The Island (27 page)

“It’s not uncommon to develop feelings for the person who saves your life.”

Lee shrugged. “Except I developed these feelings before he saved my life.”

“You developed a strong emotional attachment to the one man who didn’t torture you,” Doctor Fisher said in her quiet, steady voice. No judgment, no censure, just concern. “And that was the smart thing to do. That was what you needed to do, on the island. But you’re safe now. Do you think that it could in any way be an even relationship?”

Maybe that’s what I was thinking on the ship. Fucked that up as well.

“I don’t know,” Lee said. He rubbed his temples. “I mean, you say don’t make any big decisions. You say my brain isn’t working properly, and I know that, but what if it was real? If I can’t trust my logic, how about this: do you throw away a six-year assignment to save the life of a guy you don’t even know?”

“Maybe,” Doctor Fisher said. “If you’re a moral person.”

“I don’t think morality comes into it,” Lee said. “Not for people in that work.” He sighed. “I just want to know, I guess. I want to know if the one person who looked me in the eye when I was at my worst could still do it now.”

Doctor Fisher didn’t say anything.

Lee sighed. “How will I know when I’m better?”

“It’s a process, Lee,” Doctor Fisher said quietly. “It’s going to take time, and it’s going to take work. Do you feel better compared to last week?”

He shrugged.

“Well, you went out to a club,” Doctor Fisher said. “That’s something you wouldn’t have done a month ago.”

“It didn’t exactly go well.”

“Do you remember what we said about celebrating the small victories?” Doctor Fisher asked him. “This is important. You took a big step. You should be proud of that.”

Lee leaned back in his chair. “I don’t think I want to go to clubs anymore. I don’t think I want to go back to my job. I don’t think I want to try and be the person I was before the island, because it will always be a lie. I was an arrogant asshole, you know. I thought I owned the fucking world.”

“You’re young.” Doctor Fisher smiled. “You’re smart. You’re good-looking. I think most people would agree that you owned the world. We all did when we were twenty-two.”

“I was wrong,” Lee said. He rubbed the whorl of scar tissue near his throat and thought of Vornis. “I don’t even recognize that guy anymore. Shit, last night I didn’t even want to get into the taxi because I saw the way the driver frowned at me when he saw me coming out of a gay club. The guy I was would have been dry humping some random stranger in the back seat, and to hell with what the asshole driver thought.”

Doctor Fisher’s smile grew. “I’d like to meet that guy one day, Lee.”

“I’m fairly certain he’s gone.” Lee sighed. “It’s easy to be brave when you’ve got nothing to be scared about.”

“Don’t sell yourself short,” Doctor Fisher said. “Not now, and not then.”

Lee sighed again. “Yeah, I know. It’s my brain, right? I’m just sick of feeling like I’m not getting anywhere with this.”

“You are,” Doctor Fisher said. “You’re taking bigger steps than you realize.”

Lee looked at his watch and thought of his dad waiting in the parking lot, and the long, awkward drive home.

Doctor Fisher looked at her watch as well. “Okay, then. Homework for this week.”

Lee smiled at that.

“You’re going to write down all the steps you take, however small you think they are, and next week we’ll discuss them all.”

“One foot in front of the other,” Lee murmured.

One sand dollar and then another.

Chapter Eighteen

“Thank you, Mr. Shaw,” said the woman. “You’re excused.”

Shaw gathered up his notes and walked outside. He sat in the foyer and looked out at the miserable weather. Another cold, gray, gloomy Canberra day. He’d liked the city once, when he’d been young and naive enough to be impressed by the dense population of power brokers, politicians, and public servants. Canberra was the heart of the nation, or at least it told itself that. The rest of the nation seemed to get along just fine without it.

And there was a reason Shaw worked out of the Sydney office. Canberra had to be the most boring city in the world, once the initial glow wore off. Trying to find somewhere open for dinner after nine p.m.? Good luck with that. No, fly-in, fly-out was how Shaw liked it now.

And now here he was again, staying in a dull, three-star hotel with Callie, missing Molly, until the end of the inquiry. And an inquiry headed by politicians, of all people. It had taken the first week just to get them
au fait
with the acronyms ASIO used. Shaw still wasn’t convinced some of them knew what ASIO stood for. It had been hard not to let his contempt show. Politicians didn’t care about national security. They only pulled that card out when it came to refugees arriving on boats. They didn’t know the real thing when it bit them, and they were completely out of their depth here.

