by Greg Rucka
“We need more ice,” Heath says, rising and heading for the kitchen.
The Lear taxis straight into one of Hurlburt’s hangars upon landing, and the doors close immediately behind them. The one called Steelriver is first down the stairs, with Nessuno coming second to last in the group of shooters, Warlock behind her. She’s seen predawn creeping into the sky as they touched down, but once she’s out of the light of the plane and into the hangar, everything here is sharp and bright, high halogens that bathe the cavernous interior blue-white and bounce a glare off the polished floor.
There are eleven men waiting, all in civvies. Nessuno casts her eyes over them in quick survey, trying to recognize faces and, failing that, duties. A black Chevy Blazer has been parked maybe ten meters away, and its motor is running, one man in a suit standing beside it and another visible behind the wheel. Something about them shouts federal to her rather than military. The others are all from the army, though, she’s sure of that, even if she’s not sure who they are or what they’re here to do. Maybe a couple of MPs, she figures, and one or two counterintelligence agents. The shooters have humped their gear bags off the plane, and they drop them at their feet. Warlock peels off immediately for a quick consult with a stone-faced Latino whom Nessuno puts in his midforties. They start exchanging quick, quiet words that she cannot and does not try to overhear.
She’s tired, still shaky, and there’s a pressure behind her eyes that’s either the start of one hell of a headache or the demand of tears or both. The headache she can deal with, the way she dealt with the shakes and the vomiting, but she doesn’t want tears, not here, not now. She knows they’re coming, and she’s willing to accept them later without complaint, the same way she saw Warlock accept his adrenaline crash. The price of doing business. But she will neither accept nor allow water from her eyes in front of these men.
The flight crew disembarks, and Nessuno watches them make a silent beeline for the rear of the hangar, never once looking back. They don’t know, and they know better than to want to know. Four of the waiting group go up the stairs, disappear inside the plane, come out again in just over a minute. They’re carrying Tohir, strapped to a stretcher. He’s still unconscious. They load him immediately into the back of the Blazer. The one in the suit watches without comment. Nessuno wonders how Tohir will be parceled up, if it’ll be DIA or FBI or perhaps some other arm of Justice that takes possession. The man is a criminal as much as a terrorist. She wonders if someone, somewhere, imagines a trial.
It doesn’t matter. In the end, everyone will get a piece of him.
She doesn’t care.
Right now, she tells herself that she never wants to see Vosil Tohir’s face again.
Someone opens the hangar doors, and she watches the Blazer roll away, speeding up and then turning out of sight. When she turns back, the stone-faced man is in front of her, offering his hand.
“Colonel Daniel Ruiz,” he says. “Welcome home, Chief.”
“Thank you, sir.”
Ruiz shakes her hand as though he means what he says, then indicates two of the remaining men. The older of them is black, wearing blue jeans and a Red Sox sweatshirt, head shaved and glossy enough to kick light. The other looks a bit younger, midtwenties, perhaps, white, shorter, also blue jeans but no jacket, and he’s made no attempt to hide the SIG riding at his hip or the cuffs in their case on his belt. He’s got a haircut that hasn’t quite forgotten regulation but is doing its best.
“These are Sergeants Danso and Harrington,” Ruiz says. “You’ll need to go with them.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Mind if I sit in?” Warlock asks.
The older sergeant, Danso, shrugs. “You missing the CI action, Jad?”
“I just want to make sure you haven’t lost a step, Han.”
“No objection. Chief?”
“No objection.”
There are more words, Ruiz telling the shooters where they need to be and when. The one called Cardboard offers her his hand.
“Keep the shirt,” he says.
She falls in with Danso on one side and Harrington on the other, Warlock walking a little behind, begins crossing the hangar, following the path of the flight crew. They’re trying to keep it soft, but she can’t escape the feeling of being guarded, of being watched.
“I was hoping you’d ask for it back,” she hears Steelriver say.
