“I’m sorry, Mr. Colter. I shouldn’t have said anything. That wasn’t my place.”
“Don’t apologize,” I soothed her. “We’re just…having trouble connecting.”
Her grunt was not subtle.
“What was that for?”
“It seems you’re always having some sort of miscommunication.”
She was painting us both poorly.
“But men have trouble with that, don’t they?” she offered.
“I don’t think that’s a—”
“It’s okay. My dad and his brother, my uncle Stan, are the same.”
That was somewhat helpful to hear. “And what happens with them?”
“Well, now they only speak on holidays.”
I changed my mind. That was not helpful at all. “I appreciate your taking the time to talk to me. And thank you for your candor.”
“Keep in mind, Mr. Colter, that Owen can be a real ass, okay? When he thinks he’s right, he can be so annoying, so self-righteous, that all you want is to kick the crap outta him.”
She wasn’t wrong. Owen on his high horse could be insufferable, especially when he felt the need to lecture me on things I already knew.
But now, fighting, again, I was simply tired. I wanted us to call a truce and make it last. I just didn’t know how because I was clueless as to what was setting him off.
Getting on the plane that night, knowing that the two of us were heading to opposite ends of the globe, me to Paris for the next two weeks, him to Bangkok, I had an odd feeling that I shouldn’t have been going. It didn’t make any sense, so I called Owen again and left another message. Of course, by then I was angry about being ignored and told him to grow up and call me.
“If you want respect, Owen, you need to give me some in return.”
I wasn’t surprised that he didn’t call me back.
Normally, I couldn’t take trips like this at a moment’s notice. When I started Torus Intercession after I left the Army, I had to be there, wrangling fixers and deciding which jobs I would take and which I should decline. But now, one of my men, Shaw James, had started to run the Chicago office for me, and along with his soon-to-be husband, Benji Grace, who was a psychiatrist, they were doing very well vetting new clients. The important part of the equation was that I trusted the two of them to make decisions, and I hadn’t had that before. It freed me to focus on the international side of Torus, on assisting people who reached out with global concerns. As a rule, Torus Intercession was a domestic agency, but I could now take advantage of the wide network I’d developed over the years and do some good.
After West Point, I went into the Army, eventually moving up the ranks to colonel by forty-eight. In parallel, I was with INSCOM, US Army Intelligence and Security Command, and we worked hand in hand with the CIA in counterterrorism. I retired at fifty-one, from all of it, with the understanding, that all operatives had, that if I was needed, I would return to service. It was interesting that everyone who worked for me thought I’d worked exclusively for the CIA even though they knew I’d been in the Army. How they imagined I could have operated at the agency and been a member of the active military at the same time, was beyond me. It didn’t work like that. I worked for INSCOM, and ACC-DTA, Army Contracting Command-Detroit Arsenal. But all that was a lot for people, and because I was assigned to work with the CIA, was attached to missions, it was easier to just say that yes, I was a retired spook.
When I started Torus and the people I hired asked questions, I explained about my service, but what they retained, again, was CIA. I understood. Three letters were easier to remember than the longer moniker. And the important part was the opportunity I was offering. Leaving the service, I found that my need to help others didn’t abate. I needed to retire, yes, because I wasn’t my own boss and couldn’t choose the best outcome for all those involved. And it wasn’t that I had a God complex, but there was acting for the greater good and then there was simply doing what was right and good. I was now firmly in the latter category.
In creating Torus Intercession, I had a clear mission, which was to be a fixer for others. If people needed protection, mentoring, coaching, or someone to be their advocate, that was what Torus was about. We would always leave a situation better than we found it, and would not leave until the job was complete. What I never imagined was that when people saw their lives changing for the better, the person responsible for that metamorphosis would be the person they wanted to stay with them for the rest of their lives. I lost more fixers to love than injury. I had a definite Cupid problem.
It had been alluded to over the years, especially by Nash Miller, my longest-tenured employee, that perhaps I was running a matchmaking service. For the record, I was not. But it made sense that the person who came to help you, who assisted you in fixing your life, either by guarding you or finding avenues to improve your outlook and state of being, would be the person you would fall head over heels for. When I started out, the turnover of personnel was not something I had accounted for. Now I expected it. And it was always surprising to see who left. The person I was certain no one could love, that no one could get through their considerable armor, was, inevitably, the one love caught up with. Astounding to get that phone call saying: I’m staying here. Thank you for everything.
Honestly, now and then, I did know that sending a fixer somewhere was more for them than anything else. I would send a guy who’d never had a family out to a place where all the family needed was that one person to make them complete. At times, I could see that my fixer was the one who needed fixing. I tended to hire people who were broken in different ways and sent them out to be heroes. At other times, the person asking for help needed more than they thought, because beyond the protection or babysitting, it was connection. Mostly, my people drew others back into the world, which allowed them to see those around them who’d always been there, ready.
At the moment, I had four fixers I could send out into the field, but I had Shaw and Benji looking to hire two more. Six was my comfort spot so they could provide backup to one another if necessary, and I could send someone from Chicago, where we were based, to the opposite side of the country. I liked being able to handle client issues if emergencies arose. It was important to me to be able to help. It was my mandate at Torus to bring syzygy—connection and alignment—to everything we did. I found that lives were saved, either literally or mentally and emotionally. And every now and then, I got my fixer back too. Maybe that was what was on Owen’s mind as well.
Love.
He saw people he worked with fall in love and leave all the time. Perhaps that was weighing on him, the desire for connection. I had no idea. But when I saw him next, certainly before he left for Thailand, I would find out what was wrong with the man I shared a home with.
TWO
“Well now, Mr. Colter. Can you identify him? Is it Mr. Moss?” asked the police surgeon, a slight man in his midfifties, of Taiwanese descent.
“Yes, it’s him,” I answered, my voice trembling as a tsunami of emotions overtook my laryngeal muscles, forcing my voice to crack. My relief was as overwhelming as my grief had been two days earlier when I got the call that Owen was dead.