Spy Mom (51 page)

But over the last two years, things have cooled between us in a way that sometimes makes it hard for me to breathe. Maybe it's the weight of everyday logistics, the basic management of a family unit that leaves little time for all the other important things in life. Although it doesn't happen every night, occasionally I'll tuck myself into bed by 9
P.M
., which does not leave much room for adult conversation, let alone other activities.

Or maybe it's the fact that, although we've been married for a number of years now, Will still has no idea who I am and that sort of thing can be a hurdle to intimacy once the momentum of pure lust disappears. I sometimes think I'd like to tell Will about Sally Sin and the Agency and how long a night can seem when you're trudging through the jungle or what the air tastes like when you're running as fast as you can at 18,000 feet, but I cannot risk the safety of our family for my own self-indulgence.

And for his part, Will has yet to ask. I know he sees the cracks, the inconsistencies in my stories. But he digs no deeper, indicating to me a fear of what he'll find if he does. Sally Sin has been officially dead for some time now yet she still has the power to destroy all of us.

Watching Theo and Will roll around on the floor like puppies, I remind myself that every relationship has its peaks and valleys. Or I think they do. None of my past relationships were conducted in English or lasted very long, so it's not as if I have a great data set from which to draw conclusions. But I am hopeful. Or hopelessly naïve. I haven't decided yet.

Theo tries gallantly to impale Will with one of the light sabers. Will ducks and sidesteps as if he studied fencing with the royals at Buckingham Palace. Theo giggles with delight at each failure, his blond hair falling into his eyes, flushed from a dogged pursuit of the enemy.

A strange sensation rises in my stomach, a toxic mix of nausea and dizziness.

“I'm going to set the table,” I say, standing up quickly, which makes the feeling worse. I walk down the hall, holding the wall for support. Please don't let me puke on my shoes. I don't want to spend the evening picking barf out of the lace-holes with a Q-tip. That thought is so appalling I'm forced to hold on to the edge of the sink with my eyes closed, waiting for the sensation to pass. When I open them, I see my reflection in the window above the sink. I look ghostly, hollow. Can that really be me? Surely I'm dying of some terrible disease, liver cancer perhaps, or the plague.

I wipe my face with a damp dish towel that smells faintly of apple juice. There are questions I must answer and they create an off-color haze around me. The first one is, what do I owe a man who saved my life but never wanted me to know he was my father? The second is, should I be willing to risk everything for him? Is he the third person on my list of people I would willingly give my life for? But maybe I'm not asking the right question. The right question may be, is it worth risking my future to uncover the truth about my past?

I trace the outline of my face on the window. The air is cooling outside and my fingers leave little damp trails on the glass.

“Yes,” I hear myself say out loud. “Yes, it is.”

And that means, according to Chemical Claude's demands, I have less than forty-eight hours to do something about it.

In Nepal, bridges aren't given all that much consideration. They are pieced together with whatever materials might be lying around and usually that doesn't include steel and bolts and detailed engineering plans. The bridge I suddenly found myself on didn't look like it could hold the weight of Chemical Claude, his two hatchet men, and Ayushi, let alone me. I approached the first rickety board very carefully, my Colt Commander dangling at my side. I was not nearly a good enough shot to take out the goons and Chemical Claude and miss Ayushi and grab her before she fell in the river. Later I would be, but not on that day.

“Chemical Claude,” I said, trying to buy time. “Where'd you get a name like that?”

He made a face as if he were sucking on a wedge of lime. The eyes of the man holding Ayushi grew round like saucers. Clearly, my attempts at small talk needed some improvement.

“That name,” Chemical Claude hissed, “does not reflect the extent of my range. I am much more than chemicals. I am warfare for the ages.”

“That's a great tagline,” I said, inching forward slowly. “You might want to make a commercial.”

“You're ill informed,” he said. Sadly, if that were true, it would not be the first time. “I come here to rekindle my spirit, to be as close to the gods as a mortal can get.”

