Brooke and Domenic follow Addison Seager as if they are lovelorn and weird. When he wakes up and leaves his villa at 11, Brooke focuses in on his face with a knuckle-twist search through her binocular telescope. He's gone silvery and bearded—thankfully distinctive, easy to track, she thinks. Her eye socket is nestled in the cool, theatre-darkness of the eyepiece.
Through teased-apart shutters like closet doors, the coastal town opens up downhill from their apartment, washed-out and morning white. She has a good, complete view of Seager's villa that is open and airy which must be deliberate. He probably didn't have a choice when ONI placed him here in Kyklos all those years ago. It was their way of maintaining control over him, this exposed location an unspoken reminder that they owned him.
But Brooke and Domenic are not working for ONI this time. They'll use that display of conceit to their advantage because they'll come at him from the same angles ONI might have, when ONI was a smothered sniper snap through a half-open window—just a black bullet carrying the ugly, self-assuring weight of the greater good. The war how she remembers it was very different for Brooke than others, but still dangerous. Still violent. Still bloody.
This time around she is not here for that. Seager must live. That's her first parameter. Seager must live. But why? There are things Brooke wonders about that Rachel hasn't told her (because why does she need to know?) so maybe she'll wonder about them to Domenic, but in all likelihood he knows less than she does. Rachel prefers it that way. They will hunt Seager like they do everyone, but the difference is Seager must live because Rachel said so. It all feels like a game where they expect nobody to get hurt and neither Brooke or Domenic have talked about killing at all, like it's taboo.
Right now they're trying to find out who's watching Seager like they are. Rachel refers to them as an interested third party. These people are hidden but there, and they will be looking for anyone like Brooke and Domenic too so they cannot get too close. They won't be ONI agents, Rachel has told them. Not active ones, anyway. Maybe at one time, another life—another world—but not now. They are acceptable casualties, is what Rachel really means; these people whoever they are are trying to prevent Seager from harm, and there's no telling how prepared they are to do this. Maybe 15 years has made them complacent, too, like Seager—too far removed from any rumour of danger after all this time to take it seriously. Maybe this will be a vicious surprise for them, and easy on Brooke and Domenic. She can hope. But the two are just starting their surveillance, and they've found no one yet.
Everyone is suspect. Brooke doubts someone would have followed Seager around for 15 years, but what does she know? Seager might even be friendly with his tails. Or they are young, rotated in and out every so often, and they have no idea why they are following their mark and have never met. Maybe they are like her and Domenic, and they have one order as well and nothing else: Seager must live.
Brooke and Domenic are trying to kidnap Seager for Rachel. That is the objective. Why is not important to them, being who they are, but instead how. They are their own architects here. They've talked about plans and places of where best to do it, the kidnapping, but there is always the hanging question of how to do it without themselves being caught by surprise. That they might be shot because Seager must live. That they know Seager has a tail (but without knowing who and how many) is a piece of valuable intelligence that adds a whole new layer of complexity to what might have been as simple as a smash and grab, like Seager was a dazzling, glass-cased import right next to the exit of a crowded jeweller's.
Rachel could be wrong, too, and they are doing this extra work for nothing, but there's only one way to be sure.
Brooke and Domenic have given themselves a week and a day to analyze any patterns in Seager's daily routines, of the people near him. Rachel's had eyes on him before and his life seems predictable enough for the pair to be in all the right places every hour of the day. From her vantage point in the apartment, Brooke watches Seager leave his place—alone. She marks this down and the time in a notepad, and tells Domenic he's up. Domenic's sitting in a car about a block from Seager's villa, and he watches him amble down the road moving on foot. He notes the direction Seager's heading and then, like he's finding the corners of a jigsaw puzzle, all logic, from a folder he picks out a preset schedule that's most likely going to be the man's entire day. Domenic tells Brooke where to be, and she's out the door of the apartment, navigating down a steep footpath into town.