Heath comes back with more ice. She’s five years older than Nessuno, has crossed over into her thirties, blond hair cut short and neat, and a Laura Ingalls Wilder face that makes the people who meet her think words like sweet and innocent, an illusion that’s shattered the moment she opens her mouth and begins to swear in a way that would make the entirety of the marine corps blush. Right now, she’s not doing a very good job of hiding her concern.
Nessuno holds out her glass for ice.
“You need to reintegrate,” Heath says.
Nessuno takes the bottle, refills her drink. “I thought that was what we’re doing.”
“No, we’re getting drunk. This is off-the-record shitface time.”
“Unofficial.”
“Fuck official. I saw your medical, did I tell you? You’re clean.”
“You said.”
“Did I? The bourbon must be working.” Heath takes her seat on the couch again, tucking her feet beneath her. She swallows some of her drink. “So tell me.”
“What?”
Heath indicates Nessuno with the glass in her hand, gesturing vaguely at her shoulder. “Scarring along the shoulder, consistent with bullet track or similar projectile injury whatever the fuck that means and which, I note, you failed to offer an adequate explanation of how you came to have such a mark when questioned by the examining physician for such and shit I am drunk. You know how I know I’m drunk?”
“Run-on sentences.”
“Run-on sentences,” Heath says.
“You always talk in run-on sentences, ma’am.”
“Call me ma’am again and I’ll club you with this bottle. Tell me.”
Nessuno shrugs. “He didn’t do it, if that’s what you’re asking.”
“That was kind of what I was asking, yes.”
“I didn’t duck fast enough.”
“I thought Tohir didn’t use you like that.”
“Nice.”
Heath winces. “Not what I meant.”
Nessuno actually grins, is surprised by how good it feels. It passes fast. “There was a deal—heroin—and he wanted me to go with him and look like arm candy. They were selling to some Italians.”
“December.” Heath nods. “I remember the report.”
“So Tohir wanted me there to look good, but also to listen in on what was being said in Italian because his Italian is shit. We finish up, and I’m being a pretty hostess and clearing the drinks, and I overhear one of these guys saying they’re going to fuck us over. So I told Tohir.”
“And?”
“Bullets were employed.” She says each word clearly, aware that she, too, is now quite drunk. She looks into her glass. There’s a fingernail’s depth of bourbon remaining, but she thinks it’s less, because of the displacement from the ice.
“You left that part out.”
“What were you going to do, ma’am? Come take me home? Kiss it all better?” Nessuno empties her glass and sets it down, harder than she intends to, and it knocks loudly on the surface of the coffee table. “Yeah, I’m drunk, too.”
“You fucking well better be, you just called me ma’am again. And you killed the fucking bottle. That bottle was full when we started, Chief.”
Nessuno is staring at the empty glass, the ice cubes slowly melting. The wave of sudden self-pity she feels is followed by a surge of anger that she suspects is directed, more than anything, at herself but that she points at Heath instead.
“That’s not my fucking name,” Nessuno says.
They end up in a briefing room attached to the hangar, with Nessuno seated at one side of a long ta
ble and Danso and Harrington opposite. Warlock stands. On the table is a pitcher of water, three plastic cups in a stack, a cardboard box about the right size for shoes, and a thick envelope, catalog size, stamped with declarations of secrecy and warnings of exactly how much trouble your ass will be in if you open it and aren’t authorized to do so. There’s a routing sequence on the envelope, and four signatures, arranged by date, ending with the most recent. Reading upside down, she’s pretty sure the last signature is H. DANSO. The first one, she knows, is A. HEATH. There’s also a small monitorlike unit that resembles nothing so much as a View-Master, except it’s molded ballistic black plastic and probably costs a hundred times as much as the toy.
“We’re going to ask you some questions, Chief,” Danso says, breaking the seal on Nessuno’s proof-of-life envelope without ceremony and pulling a sheaf of papers free. He hands the envelope off to Harrington, who empties the rest of the contents on the table, a set of eight-by-ten photographs, and begins laying them out in front of her.
