It takes Brooke a few hours to reach her destination, the Greek island Lemnos, quick as if she ducked into a cab outside her borrowed apartment and suddenly got out in the chestnut warmth of the Mediterranean coast, her inky, bitter coffee hair—still damp—a hasty crosshatch. She cut it herself so she knows about the mistakes, probably around the back where it's hard to be everywhere at once and there's no one else to kindly tug the clippers from her battered fingers that are already sore; they scythed through the prairie-blonde abundance flung this way and that so she could scrutinize the awkward harvest through the mirror. Then, in shirtless prayer by the tub, she rubbed the murky solution into her scalp and breathed through her mouth. After she rinsed and toweled off, Brooke dutifully weeded the yellow hairs from off the bathroom floor and out of the sink and held them in her stained hand for a minute before dropping them in the trash bag that hung on the doorknob. She still feels the gritty dye residue underneath her fingernails all these hours later.
She convinces a taxi driver outside the airport to take her to the town of Kyklos, a fifty-minute drive along the coast. When she asked if he spoke English, he adamantly shook his head no until she fumbled through an obese wad of American dollars and pretended she was generous. For that money, he strung together in broken English, you buy my car and you drive all over Limnos, no? Brooke smiled a smile. He loaded her carry-on into the trunk of his hatchback and they took off.
Brooke watches the waves slather upon the shore white as they trundle past, the asphalt road sometimes ending in abrupt dirt and rocky jitters before returning to civil smoothness a while later. The A/C is busted; she has her window down and her fingertips rake invisible lines through the coarse breeze travelling past. She catches the driver's eyes in the rear view mirror studying her in the backseat.
She thinks it's the hair—with his mystified-then-polite glance away, she feels like she's a sneaky girl who fished through her mother's drawer and found a pair of sewing shears she wasn't supposed to play with but did anyway because she thought it was time she became independent and learned to cut her own hair. She's satisfied with her first try; it's perfect and shoulder-length in front—a jagged and confused clutter behind, and when her mother finds out she screams at her so loud she'll have to apologize to the neighbours the next day. Brooke imagines how she might be dragged to a hair salon afterwards, her mother leaving tiny half-moons all over her forearm, and the cabbie's expression mirrors that of the sympathetic hairdresser she'll meet: cheeks sucked in, mouth curved downwards with composed effort because she thinks it's funny—meanwhile Mom flails around the salon with a rolled-up magazine, swatting suggestions of a pricey coif and lather like they are lecherous mosquitoes. When the cabbie doesn't look again, Brooke puts a conscious hand to the back of her head. She can't feel anything wrong. The rest of the drive, she squeezes her hands between her knees and picks at her nails.
As they near the town, the empty beaches fill up with people; umbrellas mushroom from the ground and sway drunkenly. The cab driver honks at a family that has crossed the road in a hurry to plant its own beachball-coloured flag in sandy real estate, but he can't stop the trickle of people seeping through and overflowing the brittle traffic dyke, chasing the diminishing water as if they are themselves being yanked by the pull of the tide. Kyklos is a tourist town, but Brooke is a tourist too (or aims to be—she's just passing through). The taxi stop-goes all the way to the town square where she politely asks to be let off. With her carry-on flung over her shoulder, she walks the rest of the distance to an address written on the back of her brain. Scraps of paper tend to misplace themselves even to the most careful of people, and Brooke never writes down anything sensitive on one of her body parts unless she's prepared to lose it. She's come across people who have made the mistake of doing so before—she's collected quite a few fingers and, on occasion, a couple of toes over the years. She's read about tongue tattoos, or bottom lip tattoos, or even eyelid tattoos and her mind wanders sometimes.
She passes by a beach-facing patio where a couple basks in the incandescent warmth emanating from everywhere: the fraying sunlight, the toasty taverna, each other. They sip from iced teas or whiskeys—Brooke can't tell from here—and the woman's bare feet rest low on a cracking plank-table, pink and sandy and creasing with starving tension as the man murmurs into her ear.
Brooke presses on and finds her way to a stuccoed cluster of low-rise apartments a little ways off the beach. Four vacationers on the farthest balcony fiddle with fat designer sunglasses and strap up criss-crossed sandals, their American laughs careening all the way down the road. Brooke has her key ready and slips unnoticed through a vine-twisted gate that guards the entrance to her apartment. A cramped, tiled staircase takes her up to the second floor. There are three bedroom doors and the hallway opens into the kitchen where a hanging lamp dangles too low over the dinette. Brooke eases each door open and peeks inside their respective rooms. The first and second are ordinary if sparsely decorated spaces with single beds, desks, and bookcases. She leaves her bag in the second.
