Page 27 of Salt Kiss
“I hired you to follow me day and night, to be near me while I conduct business and more personal affairs. I’m not shy.”
Swallowing, I turn back around. Mark is wearing the pajama pants, butonlythe pajama pants. His chest and shoulders are bare; hair like dark, tarnished gold glints softly from his chest, and more stretches from his navel to the drawstring waistband of his pajama pants. His nipples are a muted pink, the inside of a seashell seen at dusk, and there is a tattoo of a bird in flight on his left forearm. I’ve seen part of it before, when he’s had his sleeves rolled up, but now I can see all of it: precisely drawn feathers and a sharp beak and a single closed eye, all rendered in black ink.
The pants hang low enough that I can see another black tattoo on his hip, just above the waistband. It’s two words, small enough that I can’t read them from here.
“Tertia optio,” says Mark, noticing the direction of my gaze.
“The third option.”
Mark looks surprised. “That’s right.”
“My father,” I explain. He was familiar with the adage that if diplomacy fails and war isn’t a possibility, a third option should be chosen. The third option being any plausibly deniable thing the CIA deems necessary, of course. “He didn’t believe in it. To him, if diplomacy fails, then transparent conflict is the answer. Not whatever it is the Special Activities Center does.”
Mark pulls back the covers on his side of the bed. “Spoken like a soldier” is all he says.
I don’t know why, but I bristle. “He thinks any fight should be a fair one. Soldiers fight fairly, honestly.”
“Okay,” replies Mark, and that amused tone is back. He gives me a look, and I get the distinct impression that he thinks I’m beingcute. It makes me bristle even more.
“He’s not wrong,” I say stubbornly. “Special ‘activities’ is just a euphemism for murder—”
“There are things worse than murder,” Mark interrupts, like a teacher who’s had enough of a student getting an answer wrong. “Lots of murders, for example. Isn’t it better that one or two people die rather than hundreds or thousands? If one or two deaths stops months or years of killing, torture, rape, famine, utter misery?”
“But it’s notright,” I say stubbornly. “It’s not a fair fight to come through a window and justkillsomeone—”
“We didn’t always kill people,” Mark cuts in impatiently. “Special activities is a lot more than that. And as for fair fights...if you consider drones and Hellfire missiles against rebels armed with forty-year-old guns and their great-grandfathers’ bayonets a fair fight, then I’m not sure what to tell you.”
He’s wrong, I know he’s wrong, but I struggle for the words to tell him so.
He lets out a soft breath.
“You should change into your pajamas,” he says. “Even if you sleep in the chair.” And then he climbs into the bed, arranging himself on his side, facing away from me.
I quickly change, pulling on the pajamas—top and bottoms—and then go back to my recliner. It’s been a day of nothing but sitting, and I doubt I’ll be able to fall asleep, but this will be my best chance, here on a secure flight with a door closed to the rest of the plane. Once we land, I’ll need to be alert and watchful, awake, and if I learned anything while deployed, it was to sleep while I can.
A fair fight...
Mark is wrong, of course he is, but when I close my eyes—just for a moment—I see Sims.
Sims framed by trees and fog, and he’s holding his gun with a shaking hand, and I’m dreaming, I think, asleep and dreaming the familiar nightmare.
Everyone put your goddamn guns down, he says in the dream.
We are motionless, staring. Unable to think. We trained and trained and trained for the enemy, but with one of our own pointing a gun at us, we’re lumps of confused meat, worse than boots, worse even than civilians.
This can’t be happening.
Now!Sims snarls.I’m not fucking joking!
We got out of our escort vehicles to scout a potential rebel trap in the surrounding woods. Rebels that Sims said he saw.
But there are none and now we’re out of our vehicles like fucking fools. He’s going to kill the woman nominated as Carpathia’s next prime minister, who will lead in conjunction with its president. He’s going to kill everyone else in the car we’re escorting, including her family.
I don’t drop my gun.
Sims, I say, and my voice is shaking like his hand.What the fuck are you doing?
The fog is clammy and cold, and makes everything hazy. The children in the car are crying and I can hear them through the windows. Their father is holding them. The ministerial nominee steps out of the car, her back tall, blocking the window and her family behind her. When I give her a quick glance, she’s dry-eyed and pissed off.
