The damned don't have the right to complain. Not about anything.
And Toys did believe that he was damned. His Catholicism, long absent from his life, had come flooding back with irresistible force, bringing with it all of the guilt, the weight of sins, the visions of the Pit, the certainty of his own fall into hell. Things he had scoffed at only a few years ago, things he jeered and made jokes about, were now burning lights in his inner darkness.
He preferred to be alone as often as possible. When he went to work, he spent most of his time in his office with the door shut. Most of the people who worked for him at FreeTech didn't. They were happy in one another's company, and the whole building was alive with their chatter and laughter. To them he was a moody, eccentric, misanthropic loner who seldom smiled, though he never spoke harshly to anyone. Ever.
If they only knew, he often thought. If they knew who they worked for, that happy crowd would transform into a mob of villagers with torches and pitchforks.
A few did know, of course, and an even smaller handful knew all of it.
Junie Flynn was aware. She was Toys's partner in the FreeTech venture. He was the money, the logistics, the big-picture planning. Junie was the one who actually oversaw all of the projects. The company was built around the deliberate and specific repurposing of radical, cutting-edge technologies obtained by the Department of Military Sciences. In short, the DMS took very nasty toys away from terrorist groups, teams of rogue scientists, and utter madmen and then gave the science to FreeTech. It was amazing how much of that deadly science could be realigned to do measurable good. FreeTech deployed teams all over the world to help with water purification, sustainable farming, renewable energy, education, health, and more. They did it very efficiently and they did it very quietly.
That was another part of Toys's job--to keep his company out of the press and to let groups like Doctors Without Borders, Habitat for Humanity, and scores of others take the credit. It would actually have killed Toys if his name somehow wound up on a short list for a Nobel Prize. There was no amount of good he could accomplish that would wash his soul clean. He knew that with absolute certainty.
So he did his job and went home. On the way home, he often stopped at the church. Sometimes for mass. Sometimes to light candles for the souls of everyone that he had killed--directly or by enabling the actions of his former employers. Sometimes he sat in a quiet pew in the most remote corner of the church and wept. He never prayed for forgiveness, because he did not believe he deserved any and because he did not think God was that tolerant. He lived alone, except for a battered old stray cat he'd named Job. He did not have friends. He did not date. He ate alone and he lived his life and he waited for the day he would grow old and die. Toys was a young man, he was fit and healthy, and he understood that the purgatory of being alive was likely to last a long, long time.
So it was in that church, in that pew, on a random Tuesday on another of San Diego's relentlessly sunny days, that he met the woman.
3.
She came and sat down in the next pew up and a little apart. Not next to him, but close enough so that her presence there had to draw his eye.
It did.
He looked at her, assessed her, instinctively ticked off the pertinent details, then looked away. She was in her early thirties. Very thin, very pale, with coal-black hair pulled back into a severe ponytail. Minimal makeup. Middle Eastern features. She looked vaguely familiar, but in the way someone is when they look a little bit like a famous person. A borrowed familiarity.
Toys did not react to her as a woman, merely as a person. She was pretty enough, and fell into the category of the kind he used to go for. Women and men of the subgenre that had once been called heroin chic: borderline emaciated but actually filled with a raw and intense sexual energy. Like him. Or, like he had been once upon a time. That was all past-tense now, and Toys hadn't been with anyone in more than four years. Not that he couldn't have found willing partners, but he was equally aware that he exuded a toxic vibe. Hands off. Or, maybe, unclean. People who began to make passes at him quickly changed their minds and moved off with looks of uncertain disapproval twisting their mouths. That was fine with him. The last thing on earth he wanted was a girlfriend or boyfriend, or even a fling. Living like a monk was more appropriate somehow.
He caught the woman looking at him. He glanced at her and then away, but the memory of dark eyes made him cut another look. This time she smiled. A small, sad little smile.
He nodded to her. She nodded back, her smile fragile. And again there was the flicker of almost-but-not-quite recognition. He'd known so many people in so many places around the world, and he'd spent an enormous amount of time in the Middle East with his former employer, Sebastian Gault. This woman could not have been part of that crowd. Most of them were dead, and the rest were of a life Toys had stepped away from. They called themselves either warriors of God or freedom fighters; the rest of the world called them terrorists. The woman's face touched an old memory, but not in a way that set off his alarm bells.
Toys bent to read from his Bible. Something about someone doing something to someone else. He couldn't concentrate, though. He could feel the woman looking at him, but when he glanced up, she was focused on the pages of a hymnal. Toys tried to read more of the passage but realized that he'd repeated the same verses three times and still had no idea what they said. It was one of Paul's epistles. Dense, pedantic stuff.
"Can I ask you a question?"
He jerked in surprise to find that the woman was no longer sitting in the next pew but was now standing but a few feet away. He could smell her. Some kind of inexpensive perfume. Roses. And soap. She smelled clean. She wore floral shorts and the kind of sandals that were good for walking.
"Sorry, love, did I make too much noise, or--?"
She smiled. "You're English?"
He nodded.
"I was in England for a while. In college."
