This story is a continuation, not a sequel. Please be sure to read the first part of Shooting the Moon before you read Part Two.
Shooting the Moon, Part Two
By Claire Gabriel
"He and Nikita, together, are quite good."
Madeline, speaking of Michael, in "All Good Things"
Prologue
Michael Samuelle had believed that this waking nightmare was one he would never have again.
It had ended, he thought, on a white bridge crossed in one direction by a child, and in the other by a man who would in moments be lying dead on it.
But he had been wrong. The very man who had dominated that other scene--standing arrogantly, legs apart and arms folded, while the two flanking him shot down their enemies' leader like a stray dog--that very man now faced him on a computer screen, his eyes hidden behind dark glasses, his mouth curving in a smile no less arrogant than his stance on that bridge.
"If you want to see your son again," said the man, whose name was Retzlaff, "you'll do as I tell you. No games this time. I was there. I saw what fools you made of Graf and Haled. You will not make such a fool of me. Is that understood?" Remaining silent, Michael realized that he had been holding his breath, and let it out slowly, silently, determined that his adversary not know that he had been holding it. "Very well. You don't have to answer me. You only have to obey me."
"I no longer have access to information in Section's computers."
"Oh, come now. You have access to anything you want." Silence. "Good. You have three days." And the screen went dark.
Michael stood silent, an erect exclamation point in a pretty blue and white room mellow with Mediterranean sunlight. It was a mild, warm day for winter, but he felt as though he were frozen in place.
"Daddy?"
He flinched, a painfully unfamiliar sensation. He had not realized that he wasn't alone in the blue and white room while he viewed the transmission from Retzlaff. Slowly he turned to meet the dark gaze of the child who stood in the doorway--a dazed, still-terrified little boy who looked back at him with accusation.
"I'm the extra kid in this family," Adam informed him, on the verge of tears, and Michael realized that at this moment the child's fear was not for himself but for his absent brother. "You should have let them keep me instead."
I. Retrospection
The first and only time the man she privately called Stare Bear had asked her to dinner, Nikita had been hugely disconcerted--not only by the apparent intent of the invitation, but by the possibility that she was being tested yet again, and the absolute necessity of responding as though her life depended on it--since it probably did.
When she asked him to lunch almost a year to the day since she had become head of Section One, she was confident that his testing of her, though ongoing, was not nearly as intense as it had once been. They had come to know one another, if not precisely to trust one another, in the interim. After all, Alex Cornu was the de facto leader of Alpha Group, the five men to whom she was accountable for her actions as head of Section. If they wanted her canceled, they would have her canceled. But she was fairly certain that the Bear would not have her killed for asking the question she would ask today, and fairly certain was enough. The time had come for her to get answers about Adrian.
Much to his amusement, she took him beneath two golden arches in the shape of an M into a place where she was sure he had never been before. "Your choice of venue is intriguing, Missy," he teased her, squinting up into the winter sunlight at a sign proclaiming the specialty of the house. "If the medium is the message, the message is something less than seductive."
"I don't want you getting the wrong idea," she had answered lightly, her grin genuine. She might not trust the man completely, but she liked him, and she was sure that the feeling was reciprocated.
"Perish the thought." Standing in the midst of the noonday throng in an overheated room smelling of damp winter coats and salted fat, he studied the menu mounted on the wall above the scurrying clerks. He looked, as usual, immense and impeccable, now very much out of place but not minding at all. "If my wife could see me now, she would have a coronary."
"The Big Mac is pretty good."
"Will you join me in my debauchery?"
"Sure." She would have preferred the salad bar, but when in Rome. "Fries with that?"
"French fries," he mused, stroking his gray mustache. "More fried than French, I dare say."
"Of course. And a chocolate shake?"
"Milk," he said thoughtfully. "Shake. It sounds...unsettled."
"Trust me. You'll love it."
When they were seated at a small table squeezed in among other small tables overlooking the main thoroughfare of the cosmopolitan city where Section now resided, he asked, "Now what is this all about?" and then took an appreciative bite of his Big Mac.
"Why was Paul's predecessor allowed to leave? I've spent weeks trying to chase down the answer, and I'm still coming up empty."
For an instant he was absolutely still, his gaze focused on hers but his other senses intensely alert. She had been careful, though. There was nothing in her question that would reveal to anyone else what it was actually about. When he had satisfied himself of that fact, he went on chewing, swallowed, and wiped his mouth with a paper napkin. "Why here?" he asked with a slight frown.
"Nobody else here cares that I'm asking. It's like hiding in plain sight."
A soft snort--his trademark response when he admired her nerve but didn't approve of what she'd said. "Can we ever be sure of that?"
"Will you ever answer my question?" Her tone was casual, but deliberately so. Manufacturing an easy smile, she took a sip of her shake.
Softly, regretfully: "Don't go there, Nikita."
"I'm there, Alex."
"Why? We thought you were fully committed."
"I'm committed to doing the best job I can, and I'm not going anywhere any time soon if that's what you mean. I can run, but I can't hide. I know that, and...." With one exception, she had always made it a point to tell this man the truth, knowing that lying to him would be her downfall no matter what else she was doing right. "I'm proud of what I've accomplished this past year, and there are other things I'd like to do before...before the job feels finished. But there's something else I want besides what I have in Se--what I have now."
"And that is?"
"A life."
"Ah." It was a sigh. "How disappointing." For once she couldn't tell whether he was serious or not. "A life with your son?"
Careful. No more lies unless she had to. "My son is loved and safe where he is."
He inclined his head in a slight bow. "Good. Very well, then. The person you inquired about was the founder of the organization and thus a unique entity unlikely to transgress against it. She also had her own coterie of subordinates to protect her should anyone try to harm or ca-- remove her. You share neither of those attributes."
"Paul made chopped liver of her coterie of subordinates when he decided to put her out of business."
"Yes. That option was always the fail-safe, you see." Quietly, almost gently: "Your life is the life you have now. You chose it. It's yours for as long as you live. We thought you understood that."
My father chose for me, and I understand nothing of the kind. With an effort, she restrained herself from raising her chin defiantly. "And what if I end up failing?"
"Why should you fail? You're highly intelligent, people-oriented, and with an intuitive tactical facility enhanced by your time in the field and as a mole in Section. The essentials that you lack are seasoning and a tolerance for moral ambiguities."
"I hate moral ambiguities!"
"Quod erat demonstrandum. Unfortunately that tolerance is often the key to survival in our business."
"So you're all going to sit around and wait for me to grow into the job?"
He picked up a French fry, examined it as though it were a specimen, took a bite, and raised his eyebrows appreciatively. "With an appropriate second-in-command, that might happen sooner than you anticipate."
"Kelly's fine! She's--"
"Strong in several of the same areas that you are, but lacking Madeline's--shall we say skill set? She belongs in MedLab, focused operative psychology. You need a second whose strengths complement yours rather than duplicating them. From another...department, perhaps. Someone who would have known that Lavalle would have to be canceled, for example."
"I thought I could turn him back."
"No one is ever turned back. Only turned and, hopefully, caught."
"But--"
"A seasoned operative would have known that."
"You mean an older, more experienced one."
"Of course."
They finished their meal in silence, Nikita wavering between relief that her cancellation was not imminent and despair that her hopes for banishment had been temporarily dashed. Eventually the Bear licked his fingers with his usual fastidiousness and remarked wryly, "My compliments on your taste in cuisine. The atmosphere was...instructive, and the company was delightful." Again, the faintly mocking bow of his gray head. "I suggest, however, that you focus on the possible when you plan your future."
But I am, she thought, smiling more to herself than at him. "It's not a dream. We'll make it happen..."
At first the hardest thing to bear was that her son did not remember her from one visit to the next. He was happy to see her, but he was happy to see everyone, and would go grinning into the arms of anyone who wanted to pick him up. It continually amazed her that Michael, often so taciturn, appeared to be raising a child who smiled almost continuously and seemed to be fond of everyone, even total strangers. And as time went on, Luc came to remember her. As he neared his first birthday, he began calling her "Kee" and remembering to call her that weeks later even when he had not seen her in the interim.
"Maybe it's just because you tell him I'm coming," she said wistfully when she visited in the early fall. She and Michael had been making love, and it was one of their infrequent leisurely times, when everything seemed natural. There were other times, more frequent, when it seemed that they would eat each other up, ravenous with pent-up longing. But tonight they had taken their time, and now she lay across his chest, her fingertips caressing his bare shoulder.
"That's not the way babies remember." His own fingers traced her eyebrow and moved lightly down her cheek. "His heart remembers you because you're his mother."
Who could help loving this man? "I guess I don't know all that much about how babies do anything."
"You know enough. You know how to play with him, and you love it as much as he does." Sadness in his eyes now.
"Don't you?" He looked away, and there was a silence. "You're beautiful with him and Adam. They both adore you." Silence. "You're not happy this way." It was not a question--simply something that had to be said between them sooner or later. "You miss Section." Again, it was not a question.
"'J'accuse'?" he asked softly.
"Maybe a little." She buried her face against his throat, drinking in the roughness of his beard against her cheek. "I know. I'm telling you how you feel again. I'm sorry."
"I miss my self." His voice was flat, soft, virtually emotionless, and yet she sensed despair in it. "Only half of me is here. I love them both so much, but I'm still split in two."
"Just a different two than before."
"Yes."
Good thing you've had a lot of practice. But she held the words back, along with the bitterness that she knew would be in her voice if she spoke them aloud. Michael's ability to function on two levels still bewildered and angered her. Worse, it frightened her. Even though it seldom manifested itself now, she knew it was still there and always would be. It was Michael. That was who he was. "I live my life split in two," he had told her once, but she had never been able to understand how he could abstract a part of himself and still be whole. "I have to keep my feelings separate. That's how I live my life." And now he was having to do it again.
"You shouldn't have to do this all alone."
"We have no choice." But he seemed relieved to have talked to her about his feelings, and after a while, they slept.
She was awakened by the sound of her son's voice from the doorway.
"Widey wake," he informed his parents, confident that his intel would be received as a delightful surprise even though it was scarcely dawn. His vocabulary was growing in great leaps chiefly due to Adam, who never tired of his company and talked to him constantly when they were together.
"I thought," she mumbled sleepily, "that those fences on kids' beds were there to keep them in."
"He's part monkey."
"Mmmmmm. His father's son, you mean." Covering her nakedness with the sheet, she peeked at Luc over its edge. "I see a baby boy!" When he crowed with delight and began to toddle across the floor, she squeaked under her breath, "Michael? Where's my nightshirt?"
"On the floor over here." Amused, damn him.
"Well, give it to me, smartass!" She swiftly made herself presentable under the sheet, Luc watching its undulations with fascination as he approached. "I see a baby boy!" Preparations completed, she swooped him up, both of them laughing, and deposited him between her and Michael. "Whose baby boy are you?" she demanded, and blew in his neck, making him squeal. "Are you Kee's baby boy?"
"Kee bay!" he assured her. Then, turning, he patted the stubble on Michael's cheek as though to reassure his father that he hadn't been turned. "Da bay!"
She had intended to tell Michael about Max Retzlaff and the New Collective that weekend. The few times she had broached Section business on her visits, Michael had been intensely interested and had always made comments and suggestions that proved helpful. But by tacit agreement, they seldom talked shop. Their times together were too short. Instead, they spent the day with the children in the blue and white inner courtyard of Michael's blue and white bungalow near the edge of the town of Rhodes. Some time in the future they might all venture out to be seen together, but this was not yet the time.
The courtyard garden was largely untended, a sea of green and light gold dotted with scarlet blossoms, not unlike the countryside outside the city. But there were footpaths for playing horsy and for playing catch, and Nikita and her son made good use of them. It was so good to be there with him and Michael and Adam that she could almost forget that she didn't belong there, that she could only visit her son like a favorite aunt because if he called her Mama and someone heard it, that someone could know who he was--the son of Section One's chief and its top former operative. Who might make that connection was not important. All that was important was that the connection would never be made.
"I got him a doll," she told Kelly the day before she left for Rhodes to celebrate his birthday. "It's a boy doll, all blue except for a pink face."
