He turned the anachronistic doorknob, feeling the cool tingle of its polished brass in his hand as the solid, hand-made door swung inward with a squeak of hinges. From the dim light of the chemical ghostlights at the baseboards of the room, he could see Tanaka sitting cross-legged in the center of the floor, staring straight ahead, his fingers intertwined in a complex mesh. Pushing the door shut behind him, Jason suppressed a shudder. Tanaka’s face was wreathed in shadows while the rest of his form was lost in the darkness of his loose, black clothing. Burning red cinders floated where his eyes would be, from the reflection of the dim ghostlights off his retinas; and McKay almost felt as if he were stepping into some otherworld, with Tanaka as its resident demon.
“I hope I’m not interrupting anything,” Jason stepped forward, feeling a bit awkward.
“Nothing that can’t wait.” The bodyguard rose to his feet lithely and economically, not a movement wasted. Jason realized then, for the first time, just how dangerous this man looked. Before, he had regarded him as just another hired merc out of the Eastbloc, but the way he moved spoke volumes as to the extent of his training.
“Mr. Tanaka,” McKay began, “I think we’ve got a couple problems that we need to work out.” He took a deep breath before continuing. “Look, I know you’ve been guarding Ms. O’Keefe for a long time, and I appreciate that, but I think we need to reach some kind of accommodation. It won’t do either of us any good to keep bumping heads in potentially hazardous situations.”
“I see no problem,” the bodyguard replied, his face unreadable in the shifting shadows. “You and your people will stay out of my way.”
“Uh-huh.” McKay chuckled humorlessly, putting his hands on his hips in an effort to avoid making fists with them. He’d lost his temper once tonight already, and it just wouldn’t do to get into a confrontation with a man he’d have to work closely with for the next year. “That’s all well and good to say, but in a situation like this evening, your allowing her to leave the building could have gotten her killed.”
“When armored personnel carriers come to call,” Tanaka declared, smiling thinly, “the worst possible place to be is inside their probable target.”
“That may be,” the Lieutenant said, trying to work the tension out of his neck. “And you may have insights in the future that will help us both take care of Ms. O’Keefe. That’s why I feel we have to work together.”
“Lieutenant McKay,” the Japanese man interrupted, “I have had much experience with soldiers, of one government or another. Some of them were honorable men, some were not. But all had overriding loyalties to a General or a Chairman or a President—or merely to a career.” He seemed to look McKay up and down without moving his eyes a millimeter. “From what I have seen, you are not without courage, but I cannot trust you.” The bodyguard sniffed almost imperceptibly, a dismissive gesture that was the most expressive thing the man had done since Jason had stepped into the room. “The point is moot. I am not under your command, and I will continue to act as I see fit to safeguard Ms. O’Keefe’s life. Your assignment, whatever it may be, is your own concern.”
“All right.” Jason took a deep breath, his shoulders squaring as the fire that had been kindling in his gut for the last five minutes flared behind his eyes. “I tried to be pleasant about this, but I haven’t yet found one of you damned civilians who wanted to listen to any kind of reason, so I’m going to be blunt.” He stabbed a finger at the bodyguard. “You can go ahead and be as stubborn as you want to be about all this, and you can ignore me as much as you want. But when the time comes that you get in my way, or obstruct any decision that I consider vital to ensuring Ms. O’Keefe’s safety or the safety of my team, I’m not going to argue with you, and I’m not going to bother trying to arrest you. I’m just going to have someone put a bullet in you, and worry about the consequences later. And that’s something you
Jason stormed out the door without another word, slamming it behind him with a negligent shove, and stalked his way down the darkened hallway, cursing as he went. He started in English, worked his way through Spanish and French, and was well on his way into German by the time he found himself in the large, extravagantly- decorated study at the other end of the wing. The reading lamp over one of the couches was lit, and beneath it, he noticed too late as he entered in mid-invective, Shannon Stark sat reading an old-style, jacketed book. She looked up at his entrance, eyebrow raising.
