by Greg Rucka
When he goes down on her, she claws at his back, tears at the bedclothes, cries out with the sudden intensity of the pleasure. It’s something Vosil Tohir never did, something he thought demeaning, servile, unmanning, and unbecoming; the source of his pleasure and hers was to be found in his cock, no place else. Bell’s pleasure is in her, and it takes her by surprise, and it delights her. She wonders if this is what Heath imagined, this shift from object to identity. When she thinks she can bear it no more, she pushes him away, rolls to climb him. She tastes herself in his mouth. He is hard, and she is eager, and she does not look away, meeting his eyes as she guides him inside, as she mounts him. This, too, is welcome, and wonderful, and never what Tohir would allow; he was always on top, and so often behind, and while his hands could be gentle, they would always announce possession.
She bends to him, kisses him, riding him. His hands rise, and she almost flinches, imagining he is reaching for her throat, but instead they find her shoulders, describe a descent along her arms. Fingers lacing with hers, as if to steady her, and now the Saint Nicholas medal is swaying, rocking between them, and she feels him beginning to lose himself, and she wants to go with him, wants to climax as one. Her forehead touches his, her grip on him tightening, the sudden burst of urgency and that tremendous pulse building inside her until she can barely manage the word.
“Now,” she tells him.
They lie together in the darkness, and she stays in his arms, postcoital, still coasting in shared pleasure. She moves first, slipping from his embrace, separating; yet another difference between the two men, Tohir always so anxious to rebuild the barriers eroded by their intimacy. Nessuno expects Bell to drop off into sleep after they separate, but instead he rolls on his side, his hand drawing lines on her flank.
“Tell me about Poland,” Bell says.
“You don’t want me to tell you how to keep a secret?” It’s Elisabetta talking now, far more than Petra Nessuno, playful, teasing. The smile comes unbidden, the satisfaction of having shared this bed.
“I know how to keep a secret.”
She laughs softly. “Not like he was talking about you don’t.”
“Sure I do. The way Heatdish keeps a secret? He kills everyone who knows it. That’s posturing.”
“Not how he saw it.”
“You’re still here.”
“You know how to kill a moment.” It’s another evasion, another Elisabetta quip, and Nessuno feels herself struggling for equilibrium between two covers, between this person she wants to be here and now and the person she has had to be for so terribly long. She knows somewhere in the middle ground there’s a truth, the amalgam, but it’s out of reach, like the taillights ahead of them on the drive back from Leesburg, visible at steady distance but somehow impossible to close the gap.
He moves hair out of her eyes, tucks it behind her ear. Even in the darkness, she can make out his face, his expression, the concentration.
“This is your idea of pillow talk?” she asks.
He kisses her, softer than before.
“We had a lead, this Italian named Pallazzini,” she says. “I—Elisabetta, I mean—met him in Dubai. He was moving antiquities, stolen art, like that. He’d done very well with the fall of Baghdad.”
“Seems like a number of folks did.”
She snorts, hates herself for doing it. Elisabetta never snorts; she laughs or she doesn’t, but she never lets herself sound like a pig.
“Pallazzini led to Heatdish?” Bell asks.
Nessuno nods, wets her lips. She’s finding this harder to talk about than she imagined, but now that she’s offered it, she cannot turn back. She needs Elisabetta’s voice, her distance, her remove. It was Elisabetta who did these things, she tells herself, not Petra.
“I knew Tohir was a mover,” she says. “When Pallazzini brought me to meet him, it wasn’t obvious, he wasn’t flashy—he was never flashy—but I knew it. I mean, he didn’t even give me his name at that first meeting. And I was fucking brilliant, I have to tell you. I was gorgeous, and I was sexy, and I was smart, and I made sure he saw all of it, and it worked. Moved the first piece—it was a painting—flawlessly.”
“With a little help, I’m sure.”
This time, she doesn’t snort. It’s a gentle laugh, exactly what it needs to be.
