London, 1969
The office had a well-used dartboard, because Stephens believed that taking a few minutes of relaxation here and there could only improve the quality of work that often spanned hours if not days of intense, unrelenting strain. Since the team was largely composed of highly skilled, and fiercely competitive, marksmen, simply throwing the darts had long since gone by the wayside. Now it was throwing them blindfolded, or over one's shoulder, or dangling upside down, or whichever spur-of-the-moment improbable variation happened to occur to them. The idea of taking the next logical step and instituting a similar game at the firing range had been sporadically discussed and regretfully discarded.
As the work day ground to a merciful end, a few of the team members were standing by the board, trying to dredge up the enthusiasm to play a quick round before going home. Kay, usually one of the more reliably imaginative players, didn't even bother to try; she just put on her jacket, waved a desultory farewell, and headed for the door.
Moore caught up with her in the corridor. "Have you thought about what I said?" he asked urgently.
"I have," she said.
"And?"
She stopped, and looked right at him. "I'm going to find General Hogan. And I'm going to tell him that if there's anything, anything, I can do to help him find Jack's murderer, he doesn't even need to ask."
Moore's face tightened angrily. "You're a damned fool, Kay," he ground out.
"No, I'm a cold-blooded killer, don't you remember?" she shot back. "Hogan has the best chance of getting to the bottom of this, and that's really all I care about just now. I'm going to trust him."
"Based on what? Ten minutes' acquaintance and Jack's pillow talk? You're choosing to trust a total stranger rather than your own team!"
"Someone on my own team is a murdering traitor, Jule. I know you don't want to believe it, but I do. It's one of us. Trusting a total stranger is the only card left in my hand."
"Fine. Go ahead and play Miss Marple if it makes you feel any better," Moore said. "You do realize that by any measure in the book, you'll be the prime suspect, don't you?"
"Me?"
"You. Cherchez le femme, for a start. Oldest motive in the world."
She rolled her eyes.
"More to the point," he continued. "You said that someone on this team is a traitor. Not necessarily true, now is it? By definition, a traitor betrays their own country. And it isn't as though you're really British."
Her voice was like ice. "If you're quite finished…?"
"Oh, I'm finished, all right. Go on, waste time chasing phantasms. And good luck trying to prove your own innocence while our team crumbles to dust and ashes. When everything goes to hell, remember that I tried to save us. And, while you're at it, bloody well remember that you weren't the only one who cared about Jack!"
Moore stormed away, back towards the office. Kay, equally furious, stalked towards the elevator. Their unnoticed eavesdropper frowned as some very unwelcome conclusions began forming in his mind.
*.*.*.*.*.*.*
Laos, 1964
The dream started like it always did. He'd long since trained himself to sleep silently, motionlessly, but he couldn't do anything to hide the cold sweat, and as the dream barreled its way to the inevitable conclusion, it gave him away.
What woke him was the voice, a soft, calm voice whispering little endearments, telling him, over and over, that everything was all right, that he was safe, that he could rest. In German.
It didn't help.
Quite the opposite, actually.
Kay treasured a few jumbled, vague impressions of a woman with gentle hands who had kissed her when she cried, who had smoothed her tangled hair away from her face and whispered soothing reassurances in German. She thought those hands, that voice, might have belonged to her mother, although she wasn't sure about that. It didn't matter. Even in hell, someone, she felt certain, had loved her. Cared for her. Jerked from a sound sleep by the sudden icy chill and the palpable terror of her bedmate, she automatically reverted to those words, those actions, that tenderness.
There were other memories, terrible memories, and they had been in German, too, but when it came right down to it, for her, German was the language of comfort as much as it was the language of death.
Newkirk had no such memories, and awakening from a German-inflected nightmare to a German-speaking reality tipped him over the line into full-blown flashback. He lashed out, batting her arms away.
Kay's voice didn't falter. "Jack, wake up," she said, switching back to English. "Jack, do you hear me? It's Kay. Breathe. Whatever you're seeing, it's not real. Jack, you've got to wake up! It's all right. You're not there anymore. It's all over."
He didn't seem to hear her. She remembered the conversation they'd had a night or two ago, and she tried a new tack. "Peter. Peter, love, you have to wake up. It's not real, Peter—you're safe now. It's all over. I promise. You are not there anymore. You're here, with me, and I'm not going to let anything happen to you. Breathe, Peter. Breathe."
As the dream shredded into nothing, he took a deep, raspy breath, then another one, and the world snapped back into focus. He slumped bonelessly back down onto the pillow.
She let out a relieved breath. "There you are," she said. "Better?"
"Yeah," he said, internally cringing. He knew what the next question was going to be. "I'm all right. Thanks."
She surprised him. "Good. Think you can go back to sleep?"
He blinked at her. Usually at this point in the proceedings, someone asked what was wrong, what had he been dreaming about, did this happen often? And then, when he declined to discuss the matter, it usually meant the end of whatever relationship had been in progress. Wasn't she going to make him explain?
She shrugged. "You're not the only one who has bad dreams," she said, answering his unspoken question. She wasn't going to ask. "Do you want to try to go back to sleep, or would you rather stay up for a bit until you're sure it's not going to start right back up where it left off? That's what I usually do."
"Huh. Do you now," Newkirk mumbled. It occurred to him that every once in a while he'd wake up to find that a report had been written, or their guns oiled, or, sometimes, breakfast made. He'd never thought to wonder why.
"I know that nothing's ever going to make them go away," she admitted quietly.
"Nor mine," he agreed. "Not likely."
"So if there's nothing to be done… might as well do it," she said, and managed approximately half a smile. "Feeling better?"
