Page 7 of The Jackal

The voice came out of the dark at my shoulder. I didn't startle—you don't startle me, it's another thing the threshold took—but I'll admit Ken is one of the few men alive who can get inside my distance before I've clocked him. He does it without trying, which is its own kind of credential.

He stepped into the thin light. If you passed him in an airport you'd forget him before you reached your gate. Average height. Average build. A face built for being unremembered.

He wore no uniform and no rank, and the first time we met, years back, he'd told me his name was Ken and to never call him anything else. I never have. I don't know if Ken is his name. I stopped wondering. He has the same stillness I carry. The same economy. The bearing some people read as cold and I read as familiar—a man who has stood at the edge of it enough times that the small noise of being alive has gone quiet in him. I think it's the mark of the trade. You can spot us by what we don't do. We don't fidget. We don't fill silences. We don't look away.

"His people came for him," Ken said, watching the ramp. "That's a good thing to see."

"It is."

"You did a good job, Cash."

From anyone else, it would've been a line you say. From Ken, it was a full citation. He doesn't spend words he doesn't mean.

I waited for the rest of it. There's always a rest of it. There's always another. That's the shape of this life—you close one folder and there's a new one waiting, because the dead don't take a season off.

Sometimes, it's a man like Beasley, lost behind a line he was never meant to cross, in the hands of people you have to go through to reach him. Sometimes, it's quieter and ugly in a different key. A soldier who died where the report can't say he died—in a rented room in Manila with a girl who ran the second his heart stopped—and somebody has to go make the truth of it vanish so a wife in Ohio gets a flag instead of a phone call she'd hear for the rest of her life.

We don't choose. We go where we're sent, to whoever's been taken, and we bring back what can be brought back. I had my hand half out for the next folder before I knew I'd moved.

Ken didn't have a folder.

"No assignment tonight," he said.

That stopped me. There's always an assignment.

"There's a plane for you." He lifted his chin toward the far end of the tarmac, past the floods, into the dark where the field ran out. I followed it and found the shape eventually—low and sleek and black, a private jet sitting where the transports don't, lights on, engines already turning over, a thin shimmer of heat rising off the back of it into the cold.

"Going where?" I asked.

"Don't know."

I looked at him. In all the years, I'm not sure I'd ever heard Ken say those two words.

"A call came," he said. "Above me. Above where I can see. The instruction was one line. Put Cash Dane on that plane." He turned and looked at me then, and there was something in it I had no category for—not worry, Ken doesn't do worry, but a kind of attention, like a man watching weather he can't name come over a ridge. "So, I'm putting you on that plane."

I didn't ask the other questions. They wouldn't have had answers, and Ken doesn't perform certainty he doesn't have—it's the thing I trust most about him. Whoever could reach over Ken's head and pluck me off a tarmac in Germany with a one-line order was a long way up a ladder I'd never seen the top of. There was a time that would've put every instinct I own on edge.

It didn't. I was too tired, and I trusted the only man standing there. Some part of me—the part that feels the dead through a wall—was quiet about it in a way I'd learned to listen to.

Ken put out his hand. I took it.

We held it a beat longer than men do. We don't have many of our own, Ken and I. The chaplains, maybe, carry something close to the weight we carry, though they get to believe out loud and we mostly don't. Everyone else sets death down and walks away. We're the ones who stay in the room with it. When you find another man who can stand in that room and not leave, you don't waste the handshake.

"Go on, then," Ken said. "Sleep, if you can."

I shouldered my pack and walked toward the jet.

Everything I own rode on my back. It isn't much, and that's by choice. A man in my line travels light. I crossed the open ground alone, the way I cross most things, my boots loud on the wet concrete—the transport behind me with its terrible cargo and its honor guard of brothers, the black jet ahead with its engines running and no destination anyone would give me.

And somewhere in the middle of all that dark and open ground, the tiredness landed on me. Not the body kind. I can run a long way on a little. This was the other kind. The deep kind. The bill that comes due after you've held death close and steady for days and finally get to set the steadiness down. My eyes felt full of sand. My bones had opinions.

I found I was hoping the flight was a long one.

I wanted the dark of a cabin and the white noise of altitude and a seat that leaned back far enough. I wanted to sleep. And under the wanting to sleep was a wanting I don't say out loud to anyone, because there's no version of it that doesn't sound like the ramblings of a man who came back from the dead a little wrong.

I was hoping I'd see Leonard Beasley.

This is the part the living would never believe, and the part I wouldn't trade for anything they've got.