Cry 'Havoc': All Honorable Men | Three
Title: Cry 'Havoc': All Honorable Men
By: tea_diva
Chapter: THREE
Word Count: 7,758
They end up walking in silence through the streets of Paris. Brad isn’t sure if everything that has happened in the past twenty-four hours is finally starting to catch-up to Ray, or if the man is maybe just tired. Brad doesn’t dwell on it, he is preoccupied trying to process what he can no longer deny: somebody wants to kill him.
It should feel stranger than it does but oddly he isn’t all that surprised. Mostly he just wants one familiar thing that he can hold-up and say, ‘Yes, I know this. This is recognizable to me’. The only thing that feels remotely comforting is Ray Person. Brad’s pretty sure that’s an indication of mental instability, but Ray’s chatter keeps him focused, keeps him from tail-spinning.
“How about here?” Ray tips his head to the right, toward a corner entrance off the street. The sign reads: Hotel de la Paix.
The woman behind the desk smiles at them and hands over a key, and it’s not until Brad pushes open the door that he realizes the mistake. She’s given them a single room with a queen-sized bed. There is no second bed. Ray sighs. “I don’t even care. I’m so fucking tired, and I’ve slept in worse conditions. Just, like, don’t molest me in your sleep or something.” He chucks his bag onto a chair before collapsing onto the bed.
Brad walks a circuit through the room, pulling the curtains closed and making certain the windows are locked. It feels like he’s moving out of habit, some part of himself that knows what has to be done and is doing it, which is good because his brain has gone carefully blank.
“So, what now?” Ray asks the ceiling.
Brad glances toward the bed where Ray is sprawled like a starfish. There is a chair in the corner beside the one holding Ray’s luggage, but Brad doesn’t sit. Instead, he stands there awkwardly in the room. “Ideally, we would take the opportunity to alter our appearance.”
“You are a six foot four, motherfucking Aryan giant,” Ray points out. “Dying your hair, like, red or something isn’t going to make you any less conspicuous. Also, I am not going blond for you.”
Brad had already figured all of that, which is why he hadn’t suggested they stop at a pharmacy before they found a hotel. He hadn’t liked the idea of changing his own appearance. The one thing about himself that is beginning to find familiar is his own reflection; he hadn’t wanted to change that, no matter how sensible it might be to do so.
“I have to go to the Hotel Regina. If I’m Kempe, then they’ll have some records that could be useful. Only…”
“Only, you’re dead,” Ray offers helpfully. He waves his hand. “No worries. I got this.”
“Are you…?”
“Don’t even,” Ray says, lifting his head off the bed so he can glare at Brad. He taps a finger against his own chest, “Recon Marine,” then he points to Brad, “Crazy Amnesia Guy.”
Brad rolls his eyes toward the ceiling. “Right.”
________________________
Dowdy is getting used to coming into his office and finding James Mattis sitting at his desk like it belongs to him. It is, Dowdy has discovered, a terrible way to begin the day but he can’t exactly ask the man, who is technically his boss, to go away and come back after Dowdy has managed to finish at least one pot of coffee. He also can’t delay and come in late, hoping that Mattis will get bored and go away. James Mattis is the most stubborn and persistent man Joe knows, and there is no amount of time that he can delay that might incite the man to leave. Lovell has taken to meeting him by the door with a cup of coffee. It’s not enough, but it’s at least something.
“Jesus Christ,” is how Mattis greets him when Dowdy pushes open his office door. “What the hell is going on in this goddamned office? Did you do this?” He holds up the morning’s newspaper where Nykwana Wombosi’s face is featured along with a three page article discussing the accusations Wombosi made regarding a CIA assassin trying to kill him, and the suspicious nature of his death.
Dowdy sets his briefcase onto his desk and stands there with his coffee mug, wishing that Mattis wasn’t in his chair because he’d really like to sit down. “We think it was Colbert.”
There was no official hit authorized, and nothing went out through Treadstone networks, so he at least knows it wasn’t them. Wombosi has other enemies, true, but the hit was clean and precise and any of the people Dowdy knows who had the means and motive to assassinate the man would have made more of a message out of it. The only message the single clean bullet directly through the center of the man’s forehead leaves is: go away.
“Holy goddamned hell,” Mattis mutters. “This crazy sonofabitch is completely out of control. Why isn’t he dead yet?”
“We think that now that he’s completed his original assignment, he’ll come in. That’s usually how the training works.”
“There is no ‘usually’ in this situation!” Mattis snaps. “We’ve got a black-ops agent who’s completely off the reservation. He’s put two cops in the hospital, trashed an American Embassy and now has just assassinated a public figure! He’s on the run somewhere in Europe and who the fuck knows why. So don’t give me ‘usually’, Dowdy. Give me definitive. If you can’t, then activate the next asset and get this sorted.”
Dowdy watches as the man rubs his hands over his reddened face. “I have to stand in front of a damned oversight committee and what the hell am I supposed to say about Treadstone when everything is so colossally fucked?” Mattis says.
If they do not manage to bring Colbert in, or put Colbert down, then Dowdy knows that the very least of their concerns will be whatever the oversight committee decides about their budget. Maybe Mattis has been wandering around the interior of Langley so long that he’s forgotten about the real world, but Joe doesn’t have that luxury. If this gets out then they’re all going down, and it will be exceedingly messy and extremely public.
________________________
The sheets are scratchy against Brad’s skin. He lies on his back, Ray snoring contentedly beside him, and tries to think about nothing.
Sleep has been elusive since Marseilles. The rest he managed on the ride over was the longest and most satisfying stretch of actual sleep he has managed since waking up on the boat, but Brad doesn’t fool himself into thinking that it marked a permanent change.
He rolls carefully onto his left side, faces the beige-painted wall and closes his eyes. There is the faint sound of traffic in the street outside, the periodic quiet whoosh of a car, laughter as people walk along the street. He lets it fill him up, lets it take away thoughts about guns and glass and knives, and the fact that he is beginning to wonder if he even wants to know who he is.
When he breathes in there is a spicy hint of cloves in the air, a bright citrus smell underneath it that he can’t quite place. Brad breathes in deep. Feels like he knows that smell somehow, like it’s familiar.
There is an arm draped around his waist and he looks down, prepared to shove Ray back to his own side of the bed, but it’s not Ray’s arm. “What are you thinking about?” a voice whispers, puffs warm breath across the back of his neck.
It’s not Ray. Brad’s no longer laying under the rough sheets in the small, drab little hotel room; he’s somewhere else. It might be his apartment; it might be somewhere he doesn’t remember, he can’t tell, the image blurs when he tries to concentrate too hard.
Instead, Brad lets his eyes close again, feels the cool softness of the sheets and the warmth along his back. The rhythm of his breath echoed in the body of the man who is lying behind him. It doesn’t make him feel tense and claustrophobic the way he feels when he walks down a crowded street. He feels anchored and safe, like he’s precisely where he is supposed to be.
“I think I’m dreaming.”
There’s another puff of warm breath across the naked skin of his shoulders. The arm around his waist shifts up, and Brad looks down at the hand that splays wide across his chest. “You’re wide awake,” the man whispers, drops a kiss to Brad’s shoulder. “And you’re in bed with me.”
Brad finds himself entwining his fingers with the hand resting on his chest. “It’s a very good dream.”
This time there is a warm chuckle that makes him smile. “What will it take tonight?”
The question strikes him as strange, even as he realizes that the man says it like it’s somehow traditional. Like this is something they go through often. He keeps his eyes closed and feels the man shift closer, dropping soft, unhurried kisses along Brad’s skin. “Tell me about Tuscany.”
“You travel more than I do,” the man says, his voice still soft, something fond making his words feel like another kind of caress.
“I don’t get to sight-see,” Brad points out. “You see everything differently.”
There’s a kiss that falls onto his temple and Brad wants to open his eyes and look at the man who is holding him and touching him, but he’s also afraid that if he tries to focus on the other man in his bed he will blur and fade the same way the room did when Brad tried to remember it.
“Not so differently,” the man whispers.
But then he talks about the green hills rolling like waves higher and higher, building into the distance. How the sun spills light out onto fields of sunflowers. Brad falls asleep listening to a description of the morning mist, filling in the dips between the hills until the world looks like it was built in a cloud.
When he wakes up he’s back in the motel, Ray still asleep on the opposite side of the bed, though thankfully he’s kept his limbs to himself. Brad wonders if that other bed he had dreamt about was actually a memory. It makes him wonder if that was the same man who shared Brad’s apartment, who kept his running shoes beside Brad’s in the closet and his toothbrush in the bathroom cabinet. Did they break-up? Are they still together?
It’s the first time he spares a moment to regret the ease with which he dismissed the fishing boat captain’s suggestion that he go to the police. “They will take your picture,” Captain Gerard had said. “They will show it around, see if someone recognizes you. You are not the first person to have amnesia ever, yes?” Brad had thought only of the bullets that Jean-Paul had plucked from his back. It had made him less inclined to work any public channels for answers. He’d had the bank account number, which had seemed like the safer bet.
But the bank account had given him no suggestion of anyone who might have shared his life with him. The apartment might have held a clue, but there hadn’t been time to search for it.
“Ray,” he says, because he doesn’t want to dwell. “Wake up. We have to get going.”
“Five more minutes.”
Brad rips the blanket off the other man. “Now, Ray.”
________________________
Nate pushes open the blue door of the café and spots Mike at the usual table, already with two cups of coffee waiting. It’s only been a few days but having Mike in the city is starting to feel normal, like the man has always lived here. “Morning,” Nate greets as he drapes his coat over the back of a chair before he sits down.