The third Brooke finds empty except for a few thick vertical rolls of milky plastic sheeting that stand nearly as tall as her, untouched. A set of folding chairs and tables lean neatly against the exposed drywall—off to the side someone has thoughtfully left bleach, paint buckets, rollers, and starchy tubs of innocent Polyfilla. She knows what all this is for. Brooke's breathing sounds different here, as if it's being amplified but not allowed to escape the room, sucked into the morose drywall, sealed up, painted over. When it becomes too much for her, she quickly backs out and closes the door—she releases the knob the way she'd back away from a snarling dog on a taut chain. Once at a safe distance she turns her back on it and explores the kitchen, pulling open a cabinet and inspecting its surprisingly homey dishes, but she can still feel it over her shoulder—can still smell the chemical sweetness of industrial supplies as it begins to take over the apartment. It stinks, languorously oppressive like a dead relative nobody wants to deal with or move, shaming eyes baton-passing the responsibility from person to person until it makes a couple of revolutions and somebody can't stand it anymore. With quickness, Brooke rescues her carry-on from the second room and dumps it on the bed of the first, unpacking to keep her hands busy.
Making sure all corners are hers alone—closet empty, desk and dresser drawers the same, bed...—Brooke discovers a foreign but familiar rifle case tucked underneath her bed and brings it out into the better light of the kitchen to look at it more closely. It makes no pretensions about what it is, unlocked and inviting—it's hers. She's never seen this one before, but it belongs to her world.
Disassembled pieces of a sniper's rifle lie snug in felt burrows, these compartments shaped and segmented like the obscure box of a board game not yet set up, and Brooke determinedly takes to figuring it out. It's a puzzle she's practiced over and over again, poetry in its rhythm and repetition—she winds and screws (and screws and screws), she tugs and releases, and she knows she's done when it tells her. Her machine hands hum a pinched red from the finicky details that require all fingertips and nails, the strained exertion she's come to expect holding it the way she does and always has done. She allows for a glance outside into the sun and all the way down the road she sees a woman walking two stumbling children up from the beach, towels hugged around them like Dracula capes. She suddenly wonders if, at this range, she could pick off the littlest one from here—the one who lags behind and kicks sand from her flip-flops, violet face teary and her turbulent complaints felt through the almost-there magnification of this scope—and how might she correct and account for windage and drop, ensuring a clean, killing entry and exit. The girl would flop on the ground and onlookers would wildly search, puzzled, but Brooke would be long gone before they decided this was really happening, that they weren't just daydreaming in this lazy, tourist-town heat.
Then, as suddenly as the unexpected hornet thought came flitting in, Brooke empties her mind and looks at a rust spot on the balustrade outside her window. She waits until there is no one in her view anymore before she looks at the water again, palms cold. The thought didn't scare her. It was the nonchalance she felt thinking it, the brash confidence of knowing she'd get away. Because she is practiced. Her once-suggestible hands, now steel and tempered, were made this way. She doesn't know why she pauses in reflection now, only that she feels the need to. This scares her too.
She busies her hands again, tweaking what needs to be tweaked with a screwdriver and a file, until she is brought out of her throat-lump trance: she hears footsteps on blocky stone steps, the kind a powerful loafer makes, cutting through all else. They ascend and pause, and key-fisted talons claw and scrape at the door. When it opens, Brooke already has a 9-mm pistol that she found at the bottom of the rifle case within her grasp. Her hand hovers there, however, because she isn't being taken totally by surprise. A man appears at the end of the hallway, dark-skinned, neatly bearded, and neatly dressed in jeans and a clean, button-down shirt. His arms Boa-constrict a large paper sack—sprigs of bobbing greens stick out the top, and he moves with a disarming plastic rustle. When he peers through his thick frames and sees Brooke in the kitchen, the contours of her spine a delicate twist as her head turns in profile view to look him over, he stops in place and lets her do it without challenge. She's got one hand poised near but not quite on a pistol in plain view. For a moment, they are at a standstill. She can snap off a shot straight down the hallway so she is in no hurry to make the first move, but he knows she is still a little uncertain about the paper bag—if he's hiding a weapon of his own inside or behind it.
Probably to diffuse the situation, he goes first: "Which room is you?"
"First on your right," Brooke tells him.
The man has an accent—clipped middle-class Londoner, she figures it for. He asks, "You aren't expecting me?"
