UNDERGROUND
In the ash-dirty cold of a very early February morning, Jackson Rippner looked out across a rooftop at the Chicago skyline and thought how he seemed to be living during a time of predestined, surreal moments. The second of such moments-- at present, he acknowledged three-- had come three days ago, when Lisa Reisert knocked him unconscious. The third had come a day later than that, when her father, Joe, nearly strangled him in a headlock in Lisa's kitchen. And the first had come-- almost unfair to include it in the count, but it seemed to fit-- two years back, when Paul Miller had kissed him in the shower.
It had been almost a month to the day before the launch of the Keefe mission. Jackson Rippner had a head full of plans and, after roughly a month of observing Lisa Reisert, a body at least half full of hormones. A simple biological response, he told himself: desire. He didn't bother denying it as perversion: she was a gorgeous young woman, and his chemicals were reacting accordingly. Nothing odd there. Nothing worthy of alarm, certainly nothing worth reporting to the company's psych department.
Still, heading into those weeks preceding Flight 1019, Rippner was a tense young man. He channeled said tension into running, yoga, weight lifting, and bouts in the gym space the company included as part of its facility in Miami. Paul Miller was his oftentime opponent on the mats. Slender, pale-eyed, red-haired Miller might have been Rippner's put-through-the-wash fraternal twin, his build similar to Rippner's compact, wiry frame, his late hours-- as one of the company's chief security programmers-- similar to Rippner's, too.
They'd usually spar in the dead hours just before dawn. In terms of the Keefe job and its planning timeline, this was when Lisa Reisert, having wandered out to her kitchen for post-midnight eggs or some other snack, was now back in bed. (Rippner, quietly detail-obsessed, noted the some-others: if she wasn't eating eggs at three a.m., Miss Reisert was most apt to be toasting pre-packaged waffles [generics, never Eggos: Rippner found that oddly amusing until, out of curiosity, he tried the generics and discovered that they were far less like cardboard than their Kellogg counterparts]. He noted, too, how she always re-flossed and re-brushed her teeth before she went back to bed, a fact he might have found smirk-worthy were it not something he himself did.) Even if Miller hadn't been reading tension in Rippner, even if he couldn't see that Rippner, just possibly, was spending a minute or two longer on the details comprising the Keefe affair than the mission might actually warrant, Paul was available in those pre-dawn hours before Rippner went back to his hotel for a few hours' sleep, he was neutral-enough company, and he wasn't a half-bad fighter. Truth to tell, he could visualize a fight with the best of them. Rippner could see that.
The problem was, Miller found it difficult to channel violence toward other human beings.
Had he attempted a career like Rippner's, as a situations manager, this difficulty would have led, in the field, to a most fatal hesitation. When the stakes were less than lethal, however, Miller proved himself to be a quick, creative opponent. So quick, in fact, and so insidious that Rippner nicknamed him "Octopus." Actually, he'd said, grimacing as he got up off the mat, "You've got more arms than a fucking octopus," but Miller had construed the grimace as a grin and the comment as a joke, and he'd smiled, obviously pleased at having gotten the drop on an employee from one of the company's most dangerous echelons.
Rippner let him smile and, more than that, half-smiled absently in return (honest to God, his head was buzzing with the Keefe job on top of the fall he'd just taken, and he was hopped up on caffeine and exhaustion besides), and that half-smile was, likely more than anything else, what led to a minor misreading on Miller's part: that kiss in the shower.
They were all alone in the stalls. Four to the white-tiled room. Rippner took one, Miller took another. Laid out their clothes on the room's center bench, hung their towels. Rippner was standing with his eyes closed, letting the water pelt down on the back of his neck, when he heard Miller's shower shut off. He alerted to the sound, much as he alerted to any change in his environment. No sounds of a scuffle. Nothing suspicious. He relaxed again.
Behind him, Miller said: "Rippner."
"Yeah--?" He opened his eyes, blinked away water as he turned.
Miller was nude. He put his hand against Rippner's neck and kissed him on the mouth.
Despite the shock of it, Rippner stood without tensing. When their lips parted, he looked Miller in the eye.
"No," he said. "I'm flattered, Paul, but no."
Miller took a step back. The water was still beating down between Rippner's shoulder blades.
"Got that much out of you, anyway," Miller said softly. His eyes wandered Rippner's body. Rippner let him have that, too. "And I'm still alive," Miller added, a trace of wonder in his voice.
"Wouldn't have you any other way, Paul."
"A kiss is just a kiss, right?" Miller met his eyes. He smiled. "You blue-eyed devil."
He left the stall. Rippner shut off the water, dried himself, dressed. He and Miller left the building together, went their separate ways home.
He spent a certain amount of time that morning, as he watched the dawn light drive shadow across the ceiling of his Miami hotel room, evaluating his reaction to Miller's advances. Rippner had felt no desire to sodomize Miller, or to be sodomized by him, but he'd felt no desire to hurt him, either. And not only as a Doberman that hadn't heard its attack command: he honestly felt no malice toward the man. Later, much later, after the Keefe affair had (messily, noisily, and painfully) settled, after he'd spent time in the hospital and briefly in prison, after airline monsters and bagels and ice-storm neurotoxins, he would feel a need, almost, to apologize: You weren't the one, Lise. You weren't the one to make me realize I'm still alive.
Not that being with her hadn't refined the idea, made it acceptable, even very, very good.
Being human has its privileges, as John Carter, his boss, the company's most-respected ghoul-tender, might say.
It only made sense that he should come down for a few days while they planned their trip to the U.K. Neither of them liked playing phone-tag; e-mail was too clumsy. (These were the things they told themselves.) Miami was warm; grinding through the last, dirty months of the type of winter that seemed to put the lie to the concept of global warming, Chiccago, most emphatically, was not. It only made sense, too, that he should bunk at her place. All he had to do was pack a bag and his laptop and go. He could download his training files from the company's secure website when he arrived and erase those files again before he headed home. Why waste money on a hotel room when chances were better than good that he'd only end up bedding down with her every night anyway? Sharing space was a test for them as well, though neither of them precisely identified it as such. Lisa came closest when she mused one morning, over English muffins and grapefruit juice at the kitchen counter, whether they should book one room or two at the Aldwych.
"One room would save money," Rippner said, wondering why, for the first time in maybe a quarter of a century, he suddenly felt shy.
"Look into it today, okay?" She finished her juice, then came over and slid her last muffin-half onto his plate. Rippner, seated at the kitchen table with his laptop open in front of him, looked up at her.
"Will do, boss-lady."
Lisa leaned down, kissed him on the lips. "Don't trash the place. I'll be home at six."
He could see the blush on her cheeks. "Okay."
She gave him her spare key and the code for the security panel. An odd feeling, oddly touching: possibly the most intimate thing she'd ever done for him. Whatever she'd perpetrated on him in bed-- hell, in the shower, on the sofa, pushed up against the kitchen counter-- had nothing on her placing that piece of metal on his palm. This wasn't hormonal, this wasn't lust: it was sense and logic: he needed to be able to come and go while she was at work. He didn't say, "Not as if I couldn't get in without a key.": he could see her thinking it. Like him, and ever the picture of manners, she was gracious enough not to say it out loud.
While she was at the Lux, he'd work on his training files, straighten up a bit, throw in a load of laundry. He'd do long sets of pushups or crunches or go out running. He ventured once all the way to the beach, but the day was too clear, too sky-blue and sunny. Too much of a contrast to the gray light and cold he'd left in Chicago. He'd traveled, of course, as part of his work; he'd seen his share of tropical or semi-tropical paradises. Here, however, he felt absolutely exposed. He wondered if he might have felt differently if Lisa were running with him.
When she got home, they'd tell one another about the day they'd had.
"I saw part of a Lifetime movie today," he told her, watching her shrug out of the jacket top she'd worn to work and make a beeline for the bedroom. Every night-- he knew this from before-- the heels and businesswear came off the second the door was locked behind her. And now, still, he never watched while she changed. (She'd emerge, in two minutes or less, dressed in a t-shirt and old jeans.) He called toward the open bedroom door: "Sort of a penance, I guess."
"I'll say."
"I learned something from it, though."