Instead of a response, Mike drops the newspaper onto the table, spinning it around so the front page is facing Nate. He doesn’t need to glance down to know what it reads but he does anyway. Takes the five seconds he spends looking into Nykwana Wombosi’s face to calculate the best response.
“Jesus, Nate,” Mike says, which prevents him from denying any responsibility.
Mike knows him too well. The downside to a job like Nate’s is that if your close friends are all in the same line of work, then every trick and lie you know will almost never fool them. Even for a moment.
He folds the newspaper and sets it aside, picking up his coffee cup and taking a sip. He raises his eyebrows pointedly. “I know our Paris asset well enough to determine this was a measure that had to be taken.”
Mike rolls his eyes. “Knock it off, would ya? It’s me you’re talking to.”
Nate nods, almost to himself and sets his cup down. “None of this is like Brad. Not a single piece of what’s been happening in the past few weeks makes sense. Which means one of two things. Either the Treadstone conditioning has caught-up with him and he’s snapped. Or he doesn’t know what the fuck he’s doing.”
“Neither one of those are good options.”
Nate shrugs. “Either way, this had to be done. I can’t help thinking he’s tracing his steps. He went to Zurich before he came to Paris. If that was the case, he’d track his steps back here,” he taps the paper. “Wombosi wasn’t exactly a very forgiving sort of man.”
Mike stares at him for a moment. “I’m not even going to ask how you put the order through.”
“Probably best if you don’t know.”
“And what happens if he knows exactly what he’s doing? What happens if this is what everyone is saying it is: a rogue asset out on some sort of vendetta kick?”
Nate rolls his eyes. “Does this seem like vengeance to you? He hasn’t come anywhere near the agency yet. Except for Barcelona, and that might have just been self-defense.”
“Nate…”
“Then I’ll deal with it,” Nate says, sitting back in his chair, his gaze shifting away.
“Bullshit,” Mike says. “I know Brad, too, you know. I know you pretty damned well, also. No way I’m buying that you’d be prepared to sort this the way Command is wanting it sorted.”
Nate doesn’t feel inclined to respond to that. Langley has been on the hook asking for the next asset to be set in place; ready to move the minute they have a location. “I’ve got an asset already on standby,” Nate tells Mike, gets a grim sort of satisfaction out of the way his friend’s eyes widen. He can’t afford to explain his strategy.
“Nate,” Mike says, cautious, like he’s trying to read between the lines of everything Nate is saying. Nate wishes the man luck but in this at least, he is being deliberately vague. “You’re not alone, here. I came so I can help, however you need.”
He’s known Mike for a long time. He trusts the man implicitly, which is why he says, “I can’t, Mike. However this plays out, I can’t have anyone else implicated. When it’s over, then it’s done. You know how this goes; you know how we work. I refuse to let there be some bureaucratic Inquisition that extends beyond Paris.”
“Are you going against Treadstone?”
Nate raises his eyebrows and matches his friend’s eyes with a steady gaze. He says, “I’m doing my job.” He refuses to say anything further. He thinks Mike already understands.
________________________
Ray waltzes out of the Hotel Regina with a cheeky grin, which Brad thinks must mean that the mission was a success. It’s confirmed when Ray trades Brad two folded pieces of paper for the bag that he has been minding. “That was ridiculously easy,” Ray says. “Next time, give me something that’s at least a little bit of a challenge.”
Brad unfolds the papers. On the first is a breakdown of Matthew Kempe’s bill. The second page holds a list of phone numbers Kempe dialed while staying at the hotel, as well as the cost of each call. “I need to find a phone.”
There is a payphone at the end of the street, which Brad rigs so as to avoid paying; he doesn’t have any change anyway. Ray heads off in the direction of a restaurant somewhere after the fifth call, and Brad continues to work his way down the list until he finally hits a Paris number with some promise.
“Alliance Security, Maritime Division,” he announces as he drops into the booth across from Ray. “I’ve got a meeting in a half hour. They know Matthew Kempe.”
“Are you sure that’s a good idea?”
Brad tips his head to the side. “Maybe not, but I don’t see how I have much choice.”
“Stop this ‘I’ bullshit,” Ray says. “I’m right here. Give me something to do.”
“Check around on Kempe.”
“What, you mean in case he’s your twin brother?”
Brad stares at him a moment. “Yeah.”
________________________
Dowdy’s day starts to pick up when Lovell sticks his head through the open door and announces, “Paris police have found the vehicle.” He marches out into the main room and puts his hands on his hips. “Tell me.”
Of course, there are no fingerprints in the car, nothing that connects it to Colbert. The police involved in the chase, those who didn’t end-up in hospital, recognize that particularly hideous shade of orangey-yellow though, and that’s something.
From there they have a start point, and within three hours Dowdy gets the next piece of good news. “Hotel de la Paix? Get me the Paris outpost, I want them working on this.” Nathaniel Fick answers the call, but Dowdy hears Schwetje coming into the office because the man won’t stop talking and he has a loud voice. Apparently the information has come right during a shift change.
“It’s fine, Bravo-2.” Dowdy tries to mean it. “Dismissed. Get some shuteye. With any luck this will be resolved before you come into work tomorrow.”
“I hope so, sir,” Fick says, and then there’s the little chiming beep that means Fick has transferred Dowdy over to Schwetje’s line.
“Alpha-2,” Schwetje greets.
Dowdy paraphrases everything all over again and says, “Get the Paris police on it. I want them staking out that hotel room and ready to move the moment Colbert shows his face. Get the asset shadowing that hotel as well. Tell him to stick to Colbert. When we give the order, I want him in place.”
“Roger that.”
The directions are simple, so when Dowdy hangs up he feels confident that he might actually be able to go home tonight, curl up in bed after explaining to his wife that it was a spur of the moment work assignment that he just couldn’t turn down. With any luck, she won’t sentence him to the couch; she’s usually pretty understanding. Treadstone can go back to being invisible, and Mattis can forget that he’s head of their little secret department, and Dowdy won’t have to see the man first thing in the morning before he’s had a chance to fortify himself with an entire pot of coffee.
________________________
“I just had a meeting as Kempe, so I am definitely Kempe.” Brad drops into a chair at Ray’s table, pulling the plate of breaded calamari Ray’s snacking on over and popping one in his mouth. “I’m definitely Colbert, but I’m also definitely Kempe.”
“Well,” Ray says around a mouthful of calamari. “I hate to tell you this, Mr. Kempe, but you’re dead. Hey,” he adds. “You’re pretty hot for a zombie though. That’s something.”
Brad frowns. “Ray, what the fuck are you talking about?”
“While you went and had your little gay-ass talk about yachts or whatever the fuck, I did some digging on Kempe, and I found you,” he pauses, seemingly for dramatic effect and then blurts, “Dude, you’re in a morgue. Sorry to have to tell you this.” He doesn’t look at all sorry.
“I can’t be in a morgue,” Brad argues. “I just had a meeting as Kempe. I am Kempe.”
Ray shrugs and pops another breaded piece of calamari into his mouth. “Then who the hell else is claiming to be Kempe? Because whoever that dude is, he’s dead.”
Brad frowns at the calamari and flags down the waiter, asks for Ray’s bill. “We’re leaving,” he says, as Ray drops his money on the table.
“Checking out the morgue?” Brad nods. “Right on, right on.”
It’s late by the time they get there but there is only a young, skittish attendant who happily clutches the money Brad hands over and pulls open one of the small metal doors in the wall. Ray and Brad both stare at the slab the attendant pulls out for them.
“Uh, dude,” Ray says. “Where’s the body?”
“What?” The attendant finally turns his head to look at the slab he’s just pulled out. “Oh shit. Uh… Maybe his brother came back and took it?” he’s muttering, which prompts Brad to turn on his heel. “Wait a moment, wait, where are you going?”
Brad ignores the attendant and yanks the big brown book off the front desk, flipping it open. Everyone is required to log-in when they enter. He and Ray bypassed that step because whoever said money couldn’t buy everything was lying. Now, Brad finds the day’s sheet and rips it clean out of the book. “Oh my goodness,” the attendant is saying, but Brad walks out of the morgue and up the stairs, back onto the street.
“Well, that was weird,” Ray says, jogging to catch up. “For a change. What have you got?”
“Nykwana Wombosi,” Brad reads off the sheet. “He went to see Kempe.”
“Wombosi and Kempe. Yeah, they sound like they could be related.”
Brad ignores the comment. “He obviously knows something about this. I have to talk to him.”
“Sure thing,” Ray says, and then he starts back stepping. “Wow, hold-up. I knew that name sounded familiar. Check it!”
Brad glances at the newspaper stand that Ray is pointing at. ‘Nykwana Wombosi Murdered’ is in bold type on the front page. He hands over the correct amount of change to the vendor, picking up the paper as he offers an absent ‘merci’ to the man.
He reads the entire article and thinks that he should feel something. Shock, or denial, some kind of reaction to what he’s piecing together, but all he can think is, ‘Oh.’
“What?” Ray asks, when Brad hands over the paper. “Dude, I can’t read French for shit. Just tell me.”
Brad lets out a slow breath, ruffles a hand through his hair before he turns to face the other man. “It says that three weeks before he was killed a man climbed onto Wombosi’s yacht five miles off the coast of Marseilles and tried to kill him. Wombosi chased the man off the boat and shot him three times in the back.” Brad blinks; he still feels nothing. “It says that I’m an assassin.”
