Before they'd even left the CIA base, Angel had understood things weren't going to be the way that Shaw had said, that she'd made a bad mistake – maybe the worst mistake of her life; that much had turned crystal clear when Shaw had hurt (killed? Yes, she thought probably killed) Darwin.
It was a bad place she'd come to, and the hell of it was that there was no out. She couldn't pack up her things and hop a bus for the next big bright city, like she had so many times in the past when things just got too heavy. There was no starting over, no new beginning. She was stuck.
Stuck in the creaking and groaning submarine, sunk beneath God only knew how many tons of cold sea water. It was like a walking nightmare. She felt entombed. She wanted to see the sun. Wanted to fly. Yes – to fly away and never look back, but she guessed she was old enough to know that what you wanted and what you got weren't usually the same thing.
If the sub was a tomb than Janos Quested was its ghost. Angel caught glances of him occasionally – even if he spent most of his time in his room, it was impossible not to run into one another within the limited confines of the submarine. He never spoke, nor did he respond when she spoke to him.
It was more than a week before she even learned his name, and then only because she had asked Azazel.
Azazel was almost never on the sub, but when he did come around that meant that he was feeling sociable, which meant that he wanted someone to get drunk with him. Angel didn't really dare – she had an idea that she might end up seeking Shaw out to say something that she'd regret later if she went too far south of tipsy – but all it really took to keep Azazel happy was for her to sip at her drink and listen to his war stories. He wasn't that bad, really, but he was always too close to the edge – even when the booze mellowed him out – for her to really relax around him.
And he wasn't stuck the way she was. Azazel could leave any time he wanted, yet he always seemed to come back. The way Angel saw it, that made him suspect.
She got Janos's name and then some from Azazel. Angel had begun to wonder if he was a deaf-mute, but when she asked Azazel about it he laughed and shook his head. "Janos talks," he assured her. "But not so good is his English speaking." Azazel accent, which was thick under the best of conditions, became almost impenetrable when he was drunk, and it took Angel a little while to decode what she had just been told.
"Él no habla Inglés?" she asked, and Azazel thought about that for a while – his Spanish was even more dreadful than his English – but then he nodded gravely.
"Da," he said. "Not even word." It was not, Angel would conclude later, a deliberate lie. The problem with Azazel was that he was not especially perceptive; it was almost comically easy to pull one over on him.
"That's a problem," she said, staring down at her drink thoughtfully. Her father had grown up in old San Juan, but she'd never picked up more than a few dozen words of Spanish and a maybe a handful of phrases.
Azazel shrugged and refilled his glass, then he leaned forward and topped off hers.