She came out. Jeans, as foreseen. A worn garment-dyed green t-shirt. She finished freeing her hair from the collar. "What did you learn?"
"When things don't work out in a relationship, it's because people are afraid to talk. They don't want to seem weak or trivial."
She heard that without laughing. Her eyes went a shade more gray: she was listening seriously, even if her dimples were in evidence. He liked her dimples. "It's the little things, you mean."
"Yes. You know how ecosystems are built on micro-organisms? Relationships are built on the same kinds of things."
"So relationships are built on algae?"
He kept his face very sober. "And plankton. Sea monkeys."
Now she laughed outright. He joined her. She started-- he felt only he would have noticed it, and that gave him a sense of pleasure: she still found his laughing a surprise. And of all the things he didn't mind about rediscovering his humanity, her laughing at him was near the top of the list. He liked her laugh nearly as much as he liked her dimples, and, as his therapist pointed out, Lisa wasn't laughing to insult him or make him angry. (Actually, he'd been proud to realize that on his own.)
"All of this-- not just the programming, the transfer: it's like learning a new language," he said. Lisa had quieted. She was watching his face so very closely, yet she wasn't staring: her eyes were simply doing what human eyes were meant to do, taking in details by the tiny thousands and relaying them to her brain. A million rays of light bouncing between his skin and her retinas, contact intangible but real. Like her eyes were bathing his face in light. "New words, new gestures, new behaviors: when I internalize them, I'll be able to express myself."
Lisa brushed knuckles against his cheek. "I think you're doing a fine job expressing yourself."
She suggested later, after their workout and dinner, after they'd had their daily run at planning for London, that they watch a decent flick to make up for the travesty he'd suffered through earlier. Rippner, comfortably sore, showered, and fed, let her pick something from the collection of classics on the dark shelves flanking her T.V.
He didn't tell her that night, but he didn't trust films. Misdirection, guided vision. He always found himself paying more attention to the scenery, the background characters. He thus studied the main action obliquely. Fighting the direction. Admittedly, he didn't mind watching movies, especially lying-- as he found himself twenty minutes later-- with his head in Lisa's lap while she fed him popcorn, but he knew that he and she approached film differently. Some of those golden-age directors, he thought-- Huston, Curtiz, Cukor, Wilder, Hawks-- would have made fine managers. They could make you see exactly what they wanted you to see without you realizing it. Similarly, in the field, you could find yourself manipulated or murdered without ever knowing what had happened. Modern directors, in contrast-- Fincher, Boyle, even the acknowledged greats like Coppola, Scorsese, and Scott-- were too busy putting their personal stamp on their projects. Visual tricks that were too obvious. He laughed in sudden delight, watching as Michael Curtiz had Humphrey Bogart and Claude Rains walk right through the wall of Rick's office in tonight's canonical apology for the sins of the Lifetime Channel, Casablanca. He looked up at Lisa--
"See what just happened there, Lise?"
-- and she laughed too, then. "I never noticed that."
He counterbalanced his suspicion of cinema with a love of books, platonic and simple. Nothing moved in a book. The only motion was in his mind. The words stayed where they were on the page. He didn't have to track anything. Films were, in contrast, compositions in motion. He wasn't by nature paranoid, or any more paranoid than the strictures of his work required, but he was by training an assessor and manipulator of situations and people. When he was reading, he could shut that part of himself off.
Not that he was suffering. The fingers that had fed him popcorn were now absently rubbing his chest. Rippner relaxed beneath the caress, his own fingers brushing Lisa's wrist, while they watched Rick Blaine rediscover his lost soul.
Ironic, maybe, given his lifelong contempt for team athletics, that two of the most revelatory moments of his adult life were linked to the gym. First with Paul Miller. Then with Lisa. On his third day in Miami, she knocked him out.
They found themselves, following her Wednesday shift at the Lux, at the gym, on a sparring mat. She'd had her share of self-defense courses, but he wanted her to know more. She wanted to learn. That evening, she landed a chance right hook square on the point of his chin, and the world tipped and went black.
He came to in the center of a circle of people, flat on his back, with his head in Lisa's lap.
"Good shot," he mumbled. He felt as though his mouth were full of rocks.
"Never thought you'd have a glass jaw."
Through the hot-wool muzziness thrumming from his chin to his temples, he wanted her to know he wasn't mad. More than anything, he wanted her to know that. Despite her joke, he could see she was trying not to cry. But it wasn't out of fear of him.
She was afraid of herself. Of what she felt. Old hatreds, old hurts, mixing with more recent ones. Some of which had been inflicted on her by the man lying stunned on the ground before her.
Rippner persuaded the club management not to call for an ambulance. He signed papers, disclaimers of liability, an insurance form. Lisa was quiet all the way home. They picked up Thai takeout; she barely touched her food. He asked her, after evening wore into night:
"Should I sleep on the couch tonight?"
"No." She looked past his left ear, replying. "I want you with me."
He expected her to keep to her side of the bed, facing away. Once he settled back, though, she eased close and laid her head against his chest. He held her in his arms. He caught her scent and felt a twinge of arousal, but she was already relaxing against him, her breathing going slow and deep, and that, tonight, was what he really wanted.
He woke up alone, still on his back. The room was shadow-dark, urban dark. In the age of sodium lighting, there was no such thing as perfect blackness. Life as a poorly compressed film file on a cheap DVD. The clock in red told him: 2:48.
No light from under the bathroom door. He sat up, swung his legs off the bed, stood. Years of habit: he walked to the side of the open bedroom door without crossing in front of it, listened.
No sound from the apartment. He looked out. Light from the kitchen, weak and pale and utilitarian. He padded out across the living area.
Lisa was standing looking into the open refrigerator. She didn't turn as he leaned into the frame of the kitchen door. She was wearing light cotton lounging pants and a long t-shirt; she was absently fingering the fabric between her collarbone and left breast. Over her scar. In the sterile glow from the refrigerator, her eyes were shiny with tears.
"Lisa--?"
She didn't start. She swayed slightly on her feet, as though the sound had nudged her. Reed-like on her slender, long legs. Rippner came closer.
"Memories?" he asked.
She nodded. Rippner went to stand beside her. After a time, he reached out and gently rubbed her back. He felt the warmth of her skin through the soft cotton of the t-shirt, the life in her a sort of translucence beneath his fingers. The shift and give of a living body. He was still unaccustomed to thinking of touch not in terms of violence but in terms of comfort, of tenderness. Lisa edged closer, then turned to him, and he took her in his arms and held her close. He'd never seen her tears, watching her from outside, before the Keefe mission, before their meeting had been mutual. He hadn't considered himself a monster then, only a man doing his job, even if, in doing that job, he'd run right up to the borderline between thoroughness and obsession. And now he was the one she trusted. No irony there, no psychosis, simply a sad fact: for all her outward, dayside poise, she was lonely and damaged, and, for better or for worse, he knew her better than anyone else. So he was the one to whom she found it easiest to turn. Not contemptible on her part: sensible. She knew his capacity for harm; he'd never again surprise her there--
His chest ached: an abrupt, awful sadness. Part of him stood back analytically-- Is this regret?
He squeezed her, his cheek against her hair, his eyes watchful (this, again, automatically: his monitoring of the shadows all around them)--
Then he realized something: he'd never seen her reach for the phone during these kitchen raids. He said to the darkness past her head: "You have to be brave for your dad, don't you?"
"He needs to know I'm okay."
"Are you?"
"Yeah. Most of the time. Only sometimes, late at night, I get--"
She stopped speaking. She pressed herself closer to him.
"How do you like your eggs?" Rippner asked.
"You've watched me, Jackson; you should know--" She caught herself, stopped. He felt her tense. He held on to her, gently.
"I'm asking how you like your eggs, baby."
"Over medium. But they never seem to work out--" She drew back slightly, looked at him, mild puzzlement mixing with the sadness on her face. "Why--?"
He smiled, reached to switch on the kitchen light. "Have a seat."
When he'd first seen her scar, those many months back, he knew he'd won.
Not the contest between them, no: not the scenario aboard the plane, even though the scar contributed there. There it was merely a tool for keeping her off-balance-- "So that's how it's going to be--?"-- as if her lying to him could possibly matter to him personally. No: she felt guilt at lying to him (a complete stranger! And a stranger who, by all appearances, meant her harm-- How insidiously we're programmed to be polite!); that guilt was a momentary weakness; he'd used it to manipulate her. All part of the fight, a move that, for the moment, she couldn't quite counter.
