Читать книгу Slow Recoil - C.B. Forrest - Страница 13

FOUR

Three days earlier…

Kadro stands on the balcony of the cheap airport-strip motel smoking a Canadian cigarette. Du Maurier. The cigarette is smooth. Fine. Back in the war, he liked those mornings best when the sun had not yet burned away the fog completely, and he could stand alone with the gun slung over his shoulder and enjoy a cigarette all to himself. The fields seemed peaceful then and not at all associated with the gruesome acts of war. The bullets, the bombs. The effect of shrapnel on the human body. The sweet, sick stink of the dead, the sounds they made in their own moment of dying. None of it seemed possible inside the stillness and clear sunshine of those fields. He would smoke his cigarette and watch the morning glow within itself, and it made a man feel grateful to stand with his legs wholly intact, heart still beating, still pushing blood. He understood in those moments what it meant to be entirely alive, because he was already dead—his generation expendable as a matter of birth and name and timing. The great lottery of life. His number was accounted for; it had been waiting for him just up ahead all the days of his life. The next field, the next town.

“Always daydreaming,” that’s what Krupps used to say. The weary squad leader with the perpetual smirk, the crooked grin. The dimpled cheeks of a farm boy contrasted against the dead eyes of a killer, their best shooter. Removed the head from an enemy soldier at six hundred yards. At dusk. With a hard wind blowing at them. Krupps had collected on the bet from every man in the squad, including Kadro. It was supernatural.

But it was Krupps who was dead and not him. Dead going on seven years now. And only just yesterday. Life was funny that way, how time shifted, played tricks so that even now Kad could close his eyes and actually smell the cordite, the blue-grey smoke from their guns—and then the other smells that came on, the stomach-curdling stink of death, the foul funk of bodies left to bloat and swell in the hot summer sun, a smell that settled in your mouth like a taste, something that stayed on your tongue for days.

“This,” Krupps said, handing him a pint of plum brandy, “is the only thing that gets rid of the stink. Drink it. And then smear some under your nose… ”

Yes, life was funny. Kad’s brother Tomas had studied at a school in Chicago, because he was the smarter of the two, always reading these thick books, preferring conversation and debates to sports or roughhousing. And it was Kad who’d stayed home with the rifle and the grenades, the bayonet that he could mount on his rifle when the fighting got that close, that dirty. Kad was not jealous of his brother. He was proud of Tomas and happy that he had been spared these years of war. To see the world come to an end, to stand each day in the midst of the apocalypse. To have killed men, to have witnessed the cause and effect of the bullets stored in the belt slung across his back. Kad had seen the brochures for his brother’s school in Illinois. Ill-in-noise—how many times had he said that word as he tried to imagine this unknown world his smart brother had flown to with scholarship dollars. The fields that looked like a golf course, the thin white girls with blonde hair, always blonde. What perfect timing Tomas always had. He graduated and earned his scholarship—his ticket out—in the very months before the war came to their villages, to their homeland. At first it was the whisperings of independence that reverberated around the world.

“I will come home to fight,” Tomas had told his brother in their last phone call.

“Father will not allow it. You are the only hope we have… stay where you are.”

Everything happened so fast. But not really. No, this was two thousand years in the coming. It was always there, as Kadro’s grandfather had said, this wound without stitches. When Bosnia voted for independence from Yugoslavia on February 29, 1992, the dominoes teetered. In the days following the vote, the Yugoslav Amy disbanded, looting the Bosnian reserve units of their weapons and ammunition, equipment and uniforms. There remained the fledgling and poorly trained Armija—the government army of the Republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina, or perhaps the 7th Muslim Brigade of the Armija for the truly devout. Neither option appealed to Kadro, for he was neither devout nor interested in guaranteed annihilation as part of an ill-trained and ill-equipped army fighting for a country so new, it had barely had time to ink a national emblem.

The storm clouds gathered and the fates conspired. Yugoslav Army soldiers fresh from the killing fields of Croatia paused to catch their breath in Bosnia, there along the Drina Valley at the Bosnian border with Serbia. A pileup of tanks, artillery, personnel carriers, soldiers smoking and stewing and drinking in the local pubs—drinking and talking and fermenting their hatred, this notion of revenge for the homeland.