"I am." Rachel might have mentioned it in passing, a new partner. No one to Brooke but a replacement for the one she lost, though. She decided early on to keep an eye on him.
"Just jumpy, then?"
"What's in the bag?"
"Dinner, love." He places it on the tiled floor and gives it a strong nudge in her direction. When he moves into the second bedroom, Brooke stands and approaches the offering. She puts it on the counter and finds he isn't lying. She allows him past when he returns.
"Domenic," he says.
"Brooklyn," she says back.
#
Domenic has set the lamb to lightly sear, his snake-charmer hands producing a hidden hiss from behind a covered skillet. They work their way over to a saucepan, stirring with a metal spoon, while Brooke placemats the table with maps, photos, and clasped files. The materials are a copy of the things she looked over when Rachel visited. The photos are of the man, a rustic-looking house, an alleyway. The maps are marked with circles and scrawled X's.
"Addison Seager," Brooke reads out. Their mark. "Forty one and out of the intelligence game. Has been for sixteen years."
Domenic keeps stirring.
"Have you done this kind of thing before?"
Domenic keeps stirring.
"So why you?"
Domenic stops stirring.
Brooke doesn't intend for this to be a hostile question. There's a genuine searching behind her casual bluntness. She wants to know him in the way she knew Benson, but she doesn't know how to try—where to start. Benson was always different. Maybe because she knew he never belonged and she always wondered the same thing: why him?
Domenic thinks. "'Cause I was here, I suppose. It's all very convenient, isn't it?" He starts up again. "I've come recommended—if it makes you feel any better. I've done work for the doctor before. Nothing quite like this, but all sorts of... similar. However, she made it very clear: I'm your backup, not the other way around. Which suits me fine, honestly." Domenic leaves the saucepan alone and begins to work on a bundle of carrots. He snips off their knobby ends with a flick of his chef's knife, sweeping the unwanted bits from the chopping board and onto the countertop.
"Did you wonder about me?" Why me? Brooke holds Seager's photo in front of her face, but her stare grazes overtop, watching the airy movement of his hands. They are machine hands too, exerting the identical amount of pressure with each downward slice; effortless, practiced, merciless and without waver.
"Not one to ask questions, love. It's what makes me valuable."
Domenic is right about that. Brooke forces herself to get back into her old mode. Find that confident woman who would be perfectly fine with firing a rifle out of a window—the woman who fantasized about it. Seager's face comes into focus. She says, "How much trouble do you think he'll be?"
"Him? Nothing. Sixteen years' retirement makes you a bit useless. But the man's got angels looking out for him. They're who we've got to worry about, and it's up to us to find out who they are."
"Inside of a week?"
"That's generous, believe me." Domenic scoops up the peeled and sliced carrots and deposits them inside the saucepan. "Because most of the work's already done for us. Stand back and look at the table for a minute, love. That there is Mr. Seager's entire life. We've got it down to the minute, where he'll be, and who he'll be with on any given day."
Brooke can't help but lean back and do as Domenic suggests. Laid out this way, Seager's life is a chart of numbers and a network of footpaths. She feels large sitting at the table, her elbows propping her up over everything. In this moment she is all-powerful, all-seeing. The lines drawn on the maps tell her a story of what has been and what's about to be. It's been a while since she's felt this kind of control—since she felt in control. She silently thanks Domenic for this tiny moment of pleasure he's provided her.
Domenic adds the seared lamb to the steaming saucepan with tongs and lets it stew. He retrieves two dripping bottles of beer from the fridge and passes one to Brooke. She takes it tentatively, but Domenic has already won her over. Wrapping a damp washcloth over the handle of the saucepan, he picks it up as Brooke starts to clear the mess from the table. But he moves around her and heads out onto the balcony where there is patio furniture waiting to be used. He calls Brooke over to take a look, to see what he sees, and she follows with her beer, meeting the whispered tickle of evening wind rolling off the cooling sea. The sun is drooping under the visible, jutting edge and she can see the intimate lights of the little town all down the coast. She realizes they don't upset her like they did in the big city where she was always trapped behind glass, looking out. Here she is closer. Here she is within. Domenic looks out at Kyklos too and they clink their bottles together.
When Brooke raises it to her lips, the welcome chill makes her think of the couple she saw earlier in the day with warm skin and iced teas or whiskeys—she couldn't tell—and how they were collapsed over and under each other. It makes her think of Benson, yes, but it makes her take a glance at Domenic too. And this makes her think that for the first time since waking up in this world that's not hers things will be all right.