Ray gapes at him a moment, and Brad doesn't wait around long enough for the other man to think-up a response. They catch a cab to the hotel and Brad keeps waiting for Ray to tell him he’s leaving, that it’s been fun. Instead, Ray’s expression is wholly inscrutable, and he says nothing at all.
Nearing the motel, Brad catches sight of flashing red lights and orders their cab driver to stop. “Stay, if you want,” he says to Ray, “but I’m going. They’re onto the hotel.”
Ray’s out the other side of the car and chasing after Brad. “What the fuck? Are you serious? How can you be sure?”
Brad jerks his head back to the end of the street. “Think about it, Ray. What are the odds of there being some other reason for all those cops to be parked on that street, right in front of the hotel we’ve been staying at?”
“I’m not being naïve,” Ray insists. “It’s just, you put this shit together so fast, and some of us take a second to figure it out! I would have totally walked right into that place.”
“Well, apparently that’s because you’re not an assassin.” And oh, there it is. Now he feels anger and frustration building up inside him. He pushes it resolutely back down, and refuses to think about it.
“Hey.” Ray catches up to him again as Brad heads in the opposite direction from their hotel. “I’m not here because I thought you were going to turn out to be some kind of hero. Sure, that would have been great. But I saw how you dropped those guards at the Embassy. People don’t keep the shit you had in your safety-deposit box because they live in a completely normal world. Okay?”
Brad hadn’t wanted to discover that he was a hero. He’d just wanted to find out where the hell he belonged. Apparently, the answer was exactly nowhere because he wasn’t supposed to exist. He went three weeks feeling like a shadow only to realize that apparently, he’d chosen to be exactly that. He was a shadow long before he’d ever lost his memories.
That was why no one was looking for him. No one except the police, apparently.
“Look,” Ray says. “Have your hissy-fit, I’m not trying to stop you. But as far as I can see, this hasn’t changed anything.”
“How can you be so fucking stupid?”
“How can you be so fucking stupid?” Ray retorts. “Where exactly do you plan on going? Gonna touch-base with one of your old pals? Huh?” Brad turns away and starts walking again, but Ray is right beside him. “You’ve got nowhere to go, and people are still trying to kill you. What we need,” he says. “Is a place to hole-up, where we can figure things out.”
Brad can’t disagree. He stays silent as Ray claps a hand on his upper arm. “Luckily, your dearest pal Ray-Ray has just the spot.”
________________________
“What part of fucking stake-out didn’t they understand?” Craig yells as he paces around the office. “I specifically told them!”
Craig had, for once, been utterly specific. Nate keeps silent, his expression completely blank. No one needs to know how a quiet stakeout turned into five police cars blockading the road with their lights shining, just like no one needed to know who ordered the hit on Wombosi.
“The French are fucking morons!” Craig snarls. “Dowdy is going to be pissed.”
“Mistakes happen.”
“At least I know you have my back, Nate.”
Nate nods. “But there’s only so much I can do here, Craig. I mean, I wasn’t in the office when you carried out Dowdy’s orders.”
Craig pauses and blinks wide brown eyes, hearing what Nate is carefully not saying. “Do you think it will come to that?”
“We’re breaking a lot of new ground here,” Nate says, calmly. “We’ve never dealt with a situation like this. I can’t say how command will crack down on us once this gets settled.”
The phone rings and Craig actually jerks back a little. “You answer it.” Nate clicks on the speakerphone.
“Alpha-2-7981!” Dowdy’s voice actually booms before Nate can even offer some sort of greeting.
“Sir!” Craig says.
“What part of ‘stake out’ did you not understand?”
“Sir! I was very specific when I relayed the orders.”
“Well, get out of that office anyway! You’re like a bad luck charm, and there’s enough shit we’re trying to deal with as it is!”
Craig staggers back. “Am I fired?”
“You’re not fucking fired, I’m just sick of talking to you, so go home!” Craig grabs his jacket and runs out the door. “You better be in that goddamned outpost, Fick,” Dowdy shouts.
Nate picks up the phone, now that the speakerphone is no longer necessary. “Sir.”
“As of sixteen minutes ago we know Colbert was by the hotel. That’s our start point. They can’t fly, and trains are risky. I’ve got everyone here working on grids, and checking into Ray Person. I want to know everywhere he’s lived in the past six years, and I want people checking those addresses.”
Nate can hear the people taking these orders and getting to work. Suddenly thousands of clicking keyboards are echoing faintly in the background on Dowdy’s end of the line. “Have you got the asset on standby?”
“Yes sir, all he needs is a location.”
“Good. Pull up what you can on your end. We’ll be in touch.” Dowdy clicks off.
In the silence of the office, Nate settles back into his chair and calls up the map he’s been working on. He narrows the parameters, watches as the colored markers speckling the globe suddenly become six locations within Europe. One of those locations is in France.
Nate stares at the address and hesitates. There’s no way to be certain, and the wrong move at this time would cause more harm than good. After a moment, he pushes back from the desk and reminds himself to be patient.
________________________
Brad drives their boosted Volkswagen all the way to wine country, up a private road and through an actual wrought-iron gateway. “I know. He can be so fucking pretentious, right?” Ray says as he hops out of the car.
Brad looks around at the acres of land, and the three-story manor house they are facing. “Are you sure this is a good idea?”
“Absolutely,” Ray says, with total confidence.
Brad isn’t mollified. He has learned that Ray says just about everything with absolute confidence. Ray stoops by a giant planter by the front door and shifts one of the bricks on the edge of the walkway, fishing a key out from beneath it, then proceeds to unlock the front door.
Brad frowns. “How do you know this guy?”
“We fought a war together, dude. That kind of shit builds bonds. Seriously, he won’t mind us being here.”
When they step inside Brad notices the Christmas lights glinting everywhere, and the giant Christmas tree replete with red and gold ribbon and a gold star at the top. Then he notes the pair of boots sitting to the left of the front door surrounded by a small puddle of melting snow.
“God dammit Ray,” he hisses.
“Ray?” someone says, and Brad looks up and notices where a guy even shorter than Ray is holding a rifle trained on them. He doesn’t look like he ever went to war, Brad thinks this guy looks like a choir boy, but he can also tell in the steady hands gripping the gun and the sharp stiffness of the kid’s posture that whoever this guy is, he has handled a weapon before and has fired more than one shot to good effect.
“Hey, Walt! Merry Christmas! Look, I brought you a present!” Ray greets, ignoring the rifle and walking right up to the guy, wrapping him in a hug. “He’s got amnesia,” he whispers loudly, then spoils the effort by turning to Brad and saying, “Hey, Amnesia Guy. Meet Walt!”
“Hello,” Walt says, still looking a bit wide-eyed. “Er...”
“Colbert,” Brad says. “Brad.”
“Ah.” Walt lowers the rifle and shakes Brad’s hand. “Did he rope you into this?” Brad keeps silent but Walt seems to have already come to the correct conclusion. “What do you need help with this time, Ray?”
“Come on, can’t I just be visiting because I missed you, Pooky?” Ray pinches Walt’s cheek and threatens him with smoochy-lips, which Walt deftly smacks away before turning and heading further into the house. When Brad follows, he finds the man in the kitchen preparing coffee.
Walt glances up as he sets out some cheese and some fresh bread. “Tell me everything from start to finish, or I’m kicking you out of my house.”
“You’re gonna love this,” Ray assures his friend. And then starts, “So, there I am stuck in Zurich…”
Hearing the entire saga from Ray’s perspective makes it seem wholly ridiculous. That may have something to do with the embellishments Ray gives his narrative. It’s the sort of story that only appears in bad fiction.
Brad finds himself sitting in Walt’s grandiose kitchen only half listening to a recount of the little bit of his life that he actually remembers: the last several weeks. He has a plan, albeit a loose one, to uncover who is trying to kill him and why, but he keeps getting stuck on Ray, and now Walt.
He would like to be able to worry about them. They’re liabilities, but also Brad thinks he’d feel a little disappointed if Ray got shot and killed. They’re not friends, really. Friends are people who share some mutual sense of affection, and usually a few interests or opinions or something. Under normal circumstances Brad doesn’t think he’d have spared Ray Person a second thought. Being at the same place at the same time isn’t really a solid foundation for a friendship. Paying someone an egregious sum out of a self-interested desire to not be arrested doesn’t form any sort of bond. Brad could have just as easily found some other means to get to Paris.
Embarking on a nine hour road trip with someone, surviving an attack by an anonymous rifle-toting assassin who later throws himself out a window onto the road directly below you, driving at high speeds and often in a direction opposing traffic through the streets of Paris while the police chase you, and then seeking refuge together whilst trying to uncover who is trying to kill you and why, seems to build some sort of bond, though.
Ray Person is a Recon Marine and Brad still remembers the man standing in Brad’s apartment with a big ass butcher’s knife, waiting for his opportunity, ready in case his assistance was needed. There has been more than one time when Brad could have been in trouble but hadn’t been because Ray kept calm and thought things through because somehow, for some unknown impossible reason, he trusted Brad.
Brad realizes that the feeling is mutual.
If Ray thinks Walt can be helpful, Brad is willing to hear him out. Two Recon Marines should be able to take care of themselves long enough to get to cover. Brad’s pretty sure that whoever is after him is only peripherally interested in Ray.
Ray ends his story with, “It turns out he’s an assassin and somebody’s still trying to kill him, and obviously they have my picture, so if we don’t wrap this shit up but soon we could both be in a world of hurt. And, naturally, I thought of you.”
“If you don’t mind the question,” Brad says. “What do you do?”
Walt shrugs, and looks apologetic. “I operate a vineyard.”