No: when he saw the scar he knew her strength. That it was tested and true. He might kill her, but he would never break her. He might beat her, assault her sexually, and it would be nothing but redundant to her. Do your worst, Jackson, and she'll feel nothing but contempt: it's already been done.
He wanted, for a second, there in that cramped Boeing lavatory, before revulsion kicked in (he found the idea of sexual abuse sickening), to thank the man who'd done this to her: the assault had forged power in her, fearlessness, even if she, at this moment, didn't realize it. (To be fair, at that exact second, throttling her in an airplane mod-con, he hadn't fully realized it either. Only later, tracheotomized with a cheap novelty ballpoint, did he know just how strong she was.)
He would fantasize, even later than that, about finding the man who'd raped her. Carter could help him: they'd have access to every DNA database in the United States, and these creatures never struck only once. Two scenarios, then: he'd kill the thing, and he'd tell her.
Or not.
And that-- that would become a space between them, a silence.
Or-- scenario two-- he'd bring the creature to her, and, together, they would--
That was even more ridiculous. Where her pride lay was in how she'd managed to endure. She'd moved on; she'd survived; she was very much alive. What was more, she would never stoop to torture.
Nor would he.
Torture wasn't repugnant to Rippner. It was simply pointless. You used a mark, or not; you let that mark live, or you killed it. Torture, as his contacts at the State Department would confirm, was a waste of effort. And Rippner took no pleasure from it. His pleasures, when all was said and done, were almost ridiculously mundane: good food and drink, good music, a good run, a good workout, good sex. The satisfaction he felt at completing a mission.
He'd told these things to Alice, his therapist at the company, short, square-built Alice with her straight short brown hair and matching serious bespectacled brown eyes; she seemed pleased.
He tried to remember, as Lisa pulled out a chair for herself at the oval oak dining table, as he mustered the eggs and butter, the old-style iron frying pan and the beige stoneware plates, when he went from telling her things he wanted her to know to telling her things he needed her to know. He tried to remember when he went to needing her. A miserable word in itself, need, but there it was. Not as he needed air or water, of course-- he wasn't that far gone. Maybe her generosity in bed had triggered it. In terms of sex, she was becoming utterly fearless, completely giving. He found himself emulating her. Maybe it was how she looked first thing in the morning, tousled and makeup-free (not that she wore much makeup in any case), each tiny flaw in her skin serving only to draw him that much closer to her.
Perhaps it was because she now had him off-balance. They'd begun their relationship as antagonists; they'd seen one another at their very worst. Now they were moving backwards, in a way, toward happiness. Or, with less syrup, toward a mutual contentment. There: contentment. A concept he could accept.
And one he could identify with in concrete terms, watching the butter spit and spatter in the heavy black pan as he cooked eggs for her at three a.m.
Two fried eggs, their tops ever so lightly browned, their yolks firm but yielding and clouded to yellowish-pink, on one of the stoneware plates. Glasses of water, a half-pot of coffee. Neither of them lost sleep because of caffeine. Enough toast for both of them. Butter and jam. He took a seat across from her, and Lisa asked, as she reached for the pepper:
"Where did you learn how to cook eggs?"
"Ore boat."
She smiled. "What--?"
"Spring. I was just short of sixteen. I ran away and joined the crew of an ore boat. Ended up as cook's assistant. Dory'd want to sleep in, and I'd get stuck making breakfast. Those guys eat like kings, and they're mighty fussy about their eggs."
"Why did you run away, Jackson?"
He felt himself go still, looking at her. He felt his eyes say--
None of your business, Lise.
She frowned slightly, then reached for her water glass. "I'm sorry," she said.
He watched her. She was four feet away from him, maybe even less, and he felt the distance growing suddenly, spewing out space between them; he saw himself moving far off, felt himself growing colder--
"It was my dad," he said. Effort there. His throat seemed to close around the words. He reached for his coffee cup, watched his hand shake as he did. "He, uh--"
She set down her glass. He was looking at her less directly than she was looking at him, but something in her expression made his eyes sting. He took a long swallow of coffee, cleared his throat around the bitterness, the heat. Lisa was waiting, patiently, when he met her eyes.
"He died," Rippner said.
After seeing his son hit the family dog (a genial, slobbery brown Lab-shepherd mix named Moose who, like any good mutt, would eat anything within reach, including, unfortunately for young Jackson Rippner's war-epic playtime plans, the heads off of G.I. Joe action figures), James Rippner took his boy aside. Outside, to be precise. Down the road to the park, where selfsame struck Moose happily ran bounding circles around them in the suburban Chicago sunshine, his ham-pink tongue flapping from his mouth in a dog's dumb grin.
"You'll get far more out of people and animals through patience, Jackson," James said. "Remember that." He whistled Moose over, and he and his serious, slender eight-year-old boy walked on.
Remember that was James practicing what he preached. It was a warning, too. The first tick in what Jackson and his younger sister--
-- "Milla?" Lisa asked, interrupting.
Jackson smiled, surprised. "How did you know?"
"'With love, Milla.' It's on the handle of the knife second from the left in the bottom row of the case in your bedroom closet."
"Snoop."
"You said I could. I had it in writing."
"Her name's Camilla. Named for our grandmother on Dad's side. She's off in Switzerland. Assistant to an assistant construction engineer at that new physics research facility at C.E.R.N. They're going to destroy the world, you know," he added, drolly. "With teensy-tiny black holes. She's excited about that."
Lisa chuckled as she spread strawberry jam on a piece of toast. "Are you named for your grandfather, Jackson?"
"Fortunately, no."
"Why fortunately?"
"Igor Stefan Rippner, anyone...?"
"Oh."
"Indeed, 'oh.'"
He poured coffee, a warmup for himself, a first cup for her.
-- the first tick (returning, sans "Anyway," and with but brief repetition, to his story) in what James Rippner's children knew as the three-count. He'd never struck them as punishment, but they knew his temper. Jackson remembered seeing him haul through the driver's-side window of a bruised-white Trans Am a teenager who'd been speeding through their neighborhood, past the park, past yards with children out playing. While the kid paused to rev his engine at the stop sign at the corner of the Rippner property, James Rippner barreled across his yard, reached in, got the boy by the arm and neck and dragged him out. The Trans Am was a stick; he reached in, before the boy had a chance to react, and shut off the motor.
By now the kid was thrashing and kicking and swearing. James Rippner was not a large man. His height and build were much the same as those to which his son would grow. But James, like the man his boy would become, was strong for his size. Ever preternaturally so. His was a terrible, steely strength. While Jackson's mother called the police, Jackson, watching wide-eyed from the front steps of their house, saw his father say something to the boy in his grip, very quietly, and the boy went still and remained that way even after the police arrived.
Jackson never knew what it was his father had said. But he could recognize fear when he saw it, even at eight years old.
"He was shot and killed in a holdup at a Holiday Station Store," Rippner said. "I was ten and a half years old."
James Rippner worked in programming and support for a technical-publishing firm. He'd been beeped in after-hours to deal with a mainframe meltdown; the next morning, just before dawn, he decided to stop and top off his gas tank before heading home. It was January, and savagely cold, and Ellen Rippner, his wife, Jackson's mom, would be taking his car to work later that day, as hers was laid up with alternator trouble. A clear, bone-dry, midwinter dusk. One of those pre-dawns that was so cold the sky seemed to be flaking: frost glittered in the glare of the overhead lights as he pulled up to the bank of gas pumps.
Or so Rippner imagined it.
James Rippner was standing in line at the till behind a forty-something tall man in a camo jacket and a White Sox bill-cap when the boys walked in. Nineteen years old, parkas black in the black-and-white of the surveillance-cam footage, dark stocking caps. One carrying a thirty-eight, the other a sawed-off shotgun. James Rippner was the one who refused to get on his knees, to lie down on the floor. The surveillance tapes showed the whole thing. He wasn't being defiant. He simply refused to acknowledge the boys with the guns. At trial, the defense counsel laid the lion's share of the blame at James Rippner's feet. Because of him, the lawyer said, four people-- the man in the White Sox cap, two clerks, Rippner himself-- were dead.