The 41 year old retiree lives a life of leisure for someone under constant, tentative threat. He dines on a beachside patio for breakfast, neatly flipping and folding over a newspaper until his fingertips are black. He munches on a pastry and Brooke watches him finish it bite by bite. By the middle of the week, they don't watch Seager so intensely. He is a television program on mute to glance at once in a while over dinner or laundry. They've already ruled out stationary people as his tails—the newspaper vendor he visits every morning, the pretty server of his favourite cafe, the papou he ends up playing chess with whenever he wanders into the park—they exist in a place but never anywhere else. They're looking for a familiar face, someone who is able to pass through these invisible barriers that separate Seager's life into tangible blocks of time, his life an itinerary.
Domenic calls out possible tails, sometimes seriously and sometimes not. He makes Brooke laugh. She feels she is allowed to because this easy-going tourist town has sapped any trace of the bustle and thundercloud intensity Rachel tends to bring (and only seems to exist in). Seager's life in comparison is too carefree, too sedate to even imagine him once belonging to their world, soldiers and spies. Brooke's wondered more than once if they have the wrong man completely.
"He lives alone," Domenic says to Brooke one afternoon, "he eats alone, he has a tiny circle of mates he sees regularly, but irregularly enough that there's no way they're watching over him. There's no way they could be his tails, unless they're just... rubbish at it. If we wanted to take Seager out today, we'd have more than ample opportunity. If he's got protection, I haven't a clue as to what they're thinking."
Brooke is watching Seager through her telescope having lunch with a dark-haired woman. She's seen her before, but like Seager's friends, she is around only sometimes. Right now her hand rests atop of Seager's on the creamy tablecloth. Brooke removes her eye from the telescope and says to Domenic, "If you had to do it—keep Seager safe I mean—how would you do it?"
Domenic stirs milk into his teacup and ponders the whorl. "If I'm ONI or this third party, and I've got this really fantastic, The-Second-Coming of a human being tucked in my back pocket—that's our lad Seager—and there are two very bad people coming to kidnap him—"
"The absolute worst."
"—couple of real cunts, yeah—and it's up to me to protect the hairs on his rather bristly mane because I must, well, for starters I wouldn't make his house out of glass. All of this, whatever this is. Whatever we're not seeing." Domenic leans back in his chair. "If I had my way, I'm shelling out for the works: lock, key, concrete, razor wire..."
"Laser beams..."
"In every colour. And a pressure plate that drops a... a giant boulder right on top of you. I'll make him a moleman, honestly."
Brooke smiles. "Fortress nigh impenetrable—staple of every good paranoid despot."
"If I'm a tyrant, who are you?"
"Lady Macbeth."
Domenic snorts a chuckle across the top of his cup. "You're frigid, love. Just handing me that apple."
Brooke says, "To evil, pal." She didn't mean to. That sort of slipped out. She searches for Seager again, but he hasn't gone anywhere. She wishes he had.
She hears: "You were ONI back then, yeah?"
Brooke twists in her seat and gives Domenic a stare like he'd just flicked the back of her head.
"Sorry, if that's off-limits..."
"I was," Brooke says. "With ONI."
Domenic nods. Before the silence takes them, he says, "That's it. That's all I wanted to ask."
Brooke says suddenly, "Who do you think I am?"
"I shouldn't have brought it up."
"Uh-uh. Seager's not going anywhere and neither am I. It's just you and me, here, now, and I know you've got something you want to put out into the air."
Her Yankee bluntness prods Domenic into the rough burn of a leering spotlight. He thinks about what he's about to say and then just goes for it after a sigh. "I don't know who you are, Fields. I don't know what you've done. It was stupid of me to presume anything. I don't come from a place of judgment, though. I wouldn't be here otherwise."
Brooke feels a pinprick of guilt because she made the comment first, an offhand joke when she was never really comfortable joking. "Okay?"
"I know why I'm here. Don't know why you are, though."
"It's nothing to me," Brooke says. "Maybe because this is nothing to me."
"It's a job."
"Just a job." She nods. "An op just like any other."
"You've been around, then," Domenic says. There's a timid curiosity in it because it's not an idle statement—there's a bit of searching—and he knows he's at the mercy of Brooke's temperament that he isn't at all familiar with.
But she says, "Did you know I was active during the war?"
"Had that feeling."
"Oh?"