“CI?” Nessuno asks.
She knows the answer already, knows she’s asking only to buy herself time, though she’s had the entirety of the flight in to get her head straight. It hasn’t been enough, and while she knows absolutely that nothing in what she has said so far, in anything that she has done, has betrayed the fact, she is scared. She is as afraid as she ever was in the past sixteen months, as frightened here in Florida as she was in Tashkent, or Vienna, or Moscow, that she will be revealed as an impostor, as a fraud, as a spy. She knows, absolutely, that she shouldn’t feel these things. She knows that she is home, that she is safe.
But she cannot make herself stop feeling what she feels, and that, in turn, makes her feel all the more adrift.
“We are counterintel, that is correct.” Danso pats his pockets for a moment, and Harrington stops moving the photos around long enough to shake his head and produce a ballpoint, handing it over. Danso clicks the pen alive, begins running down the first sheet, and Warlock takes the opportunity to reach in for the pitcher and pour. He sets one of the cups in front of her, takes another for himself. She’s oddly touched by the act, tries to find a smile to give him, but by then he’s already backed off, and Danso is ready to begin.
“What’s your name?” Danso asks.
“Nessuno,” she says. “Petra Graziella.”
“Rank?”
“CWO Two.”
“DOB?”
She needs a moment before she can tell him.
“And where were you born?”
This comes a little faster. “Philly, Thomas Jefferson University Hospital.”
“Your father’s name?”
She tells him.
“Your mother’s maiden name?”
She tells him, feeling marginally more confident. All the answers are there, waiting in the back of her mind. Covered in dust, hidden in corners, but there. She just needs to stay calm, she thinks, and it’ll all come back.
“Your mother’s place of birth?”
“Palermo.”
“Name of your first DI?”
“Sergeant Mendoza.”
“Where did you have your first kiss?”
“Wrigley Field.” Feeling more confident now. Nessuno can practically see the game in her mind’s eye, remember it like yesterday, the view from her seat on the first-base line. She can smell the beer, taste the peanuts. “Cubs were playing the Pirates.”
“How old were you?”
“I was eleven.”
Danso, who has been making tick marks on the sheet, looks up at her. “How old were you?”
She blinks, guard instantly in place, rising on instinct. No change in her expression, no darting eyes, no shift in her posture, all the things she knows to keep her lies looking like the truth. Outside, what she is showing Danso and Harrington and Warlock looks like nothing at all, she knows. Just a pause, just a woman taking a moment to reconsider.
But inside, a piece of her is writhing, fighting rising panic. Remembering Tohir, when he asked her the same question, his arms around her, flushed from their lovemaking. He’d told her that the first time he’d had sex he was eleven, and she’d said something about him starting early. He thought himself a good lover, his performance had mattered to him. She remembers what she said, how she’d told him that he was probably fucking before she’d even kissed a boy for the first time, and he had laughed and buried his face against her neck and told her he loved her foul mouth.
“I was eleven,” Nessuno says again, and the part of her that watches during these moments, that looks to both her performance and its reception, relaxes. “Maybe twelve. I’m sorry, I don’t remember.”
Danso holds his gaze on her a moment longer, and she gives him nothing in return. He goes back to his sheet. Harrington, still silent, hasn’t looked away from her once, and she thinks that he is the more dangerous of the two, that he is the one she needs to worry about convincing right now.
“Name of your favorite pet,” Danso asks.
Not good, she thinks. There’s nothing there; she can’t remember the cat’s name. She can see the cat, curled on the foot of her bed; she can see the powder-blue comforter beneath it, the lace edge of one of the throw pillows. But there’s no name, and she feels them watching her, waiting, and this time she knows she must say something before her silence condemns her.
“She was a tabby,” Nessuno says. “I don’t…Daphne. Her name was Daphne.”