"Oh."
"I've seen you in here a few times."
"Oh?" He had not noticed her before, though he had not been trying to notice anyone.
"I moved to San Diego a few months ago," she said. "Got a place in Pacific Beach, near that restaurant? You know the one right on the boardwalk? World Famous? I see you in there almost every morning." Her accent was definitely Middle Eastern. Iraqi, he thought, but with a heavy veneer of London English and generic TV American.
"Oh?" he said again, trying not to feed the conversation.
Undeterred, she came and sat down in his pew. He almost flinched, almost slid away from her.
Almost.
4.
Catamaran Resort Hotel and Spa
3999 Mission Boulevard
Her name was Aayun.
"It means 'eyes,' " she said.
"I know," said Toys.
She was surprised. "You speak Arabic?"
"A bit. Traveler's Arabic. I don't know much."
It was a lie, but it was enough. They were sitting at World Famous. It was the third time they'd talked since meeting in the church. Toys had tried very hard not to be interested, but she was interesting. Smart, filled with energy and life, but also a little sad. It was the sadness that drew him to her. He understood sadness in all of its many shapes and flavors. Their conversations were never personal, which seemed to be by mutual consent. She was as intensely private as he was, except for her desire to talk. So they talked. They talked about art and music, about movies and places they'd been. He was careful not to talk too much about his travels in Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, and other troubled places. She spoke of growing up in a small village near Baghdad, and of moving away with her family in the early days of the war. They did not talk politics. They did talk religion, though, and it became clear that she was not a Catholic. He asked her why she'd been in the church.
Aayun blushed. "I . . . I followed you in."
"Why?"
She shrugged. "I don't know why. I just did."
Toys felt enormously uncom
fortable about that, but he let it go. Aayun was interesting, articulate, amusing, and insightful. He could talk to her about things that had no connection at all to who, and what, he had been or who, and what, he was now. She called him Alexander because she had no idea that the world called him Toys. One day she touched his hand at the table and he didn't pull away. It surprised him. And he liked it.
They met for meals and talked their way through food they barely ate and tea they consumed by the gallon.
He had no intention of taking her to bed. They went to bed anyway.
It was a sultry night, and he had brought her to the small ground-floor apartment on the grounds of the Catamaran Resort Hotel where he lived. She was delighted as he showed her around. The resort was gorgeous, with sculptured gardens in which stands of green bamboo framed ponds of brightly colored koi. Parrots in lovely ornate cages chattered to one another, and ducks waddled in and out of a series of lazy streams that were also home to turtles and bullfrogs. Totem poles hand-carved in Bali seemed to encourage meditation in the gardens. And guests could wander beneath the cool canopy of leaves formed by over a hundred species of palm trees, with a thousand species of flowers and plants filling the air with a subtle olio of fragrances.
Toys's apartment was the least ostentatious of the rooms, with the least enchanting view. That had always been fine with him. It was remote and it was quiet. The fact that he owned the hotel was something no one at the Catamaran knew, nor did he tell Aayun. The staff knew that he was a permanent resident--the only such person at the place--and they mutually assumed that he was a relative of the owners.
But Toys was related to no one. The staff at FreeTech knew he lived there, but Junie Flynn was the only one of them who knew he owned it. And that he owned large chunks of San Diego real estate. Not his own money, really, but close enough.
The money had come to him along with a challenge to do some good with it. However, it was blood money, and Toys felt stained by it.
The British pharmaceutical magnate Sebastian Gault had been Toys's employer as well as his best friend. It had been Gault who had pulled Toys out of the squalor of his younger life, seen the potential beneath the veneer of poverty and bad habits, provided him with the best education, and given him a chance to prove himself. Toys had risen to the challenge, becoming a fixer in his own right. When problems arose, Toys sorted them out. Sometimes that meant arranging a bribe, sometimes it meant cutting a throat. Toys had never been squeamish about it, and soon had a reputation in certain circles as a ruthless, efficient, fiercely loyal enabler of Gault's excesses. Even when that meant supporting Gault's big-ticket play to manipulate the political and religious extremes of El Mujahid and his terrorist network.
The plan was built around a weaponized disease pathogen called Seif al Din that had been designed by the brilliant scientist Amirah--who was also El Mujahid's wife. Seif al Din had been engineered to be virtually 100 percent contagious, and it turned any infected person into a mindless engine of destructive rage. Zombies, or at least the real-world approximation. The plan had not been global destruction. No, Gault wanted to scare the superpowers, notably America, into shifting the bulk of their defense budgets away from mechanized warfare and into research and development for prophylactic drugs that would protect the population from the disease. Gault was well positioned within the pharmaceutical community, and although everyone in the industry would benefit, it was his own profits that were of primary concern.
The problem was that El Mujahid and Amirah were never really under Gault's thumb. They saw the pathogen as a weapon of God, something that would do what decades of terrorist attacks and suicide bombers had failed to do: tear down America.
Toys had bullied Gault into trying to stop it. Together they had destroyed Amirah's lab but nearly died in the process.