"Yeah. Not by looking at you, believe me, no, but I've met old spies. It's you lot who used to do this sort of thing for reasons beyond yourselves. For duty, yeah? Didn't matter what—jobs dirtier than this, even—it was still for a cause. War meant you could do no wrong, 'coz if you didn't, there might not be a tomorrow. Big crusade made killers into soldiers."
Brooke says nothing, but she remembers quietly: every distance, every face, every method, flecks of dried blood on her forearms she only discovers later—that she frowns at, wondering if she should wear longer sleeves, next time whenever.
"Then the war went away, and soldiers turned back into killers," Domenic says. "That big reason just... vanished. The work was still the same—doesn't put on its hat and call it a night, and do the white-picket, hair-curlers, potroast waiting in the oven thing—but it was qualms that won out. The whole feeling-bad-about-it. Post-war slump suddenly made the necessary an ugly thing—a very, very illegal thing. Bleeding hearts left the Office for good, got a pint, and went out to celebrate the end of the war in the streets. They were soldiers who couldn't wait to come back from a tour overseas, from some dark calling that was done with them. But the lifers, now, they just burrowed in deeper, disappearing into rooms and floors that ONI still denies all existence of so that they could keep working." Domenic's voice grows far off. He stares into a corner. "These are people I've met. Absolutely cold. Who you might mistake for career criminals because they don't judder one bit. Like how surgeons don't lose it, hacking apart a body. All just practice. It isn't evil. It just is."
"And this is what for you?" Brooke asks. "War's long over, and the work's the same."
"It's money, isn't it," Domenic says. There is no wondering there on his part. "I'm not a spy. I never fought. I was born near the close of it. Wasn't my war—like it's not someone's decade. It's all just vague history to me. I came into this with one thing in mind. You can consider me a mercenary at best. I don't pretend to be anything more—or anything less. The job is the job."
"Okay," Brooke says, "so do you think I have a problem being here?"
"You tell me."
"It was a joke."
"Then it was a joke."
They both mercifully drop it. Domenic finishes his tea and walks to the sink. Seager's still in the same fucking spot. Brooke keeps her head buried in the telescope, but just rests in the smallness here. She listens to the tap run, the burbled overflow and cascade down leaning, piled up things. Domenic wanted to know, understandably, if they were on the same page, that she had his back because he did hers. No qualms.
His talk of killers makes her think back to the war. She was serving mankind—they all were. But back then, though her targets were all human, they needed to be removed because, really, Rachel said so. Brooke supposes that many who were like her took it on faith what they were doing couldn't possibly be wrong (or maybe just told themselves that) but Brooke herself never asked why. The why never mattered so much, because all she knew—and all that she cared for—was that it would please Rachel if she did. After an op, she'd go into Rachel's office and want for her to tell her she did a good job, but she rarely did. That hurt her sometimes. Other times she might sit near to her because when she spoke she'd brush a hand over Brooke's arm that came in bloodflecked once, then more often, for Rachel—to show her what she'd done—and that feeling of Rachel's attentive, tangible concern for her body was enough. Just an imagined delight, enough, until next time whenever.
If she remembers one thing from that life before, it's that she would die for Rachel and Rachel alone. Maybe that's what made her a soldier. More so than Domenic. Despite what he seemed to suggest, that soldiers somehow were more principled—that they were somehow removed from it, morally—Brooke would do anything the woman asked. Soldiers did despicable things, too, when they were asked. People forget that sometimes. Brooke would be ready for whatever she needed to do. And she'll do it, if that'll convince Domenic.
One day Brooke and Domenic follow Seager to a park they can't see from the apartment. It's most likely a waste of time, a scenic route to break up his routine monotony, but both Brooke and Domenic can't take the chance to leave it be, if here is where his tail might finally reveal himself. They're drawing a blank, and it's nearly been a week. This is a move born of their placid desperation.
Brooke picks a bench in the corner and folds her long legs underneath her summertime dress and folded magazine. Seager drinks tea in the shade, unaware. She's curious to see if he's waiting for anyone in this out of the way place. But she becomes distracted suddenly when somebody uninvited comes and sits on her bench awkwardly and next to her. It's a young woman in eyesore, sunny jogging clothes sweating and a bit winded, who bends over to lace up her shoe. She glances up at Brooke and says a bright hello. Brooke's caught staring, unfortunately, so she gives up a weedy little smile underneath her fat and white sunglasses that take up most of her face. She hopes the jogger won't stick around, but it gets worse for her because while she wasn't looking Seager crossed half the park and now he's right there.
