Every night, Esther calls. Around nine, if she can. Later or earlier, if she can't. It's the deal she and Ben made early on, half-wordlessly, as much by sympathy as through negotiation.
Tonight she didn't call.
Rebekah was just home from college, fussily refreshing finals postings. Deborah was trying on her prom dress—a beaded floor-length ivory A-line number that made her mahogany hair and olive skin glow (and Ben's heart squeeze with her incipient adulthood)—one more time.
Ben was fretfully playing solitaire and totally not sitting by the phone. All three of them should have been in bed, but Ben was well-accustomed to the largely nocturnal habits of people between the ages of fifteen and twenty-nine. And it's hard to sleep with a little knot of anxiety in your belly.
The doorbell—much too late for a social call—came like an electric shock. He got to it even before Deborah, which is saying something in a house with a teenage girl. She might have been afraid her prom date would catch her in the dress.
Ben paused, one hand on the lock, the other on the handle. He braced himself and glanced in the security mirror Esther had mounted outside the side light window with a screwdriver and four mismatched screws.
It was Stephen Reyes. He had his daughter, Autumn, on his hip.
Ben rested his forehead against the wood for a long second before he made himself pull the damned door open.
*
It was five thirteen in the morning, Eastern Daylight Savings Time, when Stephen Reyes walked into the Emergency Department of Mount Sinai Hospital. His reflection in the revolving door looked every bit as crisp and professional as he did not feel.
In the past six hours, he had been awakened—that was the wrong word, because it implied he had been sleeping—by Arthur Tan's dead calm voice on his cell phone. He had made three personal visits, and arranged that Ben Falkner watch Autumn for a day or two.
"We'll get her home," he'd told Ben, knowing it was bullshit. "You sit tight. We'll take care of everything."
Knowing Esther Falkner was never coming home again. Knowing that some things were too damn big and terrible to be taken care of.
He'd accepted Gray Putnam's offer of a lift on a private jet belonging to a ridiculously wealthy, ridiculously idle Putnam family friend whose not-too-distant relatives had included several Northeastern congressmen and a lieutenant governor. "After all," Gray said, red-eyed in tailored pajamas, "I'm going your way."
Gray was parking the rental. Reyes looked around. In the hushed hour of early morning, the ER was as quiet and still as ever an ER was. Somewhere, someone moaned softly. One person slumped sleeping in a plastic chair in the waiting area. Another watched the silenced TV vacantly, kept company by a little girl who looked like she'd been crying. A tall, broad woman behind the admitting desk looked up from her monitor, a game of Spider Solitaire reflecting green in her spectacles.
"May I help you?"
"I'm Dr. Stephen Reyes," he said, stepping forward. Letting his Chicago accent color his voice in ways he never would in D.C. "I'm looking for—"
"Special Agent Lau," she said, understanding. Suddenly consolatory. "She's in the surgical waiting room. Just up that way, elevator. Follow the signs."
"Somebody will be right behind me," Reyes said. He was already walking away.
Gray didn't catch up by the time he made the elevator, or by the time he found Lau. She didn't see him at first, because she was curled in a chair, head in her hands. She was still wearing her unfastened tac vest. It was sticky and brown with old blood.
"I brought you clothes," he said, and held up the duffel bag. She didn't look up.
He hadn't really expected her to.
He sat down beside her. "Civilians are going to be coming in soon."
That got her attention. Lau would think of somebody else. Somebody who might be horrified by a blood-covered FBI agent. She took the bag when he handed it to her, didn't stand. Her fingers seemed sluggish as she closed them on the strap.
"There's a bathroom across the hall," he said. "Go."
She stood up, exactly as if he had any right to tell her what to do, and went. When she returned, she wore a clean shirt, a cardigan against the air-conditioned chill. A pair of jeans. The blood was mostly scrubbed from under her nails, and her fingertips were pink with the scrubbing.
He handed her the coffee next. He'd dumped two packets of cocoa mix into it, and she made a face when she sipped it. But her complexion looked slightly less greenish a moment later, so he guessed that the sugar was doing its work.