"Very PC. You sure Michael won't mind?"
"I asked him. He said, 'Why should I mind?'" But her thoughts were fragmented, and now she rose and began to pace. "We finally got a visual on Max Retzlaff, and I'm having a hell of a time being professional about it."
"Why?" Kelly frowned, her friendly concern immediately edged with professionalism. "This is the top dog of the New Collective, right?"
"Yeah. It took him a while, but he's managed to pull together most of the serious threats in the old one." Nikita paused in front of one of the screens in the Perch and tapped a few keys. Retzlaff, dark and arrogant, gazed back at them. "This is the man who killed my father."
"The shooter?"
"There were two shooters. He stood between them with his arms folded like he was the king of the world. God, I see him in my dreams. And now I see him on my screen. He's probably no worse than any of the other freaked-out terrorists we've faced, but there is something about this man that freaks me out. There aren't that many of them that I've really hated, but I hate this man so bad I can taste it."
"The killing wasn't his idea. It was Philip's."
Startled, they both half turned to see Christopher walking toward them from the top of the stairs. Stalwart, comforting Chris, once her father's friend and her emotional support in AlphaGroup since the beginning, long before she and the Bear had become friends.
"You think that makes any difference to me? He killed my father, and he loved every minute of it."
"I know." Chris squeezed Kelly's shoulder and she briefly touched his hand before he withdrew it and sat down between them. "Go ahead. Hate him. You're entitled. But it all happened because it was what Philip wanted--to get Adam free without exposing himself to torture and compromising the agency. How much clearer could he have made it?"
She remembered her father's bodyguards restraining her when she tried to rush forward as he was gunned down only yards away at the other end of the bridge. They knew what was going to happen. They knew what was going to happen.
Because her father had told them, given them their instructions, before he went to his death.
"Just another day on the job," she said bitterly. "Nothing personal, right? Dammit, Chris! That man killed my father!"
"You keep saying that," Kelly said softly, "as though you need to justify your feelings about him."
"I'm head of Section. I'm not supposed to have feelings about any of them."
"Bull. Who do you think you are--one of these computers? Operations, maybe? Didn't he ever hate a bad guy?"
"Gustav Pogue." Nikita gave a short, bitter laugh. "Doesn't count. Paul was going nuts at the time."
"What?"
"Oh, it's...a really, really long story. But there was his ex-wife's husband too. And George. Always George. I cannot believe this. I'm talking about Paul Wolfe as though he were my role model!"
"If you want to stay alive, you could do worse."
"He didn't stay alive. I bet he was obsessed with something when he tried to rescue Adam from the Collective. Pickup mission with no backup? Too stupid, and he wasn't stupid." She sighed, feeling a little better. "Okay, enough. I have go home and get ready for a birthday party this weekend."
Later, as she began her packing, something made her pull out her PDA to see if there might be a last-minute message from Michael. She took one look at the LCD display, and it was as though the world slipped out from under her and sent her spinning into a void. On the edge of panic, she wondered what was the matter with her. There were only three words:
"Come now. Tonight."
II. Confrontation
It was a warm day for winter. He and Adam were both sweating as they sat together at a table made of pale gold wood in the blue and white room--he working at his computer and Adam on the floor next to him with his cheek resting against his father's leg. The child couldn't bring himself to stray more than a few feet; even a couple of hours as Max Retzlaff's captive had brought back all of the horrible memories they had tried so hard to soothe away. From time to time Michael would stop manipulating the mouse and lay his hand on the child's head, and it seemed to help: early in the afternoon, Adam fell asleep and slept for nearly two hours, apparently without dreaming. Maybe it wasn't as bad as he'd anticipated, Michael thought. Maybe he had gotten Adam out of there before irreparable damage was done. Maybe.
"Are you looking for Luc in the computer?" Adam asked when he woke.
"Yes." Michael stroked his son's hair again. "Go back to sleep." Adam sighed and relaxed, and it was only after he had dozed off again that Michael realized that neither of them had had anything to eat all day.
Laying the mouse aside, he rested his forehead on his clasped hands and swore softly. It was a self-indulgence he seldom permitted, but at the worst times in his life, when everything was wrong and there seemed to be no way to put it right, it felt good to let go and swear in every language he knew. You didn't have to shout it out. You could hiss to yourself it as he was doing now, and if you let go enough, you didn't even have to hit anything to release most of the tension at least momentarily. He wanted to hit something now--to smash something to pieces as though it were Max Retzlaff's skull. But that would wake Adam.
He brought up the video of Luc as he had last seen him, the baby's arm resting casually along Retzlaff's right shoulder as he gazed around, fascinated as usual by any new environment--pointing, gazing, pointing, and from time to time smiling. Adam stood on the man's left, pale and terrified, his dark eyes huge. When Retzlaff told him to speak to the image of his father on the screen, he had whispered, "Daddy, I want to go home" and began to sob and tremble, his right arm immobile in Retzlaff's grip. The only time his captor had let go was to prevent Luc from grabbing Retzlaff's sunglasses.
"Call it a gesture of good faith," he had said. "You may have one of them back, and you may choose which one. He will be delivered to you at a place not far from you which I will designate. After that, we will begin to talk seriously, you and I. The directory, the locations of all substations, and everything Section is planning for the New Collective. This is not negotiable...."
By the time the screen went dark, Luc was crying too, but only because Adam was.
That had been at six-thirty this morning, less than an hour after Michael had awakened from a drugged sleep to discover that both his sons were missing from their beds in a house where he had believed no one from his past life but Nikita knew they were living.
Fool.
Again he swore, and again restrained himself from striking the table with his fist.
Fool.
And so he had made the choice that had to be made, leaving his healthy, smiling son in a situation that his damaged, weeping son could not survive with his fragile psyche intact. And now, in a part of his consciousness where he did not want to go but had to, his own voice cried out in silent despair: How can I make her understand?
Oddly enough, knowing that she would hate him for it before she would love him again made him love her even more. You're the only part of me that's not dead, he had told her once. The only one of us who still has a soul. He knew only too well that there was often a high price to pay for the explosive vagaries of Nikita's soul. But he had long ago determined that for him, that price would never be too high.
The sun, warm and mellow, slid down the brilliant blue sky toward night. She would be there tonight, he knew. But in the meantime, he had work to do.
By a stroke of extremely good luck, Retzlaff's video input at the time of their second contact had been as high resolution as Michael's finely optimized output screen. That provided the only chance he had of locating his enemy before the three days were up. But it would take a great deal of time and concentration to work that advantage to the limit. His concentration was virtually complete because he willed it so. But he had only three days, and even the legacy of Birkoff's genius had its limits.
It was dark when she came at last. The leisurely transportation schedule to and from the mainland would have been a problem for her; planes came once a day, ferry boats considerably less often. But she would be traveling alone; Helen had come several days ago and was already in residence at a nearby hotel.
He did not know how Nikita would manage to get there tonight. He only knew that she would do it because he had asked her to.
When he heard a helicopter landing in the trees a few hundred yards behind the house, he knew that the time of reckoning had come.
He had never seen her so pale. It was completely dark now, but her pallor cut the courtyard darkness like an ivory knife.
"You chose to leave our baby with Max Retzlaff?" It was only a whisper, but in his heart it was yet another knife.
"Adam can't survive another three days in captivity, Nikita. It would destroy him."
He had been holding her shoulders in his hands and her gaze with his eyes. Now she twisted free and backed away, her eyes like huge burning holes. "Split in two, right? You fucking thought it through and split yourself in two and did what had to be done. My god. Oh, my god." He reached for her, but she backed away. "Don't. Just...don't."
"Kita--"
"I have to get away from here." She was whispering again, but it was as though she were screaming at him.
"This is your home. You need to be here."
"I'm a visitor here. I don't have a home. And now I may not have a son any more, thanks to you." And she was gone, running away from him toward the small door in the back wall of the courtyard--the little door that had been the deciding factor in his purchase of this house after he brought Luc back from London a year ago. The little door that would let Luc's mother come and go unseen.
Except for Retzlaff? But if that were true...
Splitting himself in two again, knowing that the other part of him was weeping somewhere deep within his soul, he went back into the house and picked up his laptop.
Toward midnight Adam had a nightmare and woke screaming for his father. "Big glass eyes," he sobbed, clinging to Michael's neck, his fingernails digging. "He had glass eyes, Daddy!" He knew what sunglasses were, had seen them on his father countless times. But his grip on reality was tenuous again, and Retzlaff's dark glasses had become the focus of his terror. It took Michael the better part of an hour to get him back to sleep, and even then he didn't dare leave the room, but sat on the floor, leaning back against the edge of the bed, using his thigh as a pad for the mouse.
It was close to dawn before she returned.
He must have dozed, because she was suddenly sitting next to him on the floor, taking him in her arms and pressing her face to his. They held each other fiercely and in silence for a time. Michael heard himself sob once, hiding his face against her shoulder, and she whispered, "Don't, love. We'll find him."
"I'll bring him back to you. I swear it."
"We'll bring him back to us," was all she said, but it was more than enough--that and the fact that, like him, she wore a sleeveless black T-shirt and long black pants. Dressed for work, her hair in two pony tails on her shoulders. Like him, she knew what had to be done and was ready to do it as soon as they had enough intel to proceed.
He had never loved her as much as he did at that moment.
"Helen said I would have done the same thing for the same reason.'"
"What did you say?"
"I screamed at her. 'Shut up! Shut up!' Then I knelt down next to her and put my head in her lap and cried like a little kid." Her hand patted his shoulder, Helen-like. "She's so solid. I don't know what would have happened to me tonight if I hadn't had her here."
"Was she right?"
"I honestly don't know. I hope so." She looked over at his laptop lying on the floor next to them and sat straighter, smoothing stray wisps of hair behind her ears. "So where are we on the profile?"
Birkoff's program was an adaptation of the satellite technology that permitted one-meter photographic accuracy from thousands of feet above earth. State-of-the-art technology was required for both input and output, but Section and its enemies were in possession of that more often than not. A close examination of a tiny reflection in Retzlaff's dark wrap-arounds had revealed that the technology involved here was good enough.
"He was facing a window," Nikita breathed. "That's why he had dark glasses on. Our intel says he's light-sensitive"
"Not facing. It was off to his left, but the reflection is there."
"'Pixels within pixels,' Birkoff said. I thought he was crazy."
"This technology isn't widely known. He hacked into DOD to get at it." Carefully, Michael moved the mouse. Almost there. And what he had suspected for several hours appeared to be true.
"Is it a weather vane?" Nikita asked, spellbound.
"No." Carefully, now. "Look."
"It's a deer--on a pedestal," she whispered, and then her voice rose with excitement. "It's the entrance to Rhodes harbor!"
Adam stirred and opened his eyes. It was barely morning, but there was enough light for him to see that Nikita was sitting on the floor with his father. Tears rose in the child's dark eyes and trembled there, ready to fall.
"Are you mad at me?"
Guilt. On top of everything else, survivor guilt. As though he didn't have enough to contend with.
Calmly, smoothly, Nikita rose to her feet, sat on the edge of the bed, and stroked the little boy's cheek.
"No. I'm not mad at you. And you're not the extra person in this family. I am."
Michael closed his eyes and pressed his fingers against the lids. Who could have guessed that the heart could burst with love and break with pain at the same time?
"You love Luc best," the child insisted.
"He's my son, Adam. That makes him special to me, just like you were special to your mother. But I love you too, and I'm very glad you're safe."
Abruptly, the child came to a sitting position and flung himself into her arms. After she had held him for a few moments, he said, "He's in a room with a hole in the ceiling."
"Who is?"
"Luc."
Over the child's head, Nikita and Michael stared at each other, she wide-eyed with new hope, he feeling a shiver slide across his neck and shoulders and up the back of his head.
"What kind of a hole, Adam?" he asked finally, and cleared his throat of the huskiness there.
"There's glass in it, like a window. The sun came in."
A skylight.
Luc was in a room with a skylight, a certain distance in certain direction from the entrance to Rhodes harbor. And another of Birkoff's programs would find that distance and that direction for them.
