21. March 7th

MARCH 7TH

Waters

As soon asWaters was a mile from the house, he pulled the Jeep down a dirt track turnoff and into the trees. He didn't have to wait long before the back flap opened to allow Nemo to roll into the storage compartment, and the side door opened to allow TB to cram himself into the passenger seat. Waters didn't look at them. He just sat in the driver's seat, drank his bottled water, and waited.

The car was silent for a while. Given that TB was an "information specialist" by trade, he had the silent treatment down. He would never be the first to begin a conversation unless he wanted to. Waters had withstood some of the worst interrogation and torture known to mankind, but if TB was going to use his "soft" approach, he knew that he would never win the Silent Game against his teammate. The twisted part of Waters refused to just give in, so he held out as long as he could.

TB sat and looked at him. He didn't move. He didn't blink.

After three minutes of silence where the only sound had been the crinkling of the plastic bottle that Waters drank from, he tossed the bottle in the back and refrained from smiling at hearing the soft "Hey!" from Nemo when he got hit with it.

Another minute or so went by without any noise at all. Waters just sat in the driver's seat, one wrist resting on the top of the steering wheel, staring out the windshield.

The fingers of his free hand resting on his leg were getting ready to twitch.

"Just get it over with and spit it out," Waters eventually grumbled.

Nemo piped up from the back. "Four minutes, nineteen seconds, Boss. New record. Way to go!" he praised with a congratulatory smack to the shoulder.

"Have you registered for china yet?" TB rumbled, totally straight-faced.

Here we go.

"Fuck you. I'm registering for a new Glock so that I can put you in the hospital and shut you up for a few days."

Totally deadpan, the giant informed him, "I'm just checking. Wanna make sure I'm prepared to purchase early. I don't want to be stuck as the chump who's left with the gravy boat for four hundred dollars at the end."

"Midas and I already have dibs on the gravy boat, so you're stuck with the thousand dollar place setting," Nemo offered just as deadpan.

"Okay, okay, you two have had your fun," Waters interrupted. "What do you have for me?"

Nemo reached into his pack and pulled out a brown paper bag, stuck his head between the seats, and tossed it into Waters' lap.

"What the hell is this?" He looked inside and laid his head back on the headrest. "That's not what I meant."

"Yeah, I know. But it's what I have for ya. Cherry double-checked your kit before you left and noticed you weren't packing. And after the last couple of weeks of watching you and Kubrick dance around each other like the hippo and the alligator from Fantasia, I figured that you needed them."

With a look of disgust on his face, TB snarked, "I don't think she'd find that comparison flattering." Suddenly, he turned in his seat to look behind himself. "And why do you know that movie?"

"Name a movie I don't know about, Total Brontosaurus. Why do you know it? Okay. So. Anyway. We noticed you were taking an unscheduled trip into town after yesterday's blackout, so then I knew you needed them." Another congratulatory slap on the back. "Smooth, motherfucker! Of course, now I'm kinda pissed that it's imminent I'm going to lose the pool."

Waters rubbed his forehead and grimaced. "Could we please not have a betting pool on my sex life?"

"Dude," TB said, "there's not much else to talk about right now. If I have to do one more round of Would You Rather with Nozzle, here, I'm gonna strangle him."

"And even those games have been themed around your sex life," Nemo added.

"Kill me now," Waters moaned. "It's not about me. I can take your trash, but it's disrespectful to Kai, you dumbasses."

Silence reigned in the vehicle. Waters knew he'd made a mistake the minute he'd said her real name. He leaned his outside elbow on the windowsill and covered his mouth with his hand.

Fuck.

"Well, there it is," TB said.

"Okay, then," Nemo added.

That one slip had made it clear he was declaring that his feelings were more than casual. A catastrophic rule break. More silence invaded the Jeep until TB decided to take pity on him and not make a bigger production out of his mistake. "Midas found a breadcrumb."

Waters went into operator mode, removed his sunglasses, and turned to TB. "You couldn't have led with that?"

TB shrugged. "Thought the other might be more fun. Problem is, the bread crumb is pretty tiny and pretty stale. It could be nothing," he warned.

"Midas wouldn't have mentioned it at all if he didn't think it was something, though."

"There is that." TB's eyes continued to scan outside the car. "On the day of Ka-Bar's last email to Kubrick, the French Ambassador in Cairo—the one he's tight with, Jacques something-or-other—had an emergency. He left the embassy under the radar. No security. Now, he could have been going out to meet his mistress for all we know."

"But that's highly unlikely," Nemo followed up. "He's pretty damn devoted to his wife and kids."

