After the Rain

combat.”

“Correct. I ain’t necessarily talkin’ about combat. And there’s other things you might have to do.”

“Things?” Jane had said.

“What, I gotta draw you a picture?” Holly said pointedly to the two women.

So Nina told Jane, “He means like whatever it takes. Like you might have to suck some smuggler’s dick. Not your favorite thing, Jane.”

Jane came back fast. “Just as long as it ain’t Holly’s.”

D-girls. Nothing but hardcore. Behind the bravado they were all picturing Paula Zahn on CNN going zombie- cottonmouthed, trying to get her words out while in the background a nuclear plume mushroomed over downtown Chicago, or Kansas City, or…

Fuck it.

Nothing else mattered. Mission first.

But the way the plan worked, Jane drew a pass. Jane was in the motel in town probably reading Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone to Kit. Nina got the duty and now here she was in a smuggler’s bed, listening to him putter around in his living room just beyond the closed but unlocked door. Jesus, his place was clean. Did that mean he was clean? What if he was a bareback kind of cowboy who didn’t want to use condoms?

What was the statistical probability of contracting AIDS from unsafe sex in remotest North Dakota, anyway? Better or worse odds than being the first dummy rolling out of a Black Hawk on a hot mountain LZ in Afghanistan?

Numbers. Odds. Probabilities…

Nina slid between the clean sheets.

Downstairs she heard the dolly scurry across the floor. A one-man ant colony, Gordy went back and forth, loading the crates of whiskey. The rhythm of the work, the rolling dolly wheels, the thud of the cases being hefted in place drummed like a harsh lullaby.

Exhausted from the alcohol, Nina’s mind wandered.

The mission.

Her first job was to survive insertion. Boy, there’s an example of military lingo falling flat on its ass.

Think about other things.

Like her ex-husband…no, that wasn’t right, they were just separated. Her estranged husband. Better.

It occurred to Nina that her asshole estranged husband would be right at home in these shadows. He’d lived this life for years on end working the margins, hiding out. A lot of people thought he’d done it too long. Not much for small talk, Broker. Not real great social skills at a cocktail party. Good with Kit, though.

And no one was better in the fog.

It was Broker who had taught her about compartments. The necessity to keep various parts of your life scrupulously segregated. And right now she had her daughter in one box and her husband in another. So she just cracked the door on Broker’s cubbyhole, because if she wasn’t careful all this stuff would come rushing out.

Stuff she didn’t need right now.

Emotional stuff.

She realized she was holding on to her discipline like a chin-up bar. Hanging by it. White-knuckling it. Below her the rest of the night waited.

In order to function she had to sleep.

But sleep would leave her vulnerable.

She had to let go and drop into the darkness.

She had duty-trained herself to do so many things-among them, to drop into a fundamental animal sleep almost at will. She had learned how to sleep standing up, to catnap, to meditate.

So she relaxed her grip on the strange day, finger by finger, and started to slide down into the blackness. Sinking, she caught a fleeting notion of Broker and how he’d handle the news that Kit was left hanging in some motel room in North Dakota.

So, Broker, how many women did you sleep with in the line of duty?

But then she had to smile. He wasn’t gonna like it the way she reeled him into this one. Uh-uh. Boy, was he gonna be pissed.

And that’s exactly how they needed him.

Chapter Nine

The rotary phone in the booth at Camp’s Corner still worked long after the golf course failed and the gas station and store closed. People drove out of their way to show their kids this dinosaur from the days before wireless. The county had originally asked the phone company to keep the line open so farmers working during spring planting and the fall harvest could make calls in an emergency. Which was good, because the man pacing back and forth next to the booth was facing a crisis.

Close to midnight and the city lights of Langdon, miles to the north, pushed a dome faintly against the sky. Overhead, a sickle moon wedged between the clouds. Lots and lots of mosquitoes swarmed around.

He was torn over the decision he had to make as he swatted at the bugs. Across the road, a spooky thread of moonlight outlined the Aztec dimensions of the Nekoma radar pyramid. He hugged himself, shivered in the muggy seventy-nine degrees, and looked up. Jeez. It was creepy out here, suspended between the ruins of the Cold War and this slender Muslim moon.

As he paced, he put his right hand, palm open, over his heart, like when you sing the national anthem. Except he was searching for his sluggish heartbeat. He suspected that a catastrophic illness lurked inside him, coiled up, something part diabetes and part cancer, that lapped sugar from his blood the way a dog laps water.

Sometimes he saw things.

Shapes jerked at the corners of his vision. He caught fleeting glimpses of movement he thought were people darting away through doorways.

At first he thought he might have paranormal powers. Lately he had come to believe that it was a sign his death was near. If this were the case, he reasoned, the closer he came to it the better he could see into the world that existed just the other side of death. Since his body and its functions repelled him, the idea of leaving it was a kind of comfort.

He had entered “out of body experience” in his computer’s search engine one day and found his way to research papers about NDEs-near death experiences. The more he read about it, the more he surmised that the shapes he detected were presences transiting a zone between the sputtering energy of life ending and the total void of nothingness.

Near Death Experience.

The subject intrigued him and he’d investigated the sensation of what it might feel like with the help of a drug called ketamine. Abusers of the compound called it “going in the K-hole”; the dreamy scary sensation of leaving the body.

He had always suspected, and now he knew it for sure.

He was different.

It was time. Charon picked up the phone, inserted coins, and dialed the number. The Mole picked up on the other end but didn’t say hello. Charon pressed the receiver closer to his ear and could feel the building anxiety-the whole attack plan hung in the balance. Finally Charon broke the silence: “It’s me.”

“Where the hell are you?” the Mole asked.

“Still in town. You know, Rashid must have told them something, ’cause I think they’re here.”

“Shit. How many?”

“Three. Two women and an older guy.”

“I repeat. Why are you still there?”