Dreamspinner Press Year Four Greatest Hits

by Felicia Watson

  I gentled my voice. “It was indeed, Niall. Much more than that. I liked it. Good place.”

  He looked up at me then, the anger fading as quickly as it had come. Maybe he recognized something in my expression. There was too much we could both have said, but not enough to ease the moment.

  “What about you? Were you badly hurt?”

  He shrugged. His limbs looked sapped of strength. “I doubt you need to ask. You can assess me as well as I can myself.”

  I grimaced. We’d been through the same training, after all. “Tell me how you think you are.”

  “Just shock I think. Some bruises.”

  I nodded, knowing he was in pain, and knowing he knew I knew he was in pain, and that I knew… well, whatever the hell any of that mattered. “So what do you want to do now? You want to sleep?” The moment of truth had come at last. I’d submitted to the Department’s demands and was resigned to offering what sparse hospitality I could. Hurrah for me. I braced myself for Niall’s scorn, for the inevitable resistance and resumption of hostilities.

  None of it came.

  “Yes,” he said quietly, and rare though it was, he surprised me. Guess he was definitely in shock. Or maybe I’d never seen him before in such a vulnerable position. “I just want to lie down here and crash out for a few hours. If you’ve got a blanket, fine, but I’m not cold or anything. If you need to work here or something, just say. If I’m in the way, I can sleep somewhere else.”

  I was listening to his words, but not hearing. I was just watching his mouth, trying to read his body language. He was fucking unhappy, I could tell. And tired beyond exhaustion.

  “Hell of a time, eh, Sutherland?”

  His laugh was short and bitter. “You can say that again.”

  We stared at each other then, for a few long, painful seconds. His eyes were full of residual shock and horror, plus sadness and anger. Maybe mine looked a bit like that too. In the end, I turned away from his gaze. It was all just a little bit too uncomfortable.

  “I’ll get a blanket.” I slid off my stool with a wince of discomfort. “Damned couch is more like the back of a drunken camel, but that’s all there is on offer in a mansion like this. You’re welcome to it.”

  Monday 22:45

  IN THE end, he slept right through the day and on into the night. Flatbed trucks screeched over the gravel paths as guys came back from a day’s work; the dogs barked and howled some more and so did the emerging trailer kids, engrossed in the usual homicidal superhero game. Life at the trailer park made no concessions to Niall. I mean, I was used to it by then. But he must either have been extraordinarily tired or medicated, because he didn’t stir.

  I got on with my usual stuff, which consisted of clearing up and reading the newspapers and puttering about on some projects I’d been dabbling in. The details weren’t important to anyone but me. There hadn’t been much else in my life for the last couple of months, not that I was complaining. Well, okay, maybe I was, sometimes. But it wasn’t like there was anything I was prepared to do about it. Not at the moment.

  I walked around Niall a couple of hundred times. Sometimes I stopped to watch him sleep, his body stretched out as best he could on my couch. Head cushioned on his arm, dark hair caught up against his cheek, legs folded and hips shifting occasionally as he sought a more comfortable position. But after a while, I tried my hardest to resist that entertainment. It didn’t exactly give me any peace. I napped for an hour or so myself, though thanks to Judith and Simon’s visit, I was a little less relaxed than I might have been. When it grew dark outside the trailer and things were quieter again, I ate a cheese sandwich or two, drank some coffee, and decided to spend my time in working out what the hell was going on.

  When Judith set up the Project Team, we all knew it was risky. She’d never kept entirely within the rules of the Department as it was, but she believed there was a need for a small, specialist intelligence team to use on the more sensitive missions—and she pushed for management of it. Amazingly, they agreed. She chose her own guys and ran it her own way. A very fair boss, with an unusually compassionate care for her staff—for all of them, right down to her devoted assistant Cissy, the drivers, the clerical team, and anyone else who supported her.

