by Daniel Pyne
On the one-year anniversary of Dennis Troon’s funeral, still grieving, Jenny slipped out with her friend Rachel and got her father’s portrait tattooed on her back, left shoulder. First ink. She didn’t tell her mother, and her mother didn’t notice the bandage that covered it for the first few days. But when Jenny finally uncovered and looked at it in the mirror, she was horrified at what she saw. Although she’d given the tattoo artist her favorite photograph of her father, what she discovered on her shoulder was some sort of black-and-green wolverine—not the X-Man, the animal, and badly drawn at that. So badly rendered that Jenny burst into tears seeing it, and her mother heard her and forced her way into the bathroom (how did she know how to jimmy the lock?) and thus discovered Jenny’s ugly secret.
Not that her mom was judgmental; she offered to take her daughter to have it removed. Jenny, however, in her grief and embarrassment, insisted that she didn’t want to lose it; she wanted it fixed. Which she now knows was impossible, but the reflexive willfulness she inherited from her mother caused her to dig in and refuse any help.
At least, she thinks, in every other way I’m nothing like her.
A couple of years later, stoned and moody after dropping out of college, she tried to have another artist turn it into a rose. Her brother says now it looks like a hallucination broccoli. And ever since, Jenny just doesn’t take her top off except when she’s alone, not even for sex, although that hasn’t been much of an issue. She’s told her few hookups she has a hideous scar from a childhood kitchen grease fire, and she used to hope they would think this was something her mother had done to her.
Lately, she’s just ashamed of the whole fiasco. And sometimes wishes her mom would bring it up and offer again to go with her to have it removed. Or does she not remember that?
Shayda bangs out of the back door and into the alley, dragging two black plastic twist tie trash bags and looking surprised to find Jenny already back here. “You on break?”
Jenny takes one final drag on her cigarette and mashes it out on the bottom of her shoe. “No. Why?”
“We’re short behind the register. And somebody just did an online order for, like, ten gazillion variations on venti mocha frozen frappe shit.” Shayda takes some scarlet lipstick from her pocket and applies it blind, like a slash, to her mouth.
Jenny flicks her cigarette butt onto the ground and helps heave the trash into the bin. One of the bags splits open on a sharp metal flange and spills half its contents back out onto the pavement. “Dammit.”
The Amazon van rolls back up the alley, passing them, slowing to a crawl, Chet’s face in shadow in the driver’s side away from them, but his eyes are turned this way and bright, like they’re backlit. “Hey, ladies.”
“Ew. I know that guy.”
“Chet,” Jenny says.
“Chuck,” Shayda corrects. “Creep cupped my butt the other day when I was restocking napkins.”
A claret tongue splits the lips of the Amazon driver, and he waggles it at them lewdly.
Something in Jenny snaps. She reaches down and picks up the first thing she can find: a stale scone sopping with milk so spoiled she nearly retches as she reels back and throws through the van’s window a perfect spitball strike that hits Chuck on the side of his head and breaks into pieces that will be hard to clean out. He howls. Jams on the brakes. Throws open his door.
“Fuck fuck fuck.”
Shayda says, “Oh Jesus,” turns, and runs back inside.
Out of his vehicle, spitting, coughing, one eye clotted with viscous scone bits and half-shut, Chuck is holding one of those steering wheel lock bars, with which Jenny assumes he’s going to try to clobber her.
“The fuck are you doing?” he’s shouting, doing a stagger-walk around his van, clawing fetid crumbs from his collar. “The fuck do you think you fucking are?”
What Jenny thinks is she needs another weapon, and there’s an awkward length of rebar under the trash bin that, once she’s yanked it free, is way too long to be practical, but for one brief breath she imagines herself lifting it and running Chuck through, like a warrior princess would.
“I’m your worst nightmare,” Jenny barks at him, because she remembers it from a movie. “I’m Chuck the Creep’s hell on earth, a bitch with balls.”
“What’s going on here?” Dimitri, her manager, has stepped down from the back door.
