glamorous diagonal. She took off her sunglasses and hung her head, and Hood watched the tears run off her nose. Hood set a hand on her shoulder and she shrugged it off.
'When did you see him last?' asked Hood.
'It's been two weeks,' she said, holding Hood's gaze.
'You guys had no hall pass for that one.'
'None whatsoever. It wasn't the first time. Those precious days kept us sane. Kept him alive.'
Hood wasn't surprised. The UC agents were known for sneaking away sometimes-even from their handlers. 'Where?'
'San Francisco.'
'When did you talk to him last?' Bly asked.
Seliah didn't look up. 'This morning.'
'Did he say where he was?'
'He didn't say anything. He cancelled his cell service six days ago. Threw it away for all I know. It's all e-mail now. He sounded tired but okay.'
Six days, thought Hood. She should have told them about the cell phone.
'Do you know where he is?' asked Bly.
'He can't tell me where he is because I can't know. He can hint when he'll be home. He can tell me he loves me but he can't call me by name because I might become a target. You office jockeys have no idea how awful undercover work is for a married man. There's a reason you prefer them single. I'm sorry. I'm sorry for what I just said. It's… This is hard. So damned hard.'
'We understand,' said Bly.
Seliah lifted her face and looked at them, and Hood saw not hours but weeks of torment in her red-rimmed blue eyes. Her pupils were screwed down tight against the light. She was twenty-eight years old. She'd aged since he saw her last. That was what-two months ago, when Sean had stolen a few precious days with her at home and they had elected to share some hours with his Blowdown brethren? She slid the sunglasses back on and tugged the straw hat back into place. Even in the shade her platinum hair shone.
'I don't love the sun anymore,' she said. 'And I can't stand the smell of chlorine. I've lived on sunshine and chlorine for twenty years and now… something's changed in me. More important, though, something changed in Sean, too.'
'We want to know what it is,' said Hood. 'We want to help him. He's my friend, Seliah, and so are you.'
She stood, strong-legged and broad-shouldered. 'Come to my house this evening at six. I'll have some things to show you. Maybe you can make some sense out of them. I've tried and failed and now you're telling me my husband is a murderer.'
5
At six ten Hood and Bly sat in the Ozburns' San Clemente living room. The home was up in the hills on the east side of the interstate. Hood looked down through the picture window at the terracotta rooftops of the city below, and the jut of pier, and the black Pacific stretching to the horizon, touched far out near its rim by the first orange sparkles of sunset.
Seliah brought in a laptop computer, moved a dog-eared paperback Dracula from the coffee table and set down the machine in its place. Then she went to the picture window and pulled the sunscreen down. The view vanished and a cool light radiated through the honeycombed cells of the blind.
When she turned to them her eyes were clear, and she looked to Hood like her old self. She wore a periwinkle shift and a matching barrette that held one plane of her hair away from her face. She had a lovely smile.
She sat on the couch between Hood and Bly and opened the laptop and squared it before her and logged on. A moment later she was in her e-mail program, scrolling down through the saved messages. Scores of them, scores more. Fifteen months of life in there, Hood thought. She stopped and moved the cursor down and highlighted one of them; then she sighed.
'Sean went undercover not long after Jimmy was kidnapped,' said Seliah. 'What happened to Jimmy hit Sean hard.' She stood and walked to the blinded window and looked across the room to Hood and Bly.
'Six months undercover Sean started to suffer. He wasn't able to come home as often. I think he was down in Mexico a lot. For an undercover U.S. agent, that's like dipping your toes into the pools of hell. Right? His calls got fewer and he was less talkative. He was always tired because he was always scared. Who wouldn't be?'
This didn't track exactly with what Hood had experienced. Sean had called almost every day. He usually sounded evenhanded, cool, and often wickedly funny. But Hood had heard the pressure in Sean. He had sensed the wariness and the hard discipline that Ozburn used to maintain his cover and therefore his life. He was up on the high wire but he'd seemed balanced.
Hood now speculated that it might make sense that a man under heavy pressure would confide in his wife instead of in his team-mates. Or it might not.
Seliah pulled a chair up to the window and sat facing Hood and Bly. 'Of course, I wondered about his new cartel friends. And the women. And what he needed to do to keep from being blown. That's always the question. How will they test him? What will they expect of him? So at the very least, temptation lifts its lovely face. Have you ever been in a tense situation with an attractive person of the opposite sex? A situation with pressure, maybe danger? With something at stake? Competition maybe? Sure you have. I have. It makes you feel brave and romantic and… downright urgent, doesn't it? It builds. And when the race is over you want to celebrate. Oh, yes. You want release, don't you?'
'That does happen,' said Bly. 'We try to factor it in when we plan the operation.'
'I factored it in, too. But the next six months were bad. Less contact. I'd see him every three or four weeks for a day, maybe two at the most. He was such a mess he couldn't eat or talk or make love. He couldn't even sleep. I could feel this story inside him, this life, these things, all needing to get out. But he couldn't even begin to let them out. He needed to decompress before coming up, but undercover isn't scuba diving. You don't get to stop and breathe at a certain depth on your way up. You don't have a buddy. You just shoot to the surface and bob there and hope somebody picks you up. Then, boom! You go back under. Down to the depths.'
She stood suddenly, then seemed embarrassed. She sat again. Hood wondered at the calm Seliah he had come to know, and now this anxious new one. It looked like the undercover work had gotten to her, too. According to the ATF agent runners he had talked to, it usually did.
'Do you think he has another woman?' asked Bly.
'He has another life. So why not another woman to go along with it?'
'You should have told us he was in trouble, Seliah,' said Hood. 'That was always the agreement. You had the training, too. That was your part of this operation.'
'Sean begged me not to tell you. He wanted to do something big and something good. He didn't want to be brought in. He wanted to set it right with Jimmy. So…'
She rose again to adjust a wall thermostat. Hood heard the air conditioner click on. Seliah went to the shaded window, then stepped away from the muted light and looked at them again.
'I looked into my heart, Charlie. It wasn't hard to see in. My heart has always been big and simple and obvious. My loyalty was to Sean. Not to ATF. Not to Blowdown. Not even to you, and you're the best friend we've had through this.'
Hood's spirit withered when he heard the words best friend. What kind of a friend let this happen? What kind of friend failed to register such pain? True, Sean was a fine actor. And he'd acted well during their few hours together, here and there, over the last fifteen months. Seliah, too. They'd fooled Bly and Morris and Velasquez and Soriana and Mars. But doesn't a friend know? Doesn't a friend see?
'Three months ago, almost exactly one year in, he was close to breaking,' said Seliah. 'So we took off together. July, Costa Rica. It was somewhere we'd always wanted to go. Two weeks, just us, traveling around a beautiful country. We stayed in a cloud forest and on the beach and even up on the Arenal Volcano. We leased a little plane and tooled around it. No phones, no cartels, no ATF. Sean presented that trip to you as a much-needed break for me. You have no idea how exhausted and bitter he was. Everything came out.'