But their killers were facing death by lethal injection. And that, thought Jackson Rippner, through the stone-calm distance of unresolved grief, was a good thing. A crime spree, a pattern of chaos: stopped.
"Two years after the trial," he said, "their sentences were commuted to natural life. Part of this huge amnesty pending the review of the constitutionality of Illinois's death-penalty statute. All those fuckers on death row whining about Eighth Amendment violations. Saints and fucking martyrs--"
He started to go hoarse. He paused, reached for his water. Lisa stayed quiet, her eyes on him, while he drank.
"I couldn't accept it," Rippner said. "I wanted them dead. I could accept it-- I could accept him being dead if I knew they were going to die, too. This, though-- That winter-- I was fifteen-- it was like the cold got inside me and put down roots. I started cutting school, staying out all night. I stole shit. Liquor, mostly. I got in fights. I got the shit beat out of me, Lise. Not because I couldn't've won, but because I wanted to see how much I could take and still not feel anything. Mid-April, when the ice was coming off the shipping lanes on Michigan, I went down to the docks and walked on board that ore boat. They were short-handed. Captain was this big German guy from Wisconsin. Said if it turned out I was absconding from juvie, he'd throw me overboard a hundred miles from shore. But I wasn't." He smiled slightly. "And so I learned to fix eggs. Fried, scrambled, poached. Cheddar omelets. Eggs benedict. Those guys were nuts for eggs benedict. All the fat on the menus, it's a wonder those boats don't snap in half more often than they do."
She'd long since finished her over-easies; together, they'd finished the toast. Lisa rose as Rippner did, cleared her share of the plates.
"Did your mother ever remarry?" she asked.
"No." Rippner brushed crumbs into the waste basket. "I know she loved Dad, but when it comes to intimacy in general, I think she can take it or leave it. So she pretty much leaves it."
Lisa rinsed a plate, set it in the sink. "Where is she now?"
"Working for an architectural firm in New York." Rippner squeezed dish soap into the frying pan, then brimmed it with water and set it to soak. He turned to Lisa. "And so, being the one who made the most desperate attempt to escape the Windy City, I was the one who ended up staying. Not that I haven't done plenty of traveling."
"Does she know what you do for a living?"
It was a brave question, but she kept her voice steady. He didn't hesitate replying.
"Yes."
Lisa turned the last plate slowly beneath a thin stream of tapwater. "Does she know about us?"
"So we're an 'us' now."
"Of course we are."
She set the plate in the sink, levered off the water and dried her hands, and turned to him. She hadn't said anything by way of condolence with regard to his father; he stood watching her as she watched him, mutually embarked: a moment of silence balanced between them. Her expression said she knew that he considered her sympathy or her vocalization of it unnecessary, either or both; that recognition coming in such close proximity to the one word-- "us"-- sent his heartrate heavenward. He knew, in turn, that when she was deeply serious, her eyes were far more gray than blue. Midlake on Michigan on a cool spring evening: that's how they looked now.
"Not yet she doesn't."
His phrasing seemed to please her. Though her eyes stayed thoughtful, she smiled. "I could hire you as my cook."
Rippner smiled back. "Is that all...?"
Lisa lightly fingered his t-shirt just above the waistband of his boxer-briefs, and Rippner, in frank relief, gave himself over to the twinges of earlier. "Why, what other services do you offer, Mr. Rippner?" she asked.
That same morning, nearer sunrise, he watched as she disentangled herself from him and sat up. She'd been lying half across him, and sometime in the night's last hours he'd pulled the better part of the bed's flat sheet across her back, so in rising she left him effectively exposed. Rippner, sprawled in lingering post-coital satisfaction in the early morning light, lay gazing at her. She sat at the edge of the bed looking back at him.
She smiled. "Don't tempt me." Her eyes left his, went to his throat, his chest. To his belly, then lower still. The urge to touch her again was nearly overwhelming. "I'm running late as it is."
She pulled the sheet across his loins and got up, and then she went off to shower while Rippner half-sank back into a contented doze. He watched her dress. His personal prohibitions regarding her privacy didn't apply when he actually was in her bedroom. If she wanted him out, she was certainly free to say so. She chose a suit-dress in deep teal blue. Business demure. A style and cut flattering to her curves, the coltish, lean lengths of her, the fabric practical and modest, the color a perfect contrast to her auburn hair. The doorbell rang while she was drifting between the bedroom and the bathroom, taming her shoulder-length curls. Rippner roused himself. He pulled on his boxers, plucked his t-shirt off the floor next to the bed, shook it out as he left the bedroom and crossed the living area.
"I'll get it," he called over his shoulder.
"Thanks, sweetie," Lisa called back.
Rippner smiled to himself, pulling on his shirt. He checked the peephole.
It was Joe Reisert.
Time to be a man, Rippner thought. He took a deep breath and opened the door.
Reisert, obviously, was surprised. He looked, then scowled, at Rippner. He didn't quite recognize the man in front of him; that much seemed plain. From his expression, he knew, for the moment, only that Rippner was a man, in undershorts and a t-shirt, in his daughter's apartment early in the morning. Since they last saw one another, Rippner had had his hair cut. In Miami, he'd gotten some sun. At this hour of the morning, he was in need of a shave.
"Good morning, Mr. Reisert," he said politely.
Realization crossed Reisert's craggy face like an illuminating wall of flame. He launched a fist like a headache ball at Rippner's jaw. Watching, as it were, from a sudden martyrlike distance, Rippner made no effort to duck. When the blow landed, he felt as though the entire room had shifted twelve feet to the left and the kitchen wall, with the entire weight of the apartment building behind it, had caught him in the skull.
"Lisa--!" Reisert shouted.
With his head-bones pulsing, Rippner let Reisert get him by the throat. And Reisert knew what he was doing. He pulled backward, hauling Rippner off-balance, and Rippner's hands reached instinctively for the forearm across his throat, trying to protect his neck--
"Stand still, or I'll break you in half," Reisert growled. "Lisa--!"
"I might let you," Rippner rasped. Reisert had awakened the old injury to his vocal cords. He reached, repositioned the man's hands. "There. All you have to do is lean, Joe."
Lisa ran in and stopped, appalled, just inside the doorframe between the kitchen and the living area. "Dad--!"
"What has he done to you, honey?"
"In general?" Rippner couldn't help it. "The specifics might be embarrassing--"
Joe applied more pressure. Rippner went quiet.
Humility is not to be made weak: it is to surrender to another's rightful feelings. Reisert's anger was justified. All part of Rippner's re-humanification: perhaps the idea was an offshoot of the early stages of hypoxia, but Rippner, from a distance away, watching himself being strangled, thought he saw sense in it.
Reisert persisted: "This murderer, Lisa, this criminal: what is he doing here--?"
Rippner countered, gasping: "With your own eyes, Mr. Reisert: how many people have you seen me kill? How many?"
Lisa's expression was caught between uncertainty, panic, and shock. Her right hand reached unconsciously out, toward them; her feet stayed where they were. "He works for the government, Dad--"
Reisert looked from his daughter to the wiry young man he was throttling. "You're a secret agent--?"
"Yes," Rippner croaked. Still not resisting, still not fighting back. "In a manner of speaking--"
Reisert snorted. "Pull the other one, pal."
"Dad, please--" Lisa said.
Rippner couldn't see Reisert's face, but he could feel the anger in the man's breathing, the heavy, powerful shift in his torso, the strength in his arms and hands. He could see Reisert's expression refracted in Lisa's. Reisert released him.
"What the fuck is he doing here, Lisa?"
"That's about half of it," Rippner muttered, straightening, massaging his throat. Again, he couldn't help himself. He never thought of himself as suicidal, but sometimes he sensed almost an urge to call grief down on his head.
"Jackson--!" Lisa snapped.
He started. Stared at her and froze. So did Reisert-- in the second before he took out a cell phone and said, "I'm calling the police."
"Put that away, Dad," Lisa said. "Now--!"
She wasn't asking. Reisert paused, his thumb over the keypad. Then he closed his phone and meekly put the thing back in his shirt pocket and stood as quietly as the young man in skivvies beside him while his daughter looked at the two of them with eyes the color of bayonet steel and chose her next words:
"What are you doing here, Dad?"