"I am," he said. He couldn't quite believe it, but he actually was. "But next time you've got nothing to do… wake me up, all right? Two can do nothing easier than one, I'd say."
She looked searchingly at him, saw that he meant it, and nodded shyly.
If either of them had any more dreams that night, they didn't remember them in the morning.
*.*.*.*.*.*
Russian Front, 1943
He was still alive. He intended to stay that way. The question was how.
The Russian Front was something like he imagined Hell would be, and possibly a bit worse than that. At least Hell would have the advantage of being warm. This fool's errand of a campaign was madness, and he had no intention of laying down his life for a lost cause.
Colonel Lange had no intention of laying down his life for any cause. He was going to get out of this frozen wasteland, and he was going to get back to his nice safe stalag, and right after he decorated the central compound with a few well-chosen, and well-ventilated, corpses, he was going to spend the rest of the war quietly feathering his nest and not being shot at. That was the plan. That was how it was going to be, damn it, because that was how it ought to be. That was what he deserved, and that was what he was going to get.
*.*.*.*.*.*.*
London, 1969
"I've arranged hotel rooms for all of us," Hogan said, as they left the pub. "Nothing too fancy, but a real step up from Barracks Two, at least."
"So long as it has a bed, I'm sure I'll love it," said Kinch, raising a hand to hail a cab. "I'm so tired that even those rickety bunks would look good."
"Those bunks were only that rickety because we kept using bits of it to brace tunnels," Carter objected.
"I was sleeping on them before we started digging tunnels," Kinch reminded him as a taxi pulled up. "Trust me; they were that rickety from the get-go."
Hogan gave the driver the address, and squinted at the narrow back seat. "No room," he decided. "You two take this one; LeBeau and I will get another. We've been through a lot together, but I draw the line at sitting in your laps."
"All right. See you in the morning, Colonel," said Kinch, getting in.
"Yeah. Good night, guys," Carter chimed in.
The cab sped away, and Hogan lifted his hand to hail another one.
LeBeau shook his head. "I am not going to the hotel. I have a key to Pierre's appartement, and he has a guest room. I shall stay there one last time."
"That sounds nice," Hogan said. "Say, mind if I come too? I was only at his place once, and it was a long time ago."
LeBeau wondered if Hogan was carefully not saying that he didn't want to be alone, or if he simply thought that LeBeau oughtn't to be. It didn't matter, he decided. He didn't want to be alone either, and he especially didn't want to be alone in a flat that he knew would be full of ghosts.
"D'accord," he said. "I cannot imagine that Pierre would have objected."
Newkirk's current flat, it transpired, was a far cry from the one Hogan had seen in '46, which was something of a relief. It was small, but it was in a reasonably nice building, in a fairly good neighborhood, and everything in it was neatly maintained and comfortable to the point of hedonism. There was a large bookcase in the living room, filled and overfilled with well-worn volumes, and a deep, inviting armchair that looked like the ideal place to read them, not to mention a color television. The kitchen was quite obviously that of a man who had no interest in cooking, and only the tea kettle looked as though it spent much time on the stove, but his bed had the sort of thick, sybaritic mattress and fluffy duvet that they had all spent half the war—the nighttime half—wishing for.
And yet it was strangely impersonal. It was a pleasant place to sleep, a convenient place to store whatever clothing he was not currently wearing, and not much more than that. Newkirk had spent most of his career in places he had to be ready to abandon at a moment's notice, and it seemed that extended to the place that was, ostensibly, his home.
LeBeau, for lack of any other ideas, drifted to the bookcase and scanned the titles. It was an eclectic mix. There were the usual literary lions; Shakespeare and Wilde and Kipling and that ilk. There was rather more poetry than one might have expected. There were lighter novels. There was history, including several volumes on the Second World War that, it transpired, had some very remarkable annotations written neatly in the margins. And on the shelf second from the top, secure in a cardboard slipcover, were the two thick volumes of Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cookery, their spines a bit worn with heavy use. Incredulous, LeBeau pulled the books from the shelf.
They had been glued together, and when he opened the cover, he saw that a neat rectangle had been sliced from most of the pages, transforming it into a box. The book-safe was obviously meant for emergencies; it contained a handgun, and a generous supply of ammunition. In addition, there was a thick wad of currency from several countries, and a key ring. He looked at the keys. One looked like a housekey, but another, smaller one, he guessed was probably for a safe deposit box. Heaven only knew what was in it. False identification papers, maybe. Or perhaps the Hope diamond. Where Newkirk was involved, anything was possible.
The bottom of the book-box was padded with a folded bit of cloth, faded and old, but it was still recognizable as a RAF flight cap, and when LeBeau pulled it out of the box, the identity disks that had been tucked inside it clattered to the floor.
"The one book whose title he could never forget," Hogan said quietly, picking them up. The name on the tags was not 'John Selden'.
"The one book he would never read," corrected LeBeau, his voice husky.
"That too. But still. This was the stuff he'd grab if he ever really needed to run for it, and when he wanted a safe place to hide his essentials… he thought about a French chef," said Hogan. "Take the compliment, Louis."
"Essentials? A gun, some money, whatever this key unlocks, and a name he did not dare to use. It is not much to show for a life."
Hogan didn't have an answer for that. "Let's get some sleep," he said, instead. "It's been a long, miserable day, and tomorrow isn't going to be much better."
*.*.*.*.*.*.*
Author's note: Newkirk usually wins the 'non-dominant hand' version of darts. Moore is surprisingly good at the 'blindfolded' version. Kay is more or less unbeatable at the 'dangling upside down' variant. Stephens has a knack for the 'throwing over his shoulder' version. Donnelly, who is ambidextrous, has a natural advantage at the 'one in each hand' double-throw version. And now you know.