For a while they discussed the food, and Greece, and how they all wished they had a little down time there to vacation a bit. Eventually, a silence fell as they finished the last remaining morsels from their plates. David reached for his wallet, but Victoria held up a hand. “No, it’s okay. I’ve got this. Expense account. I’ll just say you’re informants. So you know, make sure you are!” She smiled and left a bunch of euro notes on the table. “I better get back. I’m meeting a new cameraman in twenty minutes. I have to break a new one in almost every trip it seems.” She smiled, squeezed Molly’s shoulder as she passed, and bid them goodbye.
As she left the restaurant, Molly leaned forward and gave him a kiss.
“What was that for?” he asked, before he could stop himself.
She looked bemused. “Because I wanted to. That’s okay isn’t it?”
He smiled in response, not knowing what the right answer would be. A guy had to keep some stuff back, if only for his own sanity. A “yes” reply would probably infer that they were in a relationship, and he wasn’t sure if that was true. Not exactly true, anyway. And a “no” might cause some kind of hiccup in their recent…physical activities, and he wasn’t prepared to put a stop to those, regardless of what the long-term situation could be.
“Want to get out of here?” he asked.
She raised one eyebrow. “Sure,” she drawled, ripe with meaning.
“I meant for coffee…but if you prefer…”
She laughed, as he’d meant her to do. “Coffee’s great too.”
Molly reached into her purse and brought out a five-euro note. “She didn’t leave enough for the waiter,” she said, as she took a few steps toward the bar at the back. She held out her hand as if to shake the waiter’s, but slipped him the banknote.
In an instant he remembered.
David was pissed. At himself, and her. As soon as he’d seen her pass the waiter’s tip, he remembered Molly doing the same to Doubrov. Fuck. He’d forgotten about that until he saw it again.
After about fifteen minutes of weaving around squares, street corners, and pedestrians, he found a café with chairs and tables in a square across the road.
She seemed normal, but man he wanted to shake her. Instead he pushed her toward some iron tables in the square. “Sit, stay.”
He heard her murmur, “I’m not a dog.” Before he disappeared into the shop to place his order. All the while the man was making their coffees he kept an eye on Molly across the small street. What was she up to? She kept checking her phone. Goddamnit. This made him mad. He’d been so wrapped up in her that he hadn’t even stopped to consider that she was up to her freaking eyeballs in this simply because she was really up to her freaking eyeballs in this. He was sure she was up to her neck in something she didn’t fully understand.
The Molly he’d met last year was an innocent. A bystander. But clearly that had changed. He just didn’t know if it was worth his own peace of mind to stand with her in whatever shit she’d fallen in. Every part of him wanted to protect her, but the voice of his work therapist telling him not to get involved with anything that wasn’t sanctioned also echoed. It was a compelling voice. It was on her say-so that he would keep his new job.
He tipped the man behind the bar and took his two caffé freddos out to the table.
“What’s this?” she asked.
“Cold cappuccino,” he replied sitting down.
“Did you think to ask what I wanted? Maybe I like tea.” She definitely sounded pissed off. “So what’s wrong? You switched into automaton-David as soon as we left the restaurant, and you dragged me here as if I’m some kind of suspect in something. What happened?”
He couldn’t even bring himself to try to talk her down. He just sighed and raised his eyebrow at her. “You slipped Doubrov something. I saw it, and forgot it with all the—” he waved his hand at her “distractions.”
“Distractions? You mean me? Is that what I am?” She sat back in her chair and leveled a look at him.
“Nice try, Mol. Enough with your tangents. What did you pass him?”
She paused and took a sip of the coffee and shrugged. “I don’t like tea, actually. I love freddos. I just…” She took another sip.
“You just wanted to be contrary, didn’t you?” He put his sunglasses on and relaxed a little. He was going to get to the truth, if they sat there all day. “We should have spent more time together in Iraq.” Let her try to chat her way out of it, but he’d get his answer.
She leaned forward. “You were working for the bad guys.”
“Not to put too fine a point on it, but so were you.” He shrugged, but inside, poking at this wound made him nervous. Making light of his nightmare year working for a private security company that turned out to be full of criminals and murderers felt wrong. But easy. Easier than being real anyway.
“That’s so unfair. I didn’t even know I was working for the bad guys. You, however, did. Wait. Didn’t you?” She shoved her sunglasses on her head as if to see his expression better.
He kept a poker face going. That he was good at. “I had an idea. I just didn’t know how bad it was until all the shit went down. And what you saw, that wasn’t even the half of it.
Concern etched her forehead as she watched him. He wondered if she was genuine or if she was wondering how to play him. Or if he was just too suspicious of everyone. This wasn’t how meeting Molly again was supposed to go down. Amazing sex followed by revelations and suspicions.
“What happened after Iraq for you?” she asked, unwrapping a straw and sticking it in her coffee.
“Not nearly as much fun as happened to you, I think,” he said. “I saw you on television. A lot.” It had been a sweet torture. Seeing her in his room, on the airport TV screens, her voice speaking to him, had been agony. But the positive outcome of seeing her on TV was that it had fooled his body into thinking she was unattainable.
“Well, Harry thought that the more coverage we got, the safer we all were. If anything happened to us, journalists already had us on their radar. Stuff would have been harder to cover up.
Harry—or Henrietta—Molly’s boss, and David’s friend’s wife, had been smart. And lucky. “No one I ever worked with at the company was scared of being found out. Few were scared of anything. That’s why I mostly rolled alone.” And that was still true.
“So what happened?” she persisted.
“Not much. I had to give evidence at a few committees, none of which made C-SPAN, thankfully. I stopped my short-term relationship with bourbon and severed my ties with MGL Inc. That was the easy part, as most of my bosses had gone to live in federal prison. There were so many charges.” He shook his head. “Then a friend hooked me up with Barracks Security and gave me a second chance doing some good. The company’s a good one. Not driven by money. They only take jobs for the good guys. It makes a difference.
“What about you? What happened after the cameras stopped rolling?” He was determined to get to her truth one way or another. God she looked good in the sunlight that dappled her face, shining through the trees, playing light tricks over her lips. He wanted to grab her and kiss her right now. And that pissed him off.
“When we got back from Iraq, our team was sequestered while they rounded up all the ringleaders. Then we were questioned. A lot. Debriefed, over and over. They wanted to know everything. We’d been working for tomb raiders for three years.” Her voice rose in indignation.
“Tomb raiders?” he suppressed a grin.
“That’s what one of the senators called it. I mean, we never found a tomb per se, but they did take our site research and just plundered those areas, stealing everything they found there. It was heartbreaking to find out what they’d been doing.”