Rippner, watching her, waiting for Reisert to reply, wanted to think her anger wasn't solely at or over him, over embarrassment at the company her father had found her keeping. He wanted to believe she could protest Reisert's disappointment, the scowl on the man's face. He thought he saw her relax slightly, an easing through her shoulders.
"I just, umm-- I was on my way for a round of golf, and I was wondering if you'd care to go for breakfast, honey."
"I'm running a little late, Dad." Lisa's voice softened. "Why don't we meet for dinner later?"
Reisert glanced at Rippner. "'We'--?"
"The three of us." Quiet authority in her tone. "How about Bardo's? You can get us a table."
"I don't--" Reisert looked again at his daughter. Something akin to numb resignation was beginning to replace his frown. "Eight o' clock?"
"We'll meet you there." Lisa crossed to them. She put a hand on her father's chest, leaned up, and kissed him on the cheek. "I'm running late, Dad. I've got to go to work. See you later, okay?"
"Okay, honey. Eight o' clock." He returned the kiss. Before he turned to go, he looked at Rippner. "Mr. Rippner."
"Mr. Reisert."
Joe left.
All that day, Rippner wondered if she was fighting as much of an urge to call him as he was to call her. He kept clear of the phone, and it never rang, not once, all afternoon. He went out for a long, hard run, and when he came back, and all through his shower, there were no messages. He studied his training files with fierce, cold concentration. At six-oh-eight, Lisa came in quietly, hung her keys, set her purse on the kitchen counter. Then Rippner sat beside her on the sofa while she reached gently to touch his latest bruise.
"Why did you let him hit you?" she asked.
"Who's to say he didn't get in a lucky shot?"
She didn't smile. This wasn't her customer-service face. The stillness in her expression reminded him of old newsreel footage he'd seen once of Soviet soldiers standing on review before Josef Stalin. Stoicism before a madman. The hope that maybe, just maybe, the monster would simply pass by.
"A sociopath is sleeping with his daughter," he said. "One good punch: he deserved that much, at least. Don't you think?"
"How many people have you killed, Jackson?"
"With my own hands?"
"Yes."
"Nine that I know of."
"Were any of them in self-defense?"
"Yes. The rest were according to plan."
"And that makes it alright."
"No. That makes it according to plan. I wasn't acting out of impulse."
"Who makes plans like that?"
"I repulse you, don't I?"
"I'm trying to understand you, Jackson."
"You're patronizing me."
"'Understanding' equals 'patronizing'--?"
"Bad enough, isn't it? Bad enough you could snap your fucking fingers, and Carter would have me killed--"
"Bad for me or for you--?"
"How the fuck would it be bad for you?"
"God, you really are thick, aren't you?"
Like a flare inside him. An arc welder in his heart. He saw the motion in his mind, he felt himself tense in preparation: an open palm across her face, sharp and stinging, and then her head in his hands, the fingers of one hand tangled in her hair while the palm of the other hand cupped itself against her chin. Shock in her staring eyes. And one good, hard twist--
Jesus--
He hadn't moved to touch her. Not an inch. He calmed himself. She was looking at him, her eyes and face as unreadable as stone.
"You know as well as I do that you could kill me ten times over before I could call Carter," she said. "You probably even know I don't have his number on speed dial."
"And I know, even if you don't, that he's a man of his word, Lisa. If you were dead, and I was the one who killed you, he wouldn't have me hunted down: he'd do it himself."
"How do you know, Jackson--? How do you know he wasn't just feeding me a line to make me feel safe around you?"
Rippner ignored the implications-- she doesn't feel safe around me; I make her feel threatened; he said: "I've seen him do it. I was his backup once, when--"
He stopped. In her face he saw weariness more than anger or fear. More likely than not, she'd been dealing all day with demanding assholes, that much following the scene this morning with her father, and now she'd come home to another rectal ego-case. This one with bonus psychoses.
"I'm making you unhappy," he said. "I should go."
"Jackson." A tender reworking of the image in his mind: before he could get up, she reached out and laid her palm against his cheek. "People can argue and still lo-- like each other. Don't go. Stay here. Please."
He settled himself with her on the sofa. The room was darkening, but they didn't reach for the lights. Lisa relaxed against him.
"You wouldn't be human if you didn't resent Carter giving me your killswitch," she said.
"Is that good?"
"Yes."
"Anyway, I'll be gone in six months."
He felt her tense. "Where are you going?"
"Once my probation is up, you won't have to worry about seeing me again."
"But--"
"Don't tell me you'd miss me."
"Alright, I won't tell you. I'll let you figure it out for yourself."
Rippner smiled at the growing dusk. "We should get ready for dinner. Don't want to be late for your dad."
He disliked neckties. Not that wearing one hurt the scar at his throat, no, only the fact that a Windsor knot always seemed like an open invitation: throttle me, please. It was a knit tie in sliding shades of blue and purple, and Lisa knotted it for him while he stood very still and more nervous than he cared to be. His shirt was a very pale blue; he'd thought to pack a summer suit, a textured cotton-silk in black. Lisa wore a one-piece dress in deep greenish-gold, a crinkled soft fabric, light and shadow playing within hundreds of tiny crevices when she moved. A modest, straight neckline, a dark knit sash at her hips. At seven fifty-three, they lucked into a curbside parking spot less than a block from the restaurant; Lisa swung her silver Taurus SEL into it with the casual panache of a rodeo rider putting a barrel pony through its paces. No stereotyped young-businesswoman Camry or Civic for her: obviously she'd listened to her dad in terms of things automotive and ended up with a good old-fashioned American tank that still had plenty to say when it came to sleek style, economy, and power. Not to mention, the thing had a trunk the size of a Manhattan studio apartment.
Which will be more room than I'll need, Rippner thought, unbuckling his seatbelt and getting out, if I manage to make her mad tonight.
His thoughts altered abruptly when she joined him on the sidewalk. It was a clear night, the stars directly overhead diamond-sharp and precise, and yet a deep royal blue lingered in the horizon at the street's western end. The air was warm without being humid; the breeze carried a hint of flowers, of scented things growing. Lisa turned her head, putting her keys in her purse, and in that moment, Rippner found himself staring, transfixed, at the line of her jaw, the hollow, the joining-point, just below her right ear. She wore no earrings. She had her hair up tonight; her neck was exposed.
"Lisa," he heard himself say.
"What, Jackson?"
She looked at him, amiable, expectant. The breeze ruffled a feathering of hair errant near her left ear. He could feel the stars overhead like eyes or scopes watching him through light a billion brilliant years in the traveling.
"There's something I want to--" He paused, frowning. His thoughts and his larynx weren't coordinating with one another. His heart seemed to be getting in the way. "Something I, umm, want you to know--"
"Tell me."
She was looking up at him, that ever-so-slight up, and she'd moved closer to him, or he'd moved closer to her, and he could feel her even though they weren't touching, as though that breeze were brushing them one to another, the gentlest of electrical currents passing between her body and his. Rippner found himself swallowing a mouthful of heartbeats.
He said: "You look very beautiful tonight."
A flicker in the blue of her eyes. Though what he'd just said was absolutely sincere, and in his heart perfectly true, she'd caught him in a lie. She smiled, and blushed slightly, and in seeing her cheeks color he knew: she'd heard the words he hadn't said.
"You don't look half-bad yourself, Mr. Rippner," she replied. She took his hand as they walked to Bardo's, and Rippner felt his own cheeks warm, too, pleasantly, in the balmy Miami night.
Joe Reisert was waiting for them at the restaurant's bar. He was wearing a pale gray shirt and a darker gray sportcoat, and he had about him the look of a man who had taken the lay of the land and who, though not comfortable with said lay, could see options, exit strategies. Though the thought that Lisa's father might be ex-Secret Forces seemed too much of a cliche, if not a stretch (if nothing else, the guys in Information Services had certainly dropped the ball in not letting him know, back when the Keefe mission was in the planning stages), Rippner found himself wondering if Joe Reisert might have served with some distinction in the military. He thought he could read a hint of Marine steel, not just a father's justifiable suspicion, in the man's dark-eyed stare.