The line of dominoes toppled and fell with the Siege of Sarajevo, the guns in the hills opening with salvos of artillery and incendiary tank shells. And so Kadro’s new Republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina—recognized as sovereign by the U.S. and most of Europe—was truly a nation born into war. The days were merciless. It was mayhem. Kad’s father would meet a group of men at the tavern in their small village and return with updates, fragments of news. To his wife and daughter he would say only that the war would be over before it reached their town, and anyway, what did anybody want with a bunch of poor farmers this far from the city? They were but a dot on a map, of no strategic value. But to his son he spoke the truth. This village had fallen, such and such official had been hung from a telephone pole. He told Kadro of the reports from the front, what the men were doing in the villages to the women, the girls.

“I am too old to fight,” his father had said, “but I will. To my last breath those bastards won’t touch your mother or your sister. I will burn my own home to the ground before I give them the satisfaction. There is no choice now, my son, you must fight. Either with our small army or with one of the units forming up… ”

And so it was that Kadro joined a handful of his classmates in a paramilitary unit that was rumoured to be funded by a wealthy landowner with business connections in Russia and the Balkans—this never-seen entity referred to simply as “The Colonel”. They were a rag-tag jumble of farm kids and country kids who could shoot well but lacked any formal military training, no understanding of comportment. The commander of their unit, whom they referred to as “Captain”, explained to them their predicament.

“This is not the fucking regulation army, boys. You are not protected by any international laws or conventions,” the Captain told them, standing on the tailgate of a black half-ton truck. He was the only one among them dressed in full camouflage, new trousers bloused over new black boots, his grey and black beard neatly trimmed. “But that hardly matters now. This is not a conventional war. We have only one mandate, and that is the mandate as declared by The Colonel. We are to take back as many of our villages and to kill as many of the enemy as we can before we ourselves are terminated. Any questions?”

Kad looked out now across the parking lot of the fifty-dollar motel. The sun was rising, giving birth to his purpose in this life. The burden of his brothers and sisters squarely on his shoulders. The load was heavy, but he didn’t mind. He had no family now, no past, no future. He was invisible; in fact, he had never been born. He turned and slipped inside the glass patio door and surveyed the room: the ugly artwork on the wall, the red shag carpeting worn from a million footsteps, the brown water stains painted like a map of Africa on the stucco ceiling, the cheap plastic cups wrapped in more plastic, the bed with its sloping mattress, the floral-print comforter.

This was Canada. The word made him think of the UN and the blue helmets and the white troop carriers shipped to a war that was none of their business, these fresh-faced boys sent halfway around the world to stand at roadblocks and witness murder. Canada. Smooth cigarettes that did not burn your throat, soft beer, soft women. The place where people apologized even when it was you who bumped into them. That was the word that came to mind: soft.

Out on Airport Road, a car backfired, and Kad ducked low, hunching at the shoulders. The automatic reaction even after all these years. His mind worked to decipher the sound, incoming or outgoing, mortar or something worse, something larger—an American five-hundred pounder sent to level a street, a block.

“We have to move,” Krupps says, kicking at Kad’s boots, waking him.

“What about Ahmet? He’s too fucked up to move. He needs blood,” Kad said.

Standing in the motel room and the fields of war all at once. Standing and seeing Krupps, seeing everything as it was, as it always will be. Outside the traffic of Toronto ebbed and flowed.

“Leave him for the UN. Give them something to do for the morning, those bleeding heart blue helmets. Thirteen minutes, Kadro. Let’s move.”

He took a final long haul of his cigarette, tossed the butt to the ground. He exhaled the tobacco and looked out across those fields. The places he had played as a boy, the small wonders of a boy’s imagination at work in those deep woods. The trees and hedgerows were forming now, coming to life, the fog burning away to reveal the true nature of the torn landscape.

There was a knock at the door.

Kadro opened his eyes and blinked. Here in the room. Here in Canada.

The man with the guns had finally come for him.

Now Kadro was at the wheel, and the man with the guns was in the passenger seat. Riding shotgun is what the Americans called it. From the days of the Wild West, the stagecoaches carrying payrolls across the bleak prairies. The driver had to keep his hands on the reins, so this required a second man with free hands and free eyes to shoot at Indians and bandits. Kadro had watched dozens of black and white westerns when he was a boy. John Wayne and Gary Cooper with their six-guns. Sitting around the TV at his uncle’s place, five or six cousins sprawled on the floor, their fathers getting drunk on plum brandy and filling the old farmhouse with choking cigarette smoke. How he and his cousins had fashioned sticks and branches for guns, playing in the woods and the barns, shooting each other out of trees, trying to squint like the American cowboys. If only they had known what their life was to hold, of the killing that was to come for their generation.