It felt like a Star Chamber deal. Shaw recognized one or two of the faces sitting in judgment of him, and he was fairly certain they didn’t like him. And the rest? No fucking clue. Faceless bureaucrats. They were the real authority here, and that shouldn’t have rankled so much. What was Shaw himself but a faceless bureaucrat?

Shaw sighed. It was raining again. Why was winter in Canberra always so miserable? It rained, and the only time it stopped raining was when it actually snowed. Jesus, it was enough to make him wish he was still on that Fijian island.

“Why the long face?” a voice asked him.

Shaw looked up and smiled. “Zev! Are you a part of this circus as well?”

“Trained seal,” Zev said, slapping his hands together and yelping.

It attracted the attention of others in the lobby.

“What are you going to say?” Shaw asked.

“I’m going to be silent and mysterious,” Zev said. “But I thought, with your permission, that I’d remind them that your country has very strong ties with the U.S., and that maybe it wasn’t such a bad idea to rescue one of their DEA agents. The Americans will like that.”

Shaw nodded. “The Americans will like that.”

“I already blamed you at my inquiry,” Zev said with a quick grin. “The least I can do is spin a new tale in there.”

“I’d appreciate that,” Shaw said.

A woman flittered out into the foyer. “Mr. Hirsch? Mr. Ari Hirsch?”

“Showtime,” Zev said, and headed inside.

Zev was inside for less than an hour. Shaw doubted that was long enough to rehabilitate his reputation, but Zev gave him a wink as he sailed outside to the car that was waiting for him.

Shaw flicked through his notes again. There was nothing new in there. Either the government would support his decision to scupper an entire six-year operation to save Lee, or they wouldn’t. And worrying about it wouldn’t change the outcome.

Callie sighed as she sank into the seat next to him. Her face was pinched with cold. She’d been outside to use her phone.

“How’s Molly?” Shaw asked. He didn’t really trust Callie’s latest boyfriend to dog-sit.
Latest
boyfriend. That made her sound like a tramp, which was unfair. Callie was very discreet.

“She’s fine.” Callie brushed her curls back behind her ears. She’d been going for a severe bob the last time she’d had her hair cut but failed to take the curls into account. “Steve wants to know if we can keep her all the time.”

“Over my dead body,” Shaw murmured.

Callie raised her eyebrows. “Well, that was always the plan.”

Shaw snorted and found a newspaper to read. He heard the automatic doors roll open but didn’t bother look up.

“Shaw?”

Shaw recognized the voice before he recognized Lee. His dark hair had grown into the soft curls he had imagined it would. He wasn’t pale anymore. He had a healthy glow and no bags under his eyes. He’d filled out a bit. He looked good. And God, he’d
missed
him. It all flooded back in an instant.

“Jesus, Lee!” He stood, stuck out his hand, and caught an eyeful of the sour faces of Lee’s escorts. A man and a woman, but they were cut from the exact same mold. They both wore sunglasses and dark suits with American flag pins on the lapels.

Lee shook his hand. “Good to see you, Shaw.”

“You too. You look good.” Fuck, was he gushing? That sounded a lot like gushing.

Lee smiled hesitantly and wiped his hand on his jacket. He was nervous, Shaw realized. It wasn’t his job on the line, but they were going to make him relive it all inside that room.

“Yeah,” Lee said. His brows drew together in a frown, and Shaw resisted the urge to reach out and smooth it away. “I didn’t recognize you in a suit.”

Shaw shrugged. “No. You either. Good luck in there, hey?”

“Thanks.”

Lee allowed his escorts to draw him off to the side. He sat in a seat, staring at the carpet and jiggling his leg until his name was called.

Shaw watched him go. He heard the doors to the chamber open and close and wondered what Lee would say about him.

“Cute,” Callie murmured.

Shaw made a face. He read the newspaper again, never more conscious than now of the clock ticking slowly on the wall. What the hell were they asking him in there? What Shaw had done? He didn’t care about that. What Vornis had done? It wasn’t fair.

He looked around the foyer for the boss and found him fighting with the coffee machine. Shaw approached him.