“Problem?” she asked him, setting the volume down beside her.
“Naw,” he chuckled. “Just rehearsing for my court-martial. What’s keeping you up at this hour?”
“Well, we may not think much of His Honor, the Governor’s taste in architecture,” she explained, “but he has a hell of a library.” She ran an appreciative hand over the spine of the lavishly-decorated book she’d been reading. “This is a Hemingway first edition, and there’re dozens of others in here.” She stood, motioning back at the shelves behind her. “All the old classics, most of them first editions, some even signed, for God’s sake. It must have cost a small fortune to have them imported here from Earth.”
Jason stepped over to the couch, picking up the book.
“I used to love reading when I was a kid,” he told her. “I’d sit out at the docks with a hardcopy of Hemingway or Heinlein and lose myself for hours.” He laughed softly, eyes seeing something long ago and far away. “Dad thought I was nuts, but Mom told him to leave me alone—Mom was always the old-fashioned one.”
Shannon moved closer to him, putting a hand on the book he still held, her fingers brushing against his. She wore khaki shorts and a matching top, unbuttoned over a pale t-shirt; and he was suddenly acutely aware of the warmth that radiated off the bare skin of her legs and neck, and of the faint but unmistakable sweet scent of her perfume.
“I enjoy the old poetry the most,” she told him, green eyes locked on his like sighting lasers, the expression on her face displaying an intent totally separate from her words. “Like Lord Byron:
’Away with your fictions of flimsy romance,
Those tissues of falsehood which folly has wove!
Give me the mild beam of the soul-breathing glance,
Or the rapture which dwells on the first kiss of love.’”
She had brought her face closer to his with each word; and by the finish, her lips were inches from his, only the book separating them. For some reason, Jason found himself having difficulty putting together a coherent thought; his chest felt tight and his head was light. There had to be some reason he shouldn’t be doing this, he thought as he leaned forward almost imperceptibly to allow their lips to meet, but he couldn’t for the life of him think of one right now.
“I don’t like this,” Jason heard Vinnie mutter, half to himself, half to Jock. McKay had to agree that there was a lot not to like.
The three squat hemispheres of buildfoam that were the Mendoza’s farmhouse jutted out of the rocky, arid wastes that bordered the northern deserts, the white surfaces glaring harshly in the midday sun. The flitter that had delivered them there crouched buglike a good fifty meters from the buildings, the governor’s pilot and a security guard lounging lazily in the shade of its open boarding hatch, while Valerie O’Keefe’s party and McKay’s team slowly approached the farmhouse.
They were all out in the open, with the nearest backup a hundred klicks away, and no more of an advance recon than a couple low fly-bys. McKay had requested an earlier visit, with his team going first in a separate vehicle and checking the whole area out, but O’Keefe had found the idea insulting.
“These people are personal friends of mine, Lieutenant,” she had told him coldly. “I will find any such treatment of them a personal insult.” And that had been that. Jason had been in too good of a mood at the time to push the argument any further, not that it would have done any good.
He glanced at Shannon, saw her returning the look behind her round-lensed sunglasses, and had to smile. He’d worried, just before they’d drifted off to sleep early this morning, that things would be awkward for them now, and that he’d just sacrificed any chance at a good working relationship for a couple hours of—admittedly intense— pleasure. But in the morning, she’d managed to handle it just right, playing it loosely, but not lightly. He’d left his bedroom with the feeling that, although what had happened was not serious enough to affect their military association, nor was it something he could dismiss as a meaningless one-night stand. In fact, rather than worried, he actually felt damn
He forced himself to concentrate on the business at hand as from the largest of the three structures emerged a Latino couple whom McKay recognized from Val’s speech as Jorge and Carmella Mendoza. They looked much the same as they had in the holo from two years before, perhaps even a bit healthier and surely better dressed. But something about them struck Jason as not right, before they ever spoke a word. They seemed nervous and fitful as they stepped away from the door, like cornered animals. And he had an odd feeling that the thing responsible was the man that walked out that door just behind them.
