Page 24

“And if they die anyway?”

“Then I tried,” I say. “And the city will still hear that I did not leave allies to burn.”

Mackensie stands and walks to the window. He makes the call there, voice low, words clipped.

Names.

Numbers.

A jet that does not file the kind of paperwork honest men file.

It takes less than two minutes. When Mackensie hangs up he looks back at me.

“It’s moving.”

“Good.” I stare past him at the park far below…

Green. Paths. Tiny people who think a morning walk is the most dangerous thing they will do today. The park takes me somewhere else.

MANY YEARS AGO…

I was seventeen. A bench. My father with a paper cup of coffee. Me with a Coke I did not want and drank because he had bought it. Spring light. Dogs. A woman pushing a stroller like the world was safe.

My father sat the way he always sat in public. Relaxed enough to look harmless. Alert enough that I already knew better.

“If anything happens to me,” he said, “you must know you have what it takes.”

I laughed. I was seventeen. Immortal. Stupid in the way sons are allowed to be for one more year.

“The big decisions,” my father said. “You were born for them. Born to lead. Do not let anyone tell you that seat is too heavy. It will be. You will carry it anyway.”

I smiled. “That day is a long way off.”

My father smiled too. Wry, tinged with sadness. The kind of smile that does not reach the eyes.

“We’ll see,” my father said, the scar just under his eye crinkling.

For a moment the air changed. Not the weather. Him.

My father’s gaze moved off my face and across the path, the trees, the man feeding pigeons who had not been there when we sat down.

“We need to move,” he said.

No raised voice. No explanation. We stood. We walked out of the park and the city sounded the same as it had two minutes earlier.

I sensed it then. Wrongness. No name for it. No shape… just the knowledge that the morning had cracked and I was not being told why.

The next day he was dead.

PRESENT DAY…

I drink the last of the espresso and the memory goes back where I keep it. Not gone. Caged.

Mackensie is watching me. He does not ask where I went. He never does when my face does that.

“I’m going to shower,” I say. “Then I dress. Then we go to Keller’s.”

“Of course.”