Authority(64)

“Next time you tell this story, you should leave out the seduction, which didn’t happen,” Control said, a spiral of ash in his head and a faint ringing in his ears. “You could also add that the operative didn’t have clear orders from his superior.”

“You heard the man. You heard him.” The Cheney murmur, as subtle as a donkey burp.

Grace kept speaking directly to Whitby, with Whitby now swiveling toward Cheney, the expression asking Cheney what he should do, and Cheney unable or unwilling to give him guidance. Let it play out to the bitter end. Draw the poison. This was trench warfare. This was always going to continue.

“So the operative beds the girlfriend”—no triumph in her voice at least—“although he knows it is dangerous, knows that the members of the militia might find out. His supervisor does not know what he is doing. Yet. And then one day—”

“One day,” Control interrupted, because if she was going to tell this story she should get the rest of it right, godfucking dammit. “One day he goes to the bar—this is only the third time—and gets made by surveillance cameras put in overnight by the boyfriend.” Control hadn’t spoken to her the second time in the bar. That third and final time, yes. How he wished he hadn’t. He couldn’t even remember what he’d said to her, or her to him.

“Correct,” Grace said, a momentary confused expression adding weight to her face. “Correct.”

* * *

It was an old scar by now for Control, even if it seemed like a fresh wound to every scavenger that tried to dip their beak or snout into it, to tear away some spoiled meat. The routine of telling the story transformed Control from a person into an actor dramatizing an ancient event from his own life. Every time he had to reenact it, the monologue became smoother, the details less complex and more easily fitted together, the words like stuffing puzzle pieces into his mouth and spewing them out in the perfect order to form a picture. He disliked the performance more each time. But the only other choice was to be blackmailed by a part of his past now more than seventeen years and five months gone by. Even though it followed him around to each new job because his supervisor at the time had decided Control deserved, forever, more punishment than he’d received at the point of impact.

In the worst versions, like the one Grace had started to tell, he’d slept with the girlfriend, Rachel McCarthy, and had compromised operations beyond repair. But the truth had been bad enough. He had come out of private college as his mother’s protégé; excellent grades, a kind of unthinking swagger, and completion of training at Central with high marks. He’d had great success in the field the first two times out, tracking good ole boys across flat plains and gentle hills in the middle of the country—pickups and chewing tobacco and lonely little town squares, snacking on fried okra while he watched guys in baseball caps load suspicious boxes into the backs of vans.

“I made a terrible mistake. I think about it every day. It guides me in my job now. It makes me humble and keeps me focused.” But he didn’t think about it every day. You didn’t think about it every day or it would rise up and consume you. It just remained there, nameless: a sad, dark thing that weighed you down only some of the time. When the memory became too faint, too abstract, it would transform itself into an old rotator cuff injury, a pain so thin yet so sharp that he could trace the line of it all the way across his shoulder blade and down his back.

“So then,” Control said, Whitby beginning to be crushed by their tandem attention and Cheney gone, having orchestrated a subtle jailbreak right under Control’s nose. “So then, the boyfriend has it on tape that some stranger was talking to his girlfriend, which would probably be enough for a beating. But then he has a comrade follow this stranger to a café about twenty minutes away by car. The operative doesn’t notice—he’s forgotten to take the steps to see if he was being tailed, because he’s so thrilled with himself and so confident in his abilities.” Because he was part of a dynasty. Because he knew so much. “And guess who the operative is talking to? His supervisor. Only, members of this militia had a run-in with the supervisor a few years back, which, it turns out, is why it’s me in the field rather than him in the first place. So now they know the person talking to his girlfriend is comparing notes with a known government agent.”

Here he deviated from the script long enough to remind Grace of what he had endured just that morning: “It was like I was floating above it all, above everyone, looking down, gliding through the air. Able to do anything I wanted to.” Saw the connection register with her, but not the guilt.