She dropped the duffel, heavier now with her bloody clothing and tac vest in it, beside a chair. She did not use the chair. "I should never have left them."
Reyes studied her drawn face until she hid it behind the paper cup once more. He decided on brutal honesty. "Then you'd be dead as well."
She nodded. "You're probably—"
"No probably. What would you have changed?"
"Nothing," she said. Then, "Hafidha didn't make it."
"Shit." They'd still been working on her when he got on the plane. He'd—
He hadn't actually believed...
He hadn't believed. He'd known it was possible. But he'd...
The string of titles of authority in a fistful of languages. The rainbow of tinted contact lenses. The sharp-edged jokes. All her, and not her, because they could have been part of someone who was not Hafidha Gates.
Except they weren't. Now they were gone, with her.
Sol, Esther, Hafidha. And the part of him defined by them was gone, too.
He sat very still. When the thing in his throat would let him speak without weeping, he asked, "Where's Villette?"
"Sedated, for now. Danny's still in surgery." She sipped—gulped—again, her throat working as she swallowed. "We can go in and sit with Chaz if you want. He should be awake in a couple of hours."
She'd been waiting for him, in other words. He wished he'd decided to suffer the awful hospital tea. He needed something to do with his hands. Still no Gray. Maybe the parking ramp had eaten him.
Maybe he was quite sensibly crying in the car.
"In a minute. Finish your mocha." When she looked at him quizzically, he answered the unspoken question. "We're waiting for Gray."
She winced, then looked into her cup and seemed surprised to find it empty. "Ben?"
"Home with the kids. Mehitabel went over." So had Tricia, after he called her. But he didn't think Lau needed to hear that now. "Somebody from Honolulu field office is going to have to talk to Mr. and Mrs. Gates."
The cup was still empty. Her face stilled, and he watched as she considered the intersecting ripples of tragedy rolling forth from this night's work, lapping over one another and expanding, ever expanding. "I should never have left them."
Reyes made a curt, hard gesture with his left hand. "Yeah, well. Neither should I."
*
That was fourteen shots—the Sig's whole magazine. Wasn't it? He was under pressure. Even he might have lost track. Maybe it was fifteen. There might be one more.
No, the striker hits nothing. It was seventeen. Well, that's that, then. Walk out. Forget he knows what steel and polymer taste like.
He doesn't know if that happened, either. Maybe he's only imagining the smell of smoke up close, and the taste.
The ruling "good shoot" is such a curious judgement. "Good" isn't the word he'd use.
But. No, the slide locks open when the gun is empty. If there had been any more bullets, he would have known.
He would have known.
So it's not real.
It didn't happen.
It's just a dream.
And he'll keep telling himself that until he nearly believes it.
Memory is just a story we tell ourselves. It has very little relationship to objective reality.
You won't win, Bug.
I won't let you.
Someone squeezed his fingers. Insistently.
Chaz opened his eyes. Focused through the familiar sedative haze. Found Lau's face, Reyes behind her. Felt a rush of terrible apprehensive relief—
The mirror was a reflex now; easier to reach out and feel the answer to his question than to open his mouth and ask. So he reached out—
And read the answer staining Nikki's expression before he ever felt it staining her heart.
*
"Well," said Bear, "I never expected—" and stopped. He had been about to say "—to see the two of you be first on board," but then he saw the look on the faces of Special Agents Lau and Villette. Or, rather, the lack of expression. Villette's non-expression was the gift wrap on a whole lot of swelling, lacerations, and bruises.
He stood beside the gantry stairs, one hand on the rail, and his heart gave a thump. He said, "What—?"
"You didn't hear," said Lau, making it a statement. "We're your only passengers this trip."
"Unless you count the body bags," said Villette, cold, and distant, and it was like he was being intentionally hurtful, because if he'd been anything else, Bear thought, he'd have broken down.
"Who—"
"Brady's going to make it," said Lau. "He's still in the ICU," she added in the tone an air traffic controller used when you called in a Mayday.
"Esther?" said Bear.