"Do you have Birkoff's ESS?" Nikita asked softly, and he nodded yes.
The Earthbound Sextant Simulator was another of Birkoff's intuitive leaps of faith based on his vast computer knowledge. After giving Adam his breakfast and sharing a bottle of water, Michael and Nikita were back at the computer, now sitting at the little round kitchen table with an empty high chair reminding them what they were doing there every time they looked up. Adam sat on the floor near them, staring down at his hands, then playing with his fingers. Finally he retrieved a toy truck and sat with it in his lap, hitting the wheels with the palm of his hand to make them spin. The rasping noise they made was exquisitely irritating, but no one suggested that he stop.
"What time of day was it?" Nikita had asked before they began working.
"The second contact was just after 0900."
The shadows in the image were clear. "Then he was northwest of the harbor entrance."
"Yes."
The calculations necessary for the ESS were much more complex than those involved in resolving the image had been, and it was necessary to hack into a mainframe in order to get them done in an acceptable amount of time. The saving grace was that there was no need to calculate an artificial horizon, since the horizon on the image was clearly visible.
At one point late in the number crunching, while they waited for the current calculations to be completed, Nikita asked, "Are you sure Retzlaff doesn't know I'm Luc's mother?"
"It's a high card. If he had it, he'd have played it."
"We must have done something right."
"It's what we do from now on that counts."
III. Mission
He was in mission mode, she thought. Already? How can he--? But she had promised herself and Helen not to go that route again.
"Do you love the man he is or the man you want him to be?"
"I'm not sure."
"Well, you'd bloody well better make up your mind. It's past time. Will he take you back after the things you said to him?"
"Yes."
"Because he loves you for who you are."
"Or in spite of it."
"Nonsense, Nikita. With the two of you, 'in spite of' wouldn't bear the traffic."
"All RIGHT! All right. 'Because of'."
"Good girl. Go thou and do likewise, and then bring that poor baby home."
And now, watching him work as though the work were all there was, yet knowing that his love for Luc was always a part of him even when it was invisible, she pondered a new theory on who her role model as head of Section ought to be.
Within the next hour, they had determined that the building where Luc was being held was within a four-square-block area.
She had chartered a helicopter in her mad dash to get to the island, but they both knew that wouldn't work now. An island-jumping copter pilot with a two-passenger charter job would remember having seen them, and it was essential that no one remember having seen them. And so they spent half the afternoon suspended beneath a hot-air balloon, Nikita in a T-shirt of Michael's and a pair of her own shorts accidentally left behind on a previous visit, Michael dressed similarly in unremarkable gray, holding hands and appearing to gawk over the side right along with the tourists and a few locals enjoying a newly available diversion. After the tour they changed clothes again, balancing emotionally in a wire-thin space between growing dread and sheer exultation. Nearly half of their three days were up, but in the four-square-block area they had examined as though it were the gold at the end of the rainbow, there was only one building with a skylight in its roof.
Adam had shown no fear while they were flying beneath a balloon, but when they explained as dusk fell that they were going to get Luc soon, terror came into his eyes.
"Who's going to take care of me while you're gone?"
"Helen will, "Nikita answered. "At the hotel."
"Some people might steal me."
"If there are lots of people around, no one can steal you because someone would see them." It was true enough that she was able to say it with conviction. There was simply no alternative.
Reassured, he nevertheless frowned. "She reads to me too long."
"We'll ask her not to."
The rain began as they left the hotel. They had not thought to wear jackets even though the temperature had fallen below 15 C as night came on. Nikita had bought a watch cap to prevent her hair from catching light, and by the time they reached the square white house with the skylight, their clothes and her cap were saturated. The wind came up--a mild wind by other standards but an intense and lashing one. They barely noticed it, and as they stood hugging the wall of the house, neither of them was shivering.
They had planned the mission earlier, but there was one thing that had not been said aloud. She wondered if he took it for granted that she knew. But apparently not.
"You know what the endgame has to be," he whispered close to her ear.
"We can't leave anyone alive to fire on us when we're carrying Luc. Michael--I killed six people to save you from being blown up. If I have to kill six more to keep Luc alive, I'll do it."
"Good," was his only answer.
They gained entry at the back of the house, in leap-frog mode with guns cocked, covering each other's backs as they had always done. The building was apparently a safe house rather than a substation, for there were no guards. They encountered two men playing cards and one exercising, and shot them all, their silencers thumping in the quiet house. Retzlaff did not appear, and their certainty grew that they would find him on the second floor in a room with a skylight.
One bare bulb burned there, and the skylight showed nothing but blowing rain and darkness.
Clad only in a diaper, Luc was curled up sucking his thumb in the center of a circle of moisture on a bare mattress. The other end of the rope around his waist was tied to the brass headboard.
He did not sense their presence in the hallway, hugging the wall on either side of the door, Michael's weapon pointed upwards and Nikita's at the floor. But Retzlaff did. He had been reading in a straight chair, but when they stormed the room he was already on his feet, gun in hand. His first, automatic reaction would be the last decision he ever made, and it was a bad one: he took his eyes off Michael in order to aim at Luc.
Michael's bullet exploded the hand and sent the gun flying. As Retzlaff fell to his knees, groaning, Michael headed for Luc and Nikita headed for Retzlaff.
In spite of the pain, those arrogant dark eyes looked up at her with admiration. "So, Nikita," muttered, wincing. "You must be the mother."
"And the daughter." Grasping her weapon by the barrel, she struck him across the face with all the hate she held in her soul, and then drew her arm back to strike again.
"Nikita, stop."
Knowing that Retzlaff was barely conscious, she allowed herself to look over at Michael, who was holding Luc in his arms, his hand turning the baby's face away from her.
"For him?" She gestured toward Retzlaff, her disbelieving gaze fixed on Michael and their son.
"No. For yourself."
She did not want to hear him. She wanted to beat this man to death. But in memory she saw herself kicking a helpless Martin Henderson in a recurring dream, then waking from it desolate and empty, as though she had lost her self yet again each time she dreamed that dream.
Turning slowly back, she pressed the gun barrel against the left side of Max Retzlaff's chest. Looking into the still defiant dark eyes, she pulled the trigger once. When he fell to the floor, she leaned down and closed his eyes with a finality that was almost gentle.
Then she and Michael were holding each other and their son. Luc's diaper was saturated and he smelled foul, and the two of them were wet through and through from the rain. But nobody seemed to mind any of it, and Luc was smiling at her.
"Kee bay," he told her without being asked. "Widey wake."
That night she and Michael made love as though it were the first time only better. Then they took their sleeping baby from his crib and snuggled him between them in their bed.
After a while, she said quietly, "You said once that if you'd found me desperate then, you'd have risked all our lives to bring me home. Would you risk all our lives with me to try to keep Luc and Adam safe from now on?"
He was silent for a long time, his hand unmoving on her shoulder. Then: "Can you live with it?"
"I've been living with it for almost a decade."
"You never chose it."
"I choose it now, Michael. It's the only way to keep these little boys safe."
Again he was silent for a time, and then he said calmly, "Then bring me in."
"You mean," she answered just as calmly, "bring us both in."
IV. Decision
"Let me get this clear," said the Chair of Peter. "You're proposing that this man become your second and that Section provide body guards for your children. Have I got that right?"
"Quinn did Madeline, and these holos wouldn't even have to have personalities. Just eyes and ears and big memory capacities and concealed weapons. Their appearance could change from day to day. Luc and Adam wouldn't even know they were there, and neither would anyone else unless they had to act."
"That is a very tall order."
"She could do it with her eyes shut."
Watching and listening, Michael marveled at Nikita's demeanor. She despised Charles the Chair for a fool, and yet her manner toward him implied deference while remaining self-assured. In short, she worked him like the pro she had become.
It was Alex Cornu they would have to contend with.
"How did Retzlaff find you?" he asked Michael now, in full Stare Bear mode.
"Applying Occam's razor, it's likely that one of the operatives stationed at the safe house recognized me and followed me home."
Cornu's eyebrows rose, and even though he was not looking at her, Michael sensed Nikita smothering a grin of approval. "And how did you gain access once you found it?"
"Together."
Christopher chuckled.
They had determined beforehand that his part in the deception regarding Luc's paternity must not be revealed to the rest of the Group, and that the only way to assure his safety was to induce genuine, incredulous surprise on his part. And so Nikita had begun by telling the Group that Michael was her child's biological father and caregiver--a truth that Chris knew she had been guarding with her life for a year. When the effect was as she and Michael had planned--dropped jaw, sudden pallor making his freckles stand out like bacon bits--she had gone smoothly on to apologize to him for the "deception" of telling him that he was her child's father. Chris had had the presence of mind to simply continue to stare at her while the purpose of her current deception gradually sank in--a presence of mind that Michael genuinely admired given the circumstances. It had taken the man only a few seconds to realize that they were protecting him, and now he was playing the game right along with them.
"It's called synergy." Just the right amount of bitterness and anger in his voice. "The two of them plot and scheme like the pros they are, and end up taking out the head of the New Collective and three of his minions. Know what, gentlemen? We could do worse than to let them run Section together."
"Michael Samuelle is a renegade," purred Hyena, smiling. "He's been out in the cold for well over a year." So there, Nikita.
"He didn't turn, Steven. We let him go, remember? Because he saved Section's butt with the old Collective."
"True, but--"
"You lied to us." It was Cornu, now staring at Nikita.
"I have never lied to you," she answered quietly, "except where it concerned my son. If he's safe and we're together, I'd have no reason ever to lie to you again."
"Would you compromise Section to save him if it came to that?"
"We didn't, did we?"
Silence.
Finally Cornu turned his gaze to Michael. "Could you accept Nikita's authority as head of Section?"
He had expected the question, and prepared for it. "I find it easier to accede to Nikita's choices than she does to accede to mine." I never let anyone see the other half, but it's there, always a part of me.
There was a universal, albeit silent, intake of breath. Even Nikita was staring at him as though he had set off a small bomb--small enough not to injure anyone, but with enough force to shake a number of deeply ingrained preconceptions.
Cornu was the first to recover. "Because of the nature of your personalities?"
"Because of the nature of our choices."
"Oh? How so?"
"When we differ, her choices tend to express values latent in me, while mine tend to express values at odds with hers. I'm pragmatic. Nikita is innovative--"
"Not true." All eyes turned to Nikita, fascinated at the turn the interrogation had taken. "I'm a maverick. You all know that. Michael's values are more Section's than mine are."
And Cornu asked softly, gently, his gaze moving deliberately from her to Michael and back again: "Given that, Missy, what's wrong with this picture?"
Too soon, Michael thought. Too soon for her. But it was done. He had known all along what the Group would eventually decide, and even if he hadn't wanted it, he could not have stopped it. And coming from Cornu, she might not find her displacement so painful.... Incredulous, he watched her face as a half smile came and went in an instant--too quickly for anyone but Cornu and possibly Christopher to have seen it.
"What's wrong with this picture," she replied calmly, coolly, her gaze moving from Cornu to Michael and holding his, "is that the wrong person is in charge of it."
Their gaze held, and there was not a sound in the room until he asked softly, "Are you sure?"
"Oh, yes." Now her eyes moved back to Cornu, and there was triumph in them. She had passed yet another test, perhaps the most important one ever. "I'm sure."
"Now, look here," said the Chair of Peter, sensing that he'd been had, but not sure exactly how. "Now, look here! This is preposterous!"
"Mr. Chairman," said the Bear, his eyes still on Nikita with what Michael identified unquestioningly as pride, "I move that the Group discuss this matter in private."
"You knew what they'd do," Michael told her.
They paced across the roof of the building together, having been banished from the room while the Group conferred about their destiny. The mild, humid air that passed for winter on Rhodes was nearly twenty-four hours in their past; here it was bitter cold, with the wind whipping sparse, low drifts across bare roof as though they were made of sand, and blowing their hair around their faces. She held his arm as they paced, both of them with gloved hands and collars up around their ears.
"I wasn't sure. If I had been, I wouldn't have been so nervous. I should have counted on the Bear." Serenity, he thought. She wasn't happy. It was possible that neither of them would ever be really happy. But together they had come to a place where they could live.