"Correct," TB admitted, "but we have no record of where he went, whom he saw, or what he did. He could have been doing something as innocuous as buying a birthday present for someone. But, add to the fact that he accessed his personal safe before exiting the building, put one and one together, and you get three."

"He could have been accessing exit packages," Waters surmised.

"That's what God thought. The embassy records every time anything is accessed within its walls. This includes personal safes, locked doors, and computer logins; hell, they even keep track of how many times the water gets turned on and off and when. After doing an inventory of past usage, the man hasn't opened that particular safe in over two years. So, yes, Midas thinks he was accessing emergency exit contacts and providing someone—hopefully Ka-Bar—with a package because he couldn't get to his own stash. The problem is, Midas was only able to follow him a few blocks on CCTV, and then the guy just disappeared into thin air."

"Since that's impossible, that means we have a rough idea of where to search. Ka-Bar must have been hiding out in that vicinity. We're now left believing he would know that someone would look into the embassy, find the discrepancy, and use CCTV to trace the ambassador. Even if he's not there now, he could have left another breadcrumb wherever he was," Waters commented. His elbow propped once again on the windowsill, and he rubbed his top lip with his index finger. "Thin."

"The thinnest," Nemo agreed.

"Right now, anorexia is better than nothing," TB reminded them. "Besides, we need something soon. Our dental benefits can't handle the rate at which God is losing teeth."

Waters gave a small laugh despite the situation in front of them. "I just wish I knew if this all connected directly to Kubrick. It doesn't make sense."

TB looked back at Nemo. "Well, that's the other piece of news."

"I'm not going to like this, am I?"

"As you SEALs are always so fond of warning each other, ‘brace.' We now have confirmation. Her trailer was searched."

"That's definitely what you should have led this conversation off with. Goddamnit!" Waters struck the steering wheel with the heels of both hands.

TB ignored him. "Cyclopes went off around oh-two-hundred. Someone was looking for something. They didn't trash the place, but they did break in, and they didn't hide the fact that they were there. By the time Steel got there to check it out, whoever it was had already left. No prints, either."

"And we know it wasn't Big Bird who broke in since if it was, Steel would have been there to witness it happen. Apparently, our angry bird brain was at a club all night, then went home with some internet influencer. He was there until just after three o'clock." Nemo shook his head. "How depressing. They only got to her place at about two-thirty. I should apologize to her for him when I get back."

TB smacked Nemo upside the back of the head and shook his head.

"What do you want to do, Boss?" Nemo asked.

Waters drummed his fingers on the steering wheel, thinking carefully before he answered. "Tie Kubrick up and cart her off to a safe house for starters."

"Kinky."

"Shut up, Nemo, or I'll tie you up and put you in a coffin with that snake."

"That's a low blow."

"How's your ass feeling, by the way?" Waters sniped.

"Like two fangs punctured it. And not in a good way."

TB looked at Nemo. "There's a good way for that to happen?"

Remembering a set of fangs that had punctured his right ass cheek last night, Waters shifted uncomfortably in his seat. "Everybody's got their kink."

Nemo got back on topic. "Well, we don't have a safe house here, and I highly doubt she'll agree to shutting down her film to go to one stateside."

Waters grunted at that.

"And while tying her up sounds fun," Nemo continued, "I don't want to go another round with that snake. So… what do we do?"

Sighing, Waters scrubbed his face with his hands. "It wouldn't take someone too long to figure out where she is. Right now, I can watch her just fine. It's her, me, and six actors. We're basically in each other's pockets twenty-four-seven. I can limit crew access to her with help from you guys, but more and more of them are arriving daily. Shit, once filming gears up, add extras in, plus gawkers, there'll easily be two to three hundred people running around, and I won't know who belongs and who doesn't."

"Can we lock down the shoot?" TB asked.

"Three of us can't maintain that. Hell, we're good, but even all six of us couldn't do it. We're talking total clusterfuck."

"Well, you're not planning on leaving her side anytime soon. Not that you had been before you decided to play house. But at least now it won't look weird if you keep with her."

"Yeah, but then we have to make public that we're in a relationship."

Goddamnit.

TB smirked and looked out the passenger side window to hide the smile. Nemo just raised an eyebrow at him in the rearview mirror, a shit-eating grin on his face.

"You tell anyone what I just said, I will bury you both in a pit of vipers like Ragnar."

"Nice. Double confirmation for the betting pool. With that, I shall make my exit." Nemo clapped him on the shoulder, a little lighter this time. "She makes you smile. I don't even need binoculars to see that. Enjoy it, Boss." With that, he rolled out of the Jeep and disappeared into the cover of the jungle.

Silence hit the Jeep once more. TB showed no sign of leaving any time soon. Waters sighed. "Something on your mind, TB?"

