The Guardian

by David Hosp

  She stayed bent there for another moment, catching her breath, loosing a few more curses before straightening up to head back down the trail to see whether she could pick up the chase again. As she did, though, she heard a noise coming from down the path, around a turn blocked by a large boulder. She had no time to react before Fasil was there, standing in front of her, ten feet away, puffing his way up the mountain. He still had the box in one hand and his gun in the other, but his focus was on the ground as he picked his way carefully along the trail.

  She raised her gun and took aim. ‘Stop!’ she shouted.

  It startled him, and he tripped over a loose stone as he looked up at her. He fell to his knees and the box toppled out of his hand and landed on its side next to the path. He looked at it, and then back at her. He started to raise his gun, but she emphasized her aim, moving forward with the barrel directed at his heart. ‘No, no,’ she said.

  He lowered the gun, but didn’t drop it. ‘You do not understand the wrath that you will bring down upon yourself!’ he said angrily.

  ‘Drop your gun.’

  ‘I am saving my country!’

  ‘I said, drop it!’

  He looked at her in a rage, every muscle in his body tense. With all the fury in his soul, he screamed at her, ‘Qatala armad zaniya!’

  She heard the words and found herself back in Kandahar, being pelted with rocks and spit as she stood there, a line in the sand protecting those who were willing to take the risk of standing up for their most basic rights. She saw the little girl writhing in pain, dying in her mother’s arms as the skin darkened and peeled away from her face. ‘You,’ she said quietly.

  He raised his gun, still screaming, but it never got higher than his waist. She fired into his chest, and he toppled back onto the path, dropping his gun. She walked over to him and looked down into his eyes. His hatred was still there, burning into her. She pointed her gun at his forehead. He nodded at her and closed his eyes. ‘It is as it will always be,’ he said.

  She could feel her finger tighten on the trigger. There was no noise, no distraction, nothing to startle her. Only her anger and her hatred and her need to exact revenge for her brother, and for Nick O’Callaghan, and for Saunders, and for the little girl who had died on a Kandahar street. She took a deep breath, held it, took aim, and tightened her finger again. She wasn’t sure for how long she held that breath. It could have been thirty seconds, or a minute, or two. But when she released it, it took with it some measure of her hatred, and she lowered her gun.

  Fasil opened his eyes and looked at her. There was disappointment in them – no, not just disappointment, but a sense that she had betrayed him. She looked up and saw that Toney and Morrell and Akhar were all standing there, twenty feet away, watching the scene in silence.

  Cianna put her gun on the ground. ‘He’s yours,’ she said.

  ‘You do nice work,’ Toney said. ‘We have a lot to talk about.’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  Without another word, she walked past the men on the mountain and headed alone down the slope and away from the death and mayhem that had seemed to follow her most of her life.

  EPILOGUE

  Cianna Phelan sat in the passenger seat of the rusted Nissan Sentra in front of the tavern on L Street in South Boston, staring straight ahead. Her fingers picked nervously at a loose tab of vinyl peeling back from a crack on the armrest. It had been two weeks since the shoot-out in the mountains, and she had spent most of that time on her own. She was only just starting to feel able to talk to others. ‘Thanks for bringing me here, Milo,’ she said.

  ‘No problem,’ he said. ‘Do you want me to come in with you?’

  It was nice of him to offer. She knew that he did not really want to come into the tavern with her. Confrontations made his stomach churn, she knew, and she marveled once again at his choice of profession. ‘No thanks,’ she said. ‘I can handle this myself.’

  He turned to look at her. ‘You’re going to leave, aren’t you?’

  She didn’t look back at him, and she said nothing.

  He took a deep breath and blew it out through his fingers. ‘Maybe it’s just as well,’ he said. ‘This line of work is getting to be too dangerous. I need to find something else. If you leave, it gives me an excuse.’

  She finally looked at him. ‘Oh, please, Milo. What else would you do?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ He shrugged. ‘Maybe I’ll open an Asian-fusion restaurant. If the yuppies keep moving in at the rate they have been, you never know; I could make a run of it.’