"Are you sure we can do this, Nikita?"
"My father thought I was born to be head of Section, but he was wrong." Putting her arm around his shoulders, she made a leather fist and bumped it against his cheek. "You were born to be head of Section. I was born to give the head of Section a hard time."
He gave a brief, muted laugh, surprising both of them. "I know."
"And you know I can't promise never to argue with you. But things are different now."
"How different?"
"I've been the leader for almost two years. I know that as a leader you can't do your job with somebody pulling against you. There's a little thing called loyalty, and ..." They had come to the edge of the roof. Directly in front of them all that was solid dropped away into windy nothing, but neither of them had ever been afraid of heights, and the sky above was as blue as their son's eyes."...I trust you. Remember that next time I get in your face about something."
"Will you remember it?" he asked huskily.
"Probably not. So remind me."
He smoothed a flying strand of hair behind her ear, and leaned his forehead against hers. They stood in silence, the face of each protecting the other from the wind, until they realized that Christopher was standing in the doorway of the stair enclosure in the middle of the windswept roof. One look at his expression told them that they had shot the moon yet again.
V. Section
Watching from above as Michael walked across Section's common area three months later, Nikita tried to put into words for herself how he looked as he walked there. As though he had never been away? Yes, but that didn't come near to saying it all. He looked...like a black star. That was it. A black star with his planets rotating around him too slowly to appear to move across the sky, and yet keeping their orbits over time, held there by his personal gravity. Each would draw a little closer now and then, to be briefed or debriefed or reprimanded or, at her urging, praised--in a soft, steady voice, looking away and then back and then away, while the operative on the receiving end stared at him in astonishment gradually turning to unadulterated joy as he or she drifted back into orbit, feet barely seeming to touch the floor. The first time his second-in-command had observed the phenomenon, she had to go elsewhere and blow her nose, getting her teariness under control by speculating about what the Section of years past might have been like had Operations or Madeline ever praised anyone without an iron hand inside the velvet glove. No, she decided. That would be a steel blade for their predecessors. Michael was the iron hand, still just as real as the velvet glove she had convinced him to don when he interacted with his operatives. They all knew the iron was there. That was why they reacted to his praise as though it were buried treasure.
As she watched him walk the walk, she remembered telling Kelly once that he was 'watchable,' and smiled.
They took coffee breaks, something that Operations and Madeline had never seemed to need and their operatives never quite got. In those days you went out for coffee when your shift was over, or you went to the lounge where nobody ever really lounged, and inhaled your coffee to prime yourself for a mission or a debriefing. These days, Michael and Nikita turned down the lights in the Perch and had their coffee together at a small table they had brought in for that purpose. At first they felt uneasy doing it; Section tradition had it that when the lights were down, those in charge were "up there" doing something they shouldn't be doing during working hours. The latest new regime had, in fact, been there and done that themselves once when their relationship was new and Michael was temporarily minding the store. But once had been enough. The Perch wasn't particularly suited to intimate moments, and neither of them any longer felt the need to mark their territory.
"I watched you when you were on your way up here just now," she told him, laying her hand on his, their coffee mugs exuding aromatic steam, the near darkness broken only by the light from the computer screens. "You looked like you were somewhere else--thinking about something else. That's unusual for you when you're here."
"I was remembering Paris. Operations and I walked through and left together just before the Paris hub was incinerated." He turned his hand and took hers in it, reflected lights flickering in his eyes. "It's a good memory--much better than the last one I have of him."
She thought for a moment. "When I sent you to debrief with him that last time. When my father was here."
"Yes."
"How was he then?"
"Displaced into despair. I don't like to think of him dying like that."
"He died on a mission, Michael. We'll probably never know what it was. He didn't care enough about Adam to risk his life just to rescue him from the Collective. But he died doing something. When he was in despair, he didn't do anything but be in despair."
Michael stared at her for a moment, and then said softly, "Thank you."
"Do you feel guilty about taking his place?"
"No. But I wonder what feelings he'd have if he could see me now."
"Mixed."
"He hated you for displacing him."
Ah, so that was it. "Mixed. He never hated you. You were his heir apparent, and he was afraid of you. But he was proud of you too." She sighed. "Which is more than he ever was of me."
"Your father was proud of you, Kita."
As she gazed back at him, tears came to her eyes. Finally she whispered, "Thank you," and wiped the tears away with the back of her free hand. "So." Turning up the lights again: "Here's where we are on Islamabad."
Three months moved toward six, and sailing became less smooth, although in ways she had expected it to.
"You know she's right, Michael. They need a good solid psychological orientation for the way they have to live. We needed it, but we never got it. In the CIA they get--"
"This isn't the CIA." He did not stop typing.
"Yeah, I know. But--"
"She gets them for two days." He closed his mouth on the last word, and she set her chin. But there was no use arguing; he'd already made a concession, and he never conceded by degrees, only all at once. She thought briefly about arguing anyway, sure that she was right. But over the years she had finally come to realize that being right just wasn't enough sometimes.
And anyway....
"You were supposed to remind me that I trust you, but you never do it," she said crossly. He shook his head, not looking up from the keyboard. "Why not?"
"If I have to remind you, there's nothing to remind you of."
He stopped typing then, and they exchanged a long look that spoke more of patience and mutual tolerance than it did of harmony, much less affection. But there were not nearly as many such moments as she had originally anticipated.
"So, time to talk to Kelly, right?" Blank stare. "Time to talk to Kelly. Right. Oh--" Innocence tinged with irony: "She wants to know how to explain to them that they might have to kill each other someday."
"What does she expect us to do about a rogue operative? Call the police?" A very faint smile. "Call the CIA?"
"You caved!"
Since Kelly's reaction was about what she expected, Nikita leaned back against the door of the MedLab main office and relaxed, one hand on the door knob and the other in the pocket of her jacket. Kelly stood behind her desk. A moment before she had been sitting there, but now she was on her feet, both palms slapping down on the desktop in outraged emphasis. Nikita had resigned herself early to the fact that Michael and Kelly would probably never get along personally, even though she was certain that each harbored a grudging professional admiration for the other. From this she had concluded that the best place for her to be was between them. It was also an exciting place to be, and although she told herself that this kind of excitement she could do without, she knew deep down that she rather enjoyed it. Nonetheless, Kelly had never before been quite this furious.
"You're supposed to be an advocate for the rest of us. Hell, I don't know if you're spaced on the main man's mojo or if you really agree with him most of the time."
"What do you think?"
"Half and half," Kelly growled, dark eyes still smoldering.
"Oh, come on." Satisfied that it was safe to approach ground zero, Nikita moved to sit across the desk from her friend. "You respect him and you don't even like him. Why's it so hard to accept that I respect him?"
"Respect? HA! Not the word I'd use." But she pulled out her chair and sat down. "When we talked about this, you agreed with me."
"I still do."
"Then why--?
"He's not going to change his mind, Kel. Trust me. It's not gonna happen. I talked him into half of what you asked for and twice what he wanted to give you. That's it. Mission's over." Silence. "You feel betrayed, don't you?"
"You bet I do. You and I were so in sync. We were running this place like--"
"Like it was a family."
"We could do worse."
"But it's not a family. Madeline used to tell me it was when she was trying to mess with my head, but we both knew better. It's the most covert intelligence agency on the planet, and that is nothing like a family. You know I was toughening up before Michael was even in the picture. I was even toughening up with you. But I don't have what it takes any more than Chris would. Michael does."
Kelly scowled, but her angry gaze was turning into a brooding stare. "Chris says it sounds to him like half of Section thinks Michael's God in black and the other half thinks he's their hardass new stepdad."
Nikita laughed. "That about covers it."
"You're happy." It was an accusation, but also an acknowledgment.
"I'm very happy some of the time. That's all any of us here can expect." But there was more to it than that....
"Do they all see me as their advocate with Michael?"
Walter studied the piece of equipment he was working on, which looked like a very fine filament delicately balanced on a tiny fulcrum. "If that's spelled c-o-n-d-u-i-t, yeah."
"They don't see him as their adversary, then."
"Not really. But it's scary to work for the best of the best, and it feels good to have somebody they know and trust between them and him."
"They don't trust him?"
"Sure they do. I mean, hey--you know anybody else who's more predictable? But he hasn't been their momma for two and a half years like you have."
"Oh, Walter."
He waved a hand at her, a brushing-aside movement. "And you've got his ear. So how'd you expect them to feel?"
"Jealous."
"That too. But it's a good trade-off. Something in it for them too, as long as you CON DU IT."
"Eeeeeewwwwwww!" But she couldn't help laughing.
"That's better." He used a tiny tweezers to shift the filament slightly. "So what's bothering you, Sugar? Still feeling like you broke your promise to your dad?"
"No." Grabbing a rolling chair, she sat down opposite him at his counter. "I've pretty much worked through that. He said somebody had to 'make things better' and he and I were the only ones who could. He was wrong. Michael is the leader that Veytoss predicted. My father's gone and I'm here, so I get to decide who's the only one who can do what he wanted done. I didn't set it up that way. He did." She bent her head, running her fingers through her hair from forehead to nape, sensing that Walter was looking at her now rather than at what he was working on. They were silent for a few moments, and then she said in a low voice, "What's bothering me is that I'm starting to like it here."
"Ah."
Without looking at him, she muttered, "You're smiling, but it's not funny."
"So you're finally learning to sing."
"Not funny, Walter."
"Nikita, look at me." She looked up, and saw that he was indeed smiling at her, but not with amusement. "I'm happy for you. I thought that kind o' thing was allowed in Section these days." When she could only swallow the lump that was suddenly in her throat, he touched the filament lightly with the tweezers. "See? If you're careful, it doesn't fall either way. It balances out."
Her only answer was to pick up his free hand and press her cheek to it. "How about coming to dinner again before we go to the farmhouse next weekend?"
"Aw, I know you. You just want Spybaby to get another chance to pull my hair."
"Walter, you have to be firm with him. Just tell him No. He doesn't do it to Michael and me any more."
"That," said the guru of Section One, "is because he knows who's in charge. Just like they know it around here."
Epilogue
Michael's house in Belgium, which had felt like a refrigerator the first time she had seen it, was filled with light breezes and the scent of wild flowers. The same window still refused to close, but in the summer, such things didn't seem important.
The sleepy little town a few kilometers to the west could scarcely be called a town. In addition to the grocery store, there was a petrol station, a small coffee shop, and a souvenir store for the tourists who stopped to fill their stomachs and their cars' tanks. Full of badly made stuffed animals and garish figurines, it was Adam and Luc's favorite place to visit.
As Michael followed them patiently around the store, repeating, "No. No. Not today. No." yet not appearing to be the least bit bored, Nikita stood thoughtfully before an apparel rack on which were hanging several teddies that had caught her attention. Cheap. She shouldn't give them a second glance. Yet she couldn't take her eyes off the pale blue one, which was suggesting possibilities that set her pulse racing.
She wasn't sure how long she'd been standing there looking at it when Michael's arm reached around her and deftly removed the object of her scrutiny from its hanger. Leaning into the curve of his shoulder, reveling in his warmth and his scent, she murmured, "Why bother? You'll just take it off."
"No." Reaching around her with the other arm, he rested his chin on her shoulder as he folded the filmy blue thing neatly in front of them, smaller and smaller. "You will." Taking her hand, he deposited the blue square in it, touched the tip of his tongue to her throat, and moved away with palpable reluctance.
By the time she had purchased the item in question, her heart rate was under control. But turning, she stopped, suddenly chilled.
The wooden floor of the little shop's main aisle stretched before her, sunlight pouring in through the open doorway past Michael, Luc, and Adam--moving away from her together as Michael and Adam had done in the train station two and a half years ago. Between them walked her son, each of them holding one of his hands, the sun catching in his hair--fine golden strands tumbling around his ears in curls like his father's. Walking away from her....
She caught her breath, forcing the haunting image away, laying a persistent ghost just as Luc looked over his shoulder at her.
"See a mama! " But before she could join the game: "See a reb poober, Mama!"
"He means a red Pooh Bear," explained Adam, proud to be the family expert on Lucspeak.
