“It’s like his thing with cold war strategies and mechanisms still underpinning modern intelligence work. Except it’s his strategies and mechanisms from two decades ago, theories, really, underpinning the current work being done in crisis security. Everyone is talking about Armageddon threats. As if everything we’re currently facing is comparable to nuclear war, when what we’re really talking about is death from a thousand tiny cuts.”
He can see a tension in her silhouette, she is squeezing her own head with her hands, trying to force something to stay inside, or to be fused from the pressure of her need. Diamonds from coal.
“Fuck. It’s too. I don’t have enough. Something. So fucking.”
Her hands fly off her head, down, slapping her thighs.
“Too much. Not enough. I need more. Or less. I’m tired.”
She stands there.
“I need to switch off now.”
Skinner imagines a button, like the white plastic circle that turned off the light, on the back of her neck.
“How does that work?”
Her shoulders rise and fall.
“I need to shut down. Process. But I’m overloaded. Overtired. My brain is spinning out.”
She slaps her own forehead.
“Stupid fucking brain.”
Skinner thinks about meditation, the quiet rest he can summon for himself by practicing being invisible, but he’s pretty sure even trying to explain something like that to Jae will just piss her off.
“Do you need quiet? White noise?”
She’s looking at the wall opposite the bunks, body facing him, but features in profile, dark.
“I need some pills.”
“In your bag.”
She shakes her head.
“No. I left them in Stockholm, in my duffel. I didn’t want to be tempted. I need to not be thinking is all.”
Skinner thinks about not thinking.
Jae turns again, looking out the window behind her, dim patches of white on a low hillside, crevasses where snow has been cradled in shadow, away from the spring’s cool sunlight. She turns back to him.
“Come here.”
Skinner walks to the table.
Her hand comes up between them, stops, then lays itself on his chest, palm down, over his heart.
“Skinner.”
“Yes.”
“Not your real name.”
“No.”
“Why then? Something you do? That you’re known for doing?”
“No.”
His heartbeat hasn’t changed since she touched him, some effort to keep it even.
“My parents were radical behaviorists. They raised me in a Skinner box. Until I was twelve. Then some people took me out. So. When I needed a name. Professional. Well. Skinner.”
Her hand moves, angles, fingers curved over his left pectoral muscle, heel resting in the hollow of his sternum.
“Why did they do that?”
His heart is beating faster now, harder, he doesn’t try to stop it.
“They were scientists. And their brain chemistry was problematic. It was an experiment. At first. And then. It was just normal. And it seemed to work. And I liked it.”
Her other hand places itself inside his jacket, small, just above his waist, fingers aligned with the indentations between his ribs.
“Who took you out?”
She hasn’t appeared to move, everything still, just her hands, as if entirely separate from her body or her will, touching him.
“People. They thought I was being hurt.”
“Were you?”
“No.”
Her right hand slips over his chest, tucks itself below his armpit, her thumb discovers the knot of scar tissue under his shirt, rubs it.
“What’s this?”
“Wound. Knife.”
Her hands come to the front of his shirt, collar, and begin to unbutton, to his navel, then pull the tails from his pants, the last two buttons undone, then ruck his undershirt up, and her left hand returns to its resting place, and her right hand glides up, under the shirts, leaving gooseflesh in its tracks, finds the scar, feeling its outline with one of the fingers that had touched the cold glass and created a mark with its warmth. It does the same on his skin, he can feel it.
“It didn’t kill you.”
“I hope not.”
She smiles. He thinks she smiles.
Her left hand goes to his belt, unbuckles it.
“Skinner.”
Her fingers undo the fly button and squirm inside, thumb staying out, and her hand hangs there for the moment, a slight tug toward her.
“Skinner. I want to stop thinking for a while.”
She pulls on his pants, moving him closer, the hand touching the scar that hides the tip of the blade lodged between his ribs guides him, leans him down, bringing his face close, his lips. She kisses him. Pulls her lips off of his, hand finding its way inside his pants, other hand circling to the small of his back, finding the gun still tucked there, and pulling it out and setting it on the small table so that it won’t fall to the floor when she undoes the final button inside his trousers.