  ‘The townies would burn it down if they even thought there was a chance. Hell, I’d burn it down if I thought it might succeed.’

  ‘I could be a cop,’ he offered.

  ‘No you couldn’t.’

  ‘No, I couldn’t,’ he agreed. He looked away from her. ‘Maybe I’ll just take some time off. I don’t need a job, really. I never told you this, but I’m pretty rich. Family money. I’m not proud of it, but it’s true. The car, the shitty apartment, all of it . . . it’s just for appearances.’

  ‘No one with money has your haircut,’ she said.

  ‘Hey, it’s a style,’ he protested. He was silent for a moment. ‘I really have money, though.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘I’m serious.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Oh.’

  She patted his knee. ‘You don’t have anything to prove to me,’ she said. ‘You don’t have anything to prove to anyone else, either. Be who you are.’

  ‘Is it that obvious?’

  ‘No. Not to everyone else.’

  ‘In that case, there’s something I should tell you. It’s something I never even told my parents. It’s something I think I’m still struggling with myself.’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘I’m black.’

  She laughed. It was the first genuine, full-throated laugh she’d managed in a long, long time. ‘No, Milo,’ she said. ‘You can be just about anything you want to be in this world. Except that. You are, without question, one of the whitest people I have ever met.’

  ‘Latino?’

  ‘Not even on taco night.’

  He sighed. ‘Ah, well. I’ll just have to be me.’

  ‘It’s more than enough.’ She opened the door and got out.

  He leaned over and called to her out of the open passenger window. ‘For what it’s worth, I’ll miss you if you leave. We did some good things.’

  ‘I’ll miss you if I leave, too,’ she said. ‘And, yeah, we did.’

  It was a working-class place, and it smelled of grease and stale coffee. Bill Toney looked painfully out of his element sitting at a table at the far end of the room, his shirt starched and his hair neatly combed. He saw her as soon as she walked in, and he started to stand, but thought better of it. The waitress, a woman somewhere between her fifties and her eighties, with the look of someone who would never give up the fight, no matter how bad things got, nodded to her. ‘You want a table?’ she asked.

  ‘I’m with him,’ Cianna said, nodding at Toney.

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘I’ll bring you some coffee. You probably need it.’

  Cianna walked over and sat down across the table from Toney. ‘Do you have it?’ she asked.

  ‘All business,’ he commented. ‘I like that. Reminds me of Jack. I always liked him; though he’d never believe it.’

  The reference made her pause. It took a few seconds for her to phrase the question. ‘How is he doing?’

  Toney looked at her, his eyes narrowing for a moment. Then he shrugged. ‘He’s a lot better than he deserves to be. An inch to the left, and Sirus’s round would have taken out his heart. An inch to the right, and it would have shattered the spine. I’m not saying it’s a picnic at the moment, but he’ll walk again. Knowing Jack, it won’t slow him down at all. He’s already reviewing op reports and cursing out anyone who outranks him.’

  ‘Will he see
me?’

  Toney hesitated. ‘In time, I’m sure. He doesn’t want people to see him the way he is right now. It’s not just the physical aspect of it. Ainsworth recruited and trained Jack. To Jack, Ainsworth was the Agency, and the Agency is Jack’s life. He’s got a little work to do to come to terms with what happened. He asked me to tell you to wait.’

  Cianna nodded. ‘You have to come to grips with the past before you can really deal with the present. No one knows that better than me.’

  Toney reached into the briefcase and pulled out a file. ‘Speaking of the past, here, take this. This is the last copy,’ he said. ‘All others have been destroyed.’ He smiled at her.

  ‘Bullshit,’ she said. ‘What about the one you kept for yourself?’

  His smile faded. ‘That’s just for insurance.’

  ‘Against what.’

  He swizzled his coffee. ‘Against whatever.’ He pushed it over toward her. ‘It won’t matter to anyone else. As of this moment, you are no longer an ex-convict. How does it feel?’