The jogger beams and waves at Seager because they recognize each other, and they begin a chattery conversation in hybrid, mutated Greek, where she laughs at his many tries and in her thick, singsong English calls him "my American." Brooke's trapped in between them, close enough to stab him then and there if Rachel had asked, and she does her very best to remain a nobody but she feels Seager's wandering eyes fall on her whenever there's a lull, and her wavering ordinariness like untested tank armour, she wills that nothing penetrates—that he will forget about her within the hour like any other stranger. This ordeal ends after a while and the two part ways. Brooke sits in the relaxed breeze, sullen. When she gets into Domenic's car that pulls up to her curb later, she dutifully reports "He's seen me" and the rest of the week, Brooke's pretty much grounded, in the car or back inside the apartment, or just far away from Seager.
Another late afternoon, when Domenic is sure Seager's housebound with the woman who seems to be his lover, Brooke breaks into her high-rise apartment and looks around. She studies pictures of the two pulled together in all sorts of attractive embraces. She reads the spines of her albums, the labels of her prescription pills. When she pauses on her golden hour balcony for a moment, orienting herself, she quickly puts herself in Domenic's ear.
#
"Hey," he hears.
Domenic is back at their apartment keeping an eye on the couple at Seager's villa. He's stepped away from the binoculars for a minute while he puts the kettle on the stove when Brooke comes through. Interrupted, he says back to her, "What is it?"
"You never asked me how I'd do it."
"Do what?"
"Protect Seager."
"Okay," Domenic says. He heads back to the window. "Let's hear it."
"Deception."
"Isn't that what this is? They're sneaky. Otherwise we would've made his tails already."
"I think we have."
Domenic perks up. "What'd you find, beautiful?"
"If I needed to keep a man under control, I wouldn't need a fortress," Brooke says. "Because give him cuffs, he'll want to break them. But give him freedom—a convincing version of it, at least—and he's got no need to run. Give him a great love, though, and he'll put those cuffs right back on. If she asked him to."
"Thought we ruled his lady out. Haven't we?" Domenic says. He zooms farther in with the equipment, studying the woman sharing Seager's loveseat in front of a tidily burning fireplace. "She's never around long."
"Neither are we."
"Sometimes."
"Sometimes."
"So why her?" Domenic says patiently.
"Turn off the tap and I'll tell you."
Domenic hears the shushed trickle coming from the kitchen and the kettle starting to shriek but he claws at the binoculars and twists it around on its mount, peering across the water, acquiring Brooke in the distance. She's perched on a high rise balcony leaning over a high-powered telescope of her own that's nosed directly at him; glare winks off its lens like a sniper's brash checkmate in a high-stakes duel.
From her vantage point, their safehouse-apartment is bare-assed, ankles up and thoroughly, coldly spread open.
Domenic utters a quiet "Fuck."
#
When Brooke gets back in the evening, Domenic meets her at the door. He's chewing down a cigarette and looking jumpy.
He says, "I'm ready to burn this place to the fucking ground. Just say the word."
"God, Domenic." Brooke eases herself through the doorway past him, taking in the toasted smell that has soaked into everything. On his bed, his puffy suitcase is stuffed full of his things, the room itself emptied. A nearly-out pack of cigarettes rests on the kitchen counter and the blinds have all been squeezed shut.
When she just plants herself in the middle of the floor, arms crossed, Domenic says, "What are you standing around for?"
"We're not going anywhere."
"You already called this one. You know what it means when you're blown—it's your game to lose, and that's it. So get out. Now."
"We don't know that we've been made," Brooke says.
"We know that we might've been. We know that we haven't not been," Domenic hisses. "It's no way to do a job."
"Like it or not, it still has to get done."
"You see, no, no it doesn't, love. This isn't a hill to hold. All right? This isn't do-or-die-trying, the Alamo shit. You control this or you don't. We don't gamble here."