Ultimately it was all too much for Toys. He was a murderer, but he did not want to become one of the Four Horsemen of the bloody apocalypse. His Catholic upbringing, so long abandoned, reemerged, and he realized that he was an irredeemable sinner with hell as his only destination.
He had hoped to fade into obscurity and live out his years as a nothing, doing no more harm. But Mr. Church, head of the black-ops group that destroyed the Seif al Din program, found him and made him an astounding offer. He gave Toys access to the vast fortune Church had recovered from numbered accounts connected to various terrorist groups, and Church challenged Toys to use some of that money to do good in the world.
Why Church had selected him, of all people, for that role was beyond Toys. He was evil. He was a mass murderer, an enabler of horrors, a lost soul. He was damned and doomed.
But he took the challenge, even though it meant often interacting with Joe Ledger and feeling the acid burn of the man's contempt. Ledger was Junie Flynn's lover, so there were complications at every turn. Toys found no forgiveness there, and he understood that he deserved none. Not a drop. A sinner with so many black marks against his soul was not allowed the right to despise the devils who tormented him in hell.
And yet . . .
Every day, he felt that he was failing. Every day he could feel the darkness inside calling to him, pulling at him, silencing the voices of his better angels. And over and over again that malicious bitch Fate shoved him in the direction of new violence, new killings, new crimes. New sins.
All of this bubbled like a witches' brew in Toys's mind as he strolled with Aayun through the gardens. It was still there when they returned to his rooms and sat on lawn chairs with cold beers and watched the hummingbirds. His scruffy cat, Job, came and stared at Aayun for a long time. She tried to pet him, but the cat walked away.
"He's not a very social animal," said Toys.
"Are you?" she asked. Her eyes were large and beautiful and they awakened something in him that Toys had long since thought dead. Not just passion, but a desire to feel passion. To allow it.
"I . . . I need to say something," he found himself saying.
She set her bottle down and swung her legs over so she sat sideways on the chair, facing him. "What?" she asked, her voice smoky and soft.
"I'm damaged goods."
Aayun smiled. "Who isn't?"
He saw it in her eyes. Pain, old and worn like calluses into the soft flesh of her life. He had no idea what species of pain it was, or why it had come to her. He assumed it had something to do with the wars that followed 9/11. He didn't ask, though. The pain was there and it was hers, and he could understand it without having to know a single detail. As she, clearly, understood him.
There was no more conversation for a long time. He stood up, and she rose with him. They kissed beneath the fires of a dying sun. The kiss was tentative at first. Careful, as if each was afraid of breaking the other. That moment held in sweetness, and then everything became incredibly intense.
They tore buttons and fabric on the way inside to his narrow bed. When she was naked, he could see that she was beautifully made but far too thin. It did not matter. She was so alive. They kissed with volcanic heat. There was a kind of tenderness between them, if layered beneath need and urgency and fumbling of a kind that happens when things are so new, or so newly intense; the hands tremble and the body shudders and the blood roars.
He came too quickly because it had been so long. It didn't matter. She came a heartbeat later. And then after half an hour they both climbed the long hill together, sweating, crying out, gasping, and as one they plunged over the edge.
When there was no more for either of them to give, when they were spent and languid, and exhausted, he held her in his arms and buried his face in her hair and tried not to weep.
But when he heard her first small sobs, he lost all control. They clung together like drowning people.
5.
Dawn was still hours away when she leaned close and kissed his cheek, then whispered softly into his ear.
"I'm sorry," she said.
He swam upward through lingering dreams toward the surface and wakefulness. He wanted
to tell her that it was all okay, that there was never going to be any reason for either of them to say that they were sorry. For anything.
Then he felt the sting on the side of his neck. A little bee sting.
He tried to say something, anything, but even "ouch" was beyond him. Once more he seemed to fall off a cliff, but now he fell down, down, down into a bottomless black hole.
6.
Nowhere
He woke naked, bound to a wooden chair by duct tape, sick and terrified.
"You're awake," she said.
Toys forced his eyelids up. It took effort. The darkness wanted to pull him back down, to keep him. He almost let it take him.
Almost.
Instead he looked at her.
Aayun sat on the edge of a metal equipment case. The last time he had seen her she was naked. Now she wore a white lab coat over jeans and a T-shirt. Her hair was loose around her shoulders. No makeup. No smile.
"What the bloody hell are you playing at?" he mumbled, his voice thick, his lips rubbery. "And what the hell did you do to me?"
"It's a synthetic compound developed by the Iranian military. A ketamine base with some other elements. Very fast-acting. They use it for abductions when they want no noise, no fuss."
He nodded, accepting and absorbing that. He licked his dry lips and sucked enough spit from his cheeks to allow himself to swallow. It helped, but only a little.
"Why?"
Aayun shrugged. "You don't know? Haven't you figured it out yet?"
"Sorry, but no. Why would I understand anything about something like this? You drugged me and brought me . . . where?" The room was a concrete box, big and dark, with bare walls but crowded with packing crates of all sizes. The stencils on the closest crates indicated that they were machine parts from Canada. "Am I still in America?"