“Just a little,” she says. “He contacted me twice after that over the next few months, had me move two more pieces. I did those flawlessly, too.”
“And all the time, he’s checking you out.”
“Oh, yes. The full exam, tit to toe. Had me followed. My finances were a mess, credit maxed, straining the limits of my lifestyle. Everything to make me look ideal but not too ideal. I was living in Rome, and I’m almost positive he had the place searched on two different occasions while I was away.”
“You were living in Rome?”
“I was. What’s the matter, you don’t like Rome?”
“I like Rome fine. Go on.”
She shifts, lays her head against his breast, and Bell lies back. It’s easier this way; she doesn’t have to look at him.
“I ended up in London on, quote, business, unquote, and he contacted me there. Everything prior had been intermediaries, but this time he wanted to meet in person. We met, and he told me he had more work if I was willing. I was willing. I spent the next couple months acting as courier, sometimes as translator, sometimes as arm candy. By that point we were lovers.”
She hesitates, waiting for Bell to make some comment, some acknowledgment that he’s heard. She can hear his heart beat in his chest, steady, regular.
“After a few more months, we met up in Prague. Beautiful hotel, like this one, but classic. We had dinner, went back to the room, made love. The middle of the night he pulls me out of bed, says we’re going for a drive. His manner was different, he was…anxious, I couldn’t read him. All the alarms were going off. I had Petra’s voice in my head, just screaming warnings at me.”
“He tested you,” Bell says.
“Final exam,” Nessuno says. “We ended up at a farmhouse about two hours out of town. The kind of middle of nowhere where you know nothing good ever happens.”
“And there were two men.”
“There were two men. And Tohir told me that he wanted me to be beside him, because he loved me, and we could do great things together. But he had to be certain, there could be no doubt. That if I were to go further with him, he had to be sure. The first one, it was Pallazzini, of course. They’d beaten him, not as bad as some I’d seen, but he’d been worked over. Vosil put the gun in my hand, and I did it, I killed him. He thought that was the hard one, you know? Because he knew I knew Pallazzini, he thought we’d been lovers, too. We hadn’t, but he believed it. He thought that was the anguish.”
Bell, beneath her, makes no move, makes no sound.
“The other one, he couldn’t have known,” she says. “They’d tortured him. The full works, he was missing teeth, fingers, they’d savaged one eye.”
“You knew him,” Bell says.
“Tohir couldn’t have known. If he had known, he’d have killed me, too. He couldn’t have known. But Petra Nessuno knew him, this second one. They really had been lovers, you see? He was…they’d done language training together. It was just dumb fate. And he recognized me, even that far gone, I could see it in his last eye.”
Bell’s hand moves, climbs along her back, settles, palm broad and warm, and she realizes she is shaking. The words, for her, for Elisabetta, are hard to break free.
“He was going to say my name,” she says.
The phone wakes them both while it’s still dark, and there’s a moment of confusion before she realizes it’s his and not hers demanding the attention. She pulls hair out of her face and sees the clock saying it’s eighteen minutes past three in the morning. She can’t hear what’s being said on the other end of the line, but she doesn’t need to; everything in his body shifts as the last shreds of his sleep vanish.
“Five mi
nutes,” he says. He gives the hotel’s address.
Nessuno reaches for the lamp, switches it on, flinches. He’s out of bed and pulling on his clothes already. She watches the way he moves, watches him dress, sees again the scars both old and new that she discovered on him the night before.
“We’re moving him,” he says, putting his gun back on his hip.
Nessuno nods.
He picks up his phone again, and she thinks he’s going for the door next and will leave without another word, but he turns back toward her, climbs back on the bed on his knees. She sits up, and he takes her face in his hands, big palms cool against her skin. He kisses her, and despite having only three minutes left, he does it slowly, and it is sweet and earnest. She thinks he is as reluctant to let go as she is.
“I’d like to see you again,” Bell tells her. “I very much want to see you again.”