  A couple of early successes and she was cautiously settled in place. We identified an assassination threat on a Presidential candidate days before his own Secret Service personnel even started to suspect. We exposed the tax frauds of an evangelical TV preacher. And we also helped find the hiding place of a runaway child of one of our own Department’s senior management before they came to any harm. We reported it all to the relevant powers that be, quietly and effectively, and without the glare of publicity.

  How did we do it? Judith had been right, in that a small group of anonymous agents could infiltrate where official personnel were blocked. We weren’t beholden to any other boss, any other timetable. Sometimes, one man could go where a whole department couldn’t—or where they had to keep within more regulated lines. Our faces weren’t on file, our fingerprints never taken. We could concentrate entirely—and swiftly—on the areas of most risk. And we utilized a unique balance of skills.

  I was on infiltration; I had been told to expect everything from surveillance of a suspect to donning the old false beard and trying to sell Bibles on the doorstep to unsuspecting crooks. I’d had a fairly varied life, and it qualified me to blend into all kinds of background. I could convince a target that Tanner MacKay was nothing but a loud, vulgar extrovert, and then I’d merge into their particular crowd for a couple of hours and wait to see if they noticed me. They rarely did. I’d be the nondescript guy who sold them their groceries or the guy who was fixing the elevator on their floor. Or the man who briefly took their wife’s elbow at a cocktail party and left her with the memory of an expensive cologne, the sip of an overly dry martini, and a smiling, flirtatious insolence. But hardly anything about his individual features.

  I’d been described as a chameleon, and I didn’t dislike the comparison. I liked surprising people, whether I was anonymous or acting larger than life. A character that’s “in-your-face” can use as much sleight of hand as a mouse of a man, right?

  There weren’t many of us in the core Team, but the others had similar, unique resumes.

  Brad Richards worked all our computer and communication systems. He came from an army background, or so they said. He never spoke about it—well, not specifically to me—and he never pulled rank. Once, Brad and I delivered a report to the Department when it was being visited by senior military personnel. There was a classic moment when the general in charge saw Brad, did a double take, and then looked deeply confused, like he was seeing someone familiar but out of context. Not just that, but I saw him snatch back an instinctive salute, hoping none of us had noticed the faux pas. I never found the right time to ask Brad any more about it.

  Simon… well, the earnest, efficient Simon Wagner had used his organizational skills for slightly less legal purposes in his past life. He came to us from a minor correctional facility where he was serving a short-term sentence for a rather sophisticated financial fraud. They’d been sorry to let him go—not because they didn’t want him to go “straight,” or because they were worried about issues of national security, but because he was the only one who’d proved up to the task of redeveloping their transport logistics. He’d also motivated the whole damned place into a new workflow pattern that increased efficiency by twenty-five percent, and his revolutionary new training plan to reduce the rate of re-offending had just been passed by the prison board. And now? Now he was a changed man, and Judith’s right hand manager.

  Joe Lam was the other main player. Of Chinese extraction, he was built as solidly as a brick wall but with considerably better muscle definition and steely self-discipline. No fighting style had been invented that he hadn’t heard of, and probably mastered. Judith had poached him from the Department itself, and he still trained their recruits. He was the only guy allowed to
straddle the two worlds like that. He’d taught me a few new moves, and I’d hated him passionately for every damned second of it. Joe was a walking block of relentlessness, never flinching from criticizing me for all the things I apparently persisted in doing wrong. It astounded me that all his other pupils were devoted to him, willing to follow him over the top like lemmings.

  And then there was Niall Sutherland, of course.

  He was the original quiet man, appearing from some unremarkable background, yet with knowledge of both hand-to-hand weaponry and tools of semi-mass destruction like I couldn’t imagine outside of a sci-fi film. I always assumed he’d been some kind of mercenary, though he described it as nothing more than time spent as a soldier. He rarely talked about the past, except to admit to no family, and few roots. He didn’t seem to consider himself as anything out of the ordinary. But sometimes he looked like a walking ball of tension; a coiled spring of predatory violence, just waiting to be let loose. He was always amazingly focused, and when he was in “mission mode,” everything he did was tightly controlled and shockingly effective. Did I think he’d killed people in his military or intelligence career? You bet I did. I also assumed it’d been when he had no other choice. Of course, I may have been a little naïve there.