Laughing now, the bad moment gone, she clasped the hand that Michael extended to her and moved with them into the summer sunlight.
finis
By Claire Gabriel
"He and Nikita, together, are quite good."
Madeline, speaking of Michael, in "All Good Things"
Prologue
Michael Samuelle had believed that this waking nightmare was one he would never have again.
It had ended, he thought, on a white bridge crossed in one direction by a child, and in the other by a man who would in moments be lying dead on it.
But he had been wrong. The very man who had dominated that other scene--standing arrogantly, legs apart and arms folded, while the two flanking him shot down their enemies' leader like a stray dog--that very man now faced him on a computer screen, his eyes hidden behind dark glasses, his mouth curving in a smile no less arrogant than his stance on that bridge.
"If you want to see your son again," said the man, whose name was Retzlaff, "you'll do as I tell you. No games this time. I was there. I saw what fools you made of Graf and Haled. You will not make such a fool of me. Is that understood?" Remaining silent, Michael realized that he had been holding his breath, and let it out slowly, silently, determined that his adversary not know that he had been holding it. "Very well. You don't have to answer me. You only have to obey me."
"I no longer have access to information in Section's computers."
"Oh, come now. You have access to anything you want." Silence. "Good. You have three days." And the screen went dark.
Michael stood silent, an erect exclamation point in a pretty blue and white room mellow with Mediterranean sunlight. It was a mild, warm day for winter, but he felt as though he were frozen in place.
"Daddy?"
He flinched, a painfully unfamiliar sensation. He had not realized that he wasn't alone in the blue and white room while he viewed the transmission from Retzlaff. Slowly he turned to meet the dark gaze of the child who stood in the doorway--a dazed, still-terrified little boy who looked back at him with accusation.
"I'm the extra kid in this family," Adam informed him, on the verge of tears, and Michael realized that at this moment the child's fear was not for himself but for his absent brother. "You should have let them keep me instead."
The first and only time the man she privately called Stare Bear had asked her to dinner, Nikita had been hugely disconcerted--not only by the apparent intent of the invitation, but by the possibility that she was being tested yet again, and the absolute necessity of responding as though her life depended on it--since it probably did.
When she asked him to lunch almost a year to the day since she had become head of Section One, she was confident that his testing of her, though ongoing, was not nearly as intense as it had once been. They had come to know one another, if not precisely to trust one another, in the interim. After all, Alex Cornu was the de facto leader of Alpha Group, the five men to whom she was accountable for her actions as head of Section. If they wanted her canceled, they would have her canceled. But she was fairly certain that the Bear would not have her killed for asking the question she would ask today, and fairly certain was enough. The time had come for her to get answers about Adrian.
Much to his amusement, she took him beneath two golden arches in the shape of an M into a place where she was sure he had never been before. "Your choice of venue is intriguing, Missy," he teased her, squinting up into the winter sunlight at a sign proclaiming the specialty of the house. "If the medium is the message, the message is something less than seductive."
"I don't want you getting the wrong idea," she had answered lightly, her grin genuine. She might not trust the man completely, but she liked him, and she was sure that the feeling was reciprocated.
"Perish the thought." Standing in the midst of the noonday throng in an overheated room smelling of damp winter coats and salted fat, he studied the menu mounted on the wall above the scurrying clerks. He looked, as usual, immense and impeccable, now very much out of place but not minding at all. "If my wife could see me now, she would have a coronary."
"The Big Mac is pretty good."
"Will you join me in my debauchery?"
"Sure." She would have preferred the salad bar, but when in Rome. "Fries with that?"
"French fries," he mused, stroking his gray mustache. "More fried than French, I dare say."
"Of course. And a chocolate shake?"
"Milk," he said thoughtfully. "Shake. It sounds...unsettled."
"Trust me. You'll love it."
When they were seated at a small table squeezed in among other small tables overlooking the main thoroughfare of the cosmopolitan city where Section now resided, he asked, "Now what is this all about?" and then took an appreciative bite of his Big Mac.
"Why was Paul's predecessor allowed to leave? I've spent weeks trying to chase down the answer, and I'm still coming up empty."
For an instant he was absolutely still, his gaze focused on hers but his other senses intensely alert. She had been careful, though. There was nothing in her question that would reveal to anyone else what it was actually about. When he had satisfied himself of that fact, he went on chewing, swallowed, and wiped his mouth with a paper napkin. "Why here?" he asked with a slight frown.
"Nobody else here cares that I'm asking. It's like hiding in plain sight."
A soft snort--his trademark response when he admired her nerve but didn't approve of what she'd said. "Can we ever be sure of that?"
"Will you ever answer my question?" Her tone was casual, but deliberately so. Manufacturing an easy smile, she took a sip of her shake.
Softly, regretfully: "Don't go there, Nikita."
"I'm there, Alex."
"Why? We thought you were fully committed."
"I'm committed to doing the best job I can, and I'm not going anywhere any time soon if that's what you mean. I can run, but I can't hide. I know that, and...." With one exception, she had always made it a point to tell this man the truth, knowing that lying to him would be her downfall no matter what else she was doing right. "I'm proud of what I've accomplished this past year, and there are other things I'd like to do before...before the job feels finished. But there's something else I want besides what I have in Se--what I have now."
"And that is?"
"A life."
"Ah." It was a sigh. "How disappointing." For once she couldn't tell whether he was serious or not. "A life with your son?"
Careful. No more lies unless she had to. "My son is loved and safe where he is."
He inclined his head in a slight bow. "Good. Very well, then. The person you inquired about was the founder of the organization and thus a unique entity unlikely to transgress against it. She also had her own coterie of subordinates to protect her should anyone try to harm or ca-- remove her. You share neither of those attributes."
"Paul made chopped liver of her coterie of subordinates when he decided to put her out of business."
"Yes. That option was always the fail-safe, you see." Quietly, almost gently: "Your life is the life you have now. You chose it. It's yours for as long as you live. We thought you understood that."
My father chose for me, and I understand nothing of the kind. With an effort, she restrained herself from raising her chin defiantly. "And what if I end up failing?"
"Why should you fail? You're highly intelligent, people-oriented, and with an intuitive tactical facility enhanced by your time in the field and as a mole in Section. The essentials that you lack are seasoning and a tolerance for moral ambiguities."
"I hate moral ambiguities!"
"Quod erat demonstrandum. Unfortunately that tolerance is often the key to survival in our business."
"So you're all going to sit around and wait for me to grow into the job?"
He picked up a French fry, examined it as though it were a specimen, took a bite, and raised his eyebrows appreciatively. "With an appropriate second-in-command, that might happen sooner than you anticipate."
"Kelly's fine! She's--"
"Strong in several of the same areas that you are, but lacking Madeline's--shall we say skill set? She belongs in MedLab, focused operative psychology. You need a second whose strengths complement yours rather than duplicating them. From another...department, perhaps. Someone who would have known that Lavalle would have to be canceled, for example."
"I thought I could turn him back."
"No one is ever turned back. Only turned and, hopefully, caught."
"But--"
"A seasoned operative would have known that."
"You mean an older, more experienced one."
"Of course."
They finished their meal in silence, Nikita wavering between relief that her cancellation was not imminent and despair that her hopes for banishment had been temporarily dashed. Eventually the Bear licked his fingers with his usual fastidiousness and remarked wryly, "My compliments on your taste in cuisine. The atmosphere was...instructive, and the company was delightful." Again, the faintly mocking bow of his gray head. "I suggest, however, that you focus on the possible when you plan your future."
But I am, she thought, smiling more to herself than at him. "It's not a dream. We'll make it happen..."
At first the hardest thing to bear was that her son did not remember her from one visit to the next. He was happy to see her, but he was happy to see everyone, and would go grinning into the arms of anyone who wanted to pick him up. It continually amazed her that Michael, often so taciturn, appeared to be raising a child who smiled almost continuously and seemed to be fond of everyone, even total strangers. And as time went on, Luc came to remember her. As he neared his first birthday, he began calling her "Kee" and remembering to call her that weeks later even when he had not seen her in the interim.
"Maybe it's just because you tell him I'm coming," she said wistfully when she visited in the early fall. She and Michael had been making love, and it was one of their infrequent leisurely times, when everything seemed natural. There were other times, more frequent, when it seemed that they would eat each other up, ravenous with pent-up longing. But tonight they had taken their time, and now she lay across his chest, her fingertips caressing his bare shoulder.
"That's not the way babies remember." His own fingers traced her eyebrow and moved lightly down her cheek. "His heart remembers you because you're his mother."
Who could help loving this man? "I guess I don't know all that much about how babies do anything."
"You know enough. You know how to play with him, and you love it as much as he does." Sadness in his eyes now.
"Don't you?" He looked away, and there was a silence. "You're beautiful with him and Adam. They both adore you." Silence. "You're not happy this way." It was not a question--simply something that had to be said between them sooner or later. "You miss Section." Again, it was not a question.
"'J'accuse'?" he asked softly.
"Maybe a little." She buried her face against his throat, drinking in the roughness of his beard against her cheek. "I know. I'm telling you how you feel again. I'm sorry."
"I miss my self." His voice was flat, soft, virtually emotionless, and yet she sensed despair in it. "Only half of me is here. I love them both so much, but I'm still split in two."
"Just a different two than before."
"Yes."
Good thing you've had a lot of practice. But she held the words back, along with the bitterness that she knew would be in her voice if she spoke them aloud. Michael's ability to function on two levels still bewildered and angered her. Worse, it frightened her. Even though it seldom manifested itself now, she knew it was still there and always would be. It was Michael. That was who he was. "I live my life split in two," he had told her once, but she had never been able to understand how he could abstract a part of himself and still be whole. "I have to keep my feelings separate. That's how I live my life." And now he was having to do it again.
"You shouldn't have to do this all alone."
"We have no choice." But he seemed relieved to have talked to her about his feelings, and after a while, they slept.
She was awakened by the sound of her son's voice from the doorway.
"Widey wake," he informed his parents, confident that his intel would be received as a delightful surprise even though it was scarcely dawn. His vocabulary was growing in great leaps chiefly due to Adam, who never tired of his company and talked to him constantly when they were together.
"I thought," she mumbled sleepily, "that those fences on kids' beds were there to keep them in."
"He's part monkey."
"Mmmmmm. His father's son, you mean." Covering her nakedness with the sheet, she peeked at Luc over its edge. "I see a baby boy!" When he crowed with delight and began to toddle across the floor, she squeaked under her breath, "Michael? Where's my nightshirt?"
"On the floor over here." Amused, damn him.
"Well, give it to me, smartass!" She swiftly made herself presentable under the sheet, Luc watching its undulations with fascination as he approached. "I see a baby boy!" Preparations completed, she swooped him up, both of them laughing, and deposited him between her and Michael. "Whose baby boy are you?" she demanded, and blew in his neck, making him squeal. "Are you Kee's baby boy?"
"Kee bay!" he assured her. Then, turning, he patted the stubble on Michael's cheek as though to reassure his father that he hadn't been turned. "Da bay!"
She had intended to tell Michael about Max Retzlaff and the New Collective that weekend. The few times she had broached Section business on her visits, Michael had been intensely interested and had always made comments and suggestions that proved helpful. But by tacit agreement, they seldom talked shop. Their times together were too short. Instead, they spent the day with the children in the blue and white inner courtyard of Michael's blue and white bungalow near the edge of the town of Rhodes. Some time in the future they might all venture out to be seen together, but this was not yet the time.
The courtyard garden was largely untended, a sea of green and light gold dotted with scarlet blossoms, not unlike the countryside outside the city. But there were footpaths for playing horsy and for playing catch, and Nikita and her son made good use of them. It was so good to be there with him and Michael and Adam that she could almost forget that she didn't belong there, that she could only visit her son like a favorite aunt because if he called her Mama and someone heard it, that someone could know who he was--the son of Section One's chief and its top former operative. Who might make that connection was not important. All that was important was that the connection would never be made.
"I got him a doll," she told Kelly the day before she left for Rhodes to celebrate his birthday. "It's a boy doll, all blue except for a pink face."
"Very PC. You sure Michael won't mind?"
