the door. I am prepared to beg on hand and knee if forced to, but don’t need to when I notice what Henri is staring at—his computer terminal. Afraid to hope, I sit at his desk and, without bothering to ask for permission, boot up his system.
“You should look up Eva while you are in town,” he offers before quietly stepping out of the office, locking up for the night as he goes. As far as he is concerned, I am not in the room, I was never here.
He called me a ghost and so, for the task at hand, I will be a ghost.
I ignore reason, knowing codes have changed a dozen times, but finding Henri’s files proves not to be very difficult. I am almost disappointed, then staggered when I realize the sheer number of files. Punching in decade-old passwords, I am relieved when file after file opens. It is as if he expected me. Nice and tidy, I follow the breadcrumbs he has laid out, ending at Eva’s personal files, assignment after assignment, documenting her work.
“Damn it, Henri, stop being the romantic! I’m not here for her!”
Curiosity manages to get the best of me and I am suckered into reading about her latest activities. It appears she is purposely choosing assignments considered suicidal at best. It is a miracle she still lives, I realize as I click through each file. What is even more shocking is each file puts me closer to a man she seems to have a personal vendetta for, King Cobra, and by association, my brother, although she knows him by the name Daniel.
Following a hunch, I type in more code, confirming my suspicions as detailed lists appear, logging names and dates, followed by identification numbers and city names. Pages and pages of slave trade records, detailing exchanges made across the globe, the players a menagerie of international political figures and famous faces. More code and voilà, the latest information on my brother—and perhaps the reason Eva has what appears to be a single-minded focus, an implication King Cobra has someone working inside the WODC. Based on twenty-four months of explicit surveillance and documentation, Eva proposed an extreme maneuver that would destroy King Cobra’s operation, but she was denied, leading her to believe the insider was a high-ranking official.
* * * * *
Thank God, Henri is predictable. At six a.m. exactly, his key turns the lock. It doesn’t matter he left only three hours ago, it doesn’t matter it is Christmas day, his day begins at six a.m. and has for the twenty-odd years I’ve known him. I stall mid-pace, hearing the key, having paced for an hour already. I sit quickly.
He enters the room to find me sitting calmly, waiting, in one of the two high-backed leather wingchairs facing his desk. If he is surprised to find me still here, it doesn’t show on his face as he crosses the room and takes his seat behind his desk. Henri left knowing I didn’t have time to stop her. He left anyway, he made me hack in and steal the information instead of just telling me, but why?
“Find what you are looking for, Ari?”
“She thinks you are King Cobra.”
“Yes.” His eyes glint mischievously, knowing I am closer to discovering my brother’s whereabouts now than yesterday. “It seems Eva has become a rogue agent, determined to bring down King Cobra on her own, if need be. I can’t trust her. Lucky for me you showed up when you did.”
“How so?”
“You’ve read her assignment log?” He peers too deeply at me, making me nervous. He, always the teacher, me, the dense student. I stand and cross the room to look through his tall upper-level window. He joins me at the window and together we watch snow fall in the early morning light.
I say tiredly, “All of this has been for a reason, but I haven’t a clue what you want me to see. If Eva was rogue, as you suspect, she would have already meted out justice against Nikos…and King Cobra, who she thinks is you.”
“Would she?” Henri asks excitedly, and I still don’t see the hidden meaning. “Or does she see a savior?”
“A savior, Henri?”
“Oui, a savior, someone capable of seeing the job done.”
I rub my hands over my tired face. “Please?”
“Ari, Ari, Ari, mon ami, can you not see? She takes every assignment based on risk factor. I noticed the pattern years ago. She takes every one that has a ninety percent or better failure rate. At first, I thought she merely wanted to prove she was the best, invincible, but non, she wants to not succeed. By taking on King Cobra, she guarantees a horrible retribution. She guarantees her own death.”
I close my eyes against the glaring white of the snow-covered ground. “You think she is messing with Nikos to put her in King Cobra’s crosshairs?”
“Exactement!” Henri gushes, ecstatic that I finally see. But I don’t see, I don’t see at all. The look I give him must tell him because he continues, “Eva is our best. If she picks a private war with King Cobra with the intention of getting herself killed, why would I interfere with that? Don’t you see? Her survival instinct is too strong. In the end, she will kill King Cobra.”
“Oh God,” I say, realizing what has happened, what is happening. “That was his assignment all along? To reach a place of power within Cobra’s organization and become the bigger, badder fish? You put him in there as King Cobra’s replacement? You fuck! This is my brother! Do you know what kind of man it would take to replace Cobra?”
“Oui,it would take a man as Nikos and when The Agency chose him, it became necessary to separate you from him, because you would have been his conscience and we certainly couldn’t allow that.”
“He won’t do it. To take over for Cobra, he would have to turn. He won’t do that.”
“He already has. The brother you knew is no more, mon ami.”
I close my eyes, swearing, trying to wrap my mind around what is and what isn’t possible. Opening my eyes, I look through Henri’s window and see the truth, really see it, for the first time in forever.
Winter wraps the landscape in a blanket of white. It is Christmas morning. I am in Paris, once again in agent mode, the holidays holding no meaning, and somewhe
re, out there, my children are waking up.
I long for years past, burnt turkey and really awesome gingerbread. Thinking about it, I remember the hours Lattie took making incredible gingerbread houses every year for the holidays—for our family, our friends, even for the church. Christmas once meant family, festivity and age-old traditions. I appreciated the time and effort she spent creating special moments for us as a family even though she hated the materialism she’d come to associate with the holiday.
As an agent, I’d lost all sense of the meaning behind the holiday.
With a wife and children, I was able to believe in peace on Earth and goodwill toward man, but that was a temporary fantasy world of my making.
It occurs to me that this year my children will most likely not even realize it is Christmas, let alone savor gingerbread. I left them in Africa with the agreement I would see them holidays and summers. That was over a year ago. I haven’t seen them since, despite attempts to contact them. In Africa, her father is the big fish and as corrupt as they come.
For me, Christmas no longer has meaning, even though last year both Celia and Garrett tried to create a happy place for all of us to celebrate. It was nice, but it wasn’t home for the holidays, though they are more family to me than any other these days. Of late I am called more and more to duty, serving the United States, though I would not call the US my home. It is a place of safety, though even my safety is an illusion. In my world of politics and true evil there is no room for the novelty of such nonsense as Christmas and the idea of family. I shake my head, wanting it back for real—home, family, holidays…safety. I want the real deal, Christmas and presents, goodwill toward men and peace on Earth, even if just for a day.
I want to wrap myself in the cocoon of family. I think of Garrett and Celia waking together. We were supposed to share today. I had both looked forward to it and dreaded it. Is that why I’m here? Am I merely avoiding the holiday?