  Rumor had it he’d been moved on from more than one department as too much for them to handle. I often wondered who’d had the balls to try. I recalled how, during Mission Dove, there’d been a thirteenth-hour challenge to the peace talks. A non-violent opposition group was hijacked by a more militant faction, and it quickly threatened to develop into a full-scale physical riot. Judith mobilized Niall and a couple of choice acolytes within the hour. They moved swiftly and secretly in amongst the ringleaders. The protestors’ weapons were removed and “lost,” and their principals persuaded to take their provocation elsewhere. The danger had passed, and several hours before the security services got around to clearing the legalities of investigation. So maybe some of the methods used weren’t above board, but they were tightly controlled and shockingly effective. Like I said.

  Yeah. We were a strangely mismatched bunch of guys, it might seem, but somehow the core Team had worked. All of us together, friends and complements.

  Until, of course, I broke it all up.

  ELEVEN P.M. came and went with nothing more than some off-tune singing outside my trailer as someone lurched back to his own place, full of tonight’s home brew. Lights around the park flickered off, and the view from my window morphed into a small, indigo-black square. I was stretched out rather awkwardly on the floor, lying on top of some cushions and flicking through a catalog of various “might be useful if I ever get back to active duty” goods. God knows what my neighbors thought I was up to when they saw me rummaging in the waste site beside the park, collecting up a wide selection of discarded, dog-eared publications. “Stage Makeup and Costumes for Halloween”; “Be Seen in the Scene—this season’s ladies’ fashions”; “How to Build Scale Models”; “Amateur Film-Making Techniques”; “Calligraphy for Beginners”; “When Sports Stars Misbehave”—you name it, it was likely to have use for me at some stage.

  Niall expelled a breath, shifting awkwardly on the couch. I assumed he’d sleep through until morning now. I wondered what I had to offer for breakfast, but then he never ate much in the morning, I knew. A flare of anger stabbed through me. Damned Department, still hounding me, landing this particular bombshell on my front steps….

  I thumped a cushion and settled myself again.

  So was this threat to the Team really to do with Mission Dove? There were always a few people who didn’t want success, who didn’t want peace, for whatever warped reason they personally thought justifiable. I thought we’d weeded most of those out, one way or another. Guess a couple may have escaped our clutches. I’d left the tidying up at the end of the mission to Judith.

  Judith Harrington had been the favored daughter of a famous political family; an independently rich family too. She’d been expected to marry a high profile governor, or a disgustingly rich industrialist, or perhaps even a member of a minor royal family. Instead, she’d shown the lot of them the virtual finger and gone out to get a job. Used her family’s influence to get accepted into the Department, then cut a swathe through it on her own merits so that she was in a senior position after eighteen months. I wasn’t there then, but the stories still rattled around the water cooler of how her innovative budgeting changed the whole approach to a mission’s resources; of how her arbitration skills saved more than a couple of Departmental expeditions from disaster. Oh, and she kicked ass, too, had I mentioned that? People still talked in whispers about the disgraced Director who made a pass at her, and how he still found it difficult, one, to get a job elsewhere, and two, to make a proper fist of his crushed hand. There were probably more than a few establishment figures who were glad to see her move out in favor of her own team, if only to get her off their back. Maybe they were the ones keeping her in resources and support.

  So we moved in dangerous waters, as a matter of course. But then why and how had the target suddenly changed to be members of the Project Team? To me, that was way more worrying. We’d never been high-profile—most of the Department’s staff wouldn’t know us if they passed us in the corridor—and we worked damned hard to maintain that anonymity. Otherwise we’d never have been able to do the things we did, or reach the people and organizations we needed. Okay, so we couldn’t all hide away in some Bat Cave somewhere, but we did all we could to distract and mislead, as a matter of course. We all had names, though they weren’t always the ones on our birth certificates. We had homes, too, and they were under whatever protective surveillance Judith could beg, borrow, or demand. Usually.