"I asked him. He said, 'Why should I mind?'" But her thoughts were fragmented, and now she rose and began to pace. "We finally got a visual on Max Retzlaff, and I'm having a hell of a time being professional about it."
"Why?" Kelly frowned, her friendly concern immediately edged with professionalism. "This is the top dog of the New Collective, right?"
"Yeah. It took him a while, but he's managed to pull together most of the serious threats in the old one." Nikita paused in front of one of the screens in the Perch and tapped a few keys. Retzlaff, dark and arrogant, gazed back at them. "This is the man who killed my father."
"The shooter?"
"There were two shooters. He stood between them with his arms folded like he was the king of the world. God, I see him in my dreams. And now I see him on my screen. He's probably no worse than any of the other freaked-out terrorists we've faced, but there is something about this man that freaks me out. There aren't that many of them that I've really hated, but I hate this man so bad I can taste it."
"The killing wasn't his idea. It was Philip's."
Startled, they both half turned to see Christopher walking toward them from the top of the stairs. Stalwart, comforting Chris, once her father's friend and her emotional support in AlphaGroup since the beginning, long before she and the Bear had become friends.
"You think that makes any difference to me? He killed my father, and he loved every minute of it."
"I know." Chris squeezed Kelly's shoulder and she briefly touched his hand before he withdrew it and sat down between them. "Go ahead. Hate him. You're entitled. But it all happened because it was what Philip wanted--to get Adam free without exposing himself to torture and compromising the agency. How much clearer could he have made it?"
She remembered her father's bodyguards restraining her when she tried to rush forward as he was gunned down only yards away at the other end of the bridge. They knew what was going to happen. They knew what was going to happen.
Because her father had told them, given them their instructions, before he went to his death.
"Just another day on the job," she said bitterly. "Nothing personal, right? Dammit, Chris! That man killed my father!"
"You keep saying that," Kelly said softly, "as though you need to justify your feelings about him."
"I'm head of Section. I'm not supposed to have feelings about any of them."
"Bull. Who do you think you are--one of these computers? Operations, maybe? Didn't he ever hate a bad guy?"
"Gustav Pogue." Nikita gave a short, bitter laugh. "Doesn't count. Paul was going nuts at the time."
"What?"
"Oh, it's...a really, really long story. But there was his ex-wife's husband too. And George. Always George. I cannot believe this. I'm talking about Paul Wolfe as though he were my role model!"
"If you want to stay alive, you could do worse."
"He didn't stay alive. I bet he was obsessed with something when he tried to rescue Adam from the Collective. Pickup mission with no backup? Too stupid, and he wasn't stupid." She sighed, feeling a little better. "Okay, enough. I have go home and get ready for a birthday party this weekend."
Later, as she began her packing, something made her pull out her PDA to see if there might be a last-minute message from Michael. She took one look at the LCD display, and it was as though the world slipped out from under her and sent her spinning into a void. On the edge of panic, she wondered what was the matter with her. There were only three words:
"Come now. Tonight."
It was a warm day for winter. He and Adam were both sweating as they sat together at a table made of pale gold wood in the blue and white room--he working at his computer and Adam on the floor next to him with his cheek resting against his father's leg. The child couldn't bring himself to stray more than a few feet; even a couple of hours as Max Retzlaff's captive had brought back all of the horrible memories they had tried so hard to soothe away. From time to time Michael would stop manipulating the mouse and lay his hand on the child's head, and it seemed to help: early in the afternoon, Adam fell asleep and slept for nearly two hours, apparently without dreaming. Maybe it wasn't as bad as he'd anticipated, Michael thought. Maybe he had gotten Adam out of there before irreparable damage was done. Maybe.
"Are you looking for Luc in the computer?" Adam asked when he woke.
"Yes." Michael stroked his son's hair again. "Go back to sleep." Adam sighed and relaxed, and it was only after he had dozed off again that Michael realized that neither of them had had anything to eat all day.
Laying the mouse aside, he rested his forehead on his clasped hands and swore softly. It was a self-indulgence he seldom permitted, but at the worst times in his life, when everything was wrong and there seemed to be no way to put it right, it felt good to let go and swear in every language he knew. You didn't have to shout it out. You could hiss to yourself it as he was doing now, and if you let go enough, you didn't even have to hit anything to release most of the tension at least momentarily. He wanted to hit something now--to smash something to pieces as though it were Max Retzlaff's skull. But that would wake Adam.
He brought up the video of Luc as he had last seen him, the baby's arm resting casually along Retzlaff's right shoulder as he gazed around, fascinated as usual by any new environment--pointing, gazing, pointing, and from time to time smiling. Adam stood on the man's left, pale and terrified, his dark eyes huge. When Retzlaff told him to speak to the image of his father on the screen, he had whispered, "Daddy, I want to go home" and began to sob and tremble, his right arm immobile in Retzlaff's grip. The only time his captor had let go was to prevent Luc from grabbing Retzlaff's sunglasses.
"Call it a gesture of good faith," he had said. "You may have one of them back, and you may choose which one. He will be delivered to you at a place not far from you which I will designate. After that, we will begin to talk seriously, you and I. The directory, the locations of all substations, and everything Section is planning for the New Collective. This is not negotiable...."
By the time the screen went dark, Luc was crying too, but only because Adam was.
That had been at six-thirty this morning, less than an hour after Michael had awakened from a drugged sleep to discover that both his sons were missing from their beds in a house where he had believed no one from his past life but Nikita knew they were living.
Fool.
Again he swore, and again restrained himself from striking the table with his fist.
Fool.
And so he had made the choice that had to be made, leaving his healthy, smiling son in a situation that his damaged, weeping son could not survive with his fragile psyche intact. And now, in a part of his consciousness where he did not want to go but had to, his own voice cried out in silent despair: How can I make her understand?
Oddly enough, knowing that she would hate him for it before she would love him again made him love her even more. You're the only part of me that's not dead, he had told her once. The only one of us who still has a soul. He knew only too well that there was often a high price to pay for the explosive vagaries of Nikita's soul. But he had long ago determined that for him, that price would never be too high.
The sun, warm and mellow, slid down the brilliant blue sky toward night. She would be there tonight, he knew. But in the meantime, he had work to do.
By a stroke of extremely good luck, Retzlaff's video input at the time of their second contact had been as high resolution as Michael's finely optimized output screen. That provided the only chance he had of locating his enemy before the three days were up. But it would take a great deal of time and concentration to work that advantage to the limit. His concentration was virtually complete because he willed it so. But he had only three days, and even the legacy of Birkoff's genius had its limits.
It was dark when she came at last. The leisurely transportation schedule to and from the mainland would have been a problem for her; planes came once a day, ferry boats considerably less often. But she would be traveling alone; Helen had come several days ago and was already in residence at a nearby hotel.
He did not know how Nikita would manage to get there tonight. He only knew that she would do it because he had asked her to.
When he heard a helicopter landing in the trees a few hundred yards behind the house, he knew that the time of reckoning had come.
He had never seen her so pale. It was completely dark now, but her pallor cut the courtyard darkness like an ivory knife.
"You chose to leave our baby with Max Retzlaff?" It was only a whisper, but in his heart it was yet another knife.
"Adam can't survive another three days in captivity, Nikita. It would destroy him."
He had been holding her shoulders in his hands and her gaze with his eyes. Now she twisted free and backed away, her eyes like huge burning holes. "Split in two, right? You fucking thought it through and split yourself in two and did what had to be done. My god. Oh, my god." He reached for her, but she backed away. "Don't. Just...don't."
"Kita--"
"I have to get away from here." She was whispering again, but it was as though she were screaming at him.
"This is your home. You need to be here."
"I'm a visitor here. I don't have a home. And now I may not have a son any more, thanks to you." And she was gone, running away from him toward the small door in the back wall of the courtyard--the little door that had been the deciding factor in his purchase of this house after he brought Luc back from London a year ago. The little door that would let Luc's mother come and go unseen.
Except for Retzlaff? But if that were true...
Splitting himself in two again, knowing that the other part of him was weeping somewhere deep within his soul, he went back into the house and picked up his laptop.
Toward midnight Adam had a nightmare and woke screaming for his father. "Big glass eyes," he sobbed, clinging to Michael's neck, his fingernails digging. "He had glass eyes, Daddy!" He knew what sunglasses were, had seen them on his father countless times. But his grip on reality was tenuous again, and Retzlaff's dark glasses had become the focus of his terror. It took Michael the better part of an hour to get him back to sleep, and even then he didn't dare leave the room, but sat on the floor, leaning back against the edge of the bed, using his thigh as a pad for the mouse.
It was close to dawn before she returned.
He must have dozed, because she was suddenly sitting next to him on the floor, taking him in her arms and pressing her face to his. They held each other fiercely and in silence for a time. Michael heard himself sob once, hiding his face against her shoulder, and she whispered, "Don't, love. We'll find him."
"I'll bring him back to you. I swear it."
"We'll bring him back to us," was all she said, but it was more than enough--that and the fact that, like him, she wore a sleeveless black T-shirt and long black pants. Dressed for work, her hair in two pony tails on her shoulders. Like him, she knew what had to be done and was ready to do it as soon as they had enough intel to proceed.
He had never loved her as much as he did at that moment.
"Helen said I would have done the same thing for the same reason.'"
"What did you say?"
"I screamed at her. 'Shut up! Shut up!' Then I knelt down next to her and put my head in her lap and cried like a little kid." Her hand patted his shoulder, Helen-like. "She's so solid. I don't know what would have happened to me tonight if I hadn't had her here."
"Was she right?"
"I honestly don't know. I hope so." She looked over at his laptop lying on the floor next to them and sat straighter, smoothing stray wisps of hair behind her ears. "So where are we on the profile?"
Birkoff's program was an adaptation of the satellite technology that permitted one-meter photographic accuracy from thousands of feet above earth. State-of-the-art technology was required for both input and output, but Section and its enemies were in possession of that more often than not. A close examination of a tiny reflection in Retzlaff's dark wrap-arounds had revealed that the technology involved here was good enough.
"He was facing a window," Nikita breathed. "That's why he had dark glasses on. Our intel says he's light-sensitive"
"Not facing. It was off to his left, but the reflection is there."
"'Pixels within pixels,' Birkoff said. I thought he was crazy."
"This technology isn't widely known. He hacked into DOD to get at it." Carefully, Michael moved the mouse. Almost there. And what he had suspected for several hours appeared to be true.
"Is it a weather vane?" Nikita asked, spellbound.
"No." Carefully, now. "Look."
"It's a deer--on a pedestal," she whispered, and then her voice rose with excitement. "It's the entrance to Rhodes harbor!"
Adam stirred and opened his eyes. It was barely morning, but there was enough light for him to see that Nikita was sitting on the floor with his father. Tears rose in the child's dark eyes and trembled there, ready to fall.
"Are you mad at me?"
Guilt. On top of everything else, survivor guilt. As though he didn't have enough to contend with.
Calmly, smoothly, Nikita rose to her feet, sat on the edge of the bed, and stroked the little boy's cheek.
"No. I'm not mad at you. And you're not the extra person in this family. I am."
Michael closed his eyes and pressed his fingers against the lids. Who could have guessed that the heart could burst with love and break with pain at the same time?
"You love Luc best," the child insisted.
"He's my son, Adam. That makes him special to me, just like you were special to your mother. But I love you too, and I'm very glad you're safe."
Abruptly, the child came to a sitting position and flung himself into her arms. After she had held him for a few moments, he said, "He's in a room with a hole in the ceiling."
"Who is?"
"Luc."
Over the child's head, Nikita and Michael stared at each other, she wide-eyed with new hope, he feeling a shiver slide across his neck and shoulders and up the back of his head.
"What kind of a hole, Adam?" he asked finally, and cleared his throat of the huskiness there.
"There's glass in it, like a window. The sun came in."
A skylight.
Luc was in a room with a skylight, a certain distance in certain direction from the entrance to Rhodes harbor. And another of Birkoff's programs would find that distance and that direction for them.
"Do you have Birkoff's ESS?" Nikita asked softly, and he nodded yes.
