“Yes, sir.” I sat up straighter. Couldn’t help it. That deep commanding voice, accompanied by a storied career that included enough medals to cover one wall of my living room had impressed me despite the fact that he’d served with Albert and was still a close friend. That put him in the same category as Jet’s dad, meaning he deserved either the cold shoulder or a punch in the face, whichever my career could handle. At this point I couldn’t even muster a mild snub.
“How’s your father?” General Kyle asked.
Do. Not. Cry. “The doctors are cautiously optimistic, sir.”
“He’s a good man. Better than you give him credit for.”
Huh
. How did he know?
“The daughters are always the last to find out, sir.”
He laughed appreciatively. “Yeah, well, maybe you should give mine a call.” His voice changed, took on a certain timbre that made me think I’d better be listening carefully because I didn’t want to miss a word. “This Wizard is a slippery character, isn’t he?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Hard to tell what he’s up to until after he’s taken credit for it.”
“That’s true.”
“Make sure you get
him
.” He emphasized the word just slightly. Paused to let me know he agreed with our assessment of the situation but couldn’t officially set us on the track we wanted to take. He finished with, “Not the other way around.”
Easy for General Kyle to say. He wasn’t sitting in a rental house in Tehran, wondering just who would dig his career out of the Dumpster if he killed the right guy, but was never able to prove it. The Wizard’s henchmen might continue his work, use his name like he was still calling the shots and no one would be absolutely sure he wasn’t. I’d be lucky to get a job scraping gum off the undersides of the desks at Roosevelt Middle School.
Vayl and I looked at each other, and I could tell we were both thinking the same thing. Better to follow General Danfer’s directive. Take out the double. Maybe I’d been wrong about him and he hadn’t been coerced into this situation. No, he was probably a highly placed lieutenant, responsible for arranging or executing many of the atrocities the Wizard had committed over the course of his career. Okay, so we wouldn’t end up eliminating our true target. At least they couldn’t fire us for following orders.
But the whole deal sat wrong. It was the picture, dammit. The man in my hip pocket with his arms around his family. Nobody had ordered us to kill
him
. We weren’t certain he’d committed
any
offense deserving of assassination. Which was why I still couldn’t grab onto the sleep I so desperately needed.
After the phone call I stalked back to the girls’ bedroom. Tossed and turned for fifteen minutes. Gave up, got dressed, and sought out Vayl. He was still in his room. Sitting on the bench at the end of the bed, his hands on his knees, staring at the carpet.
“I can’t sleep!” I announced as I marched in. “I’d be snoring now if not for those calls! I’m going to build a time machine, go back to visit Alexander Graham Bell, and kill him before he invents the telephone!”
Vayl mustered a smile. One of the twitchy ones, which told me he was nearly as disturbed as I was. But he’d lived a lot longer, so he knew better how to go with the flow. “We have already hashed this out from every conceivable angle, Jasmine,” he said. “I cannot see an alternative to deviating from our original assignment that will not gravely jeopardize our careers.”
“I know, I know. But I still can’t sleep. And I
need
to!” I think the desperation in my voice finally registered, because Vayl slapped his hands on his knees and stood decisively.
“A walk then,” he said. “To cool you off and cheer both of us.”
I almost asked him what he had to be depressed about, that’s how tangled up I’d been in my own junk. But one look at his face reminded me of what he’d given up when he’d agreed not to turn Zarsa. I searched my brain for a way to make him feel better about not seeing his sons right away, but it was so raw from its recent bombardment it just moaned and curled into the fetal position.
So far the walk hadn’t done either of us any good. Of course it probably hadn’t helped that I kept bringing up our intolerable work situation and Vayl wouldn’t stop talking about Badu and Hanzi.
A red glow in the middle of the street several blocks ahead of us stopped me in the middle of my current rant, which effectively saved General Danfer from the maw of the Sarlaci from
Return of the Jedi
. “Do you see that?” I asked, grabbing Vayl’s sleeve and pulling him forward as I spoke.
When he didn’t immediately comment I looked up at him. The expression on his face threw me because it was so intense. “Vayl? What’s wrong?”
He jerked his arm away from mine and stopped cold. “That red flame is outlining a plane portal. I can see it
