“Was he pissed?”
“Hell no. He got it instantly. You ever play sardines as a kid? It’s the type of hide-and-go-seek with a bunch of people. They all break apart, whenever someone finds the hiding person they have to squeeze in with them. So sure, I pop him in the face, but now he’s on my side. He can barely keep from laughing out loud as I steal his helmet, vest, and rifle, put it on myself. Now I’m looking like a mini-marine.”
Klea laughed, trying to picture the ridiculous scene.
“So I stalk from room to room, shooting these guys one at a time. None of them know what’s going on, they just know that they started with eight, now there are five, then three, the bodies are stacking up. And once these guys are down, they say nothing. They’re in on it too. Comes down to the last guy — the squad leader. I walk right up to him and stick a rubber shock-knife up against his nutsack. Never saw it coming. They called him electro-nuts for the next six months.”
“And your father didn’t care that you were running around, electrocuting Marines?”
“At the time, I thought he didn’t know. Eventually, I realized he knew everything. Hanging with Marines, dating local girls, all the other shit I got up to.”
“He didn’t care?”
“I think… I think he just knew me well enough to let me explore the world. Growing up in embassies was tough, especially when your dad was up to his eyeballs in secretagent shit. He knew I needed to find my own way.”
“He sounds like a hero,” said Klea. “Not a traitor.”
“Maybe both. Maybe neither. All I know is that one day he just disappeared. Happened just before my eighteenth birthday. Everybody was freaking out, thinking he was captured or killed. I wasn’t too worried at first. But then, well, it was different this time. I actually got delivered back to the states under armed guard, supposedly for my protection. I started college not long after, studied marine engineering. About a year and a half after his disappearance, the story went wide. Apparently a lot of classified files went missing at about the same time he did. I didn’t know what to do, but it wasn’t looking good for dear old Dad, so I got out of the country. I think leaving pretty much confirmed what everybody already thought of me.”
“That he was a traitor, and you were in it as well.”
“Yeah, as if I knew what my father was up to and missed the chance to jump ship with him. I tried college overseas at first but the fact I was no longer in the US meant the gloves could come off as far as the intelligence services were concerned. I’d catch cars following me and the stuff in my apartment wasn’t always where I’d left it. They hacked my computer. Eventually, a couple of my remaining backchannel connections got in touch and warned me that my name was being floated as a potential grab target. So I left again, hooked myself up with a pretty decent set of fake papers, and went underground.
“I’d always been interested in diving, so I completed my saturation certification in Norway. Really took to it. Spent the next few years bouncing from one salvage or energy sector dive job to the next. Some of it was legal, the betterpaying jobs weren’t. So that was that, until I ended up in prison for an illegal salvage mission off Morocco.”
Klea nodded and sighed. “You think we’ll see Fatima and Hassan again?”
“The good doctor got what he wanted. Maybe not the way he wanted it, but I don’t think they’re looking for us.” He stretched out his legs, tipped his head back and looked up at the star-spangled sky. “I think getting to Mozambique’s a good start. Maybe I can jump a cargo ship towards the South Pacific. Seems like one of the few places a wanted American can still make a go of it.”
“I don’t have a life to go back to either,” Klea said. “Not sure I’d want to go back to MIT after Colin… and things were very bad with my parents when I left.”
“Make up with them. Let bygones be bygones.”
Jonah leaned back and laid on the sand, his hands behind his head.
“So that’ll be it? I go my way, you go yours?” She turned to look at him.
“Was there ever another plan?” He met her eyes, dark, moonlit. “I’ve got nothing, Klea. If not for Dr. Nassiri, I would have eventually died in prison. Maybe I’ll find somewhere to land, maybe I won’t — but I know for certain I’ll be running for the rest of my life.”
She laid back next to him and looked up. The constellations, familiar friends all those endless nights of captivity, seemed cold and soulless.
“You, on the other hand, will be a returning hero,” Jonah whispered, his voice soft, rough. “A survivor.”
“I don’t feel like a hero. Just a survivor.”
“What will you do?”
“I guess finish grad school. Get a job. Get on with life.”
“Write a book and do all the morning shows,” he said. “Just don’t make me look like some reckless asshole.”
“I do have an obligation to the truth to consider,” she laughed and rolled onto her side. “What about you? You have to have thought about it. Dreamed about what would happen if you ever escaped.”
“I’ll get on with life, too. In my own way, at least. Maybe I’ll be a salvage diver or SCUBA instructor in Thailand, Vietnam. Somewhere beautiful and very, very far away from here.”
“Is there a woman in this vision for the future?”
“There are lots of women in this vision,” joked Jonah. “But none like you.”
“There could be,” she said as she laid back and deftly unraveled a single central knot in her robes. Her headscarf slipped back, revealing her short, dark hair, shimmering in the moonlight. She slipped off her embroidered belt and opened her dress, revealing her full naked form, her freshly-scrubbed skin nearly glowing.
Jonah raised himself to his elbow and drank in the sight, marveling at the way her fresh henna tattoos danced their way up her arms, down her clavicles, collecting like a teardrop in her solar plexus, emphasizing the curves of her small breasts. He crept onto her laid-out robes, pausing for one last look before he kissed her. And for the first time, he felt she was actually making love to him, not to the ghost of her lost fiancé, not some long-ago memory fading on a burning funeral pyre, and not some desperate stranger in a life raft, but to him, Jonah Blackwell, and him alone.
Jonah and Klea walked slowly back to the compound, fingers intertwined, every step soft and measured, as if together they could float across the surface of the moonlit sand without leaving so much as a footprint. Jonah gave Klea one last deep, silent kiss and opened the front gate to the sleeping compound, the wooden panel gently sliding opening as chickens and goats stirred from their slumber.
Multiple lights flashed, blinding him. He held a hand up to his face to shield himself when a rifle butt caught him in the side of the head at the same time the back of his legs were kicked out from underneath him, forcing him to his knees. With harsh, white light still overwhelming his vision, he felt a dozen rough hands feeling over his arms, his legs, inside his kilt, searching for hidden weapons. Several voices barked out orders in English. Finding nothing, the unseen men threw him forward. Jonah landed face-first on the concrete slab, his arms held behind him as a rope wound around and between his wrists. Eyes adjusting, he caught a glimpse of the orange-haired father, his two boys held back by his single arm, wives holding up their hands in surrender as several mercenaries held them at gunpoint.
A hulking, mammoth man leaned over him, muscles slithering underneath a too-tight synthetic shirt, twisted face squinting as his eyes darted over Jonah’s prone form. The colonel, the man who’d stumbled drunk onto the Fool’s Errand a lifetime ago. The mercenary stank like sour sweat.