The Earthbound Sextant Simulator was another of Birkoff's intuitive leaps of faith based on his vast computer knowledge. After giving Adam his breakfast and sharing a bottle of water, Michael and Nikita were back at the computer, now sitting at the little round kitchen table with an empty high chair reminding them what they were doing there every time they looked up. Adam sat on the floor near them, staring down at his hands, then playing with his fingers. Finally he retrieved a toy truck and sat with it in his lap, hitting the wheels with the palm of his hand to make them spin. The rasping noise they made was exquisitely irritating, but no one suggested that he stop.
"What time of day was it?" Nikita had asked before they began working.
"The second contact was just after 0900."
The shadows in the image were clear. "Then he was northwest of the harbor entrance."
"Yes."
The calculations necessary for the ESS were much more complex than those involved in resolving the image had been, and it was necessary to hack into a mainframe in order to get them done in an acceptable amount of time. The saving grace was that there was no need to calculate an artificial horizon, since the horizon on the image was clearly visible.
At one point late in the number crunching, while they waited for the current calculations to be completed, Nikita asked, "Are you sure Retzlaff doesn't know I'm Luc's mother?"
"It's a high card. If he had it, he'd have played it."
"We must have done something right."
"It's what we do from now on that counts."
He was in mission mode, she thought. Already? How can he--? But she had promised herself and Helen not to go that route again.
"Do you love the man he is or the man you want him to be?"
"I'm not sure."
"Well, you'd bloody well better make up your mind. It's past time. Will he take you back after the things you said to him?"
"Yes."
"Because he loves you for who you are."
"Or in spite of it."
"Nonsense, Nikita. With the two of you, 'in spite of' wouldn't bear the traffic."
"All RIGHT! All right. 'Because of'."
"Good girl. Go thou and do likewise, and then bring that poor baby home."
And now, watching him work as though the work were all there was, yet knowing that his love for Luc was always a part of him even when it was invisible, she pondered a new theory on who her role model as head of Section ought to be.
Within the next hour, they had determined that the building where Luc was being held was within a four-square-block area.
She had chartered a helicopter in her mad dash to get to the island, but they both knew that wouldn't work now. An island-jumping copter pilot with a two-passenger charter job would remember having seen them, and it was essential that no one remember having seen them. And so they spent half the afternoon suspended beneath a hot-air balloon, Nikita in a T-shirt of Michael's and a pair of her own shorts accidentally left behind on a previous visit, Michael dressed similarly in unremarkable gray, holding hands and appearing to gawk over the side right along with the tourists and a few locals enjoying a newly available diversion. After the tour they changed clothes again, balancing emotionally in a wire-thin space between growing dread and sheer exultation. Nearly half of their three days were up, but in the four-square-block area they had examined as though it were the gold at the end of the rainbow, there was only one building with a skylight in its roof.
Adam had shown no fear while they were flying beneath a balloon, but when they explained as dusk fell that they were going to get Luc soon, terror came into his eyes.
"Who's going to take care of me while you're gone?"
"Helen will, "Nikita answered. "At the hotel."
"Some people might steal me."
"If there are lots of people around, no one can steal you because someone would see them." It was true enough that she was able to say it with conviction. There was simply no alternative.
Reassured, he nevertheless frowned. "She reads to me too long."
"We'll ask her not to."
The rain began as they left the hotel. They had not thought to wear jackets even though the temperature had fallen below 15 C as night came on. Nikita had bought a watch cap to prevent her hair from catching light, and by the time they reached the square white house with the skylight, their clothes and her cap were saturated. The wind came up--a mild wind by other standards but an intense and lashing one. They barely noticed it, and as they stood hugging the wall of the house, neither of them was shivering.
They had planned the mission earlier, but there was one thing that had not been said aloud. She wondered if he took it for granted that she knew. But apparently not.
"You know what the endgame has to be," he whispered close to her ear.
"We can't leave anyone alive to fire on us when we're carrying Luc. Michael--I killed six people to save you from being blown up. If I have to kill six more to keep Luc alive, I'll do it."
"Good," was his only answer.
They gained entry at the back of the house, in leap-frog mode with guns cocked, covering each other's backs as they had always done. The building was apparently a safe house rather than a substation, for there were no guards. They encountered two men playing cards and one exercising, and shot them all, their silencers thumping in the quiet house. Retzlaff did not appear, and their certainty grew that they would find him on the second floor in a room with a skylight.
One bare bulb burned there, and the skylight showed nothing but blowing rain and darkness.
Clad only in a diaper, Luc was curled up sucking his thumb in the center of a circle of moisture on a bare mattress. The other end of the rope around his waist was tied to the brass headboard.
He did not sense their presence in the hallway, hugging the wall on either side of the door, Michael's weapon pointed upwards and Nikita's at the floor. But Retzlaff did. He had been reading in a straight chair, but when they stormed the room he was already on his feet, gun in hand. His first, automatic reaction would be the last decision he ever made, and it was a bad one: he took his eyes off Michael in order to aim at Luc.
Michael's bullet exploded the hand and sent the gun flying. As Retzlaff fell to his knees, groaning, Michael headed for Luc and Nikita headed for Retzlaff.
In spite of the pain, those arrogant dark eyes looked up at her with admiration. "So, Nikita," muttered, wincing. "You must be the mother."
"And the daughter." Grasping her weapon by the barrel, she struck him across the face with all the hate she held in her soul, and then drew her arm back to strike again.
"Nikita, stop."
Knowing that Retzlaff was barely conscious, she allowed herself to look over at Michael, who was holding Luc in his arms, his hand turning the baby's face away from her.
"For him?" She gestured toward Retzlaff, her disbelieving gaze fixed on Michael and their son.
"No. For yourself."
She did not want to hear him. She wanted to beat this man to death. But in memory she saw herself kicking a helpless Martin Henderson in a recurring dream, then waking from it desolate and empty, as though she had lost her self yet again each time she dreamed that dream.
Turning slowly back, she pressed the gun barrel against the left side of Max Retzlaff's chest. Looking into the still defiant dark eyes, she pulled the trigger once. When he fell to the floor, she leaned down and closed his eyes with a finality that was almost gentle.
Then she and Michael were holding each other and their son. Luc's diaper was saturated and he smelled foul, and the two of them were wet through and through from the rain. But nobody seemed to mind any of it, and Luc was smiling at her.
"Kee bay," he told her without being asked. "Widey wake."
That night she and Michael made love as though it were the first time only better. Then they took their sleeping baby from his crib and snuggled him between them in their bed.
After a while, she said quietly, "You said once that if you'd found me desperate then, you'd have risked all our lives to bring me home. Would you risk all our lives with me to try to keep Luc and Adam safe from now on?"
He was silent for a long time, his hand unmoving on her shoulder. Then: "Can you live with it?"
"I've been living with it for almost a decade."
"You never chose it."
"I choose it now, Michael. It's the only way to keep these little boys safe."
Again he was silent for a time, and then he said calmly, "Then bring me in."
"You mean," she answered just as calmly, "bring us both in."
"Let me get this clear," said the Chair of Peter. "You're proposing that this man become your second and that Section provide body guards for your children. Have I got that right?"
"Quinn did Madeline, and these holos wouldn't even have to have personalities. Just eyes and ears and big memory capacities and concealed weapons. Their appearance could change from day to day. Luc and Adam wouldn't even know they were there, and neither would anyone else unless they had to act."
"That is a very tall order."
"She could do it with her eyes shut."
Watching and listening, Michael marveled at Nikita's demeanor. She despised Charles the Chair for a fool, and yet her manner toward him implied deference while remaining self-assured. In short, she worked him like the pro she had become.
It was Alex Cornu they would have to contend with.
"How did Retzlaff find you?" he asked Michael now, in full Stare Bear mode.
"Applying Occam's razor, it's likely that one of the operatives stationed at the safe house recognized me and followed me home."
Cornu's eyebrows rose, and even though he was not looking at her, Michael sensed Nikita smothering a grin of approval. "And how did you gain access once you found it?"
"Together."
Christopher chuckled.
They had determined beforehand that his part in the deception regarding Luc's paternity must not be revealed to the rest of the Group, and that the only way to assure his safety was to induce genuine, incredulous surprise on his part. And so Nikita had begun by telling the Group that Michael was her child's biological father and caregiver--a truth that Chris knew she had been guarding with her life for a year. When the effect was as she and Michael had planned--dropped jaw, sudden pallor making his freckles stand out like bacon bits--she had gone smoothly on to apologize to him for the "deception" of telling him that he was her child's father. Chris had had the presence of mind to simply continue to stare at her while the purpose of her current deception gradually sank in--a presence of mind that Michael genuinely admired given the circumstances. It had taken the man only a few seconds to realize that they were protecting him, and now he was playing the game right along with them.
"It's called synergy." Just the right amount of bitterness and anger in his voice. "The two of them plot and scheme like the pros they are, and end up taking out the head of the New Collective and three of his minions. Know what, gentlemen? We could do worse than to let them run Section together."
"Michael Samuelle is a renegade," purred Hyena, smiling. "He's been out in the cold for well over a year." So there, Nikita.
"He didn't turn, Steven. We let him go, remember? Because he saved Section's butt with the old Collective."
"True, but--"
"You lied to us." It was Cornu, now staring at Nikita.
"I have never lied to you," she answered quietly, "except where it concerned my son. If he's safe and we're together, I'd have no reason ever to lie to you again."
"Would you compromise Section to save him if it came to that?"
"We didn't, did we?"
Silence.
Finally Cornu turned his gaze to Michael. "Could you accept Nikita's authority as head of Section?"
He had expected the question, and prepared for it. "I find it easier to accede to Nikita's choices than she does to accede to mine." I never let anyone see the other half, but it's there, always a part of me.
There was a universal, albeit silent, intake of breath. Even Nikita was staring at him as though he had set off a small bomb--small enough not to injure anyone, but with enough force to shake a number of deeply ingrained preconceptions.
Cornu was the first to recover. "Because of the nature of your personalities?"
"Because of the nature of our choices."
"Oh? How so?"
"When we differ, her choices tend to express values latent in me, while mine tend to express values at odds with hers. I'm pragmatic. Nikita is innovative--"
"Not true." All eyes turned to Nikita, fascinated at the turn the interrogation had taken. "I'm a maverick. You all know that. Michael's values are more Section's than mine are."
And Cornu asked softly, gently, his gaze moving deliberately from her to Michael and back again: "Given that, Missy, what's wrong with this picture?"
Too soon, Michael thought. Too soon for her. But it was done. He had known all along what the Group would eventually decide, and even if he hadn't wanted it, he could not have stopped it. And coming from Cornu, she might not find her displacement so painful.... Incredulous, he watched her face as a half smile came and went in an instant--too quickly for anyone but Cornu and possibly Christopher to have seen it.
"What's wrong with this picture," she replied calmly, coolly, her gaze moving from Cornu to Michael and holding his, "is that the wrong person is in charge of it."
Their gaze held, and there was not a sound in the room until he asked softly, "Are you sure?"
"Oh, yes." Now her eyes moved back to Cornu, and there was triumph in them. She had passed yet another test, perhaps the most important one ever. "I'm sure."
"Now, look here," said the Chair of Peter, sensing that he'd been had, but not sure exactly how. "Now, look here! This is preposterous!"
"Mr. Chairman," said the Bear, his eyes still on Nikita with what Michael identified unquestioningly as pride, "I move that the Group discuss this matter in private."
"You knew what they'd do," Michael told her.
They paced across the roof of the building together, having been banished from the room while the Group conferred about their destiny. The mild, humid air that passed for winter on Rhodes was nearly twenty-four hours in their past; here it was bitter cold, with the wind whipping sparse, low drifts across bare roof as though they were made of sand, and blowing their hair around their faces. She held his arm as they paced, both of them with gloved hands and collars up around their ears.
"I wasn't sure. If I had been, I wouldn't have been so nervous. I should have counted on the Bear." Serenity, he thought. She wasn't happy. It was possible that neither of them would ever be really happy. But together they had come to a place where they could live.
"Are you sure we can do this, Nikita?"
