Severance Package

She couldn’t give it up now, when it mattered the most.

The life of Helen Kuczun depended on it.

Thirty-five hundred miles away, the monitor showed nothing but an extreme close-up of a concrete slab. Then, gray static.

“What’s going on?” McCoy barked. He slapped the side of the table, as if that would do something.

“I’m trying another camera.”

“Damn it! Tap into building security. You can do that, can’t you?”

“I don’t know. I’m not a tech guy.”

“Get a tech guy!” McCoy caught himself. “I’m sorry.”

“It’s fine,” Keene said, “but I’m not finding anything. What we have are access codes to the cameras on the thirty-sixth floor and not much beyond. Guess we never thought we’d need anything else.”

McCoy cursed.

Vincent Marella felt his skin burst with sweat and his muscles start to flutter. He assumed this was it. In his last conscious moment he thought about his boy, and all his wild conspiracy theories. If he could be with him one last time, Vincent would place his hands on the boy’s shoulders—which he remembered his own father doing to him, when it was about something important. And Vincent would tell him: You were right. The deck is stacked against the common man, and God bless you for asking the right questions. Keep asking them as long as you can.

Then Vincent was out.

Molly, Ania, Girlfriend. She answered to them all.

But as the guard fell to the floor, she took a few steps back, and she heard one name the loudest: Victim.

She felt like a victim, once again. No matter the personae she created. No matter how hard she trained. No matter how many things she learned. At her very core was the word imprinted on her DNA: Victim.

Bruised.

Battered.

With another busted lip. Swallowing her own blood. Feeling it burn a hole in the lining of her stomach.

Stop it. Take stock of yourself.

Ania rested on the lower step, next to Ethan’s body. Her tongue found another shard of tooth; she pulled it loose with her tongue, sucked the blood from around it, then spit it at the wall. It bounced from the cinder block and landed on the guard’s chest. There you go. A souvenir.

From Ania.

Forget Victim; she could reclaim her birth name now. Molly Lewis was dead. She was dead the moment she poisoned her husband, mixing the potato salad while he slept. And “Girlfriend”? After this grievous setback, she wasn’t sure the name still applied.

Ania Kuczun lives.

EARLY LUNCH!

You can’t get a pay raise when you’re angry. People will react to the negative energy and will resist you.

—STUART WILDE

Thirty-five hundred miles away, McCoy walked away from the monitors and opened the fridge. It was an American-style fridge—oversized, with a ridiculously large freezer. Neither McCoy nor Keene had ever frozen anything. It contained one item: ice cubes. McCoy scooped some out now and put them in a rocks glass, then filled it with single-malt Scotch. He put the glass to his mouth and drank steadily, as if consuming a sports drink.

In the living room, Keene stared at his partner. He hated seeing him disappointed.

Keene wanted to go over to him now, try to untangle the tight knots of muscles in his back and shoulders. That was where the stress hit him.

But Keene knew better, from experience. Best to leave the man alone.

“I’m going out for a bit,” he said. McCoy didn’t seem to hear him. He was busy pouring himself another Scotch.

How about you drink a Scot instead? Keene had once said, in a light moment.

Now was not the time for that.

Keene took his valise with laptop and cell, along with notepad and paper. He could work on some of the Dubai operation in a secluded booth at the pub just as well as he could in the apartment. He didn’t need to start surveillance for another hour and a half.

The barman nodded to him, brought him a bag of crisps and an ice-cold orange juice. Keene was probably the only Scot within ten miles who didn’t touch alcohol or red meat. He liked to keep his mind clear, his body lean. When he first started in his line of work, back when he had another name, he told himself that the drink was necessary; it kept the darkness contained in a lockbox. Slowly, he realized that the alcohol only strengthened the darkness—emboldened it. Eventually, the alcohol locked him inside the box, along with the darkness. He didn’t need that again.

When Keene first met McCoy, it had boggled the man’s mind.

“You’re a Scot? And you don’t even drink beer?”

Keene shrugged.

“So much for a drunken shag,” McCoy had said.

Their relationship was a complicated one.

Keene tried to work on some of the trickier details of Dubai, but his mind kept wandering out the pub door, down the block, and four flights up. To McCoy, and his “Girlfriend.” He wondered idly: Why did he pick that code name?

What puzzled him the most, however, was the former operative known as David Murphy.

McCoy had told Keene about him some time ago; Murphy was famous for stopping a 9/11-style plot a full two years before the original 9/11. Clinton was still in the White House; the United States was still reeling from Columbine. The plan was a hybrid: suicide bombers in twelve American cities, armed to the teeth, with bombs jacked into pulse-checking wristwatches. The bombers were told to choose the most crowded location. Reveal weapons—preferably assault rifles. (The jihadists had been paying careful attention to Columbine.) Take out as many people as you can, stopping only to reload. When law enforcement or armed civilians come to take you down, rejoice in Allah, for the watch will tell the bomb your pulse has stopped, and the bomb will do its job on the police and emergency technicians.

Anyway, Murphy caught wind of it through an informant, arrested one would-be bomber, then extracted the entire plot—along with names and addresses—through a method of interrogation that still had not been revealed.

In uncovering the plot, Murphy erased many, many sins.

After 9/11, Murphy had joined an organization without a name. Some wags called it “CI-6.” This was a joke —a mutant blend of CIA and MI-6. Neither intelligence organization had anything to do with it, or knew much about it beyond rumor. CI-6 was another beast entirely. The blackest pocket of the blackest bag—in no visible way was it attached to any official budget line of any government.

The way Keene had heard it, CI-6 had started as a joke in the crowded upstairs bar at Madam’s Organ on Eighteenth Street in Washington, D.C.