"Just wondering if you've thought this through. Don't forget. I'm the one who hauled your ass off that meat hook in Egypt. All because someone took off with a woman close to you."

"It's not the same."

"No, Kubrick isn't your sister. She's your woman. In some ways, that's probably worse."

"She's not ‘my woman.' It's not serious. It's a short-term thing, done at the end of the shoot. Besides that, no one's looking to get at me. I'm a dead man."

"You were a dead man when those fucksticks took Sarah. But you know in our line of work that attachments are dangerous. Any day, we could piss the wrong person off, and then someone we love gets put in harm's way to make us pay. That's why God delivered the message from on high to you, then us.

"Sarah was taken because you happened to piss off the wrong guy who had some crazy-smart tech guys of his own. She was God's unfortunate, expensive proof that operatives having attachments in the real world can be catastrophic. And those of us who did still have family and friends when we took the job? If we hadn't already, we forfeited them as soon as Sarah died. So now we have each other, but each of us knows the score if something goes FUBAR."

"I know." Fingers playing absently with the thread bracelet on his wrist, Waters stared at the Jeep's console, but he wasn't seeing it. "I tried to resist her. I really did."

TB shook his head. "You think I'm condemning you? Fuck, no. That's not where I'm going with this. I'm happy you've found someone who's bringing you back to life because heaven knows you, not me, have been the total bastard of the group since you came back to work. I want you to make sure she's worth the risk. Just take that into account because it doesn't have to be over when the assignment's over."

"God says no—"

"Fuck God and fuck his rules. He has no right to hold you to them."

"She's totally out in the open. I can't do my job and be with her."

TB sat in silence for a moment before going in for the kill shot. "Are you really going to keep making excuses? Whom are you trying to fool? Not me. Not any of the guys, including the boss, so you must be trying to fool yourself."

Waters let TB's words sink in and begin to digest when suddenly a surprise question came.

"Do you love fieldwork?"

Waters shrugged.

"No, you don't. You love analysis. You're the demigod. Mind like a fucking steel trap." TB smiled. "Yeah, you're great in the field. We know you've got our backs, and we've been lucky to have you with us. But none of us can do fieldwork forever."

"You make me sound old. I'm only thirty-four and younger than you."

"It's got nothing to do with age, and you know it. Did being younger than us keep us from accepting you as our team leader? Fuck, no. It's everything to do with using assets where they're best suited. You're certainly not a liability. Look, would you send Midas out as a sniper?"

"If I absolutely had to."

"Right. ‘Absolutely had to.' He can shoot better than the average man, but he's best behind his screens. It's the most efficient use of him.

"Want her in your life? Then use your sexy analysis shit and figure out how to keep your ass out of the field, or at least out of the direct line of fire. Fuck, all it takes for you to do what you do in person is for us to wear comms, and you watch through the body cams, like the past year. You were out of the loop completely for a year and working remotely on projects for the past eleven months. We've been working that way just fine." He held up a hand to stave off Waters' protest. "Trust me. We would have rather had you with us. But we're okay. And you've been excellent in the office running interference with God. Believe me, we appreciate him not being up our asses all the time. Thrilled your ass has been taking it instead of ours.

"So, keep your hand in. Do the day-to-day bullshit jobs. Vet the clients. Hire some extra help, and you can take on some local work or even actually do consulting jobs to hide us better. Run the analysis. Be the eye in the sky and order us around. And there's never a shortage of shit to do that none of us like doing, but you're totally boss at.

"But hear me on this because it is most important. Be with her if that's what you want. And if it is, then it just means adjustments inside the group, which, given the year of recovery and year of office duty, doesn't really change all that much." TB looked over at him with concern. "And if God would try to put through the final edict, you know we would help you two disappear, right?"

Waters felt that to his soul. They were willing to come between him and their boss? Just because he caught feelings?

TB broke the silence. "Does she know about Sarah?"

"No. She saw the scars. I just told her that I'd been captured on a job."

"You'll need to tell her."

"If I have to."

"Tell her. She's strong." He smiled and smacked Waters on the arm. "Take care. And don't use those all at once," he joked with a head nod to the bag. "I told him to triple what he got, but they were out of your size."

"Fuck you. How would you know what my size is?"

TB exited the jeep, leaned on the roof, and looked at him through the open door. "And Boss? She's probably more than worth it."

"She is. She's fucking perfect," he agreed, using her constant compliment to him. "But it would gut me to know that my life somehow makes hers impossible. It's just not a good idea."

"Well, you've got a number of weeks to figure that out. No need to make that decision now." He closed the door, banged two times on the roof, and with that, he was gone from the Jeep and disappearing into the jungle.