Chapter Eleven
Mathilde seemed physically well or would when she regained the fifteen pounds she'd lost and finished the course of antibiotics and antivirals and everything else the doctors had pumped into her. However, she was wearing three layers of clothing, probably a good indication of her current mental state, which wasn't encouraging.
"Are you okay?"
Marella snorted. Unladylike, sure, but she had nothing to hide in this company.
"Am I okay? Are you kidding?" She stared at Mathilde, studied the physical scars and searched for the emotional ones. "I'm fine, or I will be. The doctors say the swelling is almost completely gone." She touched her hand to the bandage almost automatically. "I don't even know how to ask you how you are," she finally confessed. "Do you want to talk about it?"
Mathilde, already bunched up in her chair somehow managed to contract even further, perhaps unconsciously.
"If I were a man, I'd just say that I'm fine." She bit her lip. "But of course if I were a man…" She shrugged. "I'd rather not think about it, much less talk about it."
Marella paused, considered. "You know this is where, as a friend, I'm almost obligated to tell you that you really should talk about it." She smiled, more than a little sadly. "I hope you feel you can talk to me about what happened."
"I have been talking about it." At Marella's surprise, Mathilde looked away for a moment. "I'm not looking forward to debrief, or the mandatory meetings with the shrinks, but I know that's coming when we go back to Knightsbridge, so I've been practicing." She gave a wan smile. "On Lydia and Claudia, mostly."
Marella tried not to take offense, tried to view this with professional detachment. The best she could do was a tightly controlled, "I don't understand."
"Yes, you do, if you think about it. I don't know them. With them, it is work, I can separate it, detach from it. If I tell you what happened, tell you everything that happened, it's personal, it's part of our lives, our friendship."
"But it happened to you, which makes it personal and a part of our lives," Marella said as gently as she knew how.
"It's bad enough that you're involved with Archangel. He's going to get the full debriefing report and the psychological assessment, and then you'll want us to socialize and have us both act as if he doesn't know all those things that I don't want to say out loud, even to you."
Marella leaned back against the pillow, head aching more than she really wanted to admit, and couldn't find the energy to argue. It was embarrassing how little use a Ph.D. in psychology helped when it was one's own friend who needed the help.
"Okay," she said after a moment. "I'm glad you're talking to Lydia and Claudia at least. I wish there was something I could do"
She was conscious of the odd disparity between them. Mathilde was the one who had been held for three weeks, had endured brutal conditions and inhumane treatment, and there she sat, legs tucked underneath her in a chair while Marella lay in the hospital bed, feeling a demoralizing sense of inadequacy.
"Tell me what happened in Bangkok," Mathilde demanded, imperiously but with a hint of desperation that was unsettling. "No, start from when I disappeared. Put it all together for me, tell me everything." She blinked a few times, and then more rapidly, almost but not quite keeping the gathering moisture at bay. "Tell me what happened to Sam."
So Marella did, from Mathilde's missed check-in and Samaritan's inability to track her down to the deadly ambush just two days earlier.
"Jamie Braxton?"
"Do you know him?"
"I knew his brother better but I met Jamie once or twice." Mathilde tugged at the shoulder length strands of her hair, the best that the Navy nurses had been able to salvage of her once long locks and scowled a bit. "His brother was an old school mercenary. If you wanted your own private army, Roy Braxton was the man to build, train and run it for you."
"Was?"
Mathilde shrugged. "Killed in Benin, some ridiculous failed coup. Sounds as if Jamie has built himself into quite a niche, though if he was as good as advertised…" She waved a hand at Marella's bandages.
Marella frowned. "He got Michael out of their hands."
"After how long? He should have stopped the ambush."
How long? Long enough that Michael smelled of burn ointment and pulled away slightly, instinctually, whenever her hand drifted to the wrong bit of tender flesh cloaked under shirt, vest and suit jacket.
"Mati, you have no idea what it was like." She shook her head, slowly, carefully, but emphatically. "It happened…" She snapped her fingers. "Like that! Less than a minute from the time the van cut us off until the time they took him from the car." Terribly conscious of how her voice wavered on those last words, she surged forward. "Probably less, more like fifteen to thirty seconds."
