The door closed and in the silence that followed, Hawke felt a level of emotional exhaustion he hadn't encountered in… He stopped his thoughts from going in that direction. His sympathies were torn between Zhenya, Dominic and Briggs. He felt all too closely a tie between his own life and Zhenya's – all of his family was either dead or missing, with the exception of Dominic who was surrogate family.
The silence was brief.
"I can't believe you're kicking him out of the country!" Santini said, his voice filled with outrage.
"I can't believe you let him walk out that door," Marella said, almost simultaneously.
Briggs winced, and held up a hand against the verbal assault as he took his seat again. Learning his head against the back of the chair, he closed his eye and sighed, sounding as tired as Hawke had ever heard him.
"Your people killed his son and you kick him out of the country?" Santini demanded, as if he hadn't heard Marella's interruption.
Not unexpectedly, Briggs opened his eye and swiveled his chair to reply to Marella's outage first.
"What could I possibly do that would exceed the loss of his son?" he asked, voice quietly persuasive, asking her to understand.
"He could have told you the rest of the names," Marella said, her voice frustrated even if her expression was full of concern and sympathy for her boss. "You've been looking…" her voice trailed off in response to the guarded expression on his face.
"You think he really knows who killed your father?" Hawke asked, sticking to the facts on the table even as he wondered how best to approach the whole question of dealing with the breadth of knowledge that they'd been handled. It was impossible not to see Briggs slightly differently now, not to draw comparisons between Briggs's loss of his father while still in his teens and Hawke's loss of his parents at a young age.
"Knows?" Marella asked, exasperated. "Your new buddy," she said, with an angry wave in Santini's general direction, "participated directly in the death of Michael's father!"
"Now, wait a minute," Santini said, outrage transferring from Briggs to Marella. "There's no proof that Zhenya was involved in anything…"
"There was no Transport Unit at the location where Michael's father was taken after his arrest," she said. "Nor any nearby. Tchesnov's people ran that place. Your Zhenya was there, he admitted it, and he was involved."
"That doesn't mean he was involved," Santini argued, sticking to his guns even if his mobile and expressive face was beginning to give away his own uncertainty.
"How else would he know Michael's father?" Marella said conclusively, crossing her arms. "You really think they were social acquaintances? In East Germany in the fifties?"
Hawke had suspected that from Briggs's earlier comments, as he thought, had Caitlin, but he was unhappy to have his suspicions confirmed. He wondered how long Briggs had been looking and was both surprised and not surprised at the amount that Marella knew. She loves Michael, he reminded himself. Even if Briggs hadn't told her everything, she might have investigated it anyway.
Briggs had been resting his forehead in his right palm; he now held up that hand to Marella as a signal to stop. She took a deep breath and returned to silence.
"You really think he was involved?" Hawke asked, walking over and leaning on Briggs's desk.
Briggs's shrug admitted nothing of what he was thinking or feeling, his face gave away only that he was drained. Marella looked keenly unhappy and shifted uneasily as if restraining herself from doing or saying as she wished.
"Was his son really killed the way you said?" Caitlin asked, skillfully turning the conversation away from the death of Briggs's father, as far as it could be turned considering the improbable linkage between the two families.
"He killed your father?" Santini said, voice full of disbelief and shock. He sat heavily in the seat Zhenya had only recently vacated. "And you sat there and talked to him?"
Caitlin looked exasperated at Dominic's redirection of what she had just steered in a different direction. Hawke marveled at Santini's swinging loyalties, wondered if his old friend had ever truly taken Zhenya's side against Archangel or if it was simply more verbal bombast on Dominic's part.
"I have no idea," Briggs said to Caitlin, with a tired smile, "but as it's an accurate description of the majority of agent deaths…" He waved a hand.
"We'll be looking into it," Marella promised. "It's possible that Nikolai Dzhamgerchinov was killed by one of our agents, but equally possible that he was killed by the Company or the agencies of another government completely."
"Vasily," Santini corrected, a furrow between his eyes.
"He said Kolya," Briggs countered. "That's the diminutive for Nikolai, not Vasily."
"He lied about his son's name?" Santini asked, in disbelief. "And he killed Michael's father? He was such a nice old guy, I don't get it."
"How many people have we had to shoot?" Hawke replied, sympathetic to Dominic but slightly perturbed with Santini's unexpected attachment to Zhenya and his feelings of loss, when what he'd really lost was an unrealistic image of a person he'd never known very well. "You think Zhenya didn't kill people in the War, too?"
"Well, that was different," Santini sputtered, thought about it and then came to an unhappy stop.
