December 24, 1963
This time, when he pressed his trembling fingers to a victim's throat, Lucien was prepared for the unsettling stillness. Unlike the last two, this man knew what Jiang wanted from the start, but Jiang made him suffer for longer than the others. The colonel had the misfortune of being the one ordered to tell Jiang, all those years ago, that his wife and child had perished in the fall of Singapore. Though Jiang never saw him again until this moment, Colonel Song endured pain borne from fresh hatred.
Lucien had come prepared to listen to the extracted information in the hopes of warning the police in the clue he left behind. Apparently, the colonel's orders to use his family's deaths to begin molding Jiang into the monster they wanted him to be came from a former senior colonel, now colonel general, Hai Xu.
Naturally, now that he had information that could save one of Jiang's potential victims, he lacked the means. No stray piece of paper could be found in the dining room in which Jiang eviscerated Song. So instead of a life-saving missive, Lucien slipped a miniature dragonfly figurine, swiped from a table holding a clock and family photos, down the back of Song's soaked shirt when he checked for a pulse. If Lucien's friend took the bait cast at the last crime scene, he would connect the animal to the identical name of their last military intelligence assignment together.
How he longed to find comfort instead of dread in hope.
Opening and closing his fists, desperate to quell his temper and slow his pulse, Lucien emerged once again from the bloody mess Jiang made—no, the mess that they made—and into the shadow cast by the foliage in Song's backyard. They had parked the car about half a mile from the house, and several miles away, Baako, small sailboat and change of clothes in tow, waited for them along the Huangpu riverbank. Baako would take the car and the evidence to undisclosed locations for disposal and safekeeping, while Lucien and Jiang sailed back upriver to the safehouse.
Eerily calm and collected for a man covered in blood, Jiang stayed one step ahead of Lucien, just enough to lead, to keep control of Lucien through peripherals. Through the back gate and the brush beyond, Song's muffled screams echoed in Lucien's ears. He hadn't felt so bloody useless in ages. Even if this flimsy plan worked, even if he eventually escaped, who would he be when he did? The shell of a man who plotted to save his own life while other men died for lies their superiors told? A weak, selfish bastard who put the life of his loved ones above those of three men? How many families were being torn to shreds by this madman whose neck Lucien could snap if he had the guts to take another life? What was a little blood on his hands when his clothes were stained with it?
While he longed to end it all the easy way, by taking Jiang's life and resurrecting an identity long dead, Lucien forced himself to heed the other voice in his head. Don't give up now, not after three men have already lost their lives, and you've left a trail. He could almost feel her hands on his chest, urging him not to do to disappoint her. Whatever your proximity, you are not a murderer. Don't become one now.
Unable to deny Jean anything, when he slid into the passenger seat of Jiang's sedan, he clasped his hands in his lap and kept his eyes forward. What was Jean doing right now? According to the clock in Song's dining room, midnight had passed long ago, so Christmas morning had already dawned in Ballarat. He thanked his wife's God for the small mercy of company at the house on Christmas morning. Though he had been toying with the idea of buying his own house before Lucien left for Sydney, Matthew wouldn't dream of leaving Jean in that empty house. Thinking of Matthew's threat, delivered just before the wedding, Lucien almost smiled. Sure, Mathew owed Lucien an ass-kicking, but in the meantime, he would look after Jean.
Could she be happy right now? As long as she had loved ones to soldier on for, she would put on a cheery face, host Christmas luncheon, pass out presents, perhaps sing a carol or two. But Lucien wanted more than anything for her to be happy, not just for an ephemeral moment or hour, but permanently healed and whole. No matter what delusions he harbored about his role in these deaths, he refused to hide from the fact that he broke the heart he had vowed to cherish. If he made it home to Jean, how would they heal? Could they heal, or would he lose yet another life, another family, to demons?
No, darling.Her voice visited him again, and Lucien realized for the first time how long it had been since he'd eaten. This time, neither of us will have to heal alone.
In the driver's seat, Jiang slipped his bloody gloves into a plastic wrap and handed them to Lucien, who stored them in the glove compartment. While Lucien had never known Jiang to be anything other than a beast, he wondered again how Jiang got to this, the point of no return. For as long as Lucien had known him, this operative had been irreparably damaged, as Lucien so easily could have been. After the war, with no family, few friends to trust, and countless crushed dreams, Lucien and Jiang both embraced the darkness. Their paths diverged only when Thomas Blake wrote Lucien in a nearly illegible script, begging his son to come home.
Huan Jiang had no one to call him home, no voice of his beloved to heed and regard with hope. While Jiang's misfortune did not excuse the havoc he wrecked, Lucien knew the inexplicable, uncontrollable rage triggered by such a loss. Lucien survived it; Jiang did not.