“Frank, I’ve already testified,” he said. “Can I go in and listen?”

“Sure.” Frank swore as he spilled coffee down his tie.

Shaw headed up the corridor and opened the door quietly. He slipped into the public gallery. It was closed, of course, but there were several heads of various agencies there, suits and uniforms, taking notes for their departments. Probably all headed:
How not to fuck up like ASIO
.

Lee was speaking in a quiet, assured voice when Shaw sat down.

The chairwoman waited for him to finish before she hit him with the million dollar question: “Agent Adam Shaw has already made mention of what he called the
peepshow
. What do you understand by that?”

Lee moistened his lips nervously and leaned forward toward the microphone. “
Um
, the first time I didn’t really know what was going on. I was still drugged. But I realized there were cameras, so I played along. We did that a few times.”

“Did you feel that Agent Shaw was taking advantage of your condition and your circumstances, Mr. Anderson?” the woman pressed.

“No, ma’am,” Lee said in a steady voice. “If he hadn’t pretended, Vornis would have done it for real. I was grateful.”

“Did Agent Shaw every touch you inappropriately?” the woman asked.

Did making him come count? Shaw wondered. What about letting Lee suck him off in the shower? None of those things had made it into his report. If Lee spilled his guts now, he was up to his neck in shit.

Except what was
inappropriate
anyway? It was Vornis’s island, for Christ’s sake, not a Sunday-school picnic. And you had to do things among people like that, because if they didn’t trust you, then you were dead. That’s what had rankled from the beginning of the inquiry. None of those men and women on the panel seemed to get that.

“No, ma’am,” Lee said. “Not once.”

Shaw kept his face impassive. Nothing to see here, move along.

He should have known. Lee hadn’t given him up to Vornis, and he wouldn’t give him up to the inquiry either. He still trusted Shaw, apparently, when Shaw hadn’t trusted himself in a long time.

“Did you tell Agent Shaw you were with the DEA?” the chairwoman asked.

“As soon as I remembered, yes, ma’am.”

The chairwoman shuffled her papers. “Do you recall the night of the eleventh of March?”

“I don’t know what date it was,” Lee said. “Do you mean the night I got rescued?”

“Yes.” The chairwoman looked at him over her glasses. “Did Agent Shaw tell you he was going to rescue you?”

Lee hesitated, and Shaw knew he was trying to figure out the motivation behind the question. He stuck to the truth. “No, ma’am. He’d said previously he would call the DEA when he was off the island. The night in question, he told me to shut up and take it.” He paused, suddenly hearing how bad it sounded. “But that was before Vornis said he was going to kill me.”

“And did you believe that threat?” the chairwoman asked.

Shaw almost snorted. She had no clue the sort of people he had been dealing with. None of them did.

“Yes, ma’am,” Lee said, and there was a quaver in his voice. “He,
um
, he always carried through on his threats.”

“And after Vornis threatened to kill you,” the chairwoman said, “did Agent Shaw tell you he would rescue you?”

“No, ma’am,” Lee said. “There wasn’t time for that. But I knew he would.” His voice was strong again.

Shaw’s chest constricted, and his heart skipped a beat, and he wondered if it was true. He’d known? Lee had
known
? Christ, he hadn’t known himself until he’d seen the cattle prod on the wall.

“Did Agent Shaw tell you who he really was?” the chairwoman said through pursed lips.

“No,” said Lee firmly.

“And did he reveal to you that Ari Hirsch was an ally?” the chairwoman asked.

Lee looked lost. He glanced around the room but couldn’t see Shaw sitting behind him. “I don’t know that name.”

Of course he didn’t. It was one of Zev’s many aliases. Unless, Shaw reflected, it was actually his real name, and Zev Rosenberg was the alias. It didn’t matter in the grand scheme of things, but it was the sort of inconsequential little detail inquiries liked to tie themselves in knots with.

“The,
ah
, man who initially identified as Ali Ibn Usayd,” the chairwoman told him, turning back through her notes.

“No,” Lee said. “I didn’t know that until we were on the shi-
um
, frigate.”

Frigate. Anzac class. The crew gets shitty when you call it the wrong thing.

Shaw raised his hand to cover his smile. He wondered if he imagined the smile in Lee’s voice as well.

“Did he tell you then?” the chairwoman asked.