A couple seconds of silence passes. Philippe still has the flash drive in his hand. He looks down at it. Looks at the screen. Looks up at me.
Suddenly my image fades away, replaced by another image: a gigantic mushroom cloud, frozen in time as it works to rise higher and higher into the sky.
Still more silence.
Then, materializing over the mushroom cloud, these four words:
THE CLOCK IS TICKING
Thirty-Seven
Because Nova and I are responsible for Roland Delano’s demise, Philippe, Reed, and Boylan take turns buying us drinks.
We sit in the back corner of some bar in the southern part of the city. It’s what Philippe calls a “safe place.”
When the fourth round comes, Philippe holds up his beer and says, “To Holly and Nova!”
Reed and Boylan echo the toast and we all clink glasses, take large gulps of beer. I’m feeling a little toasty but that’s okay. The soonest Walter can get us out of Paris is at ten o’clock tonight. When he learned we’d gotten the runaround, he decided to stop wasting our time and bring us back home. Our flight is another cargo jet leaving from the same airstrip on which I entered the country. I’m not looking forward to it but at least now I know what to expect.
Nova had asked me earlier if I feel okay about what was on the flash drive—which did in fact destroy the entire hard drive of the computer. I had just shrugged and told him I felt fine. But it was a lie. I do feel uneasy. Not that my image appeared on the screen along with that frozen mushroom cloud and those words, but the fact that Alayna Gramont or whoever else made the virus knew that I would be involved and would see the message. After all, it was a message for me, wasn’t it?
Then again, maybe I’m overthinking it. Maybe I’m being paranoid. Yes, they included my image, but that’s simply because I was responsible for eliminating Delano. There was no possible way Gramont or whoever could know I would be involved in the surveillance of the code buy. Right?
“Holly?”
I blink, look up to see Reed grinning at me. Both he and Boylan have definitely relaxed over the past six or seven hours. No longer the uptight agents who never smile, now alcohol has done its magic and helped them loosen up.
“What’s that?” I ask.
“Can you tell us about it? How you took out Roland?”
For a Friday evening at eight o’clock, this bar is surprisingly empty. Only a few people lined up on stools at the bar, a few other people scattered around the tables. Nobody close enough to overhear us, not if we keep our voices down, and besides, the music pulsing from the speakers is a healthy rock beat and will help drown out my voice.
Still, I wonder, should I tell them?
I glance at Nova. He’s watching me. His look is almost cautious. He has his large hand wrapped around his beer glass and is rubbing his thumb up and down the side. It’s such a small thing I don’t think he even knows he’s doing it.
I know I shouldn’t. My work is classified, even if it is unsanctioned. But nobody has ever asked me to tell stories before. Sure, I’ve described things to Nova and Scooter, even Walter, but that was more or less a simple debriefing of the events. Not storytelling simply for amusement.
“Well?” Boylan says. His eyebrows are raised, his lips curled in a smile. I notice he’s wearing a wedding band now—he hadn’t earlier during the surveillance—and I wonder about his family. Whether he has any children, and if so, how he treats them when he’s home. About what he tells his wife when he comes home from work, what he might say to her on the phone if he hasn’t seen her in weeks.
I glance at Nova one more time, see the caution still in his eyes, and then I lean forward and say, “Delano was having a party at this casino …”
The story doesn’t take long to tell. Five, maybe ten minutes pass. When I’m done, I finish off my beer and sit back and cross my arms. I can’t stop smiling. I don’t know why, exactly, but the look on the guys’ faces, the one of complete awe, is something I’ve never had aimed at me before.
Beside me, Nova takes a sip of his beer, looks away. He doesn’t say anything.
Finally Reed says, “And then what happened? You just ... went home?”
I told the story up to the part where I returned to the garage. Where Nova and Scooter confronted me about Rosalina. Where Rosalina told me about the ranch.
I lower my eyes, thinking now about Scooter. Remembering how he saved me even though I shouldn’t have been there in the first place.
I think about him chewing his Bazooka Joe bubblegum. About him aiming his cell phone, ready to take a picture of me in the schoolgirl outfit.
He’s gone now, having died in my arms, and today may have been my very last mission.
“Yeah,” I say, my voice soft, “then I went home.”
Nova glances at me, glances back down at his beer. His hand is still wrapped around the glass and his thumb keeps rubbing the side.
“Did you say anything to him?” Boylan asks.
“Who?”
“Delano. Before you shot him. Did you say anything?”
I find it a strange question, an unlikely question, in fact, coming from a guy like Boylan. As far as I can tell, he’s a professional. And saying something to the target before you kill him, that’s just too … Hollywood.
“No,” I say.
“That’s a pity.” Something dark enters Boylan’s eyes. “If it had been me, I would have said something.”
“Like what?”
“I would have reminded him about Abraham and Kenneth. Made him think about their deaths in the instant before he died.”
The mood has