"Tell me about your son."
As the car sped past them, streetlamps briefly shed light on Jiang's whitening knuckles around the steering wheel. "Why?"
"Because I just helped you kill another human being, and talking about our children helps me remember why I help you."
Jiang's grip relaxed only slightly. "You've seen him more recently than I, so you know more than I do."
Lucien scratched an itch beneath his unruly beard. "I only met Gen briefly, and at the time, I was more concerned with getting reacquainted with my own child." To humor Gen's father, however, Lucien added, "He is a fine chap, a good husband. Smart too—he's a professor."
Before Lucien could identify the emotion flickering in Jiang's black eyes, it disappeared.
Lucien broke the ensuing silence with an olive branch. "When Li was four, her favorite food was mandarin oranges. Well, on second thought, perhaps it was a tie between mandarin oranges and maple syrup, which she wanted to put on everything. Mei Lin was much better about telling her no than I was, but fathers are made to spoil their little girls, don't you think?"
For two or three miles, the rhetorical question hung between them, but Lucien waited patiently, even going so far as to lean his head back on the headrest and close his eyes.
Perhaps it was Lucien's serenity that broke Jiang.
"My son never liked sports. He preferred books, no matter how I discouraged his reading." While Jiang's voice was stiff and unfeeling as ever, his avoidance of Gen's name betrayed his pain. Lucien had done the same many times, preferring to say my baby daughter than to utter her name. "I suppose I wanted him to be more like me than like his mother, but none of that mattered when I lost him."
For Jiang to take responsibility for any of his misdeeds seemed impossible—simply because he justified his crimes in a misguided pursuit of justice—but he bore the blame of his family's suffering, over which he had no control, like a cross.
"No matter what happened, you made the best choice possible with the information you had," Lucien said. "So many thought they knew best before the fall of Singapore. Commanding officers saying whatever they were ordered to say, spies whispering the truth to all the wrong people, locals acting on false intelligence—it was such a chaotic time."
"Is that what you tell yourself?"
"No, I tell myself I failed them by not sending them home to my father, but that doesn't make it true." When Jiang lapsed back into stony silence, Lucien pressed on. "Gen is alive. Just because you missed watching him grow up doesn't mean that he doesn't have a life. He and his mother were reunited, Jiang. Most children were divided from their parents forever."
"Do not patronize me," Jiang snapped. "You, who left China as soon as you could, while the rest of us picked up the pieces. You only came back to spy on my countrymen and cause more death."
A vein in Lucien's neck throbbed. "You're lecturing me about bloodshed?"
"You are willing to do whatever is necessary to save your family. So am I."
Lucien forced himself to remember that violence had permanently poisoned Jiang's mind, that he had long since rejected morality and humanity to live with himself and his choices. "But they are safe," he said. "Just because you haven't been a part of their lives doesn't mean that they aren't safe. It's—it's hard to let go." Li's face, shocked and pained and confused, would haunt him forever. After seventeen years of thinking her father dead or simply gone, here stood this man who swore on his life that he spent all that time looking for her. "It's hard to accept that even though they've been in our thoughts every moment, we have not been in theirs. They grew up without us, they made friends and mistakes and choices without us, but we're so lucky that our children got to live."
Having said all he knew to say, Lucien fixed his eyes on the road ahead, and he forced himself not to turn his head when Jiang finally spoke again.
"You say that my son is a good man. I knew he would be. I harbor no delusions that he will understand the choices I've made." For the first time since he kidnapped Lucien, Jiang's voice lacked the sharp timbre of calculation. Resignation had taken its place. "He will see me as the world sees me, a mercenary, a menace, perhaps a monster. But I hope he will see a father who did not abandon his son."
Lucien shook his head, remembering the story Gen had been so brave to tell a stranger. "He saw you coming to save him, before your comrades dragged you away," he said. "Gen clung to that image his whole life, which is why he asked me to find you."
Jiang's next inhale caught in his throat, shocking him. The peculiar gleam in his eyes returned, just as briefly, between breaths.
Pride, Lucien realized. He's proud of his son. "Despite everything he suspects about you, he knows there is good in you."
True to form, Lucien had said the wrong thing. Shoulders square, jaw set, and thumbs drumming on the steering wheel, Jiang narrowed his eyes. "All this talk about family reminds me that I owe you an updated proof of life. Open your mouth again, and I will ask my friends to start sending appendages."
Lucien resigned himself to silence, suspecting that Jiang would never again allow himself a moment of vulnerability. Even after the depravity Lucien witnessed Jiang revel in, Lucien had hoped he could use Jiang's love for his son to bring him out of the abyss.
But Jiang was just another man Lucien couldn't save.