  So where had the security been for Niall Sutherland?

  Niall’s home.

  My gut cramped with familiar nausea. He might have been killed. It had been a matter of luck that he wasn’t. I hadn’t seen him for three months, and when I did, he was stumbling free of the jaws of a crumbling, crushing death.

  There was a context to this whole mess, of course. Niall and I had history. Like, we weren’t born glaring at each other the way we did today. No, we’d been exemplary colleagues and fellow operatives, mature young men with a commitment to the Department and the Project Team. We’d been bright and appropriately aggressive and everyone had rated us well.

  At least, that was in our professional life.

  I couldn’t stop my thoughts returning to the attack on him. Judith’s details had been sparse, but Niall had confirmed that his apartment was now completely gone. It presumably lay in a mess of brick and exploded plaster, miles away from here. I didn’t mind admitting, the thought of that wreckage stung me almost as much as it distressed him. Even leaving aside the injury to Niall and potential harm to others in the building, there’d been things in that apartment that were now destroyed forever—things that I’d known.

  No, not just that. Things that had been mine, or at the very least, shared between us. Things that were treasured for memory alone, for a sentiment that nowadays I tried damned hard to despise. Things from a time that I tried even harder to forget.

  For many months, I’d spent more time there than at my own apartment. There was a time when we ate together, did laundry together, watched TV, played chess, rehearsed our parts in upcoming missions, and rested after the frenzy of completed ones.

  Lived, washed, cooked, breathed, laughed together.

  Went to bed together—or the couch, or whatever square meter of carpeted floor we reached first. Yeah. That was the context.

  It was a time when we were lovers.

  Tuesday 00:15

  NIALL SLEPT, and I continued to brood.

  I should have been sleeping, too, but I never could when I was disturbed. No excuse, really, for allowing the memories to clutch long, strong fingers around my neck and choke the emotions back out of me. But they did. I teased and tortured myself with recalling everything about him.

  The m
emories were always vivid. But nowadays, I just never let them loose.

  I joined the Department over a year ago. Initially, I just sort of drifted there. I was doing contract work for some neighborhood guys I knew, working on a rather creative property deal with a major financial institution. Not that I knew anything about property; I was just there to liaise with the realtors on their behalf. Call me naïve, but I hadn’t realized the sketchy legality of the job, at least until I was approached privately by one of the financial firm’s paralegals who’d refused any part of the deal. He suggested I should look for a new career—and he introduced me to Judith Harrington. I soon saw the light and I dumped the ‘guys’. Smartish.

  So I was hired, before I really knew what the job was! It was a pleasant surprise when Judith asked me to consider doing what I already enjoyed so much: becoming someone else for a while, working my way into places I hadn’t previously been invited, just taking on challenges and having damned good fun. That’s a very facile way to describe our work, I know, but at the time it was how I viewed it all.

  And I thrived there, though I say so myself. She was building up the Team at the time, and I soon realized I’d been brought into the hub of the best people. It was small scale; we weren’t an army and we weren’t some kind of super secret agents. Just a group of people who wanted to make a difference, but were an uneasy fit with formal authority. It was good company for me. I hooked up with Brad and Simon and Joe as genuine friends, and I had a healthy respect for Judith as a boss. At the very least, there was plenty going on to keep me out of trouble.

  In those first few months, I never bumped heads with Niall Sutherland at all. I think I’d seen his name on memos from Judith, but at that time he was a Departmental employee and not part of the Team. Besides, most of my work was in preparation, and I tended to work alone on that. I helped put together the best, most effective team: decided who were the critical people in the mission to influence—either for or against us—and then chose the particular skills we needed from our own team members. So I’d never met Niall, knew nothing of him except for his reputation in the Department and a certain amount of nervous admiration on the part of his workmates. Until Judith introduced us properly.