“I’m pressing charges,” Chuck whines, letting the wheel lock fall to his side and starting to dig in his jacket for his phone. “Assault.” Now that she can compare Chuck to a normal-size man—in this case Dimitri, but could be anyone, really—Jenny confirms what she suspected all along: Chuck’s smallish. His saggy chinos, rolled up, still manage to pool over his trainers.
“I threw a scone at him,” Jenny confesses. “He’s the serial dick I told you about, D. He grabs ass when we come out from behind the bar.”
“She assaulted me with a biomuffin.”
“Stop embarrassing yourself, man.” Dimitri has only two interests: handpicked mycotoxin-free fair trade certified-organic Nicaraguan beans and cross-training. His forearms are bigger than Chuck’s legs. The manager may be an asshole, but he’s her asshole for once.
“Get out of here,” Dimitri tells the Amazon driver. “You buy your coffee beverages somewhere else from now on.”
After one defiant, disgusted sideways spit, Chuck turns and swaggers with all the dignity he seems able to muster back to his van, and they watch him climb in and drive away. Could be Jenny’s imagination, but she would swear she hears Chuck screaming as he pulls into traffic.
“You smoking out here, Jennifer?”
“No, sir.”
“Good.” This is the longest conversation she’s had with Dimitri since he hired her.
“Thanks,” Jenny says and means it.
“Shayda thought you needed help.” He glances at the rebar she’s still clutching, then spies the mess at the bin. “Put your sword away, and clean that shit up.”
CHAPTER SIX
A baker’s dozen of Sentro’s colleagues, the usual bridge mix of retired military in work-casual civilian clothes and exiled government bureaucrats in everyday suits, have gathered in the big pleather chairs around the conference table to browse her written report on the Nicosia exfiltration, which all were supposed to have read by now.
A senior man, his coiffed silver hair a Beltway cliché, starts in, “This was supposed to be a simple acquisition,” before Sentro can even sit down. Another lost name. Shit. Valdez? Falcone? Why does she forget some things while other stray memories crash in uninvited?
“I know.” The debrief has evidently started.
The senior man’s eyes tic-twitch when he looks up at her. Hector something. His eye situation is the unfortunate consequence of a nerve gas snafu in Tripoli when he was with the DIA. She remembers that. The Russian GRU was trying to kill another one of their own peripatetic ex-spies, and senior man got caught in the middle. His last name another anxious mental blank.
Was she ever good with names?
“I mean, jeez Louise, Aubrey, we’re trying to move in the direction of risk reduction and cost containment, and it’s like you’re out there, mountains to molehills, throwing money off the back of a train.”
How many metaphors can a man mix? “I know. I know.”
And she does know. All of it. It cascades back in harrowing detail: the dark hallway; the switchback no one had mapped; the stench of garlic, mold, and dry rot; the way she’d blanked on the suite number at the door.
“A number of complications arose,” she says. “Variables out of anyone’s control.”
The client was a multinational cloud-storage provider whose encryption-code team supervisor had traveled to Greece for a conference and disappeared from the hotel bar late one night. The ransom demand had been made through intermediaries; Solomon’s online investigation unit had identified the source as a Turkish terrorist organization that was, no doubt, engaged in another round of typically violent
and aggressive seasonal fundraising.
This was the crisis. Solomon’s job was to manage and resolve it. Once the asset was located, she took a team to the island to facilitate a rescue and exfiltration.
Listening to the operation audio feed over the conference room’s sound system, Sentro hears what her communications earpiece picked up of her own steady breathing while the remote audio-control op rustled papers with irritation while he looked to provide suite-number confirmation; a short delay, then the sound of a door opening to reveal the middle-aged Chinese American asset she’d been sent to retrieve, followed by the question he’d asked of her.
Can I help you?
For the big mission-review flat-screen in the Solomon Systems conference room, someone in support has prepared a PowerPoint of the Nicosia hotel-hallway confrontation. On an adjacent whiteboard are diagrams of the hallway’s events as they unfolded, positions of the principals, timeline, photographs: bodies on the ground, walls chewed up by high-caliber bullets.
The audio becomes badly distorted with all the hell that broke loose.