"Sir," he said, offering Reisert his hand.
Reisert took it. A firm, no-nonsense handshake. "Mr. Rippner."
A whiff of alcohol. Subtle. Rippner nearly smiled; he relaxed slightly. Not at all in the knowledge that Reisert was impaired, no, but in knowing that the man was willing to give the meeting a chance: he'd had one-- a shot of Johnny Walker or something in the same taxonomic region, by the smell of it-- to loosen up.
"Hi, Dad." Lisa leaned in, kissed Reisert's cheek. "Sorry we're late."
"No, honey, you're right on time. I was early."
"Do we have a table?"
"Yeah. Right this way." He stepped aside, gestured her ahead. Lisa eased past him, pointed in the direction of an empty table against the restaurant's far wall. She seemed completely relaxed.
Bardo's was a mixture of old world and new. The walls appeared to be stucco textured in gold, the effect that of tapestry, the ceiling high, the lighting low but efficient. The furnishings were mahogany-dark but modern. Clean sharp lines and corners. Watching Lisa walk on ahead of him on the slate-tiled floor, Rippner, now re-acquired as a target by Joe Reisert's pit-black eyes, couldn't help the thought: God, she's good.
"After you," said Joe, drily.
Rippner followed his girl. The grid of nerves all across his back and shoulders tensed, step by step by step, for an imaginary shot, a stab, a crack with a sap. As he pulled Lisa's chair back for her, he chanced a glance and saw satisfaction warming Reisert's eyes: Reisert was reading him as much as he was reading Reisert, and he'd seen the nervous tremor down Rippner's forearms as he reached for Lisa's chairback.
The cool-eyed, noncommital stare, the poise. Her customer-service face. He was seeing it on both sides of the table. Now I know where she got it from, Rippner thought, as he sat down.
Still, he managed to enjoy his dinner. It was a fusion menu, which Rippner, not being a culinary expert, interpreted to mean "all over the map." Lisa ordered a mojito and tilapia with a mango salsa. Rippner ordered a mojito as well, then picked a dish with beef and vegetables and what turned out to be a truly volcanic light sauce. He was pleased. The comfort of endorphins: he always found spicy food relaxing.
So he was less tense when Reisert finally asked: "What are your intentions toward Lisa?"
"Do you ask all of her friends that question, Joe?"
"No. Only the ones who've been convicted of federal crimes."
Lisa's face remained neutral as her shoulders tensed. Rippner settled back in his chair.
"Lisa and I-- as I've just said-- are friends. As you may have gathered from the scene this morning, we're on intimate terms. We trust one another. I have no intention of causing her harm. As you can see-- I've seen you watching her eyes, sir-- she's not drugged. She's relatively relaxed and very healthy. Beyond enjoying one another's company, we have at present no long-term plans. I hope you find that satisfactory."
Reisert said: "It's a bit much to swallow, you have to understand that."
"Of course."
"Common sense dictates you should be spending the next several decades in prison. You can see that, can't you? It's only right, given the shit you've pulled. You or those people you work for. Your story makes sense, Rippner, but it doesn't make you seem like any less of a rule-bending, sneaky son of a bitch."
Rippner sipped his water. "You served in the military, Mr. Reisert: am I right?"
"Yes."
"Vietnam?"
"Air Cav."
"When you flew a mission, were you aware of every bit of intel all the way up the chain of command?"
"Of course not."
Rippner put his elbows on the table, thatched his fingertips, leaned a bit closer to Reisert. "Nor was I. But I did my job."
"Your job seems an awfully lot like terrorism, Mr. Rippner."
Rippner dropped his voice, asked, conspiratorial: "Ever blow anything up while you were in 'Nam, Joe?"
Reisert bristled. "That's not--"
"Ever bomb a village, for instance?"
"You attacked American property on American soil. There's a difference."
"The largely evacuated top floor of a hotel. Well, what if it had played out like this: Keefe's original suite also faced the ocean. Midway up the building. Nice view. What if I hadn't asked Lisa to make the call to change Keefe's room? What if we had kept him and his family right where they were?"
"An explosion halfway up--" Lisa spoke, stopped. "You would have destroyed the Lux."
"Not quite. My hired help still would have been the ones firing the rocket-- for that matter, why stop at one? Why not two or three?-- and there's a good chance the place would have stayed standing, but dozens more people would have been injured or killed." He gave Reisert a moment to absorb his words, then continued quietly: "The list of estimated targets that were saved because of the demonstration at the Lux Atlantic would give you nightmares, Mr. Reisert. Money channeled into intel that saved American property. And lives."
Reisert looked at him for a long, thoughtful moment. "At the house-- you got the drop on me. You could have killed me. You didn't."
Rippner sipped his mojito, kept his face neutral.
"Seems like a hell of a way to do business," Reisert said.
Rippner nodded. "Sometimes it is."
"I had a headache for two days, you son of a bitch."
Rippner released roughly a third of a smile. "My apologies, sir."
"And I had a hell of a time getting my insurance company to pony up for the damage to the house."
"That was my fault, Dad," Lisa said. "I was the one who drove an SUV through the front door, remember?"
She looked his way affectionately. Reisert managed to maintain his scowl for maybe another five seconds. He found something to glare at amongst the ice cubes in his water glass.
"That's right," he said. His expression softened. "You were."
Rippner glanced from father to daughter. Lisa was casually returning her attention to her food.
Again Rippner thought, as he picked up his fork: God, she's good.
"Anyway," he said, "I've been re-evaluating my career options, Mr. Reisert. I figured it might be time for a switch, after the beating the two of you gave me."
"You deserved it," said Reisert.
"I know."
"You're lucky I didn't aim that gun at your head."
"Damn lucky."
"Torso's a better target."
"I quite agree."
Reisert speared a piece of steak. "What will you be doing now--?"
-- now that you're no longer blowing up hotels? He was gracious enough to leave that part unsaid. Rippner ate the rest of his delectable beef-and-vegetable hell-grill while he described for Reisert and Lisa, sans details deemed top-secret, the life of a security-systems specialist. Reisert seemed satisfied, if not pleased. He seemed, too, a little like an employer whose top pick for a premium job had bolted to a rival firm, but that, Rippner thought, was better than out-and-out hostility.
"I'll say it again: your story almost makes sense," Reisert said, once they'd finished their meals, when they were sitting in the nebulous moment between the clearing-away and either the arrival of the check or the temptations of the dessert tray. "And I'll agree: Lisa looks healthy. She doesn't seem to be under duress. She knows-- you do, don't you, honey--?" He put his hand over Lisa's, there on the table. "You give the word, I call the police, and they put him away."
"Dad, you know they won't-- they won't, trust me-- but thank you: it won't won't be necessary."
Reisert looked for a long moment into her eyes.
"I trust you."
His voice caught. For the first time that night, his composure was less than perfect. A crack in the steel. The plating warping on the bulkhead. He reached for his water glass. Rippner looked discreetly Lisa's way. Her eyes met his. A slight smile on her lips. He smiled slightly back.
"So, umm--" Joe Reisert cleared his throat. "-- are you going to give me hell, Lisa Henrietta, if I order dessert with my coffee--?"
Lisa laughed. "Not tonight, Dad, no."
When the arrival of the check threatened the fragile peace-- that is to say, when the two men in her life bristled again, debating who was to pay-- Lisa Reisert spoke once more in that quiet, reasonable, stainless-steel tone that brooked no debate:
"We'll each pay a third."
She turned her attention to her purse. Rippner and Reisert, exchanging flinty looks, reached, without another word, for their wallets.
The next night, Rippner's last in Miami, came a test: going out with her gang from work.
"It's my sworn duty to protect Cynthia," Lisa said, shedding her workwear en route to the bedroom.
"How's that?" Rippner asked, saving his work and looking up from his laptop screen. Though he might have preferred to spend their last night alone, a drink out sounded good, too. His head was swimming with computer code; he'd spent too much time indoors today.
"She gets-- mmm, shall we say-- a little too friendly when she's had a few," Lisa called. He could hear clothes rustling, hangers clacking in her bedroom closet. "It's my job to keep her from accepting rides home from every guy she meets."
