“Wait,” Mackenzie interrupts. “Nicodemo, isn’t she from somewhere in Ohio? Columbus or Cincinnati or someplace?”
“Yeah, she’s from Cleveland. So?”
“So, wouldn’t it have made more sense to establish her as an American expat?”
The Signalman looks up and glares at Mackenzie, then he looks down again and glares at the pack of Camels. The Doors song ends and Neil Young’s “Hey Hey, My My” immediately comes on to replace it.
“Well,” says the Signalman, “that would be a question for whoever was her handler at the time and also for whatever geek was overseeing risk assessment. I assume Albany had their reasons, and you should follow my example. Maybe the Schwarze Sonne wasn’t keen to deal with Americans or something. I don’t know, because I wasn’t there. It wasn’t my call. And you’re missing the point, besides. If you don’t want to hear this, just tell me and I’ll talk about something else.” Then the tooth reminds him how many times he’s put off having it pulled, and so he has another mouthful of J.T.S. Brown. He also takes out one of the cigarettes, but he doesn’t light it. He feels a little better just having it parked there between his fingers.
“No,” says Mackenzie Regan. “I’m sorry. Go on.”
The Signalman swishes and swallows the bourbon. “Yeah, well, anyway,” he says, “turns out half these Nazi bastards—and bitches—were werewolves and somehow we missed that, and here Ellison’s walked into a pack of lycanthropes with no backup, no wire, not even a sidearm, just these two briefcases of uncut Mexican horse.”
Mackenzie goes back to stirring her drink. “I sorta thought the whole point of Ellison Nicodemo is that she comes with the backup built in.”
“Well, sure. But this thing in Babelsberg—and you’d know this if you’d actually bothered to read the file—it was an exfiltration op. We were trying to get someone out, okay? There was this teenage girl, kidnapped daughter of a Canadian diplomat, if I recall correctly, and that night she was scheduled to be sacrificed as a blood declaration of faith or some blah, blah, blah cultist shit, and Ellison was supposed to get in and get her out alive and in one piece. We’d worked a deal with Barbican Estate and once the girl and Ellison were clear, London was gonna level the place with an AIM-9 strike and write it off as a gas leak. Only a pair of Julia Set agents show up with their own agenda. They blow Ellison’s cover, and everything goes sideways faster than you can say Jack Robinson. Total fucking bloodbath.”
“She used Tindalos?” Mackenzie asks, and the Signalman shakes his head.
“Nope, not that night. But she still got that girl out of there,” he answers. “So, kiddo, when I say Ellison Nicodemo was good, that right there’s the sorta shit I’m talking about.”
Mackenzie Regan takes a sip of her vodka and cranberry. Most of the ice has melted, and now it’s more LA tap water than anything else. “Okay, so what do you think went wrong that night in Atlanta?”
“What I think is that’s yet one more question that falls outside the purview of my authority,” replies the Signalman, and so Mackenzie lets it drop.
“I met a werewolf once,” she tells him, “up in Pennsylvania. She actually wasn’t such a bad sort.”
“Just shows to go you,” he says. “Me, I’m gonna light up this damn coffin nail now, and management and the health codes of Los Angeles can go fuck themselves if they don’t like it.” And with that the Signalman retrieves his Zippo from a jacket pocket and flips back the silver cap. He lights the cigarette and blows smoke at the ceiling.
Mackenzie just shrugs and checks her wristwatch. “I still don’t understand why we have to wait until tomorrow morning to pick her up,” she says.
“‘Theirs not to reason why,’” the Signalman tells her, and he winks. “‘Theirs but to do and die.’” And then he reaches into his jacket again and takes out an envelope and lays it on the table next to the pack of Camels. The envelope’s crumpled and bent from riding around in his pocket, and there’s what looks to be a coffee stain on one corner. “This is strictly on the q.t., what I’m about to tell you,” he says, then glances up at Mackenzie. “But I’m telling you because I sorta trust you, as much as I figure I can trust anyone these days. And, hey, you’ve been partnered up with me about two and a half months now.”
“Okay, so what is it?” Mackenzie asks.
“My letter of resignation. When this is over and the dust has settled—assuming any of us lives that long—I’m putting in for retirement. I’m too old for this shit. I’ve been too old for this shit for some time now.”
The Signalman watches Mackenzie’s steel-blue eyes, and sure, there’s surprise there, but not half as much as he’d expected there to be. He’s all too aware of his reputation as one of the last of Albany’s True Believers, a stone-cold MiB, the agency man through and through, balls to bones. The sort of man whose work is his life and the sort of man who probably wouldn’t last long without it. Definitely not the sort of man who voluntarily bows out of the game.
“You’re serious?” she asks him and starts to reach for the envelope, then stops herself.
“Yes, I am,” he replies. “I came real damn close back in 2015, after that goddamn mess by the Salton Sea. I should’a done it then, but . . .” He trails off and takes a drag on his cigarette.
“You know they’re not going to be happy about this,” Mackenzie says. “Do you really think they’ll even accept it?”
The Signalman exhales a cloud of smoke, then picks the envelope back up off the table and returns it to his jacket. “No shit they won’t be happy about it,” he says. “But