The passenger was a Canadian, but he was a blood brother in this. He was fully vetted. His name, or at least his operational name, was Turner. He was to be Kadro’s primary contact after landing at Pearson International Airport, to get him the tools he would need for the job. Turner looked like an accountant or a government auditor, slim with brown hair parted on the left, a nondescript face save for one feature: a patch on his left eye. Like a damned pirate, Kad thought when he opened the door to see the man standing there. For two days he had sat in the motel listening to the flights take off and land, listening to couples on either side make love in hourly appointments, nothing to do but pace and smoke Canadian cigarettes, watch idiots on game shows, and scratch those lottery tickets he found at the Shell station down the road. That first night he had ventured from the room in search of air and perhaps a bag of potato chips. Beneath a plastic display at the cash register he had discovered the opportunity to win one million Canadian dollars. Two dollars a chance. Why not?

“The vehicle is registered to a numbered company,” Turner said. “Try not to get into any accidents. Don’t speed. And whatever you do, don’t drive drunk. That’s generally frowned upon over here.”

“I know how to drive,” Kadro said. “Since I was ten. Tractors, trucks.”

“This isn’t a fucking tractor, and this isn’t a cow lane in Bosnia,” Turner said.

Kad stopped himself, as he was trained to do—to swallow instinct, smother emotion, follow orders. In any other situation he would have addressed the profane insult with a hard flat-palmed chop to Turner’s throat, grabbed the back of his neck and driven his accountant’s face into the dash of the car. The man would be sucking for air through a broken windpipe before he had time to wet his pants.

“Your ID is good enough to throw a beat cop off your scent,” Turner continued, “maybe buy a little time, but don’t screw around. Since nine-eleven, you can’t go to the bathroom without a note from your teacher. Follow the plan. Don’t deviate or you’ll bring us all down. You have the cellphone, you have my number. After today, it’s the only way you’ll reach me. The number will be de-activated in seven days. By that time you should be on your way out or…well, it won’t matter anyway.”

Kadro found everything—the streets, the shops, the women on the sidewalk, the signs in the stores, the grass and the glass and the chrome and the sheer number of brand new vehicles on these city streets—it was more than he had imagined. This city was so new, so young, it looked as though it had been built a month ago, not at all like the cities of Sarajevo or Banja Luka, Visoko, Srebrenica, with their ghosts on every corner, their architecture from the earliest centuries. This place was a movie set, it was a shopping mall, it was a picture you saw in a magazine. The year he’d spent locked away on the farm waiting for the last trace of his identity to be erased, existing for this and only this, it had been the life of a monk. Five a.m. wake up, cold water wash and meal parade, exercise and studies—both the English language and overviews of maps and cultural explanations, the security rehearsals, sitting in a chair and reciting his new name and the details of his invented life until they became real. The handler had warned him of the dangers of over-elation, of too much excitement, of meandering in the great North American arcade. No drinking, no drugs, no sex, no chance to get in trouble. Get in, get out.

“Take the next exit,” Turner said, “and merge to the right lane. Easy, easy.”

Kad saw the sign for Highway 7. They were north of the downtown core now, the CN Tower reduced to a souvenir a few inches tall in the rear-view mirror. Turner gave him directions one at a time, feeding him only the necessary information, until finally they pulled up to a self-serve storage complex. It was a sprawl of low-rise warehouses with tin roofs and yellow garage doors separating each unit, the whole place circled with eight feet of chain link and topped with razor wire.

Kad said, “Like the prison camps.”

“This is where Canadians store all the shit that won’t fit in their houses,” Turner said. “Pull right up to that little stand there and swipe this across the transponder.”

It was hard to believe, Kad thought, how people could need more space for their belongings. The things they owned. So much. He had lived the past seven years out of a duffel bag, washing his clothes in sinks, eating only enough to stave off starvation. And this is why his body was as hard as stone while the people around him were soft and slow. Turner handed him a blank white card with the words “Secure-Store” on it, and Kad waved it until the machine beeped and the chain link gate slid open.

“Number sixty-two,” Turner said.

Kad threw the car in gear and took them slowly up and down the rows until they found the unit. He put the car in park and killed the engine. The motor ticked as it cooled down. Turner dug in his coat pocket for a key then looked over at Kad quickly, perhaps one last check of this stranger he was about to arm. Kad stared back at him. He didn’t like this Turner with his orders and his “this isn’t a cow lane in Bosnia”, as though he thought Kad was some dumb farm kid from the hills. He had been that at one time, yes, as a boy. But he did not remember that boy, could not place himself in those shoes.