Brad glares at Ray. Ray stares right back. “We’re better off here than we were at that sketchy hotel where they thought we were fucking.” Which Brad knows is true. Walt is snickering a little, and Brad also has to admit to feeling a certain relief after meeting yet another person who knows just as much of his story as he does, and isn’t running away in sheer terror.
When it had been just him and Ray, Brad had dismissed Ray’s acceptance as merely due to the man clearly being insane. Walt, however, seems like a wholly reasonable person and he’s having even less trouble accepting the news that Ray did. Then again, Walt’s experience of the issue is currently only theoretical.
“An assassin,” Walt says. Brad nods. “So, what’s the plan?”
“The plan,” Ray says, once again with total confidence. “Is to dig-in here until whoever the hell employs this dude tracks us down and tries to kill us. At which time, Colbert here will do his ninja-thing and hopefully we can all gain some solid intel so we can figure out what to do next.”
Brad blinks. “That’s the plan?”
“What,” Ray says. “You knew they were going to track us here. I mean, I saw you piece that together when I told you I’d been here before. Why the hell else would you let us come here?”
The plan Ray suggested is actually precisely what Brad intended. That’s not what has surprised him. It’s Ray’s easy acceptance of it. Brad has to admit, “I thought you wanted to be dropped off some place familiar.”
“That’s so sweet,” Ray croons. Then snaps, “You’re fucking retarded, Colbert. Do I have to give my little moto ‘we’ll stick together’ speech again?”
“No.”
Walt’s eyes flicker back and forth between them, but finally he interjects, “You crashed my house at Christmas time to have some kind of old-fashioned stand-off with an organization that runs assassins that may or may not be somehow related to the American government?”
Ray blinks his wide brown eyes and says, “Merry Christmas!”
________________________
The address comes up on screen and Dowdy takes a moment to bask in a general feeling of relief. Three weeks and finally his luck is changing. “Get Paris on the line,” he says to Lovell. “Tell them to activate the asset. Give them the address.”
“Sir.” Lovell nods once, sharply, and then picks up the phone.
Everyone in the office has dark circles under their eyes, and Dowdy glances around with a feeling of pride. None of them are used to handling situations like this. They’ve gotten lazy, been allowed to become complacent because their assets are the most highly skilled, perfectly trained soldiers in the world. They don’t make mistakes.
Dowdy has an entire office full of some of the sharpest minds in the CIA, and he knows each of his outposts is kept to the same standard. By that token, he isn’t quite sure how Craig Schwetje made it over to their Paris outpost but it’s okay because Fick mostly counterbalances the man and, until recently, their Paris asset was one of the most elite assets out of a bunch of elite assets.
For all that they’ve apparently become complacent, every one of the people in his office has never faltered even once during this entire fiasco, and Dowdy is damned happy to have them working for him. He knows better than to announce that he thinks this can all be wrapped up by the end of the day. Jinxes and bad luck are something everyone sitting in that room believes in, and he counts himself among that number.
There is no getting around the feeling that the end is in sight, though. Dowdy keeps it to himself. Hands behind his back, he rocks forward and back on his feet. “Stay sharp, people.”
________________________
Brad can’t remember ever having seen a Western but Ray and Walt describe enough of them that he starts to build up a few expectations in his head. Walt doesn’t have an armory in his wine cellar but he’s got a rifle and a pistol, and is happy to let Brad choose between them.
Brad takes the rifle, and Walt pockets the other gun. “What about me?” Ray asks, but makes do with another kitchen knife. He stands by the main entrance and declares, “Nobody’s getting through this door.”
Nobody does, but that has nothing to do with Ray. At some ridiculous hour in the morning a bullet zips through the front window of Walt’s mansion and embeds itself into the wall. “You missed!” Ray shouts. “Try again, mother fucker!”
Brad looks at the bullet and then squints out the front window. The sniper didn’t miss; he hit the wall on purpose. Brad doesn’t know what that means but he knows he prefers it when the people coming after him fulfill his expectations. This guy seems to be playing some completely different game.
“Wow,” Walt says. “You’re going out there?” Brad nods. “Well, I guess I can’t school an assassin on this sort of thing.” He steps aside.
Brad pauses just inside the front door to ask, “Are you insured?”
“Yeah,” Walt says. “Why?”
In answer, Brad blows up the tractor sitting in front of the house and uses the smoke as cover. He hopes Walt isn’t too pissed about that, but he figures if he can get them all out of this alive that counts for more than the loss of a tractor that looked like it hadn’t moved an inch in sixty years anyway.
Creeping through the brush, Brad keeps expecting a showdown like Ray has been describing all night. Some quick-draw, assassin versus assassin kind of action like he faced in the apartment, only now Brad’s feeling better prepared, more confident.
Instead, it ends with a brief struggle and one bullet fired into the guy’s foot because he keeps trying to scramble away. “Son of a bitch,” the man drawls, and finally holds still. “I was trying to be reasonable, you bastard.”
Brad stands over the guy, holding his gun steady and trained on his target. “Who are you?”
“Munich,” the man says, which makes absolutely no sense. He doesn’t even sound remotely German. “It’s me,” he says. “It’s Pappy.”
“What?”
The man, Munich, Pappy, whatever his name is, blinks up at him and says, “Fick said you might not know shit.”
Brad raises the gun. “I know plenty.”
“It’s not a criticism, Iceman,” Pappy says. “I’m not here to kill you.”
“I figured that out already.”
“Then why the hell did you shoot me in the foot?” Brad doesn’t really feel inclined to give an answer. The man should be happy Brad didn’t shoot him in the head just on principal.
“What the hell is going on, Colbert? You’ve got everyone’s panties twisted up in bunches, and Treadstone’s calling up assets one by one. I had Paris Bravo issuing me counter orders, which is risky as hell if that ever comes to light. Everything’s all fucked.”
“Treadstone?” Brad echoes. “What’s Paris Bravo?”
Pappy blinks at him again, still holding his hands up on either side of his head. “Shit,” he says. “You know about fuck-all, don’t you? You are damned lucky you’ve got Fick calling in favors for your ass, that’s all I’m saying.”
Brad shifts his stance. It feels like they’re talking in two different languages. He has no idea what Pappy is saying. Jerking the gun up threateningly he demands, “Tell me about Treadstone.”
________________________
The phone call, when it comes, is patched immediately through to Langley. Lovell’s cool, “Code in, please,” relayed over the wires, falling into the silence of Nate’s office like a stone dropping into a pond. Nate can hear Brad breathing.
“Who is this?” Brad asks, after Lovell again requests for him to code in. “Who the hell are you?”
Nate holds his breath. Brad doesn’t remember. All of this, right from Marseilles, has been because their asset has lost his memory. He catches himself starting to smile. It’s the most benign of the possibilities Nate has been keeping a tally of in his head. Things aren’t as far-gone as he’d been starting to think.
“The man you sent is dead,” Brad says, and the little glimmer of hope he’s been feeling swoops right out of Nate again.
Jesus, he sent Pappy out there.
He sent Pappy specifically because he knew the man could talk to Brad, could reach him. Nate knew Pappy; as much as it was possible to know an asset like that. Pappy was one of the few that Nate could turn to, that he knew he could trust. One of the few cases of a Treadstone asset still resembling, well, a person once they made it out the other side of the training.
“Hello, Bradley?” Dowdy says, finally coming onto the line. “What’s going on there?”
Brad stays silent. Nate wonders if the man is taking a moment to calculate his best course of action. He wonders how much Brad even knows. “Come on, Bradley,” Dowdy coaxes. “We can only make this right if you talk to us. Why don’t you come in? We’ll see what we can do.”
If Brad comes in Treadstone will either put him through another round of training, or they’ll kill him. Brad might not know it, but he is Treadstone’s most prized asset, the first time the program yielded a success.
“If you don’t come in,” Dowdy says. “We’re going to have to keep going until we’re satisfied.”
“You mean until you kill me,” Brad says. Nate closes his eyes.
Dowdy sighs over the phone. “Bradley, I can’t fix this if I don’t know what’s wrong. Try to work with me here.” There’s another stretch of silence. “Why don’t you ask Ray what he thinks?”
“Ray’s dead,” Brad answers, his voice flat. He sounds entirely unfamiliar to Nate. “Walt’s dead, too. In case you were going to play that card next.”
“It’s not a card, Bradley,” Dowdy says. “Why did you kill them?”
Brad breathes in and then exhales slow. He says, “5:30 pm Paris, today. Go to Pont Neuf. Go alone. Walk to the middle of the bridge and face east. I’ll redial this number.” There’s a click as Brad disconnects the line.
“Fick?” Dowdy asks.
“Sir.”
“Get me another asset on stand-by.”
By the time Nate works out the words to affirm the order Dowdy has already hung up. Nate drops his head onto his desk. “Fucking Christ,” he mutters.
He’s still sitting like that when his phone buzzes a minute later. Nate gropes for it blindly, prepared to tell Mike that he has the worst timing in the world and instead of coffee, they should probably just find a bar and try to drink away the memory of the colossal idiocy that has been washing downstream since Brad first went missing.
Instead, he finds his phone is flashing a text at him. Nate takes a long breath and re-reads the message: ’Confirm: the valiant never taste of death but once.’
Every Treadstone asset has a code-phrase. Nate knows this one belongs to Pappy. It means the man is just fine; that he completed his objective and, for all that Brad had said to Dowdy, he’s alive and on his way back.Staring at the message, Nate feels a wave of relief rush through him that bubbles up inside until it spills out of his lips as a laugh. Brad Colbert might have absolutely no memory, but he’s still the same. Nate still knows him.
That’s something.