Lau shook her head and they went up past Bear. They sat down next to each other. They didn't hold hands.
Half an hour later, Bear had to supervise the stowing of the body bags. Black. Featureless. He touched each one softly, a kind of benediction.
His payload.
It was another hour before he felt able to fly.
*
Nikki sat on the front of the bare desk, in the emptied office. No one had moved into it after Reyes retired; everyone was used to things as they were, after all. The way they'd never be again.
She could have sat behind this desk, but it wasn't that kind of conversation.
She'd thought for an instant about doing this in the office next door, which still had amenities like lamps. And books and framed documents and family photos and a spare jacket on the hook on the back of the door. So she only thought about it for an instant. She could hardly bear to go into that room; it would be worse for him.
He stood looking out what used to be Reyes's window as if there were something to see, instead of Foggy Bottom's air-water mixture. His arms crossed his chest, his long, big-boned hands hooked over his shoulders. A breastplate, not a hug. Where there's no comfort, there can at least be armor.
She laid the manila folder on her knees, but didn't open it. "Frost's autopsy of the subject," she said. Her voice bounced back from the bare walls. The report had arrived by courier, along with a condolence card. Because Madeleine Frost was nothing if she was not proper.
He nodded as if at something else.
"Cause of death" —other than thirteen torso shots that would have killed him more slowly— "was the gunshot at very close range between the eyebrows." Like an execution.
This time he didn't bother to nod. His face was as empty as the office, lit with the same gray, cold light. It would fill up again with something, but she had no idea what it would be, or how long it would take.
"There'll be an inquiry. And this is going to look... It'll make IA nervous. Sympathetic, but nervous. You should know what you're going to say."
She heard him breathe out; his chin came up a little, and his mouth pressed thin. "I submitted my resignation."
To be shot in the chest; to catch the force of explosion in the breastbone—it would feel like that. "No."
His head turned and his eyes focused on her.
"Not— Are you insane? Not now. Chaz, you can't leave now."
"I'm sorry."
"Oh, bullshit you're sorry. Tell me you're making a really lousy joke."
He unfolded his arms and let them hang slack, as if he didn't know what they were good for. "I can't stay, Nikki. I can't stay and put it all back together and lose it again in five or ten or however many years. I can't do it."
She wanted to say,
You won't lose it
. But not so long ago she would have said that, and believed it. Maybe he would have believed it, too. It turned out not to be true. "You're grieving. Your head's not straight. This is not the time to make this decision."
"Sure it is. If I wait, I might forget—how this feels. I did once. False sense of security. Now is exactly the time."
"At least stay long enough to train a couple people from Down the Hall. Chaz, we're it. You, me, and Art. We're the unit. Don't make me do this by myself."
His eyes dropped, and he smiled faintly. "You can do it by yourself, you know. You'll find what you need, and you'll pick the right people. Pete, if you can shift him. Go get Saul Zingermann: he'd be great. He's too ambitious for Minneapolis homicide. And he's still young enough to make the age cutoff for Fibbie hiring. You'll do a good job."
She drew breath to tell him off, to insist he stay, to beg. But he was gone already. She could see it; should have when he came in the door. She'd seen him tested and weak and stretched so thin light came through him. But he'd had fight in him. Now the fierce brittle thing that pushed him forward was broken.
"Have you been to see Brady?" she asked instead, and didn't realize until his eyes squeezed closed that she'd known it would hurt and that she'd done it on purpose. Some profiler.
"How is he?"
"They moved him to Johns Hopkins," she said, rich with irony. "Still in the ICU." He stared at her until she said, "No. Too much damage. He won't walk."
A shudder twitched the cloth across his shoulders. "Right."
"You should go see him," she said, gentler.
"So his survivor guilt and mine can meet up? There's a marriage made in hell. Do you know what he'd say to me?"
"No. And neither do you."
He smiled, a hard expression; his weight shifted, his shoulders squared, his head straightened on his neck. "'Oh, look. This time everybody dies and Villette walks away without a scratch.'" He said it in Brady's voice. Her stomach clenched.