"He shouldn't have been there." Mathilde's tone was sharp, features tight, compressed.
"Braxton?"
"Archangel. He shouldn't have been in Bangkok. What were you thinking to bring him there?"
Mathilde unfolded from the chair, all three layers of clothing flapping about her as she stalked angrily around the bed, reminding Marella of nothing more than a flamingo: an agitated, white clad, French flamingo, outfitted in attire donated by Lydia and Claudia, with contributions flown in from Rose and Samantha. The white suited Mathilde. At least it normally did when she wasn't spitting out venom in French and what would be best described as Street Thai.
"I didn't bring him there," Marella protested, when the verbal storm had blown through, or perhaps they'd at least reached the eye of it. "You can't possibly think I could make that call."
"Of course you did. Otherwise, I'd be dead." Mathilde said, turning her head away but not before Marella had seen the glint of moisture. "I know the Firm's policy. I just didn't know why I was still alive." Her voice flattened, became something lifeless and gray. "Except, of course, for the obvious reasons but even that…" She tossed her hand in the air, a wild gesture, edgy, emotional.
"You thought we wouldn't try to get you out?"
Mathilde whirled back. "Diplomatic channels, maybe. Inter-agency negotiations. Tell me another occasion when the Firm negotiated with organized crime or a drug ring to retrieve a case officer instead of cutting ties and denying all knowledge."
Marella blinked. Mathilde was many things but modest about her abilities and worth wasn't one of them.
"Tell me another occasion where it was a particularly valuable person that we wanted to recover, we knew our operative, or case officer, was still alive and where to find him or her," she countered.
"Valuable enough for the regional ADD and the DDO to personally intervene?" Mathilde tossed her head in a way that once would have sent her long hair flying over her shoulder dramatically, to great effect, but now was only a little sad. "There is no such person, ma soeur." A tilted head, a glittering glance. "Or perhaps there is one."
Marella felt heat rising from her throat up and into her face.
"Should we have left you there?"
"Sam's dead," Mathilde hissed. "Three of our people are dead. How am I supposed to live with that? How can you ask me to know that you almost died, that Archangel was kidnapped and…" Her hands fluttered, agitated, angry. "I don't know what they did to him, but he's my boss. My boss's boss, and I'm supposed to get over this and forget that it happened because of me?"
"Ne fait pas le con. You were just the first victim."
Regret at the sharpness of her tone was mitigated by personal experience, knowledge that Mathilde was capable of continuing in this vein if left unchecked. It worked, if she measured success as drowning the maudlin and restoring the vitriol.
"What were you thinking? You let him walk into a trap," Mathilde snapped. "You know better than to take a Deputy Director into a war zone."
Marella started laughing, partly as a defense mechanism but also in real amusement.
"You don't know him very well, do you? Prague really was a long time ago." She smiled to smooth the sting. "It was Michael's…it was Archangel's call to draw them out in Bangkok. He'd sent Airwolf to rescue you, but he went to Bangkok for his own reasons."
Mathilde's voice was small and vaguely petulant. "Such as?"
"To draw attention from Airwolf. To find out if Sam was part of whatever you'd discovered. To try to find out what you'd learned in the first place that was so important. Probably half a dozen reasons I don't know, that I'll never know."
"So you're saying he didn't do it to help rescue his lover's best friend?"
Marella reached a hand out and snagged Mathilde as she danced by, pulled her to sit down on the bed, to remain still for a moment.
"Perhaps," she admitted, still reluctant to admit it even to herself. "That may have been one of his reasons, but I think I know him better than most." She swiped at Mathilde's immediate leer. "And I know that he usually has many things in play simultaneously. It would not have been his only reason."
"Tell me we know who did this." Mathilde's voice was restrained, but Marella could hear the plea buried in the demand. "Tell me we know who killed Sam and your Security team."
She wished she could pluck a name from the air and present it, fait accompli, to provide some sense of justice for what this woman, this good friend, had suffered and for the deaths of three men who should have gone home to their families. She dreaded the funerals, the looks that the widows would send at her, asking without words, perhaps without even conscious intent, why Michael's life was worth more than their husbands'.
"I found the negatives you'd hidden. We're working on putting names to the faces we don't know."