The questions keep coming, another two dozen that range from the banal to the invasive. She answers as best she can. From the corner of her eye, she can see Warlock standing aside, leaning against the wall. Unlike Danso and Harrington, he doesn’t seem to be looking at her, but she isn’t willing to bank on that.
Danso makes another mark, then indicates the photographs spread out between them with the pen. “From my right, please identity these.”
She looks at the photos. “That’s my uncle Nicholas, at my baptism. That one is first grade, class photo.”
Harrington speaks for the first time. “Indicate, please, where you are in the photograph.”
Nessuno puts her finger on a dark-haired girl in a blue jumper in the second row.
Harrington indicates the blond woman standing beside the third row. “Who is this?”
“Miss Johnson.”
Danso makes another mark. “Continue.”
She does, identifying pictures of friends and family. Her best friend from fourth grade, Carla Quinones; her field hockey team from high school, with Coach Linden and Tina the Terrible; the facade of her parents’ restaurant in Chicago, in Six Corners; friends and family celebrating after her first communion; her fourteenth birthday party, with all the guests as she blows out the candles; her junior prom, with Alexander Buckman, wearing that neon-blue tux, and she in a dress she thought was wonderful and that now looks absurd and dated. All these questions, and looking at her hair in that picture makes her want to blush.
When she finishes with the photographs, Harrington gathers them up again, slips them back into the envelope.
“Last one,” Danso says. “Who is Elisabetta Villanova?”
Nessuno answers without thinking and without hesitation. This question is easy. This answer holds no doubt. There is no need to plumb memory.
“Me,” she says.
They make it through half of another bottle, this of Bulleit rye, before both of them are far too drunk to continue. Nessuno tries to argue for taking a cab back to her hotel, but Heath is having none of it. This argument ultimately collapses on both sides, less because of persuasion than because the pauses between declarations stretch longer and longer, and the next thing Nessuno knows she’s awake, wincing, her back and hips aching from having slept in this damn chair for God knows how long. Heath is still asleep, sprawled on the couch, snoring with her mouth open.
Nessuno makes her way to the kitchen and pours water into her body, enough to make the throbbing headache retreat, if only slightly. Her mouth feels like pas
te, and she’s still drunk. She searches around through kitchen drawers, finds a notepad and a pencil, scribbles a message. She leaves it tucked beneath the bottle on the coffee table, where Heath will see it when she wakes. Then she calls a cab to take her back to her hotel. Heath is still snoring when she leaves.
She’s got a room at the Courtyard by Marriott in Gaithersburg, because that is the kind of place that an army CW2 with a pay grade of W-2 and is pulling down just over 42K a year before taxes stays. It is exactly the kind of place that Petra Nessuno stays, and she hates it, because Elisabetta Villanova slummed it when she had to but lived large when she could.
She has lost count of the number of hotels she has slept in over the past two years.
When she first met Tohir, it was in a suite at the Baltschug Kempinski, in Moscow. Elisabetta Villanova was many things, and one of them was an art and antiquities dealer. She’d been brought in by a third party who had Tohir’s trust to evaluate a painting, The Cheaters by Jan Miense Molenaer. The painting had been stolen from the Netherlands the year before, and Tohir claimed to be selling it for a “friend” who’d had no idea it had been stolen. He’d hoped Signora Villanova could help arrange the sale, perhaps for a private buyer. For the right price, she’d told him, it would be her pleasure.
She left that first meeting without ever learning his name, but she knew she had made an impression. Before they’d parted company, he had asked about her nationality (American), her passports (U.S. and Italy), the number of languages she spoke (nine, but only five fluently). All things, she knew, that would make her very useful to a man engaged in transnational crime.
She had been correct. Over the next four months, he contacted her twice more; once to broker the sale of a stolen Picasso, then a set of Babylonian coins stolen during the fall of Baghdad. With Heath’s assistance back home, Elisabetta Villanova was able to move them all, and they both knew that each one of these jobs was a test, a means for him to evaluate her, to check on her history, her identity, her story. Was Elisabetta Villanova for real? Was she to be trusted?