___________________________________________________
|<< END PART THREE >>|
MASTERPOST
Series' MASTERPOST
By: tea_diva
Chapter: THREE
Word Count: 7,758
They end up walking in silence through the streets of Paris. Brad isn’t sure if everything that has happened in the past twenty-four hours is finally starting to catch-up to Ray, or if the man is maybe just tired. Brad doesn’t dwell on it, he is preoccupied trying to process what he can no longer deny: somebody wants to kill him.
It should feel stranger than it does but oddly he isn’t all that surprised. Mostly he just wants one familiar thing that he can hold-up and say, ‘Yes, I know this. This is recognizable to me’. The only thing that feels remotely comforting is Ray Person. Brad’s pretty sure that’s an indication of mental instability, but Ray’s chatter keeps him focused, keeps him from tail-spinning.
“How about here?” Ray tips his head to the right, toward a corner entrance off the street. The sign reads: Hotel de la Paix.
The woman behind the desk smiles at them and hands over a key, and it’s not until Brad pushes open the door that he realizes the mistake. She’s given them a single room with a queen-sized bed. There is no second bed. Ray sighs. “I don’t even care. I’m so fucking tired, and I’ve slept in worse conditions. Just, like, don’t molest me in your sleep or something.” He chucks his bag onto a chair before collapsing onto the bed.
Brad walks a circuit through the room, pulling the curtains closed and making certain the windows are locked. It feels like he’s moving out of habit, some part of himself that knows what has to be done and is doing it, which is good because his brain has gone carefully blank.
“So, what now?” Ray asks the ceiling.
Brad glances toward the bed where Ray is sprawled like a starfish. There is a chair in the corner beside the one holding Ray’s luggage, but Brad doesn’t sit. Instead, he stands there awkwardly in the room. “Ideally, we would take the opportunity to alter our appearance.”
“You are a six foot four, motherfucking Aryan giant,” Ray points out. “Dying your hair, like, red or something isn’t going to make you any less conspicuous. Also, I am not going blond for you.”
Brad had already figured all of that, which is why he hadn’t suggested they stop at a pharmacy before they found a hotel. He hadn’t liked the idea of changing his own appearance. The one thing about himself that is beginning to find familiar is his own reflection; he hadn’t wanted to change that, no matter how sensible it might be to do so.
“I have to go to the Hotel Regina. If I’m Kempe, then they’ll have some records that could be useful. Only…”
“Only, you’re dead,” Ray offers helpfully. He waves his hand. “No worries. I got this.”
“Are you…?”
“Don’t even,” Ray says, lifting his head off the bed so he can glare at Brad. He taps a finger against his own chest, “Recon Marine,” then he points to Brad, “Crazy Amnesia Guy.”
Brad rolls his eyes toward the ceiling. “Right.”
________________________
Dowdy is getting used to coming into his office and finding James Mattis sitting at his desk like it belongs to him. It is, Dowdy has discovered, a terrible way to begin the day but he can’t exactly ask the man, who is technically his boss, to go away and come back after Dowdy has managed to finish at least one pot of coffee. He also can’t delay and come in late, hoping that Mattis will get bored and go away. James Mattis is the most stubborn and persistent man Joe knows, and there is no amount of time that he can delay that might incite the man to leave. Lovell has taken to meeting him by the door with a cup of coffee. It’s not enough, but it’s at least something.
“Jesus Christ,” is how Mattis greets him when Dowdy pushes open his office door. “What the hell is going on in this goddamned office? Did you do this?” He holds up the morning’s newspaper where Nykwana Wombosi’s face is featured along with a three page article discussing the accusations Wombosi made regarding a CIA assassin trying to kill him, and the suspicious nature of his death.
Dowdy sets his briefcase onto his desk and stands there with his coffee mug, wishing that Mattis wasn’t in his chair because he’d really like to sit down. “We think it was Colbert.”
There was no official hit authorized, and nothing went out through Treadstone networks, so he at least knows it wasn’t them. Wombosi has other enemies, true, but the hit was clean and precise and any of the people Dowdy knows who had the means and motive to assassinate the man would have made more of a message out of it. The only message the single clean bullet directly through the center of the man’s forehead leaves is: go away.
“Holy goddamned hell,” Mattis mutters. “This crazy sonofabitch is completely out of control. Why isn’t he dead yet?”
“We think that now that he’s completed his original assignment, he’ll come in. That’s usually how the training works.”
“There is no ‘usually’ in this situation!” Mattis snaps. “We’ve got a black-ops agent who’s completely off the reservation. He’s put two cops in the hospital, trashed an American Embassy and now has just assassinated a public figure! He’s on the run somewhere in Europe and who the fuck knows why. So don’t give me ‘usually’, Dowdy. Give me definitive. If you can’t, then activate the next asset and get this sorted.”
Dowdy watches as the man rubs his hands over his reddened face. “I have to stand in front of a damned oversight committee and what the hell am I supposed to say about Treadstone when everything is so colossally fucked?” Mattis says.
If they do not manage to bring Colbert in, or put Colbert down, then Dowdy knows that the very least of their concerns will be whatever the oversight committee decides about their budget. Maybe Mattis has been wandering around the interior of Langley so long that he’s forgotten about the real world, but Joe doesn’t have that luxury. If this gets out then they’re all going down, and it will be exceedingly messy and extremely public.
________________________
The sheets are scratchy against Brad’s skin. He lies on his back, Ray snoring contentedly beside him, and tries to think about nothing.
Sleep has been elusive since Marseilles. The rest he managed on the ride over was the longest and most satisfying stretch of actual sleep he has managed since waking up on the boat, but Brad doesn’t fool himself into thinking that it marked a permanent change.
He rolls carefully onto his left side, faces the beige-painted wall and closes his eyes. There is the faint sound of traffic in the street outside, the periodic quiet whoosh of a car, laughter as people walk along the street. He lets it fill him up, lets it take away thoughts about guns and glass and knives, and the fact that he is beginning to wonder if he even wants to know who he is.
When he breathes in there is a spicy hint of cloves in the air, a bright citrus smell underneath it that he can’t quite place. Brad breathes in deep. Feels like he knows that smell somehow, like it’s familiar.
There is an arm draped around his waist and he looks down, prepared to shove Ray back to his own side of the bed, but it’s not Ray’s arm. “What are you thinking about?” a voice whispers, puffs warm breath across the back of his neck.
It’s not Ray. Brad’s no longer laying under the rough sheets in the small, drab little hotel room; he’s somewhere else. It might be his apartment; it might be somewhere he doesn’t remember, he can’t tell, the image blurs when he tries to concentrate too hard.
Instead, Brad lets his eyes close again, feels the cool softness of the sheets and the warmth along his back. The rhythm of his breath echoed in the body of the man who is lying behind him. It doesn’t make him feel tense and claustrophobic the way he feels when he walks down a crowded street. He feels anchored and safe, like he’s precisely where he is supposed to be.
“I think I’m dreaming.”
There’s another puff of warm breath across the naked skin of his shoulders. The arm around his waist shifts up, and Brad looks down at the hand that splays wide across his chest. “You’re wide awake,” the man whispers, drops a kiss to Brad’s shoulder. “And you’re in bed with me.”
Brad finds himself entwining his fingers with the hand resting on his chest. “It’s a very good dream.”
This time there is a warm chuckle that makes him smile. “What will it take tonight?”
The question strikes him as strange, even as he realizes that the man says it like it’s somehow traditional. Like this is something they go through often. He keeps his eyes closed and feels the man shift closer, dropping soft, unhurried kisses along Brad’s skin. “Tell me about Tuscany.”
“You travel more than I do,” the man says, his voice still soft, something fond making his words feel like another kind of caress.
“I don’t get to sight-see,” Brad points out. “You see everything differently.”
There’s a kiss that falls onto his temple and Brad wants to open his eyes and look at the man who is holding him and touching him, but he’s also afraid that if he tries to focus on the other man in his bed he will blur and fade the same way the room did when Brad tried to remember it.
“Not so differently,” the man whispers.
But then he talks about the green hills rolling like waves higher and higher, building into the distance. How the sun spills light out onto fields of sunflowers. Brad falls asleep listening to a description of the morning mist, filling in the dips between the hills until the world looks like it was built in a cloud.
When he wakes up he’s back in the motel, Ray still asleep on the opposite side of the bed, though thankfully he’s kept his limbs to himself. Brad wonders if that other bed he had dreamt about was actually a memory. It makes him wonder if that was the same man who shared Brad’s apartment, who kept his running shoes beside Brad’s in the closet and his toothbrush in the bathroom cabinet. Did they break-up? Are they still together?
It’s the first time he spares a moment to regret the ease with which he dismissed the fishing boat captain’s suggestion that he go to the police. “They will take your picture,” Captain Gerard had said. “They will show it around, see if someone recognizes you. You are not the first person to have amnesia ever, yes?” Brad had thought only of the bullets that Jean-Paul had plucked from his back. It had made him less inclined to work any public channels for answers. He’d had the bank account number, which had seemed like the safer bet.
But the bank account had given him no suggestion of anyone who might have shared his life with him. The apartment might have held a clue, but there hadn’t been time to search for it.
“Ray,” he says, because he doesn’t want to dwell. “Wake up. We have to get going.”
“Five more minutes.”
Brad rips the blanket off the other man. “Now, Ray.”
________________________
Nate pushes open the blue door of the café and spots Mike at the usual table, already with two cups of coffee waiting. It’s only been a few days but having Mike in the city is starting to feel normal, like the man has always lived here. “Morning,” Nate greets as he drapes his coat over the back of a chair before he sits down.
