“Sure.”
Broker counted to ten and then his daughter’s strong direct voice came on the connection. “Hi, Dad.”
“Hiya, hon, whatcha doing?”
“Auntie Jane is teaching me to dive.”
“Great. How’s your mom?”
“Ah…” There was a pause, in which Broker imagined Jane giving his daughter stage directions. “Ah, Mom’s working.”
“Great, hon, I’ll be there in about an hour.”
“Bye.”
Jane came back on. “She’s good. We just got here, so we’ll hang for a while. She’s looking forward to seeing you. The pool’s in the park two blocks north of the highway. You can’t miss it.”
“So, Jane. What’s up?”
“See you soon, Broker. And like I said, come here first.”
Like he’d just received an order.
Right. Pissed, Broker immediately punched in the number for the Cavalier County Sheriff’s office, got dispatch, and left a message that he’d be there within the hour. The dispatcher informed him that Sheriff Norman Wales would be in his office and was looking forward to meeting him.
Hmmmmmmm.
A lazy herd of buffalo grazed behind an insubstantial barbed-wire fence. An unmarked but heavily fenced and abandoned-looking concrete structure bristled with antennae. The vast green rug of wheat. The endless clouds. Broker slumped behind the wheel.
So this was what his rodeo marriage came down to.
In the past, he and Nina had tried to work things out in a friendly manner. No lawyers involved. Ever since Kit had been born her father lived in Minnesota and her mother deployed all over the world. For the first four and a half years of her life she had stayed mostly with her dad.
About the time Kit started kindergarten, the battle lines were drawn. Nina wanting Broker to migrate to Europe and play “officer’s spouse” to her career. Broker wanting the family under one roof in the States, which would require Nina to give up the Army.
Standoff.
In the interim, Kit wound up traveling back and forth.
That arrangement was about to end.
Broker had been around. He was a trained, competent man who could be utterly unsentimental in action. But all his experience failed when he pictured his marriage reduced to pieces of human machinery that had stopped working.
They didn’t pack instructions on how to take a marriage apart.
His saliva dried up, his tear ducts started, and the muscles curled inward in his belly. Painful work, breaking a marriage apart and packing it into two separate boxes. Tearing a seven-year-old in half…
He pretty much knew what ripping a marriage in half sounded like. It sounded like Kit crying.
But goddammit, it was lawyer time. His kid wasn’t going to be raised by strangers in Army day care all over Europe anymore.
Or mysteriously pop up in North Dakota motel rooms.
It was time for Nina to choose. She could be a mother or she could persist in her Joan of Arc soldier fantasy.
She couldn’t do both.
But…
All the little hairs on the back of his neck had stayed at full alert since Jeff called. Because Nina wasn’t just your ordinary insanely driven, ambitious soldier gal clawing for recognition…
His cell phone rang. Thinking it was Jane again, he fumbled at it one-handed and barked, “Now what?”
“Phillip?”
He sagged and caught his breath. Only his mother called him that. “Hi, Mom.”
“Do you know more yet? About Kit?”
“I just talked to her. She sounded fine. I’m almost there. I guess Nina got called away quick…”
“It’s not her fault. She really can’t help it.” Irene Broker said. “Nina’s a triple fire sign and-”
“Yeah, Mom. You already told me.” Mom had a Merlinesque faith in astrology and believed that Nina was in thrall to her heroic stars.
“Her basic energy comes from Sun in Aries. Her inner feelings come from Moon in Sagittarius. And her behavior is anchored in Mars in Leo.”
Aries, Mars. He didn’t need a starbook to plot that trajectory. Plus she had the Scots bloodline. Well, fuck Nina and the meteor she rode in on. He pictured her going naked into battle, like her ancestors, with her pubes dipped in blue woad.
“C’mon, Mom, give me a break,” he said. Sun in Aries. Right. He looked up to where the sun should be and saw only gray woolly clouds.
“Well, are you going to drive Kit back? Because if you’re not for some reason,” she said presciently, knowing her son and the kind of work he still sometimes performed, “your dad is talking to Doc Harris about flying in and picking her up.”
“That’d be good to follow up, Mom.”
“I thought so. Now, just don’t get ahead of yourself. And give her a chance to explain. You know, practice your listening.”
“I will.”
“Good. Well, keep us posted.”
“Right, Mom.”
“And, Phillip, remember to listen.” Said it like she used to say “Make your bed. Wear a hat. Don’t talk back to your father”-the tone of her voice reducing him to about twelve years old.
“Goodbye, Mom.”
Broker ended the call and stared at the moody cloud cover. Calm down. Think. Listen. Okay.
Nina was not dishonest. She just omitted virtually everything about her last assignment to a classified military unit popularly known as the Delta Force. But ever since 9/11, communication with Nina had been increasingly spotty.
Broker was not dishonest either. But he also left a lot of things out. When people met Broker casually, he’d angle around direct answers. A sketch emerged of him suggesting a background involving a successful landscaping business in the St. Croix Valley to the east of the Twin Cities. Then he’d drop a few hints how he’d got out of landscaping and put his money in a little resort up on Lake Superior before the real estate up there went through the roof. This was the truth, up to a point; but the landscaping gig was a cover. In fact, Broker had left the St. Paul cops and joined the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension fifteen years ago. Then he proceeded to clock the longest run of deep undercover work in the history of Minnesota law enforcement.
Then, about eight years ago, Nina Pryce had launched a genteel bayonet charge into his life. She had an agenda. She had a skull and crossbones tattooed on her shoulder. She had a map to buried gold in her hip pocket.
Broker followed her to Vietnam, where they found several tons of Imperial gold ingots on a beach on the South China Sea.
They came home quietly rich, pregnant, and eventually married. More than two tons of the gold found its way into a bank account in Hong Kong. Broker lived on credit cards linked to that account.
Five years ago he’d helped the FBI penetrate the Russian Mafia. An informal arrangement evolved. The Feds let him keep his loot as a kind of open-ended retainer.
Broker and Nina’s marriage, conceived in high adventure, could not survive ordinary life. After Kit was born, Nina nursed her for six months, woke up one morning, saw the dishes in the kitchen sink, experienced a panic attack, and hurried back into the Army.
Some cops in Minnesota, who were not exactly fans of Phil Broker, saw a measure of poetic justice in the complications of his marriage.
Karma coming back to him, stuff like that.
So.
For a number of reasons, all of them having to do with airport security, Broker had decided not to fly into Grand Forks. And though he still had a deputy badge and ID, a routine phone check with the Washington County Sheriff’s office would elicit the friendly reminder that he should have turned the badge in yesterday. These minor details would complicate flying commercial with the.45-caliber automatic, the two magazines, and the box of ammunition he had tucked under the front seat.
The circumstances he was driving into struck him as very odd. Broker was familiar with Nina Pryce’s flaws. But those flaws ran to vainglory, arrogance, and compulsive overachievement. Quitting on any task or abandoning her people were taboos in her strict warrior code. He could not imagine Nina abandoning her daughter as long as there was still breath in her body…Broker knit his bushy eyebrows and smiled an unhappy intuitive smile…But she was capable of using their daughter in some cockeyed special-ops ploy, if the stakes were high enough.