Turner unlocked the door and lifted it just high enough to get a boot under it. He gave the door a good heft with his foot, and it rolled all the way up to reveal a storage unit twelve feet deep by eight feet wide. There was nothing inside the unit except for a large green trunk. Kad recognized the box as a military foot locker.

“Close the goddamned door,” Turner said, standing there at the box. Kad turned and rolled the door down, enclosing them in darkness. Then a light came on, a glow of bright blue-white from an LED lantern. Turner’s face was rendered pale and eerie in the light, and the eye patch suddenly gave him a new and sinister impression. Kad saw then the potential that existed within the man for violence; it was there, yes, he could see it now. And this was so true of life, how sometimes the things a man needed to see only became clear to him in the darkness. How a man like Turner navigated through life by appearing just as he presented himself: harmless, insignificant. It was a tactic, of course it was, because everything they did had a tactical purpose.

Turner knelt and unlocked the foot locker. He pushed the lid back and moved some things around. He came back up with a black attaché case. He flicked the latches and revealed a handgun, ammunition clips, a couple of other accessories, stainless steel death. Turner took hold of the sidearm, heavy and black. Checked the safety, racked the action to check for live rounds.

“SIG P225. Recoil action, 9 millimeter NATO cartridges in a nine-piece clip. Canadian Navy boarding parties use these beauties. Close security teams, you know—the cavalry. Cleaned and tested it myself,” Turner said.

“I know guns,” Kad said, and he took the piece.

He held it in his hand. Regarded it. Turned it over in the way that felt natural now, the way a guitar player held a new instrument— weighing it, getting to know its body and character. For weapons were a lot like humans: they could look alike, perhaps, but no two weapons were exactly the same in personality, in temperament. He had thrown aside expensive German hunting rifles with thousand-dollar scopes for a worn and beaten lever action 3-0-3 simply because of the feel and the response, the nature of the weapon. Simply because it felt right in his hands, an extension of his will. You for me, and me for you.

“Good,” Kad said, sliding the action.

“Accessories,” Turner said, and handed over a black silencer attachment about four inches long. “And your ammo. Thirty-six rounds. That’s it, so don’t waste it.”

“The rest,” Kad said. A directive.

“Hold your horses,” Turner said. Then he turned back to the foot locker. He looked over his shoulder—because he had handed over a weapon with ammunition—then turned back to his rooting. He stood up and held what looked like a men’s shaving bag. He unzipped the bag and held it open. Kad stepped closer and looked inside. Four syringes, four vials. Clear liquid.

“Be careful,” Turner said. “You as much as prick the end of your little finger when one of those is loaded up, and you’re fucked six ways to Sunday. I mean gone.”

“Do I look clumsy to you?” Kad said. His eyes were hard.

Turner looked at Kad from across the storage room. Dust filtered through the LED light. Turner blinked his one eye. So easy to offend, these types. Nothing to lose, for they owned nothing but their family name, their pride. They were machines to a great extent, and like all machines they could only be programmed to a point. There were limitations.

“Relax, sparky. I’m just saying, be careful,” Turner said. “This shit is straight from the play book of the Mossad. Get it? I’m talking covert black ops. One CC, and the poor son of a bitch exhibits signs of a heart attack—not even detectable in a routine autopsy. Boom, dead. The trick is to get the needle somewhere it won’t leave a bruise, signs of puncture. Under a toenail, back of the hairline, around the anus, that sort of thing. Use your imagination.”

Kad put the pistol back in its case and zipped up the shaving bag. “The girl is ready?” he said.

“Oh she’s ready, all right,” Turner said.

“Take me there,” Kad said, “now.”

Turner smiled, and said, “You know, that’s what I like about you people. You cut right to the chase. To the fucking bone.”

Kad wondered how much the girl had changed in the three years since they had sat around that kitchen table drinking plum brandy, making plans through long-distance and third-party communication with The Colonel. Or whether she had really changed at all. Were any of them capable of further change? The transformation was complete, as far as he was concerned. From what he had started as, what he had become along the way, and what he was right now—it was a complete metamorphosis. Psychological, physiological, biological, spiritual. He had been a boy once, yes, the little boy who worked and played at his grandfather’s farm. The smell of animals in winter, hay wet with the stink of piss. He remembered the boy sometimes, though rarely, and always within the distorted context of fractured memory. For Kadro was dead, the death certificate filed in a municipal office. He was dead, and his brother was an orphan. It was the irony of this strange arrangement—they had to die in order to be re-born for this.