Instead of a response, Mike drops the newspaper onto the table, spinning it around so the front page is facing Nate. He doesn’t need to glance down to know what it reads but he does anyway. Takes the five seconds he spends looking into Nykwana Wombosi’s face to calculate the best response.
“Jesus, Nate,” Mike says, which prevents him from denying any responsibility.
Mike knows him too well. The downside to a job like Nate’s is that if your close friends are all in the same line of work, then every trick and lie you know will almost never fool them. Even for a moment.
He folds the newspaper and sets it aside, picking up his coffee cup and taking a sip. He raises his eyebrows pointedly. “I know our Paris asset well enough to determine this was a measure that had to be taken.”
Mike rolls his eyes. “Knock it off, would ya? It’s me you’re talking to.”
Nate nods, almost to himself and sets his cup down. “None of this is like Brad. Not a single piece of what’s been happening in the past few weeks makes sense. Which means one of two things. Either the Treadstone conditioning has caught-up with him and he’s snapped. Or he doesn’t know what the fuck he’s doing.”
“Neither one of those are good options.”
Nate shrugs. “Either way, this had to be done. I can’t help thinking he’s tracing his steps. He went to Zurich before he came to Paris. If that was the case, he’d track his steps back here,” he taps the paper. “Wombosi wasn’t exactly a very forgiving sort of man.”
Mike stares at him for a moment. “I’m not even going to ask how you put the order through.”
“Probably best if you don’t know.”
“And what happens if he knows exactly what he’s doing? What happens if this is what everyone is saying it is: a rogue asset out on some sort of vendetta kick?”
Nate rolls his eyes. “Does this seem like vengeance to you? He hasn’t come anywhere near the agency yet. Except for Barcelona, and that might have just been self-defense.”
“Nate…”
“Then I’ll deal with it,” Nate says, sitting back in his chair, his gaze shifting away.
“Bullshit,” Mike says. “I know Brad, too, you know. I know you pretty damned well, also. No way I’m buying that you’d be prepared to sort this the way Command is wanting it sorted.”
Nate doesn’t feel inclined to respond to that. Langley has been on the hook asking for the next asset to be set in place; ready to move the minute they have a location. “I’ve got an asset already on standby,” Nate tells Mike, gets a grim sort of satisfaction out of the way his friend’s eyes widen. He can’t afford to explain his strategy.
“Nate,” Mike says, cautious, like he’s trying to read between the lines of everything Nate is saying. Nate wishes the man luck but in this at least, he is being deliberately vague. “You’re not alone, here. I came so I can help, however you need.”
He’s known Mike for a long time. He trusts the man implicitly, which is why he says, “I can’t, Mike. However this plays out, I can’t have anyone else implicated. When it’s over, then it’s done. You know how this goes; you know how we work. I refuse to let there be some bureaucratic Inquisition that extends beyond Paris.”
“Are you going against Treadstone?”
Nate raises his eyebrows and matches his friend’s eyes with a steady gaze. He says, “I’m doing my job.” He refuses to say anything further. He thinks Mike already understands.
________________________
Ray waltzes out of the Hotel Regina with a cheeky grin, which Brad thinks must mean that the mission was a success. It’s confirmed when Ray trades Brad two folded pieces of paper for the bag that he has been minding. “That was ridiculously easy,” Ray says. “Next time, give me something that’s at least a little bit of a challenge.”
Brad unfolds the papers. On the first is a breakdown of Matthew Kempe’s bill. The second page holds a list of phone numbers Kempe dialed while staying at the hotel, as well as the cost of each call. “I need to find a phone.”
There is a payphone at the end of the street, which Brad rigs so as to avoid paying; he doesn’t have any change anyway. Ray heads off in the direction of a restaurant somewhere after the fifth call, and Brad continues to work his way down the list until he finally hits a Paris number with some promise.
“Alliance Security, Maritime Division,” he announces as he drops into the booth across from Ray. “I’ve got a meeting in a half hour. They know Matthew Kempe.”
“Are you sure that’s a good idea?”
Brad tips his head to the side. “Maybe not, but I don’t see how I have much choice.”
“Stop this ‘I’ bullshit,” Ray says. “I’m right here. Give me something to do.”
“Check around on Kempe.”
“What, you mean in case he’s your twin brother?”
Brad stares at him a moment. “Yeah.”
________________________
Dowdy’s day starts to pick up when Lovell sticks his head through the open door and announces, “Paris police have found the vehicle.” He marches out into the main room and puts his hands on his hips. “Tell me.”
Of course, there are no fingerprints in the car, nothing that connects it to Colbert. The police involved in the chase, those who didn’t end-up in hospital, recognize that particularly hideous shade of orangey-yellow though, and that’s something.
From there they have a start point, and within three hours Dowdy gets the next piece of good news. “Hotel de la Paix? Get me the Paris outpost, I want them working on this.” Nathaniel Fick answers the call, but Dowdy hears Schwetje coming into the office because the man won’t stop talking and he has a loud voice. Apparently the information has come right during a shift change.
“It’s fine, Bravo-2.” Dowdy tries to mean it. “Dismissed. Get some shuteye. With any luck this will be resolved before you come into work tomorrow.”
“I hope so, sir,” Fick says, and then there’s the little chiming beep that means Fick has transferred Dowdy over to Schwetje’s line.
“Alpha-2,” Schwetje greets.
Dowdy paraphrases everything all over again and says, “Get the Paris police on it. I want them staking out that hotel room and ready to move the moment Colbert shows his face. Get the asset shadowing that hotel as well. Tell him to stick to Colbert. When we give the order, I want him in place.”
“Roger that.”
The directions are simple, so when Dowdy hangs up he feels confident that he might actually be able to go home tonight, curl up in bed after explaining to his wife that it was a spur of the moment work assignment that he just couldn’t turn down. With any luck, she won’t sentence him to the couch; she’s usually pretty understanding. Treadstone can go back to being invisible, and Mattis can forget that he’s head of their little secret department, and Dowdy won’t have to see the man first thing in the morning before he’s had a chance to fortify himself with an entire pot of coffee.
________________________
“I just had a meeting as Kempe, so I am definitely Kempe.” Brad drops into a chair at Ray’s table, pulling the plate of breaded calamari Ray’s snacking on over and popping one in his mouth. “I’m definitely Colbert, but I’m also definitely Kempe.”
“Well,” Ray says around a mouthful of calamari. “I hate to tell you this, Mr. Kempe, but you’re dead. Hey,” he adds. “You’re pretty hot for a zombie though. That’s something.”
Brad frowns. “Ray, what the fuck are you talking about?”
“While you went and had your little gay-ass talk about yachts or whatever the fuck, I did some digging on Kempe, and I found you,” he pauses, seemingly for dramatic effect and then blurts, “Dude, you’re in a morgue. Sorry to have to tell you this.” He doesn’t look at all sorry.
“I can’t be in a morgue,” Brad argues. “I just had a meeting as Kempe. I am Kempe.”
Ray shrugs and pops another breaded piece of calamari into his mouth. “Then who the hell else is claiming to be Kempe? Because whoever that dude is, he’s dead.”
Brad frowns at the calamari and flags down the waiter, asks for Ray’s bill. “We’re leaving,” he says, as Ray drops his money on the table.
“Checking out the morgue?” Brad nods. “Right on, right on.”
It’s late by the time they get there but there is only a young, skittish attendant who happily clutches the money Brad hands over and pulls open one of the small metal doors in the wall. Ray and Brad both stare at the slab the attendant pulls out for them.
“Uh, dude,” Ray says. “Where’s the body?”
“What?” The attendant finally turns his head to look at the slab he’s just pulled out. “Oh shit. Uh… Maybe his brother came back and took it?” he’s muttering, which prompts Brad to turn on his heel. “Wait a moment, wait, where are you going?”
Brad ignores the attendant and yanks the big brown book off the front desk, flipping it open. Everyone is required to log-in when they enter. He and Ray bypassed that step because whoever said money couldn’t buy everything was lying. Now, Brad finds the day’s sheet and rips it clean out of the book. “Oh my goodness,” the attendant is saying, but Brad walks out of the morgue and up the stairs, back onto the street.
“Well, that was weird,” Ray says, jogging to catch up. “For a change. What have you got?”
“Nykwana Wombosi,” Brad reads off the sheet. “He went to see Kempe.”
“Wombosi and Kempe. Yeah, they sound like they could be related.”
Brad ignores the comment. “He obviously knows something about this. I have to talk to him.”
“Sure thing,” Ray says, and then he starts back stepping. “Wow, hold-up. I knew that name sounded familiar. Check it!”
Brad glances at the newspaper stand that Ray is pointing at. ‘Nykwana Wombosi Murdered’ is in bold type on the front page. He hands over the correct amount of change to the vendor, picking up the paper as he offers an absent ‘merci’ to the man.
He reads the entire article and thinks that he should feel something. Shock, or denial, some kind of reaction to what he’s piecing together, but all he can think is, ‘Oh.’
“What?” Ray asks, when Brad hands over the paper. “Dude, I can’t read French for shit. Just tell me.”
Brad lets out a slow breath, ruffles a hand through his hair before he turns to face the other man. “It says that three weeks before he was killed a man climbed onto Wombosi’s yacht five miles off the coast of Marseilles and tried to kill him. Wombosi chased the man off the boat and shot him three times in the back.” Brad blinks; he still feels nothing. “It says that I’m an assassin.”
Ray gapes at him a moment, and Brad doesn't wait around long enough for the other man to think-up a response. They catch a cab to the hotel and Brad keeps waiting for Ray to tell him he’s leaving, that it’s been fun. Instead, Ray’s expression is wholly inscrutable, and he says nothing at all.
