Shoshana Nuri raises an eyebrow, puzzled, then shrugs. Bell goes to his office, is just settling in when she sticks her head through the doorway.
“They confirm,” she tells him.
Bell nods, and she holds a second longer.
“My daughter’s school,” he says.
“I see.”
“Come in, close it,” Bell tells her.
She does, standing just in the doorway.
“Here’s my problem,” Bell says. “My problem is I don’t want them coming.”
“You have new intel?”
“I have the same intel you do.” He fixes his eyes on hers. “Unless you’re holding back.”
“I am not.”
“I have the same intel you do.”
“So you’re being paranoid.”
“It’s my daughter and ex-wife.” Bell pauses. “Of course I’m being paranoid.”
Nuri considers this for a second, then nods. “Yes.”
“I’m sending it up the line.”
“To do what?”
“To put a stop to it.”
Nuri shakes her head. “You’ll compromise us.”
“It’s my daughter and my ex-wife, you think I care about that?”
“I do, yes.”
For a moment, Bell thinks he might hate her, beautiful, young, smart, and absolutely right. He feels caught, a sudden surge of dread that is almost sickening rising in his gullet. The helplessness of watching an accident unfold with adrenaline clarity, the illusion of slowing time, without the grace of attendant speed.
“Think this through,” Nuri says. She comes closer, approaching the desk, and Bell rises abruptly, suddenly wanting to maintain the space between them. “You think you’re being played, you’re being compromised, but it checks out. The timing checks out, makes this legitimate. This is a flat tire on the Humvee, this is a broken radio, this is a dead battery. That’s all this is.”
Bell doesn’t speak.
“You send this up the line, you’re compromised. They’ll pull you out and have to scramble someone into your place and that will draw attention, will demand questions be asked and answers given. Operational security will be destroyed. They’ll pull you out, and that’ll expose your man, that’ll leave me here, alone, high and dry. I am not a shooter, Mr. Bell. I am not a shooter.”
“I am compromised. I am obligated to inform Brickyard. One way or another, I am obligated to inform.”
She looks at him, her jaw clenching for a second. A nod, reluctant.
“You do what you have to do.”
She leaves, shuts the door behind her.
Wednesday night, the Yard House, louder, and the volume on the televisions is up. Ruiz is waiting at the bar, a long oblong island in the middle of the space, and Bell squeezes in next to him, displacing a squadron of secretaries. Hears one of them remarking on his ass, loud enough to know it’s a come-on, and all it does is annoy him.
Ruiz waits for him to order another of the same IPA, and they detach from the rail, move to a newly vacated standing table. Bell gets a good look at Ruiz’s expression, and the colonel is not looking like a happy man.
“Are you asking me to pull you out?”
Bell has been wondering the same thing. Wondering the same thing and feeling, yet again, the same conflict that destroyed his marriage, the same conflict that divorce was supposed to remove.
“What’s the intel?” Bell asks.
“Same as before. Are you asking to be pulled?”
“You can’t cock-block them? You can’t shut this down?”
“Not without exposure. I need an answer.”
Bell shakes his head, arguing with himself. Too many ifs, and if he knew, if he was certain, he could answer, and as he thinks that, he has his response. They’re coming, Amy and Athena and the rest, they’re coming regardless, unless he goes and stops them himself, and there it is.
Because if, God help him, it comes down this weekend and he’s
“No,” Bell says.
Four minutes past eight on Bell’s watch, it’s Saturday morning, and he hears them coming. Deaf children vocalize with joy, and without restraint, without self-censorship, without care. Then they grow, and they discover judgmental eyes, and self-awareness gives way to self-?consciousness. They learn that their voices are unwelcome to many who hear, and they censor themselves. That he can hear them now, Bell knows, speaks to their excitement and their happiness.
Bell raises his head to see Athena and Amy and a man who must be Howe leading a pack of five other teenagers toward the faux-wrought-iron gates of the VIP entrance. He can almost recognize Athena’s classmates- some of them, at least-young men and women with whom his daughter has grown up and who probably know her far better than he ever will. But the sight of her here and now, the distinctive sound of her laughter, her fingers flicking and flying in silent banter with her friends, banishes the guilt and the regret and, at least for the moment, the paranoia. Despite everything, Jad Bell is glad to see his daughter.
Amy spots him first, says something to Howe, takes a stutter step forward, picking up speed. Athena reacts, follows her mother’s line of motion toward Bell, and the smile on her face flashes into a scowl. No face reveals emotion like a teenager’s, and the anger is still there in hers, but it fades as Shoshana Nuri unlatches the gate. Then his daughter is racing forward, eager, passing Amy and straight toward him, and Bell catches her. In that moment, in the early sunshine, in her hug, everything is forgiven. She squeezes him tightly, like she’s six and not sixteen, lets him go, looks up at him. Brushes strawberry-blond hair from her eyes, gleeful.
“Hi, Dad.” Athena speaks the words aloud, eager and atonal.
“Hello, Gray Eyes,” Bell says.
She reads his lips, hugs him again, even more tightly than before, and then remembers that she’s sixteen and that her friends are watching. Her hands slip away from him and she steps back, casting her eyes down in a moment of embarrassment. Bell sees this for what it is, turns to his ex-wife in an attempt to spare his daughter, leaning forward and giving Amy a kiss on the cheek. She accepts it with a smirk.
“Jad.”
“You look good, Amy.”
Her laugh is self-effacing, dismissive of the compliment as insincere, though he means it as anything but. A year younger than he, fit and healthy, she’s more lovely than ever, Bell thinks. It’s with some heartache that he recognizes that maturity has given her a confidence that was lacking in their youth. She’s carrying a backpack over one shoulder, adjusts it as she gestures to the man who, presumably, is Howe.
“I don’t think you two have actually met,” Amy says. “Martin Howe, Jad Bell. Jad, this is Marty.”
Howe offers his hand. He’s two inches shorter than Bell, and slender, wearing khaki shorts just below his knees and an open blue oxford over a white T-shirt with the Hollyoakes school seal printed in navy at its center. Black hair that’s a little too long, stubble that’s almost verging to beard, black with touches of copper to it. When they shake hands, he squeezes a little harder than necessary, smiling, eager.
“Nice to meet you, Jad. Very nice to meet you at last.”
Bell returns the pleasantry, frees his hand. Like Amy, Howe has a backpack of his own, similarly slung. Past them, Athena’s classmates shuffle impatiently back and forth, silent conversations coming to a halt one after another as they await entry to WilsonVille. There are three boys, two more girls, most of them in jeans, a couple in shorts. All wear the Hollyoakes shirts.
“If you want to come over here?” Nuri says. She’s speaking to Howe. “And have everyone line up?”
Howe nods, turns to the class, relaying the instruction in sign. The students fall into line, Athena giggling as she and one of the boys shoulder one another for position. The boy in question is African American, a hand taller