“I want to stop thinking. I need you to help me with that.”
He does his best.
On the narrow lower bunk, inside her, she tells him to stop moving, and he does. The train rocks them. He tries then to become invisible, in the dark, and her hand moves from his shoulder to the back of his neck, pulling him close, turning his head, bringing his ear to her mouth, warm breath as she whispers.
“Don’t go away.”
She’s seen him.
Then she starts moving again, and he moves against her.
Later, when it appears that everything has worked out the way she wanted, she’s stopped thinking, and she falls asleep, Skinner eases himself from the bunk, finds his pants, undershirt, and shoes, not bothering with socks, and goes out into the corridor, locking the door, walking to the bathroom at the end of the car. He urinates, washes his hands, splashes water on his face. Looking at himself in the mirror, he wishes that he’d brought the Bersa with him or the ruler he took from the Hellsten or the compression socks and D batteries he bought in Central Station. He uses a paper towel to dry his hands and face, throws it away, mentally reviews Jae’s dossier for her weapons proficiency, recalls that she had been trained to use handguns.
Yes. She knows how to use a gun. Good.
Then he opens the door and finds, not unexpectedly at all, the young man he’d seen with Haven at Heathrow, and later on the ferry. He has a gun, held inconspicuously, but not casually, at his side, and he has positioned himself far enough from the bathroom door that reaction times won’t be a factor if Skinner should try to attack him. A prepared young man. He’s also brought two other young people with him. One looks very much like an American backpacker, her clothes composed almost entirely of bright ripstop nylon and D-rings, sun bleached short hair, nose piercing. The other looks like a British soccer hooligan, tracksuit and trainers, anorak, Liverpool colors, head stubble on a skull that appears to have been designed for butting noses in rowdy pubs. They don’t have guns, and have positioned themselves in an effort to create the illusion of a line waiting to use the bathroom, witness deterrence.
The young man wears a long-sleeve pullover, technical fabric tight across the muscles of his chest, an abstract splotch of red, yellow, and orange on the otherwise black background, an exploding sun or spreading amoeba. His pants are some form of athletic semiformal wear, also black. Boots, flat black paramilitary crossed with a running shoe. His jacket is suede, a shade of brown verging on black, safari style, assuming one were to safari the fall couture shows in Milan, stalking the slender gazelles of the runways. His gun is silver, flat anodized finish, the sights, brand name, serial number, all filed off, unblemished and smooth, customized to make the carrier feel more like a badass. It is, if Skinner is honest with himself, a nice looking gun.
The young man looks at his wristwatch, black carbon fiber d
ial and bezel, the watch of a successful arbitrage trader who enjoys testing his limits with dark-of-moon skydiving expeditions.
“Haven wants to see you.”
Skinner looks down at his own shoes, oxford boots, one of his sockless ankles visible where the cuff of his pants has snagged on the top of the boot. He pinches the fabric of his pants between thumb and forefinger, tugs upward, dropping the cuff into place, looks up at the young people.
The skydiver tips his head toward the door that leads to the next car, forward on the train.
“There.”
American accent. A neutrality that suggests the Pacific Northwest. He’s fought somewhere. More than one place. For more than one paymaster. Skinner can see just what he’d look like with his larynx crushed. He steps out of the bathroom, waits while the three young people rearrange themselves a bit. When they move, the backpacker leads, opening the door and stepping through, then Skinner, then the man with the skydiver style, and, lagging, the football hooligan. The next car is also a sleeper, their procession stopping next to a compartment door that the skydiver brushes with a knuckle to alert whoever is inside before turning the handle, pushing it open, and standing aside so that Skinner can pass. It is a private sleeper with its own shower and toilet. Skinner wonders if this was the last one on the train, and, if so, how long before he and Jae bought out their three-bunk compartment Haven booked this one. Relevant to the extent that if they’d gotten it first Skinner wouldn’t have had to go down the corridor to take a piss. He doesn’t believe in fate, but he does believe that proximity leads to complications. Sex with an asset, for example.