A studio publicity portrait reveals the asset fully clothed, from his firm’s corporate annual. Buttoned down and smiling. “Scott Chang,” Sentro narrates. “Forty-one. Father of three from Minnetonka. His wife is an Amway Silver Producer. He was in Cyprus to negotiate a cloud-sharing software license for the client, met some hot-girl honey trap in a bar, and confused a blue-ribbon blow job with true love. Lost three days in a GHB daze and didn’t, in fact, even understand he’d been kidnapped and ransomed by the Bozkurtlar Grey Wolves.”
The audio maxes out when the flash bang explodes.
“All I could do was embrace the suck,” she admits and looks around the table, hoping that those present, partners and peers, will understand, from their own experiences in the field or elsewhere, what she’s talking about and let her little memory glitch at the doorway slide.
“Happy ending, of course,” Sentro tells them. “Our client got its valued employee back. Amway wife still has a husband. And three little girls in Minnesota will grow up with a wiser, repentant dad.”
A sober silence, some shuffling of papers. Nobody wants to go first; nobody smiles.
The overhead sprinklers triggered by the stun grenade whisper on the ambient audio, raining down.
Sentro fills the awkward quiet with a comment: “That water felt heaven sent.”
No one around the table reacts.
Adrenaline and endorphins laid down underexposed snapshots that flood back to her, of Grey Wolves spilled in the hallway, of the naked female shooter she was forced to put down. As is her habit and means of self-protection, Sentro chooses not to think of them as dead but rather erased. No longer active obstacles.
But she remembers nothing of their flight from the hotel, the city, the island, their airlift back to Frankfurt, or the next thirty-six hours of her cool-down. And this is why she has, privately, gone to see the brain doctor. If there’s a decision that has to be made about her ability to do her job, going forward, she wants to make it herself.
“Why the hesitation in the hallway prior to contact?”
Shit. Sentro touches the Band-Aid covering where the bullet nicked her and looks down the conference table to the former NSA woman Lucky calls Lady Bug, but only behind her back. “Sorry?”
Okay, okay, don’t panic, but what’s Bug’s real name?
Tap-tap-tapping her mechanical pencil on the open report, the NSA woman looks back at Sentro, quizzical. “You asked your control for confirmation of the suite number.” Her taupe lipstick matches her No.6 clogs. Who does that? When the Bug—wait, got it: Laura, Laura Bugliosi—when Laura came aboard at Solomon Systems, Sentro hoped they might be friends. Discounting support staff, there are still only a handful of women on the Solomon Systems employee roster.
It didn’t happen; will never happen. Laura Bugliosi worships in the church of SIGINT. Sentro is a heretic.
“Eight seconds pass”—the senior man, Falcone, picks up Lady Bug’s thread—“and then the asset comes out of a different suite, and he seems to have surprised you.”
“I didn’t fully trust our intel,” Sentro lies. “The local recon was sloppy. I didn’t want to stumble into the wrong room.”
“You were out of position for what followed?”
“No. In position but requesting confirmation.”
“Had you not paused for it, might this all have transpired differently?”
Sentro’s been asking herself the same thing. The truth is she doesn’t know. And that scares her. “The world turns. There are no sure things or do-overs,” Sentro says a little defensively, and the room falls silent again, save for more idle flipping of pages. She likes her colleagues; they mean well. Like her, they’ve had to come to terms with a chosen profession rife with ethical and moral contradictions. Everyone finds their own way through it, and no one emerges unscathed.
Jenson, from operational finance, clears his throat. “Okay. So. Our total exposure . . .”
“Will greatly exceed our fee, yes,” Sentro concedes. “And that’s on me. I apologize. The cleanup, the local payoff, the necessity of an emergency exfiltration of the whole team after the event went south. It was just one of those days.” Of course it was. But she’s bothered by how much she suddenly wants them to believe this.
“The baseline goal for this operation was to facilitate a clean exchange,” someone says. “The money for the man.”
“Didn’t happen as planned, but we got a good result,” Sentro reminds them and looks for the source of this flinty criticism.
“You seem to be having more and more of ‘those days’ than any of our other active field operatives. Of late.” Bob Drewmore is the critic, a former ranger who, absent army fitness requirements, has been slowly eating his way toward an approximation of Jabba the Hutt. His assessment stings, because he was the one who first recommended Sentro go private sector with Solomon as she was mustering out, back in the day.