Then he’s out of sight, and she hears the door open, then close and latch. She puts a hand to her mouth, trying to somehow preserve the press of his lips. She can feel herself grinning, feel a rising spur of joy in her breast. She wants to laugh, instead just shakes her head. She climbs out of the bed long enough to go secure the locks before returning to climb back undercover, switch off the bedside lamp, and lie down again to sleep.
When she wakes there’s bright sunlight, the feel of late morning. She drifts in its warmth, stretches for the cool corners of the sheets. When she buries her face in the other pillows, she can smell hints of Bell, and she smiles again. Her phone rings, and she doesn’t need to remember which name should answer.
“Nessuno, go.”
“Tohir’s dead,” Heath says.
Chapter Ten
THE CAR HAD been waiting for Bell outside the hotel, but still, he is last to arrive, everyone else already seated. Their gear, what little required for the op, is laid out on two tables at the side of the room, and the room itself is remarkably anonymous, even for this kind of work. They’re in an office in one of D.C.’s many federal buildings, repurposed for this briefing.
Bell turns to Jorge and says, “Ribs?”
“Won’t be needing them,” Jorge says.
Bell holds his friend’s gaze for a second, tries to see how much he’s lying. Jorge should still be down for rest, but he’s here, and so is O’Day, which means Ruiz is drawing extra cards for his hand, so to speak. If Jorge is back on rotation, then O’Day should be with his team, but he isn’t, and Bell turns back to face Ruiz, trying not to wonder exactly what they’re in for.
“The mission is to transport the asset.” Ruiz hits a button and a projector throws a map onto the wall behind him. “The mission is to transport the asset.”
Bell tries to focus on what Ruiz is saying, on the map and the op, and finds it uncharacteristically difficult. He’s seeing the route they’re to take, hearing the words Ruiz is saying, and he knows he’s taking it all in, but he also knows he’s not all here, that he’s not entirely in the moment as he needs to be. A piece of him has been left behind, is still in a hotel room across town, with a woman he’s afraid he’s taken advantage of, a woman he’d prefer to be with right now. He’s feeling guilty, and he is afraid he has behaved dishonorably. What he is feeling for Petra Nessuno is more than simple physical attraction. It’s the first time since Amy that he can remember feeling this way about anyone. He is suspicious of his own motives, and this is made worse because he is suspicious of Nessuno’s as well.
Her loyalty is not a question to him, despite everything Tohir said. If she is a traitor, if she has been turned, then Bell and the rest of the team never would have gone to Tashkent. That’s simple logic, and if Bell can see it, he is certain that others, higher on the chain, can too. He’s a shooter, not a planner, after all, and if his analysis checks, surely theirs will. It’s not a question of loyalty.
It’s a question of reliability.
There had been moments when it was clear to Bell that she did not know who she was or, perhaps more precisely, who she was supposed to be. Nothing overt, just a subtle shift in manner, the moments when she’d seem to tense, then relax, when she seemed to come alive with a smile, a look in her eye. Talking about living in Rome, not as cover but as her home. There had been two women with him in the car, at dinner, in the hotel. She had known it, too. She had said as much.
He doesn’t know which of those women he’s left in the bed at the hotel, which of them had brought him up to the room to begin with. He wants to believe it doesn’t matter, that the two form a whole. He wants to believe that Petra or Elisabetta, it makes no difference, but he can’t. He cannot rely upon her, and that means he cannot rely on what he is feeling, and that makes him believe his attraction to her is all the more suspect.
The colonel is wrapping it up. Ruiz gives good briefings; the man’s sat through his own stack of them, after all, and he’s been delivering them for years now.
“Gear, keys, and paper on the table,” Ruiz says.
They get up as one, gather their things.
“Where’s the target?” Bell asks.
“In the trunk,” Ruiz says.
Bell drives, with Steelriver riding shotgun beside him, and neither has anything to say to the other. It’s not uncomfortable, but it’s not companionable, and Bell thinks that maybe he and O’Day are pondering the same things, because yes, this op is about moving Tohir safely, but it’s about something else, too, that much is clear to Bell. Maybe O’Day is thinking the same things, or maybe he’s worried about Jorge’s ribs, or maybe he’s just tired.