Haven is perched on one of the stools that flip down from the outer wall. On the table, surface only slightly larger than the stool, is a half eaten sandwich, the same plastic triangle packaging as the ones Skinner and Jae bought in Central Station. He’s chewing, wiping pale yellow mustard from his lips with a translucently thin paper napkin, mouth full. He nods at the skydiver as Skinner enters, waving, a closing gesture. The door is shut, leaving them alone. Skinner stands next to it. Haven raises an index finger, begging pardon as he chews, covers his mouth with his napkin, swallows, takes a sip of Orangina from the eternally inexplicable pear-shaped glass bottle on the table, and wipes again.
“Horrible.”
He stuffs the napkin into the plastic wedge with the remaining half of the sandwich, drops it into a white plastic bag with a blue SJ logo on the side, sweeps in some crumbs from the table, and tosses the bag onto the lower bunk, where it lands next to an iPad resting screen side down on a pumpkin-orange coverlet that has been mussed by someone lying restlessly on top of it.
“Please.”
He half rises, leans over the table, and flips down the stool on the other side.
“We need to talk.”
Skinner sits on the stool, there is no way to be comfortable on it, but that hardly matters. The keening in his mind makes any efforts at comfort an impossibility. The high screeching tone, constant, without quaver, his nerve endings reacting to his distance from Jae. Asset unprotected.
Haven moves the Orangina bottle to the side until it is in contact with the wall, turns so that he faces Skinner squarely, half his left thigh off his stool. Neither of them will be comfortable.
“They put the private sleepers next to the bar car.”
He raises his eyebrows, casts his eyes around the compartment.
“Foot traffic at all hours. Drunks. This is the measure. Swedish rail putting together a train, cars out of proper order. If you want to know how far out of joint the volcano has put things, this is the measure.”
Skinner does not face him, back to the wall, the shaded window, arms folded over his chest, feet flat on floor, looking at a stain on the carpet halfway between himself and the door.
Haven puts his forearms on the table, one lying atop the other.
“They were Hann-Aoki. In Miami. Former Triple Canopy. Protective Security Specialists. Secret clearance. Did a couple Iraq contracts, on-site security at one of the refineries. Crisis response in Yemen, getting some Finnish telecom executives safely from their condos to the airport when the government started shooting protesters. Then H-A. I know a guy over there, Pence. You ever work with him? No. Pence, former Green Beret, Vietnam, Ed Harris would play him in the movie; he tells me that at H-A they have unofficial-official slang for PSS freelancers. Cannon fodder. Anything they want to throw a couple bodies at, see what happens, draw fire, they put out a call for guys with PSS on their resume. Secret clearance. Don’t like to use their top-shelf people for that kind of thing.”
Skinner nods, still looking at the stain.
“That kind of thing.”
Haven shrugs.
“Poking wasps’ nests. Finding out what will happen. No one is sure what to expect from you. H-A decided to get some early reconnaissance. And also Jae. The playing field is pretty even on the West-Tebrum gig. Everyone has the same resources. But you and Jae running around, that made some players nervous. H-A was interested in seeing if they could remove a variable. Cost them little. Anyway. Hard to say just what they expected. Bodies on fire. Also it’s possible that they were more interested in Maker Smith.”
Skinner looks up.
“Smith.”
Haven is wearing a navy blue t-shirt cut for simultaneous close fit and wide range of movement, the collar rises higher than a regular crewneck, almost touching his Adam’s apple. He scratches at some dark blond scruff on his jaw, a day past five o’clock shadow, rasping sound.