"You're not defending the man," Marella said to Hawke in disbelief. It was clear she wouldn't allow it.
"No, I'm not defending the man," Hawke answered, unable to resist responding even if he knew better than to go down this path. "Michael wants me to go take him out, I'll do it. Right now." And he would. His loyalty, strange as it sometimes seemed to him, was to the people in this room, all of them, including Briggs and Marella. "How's that make me different than Zhenya?"
Briggs almost smiled, but instead shook his head at Hawke's offer. "It might be more merciful if you did kill him, Hawke."
Hawke nodded. He understood now the enigmatic statement Michael had made earlier.
"Drawing that correlation for the old man may be one of the crueler things you've ever done," he said to Briggs. Cruelly effective and possibly the closest either would get to justice. He wondered if it would be any comfort to Briggs; knew that it would eat away at Zhenya, as Briggs had intended.
He watched Dominic and Caitlin work it out on their own, saw in their expressions when they came to the realization, the strange and bittersweet mixture of pity and grudging admiration.
Hawke frowned, folded his arms. "Michael," he said, to draw the man's attention back to him. "That time in East Germany?"
He let Briggs fill in the rest, watched a parade of emotions cross Briggs's face, and Marella's too.
"Not the same place," Briggs replied, a quick dart of his tongue across his bottom lip the only indication of the emotion Hawke had stirred. "Though it did occur to me at the time that it would be the one thing my mother would never forgive me."
Christ, Hawke thought, unable to imagine how Briggs's mother had survived the loss of her husband, knowing he'd died under interrogation. It would ask the impossible of anyone to lose her son that way as well. And how the hell Briggs had joined the Firm knowing how his father had died was beyond Hawke's comprehension.
"Your mother must be a pretty resilient woman," was what Hawke said.
Briggs raised his eyebrows and then smiled, while Marella rolled her eyes.
Hawke decided he would be willing to pay to see a meeting between the two primary women in Briggs's life.
"Any other probing questions into my family history?" Briggs demanded. "If not," he said, standing and not waiting for a reply. "Some of us have work to do."
"You invited us," Hawke felt obligated to remind him. "But I get it, we're going."
Briggs gave him a grudging smile. "Always a pleasure, Hawke. Caitlin," he nodded, his smile brightening. "Dominic, " he said, more coolly.
Marella had the door open and they were through it before any of them had a chance to form a coherent reply. Then they were on the opposite side of it and Marella had slipped back inside.
"Bet she never has houseguests that overstay their welcome either," Dominic said, with an injured look at the door.
Hawke smiled and patted Santini on the back. "She'd have to leave work to have houseguests," he said, pretty sure houseguests were low on Marella's list of priorities.
The three of them remained silent as they retraced their steps through the maze of Knightsbridge: elevator down to the concourse level, walk across to the next set of elevators and eventually winding their way to landing pad where it seemed they had left a Santini Air copter weeks earlier instead of a hour or so.
As they buckled in and donned headsets, Santini finally spoke, still subdued.
"You think that has any merit, String? That whole Karma thing?"
Hawke, busy with pre-flight, scowled a little at the distraction. Dominic knew better than to bother him during pre-flight. No pilot worth his salt would give it anything less than his, or her, full-fledged attention.
"You mean, the idea that Zhenya's son was killed for the same reasons that Michael's father had been killed, years earlier?" Caitlin asked, her eyes flickering from Hawke to Dominic, gracefully stepping in and letting Hawke keep his focus where he wanted it to be.
He smiled at her gratefully, returned his attention to his instrument panel.
"That's part of it," Dominic said, slowly. "But the idea that Zhenya's son was killed because Zhenya was involved…" He trailed off, frustrated and still visibly uncomfortable with the idea that Zhenya had anything to do with the death of Briggs's father.
"Did Kolya die because Zhenya participated somehow in killing Michael's father?" said Hawke, unable to stay focused on pre-flight despite Caitlin's aid.
"Yeah," Santini said, cautiously. "That correlation thing you said."
"Correlation isn't cause and effect," Hawke rebutted, flipping a few switches, irritated that he was losing track of his normal routine. "Even if Michael wants Zhenya to think they are."
Dominic cleared his throat and Hawke sighed.
"I don't think Karma has anything to do with it, Dom," he said, abandoning pre-flight in frustration. "I think they both died because they chose to work in a dangerous field of work and they got caught."
He wasn't sure that had reassured Santini but Caitlin was mulling it over.
"Good thing we just fly helicopters," Hawke said, "Anyone who goes into the spy business should get his head examined."
The ground crew could still hear them laughing as the helicopter ascended.
