“Not to mention the bureau is threatening to sanction us for violating federal law prohibiting paying ransom for foreign hostages,” Lady Bug adds drolly, because everyone in the room knows that Solomon does this regularly; it’s fundamental to their sales pitch to clients.
“The feds themselves think that policy is horseshit,” Elsayed says. “Hell, the White House just bought back a couple of Christian missionaries using highway-department funds.”
Two words are rattling around Sentro’s head: time off?
“The client should have to cover all incurred overages. It’s in the standard contract. There’s no exceptions.” Elsayed shoots Sentro another sidelong look of support, and the argument swirls sans Sentro. Her thoughts skip, and suddenly she wonders, mortified, if during her wild years after Jenny was born, when she spent so much time away from Dennis—maybe Tripoli, or Mogadishu, where they worked so closely together and drank so much more than they should have—she slept with Reno Elsayed and can’t remember that.
“You want to be the one to educate the client, Lucky?” Falcone drawls.
“I would. I doubt you’ll want me to,” Elsayed drawls back.
Drewmore cackles. “He’s right.” The tension in the room is easing. The requisite hazing, to Sentro’s great relief, has come to an end.
“Look, Vic, I’m fine,” Sentro insists. Vic, not Hector. Vic Falcone. She’s said the name automatically, before she recalls it, like that awkward delay in a bad cell connection. There. Her memories aren’t lost; some of them are just slow finding her. “I’d rather get right back onto something new,” she adds, still slightly troubled by the suggestion of time off. “A simple wiretap op, if you’re so, you know, worried I’m going to start World War Three.”
A crushing weariness washes over her. What if the work is all that’s holding her together?
Falcone nods, neutral. “You must have a boatload of vacation time coming, though, huh?”
It’s not a suggestion.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Another half hour unspools before the meeting breaks up. The Bug goes quiet, lips pursed, eyes hooded, returning again and again to Sentro like surveillance cameras. Peers and partners delve into other business: a Case Western archeologist who needs site security in Cape Town, the partisan attacks dogging East Timor, how to monetize the ongoing White House obsession with Tehran, a dispute with Raytheon over incidental expenses during what all agree was a regrettable circle jerk in Honduras.
And the ill-fated events of Port Isabel shudder back to Sentro in installments, raw.
It didn’t help that her marriage was fraying.
The Yoder boy’s kidnapping had been Sentro’s first private-sector caper after the seemingly bottomless largess of government-funded work for one agency or another. Lean crew, just her and Falcone, with a Houston-based gearhead freelancer named Unger providing remote tech support; but there was an unusually robust posse of rubbernecking hometown cops and bottom-feeding feds sent from Houston to babysit. Sketchy Mexican extortionists out of Matamoros had been holding a young American boy hostage for six months before the parents, wealthy Brownsville developers, had reached out to Solomon in their desperation. The kidnappers had a price; the clients were willing to pay it; the endgame was just about Sentro getting the proper proof of life, making the money drop, and ensuring a fourteen-year-old who had crossed the border with a hundred bucks and a couple of very white friends, intending only to lose his virginity to a sex worker, got set free. After testy negotiations, the G-men and the locals had agreed to stay clear until the boy was safe.
Sentro holed up in a Best Western comfort suite and waited for a call, a handgun she didn’t want on top of a squeaky AC with tattered viscose strips fluttering. Falcone—his dusky-red hair a riot of defiance in those days, with the beginnings of the tattoo sleeve he now hides, old-school can headphones, and a cheap laptop—and two deputies had set up shop in an adjacent unit, impatient, listening to phone taps while Unger, back in the office, videoconferenced and provided a full complement of satellite tracking technology and computer support for when things broke open.
Gulf coast. Hellish heat. Summer squalls. This was three months before Dennis had learned his body was riddled with cancer. On her back, on a bedspread of bright-yellow tropical fish swimming in a soft blue polyester sea, open eyed, one arm outflung, Sentro waited for the extortion call and talked on her personal cell phone to her husband about divorce.
Dennis had called to tell her that he’d decided to let her go. He would just do what she wanted, he said. “Because if you love someone, you do what they want. Right?”
He was so determined to take control of their free fall.
Sentro, numb, unsure of anything back then except the job in front of her, offered that maybe she didn’t know what she wanted. That maybe as soon as you stopped wanting something, you got it.
“You’ll say anything,” was his observation. Dennis sounded so tired. They should both have guessed why.
She remembers saying to him: “Before you called, it’s stupid, but I was thinking. Well, dreaming. A daydream. About my mom.”
“Again? What a surprise.”
“The truth is that what I remember are just stories and her smile,” she continued, letting his gentle dig roll away. “But it reminded me how pointless it all is—history, I mean.”
“Dreams are history?”
“Everything is history. And you can’t live in the past, and it maybe wasn’t really happier anyway; you just think it was. And how, I don’t know, sometimes things are just over.”
Through her mobile came only a pulsing, soft static, waves of it.
“Dennis?”
“Like this is over, you and me?”
Hearing it said out loud like that was beginning to make her have second thoughts.
He asked: “Second thoughts about the divorce? Or everything you’ve done to make it inevitable?”
They’d traveled this road before, many times. Her job, the long absences. Why couldn’t she make a commitment to her family? Sentro had no answer, except that Dennis knew what she was, who she was, when he married her.
“Sorry.” He backed off. “I didn’t mean . . .”
“I fly back tomorrow. Just waiting to make this one last drop and get the asset; then I’m done. And everybody’s happy.”
“Everybody except us.”
“Don’t say that.” Sentro stared at the backlit window blinds. She didn’t tell him that she knew he’d been sleeping with Jenny’s sixth-grade teacher. Couldn’t bear to hear him deny it and didn’t want to risk that he would; she made her livelihood and stayed alive by parsing lies.
Plus, this was different. She didn’t blame him. They’d been given a gift and squandered it, both of them. Regular life was so much more treacherous and complicated than anything she faced in the field.
“Don’t say anything more,” she told him, smiling sadly. “I’ll come home; we’ll get takeout from that bulgogi place and put the kids to bed and sneak out into the garage and cuddle in the back seat of the Odyssey and have one last angry, high, hard one.”
She remembers how Dennis laughed, in spite of himself.