  She took the file and put it in her purse. ‘You could have mailed this to me.’

  ‘And trust the Post Office?’ He tried a smile again, but she wasn’t having any of it. ‘I told you, we have opportunities to talk about. The kind of opportunities that need to be discussed in person.’

  She could feel him looking at her, but she wasn’t willing to go there. Not yet. ‘What happened to the Cloak?’ she asked.

  ‘Akhtar took it back to the mosque in Kandahar.’

  ‘Just like that?’

  ‘Well, it was a little more complicated than that. He was accompanied by several of the military’s best men to make sure things went smoothly, and the Cloak itself was smuggled back into the mosque in the middle of the night so no one would see it and wonder. As far as the Afghans are concerned, the Cloak never left its home. Better that way. If people over there even suspected that Americans had stolen the thing . . .’ He blew out a low whistle. ‘In that sense, it was an effective plan. I’ll give Ainsworth that.’

  ‘And Akhtar? He’s okay?’

  ‘As okay as anyone who has pinned his hopes for happiness on the notion that Afghanistan may somehow get its shit together and learn to live in peace can be, I suppose. His man Gamol looks like he will win the regional elections in a walk. He’s probably the best option, but he’s far from perfect. You’ve been over there, you’ve seen what it’s like.’

  She nodded. ‘I have.’ She looked down at her coffee. ‘What happened to Fasil?’

  Toney’s face darkened. ‘You’d need clearance for me to tell you that. You don’t have clearance. Yet.’

  ‘And the rest of it?’

  ‘The rest of it was fairly simple. Lawrence Ainsworth died of a heart attack. He will be buried next to his son in a quiet ceremony with the official thanks of a grateful nation for all he did over the course of his lifetime. Sirus Stillwell was killed yesterday in Afghanistan while out on patrol. The key is deniability.’

  ‘And Jack sits in a hospital recovering from . . . what? A bad climbing accident? No one outside of the intelligence community will ever know the nature of his sacrifice?’

  ‘It’s the job he chose. People don’t go into this business seeking individual glory, because it’s never going to come. The credit for any success you have will, by necessity, be given to others. Any failure will be yours alone. That’s the deal, and everyone who joins up accepts it. That’s why they are the bravest people we have working for us. And the most dangerous.’

  ‘Sounds like a great life.’

  ‘No,’ Toney said slowly. ‘It’s a shitty life. But it’s a great calling, and a great cause.’ He took a long look at her. ‘Is it something you are interested in?’

  She didn’t answer at first. ‘Why?’

  ‘Why what?’

  ‘Why are you asking me?’

  ‘Because I have seen you in the field, and I know you have the skills. You have the physical and mental strength and the ability to kill when necessary. That was what you were being trained for, after all. It would be as though you were picking up right from the moment everything went to shit. You’d be making a great contribution to your country.’

  She glared at him. ‘With people like you and Ainsworth running things, I’m not sure whether I want to make that contribution.’

  He smiled back at her. He was a good-looking man, but he had an oily unattractive smile. It was a smile she didn’t trust. ‘Yes you are,’ he said. ‘For all its faults, this is still the greatest country in the world.’

  ‘Damning us with faint praise, aren’t you?’

  ‘The world is a fucked-up place. Like it or not, it takes dedicated people to try to keep it together. The only question is: are you one of those people?’ He’d finished with a rhetorical flourish, clearly expecting that the power of his patriotism could not fail to win her over.

  She finished her coffee and stood up, picked up her purse, which contained one of two final copies of her criminal record. ‘Thanks for this,’ she said. ‘I appreciate it.’

  ‘That’s it?’ he demanded, dumbfounded.

  ‘I’ll think about it.’

  ‘What’s to think about? I’m giving you the chance to change the world – potentially to alter the course of history. What could be more important than that?’

  She looked at him, knowing that he would never understand. She decided to try it anyway. ‘The biggest changes happen in the smallest places,’ she said.

  ‘What the fuck does that mean?’ Toney sputtered.