“Let’s go,” Kad said.

“I’ll give you the directions,” Turner said. “Drop me off at the subway.”

Kad gave him a look.

Turner said, “What, do you want me to hold your hand? This is it for me. I’m done. Over and out. You reach me in the event of catastrophe, period.”

Turner opened the garage door, and they both squinted against the flood of light. He slammed the door shut behind them, wiped his hands across his pants, and they got in the car. Kad turned the ignition and put the car in gear and said, without looking at Turner, “Your eye. What happened?”

Turner sort of smiled and said, “Left it in Bosnia.”

Kadro dropped Turner off a small parking lot kitty corner to the York Mills subway station in the north of the city. There was a brick building about the size of a large garden shed, stairs leading underground and connecting to the station across the street. Turner opened the door and stepped out. It was a good late summer day, warm enough for the diehard cyclists to wear their shorts as they careened in and out of traffic.

“Good luck,” Turner said, his hand on the door.

Kad looked over and gave a small nod.

“Get back on the highway up here,” Turner said, pointing north.

“I know how,” Kad said. The grid map of Toronto was burned into his brain like a cattle brand. The hours they had sat pouring over maps, being quizzed as though his life depended on it. And it did.

Turner closed the door, walked to the brick building and slipped inside. Kad waited a minute then pulled out of the parking lot. He made it a block before pulling into a Petro Canada station. He bought a newspaper and four scratch-and-win tickets. He sat in the car and used a penny to slowly scratch each ticket. He blew the crinkled bits of foil from his lap. He didn’t think about anything when he was scratching these cards. Nothing. The world around him closed down for a few minutes. He won ten dollars on the last ticket and went back inside. He showed the clerk the card, and the kid took it and hit a few buttons. The lottery computer made a whirling and ringing noise as though he had won a trip around the world. The teenage clerk didn’t seem too excited over the windfall. He handed out two fives, and Kad flashed his first smile in a year. It wasn’t a big smile, but it was something.

He drove east across the top of the city then south down to the woman’s apartment building near the railway tracks. Unit 801. He parked on the street and looked at his watch. It was going on four o’clock. He got out of the car and went into the building. He pressed the buzzer for her unit and waited. He pressed it again, holding it this time for fifteen seconds.

“Yes?” came a woman’s voice. “Who is it?”

“Kadro,” he said. “From home.”

A pause. A long pause. As though she were thinking. This is what he thought as he stood there. It would be naïve to assume every facet and angle of the operation would roll out exactly as planned. People changed their minds. Soldiers talked with bravado and offered up promises of infinite courage while drinking on the eve of battle. When the bullets and the mortars started to fly, it was another story. He knew about people and their limits. This is why one had to be adaptable, ready to transform within the moment. He waited, looking at some flyers scattered on the floor of the vestibule. Full-colour pictures of pizzas and buckets of chicken. Delivery to your door so you didn’t have to get off your ass and walk down to the pizzeria. The pizzas looked good and hot. His stomach growled. Then the door buzzed. He opened it and stepped inside.

They had assembled in that kitchen those years ago, around that long wood table. Back home. Would she ever see home again? It seemed like a lifetime already lived in this new country. At first the plan was easy to follow, the directives and the drills running your body as though you were on automatic pilot. The paperwork was handled through The Colonel’s unseen contacts, and she’d entered the country with a suitcase and a number to call. The one-eyed man she met through the immigration support centre, everything made to seem natural and quite by circumstance. The man got her the job as a seamstress in the little factory in the fashion district. She kept her head down and made dresses, or parts of them, and the women around her were all immigrants from some other place: Cambodia, Vietnam, and yes, Bosnians too, working for this Serb manager (though she had lied about her background and her hometown to get the job). She worked and she watched and she made notes. She saved some money and moved to that small apartment away from the guns and the gangs of Jane and Finch. She took the night course in English. Her only social time away from work, out of the apartment.