The watering hole of choice for the crew of the Lux Atlantic was a place near the hotel called Grover's. Traditional American, trendy without being too upscale. Plenty of niches with tables, bench-seating and chairs, a bar all along the wall to the left on the way in, a stage with a dance floor in front of it. An alt-country-rock outfit was playing when Rippner and Lisa walked in. The sound was good, solid but not overwhelming. Maybe two dozen people were out dancing. Lisa led the way past the bar, through loose knots of people standing off to the side of the dance floor. A picture of red-headed ebullience, Cynthia smiled and waved from a table midway along the back wall. The four other people with her-- two men, two women-- genially made way for Lisa and Rippner.
"You made it!" This, too, from Cynthia, as Jackson and one of the group's guys, a big, broad, muscular, tow-headed kid in a short-sleeved button-down shirt and too-neat jeans, borrowed chairs from an adjacent table.
"Of course we did." Lisa accepted a hug from her co-worker. It appeared as though Cynthia, as foretold, was already well underway in terms of the evening's imbibing. She looked with tipsy stealth at Rippner and mouthed the words to Lisa, once the intros had gone around-- Sara, brunette, mid-thirties, from admin; Bob, knocking fifty, gray at the temples, from accounting; Julie, ash-blonde, compact and wry, from security services; and Jeff, the tow-head, the Lux's junior doorman--
He's gorgeous.
Lisa blushed at the appetizer menu. Rippner, glancing tactfully away, motioned toward a passing waitress. He needed a beer. He suspected Lisa needed one, too.
Rippner, comfortable in jeans and his blue shirt of the night before, the sleeves rolled midway up his forearms, was taking a long swallow of ice-cold Killian's Irish Red and thinking again that the band wasn't half-bad when a flinch rippled through the group around him.
Beside him, Lisa muttered: "Oh, shit."
Approaching the table was a tall man, early forties. Tan sport coat over a blue polo. Neck and shoulders thick with gym-muscle. The fuzz on his skull looked, Rippner thought, like the bristles of a rusted-red toilet brush. His eyes seemed to be from a face at least two sizes smaller than the one he had. He fixed them on the women at the table as he approached, grinning a grin of blockish teeth, and Bob, in the outer corner chair, gallantly rose to intercept him.
"Eric," he said.
"Bob." The man named Eric crushed Bob's offered hand, then returned his attention to the women at the table. More specifically, he looked directly at Lisa-- and at the stranger in the group's midst. That being Rippner. Who, given the degree of piggish x-ray vision Eric was focusing on Lisa's breasts, through the silk off-white tee she wore, was already doing his civil best not to reach across the table and pull the guy's larynx out.
"Eric," Lisa said, gesturing to Rippner, "this is Jackson Rippner. Jackson, meet our other daytime desk-jockey: Eric Janssen."
Rippner kept his smile cool and steady as Eric tried to pulverize his hand-bones.
Equally unable to elicit a wince from Lisa's man or to get his Kenmore-esque bulk between her and Jackson, Eric settled for wedging a chair between Cynthia and Jeff instead. Bob and Julie fled to the dance floor. Sara narrowed her world down to the table's plate of nachos and the glass holding her Mai Tai. Which left Jeff. The kid seemed to be shy in direct proportion to the amount of muscle on his big frame. He sat and looked stoically at his beer while Eric pawed Cynthia, who was either too tipsy or not drunk enough to fend him off. Eric, meanwhile, was casting meaningful glances at Lisa--
This could be you, baby. This will be you. If you're lucky.
Roughly four beers later, he excused himself for the restroom. Jackson waited for a five-count after Eric cleared the table, then got up, too.
"Must be contagious." A smile for the gang. "Be right back."
He and Eric were alone in the gents'. Seeing Rippner come in, the man was good enough to confirm his idiocy immediately with a question:
"What is she, your beard?"
Rippner picked a urinal two away from Eric's. Slightly better than arm's distance between him and the gorilla. "Heartily het, thanks. We fucked in the shower before we came out tonight."
A surprised frown through all the Miller Lite. "I bet."
"Why do you say that?"
"'Cause it's gonna take a whole lot of man to break that dyke."
Rippner moved to the sinks, washed his hands. "And you're going to be that man?"
"Sure as hell wouldn't mind a shot--"
Eric's face mashed against the wall above the urinals. His left arm jerked back in a twist that said If you move, it will break. Trust me. Rippner pressed stiff fingers into the right side of Eric's back, just above the man's beltline.
"No. No shot. Not ever." He applied more pressure to Eric's lower back, kept his voice barely above a whisper: "They say you can live quite comfortably with only one kidney."
Eric arched in fear and pain.
"And not Cynthia, either," Rippner continued. "Tell you what, Eric: you're not looking so hot. Why don't you call it a night? Let's say I let you go, you finish zipping up your pathetic little alter ego, and you go home and get a good night's sleep. Deal?"
Two minutes later, Rippner, his hands re-washed, rejoined the Lux crew.
"Where's Eric?" Lisa asked. Rippner smiled. She was trying to sound nonchalant.
"We thought maybe you two had something going on." This from Sara. Possibly One-Mai-Tai-Too-Many Sara, though Rippner thought he detected more a condition-free brightening in her tone. A sort of relief-at-any-cost at not seeing Eric return to the table.
"He tried to feel me up," he said, edging back to his chair. "Had to explain to him that he's not quite my type."
He was unmussed; there were no obvious bloodstains on him. He could feel Lisa's eyes on him as he resettled himself.
"And who is your type?" she asked.
He turned to her-- and kissed her, open-mouthed, right in front of the others. Surprised, Lisa kissed him back. A delighted squeal from Cynthia: "Oh my God--!"
When their lips parted, Rippner kept his eyes on Lisa's. "I'm looking at her right now," he said.
Under the table, she felt him up (and, following that kiss, he was up, no lie), and he didn't mind at all. He drank more of his Killian's as the band launched into something with a big, blood-pulse beat, and Lisa pushed back her chair.
"Come on, handsome." She stood, smiling down at him, and held out her hand. "Let's dance."
He thought, looking back at her, smiling back, in the moment before he took her hand and followed her out to the bustle and heat on the dance floor:
You're the queen of my universe.
Leaving the table was partly a ruse. When she had him alone in the dancing crowd, Lisa stayed close enough to ask, again: "Where's Eric?"
Rippner adjusted his rhythm to the pulse coming up off the floorboards. "The Dumpster out back. If they empty it within thirty-six hours, the smell shouldn't be that--"
"Jackson--" She smacked his chest. It took him by surprise; he grinned.
"I asked him politely to fuck off out of here."
She was letting the beat move her, and she looked beautiful doing it. She was wearing a skirt in pale olive green, in a fabric that seemed to flow like water with the motion of her hips. "Cross your heart?"
"I swear: he and his tiny pecker are safely on their way home."
A smile that awakened her dimples. "You know why I'm asking, don't you--?"
Jeff and Cynthia danced past, not quite coordinated but looking very happy. "Tell me," Rippner said.
He saw devilment in her bright eyes. "Because if he's dead," she said, "I'm the one who has to cover his shifts."
Rippner smirked. He reached out, caught her hands, drew her closer, maybe, than this type of dancing required, and let the music pulse through Lisa's body to his and back again.
Twenty-three hours later, he was back in Chicago.
Rippner wasn't a systems expert. Not yet. More an apprentice. That made him muscle-on-call, but he didn't mind. In fact, given the fact that the northern cold now seemed that much more insidious for his having been warm, both in the Miami sunshine and in Lisa's bed, he found it deeply, bitterly satisfying.
On his first night back in Chicago, Paul Miller pegged him as backup for a raid on a hacker's den. Just south of midtown. A building recently renovated from a tenement, gutted and transformed to spare elegance on the inside, its coarse brick exterior acting now as camouflage for the yuppies and techies who inhabited the place. Rippner and Miller stood to the side while George Robinson, one of the company's human tanks, kicked in the door of a corner single-bedroom on the building's eighth floor.
No knock, no shouted announcement. No chance for the bastard inside to zero out his files or stuff drives in the microwave.
The hacker was black-haired and pale. He burst up out of a wheeled office chair in a U-cornering of PCs, monitors, and drives and turned on them. Like a trapdoor spider exploding out of its burrow. The green and red of surge-protector lights, power backup. A tangle of cables, standing and toppled Red Bull cans, coffee mugs.