  ‘It’s the motto for the organization I work for. I never really understood it either. Not until now.’ She walked to the door and looked back at him. ‘I’ll let you know. And thanks again.’ She left before he could say anything.

  Once out on the street, she decided to walk back to her apartment through the projects where she’d grown up. It was unusually warm for the season. The temperature had crept up into the sixties, and Southie had come alive for a brief moment. Kids played on the sidewalks in their shirtsleeves, squeezing the last hours out of what would be one of the final real nice days before winter set in. Outside bodegas and local restaurants, tables had been set up, and people loitered there, having coffee and sausages, looking at the blue sky like a lover saying goodbye.

  As she rounded the corner onto Mercer, she saw a group of kids playing kick the can in the street. There was one little girl apart from the others, sitting on the steps. She was skinny and had bruises on her knees. Her face was dirty enough that the tracks where the tears had fallen recently stood out like angry warpaint.

  It took a moment for Cianna to recognize her, and another for her to come up with the girl’s name. Once she had it, though, she walked over to her. ‘Maggie?’ she said in a soft, friendly tone. The girl looked up at her with distrust and anger, as though she regarded all adults as the enemy. ‘Your name’s Maggie, isn’t it?’ Cianna ventured farther. ‘I know your mom, Jenny. We . . .’ She stumbled, but only for a moment, as she recalled that awful scene at the apartment, and then seeing Jenny still with Vin the drug dealer a few days later. ‘We worked together once.’

  Hearing her mother’s name seemed to soften the girl’s attitude a little. She looked away, and then put her head down.

  ‘Do you know where your mom is, honey?’ she asked.

  The little girl pointed to a window on the second floor of the apartment house behind them. ‘Up there,’ she said. ‘She told me to stay here.’

  Cianna looked around her own neighborhood, and thought about her childhood. There hadn’t been much of it, and what there had been was not pleasant to recall. She thought about Nick O’Callaghan and all that he had done for her. She thought about how she’d at once protected and belittled her younger brother Charlie. It hit her how, with just a little more attention, a little more effort, it could have all been so different.

  She looked back down at the little girl. ‘Maggie,’ she said. ‘Look at me.’ The little girl lifted he
r head and Cianna could see the hopelessness that seemed to go all the way to the bottom of the girl’s soul. ‘I’m going to go up there and bring your mother out, okay? How would that be with you?’ A spark appeared in the depths of the despair, and the girl nodded. ‘Good,’ Cianna said. ‘I have a few things I need to talk to her about, and she may be a little tired and angry when she comes out, but together we’ll try to make her better.’

  She put her hand out, and slowly, hesitantly, the little girl took it. Cianna shook the hand and smiled. ‘Okay,’ she said. ‘Just stay here and be brave.’ She let go of the little girl’s hand and walked up the front stoop. As she reached for the doorbell, she checked her coat pocket for the revolver she’d kept with her since Saunders had given it to her. With any luck she wouldn’t need it, she thought. But in this line of work, it was nice to know it was there.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Thanks to the many people who helped me throughout the writing of this book. To all the wonderful people at Macmillan, but especially Natasha Harding, Will Atkins, Ruth Carim, Ellie Wood, Rob Cox, Maria Rejt and Camilla Elworthy, thanks so much for your hard work. A special thank you to Trisha Jackson, my spectacular editor, who helped me keep the effort on track. Undying thanks to Aaron Priest and Lisa Erbach Vance and all of the people at the Aaron Priest Literary Agency, and Arabella Stein, my agent in London: a writer could have no better support group.

  Finally, thanks to my family: My wife Joanie, who does such a wonderful job keeping everything else in my life from collapsing, Reid and Samantha, Mom and Dad, my brother Ted, and my extended group of family and friends who are the best part of my life. I appreciate everything you do.

  THE GUARDIAN

  David Hosp is a trial lawyer who has spent a portion of his time working pro bono on behalf of wrongly convicted individuals. He finds time to write his novels on his daily commute by boat across Boston Harbour. He lives with his wife and family outside the city.