"My father thought I was born to be head of Section, but he was wrong." Putting her arm around his shoulders, she made a leather fist and bumped it against his cheek. "You were born to be head of Section. I was born to give the head of Section a hard time."
He gave a brief, muted laugh, surprising both of them. "I know."
"And you know I can't promise never to argue with you. But things are different now."
"How different?"
"I've been the leader for almost two years. I know that as a leader you can't do your job with somebody pulling against you. There's a little thing called loyalty, and ..." They had come to the edge of the roof. Directly in front of them all that was solid dropped away into windy nothing, but neither of them had ever been afraid of heights, and the sky above was as blue as their son's eyes."...I trust you. Remember that next time I get in your face about something."
"Will you remember it?" he asked huskily.
"Probably not. So remind me."
He smoothed a flying strand of hair behind her ear, and leaned his forehead against hers. They stood in silence, the face of each protecting the other from the wind, until they realized that Christopher was standing in the doorway of the stair enclosure in the middle of the windswept roof. One look at his expression told them that they had shot the moon yet again.
Watching from above as Michael walked across Section's common area three months later, Nikita tried to put into words for herself how he looked as he walked there. As though he had never been away? Yes, but that didn't come near to saying it all. He looked...like a black star. That was it. A black star with his planets rotating around him too slowly to appear to move across the sky, and yet keeping their orbits over time, held there by his personal gravity. Each would draw a little closer now and then, to be briefed or debriefed or reprimanded or, at her urging, praised--in a soft, steady voice, looking away and then back and then away, while the operative on the receiving end stared at him in astonishment gradually turning to unadulterated joy as he or she drifted back into orbit, feet barely seeming to touch the floor. The first time his second-in-command had observed the phenomenon, she had to go elsewhere and blow her nose, getting her teariness under control by speculating about what the Section of years past might have been like had Operations or Madeline ever praised anyone without an iron hand inside the velvet glove. No, she decided. That would be a steel blade for their predecessors. Michael was the iron hand, still just as real as the velvet glove she had convinced him to don when he interacted with his operatives. They all knew the iron was there. That was why they reacted to his praise as though it were buried treasure.
As she watched him walk the walk, she remembered telling Kelly once that he was 'watchable,' and smiled.
They took coffee breaks, something that Operations and Madeline had never seemed to need and their operatives never quite got. In those days you went out for coffee when your shift was over, or you went to the lounge where nobody ever really lounged, and inhaled your coffee to prime yourself for a mission or a debriefing. These days, Michael and Nikita turned down the lights in the Perch and had their coffee together at a small table they had brought in for that purpose. At first they felt uneasy doing it; Section tradition had it that when the lights were down, those in charge were "up there" doing something they shouldn't be doing during working hours. The latest new regime had, in fact, been there and done that themselves once when their relationship was new and Michael was temporarily minding the store. But once had been enough. The Perch wasn't particularly suited to intimate moments, and neither of them any longer felt the need to mark their territory.
"I watched you when you were on your way up here just now," she told him, laying her hand on his, their coffee mugs exuding aromatic steam, the near darkness broken only by the light from the computer screens. "You looked like you were somewhere else--thinking about something else. That's unusual for you when you're here."
"I was remembering Paris. Operations and I walked through and left together just before the Paris hub was incinerated." He turned his hand and took hers in it, reflected lights flickering in his eyes. "It's a good memory--much better than the last one I have of him."
She thought for a moment. "When I sent you to debrief with him that last time. When my father was here."
"Yes."
"How was he then?"
"Displaced into despair. I don't like to think of him dying like that."
"He died on a mission, Michael. We'll probably never know what it was. He didn't care enough about Adam to risk his life just to rescue him from the Collective. But he died doing something. When he was in despair, he didn't do anything but be in despair."
Michael stared at her for a moment, and then said softly, "Thank you."
"Do you feel guilty about taking his place?"
"No. But I wonder what feelings he'd have if he could see me now."
"Mixed."
"He hated you for displacing him."
Ah, so that was it. "Mixed. He never hated you. You were his heir apparent, and he was afraid of you. But he was proud of you too." She sighed. "Which is more than he ever was of me."
"Your father was proud of you, Kita."
As she gazed back at him, tears came to her eyes. Finally she whispered, "Thank you," and wiped the tears away with the back of her free hand. "So." Turning up the lights again: "Here's where we are on Islamabad."
Three months moved toward six, and sailing became less smooth, although in ways she had expected it to.
"You know she's right, Michael. They need a good solid psychological orientation for the way they have to live. We needed it, but we never got it. In the CIA they get--"
"This isn't the CIA." He did not stop typing.
"Yeah, I know. But--"
"She gets them for two days." He closed his mouth on the last word, and she set her chin. But there was no use arguing; he'd already made a concession, and he never conceded by degrees, only all at once. She thought briefly about arguing anyway, sure that she was right. But over the years she had finally come to realize that being right just wasn't enough sometimes.
And anyway....
"You were supposed to remind me that I trust you, but you never do it," she said crossly. He shook his head, not looking up from the keyboard. "Why not?"
"If I have to remind you, there's nothing to remind you of."
He stopped typing then, and they exchanged a long look that spoke more of patience and mutual tolerance than it did of harmony, much less affection. But there were not nearly as many such moments as she had originally anticipated.
"So, time to talk to Kelly, right?" Blank stare. "Time to talk to Kelly. Right. Oh--" Innocence tinged with irony: "She wants to know how to explain to them that they might have to kill each other someday."
"What does she expect us to do about a rogue operative? Call the police?" A very faint smile. "Call the CIA?"
"You caved!"
Since Kelly's reaction was about what she expected, Nikita leaned back against the door of the MedLab main office and relaxed, one hand on the door knob and the other in the pocket of her jacket. Kelly stood behind her desk. A moment before she had been sitting there, but now she was on her feet, both palms slapping down on the desktop in outraged emphasis. Nikita had resigned herself early to the fact that Michael and Kelly would probably never get along personally, even though she was certain that each harbored a grudging professional admiration for the other. From this she had concluded that the best place for her to be was between them. It was also an exciting place to be, and although she told herself that this kind of excitement she could do without, she knew deep down that she rather enjoyed it. Nonetheless, Kelly had never before been quite this furious.
"You're supposed to be an advocate for the rest of us. Hell, I don't know if you're spaced on the main man's mojo or if you really agree with him most of the time."
"What do you think?"
"Half and half," Kelly growled, dark eyes still smoldering.
"Oh, come on." Satisfied that it was safe to approach ground zero, Nikita moved to sit across the desk from her friend. "You respect him and you don't even like him. Why's it so hard to accept that I respect him?"
"Respect? HA! Not the word I'd use." But she pulled out her chair and sat down. "When we talked about this, you agreed with me."
"I still do."
"Then why--?
"He's not going to change his mind, Kel. Trust me. It's not gonna happen. I talked him into half of what you asked for and twice what he wanted to give you. That's it. Mission's over." Silence. "You feel betrayed, don't you?"
"You bet I do. You and I were so in sync. We were running this place like--"
"Like it was a family."
"We could do worse."
"But it's not a family. Madeline used to tell me it was when she was trying to mess with my head, but we both knew better. It's the most covert intelligence agency on the planet, and that is nothing like a family. You know I was toughening up before Michael was even in the picture. I was even toughening up with you. But I don't have what it takes any more than Chris would. Michael does."
Kelly scowled, but her angry gaze was turning into a brooding stare. "Chris says it sounds to him like half of Section thinks Michael's God in black and the other half thinks he's their hardass new stepdad."
Nikita laughed. "That about covers it."
"You're happy." It was an accusation, but also an acknowledgment.
"I'm very happy some of the time. That's all any of us here can expect." But there was more to it than that....
"Do they all see me as their advocate with Michael?"
Walter studied the piece of equipment he was working on, which looked like a very fine filament delicately balanced on a tiny fulcrum. "If that's spelled c-o-n-d-u-i-t, yeah."
"They don't see him as their adversary, then."
"Not really. But it's scary to work for the best of the best, and it feels good to have somebody they know and trust between them and him."
"They don't trust him?"
"Sure they do. I mean, hey--you know anybody else who's more predictable? But he hasn't been their momma for two and a half years like you have."
"Oh, Walter."
He waved a hand at her, a brushing-aside movement. "And you've got his ear. So how'd you expect them to feel?"
"Jealous."
"That too. But it's a good trade-off. Something in it for them too, as long as you CON DU IT."
"Eeeeeewwwwwww!" But she couldn't help laughing.
"That's better." He used a tiny tweezers to shift the filament slightly. "So what's bothering you, Sugar? Still feeling like you broke your promise to your dad?"
"No." Grabbing a rolling chair, she sat down opposite him at his counter. "I've pretty much worked through that. He said somebody had to 'make things better' and he and I were the only ones who could. He was wrong. Michael is the leader that Veytoss predicted. My father's gone and I'm here, so I get to decide who's the only one who can do what he wanted done. I didn't set it up that way. He did." She bent her head, running her fingers through her hair from forehead to nape, sensing that Walter was looking at her now rather than at what he was working on. They were silent for a few moments, and then she said in a low voice, "What's bothering me is that I'm starting to like it here."
"Ah."
Without looking at him, she muttered, "You're smiling, but it's not funny."
"So you're finally learning to sing."
"Not funny, Walter."
"Nikita, look at me." She looked up, and saw that he was indeed smiling at her, but not with amusement. "I'm happy for you. I thought that kind o' thing was allowed in Section these days." When she could only swallow the lump that was suddenly in her throat, he touched the filament lightly with the tweezers. "See? If you're careful, it doesn't fall either way. It balances out."
Her only answer was to pick up his free hand and press her cheek to it. "How about coming to dinner again before we go to the farmhouse next weekend?"
"Aw, I know you. You just want Spybaby to get another chance to pull my hair."
"Walter, you have to be firm with him. Just tell him No. He doesn't do it to Michael and me any more."
"That," said the guru of Section One, "is because he knows who's in charge. Just like they know it around here."
Michael's house in Belgium, which had felt like a refrigerator the first time she had seen it, was filled with light breezes and the scent of wild flowers. The same window still refused to close, but in the summer, such things didn't seem important.
The sleepy little town a few kilometers to the west could scarcely be called a town. In addition to the grocery store, there was a petrol station, a small coffee shop, and a souvenir store for the tourists who stopped to fill their stomachs and their cars' tanks. Full of badly made stuffed animals and garish figurines, it was Adam and Luc's favorite place to visit.
As Michael followed them patiently around the store, repeating, "No. No. Not today. No." yet not appearing to be the least bit bored, Nikita stood thoughtfully before an apparel rack on which were hanging several teddies that had caught her attention. Cheap. She shouldn't give them a second glance. Yet she couldn't take her eyes off the pale blue one, which was suggesting possibilities that set her pulse racing.
She wasn't sure how long she'd been standing there looking at it when Michael's arm reached around her and deftly removed the object of her scrutiny from its hanger. Leaning into the curve of his shoulder, reveling in his warmth and his scent, she murmured, "Why bother? You'll just take it off."
"No." Reaching around her with the other arm, he rested his chin on her shoulder as he folded the filmy blue thing neatly in front of them, smaller and smaller. "You will." Taking her hand, he deposited the blue square in it, touched the tip of his tongue to her throat, and moved away with palpable reluctance.
By the time she had purchased the item in question, her heart rate was under control. But turning, she stopped, suddenly chilled.
The wooden floor of the little shop's main aisle stretched before her, sunlight pouring in through the open doorway past Michael, Luc, and Adam--moving away from her together as Michael and Adam had done in the train station two and a half years ago. Between them walked her son, each of them holding one of his hands, the sun catching in his hair--fine golden strands tumbling around his ears in curls like his father's. Walking away from her....
She caught her breath, forcing the haunting image away, laying a persistent ghost just as Luc looked over his shoulder at her.
"See a mama! " But before she could join the game: "See a reb poober, Mama!"
"He means a red Pooh Bear," explained Adam, proud to be the family expert on Lucspeak.
Laughing now, the bad moment gone, she clasped the hand that Michael extended to her and moved with them into the summer sunlight.