Nearing the motel, Brad catches sight of flashing red lights and orders their cab driver to stop. “Stay, if you want,” he says to Ray, “but I’m going. They’re onto the hotel.”
Ray’s out the other side of the car and chasing after Brad. “What the fuck? Are you serious? How can you be sure?”
Brad jerks his head back to the end of the street. “Think about it, Ray. What are the odds of there being some other reason for all those cops to be parked on that street, right in front of the hotel we’ve been staying at?”
“I’m not being naïve,” Ray insists. “It’s just, you put this shit together so fast, and some of us take a second to figure it out! I would have totally walked right into that place.”
“Well, apparently that’s because you’re not an assassin.” And oh, there it is. Now he feels anger and frustration building up inside him. He pushes it resolutely back down, and refuses to think about it.
“Hey.” Ray catches up to him again as Brad heads in the opposite direction from their hotel. “I’m not here because I thought you were going to turn out to be some kind of hero. Sure, that would have been great. But I saw how you dropped those guards at the Embassy. People don’t keep the shit you had in your safety-deposit box because they live in a completely normal world. Okay?”
Brad hadn’t wanted to discover that he was a hero. He’d just wanted to find out where the hell he belonged. Apparently, the answer was exactly nowhere because he wasn’t supposed to exist. He went three weeks feeling like a shadow only to realize that apparently, he’d chosen to be exactly that. He was a shadow long before he’d ever lost his memories.
That was why no one was looking for him. No one except the police, apparently.
“Look,” Ray says. “Have your hissy-fit, I’m not trying to stop you. But as far as I can see, this hasn’t changed anything.”
“How can you be so fucking stupid?”
“How can you be so fucking stupid?” Ray retorts. “Where exactly do you plan on going? Gonna touch-base with one of your old pals? Huh?” Brad turns away and starts walking again, but Ray is right beside him. “You’ve got nowhere to go, and people are still trying to kill you. What we need,” he says. “Is a place to hole-up, where we can figure things out.”
Brad can’t disagree. He stays silent as Ray claps a hand on his upper arm. “Luckily, your dearest pal Ray-Ray has just the spot.”
________________________
“What part of fucking stake-out didn’t they understand?” Craig yells as he paces around the office. “I specifically told them!”
Craig had, for once, been utterly specific. Nate keeps silent, his expression completely blank. No one needs to know how a quiet stakeout turned into five police cars blockading the road with their lights shining, just like no one needed to know who ordered the hit on Wombosi.
“The French are fucking morons!” Craig snarls. “Dowdy is going to be pissed.”
“Mistakes happen.”
“At least I know you have my back, Nate.”
Nate nods. “But there’s only so much I can do here, Craig. I mean, I wasn’t in the office when you carried out Dowdy’s orders.”
Craig pauses and blinks wide brown eyes, hearing what Nate is carefully not saying. “Do you think it will come to that?”
“We’re breaking a lot of new ground here,” Nate says, calmly. “We’ve never dealt with a situation like this. I can’t say how command will crack down on us once this gets settled.”
The phone rings and Craig actually jerks back a little. “You answer it.” Nate clicks on the speakerphone.
“Alpha-2-7981!” Dowdy’s voice actually booms before Nate can even offer some sort of greeting.
“Sir!” Craig says.
“What part of ‘stake out’ did you not understand?”
“Sir! I was very specific when I relayed the orders.”
“Well, get out of that office anyway! You’re like a bad luck charm, and there’s enough shit we’re trying to deal with as it is!”
Craig staggers back. “Am I fired?”
“You’re not fucking fired, I’m just sick of talking to you, so go home!” Craig grabs his jacket and runs out the door. “You better be in that goddamned outpost, Fick,” Dowdy shouts.
Nate picks up the phone, now that the speakerphone is no longer necessary. “Sir.”
“As of sixteen minutes ago we know Colbert was by the hotel. That’s our start point. They can’t fly, and trains are risky. I’ve got everyone here working on grids, and checking into Ray Person. I want to know everywhere he’s lived in the past six years, and I want people checking those addresses.”
Nate can hear the people taking these orders and getting to work. Suddenly thousands of clicking keyboards are echoing faintly in the background on Dowdy’s end of the line. “Have you got the asset on standby?”
“Yes sir, all he needs is a location.”
“Good. Pull up what you can on your end. We’ll be in touch.” Dowdy clicks off.
In the silence of the office, Nate settles back into his chair and calls up the map he’s been working on. He narrows the parameters, watches as the colored markers speckling the globe suddenly become six locations within Europe. One of those locations is in France.
Nate stares at the address and hesitates. There’s no way to be certain, and the wrong move at this time would cause more harm than good. After a moment, he pushes back from the desk and reminds himself to be patient.
________________________
Brad drives their boosted Volkswagen all the way to wine country, up a private road and through an actual wrought-iron gateway. “I know. He can be so fucking pretentious, right?” Ray says as he hops out of the car.
Brad looks around at the acres of land, and the three-story manor house they are facing. “Are you sure this is a good idea?”
“Absolutely,” Ray says, with total confidence.
Brad isn’t mollified. He has learned that Ray says just about everything with absolute confidence. Ray stoops by a giant planter by the front door and shifts one of the bricks on the edge of the walkway, fishing a key out from beneath it, then proceeds to unlock the front door.
Brad frowns. “How do you know this guy?”
“We fought a war together, dude. That kind of shit builds bonds. Seriously, he won’t mind us being here.”
When they step inside Brad notices the Christmas lights glinting everywhere, and the giant Christmas tree replete with red and gold ribbon and a gold star at the top. Then he notes the pair of boots sitting to the left of the front door surrounded by a small puddle of melting snow.
“God dammit Ray,” he hisses.
“Ray?” someone says, and Brad looks up and notices where a guy even shorter than Ray is holding a rifle trained on them. He doesn’t look like he ever went to war, Brad thinks this guy looks like a choir boy, but he can also tell in the steady hands gripping the gun and the sharp stiffness of the kid’s posture that whoever this guy is, he has handled a weapon before and has fired more than one shot to good effect.
“Hey, Walt! Merry Christmas! Look, I brought you a present!” Ray greets, ignoring the rifle and walking right up to the guy, wrapping him in a hug. “He’s got amnesia,” he whispers loudly, then spoils the effort by turning to Brad and saying, “Hey, Amnesia Guy. Meet Walt!”
“Hello,” Walt says, still looking a bit wide-eyed. “Er...”
“Colbert,” Brad says. “Brad.”
“Ah.” Walt lowers the rifle and shakes Brad’s hand. “Did he rope you into this?” Brad keeps silent but Walt seems to have already come to the correct conclusion. “What do you need help with this time, Ray?”
“Come on, can’t I just be visiting because I missed you, Pooky?” Ray pinches Walt’s cheek and threatens him with smoochy-lips, which Walt deftly smacks away before turning and heading further into the house. When Brad follows, he finds the man in the kitchen preparing coffee.
Walt glances up as he sets out some cheese and some fresh bread. “Tell me everything from start to finish, or I’m kicking you out of my house.”
“You’re gonna love this,” Ray assures his friend. And then starts, “So, there I am stuck in Zurich…”
Hearing the entire saga from Ray’s perspective makes it seem wholly ridiculous. That may have something to do with the embellishments Ray gives his narrative. It’s the sort of story that only appears in bad fiction.
Brad finds himself sitting in Walt’s grandiose kitchen only half listening to a recount of the little bit of his life that he actually remembers: the last several weeks. He has a plan, albeit a loose one, to uncover who is trying to kill him and why, but he keeps getting stuck on Ray, and now Walt.
He would like to be able to worry about them. They’re liabilities, but also Brad thinks he’d feel a little disappointed if Ray got shot and killed. They’re not friends, really. Friends are people who share some mutual sense of affection, and usually a few interests or opinions or something. Under normal circumstances Brad doesn’t think he’d have spared Ray Person a second thought. Being at the same place at the same time isn’t really a solid foundation for a friendship. Paying someone an egregious sum out of a self-interested desire to not be arrested doesn’t form any sort of bond. Brad could have just as easily found some other means to get to Paris.
Embarking on a nine hour road trip with someone, surviving an attack by an anonymous rifle-toting assassin who later throws himself out a window onto the road directly below you, driving at high speeds and often in a direction opposing traffic through the streets of Paris while the police chase you, and then seeking refuge together whilst trying to uncover who is trying to kill you and why, seems to build some sort of bond, though.
Ray Person is a Recon Marine and Brad still remembers the man standing in Brad’s apartment with a big ass butcher’s knife, waiting for his opportunity, ready in case his assistance was needed. There has been more than one time when Brad could have been in trouble but hadn’t been because Ray kept calm and thought things through because somehow, for some unknown impossible reason, he trusted Brad.
Brad realizes that the feeling is mutual.
If Ray thinks Walt can be helpful, Brad is willing to hear him out. Two Recon Marines should be able to take care of themselves long enough to get to cover. Brad’s pretty sure that whoever is after him is only peripherally interested in Ray.
Ray ends his story with, “It turns out he’s an assassin and somebody’s still trying to kill him, and obviously they have my picture, so if we don’t wrap this shit up but soon we could both be in a world of hurt. And, naturally, I thought of you.”
“If you don’t mind the question,” Brad says. “What do you do?”
Walt shrugs, and looks apologetic. “I operate a vineyard.”
