Page 94 of The Big Fix

I’d saved him.

After the call with Owen’s grandparents, we’d scrambled to find him, knowing every minute counted, but it seemed as if Owen had disappeared from the face of the earth. He’d gotten on the plane, accompanied by a flight attendant, and that was it, gone like he’d never existed.

But that made no sense, not to me or to Darius. We came to the conclusion that the only thing that could have happened was that they took him out the bottom of the plane, through the hatches above the wheels. He was ten, so he wouldn’t have gone willingly, but it was easy enough to do if he was drugged. It turned out we were right. He’d been abducted, and when we followed the trail, we found that the members of the ground crew who’d been working that day were either dead or had experienced a windfall of funds. I respected the people who’d said no, they would not cover up the abduction of a young boy, but those who’d allowed themselves to be bribed proved far more useful.

“I’ll be honest, I wasn’t myself back then,” I confessed to the room, pacing now in front of the double doors that led out onto the main deck. “When I didn’t get the answers I wanted, I was just as evil as those who tortured me.”

“Just as evil?” Arden made a face. “Really?”

“I was a horror,” I assured her.

“One difference,” Jing pointed out, sipping an Old Fashioned and watching Dante cook. “You were trying to find Owen, not exacting revenge in exchange for money.”

I looked at her. “I’m not a saint, you know. You can’t rewrite my history and make me the good guy. That’s not me.”

Jing made a noise that told me she disagreed. “You’re not a saint,” she said with a smile. “No argument there. You’re more like a well-intentioned sinner.”

“Oh, I like that,” Dante said as he stirred whatever he was making. “I’m going to call myself that from now on.”

I shook my head. “The things I’ve done, Jing, if you knew…it would change your whole—”

“Have you ever killed anyone for fun?” Owen asked me.

“What? No. God no.” That was horrific just to consider.

“Are you a serial killer?”

“No. You’re missing the point. I’ve killed people because my government told me to. Do you get that?”

“Greater good,” Dante threw out. “Long-term cause and effect.”

“You’re not—”

“It was a chessboard, Jared,” Dante reminded me. “Sometimes you were a pawn doing what you’re told, sometimes a knight sent into battle, sometimes a castle protecting people, sheltering them, and now and then, you were the bishop and you moved for reasons that weren’t your own. The fact of the matter is, none of us, not you, not me, not Darius, has ever purposely killed an innocent.”

“That doesn’t mean there wasn’t ever any collateral—”

“Listen,” Dante said, smiling, flipping a dishtowel over his shoulder. “You can stand there and hate yourself for what you did, self-flagellate all day, but the fact of the matter is, if we were sent, the person we were sent for was not a saint either.”

“We were supposed to kill that Polish dissident, remember?”

“Yes, I remember. Our boss secretly changed our orders after we told him something was hinky—”

“Hinky?”

“Oh, fuck you, I’m making a point.”

“Sorry,” I said, grinning at him.

“The point was, corruption can be anywhere. Our boss’s boss was lied to. Our boss was following orders, but when we told him what we thought, he trusted us instead of his intel. He said to get the guy and his family out while we clean house.”

That was engrained in my memory. There had been a shake-up at the agency over that one, making me glad, for the billionth time, that I was Army and not CIA.

“He and his family have been in Milwaukee for the last thirty years.”

“They have,” I agreed.

“Has it ever crossed your mind that if you’re such an abomination of a human being, then, by your logic, that makes me the same?”