As he didn't reach immediately for a weapon, Paul let him get a look at the three of them. The kid was twenty, maybe twenty-one. Caucasian. Some kind of tattoo starting near his right carotid, running down below the collar of his charcoal sweatshirt. Miller and Rippner and Robinson weren't displaying badges. The kid scowled.
"What are you-- the fucking FBI?"
"Not quite," said Miller.
Rippner stepped forward. He was a big kid, hacker-boy was, and he didn't fit the stereotype, meaning he looked like he was really in shape. He nearly laughed when he realized what Rippner, maybe six inches shorter, maybe sixty pounds lighter, was there for. He reached for a steel bar leaning against the wall.
"You don't want to do that," Rippner said.
"Fuck you."
Rippner smiled. He was going to enjoy this.
Miller, his hands gloved in latex, a grounding strap clipped to his shirtsleeve, was sitting on the floor amid the U of tables and drives, a softsided packet of Torx screwdrivers open beside him. Rippner watched him crack open housings, scan for booby-traps; he watched Miller wince with cautious effort as he uncoupled data cables. One of the company's ongoing monitoring measures: in case any of the feds or local cops were selling drives on the black market, Miller was replacing the hacker's hard drives with drives full of spurious, traceable data.
Miller tapped the silver case of a freshly freed drive. "Maybe I'll let you analyze this one, Jack my lad." Sniffed it with a grin. "You can practically smell the porn on it. Take your mind off of Malibu Barbie. Miami Barbie: sorry, my mistake."
Rippner flinched inwardly. Robinson, keeping quiet watch at the door, said: "As long as he saves the twinks for you, right, Pauly?"
"Oh, so cruel."
They left the body where it was, lying to the side of the horseshoe of computers. A tidy slit at the apex of the neck tattoo. Blood on the brown carpet beneath the black-haired head, congealing.
"Sorry about that 'Barbie' comment," Miller said. "That was out of line."
In the ash-dirty cold of a very early February morning, Jackson Rippner looked out across the rooftop of the company's Chicago office at the gray-and-black skyline. Miller had come out for a smoke following their night's work, and Rippner had joined him. He didn't smoke, but he didn't mind people who did. He'd stabbed a man to death three hours earlier; to criticize Miller for lighting a cigarette would seem hypocritical.
"That's alright, Paul." Rippner pushed his hands more deeply into his coat pockets. "If I really minded, you wouldn't be here to apologize. You know that."
It was a joke. Mostly.
Miller knew it. "Mm hm." He smiled thinly, exhaled. The wind caught his mouthful of smoke, snapped it away. "You're that most enviable of breeds, Jackson: the non-addicted sociopath."
"He should have set down that bar. I warned him."
"Which I found most interesting."
Rippner glanced at him. "Do you want to say 'stupid,' Paul?"
Miller took a last, pleasurable puff off his cigarette. "Not at all. It was over before it began; even I could see that."
"Then what are you trying to say?"
"That you'd do alright, staying where you are, but you'd do well to make a change. You'll make a fine addition to Systems." He dropped his cigarette, stubbed it out. "Thanks for your help tonight."
"You're welcome."
Miller looked at him critically. "You need a break, don't you?" He reached over, patted Rippner's shoulder. "Goodnight, Jack."
"Goodnight, Paul."
Miller walked off. Rippner lingered in the windy dark. He cast a glance at his mental calendar: eighteen days until London. And Lisa in London. He could admit it to himself: he missed her already. He would miss her more when he got back to his apartment, alone, in the last dead hours before dawn. The Illinois cold was already sunk deep in his bones.
Ken Warwick didn't possess ego enough to think that this was his lucky day. But he admitted a thrill when he looked up and saw her, following that soft "Excuse me." Copper-red hair falling just past her shoulders, grass-green eyes (and not contacts, either, by the look of them), a dimpled, shy smile that showed good teeth, a spendy dark suitdress that complemented an even-better body.
Still he possessed ego enough not to question a pleasant coincidence, or to wonder why, in this sea of cubicles at London Transport, a girl this beautiful had chosen to approach his. Ken sat taller, to hide the sag at his thirty-seven-year-old office-lifer's waistline, and smiled up at her. "What can I do for you, miss?"
"I'm Amy Kendrick. Thomson Antiquities Limited. I hope you can help me, Mr.--" -- and here she leaned out, fetchingly, for another look at the name plate on his cube's outer wall-- "-- Warwick."
She spoke his name carefully, correctly. War-rick. Almost a purr to the ars. She offered him her hand. Ken took it.
"I need to rent some space," she said. "Underground."
He suggested that they talk in the canteen. At a table by a fourth-floor window overlooking London's Broadway, with grayish daylight reflecting off the surface of his coffee and her tea with milk, she told him she felt a little lost.
"I think it's a test for the new girl," she said. She took a cautious sip of tea, then glanced shyly out and down at the black of the cabs, the red of the buses.
"What do you need the space for?" Ken asked, feeling curious and gallant in equal measure. He'd noted her accent: not British, not American, exactly. Canadian, she'd told him, en route to the canteen and its many windows admitting wan floods of February light. "I'm from Toronto," she said, with a smile, sweet and charmingly crooked, and that put him at ease. He considered Canadians more trustworthy than their neighbors to the south.
"The storage of antiques and objets d'art pending auction. We really only need the space for about three weeks."
She looked at him beseechingly with those grass-green eyes, and over a cup of coffee, Ken Warwick went from the company line-- "London Transport does not, at this time, condone the further conversion of disused deep-level shelters to commercial storage"-- to a conciliatory "Possibly we could make an exception," to a short list of potential sites.
The idea of the shelters themselves seemed to fascinate her. Dozens of meters underground. Steady temperature, steady humidity. The ability to withstand a nuclear blast--
"Nothing more powerful than a V-2, actually, I'm afraid," Ken said, apologetically. To her pleasantly blank, questioning look, he added: "The old Blitz shelters aren't warranted against atomic apocalypse. Is that a deal-breaker?"
She laughed. "Of course not."
When Kendrick entered the suite at the Mandarin Oriental, Roland Mason was looking out at the trees and velvety grass in Hyde Park. "It's so green here," he said. He turned from the window. He was a very tall man, very lean. Black hair parted to the side. Strong features. A hawkish nose, mouth a little too wide, shock-blue eyes. He moved toward her like a panther in a beautifully tailored suit.
"What did you get?" he asked.
Kendrick placed her briefcase on the largest of the sitting room's tables, home also to three open laptops and assorted papers, opened it, and handed him, in passing, a black plastic folder.
"See for yourself." She started unbuttoning the jacket of her suitdress. "I think Chancery Lane is our best bet. Most suitably located."
"If we don't mind getting cozy with the phone exchange." Mason scanned the pages of the prospectus. "How about St. Paul's?"
"Construction of the shelter there stopped in 1941." Kendrick pulled off the jacket as she walked to one of the suite's bedrooms. "They were afraid of rattling the cathedral. It's not finished, Roland," she added, with a bit more emphasis, from beyond the threshold of the bedroom door.
"But how not-finished is it?"
Kendrick had herself in an old gray sweatshirt when she re-entered the sitting room. She finished zipping and buttoning a worn pair of cargo-pocket khakis as she asked: "Do you really need to know?"
"I thought playing Mata Hari would make a nice change for you."
"I'm the damn grease-monkey, Roland." She watched him go to the bar and uncap a bottle of Glenlivet. "Rose is our specialist when it comes to subtle human interaction; you know that."
"Very tactfully put." With a toothy smile, Mason poured, then turned and offered her a tumbler of whiskey over ice. "Are you seeing Mr. Warwick tonight?"
"It looks that way, mein Kommandant." Kendrick took the glass.
"Good girl." Mason focused again on the list of shelters. "Now all we have to do is wait for Miss Wheeler to reel in the others."
Kendrick winced around a sweet-burn sip of whiskey. "What about Carter?"
"John Carter will not be a problem. We'll have what we want. The Greeks will think they have what they want." Mason looked her way. His smile became relaxed, predatory. "As for Carter and his people... let's just say, Amy, that the manager has been managed."
*****