Brad glares at Ray. Ray stares right back. “We’re better off here than we were at that sketchy hotel where they thought we were fucking.” Which Brad knows is true. Walt is snickering a little, and Brad also has to admit to feeling a certain relief after meeting yet another person who knows just as much of his story as he does, and isn’t running away in sheer terror.
When it had been just him and Ray, Brad had dismissed Ray’s acceptance as merely due to the man clearly being insane. Walt, however, seems like a wholly reasonable person and he’s having even less trouble accepting the news that Ray did. Then again, Walt’s experience of the issue is currently only theoretical.
“An assassin,” Walt says. Brad nods. “So, what’s the plan?”
“The plan,” Ray says, once again with total confidence. “Is to dig-in here until whoever the hell employs this dude tracks us down and tries to kill us. At which time, Colbert here will do his ninja-thing and hopefully we can all gain some solid intel so we can figure out what to do next.”
Brad blinks. “That’s the plan?”
“What,” Ray says. “You knew they were going to track us here. I mean, I saw you piece that together when I told you I’d been here before. Why the hell else would you let us come here?”
The plan Ray suggested is actually precisely what Brad intended. That’s not what has surprised him. It’s Ray’s easy acceptance of it. Brad has to admit, “I thought you wanted to be dropped off some place familiar.”
“That’s so sweet,” Ray croons. Then snaps, “You’re fucking retarded, Colbert. Do I have to give my little moto ‘we’ll stick together’ speech again?”
“No.”
Walt’s eyes flicker back and forth between them, but finally he interjects, “You crashed my house at Christmas time to have some kind of old-fashioned stand-off with an organization that runs assassins that may or may not be somehow related to the American government?”
Ray blinks his wide brown eyes and says, “Merry Christmas!”
________________________
The address comes up on screen and Dowdy takes a moment to bask in a general feeling of relief. Three weeks and finally his luck is changing. “Get Paris on the line,” he says to Lovell. “Tell them to activate the asset. Give them the address.”
“Sir.” Lovell nods once, sharply, and then picks up the phone.
Everyone in the office has dark circles under their eyes, and Dowdy glances around with a feeling of pride. None of them are used to handling situations like this. They’ve gotten lazy, been allowed to become complacent because their assets are the most highly skilled, perfectly trained soldiers in the world. They don’t make mistakes.
Dowdy has an entire office full of some of the sharpest minds in the CIA, and he knows each of his outposts is kept to the same standard. By that token, he isn’t quite sure how Craig Schwetje made it over to their Paris outpost but it’s okay because Fick mostly counterbalances the man and, until recently, their Paris asset was one of the most elite assets out of a bunch of elite assets.
For all that they’ve apparently become complacent, every one of the people in his office has never faltered even once during this entire fiasco, and Dowdy is damned happy to have them working for him. He knows better than to announce that he thinks this can all be wrapped up by the end of the day. Jinxes and bad luck are something everyone sitting in that room believes in, and he counts himself among that number.
There is no getting around the feeling that the end is in sight, though. Dowdy keeps it to himself. Hands behind his back, he rocks forward and back on his feet. “Stay sharp, people.”
________________________
Brad can’t remember ever having seen a Western but Ray and Walt describe enough of them that he starts to build up a few expectations in his head. Walt doesn’t have an armory in his wine cellar but he’s got a rifle and a pistol, and is happy to let Brad choose between them.
Brad takes the rifle, and Walt pockets the other gun. “What about me?” Ray asks, but makes do with another kitchen knife. He stands by the main entrance and declares, “Nobody’s getting through this door.”
Nobody does, but that has nothing to do with Ray. At some ridiculous hour in the morning a bullet zips through the front window of Walt’s mansion and embeds itself into the wall. “You missed!” Ray shouts. “Try again, mother fucker!”
Brad looks at the bullet and then squints out the front window. The sniper didn’t miss; he hit the wall on purpose. Brad doesn’t know what that means but he knows he prefers it when the people coming after him fulfill his expectations. This guy seems to be playing some completely different game.
“Wow,” Walt says. “You’re going out there?” Brad nods. “Well, I guess I can’t school an assassin on this sort of thing.” He steps aside.
Brad pauses just inside the front door to ask, “Are you insured?”
“Yeah,” Walt says. “Why?”
In answer, Brad blows up the tractor sitting in front of the house and uses the smoke as cover. He hopes Walt isn’t too pissed about that, but he figures if he can get them all out of this alive that counts for more than the loss of a tractor that looked like it hadn’t moved an inch in sixty years anyway.
Creeping through the brush, Brad keeps expecting a showdown like Ray has been describing all night. Some quick-draw, assassin versus assassin kind of action like he faced in the apartment, only now Brad’s feeling better prepared, more confident.
Instead, it ends with a brief struggle and one bullet fired into the guy’s foot because he keeps trying to scramble away. “Son of a bitch,” the man drawls, and finally holds still. “I was trying to be reasonable, you bastard.”
Brad stands over the guy, holding his gun steady and trained on his target. “Who are you?”
“Munich,” the man says, which makes absolutely no sense. He doesn’t even sound remotely German. “It’s me,” he says. “It’s Pappy.”
“What?”
The man, Munich, Pappy, whatever his name is, blinks up at him and says, “Fick said you might not know shit.”
Brad raises the gun. “I know plenty.”
“It’s not a criticism, Iceman,” Pappy says. “I’m not here to kill you.”
“I figured that out already.”
“Then why the hell did you shoot me in the foot?” Brad doesn’t really feel inclined to give an answer. The man should be happy Brad didn’t shoot him in the head just on principal.
“What the hell is going on, Colbert? You’ve got everyone’s panties twisted up in bunches, and Treadstone’s calling up assets one by one. I had Paris Bravo issuing me counter orders, which is risky as hell if that ever comes to light. Everything’s all fucked.”
“Treadstone?” Brad echoes. “What’s Paris Bravo?”
Pappy blinks at him again, still holding his hands up on either side of his head. “Shit,” he says. “You know about fuck-all, don’t you? You are damned lucky you’ve got Fick calling in favors for your ass, that’s all I’m saying.”
Brad shifts his stance. It feels like they’re talking in two different languages. He has no idea what Pappy is saying. Jerking the gun up threateningly he demands, “Tell me about Treadstone.”
________________________
The phone call, when it comes, is patched immediately through to Langley. Lovell’s cool, “Code in, please,” relayed over the wires, falling into the silence of Nate’s office like a stone dropping into a pond. Nate can hear Brad breathing.
“Who is this?” Brad asks, after Lovell again requests for him to code in. “Who the hell are you?”
Nate holds his breath. Brad doesn’t remember. All of this, right from Marseilles, has been because their asset has lost his memory. He catches himself starting to smile. It’s the most benign of the possibilities Nate has been keeping a tally of in his head. Things aren’t as far-gone as he’d been starting to think.
“The man you sent is dead,” Brad says, and the little glimmer of hope he’s been feeling swoops right out of Nate again.
Jesus, he sent Pappy out there.
He sent Pappy specifically because he knew the man could talk to Brad, could reach him. Nate knew Pappy; as much as it was possible to know an asset like that. Pappy was one of the few that Nate could turn to, that he knew he could trust. One of the few cases of a Treadstone asset still resembling, well, a person once they made it out the other side of the training.
“Hello, Bradley?” Dowdy says, finally coming onto the line. “What’s going on there?”
Brad stays silent. Nate wonders if the man is taking a moment to calculate his best course of action. He wonders how much Brad even knows. “Come on, Bradley,” Dowdy coaxes. “We can only make this right if you talk to us. Why don’t you come in? We’ll see what we can do.”
If Brad comes in Treadstone will either put him through another round of training, or they’ll kill him. Brad might not know it, but he is Treadstone’s most prized asset, the first time the program yielded a success.
“If you don’t come in,” Dowdy says. “We’re going to have to keep going until we’re satisfied.”
“You mean until you kill me,” Brad says. Nate closes his eyes.
Dowdy sighs over the phone. “Bradley, I can’t fix this if I don’t know what’s wrong. Try to work with me here.” There’s another stretch of silence. “Why don’t you ask Ray what he thinks?”
“Ray’s dead,” Brad answers, his voice flat. He sounds entirely unfamiliar to Nate. “Walt’s dead, too. In case you were going to play that card next.”
“It’s not a card, Bradley,” Dowdy says. “Why did you kill them?”
Brad breathes in and then exhales slow. He says, “5:30 pm Paris, today. Go to Pont Neuf. Go alone. Walk to the middle of the bridge and face east. I’ll redial this number.” There’s a click as Brad disconnects the line.
“Fick?” Dowdy asks.
“Sir.”
“Get me another asset on stand-by.”
By the time Nate works out the words to affirm the order Dowdy has already hung up. Nate drops his head onto his desk. “Fucking Christ,” he mutters.
He’s still sitting like that when his phone buzzes a minute later. Nate gropes for it blindly, prepared to tell Mike that he has the worst timing in the world and instead of coffee, they should probably just find a bar and try to drink away the memory of the colossal idiocy that has been washing downstream since Brad first went missing.
Instead, he finds his phone is flashing a text at him. Nate takes a long breath and re-reads the message: ’Confirm: the valiant never taste of death but once.’
Every Treadstone asset has a code-phrase. Nate knows this one belongs to Pappy. It means the man is just fine; that he completed his objective and, for all that Brad had said to Dowdy, he’s alive and on his way back.Staring at the message, Nate feels a wave of relief rush through him that bubbles up inside until it spills out of his lips as a laugh. Brad Colbert might have absolutely no memory, but he’s still the same. Nate still knows him.
That’s something.
___________________________________________________
|<< END PART THREE >>|
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