“So then you must mean that literally?” I asked, trying to gain a few more inches as he talked. His beady eyes narrowed on me. I stopped moving.

“Everyone knows I'm committed to conducting no business during my time in Nepal,” he said. “You're disturbing me.”

“Give me the girl and I'll go,” I volunteered.

“Oh, it's too late for any of that,” Chemical Claude said. “The price for what you want is to tell me in agonizing detail what Simon Still is doing in Pakistan.”

Pakistan? Simon Still? I had no idea. I hadn't been with the Agency long enough to be given access to actual state secrets. In fact, the extent of my spying experience so far was limited to following various misanthropes around and taking notes about what they had for breakfast and how many people they had sex with and what movie they happened to take in. At this point, I had more in common with a golden retriever than with an actual secret operative.

“I don't know,” I said honestly. “They don't exactly explain themselves to me.”

Realizing that if I had known the answer to his question, I would have considered telling him in exchange for our lives, struck me in a physical way. What kind of spy did that make me? I'll tell you. A very bad one.

Chemical Claude nudged the man holding Ayushi closer to the edge of the bridge. Big tears rolled down her cheeks. All of a sudden, Min appeared, limping, on the trail behind me.

“Great,” I said. “The band's all here.”

“Sally,” Min said, through clenched teeth. “This is not going to go over well on the home front. For either of us.”

I was quite confident that if I ever got home, Simon was going to exile me to an ice floe somewhere in the neighborhood of the South Pole, so I was trying not to sweat it too much.

“Just don't shoot me, okay?” I asked.

“You have some nerve asking me not to shoot you,” Min said. He took a small step and winced. Blood soaked through the laces of his heavy leather boot.

“Hello over there!” Chemical Claude bellowed. “Can we focus on the question at hand, please? What is Simon Still doing in Pakistan?” I looked at Min, who shrugged his shoulders. No help there.

“I have people there,” Chemical Claude went on, almost as if talking to himself. “Good people, but Simon is slippery. I can't always get a hold of him.” He seemed genuinely perplexed.

“We all walk away if I tell you?” I asked, embarrassed by the rank cheesiness of the line.

“Sally,” Min warned.

“Yes, you have my word,” Claude said.

I was sure he was lying, the word of a terrorist not really worth that much, but I figured I had to exhaust all possibilities and there weren't that many to begin with.

Well, if you really have to know,” I said, “Simon Still is in Pakistan looking for whoever just purchased a nuclear warhead from Ian Blackford. We heard noise that it's destined to visit India in the very near future.” Technically, this could have been true. I heard things, rumors mostly, floating around the Underground that Blackford was doing something particularly awful. Maybe it was selling a nuclear bomb to some fringe group in Pakistan? Why not? He'd done worse.

“You lie like an amateur,” Chemical Claude said, exposing his perfect white teeth in what I think was meant to be a smile. “Blackford works for me. He knows better than to sell anything to anybody without my approval.”

This was not good news and I'm not talking about my inability to lie convincingly.

“That's what you think. Blackford has no allegiance to anyone but Blackford,” I said, parroting word for word a lecture Simon Still had delivered to me no less than a hundred times. All the while I continued to move forward on the swaying bridge, hoping I could get close enough to do, well, something. What that was, exactly, I had not figured out. I was making it up as I went along, a behavior that would become something of a bad habit of mine in the future.

“I was told you would know the answer to the Pakistan question,” he said, taking a step toward me, examining my face. “But I think I was misinformed. You're nothing more than middle management. And this is a waste of time. I hate wasting time. Just kill them all.”

For a second I didn't think I'd heard the words correctly because I was focused entirely on the man with the beefy arms as he moved to shove Ayushi right over the side of the bridge into the raging river.

“No!” My scream was useless, a dog caught in a snare with no hope of rescue. Pulling my gun, I fired all my bullets into the guy who began to fall backward off the bridge. As I ripped Ayushi from his grip, pushing her to safety, the dying man lodged a bloody arm around my waist and together we plunged off the bridge into the water. For a second, I could hear chaos behind me, Min shouting, Chemical Claude's shrieking laughter, gunfire. And then nothing but the thrashing of water in my ears as I tumbled down the river to an almost certain death.