“A clean exchange happens between rational parties.” Her temper flares. “But I’m sorry—nobody calls us to deal with rational people, do they? We go in when all the other options have failed. And once in, if there are lives in play and I can save them, I do it. Goes where it goes. But I think my record speaks for itself.”
“Port Isabel.”
“What about it?” Drewmore just stares at her, smug, as if he’s just played an ace. In a way, he has; hardly a day goes by when Sentro doesn’t think about Port Isabel and wonder what she could have done differently. Better. “The boy was alive when I delivered him.”
“I guess you can look at it that way, sure. But we’re still paying on that civil suit.”
“Fuck you. That was one of my first jobs here, Bob, and I recovered the asset. You shouldn’t have settled.”
“Just saying.”
But he’s not. “For the record, you weren’t even there; you were sitting on your fucking thumbs in Islamabad, letting teenage soldiers get sent into an unwinnable sectarian civil war.”
The folds of Drewmore’s chin and jowls clench and shift. His stubby hands flutter up, defensive, backing off. “Hey. Okay. Sorry. Nothing personal, Aubrey.” He’s a good guy, she reminds herself, still married to the wife he met while in basic, commemorative rings from West Point and his multiple Middle East tours on almost all of his fingers. “It’s just, business-wise, we gotta factor the optics. Our investors don’t do nuance, nor give a runny shit about your record, or mine, only how it affects their bottom line. And you’ve become reckless, girl.”
Has she? Sentro takes a deep breath. Reminds herself that ever since the Solomon board decided to seek venture capital, these operational reviews have become public shamings.
“Caracas, Lagos. That rat fuck in the Bahamas. Now this?”
“Wasn’t me who ran the op in the Bahamas.”
“Still. History. Liability. Exposure. It’s a new game, Aubrey. I mean, hell, if you weren’t practically a founding partner here,
wouldn’t we be likely looking to find cause to fire your bony ass?”
“My ass has never been bony.”
There’s some uneasy laughter, allowing release.
“Back off, Bob. Point taken,” Bugliosi says, in a friendly tone. She trades a blank look with Sentro, who is a little astonished that the Bug has stood up for her. “Don’t be an armchair quarterback.”
“Maybe if she took a stretch of time off,” Falcone suggests, trying to de-escalate. “Until we get this all sorted out. Cooler heads and whatnot. She’s earned a break. Full salary.”
“Maybe you shouldn’t talk about me in the third person,” Sentro tells the room, thinking that the last thing she wants is a break. Another job is all she needs. The discipline, the narrowing down. The comforting sense of purpose. Her mind will settle down.
“I’m with Laura. What the hell is all this?” Elsayed asks in Sentro’s defense. “She’s not operating in a vacuum. We’re a team.”
Falcone spreads his hands in a vague gesture of helplessness. “We have three dead Turkish right-wing militia to explain to State. Weapons violations the Cypriots are squeaking about. Extensive damage to the hotel premises, ditto the leased vehicles used during the operation and subsequent exfiltration. Local fees and fines. NATO has been inquiring about an unauthorized dark flight through restricted airspace of four member countries.”
“Not to mention the bureau is threatening to sanction us for violating federal law prohibiting paying ransom for foreign hostages,” Lady Bug adds drolly, because everyone in the room knows that Solomon does this regularly; it’s fundamental to their sales pitch to clients.
“The feds themselves think that policy is horseshit,” Elsayed says. “Hell, the White House just bought back a couple of Christian missionaries using highway-department funds.”
Two words are rattling around Sentro’s head: time off?
“The client should have to cover all incurred overages. It’s in the standard contract. There’s no exceptions.” Elsayed shoots Sentro another sidelong look of support, and the argument swirls sans Sentro. Her thoughts skip, and suddenly she wonders, mortified, if during her wild years after Jenny was born, when she spent so much time away from Dennis—maybe Tripoli, or Mogadishu, where they worked so closely together and drank so much more than they should have—she slept with Reno Elsayed and can’t remember that.