“He’s gone to ground. The fire spread. Emergency responders. Dead bodies on the scene. Miami Dade PD. He’s lost all his infrastructure. Not like he was carrying insurance. He’ll have to take a contract somewhere to rebuild his finances. H-A would love to have him in-house. Could be they were looking for an opportunity to change his circumstances, put him in a position of need, more receptive to their offers. You being there with Jae. Good excuse to send in a team. Underwhelming force. Sent to deal with someone known for his ability to make a big mess. H-A can be subtle. And anyone that sanctions cannon fodder, well, that tells you what you need to know about their MO.”
Skinner is wondering where Haven’s gun is. The blue t-shirt is worn outside a pair of jeans dyed so black they suck the compartment’s light into their fabric. Skinner saw the tail of the shirt hike up when Haven bent across the table to flip down the second seat, no gun. His shoes, supple black leather uppers with timeworn creases, black rubber soles, are on the floor next to the bunk. Haven’s socks match his shirt. There could be an ankle holster. The material of the pants is so light-absorbent that it is difficult to see how narrow the cuffs are. A small black leather and nylon carry-on with a shoulder strap is on the top bunk, as is a black down jacket, thin fill, city wear. The gun could be up there. Or in the small closet, the bathroom, under one of the mattresses.
He gets tired of wondering where the gun is.
“Where’s your gun?”
Haven looks at the shaded window, back at Skinner.
“I don’t have one. Other people carry the guns these days.”
He nods at the closest door, the trio in the corridor outside.
“If I need a gun, they have plenty.”
Skinner looks again at the stain on the floor.
“You were at Heathrow.”
“British deli bagels. Awful.”
Skinner doesn’t look up from the stain.
Haven frowns, places the tips of the fingers of his right hand firmly on the table between them, his palm arched above them, as if caging something small.
“Have you no sense of what’s happening?”
The stain is old, black, shaped like an eye with some kind of bulging growth where its cornea would be.
Haven flattens his hand.
“I have a contract with Cross, personally, to protect Kestrel. With leeway. A great deal of leeway.”
Skinner looks at him now.
“To protect Kestrel.”
Haven drags his hand back across the table.
“Kestrel is my asset.”
Haven’s eyes are blue. Very dark, verging sometimes on violet. His hair is lighter than his stubble, clipped recently, conforming to the contours of his flattish skull. He has weathered since Skinner saw him last. He’s been spending some time in sunny places where the wind blows hard. They have the same build, big men who carry it lightly, though Haven has always been broader in the shoulders and chest. His love of the gym and, Skinner more than suspects, of the mirrors in the gym. Skinner believes he is older than Haven by a year, maybe two, but he can’t say for certain.
He can’t say much of anything for certain. He looks at the stain.
“I’ve been away.”
Haven taps at the corner of his right eye.
“Yes. I noticed.”
He stops tapping.
“I argued against you for this. Bringing you back in. Throwing you into this thing cold, Here’s an asset, go! I argued against that. You’re just. You never did any research on the industry. You never kept up on who worked for who, why, when, for how much. Whatever you did know, it’s all way past the sell date. You’re a reputation. Skinner’s Maxim. They teach it now. You have no idea. Those security contractors that do skills accreditation seminars. Secret clearance required. Interrogation techniques. Surveillance. They have sessions on asset operations. Skinner’s Maxim, like a thought problem, that’s how they present it. Given an operator employing such a maxim, how do you safely acquire the asset? You’re not real. Not to them.”
He nods at the door again.
“They barely have an idea that there’s really someone named Skinner. They think it’s like Murphy’s Law. There is no Murphy. Just the law that anything that can go wrong will go wrong. I mean.”
Skinner thinks about his reputation. His maxim. The things he did to establish both. A litany of fire and blood. His hand, suddenly, remembers exactly what it feels like when the blade of a flensing knife whisks an eye from its socket, a deft flourish, sucking pop, eye hanging from tendrils of nerves and arteries, until those too are cut. He imagines that, and so much more, undone by the passage of seven years, his absence erasing those actions, their meaning lost. He remembers the wasted dead, no more value left in their killing. He pictures starting over, sweat comes to his forehead, dryness to his mouth. His heart beats against the tip of the knife stuck in his ribs.