I surfaced briefly, trying for a glimpse of shore before the river pushed me back down and forward. My lungs burned and my arms and legs were heavy chunks of ice somehow loosely attached to my body. I had maybe a minute left before I boarded the bus to hypothermic cardiac arrest, when I found myself spinning in a small, swirling eddy alongside the riverbank. With a trembling blue hand I grabbed onto a rock and held fast. There was a thin stream of blood flowing from a gash in my scalp. Every time I blinked, the world turned a shade of rosy pink.

Slowly, with great effort, I pulled myself out of the river and up onto the surrounding rocks. The sun shone brightly in a pale and washed-out sky and I sat there on a rock with my arms wrapped around my legs, shivering. There was blood from other places. A bullet hole in my arm? It didn't matter. My mind was completely blank.

At some point, Min came hobbling down the trail. With a sense of urgency, he tried again and again to pull me to my feet. But I didn't want to move. I intended to sit with my frozen body on this frozen rock forever, so what was the big hurry?

“We need to go,” Min said quietly. “It's not safe.”

“Is she dead?” I asked, my blue lips cracking with each word.

“No.”

“Did he take her?”

“Yes.”

Suddenly, I reared up as if shot through with pure adrenaline. I couldn't bear to think about what Chemical Claude would do to Ayushi.

“I tried,” Min said, holding me tightly, a human straitjacket. “They're gone. They assume you're dead. You should be.”

The energy surge dissipated as quickly as it had come. I had nothing left.

“You really work for Gray?” I asked.

“Eventually we all do, Sally Sin. We all do.”

And that was the last thing I remember before I woke up on a cot in a completely white room in the Bangkok Airport. Simon Still sat across from me, blowing smoke rings and poking his finger through them.

I tried to sit up but an IV line kept me tethered to the bed.

“Chemical Claude works with Ian Blackford,” I squeaked with what was left of my voice. “Something about Pakistan. Wanted to know what we were up to in Pakistan.”

Simon flicked the ash of his cigarette right on the floor. It settled there in a little dusty pile.

“Well, that's not really any of his business, now is it?” he said. “In any case, nice work. Good girl.” Those words remain the first and only compliment Simon Still ever gave me. That it was something you might say to a puppy who had finally managed to take a pee in the grass rather than on the kitchen floor was not entirely lost on me. My whole body ached and I couldn't seem to stop shivering.

“The doctors assure me you'll be fine, more or less,” Simon said, lighting a fresh cigarette from the dying one.

“Should you be smoking in here?” I asked, the yellow air thick in my throat.

“It's Thailand, Sally,” he said. “I can do anything I want.”

As Simon watched me, I tried desperately to keep him from seeing that Ayushi's face was a drifting jellyfish across my consciousness.

“Why do they call him Chemical Claude?” I asked. I wanted more than an answer to my question. I wanted to be let in the club. I wanted to be on the inside. Simon took a few more drags on his cigarette while he decided what I deserved to know.

“They call him Chemical Claude because his first time out he botched an effort to hijack a subway in Beijing,” he said. “Instead of knocking out the passengers with sarin gas and holding them hostage for a fortune, he killed them all. It was early, kids were on their way to school. It was a crowded train. The Chinese government asked for our help in covering it up. They did not want to appear weak. They've learned a lot since then.”

I kept my eyes averted, afraid to look at him.

“This will not be your only professional failure, Sally,” Simon said. “True, he gets this round. But maybe you'll get the next.”

Inside, I was consumed with defeat and helplessness and anger. I wanted to wrap my hands around Chemical Claude's neck and squeeze until the life flowed out of him like that goddamn river. It didn't feel at all like a professional failure. It felt personal.

“In any case,” Simon said, “we can talk more about it later.” With one swift move, he yanked the IV from my arm. “Time to go.” I covered the hole left by the line with my opposite hand, the blood seeping through my fingers.