"Don't fucking lecture me."
"Is there a language barrier we've run into? Do you need me to translate, word by word, what happens when they catch up to us?"
Brooke says nothing but this goads him on.
"They'll come for us. When we sleep. And this is a far cry from a fortress." Domenic gestures towards the door. "They'll burst in and shoot anything that moves. Pets. Kids. No matter. Room by room—a hit squad. Professionals, but lowlifes. They'll do it loud and messy."
"Then we shoot them first."
"You do that, and Seager's gone. Whisked away, never to be found. What do you think our friend Rachel Wells will do to us then? She'll call cleaners of her own, yeah? She wouldn't be in the wrong to do so."
Brooke fears more scampering back to Rachel because they chickened out. She says, "Let's say she's seen me—Seager's girl—because I got too close at the park. And say she had me followed back here. If we're humped, why hasn't Seager left town by now? Why aren't we dead already?"
Domenic looks resigned because he honestly has no idea. For them, uncertainty's the most dangerous element and the smoky room's filled with it, crippling and slowly lethal. He shakes out another cigarette and chain-lights the tip while sinking into a fuzzy lounger. He says, "Same reason why we haven't made our move yet I suppose."
"Time isn't right."
"We're all just keeping up appearances. All just trying to pretend like nothing's wrong."
"You still want to bounce?"
"I do. But I don't think I will. If you're staying."
"There's no reason to believe they'll come tonight, of all nights—if they even know," Brooke says. "So we keep going. Tomorrow morning, you watch him, I've got her. She even glances in your direction... I'll take her out."
Domenic looks unhappy, but he knows whatever they do they must do together. If Brooke's right, he'll have walked out for nothing. And if he's right, they might last a little longer as a pair when they're being hunted down.
Brooke says, "I'm going to sleep. In the morning, if you're gone, I'll understand."
"I'll be here," Domenic tells her. He means this spot, in his lounger. There's a pistol on the end table nearby him. "Somebody needs to watch the door. If I need you... well, you'll hear us."
"Crack open a window, will you?" Brooke starts towards her room, wriggling out of her jacket.
"One last chance, love," he says after her. "To pack up and just get the hell out of here."
"Your worst case scenario," Brooke says, over her shoulder. "Door bursting in, room by room—is that how you would've done it? How you've done it?"
Domenic clenches his jaw but denies nothing.
"What pit did Rachel pull you out of?"
He wasn't a spy, he said. But the work's the same. ONI needed people like him sometimes. Professionals, but lowlifes. Now she was firmly in his world. She is a Spartan, biologically, make no mistake, but the psychological wall of invincibility still pervades over all and props her up—the supersoldier mindset that there are few consequences so she'll just blast her way out if it comes to it and that's it, that's mission accomplished. She's been shot and cut and beat up before and it's nothing to her. It doesn't scare her like it does Domenic, who knows the limits and breaking point of his very breakable body. Brooke already feels like she'll live forever.
Domenic sits in his chair dark and stormy and real, and for all his talk and insistence about doing what's necessary, Brooke feels she has misjudged him. It all just felt like weightless conversation then. He disarmed her first with his jokes, his hardy charm that made him easy and smooth to take in, but who she sees tonight is someone tightly wound, roughly cut—a product of his years. Like amongst a dull, perfect surface there is a botched jaggedness that crouches on a corner edge you can't see from a certain perspective, that perhaps you maintain for too long because you like seeing things this way, and changing that would not be lying to yourself anymore.
She's forgotten that he is her kind of crowd. No amount of milky sun or salty breeze, bopping uptempo records and lemony beers on the balcony can change that fact. Her sharper memories have faded, the panic of imminent danger when she killed for Rachel, leaving only a disturbing feeling of fondness. Everything before now—him, here, and the approaching night—feels like a woolly dream recalled with a scratched hiss, nostalgic and lovingly worn, so earth-tone comforting that you melt back into it, pining.
Brooke keeps a loaded weapon next to her when she lies down to sleep, mnemically aware of these truths: this is not really her bed; this is not really her apartment; the man outside her door is a killer; so is she.