Arthur opened the white van’s side panel. The metallic sign on the driver’s door said Frieda’s House of Flora and Fauna. Arthur was a spare man, elegant in body and movement. Forbearance in his stance and natural expression, he stood by the openmouthed van and waited.
Mick’s gaze shifted from the black insides of the van to the tempered features of his mentor. “I need an explanation.”
“An explanation?” The older man employed the same economy of speech as he did in physical appearance.
“I wake up, not at the arranged location with instructions for my next assignment, but—” he gestured at the building behind them “—at a funeral fun house greeted by the beautiful Bitsy of the mortuary business and her glad bag of embalming tools.”
“Bitsy.” Arthur tested the name.
“You descend from Mount Olympus or whatever lofty peak Central occupies these days, complete with a chariot. Not to mention, thanks to San Francisco’s boys in blue, my identity has been compromised up and down the California coast.”
A siren wailed through the night.
Arthur looked at Mick. He smiled pleasantly. “Shall we go?”
“What’s going on, Arthur?”
The other man had rounded the front of the van and was climbing into the driver’s seat. He buckled and adjusted his seat belt, smoothed his pants’ creases and started the engine. He turned in the seat, and with genteel features and a civil smile, he looked at Mick. “Get in, Michael.”
Something was very wrong.
Mick climbed inside the back of the van, slamming the side door shut behind him. The van was dark, no overhead light, no seats in the back. Arthur waited until Mick arranged himself on the cool metal floor, then eased the van out from behind the funeral home’s storage shed.
Mick’s questions started immediately. “Did last night’s operation go down as planned?”
“Shh.” Arthur raised a tapered finger. “Let me have my Mel Gibson getaway moment here.”
Mick shook his head, a smile starting as the van smoothly accelerated to thirty miles per hour and held steady. “Yeah, you’re one big bad ass, Arthur.”
“Yes,” was all the other man would concede.
They drove in silence, away from the sirens. It was futile to ask any more questions. Arthur would give him the answers when he was ready. Mick saw Arthur touch the pearl-gray streak at his temple. Beneath that rakish silver wave, there was a scar. Beneath that a metal plate.
“Congressman Kittredge was shot this evening,” Arthur said.
Mick listened and waited. The old man had never uttered an unnecessary word in his life.
“He was leaving a late dinner at a Bay Area restaurant when a man wearing a Halloween mask approached. The valet saw the gun and pushed Kittredge out of the way. The bullet hit the congressman’s shoulder instead of his heart. The valet’s a hero. The assassin got away.”
The sheet was loosening about Mick’s body. He pulled it tighter. He could feel the texture of the road through the van’s bare floor.
“They’re going to say you did it,” Arthur told him.
Mick closed his eyes. There was a rolling, soothing movement to the blackness.
“I issued the APB, tipped off the locals about the location of the funeral home.”
Mick’s eyes opened.
“If the local police had found you sooner, it could’ve provided an alibi. At the very least, protection. Until I could get to you, you were safer in the company of the police than our own men.” The old man’s hands were steady on the wheel, his gaze aimed straight into the night.
“I didn’t mean to involve the woman. Bitsy.”
The name sounded across the empty van. Mick saw the woman in stilettos stomping around the room, brandishing a scalpel, spouting indignation.
“She’s an alibi for you. A liability for the Agency.”
Mick’s hand fisted, ached to slam against the floor. He resisted. The gesture was ineffectual. Unvented rage was not.
“I erased your identity,” Arthur continued.
“If the Agency is trying to get me killed, they won’t be too happy about that.”
“It’s to protect the Agency as much as you. When the feds or the locals look, they’ll find nothing, a man who never existed. Still they’ll have your name. Others will know it. Grainy photos, a crude sketch or two will follow. It’s out of my control now, Michael.”
Mick waited for Arthur to tell him more, to give him a rationale. The darkness and the silence became too much, so finally he asked, “Why?”
The other man’s eyes looked into the night. “There’s not always an explanation, Michael. Life is random. Hit or miss. You stepped into its path.”
“What about the raid on the arms smugglers last night?”
“They got seven arrests, little fish, some AK-47s.” Arthur’s voice was flat. “The operation was compromised. There was a leak. The key figures had got out of the U.S. and escaped back to the Far East by last night.”
Mick’s fingers remained furled into a tight ball. Since the first death, he’d held fast to his rage. “The operation was deliberately sabotaged.” His voice was as level as his mentor’s.
“An investigation on the incident will be conducted through the traditional channels,” Arthur said.
“It should’ve gone down as planned.”
“Life,” Arthur said. “Hit or miss.” He touched his temple.
Mick knew he wouldn’t get much more information. The Agency’s M.O. was maximum secrecy equated maximum security and efficiency. Agents reported to an assigned contact. They were given only the necessary information to carry out their assignments. Each agent knew if their cover was blown, they’d be abandoned. It was the sacrifice of one for the survival of many. If nothing went wrong, the system worked.
Something had gone wrong.
Mick looked at the man driving, the man who’d engineered his first death, and in doing so, had saved his life. Since that time, he’d died a hundred deaths, a hundred different ways, none of them real, all of them resulting in greater good…until now.
Mick looked at the man he loved. “Who ordered my setup?”
Quiet was the only answer. Mick’s words hovered in the silence.
“Kittredge, our own agents, an international arms ring… It’s someone big, isn’t it?” Mick said.
Arthur’s gaze stayed on the road. “Rot starts at the top.”
“Corbain.” Mick muttered the name of the outsider put in charge of the Agency after last year’s presidential election.
Arthur steered the van into the parking lot of a convenience store. The lot was empty except for a car parked to the far side and a pickup truck near the entrance. He pulled up to the pumps and turned off the engine.
“I’ve brought you as far as I can. I’ll fill the tank. There’s a change of clothes in the bag back there. Money, identification, a name and number on a card in the glove compartment. Friends of mine. They own a twenty-two-foot whaler that can get you across the Gulf.”
Mick looked at his oldest friend. “You didn’t have to do this. If they find out…”
Arthur looked at him for a moment, then said the words he’d said to Mick twelve years ago. “Everybody deserves