"And the ones you do?"
"You tell me." Marella touched Mathilde's arm, gently. "How did you get onto Osborne in the first place?"
She'd done it. She'd said his name aloud, albeit in almost a whisper, and quite possibly opened Pandora's box.
"I started at the source." Mathilde was matter of fact, almost bored. "Tantasatityanon owns the fields. Not in his name, of course, but in a holding company. That came from CIA. Then it was a matter of tracing the web of his connections until we came to Osborne."
It sounded so simple in principle, but the amount of effort… Marella's head ached to think of it.
"How long?"
"Four years."
It had been stupid of Osborne to be photographed with Tantasatityanon at all, much less in a poppy field, but there weren't many places the men could have safely met or conducted business. There was no social or diplomatic event that would bring together the ambitious Special Counsel to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence with a man whose power was built upon drugs, money and the violent elimination of his competition.
Perhaps, Marella mused, Osborne had thought himself safe deep in Tantasatityanon's territory, in the midst of the fiefdom. No one from Washington or Langley would think to find him there.
"Was it Osborne?"
Marella returned her focus to the here and now.
"We don't know yet. Braxton and his team were focused on getting Mi…Archangel clear." Her expression twisted: gratitude mingled with frustration. "They were less interested in live witnesses who could be made to talk. Nitaya is running down known allegiances of the men Braxton's people killed and is…" She gritted her teeth, "talking to the lone survivor."
Mathilde scowled. "He'll only find the local drug syndicate. Nitaya won't even trace it back to Tantasatityanon, much less Osborne."
And yet they had photographic evidence of Lawrence Osborne in a face-to-face meeting with quite possibly the largest drug baron in the world. How to play that card was something else entirely.
And then she remembered the bits she'd overheard of Michael and Hawke's conversation earlier.
"Who took the photos? Do you know where that field is?"
Mathilde shook her head, steadily frowning.
"Archangel already asked." A smile hinted. "Far less directly, of course.
Of course he had. Never convey what is of particular interest when asking questions, for fear that your interest could be used against you.
But Mathilde wasn't quite done.
"The photographer is a local resource. Someone I've used on and off. Graduate student in ethnobiology who spends time in remote places and takes pictures of things he knows I might want to see. To help fund his research, of course."
Now the trick would be to reconnect with him without leading Osborne or Tantasatityanon in his direction. It was sloppy of Mathilde not to have obtained that information when she'd obtained the photos, though Marella couldn't summon any possible reason to say so now.
"Mati?" she said and waited for a response. "The photos of Michael? The two photos of Archangel? They were stored like the others," she prompted.
"Sam sent them to me. Sometime after Red Star." Mathilde lifted her shoulders in a perfect Gallic shrug. "I never knew why." She turned her body to face Marella more directly. "Why? Did you think I was carrying a torch for your man?" she said with a curving smile that lit her eyes and made her seem almost herself.
Honestly…. Try as she might, Marella didn't know the answer – head and heart warred -- so she smiled and laughed at the idea instead.
"You love him."
"Oh yes," Marella said, with a little more emphasis than she'd intended.
All laughter gone, Mathilde's eyes were suddenly intent upon her.
"And if they'd killed him? As they did Sam? You would have blamed me." Her voice was certain, entirely convinced.
"I would have blamed myself."
A pause then, as if Mathilde didn't know how to continue or didn't want to continue.
"For bringing him to Bangkok?"
Yes.
"For running out of bullets," Marella said flatly. "Braxton wouldn't have had to rescue Michael if I'd had another clip." She thought about it. "Or two."
Mathilde, startled, coughed to cover her surprise but then her coughs segued into a laugh, a warm natural chuckle. "The female is most definitely the deadlier of our species."
"Usually," Marella agreed. "But not this time around." She glanced at the curtains separating her bed from the rest of the ward but her waved arm included all of it: her bed, Caitlin's, Mathilde's. "This time we took our lumps." Her eyes narrowed. "Next time…"
Mathilde nodded her wholehearted agreement. "Next time the merdaille get what is owed them."
Author's Notes
Ne fait pas le con: Don't be an ass.
Merdaille: scum (referring to a group of people)