The teacher. This was her mistake. The Canadian with the sad eyes. The good heart, the small smile. She never should have gone for coffee when he asked. And then asked again. But it felt good to talk to someone—even if she felt her English made her sound like a grade school student. This was her mistake. She had lost so much, it seemed like a small gift she could allow herself, a simple coffee with a good soul. First you lose your village, then you lose your family, and finally you lose yourself. You die or choose to be born again. There had been something in the eyes of the sad Canadian, this teacher who made bad jokes about words they looked up in the dictionary—something there, yes, within the sadness a tiny spark of life. A flash of hope. And this was her mistake…

Donia Kruzik opened the door of her apartment. She stood there for a long moment. Kad stared at her, blinking. She opened the door all the way, and he stepped inside. An awkward moment as they stood there, each deciding on the proper greeting. Finally he moved to embrace her, but she shrank, and stepped back.

“Friend,” he said, “it has been a long journey. From there to here.”

He spoke in his native tongue, and it brought her back to who they were, where they had come from. She went to the tiny kitchen and put the kettle on to boil.

“I will make tea,” she said. “Are you hungry?”

He stood there. Watching her. He knew, and she knew that he knew. She took two cups down from the cupboard and got a box of Red Rose from the shelf. Something had changed. However small.

“I met the man. I have the tools,” he said.

He watched her. Then he moved to the kitchen and put a hand on her shoulder from behind. She froze. His hand was strong, and he held her there, rooted.

“Are you ready?” he said.

“Ready?”

“To do what we have sworn to do,” he said. “Have you forgotten already, sister? Has your time in this country erased the past? Have you lost your appetite to avenge our people? Please tell me this is not so.”

She bowed her head and nodded. “I am ready,” she said. “It’s a surprise, that’s all. You plan for the day for so many months and years, and then it is finally here. I apologize for not welcoming you. It was wrong of me. Please, come and sit.”

He moved his hand from her shoulder to his side but sensed the change in the weather, within the hesitation. This was the inherent risk for those sent to conduct surveillance prior to operations—a settling in, an assimilation of sorts. He would kill her if it came to that. If she was unwilling to follow through. It was her choice. That was his directive. All of them shared the same directive. The only way this would work is if every link in the chain remained connected, solid—and every link in turn knew it was expendable in the name of the cause. Hesitation or gross misconduct was to be dealt with in the most extreme manner. There was no half measure. They had signed their oath in the blood of their forsaken kin. Those who had fallen in the fields, in the rows. He had not come this far to turn away. Their trust was sacred.

She put a cup of tea in front of him, and he sat at the two-seat kitchen table. She sat with her cup and blew across the steaming water. Their eyes met and held for a long moment. They saw each other as they had been, younger and wounded, not as they had become. Changed.

“Can you share your work with me?” he said.

She went to the bedroom and returned with a single file folder. It was letter-sized, blue, and bore no writing or identifying features. She placed it on the table in front of him. He opened and began to read. The first page contained the photos of the two targets, their names typed beneath:

BOJAN KORDIC

GORAN MITOVIC

Then followed several pages of tiny notations—dates and times and tracked movements of the targets. Their home address, their work address, phone numbers, the names of their spouses and children and the schools they attended, their lives reduced to a series of comings and goings. She had done good work. The information was concise, invaluable in ensuring the two main criteria were met: that these were in fact the bona fide targets; and that it would be possible within the scheduling and routine of their lives to make contact and retreat with limited collateral damage or liability to the cause.

“Well done,” he said, and set folder aside.

“I have worked hard,” she said, “getting to know the people at work. The woman who works outside the manager’s office, this Bojan Kordic. His executive assistant. She keeps his schedule. We share a cigarette outside during break.”

“There will be time to talk of our plans,” he said. “It has been what, three years?”

“Almost,” she said.

“You look good. Healthy. This country agrees with you,” he said.

She caught his eyes, and he held her there, and she knew what he was looking for. Some sign that she had forsaken their plans. The first thing The Colonel had instructed in bringing them together for this: the greatest threat is not death, for we all died a long time ago. No, the greatest threat is that those of you who are sent abroad will succumb to the liberties and luxuries of your new country. Shopping malls and fast food drive-through restaurants, and women and men who lay down with anyone at all after a single dance in a night club. There will be those of you who forget in time why you are there in the first place…

“What do you think of this country so far?” she asked.

“It is new,” he said. “Like it just opened.”

And they shared their experiences. The first landing. Pearson International Airport. The language. The faces from around the world moving freely on the streets. Everything open and free. And new, so new, as he had said. Some things were better, yes, but many things were not. He thought of telling her about the money he had won, but he kept it to himself.

He excused himself and went to the bathroom. When he came back, he said, “Will you miss this place?”

He watched her.

“Some things,” she said. “I suppose, yes.”