Eight minutes past five brings them to Leesburg, and Bell stops the car in the deepest darkness he can find, sits with the engine idling and all the lights off for two minutes, then Cardboard pulls in beside them, gives Bell a significant nod. They’re off coms for this part, as directed by Ruiz.
“Good,” Bell tells O’Day.
Steelriver climbs out of the vehicle without a word, and Bell pulls the release for the trunk as Cardboard is climbing out of his car. O’Day and Freddie meet at the back of the car, and in less than a minute they’ve got their passenger buckled up and in the backseat, all of it done in silence. Freddie closes the trunk, climbs back behind the wheel of his own car, and O’Day buckles up beside Bell once again. Bell checks his watch, waits until the faintly luminescent second hand sweeps past twelve, bringing them to 0511. He puts the car in gear, pulls out, and with Freddie following puts them onto Edwards Ferry Road, heading east.
Traffic is sparse, but Bell keeps the car just below the speed limit anyway, at least until they hit the Leesburg Bypass. Then they’re turning north, and he accelerates, Cardboard following suit three car lengths behind. The Leesburg Bypass becomes the James Monroe Highway, State Route 15, and the town vanishes behind them and the road collapses to two lanes only, and Bell is now doing fifty-five. Cardboard holds his distance.
“Three minutes,” O’Day says.
Bell thinks he sounds bored.
Trees cluster along the side of the road, then fade, reveal flat planes of farmland, the occasional shape of a dark home. The smell of summer fields mixes with the scent beginning to fill the inside of the car, a distinct odor that Bell is more familiar with than he cares to admit. Trees spring up once more, fall away once more, and they’re passing a cluster of commercial businesses dressed in residential clothes. They pass an antiques store.
“There’s the church,” O’Day says.
Bell slows, makes the left onto an even narrower two-lane road, now on State Route 663. He feels the adrenaline dump, makes the conscious effort to keep his grip on the wheel from tightening. The road cuts through more farmland on either side, makes a sharp dogleg right, correcting north once more. Cardboard’s headlights close up, maybe a length and a half back. Bell checks his speed as they slip past yet another farmhouse, this one bigger, hay bales wrapped in white plastic, now tinged rose with the rising sun. They’re heading into a new cluster of trees, thick on both sides once more, and Bell sees the crossroads ahead, the steeple of
yet another church just beyond. The trees continue along the left-hand side past the crossroads, as if offering the church some modesty, but along the right-hand side there’s nothing but open field and, almost invisible in the light, a tree line marking the edge of that property to the north. Bell checks his speed once more, taps his brakes.
He doesn’t see the shot, but he feels it instantly through the car, feels the vehicle gag and shudder. The sound the engine makes is horrific, thousands of smoothly machined revolutions per minute abruptly violated. The car tries to slew left, already slowing, and Bell has to fight to correct it, braking at the same time. O’Day rocks forward against his belt, but behind them, the target stays securely held in his seat.
The second shot punches through the windshield, safety glass cracking and the high-speed whip of the round as it passes by. Bell feels the air compress against his skin, displaced, hears the bursting from the body behind him. He doesn’t move, fights to keep from moving, from flinching, hands on the wheel, and then the third shot comes, and then the fourth, the fifth, the sixth, and he can’t see a muzzle flash, but he knows the rounds are being sent from more than three hundred meters away, from that tree line at the edge of the field. The windshield is in tatters, falling in chunks, and two more rounds pass between Bell and O’Day, and now the rolling report reaches them, the distant echo of eight .50-caliber shots fired in less than two seconds, and then that fades.
There’s the sound of something liquid settling behind Bell, and the sound of the car hissing, and there’s nothing else. In the rearview mirror, Bell can see Cardboard’s car where it’s skidded to a stop, perhaps twenty feet behind them, see Board just now emerging from the vehicle, submachine gun in hand.