Chapter 3: Orders
Here is the thing you have spent six years making sure of: that the next time something comes for you in the dark, you will not be a package.
You're dressed in forty seconds. Leggings, boots, his shirt because yours is somewhere under the couch, the slim Sig from the small of your back that you've been carrying, quite legally, since your twenty-first birthday. When you turn around, Leon is in his trousers and nothing else, crouched below the window line with his gun up, and he looks at you, at the pistol in your hand, and for one second you see the old reflex rise in him, the one that says get behind me, hide, wait here.
You watch him swallow it.
"How many rounds?" he asks.
"Full mag and one in the chamber. Two spare mags in my bag."
"Can you hit something moving?"
"I hit a sparring partner's nose while it was moving."
"That's not the same."
"I shoot sixty-plus on the qualification course. I sent you the scorecard. Twice." You crouch beside him. "Leon. Give me an order."
He looks at you. Then the agent comes up in his face again, but not all the way. Not like the hall in Georgetown. Something stays behind, something that's looking at you like a partner instead of a cargo.
"Back door," he says. "Cover the kitchen. Anything comes through that isn't me, you put it down. Don't wait to see if it's friendly. They won't be."
"And you?"
"Front." He kisses you. Hard, fast, once. "Don't you dare get yourself killed. I just got off your detail."
There are four of them.
You know because you count. You learned to count in Spain. You hear the first one at the back door, a scrape on the frozen step, and you see a shape through the frosted glass, hooded, and you remember Leon's voice: don't wait. You don't wait. You fire through the glass twice and the shape drops.
Glass everywhere. Cold air pouring in. From the front of the cabin, three fast shots, the flat bark of Leon's pistol, and somebody screaming in Spanish.
The second one comes through the kitchen window while you're still turning. He's fast, faster than he should be, and when he lands on the counter and lunges for you, you see his eyes in the firelight from the other room: wrong, dark, the veins at his temples standing out black. Plaga. Of course. They brought it with them.
He gets a hand on your wrist. He's strong. Stronger than any man should be. He slams your arm against the refrigerator and the Sig goes skittering across the tiles, and his other hand closes around your throat, and you look up into his black-veined face and think, very clearly, absolutely not.
Your Krav Maga instructor from Haifa has a saying: when they grab your throat, it's because they've just handed you both their arms.
You drive your knee up between his legs. Then you trap the hand at your throat against your collarbone, turn into him, and break his elbow backward over your shoulder. He howls. You hook his ankle and put him on the floor, and you dive for the Sig, and you roll and come up on one knee and shoot him twice in the chest while he's still trying to get up.
He doesn't stay down. Plaga hosts don't. He's getting up again, his ruined arm dangling, something writhing and wet starting to push out of his neck.
So you put the third round through his head.
Silence. Then footsteps, running, and you swing the gun toward the hall, and Leon is there, barefoot, bleeding from a cut on his shoulder, gun up, and he looks at you kneeling on the kitchen floor with the Sig in both hands and a dead man in front of you.
"Two out front," he says, breathing hard. "Both down."
"Two back here." Your voice is very calm. Your hands aren't shaking. They'll shake later. You know that now. "One had the Plaga."
He looks at the body. He looks at you. And then he does something you don't expect. He lowers his gun, and he starts to laugh.
"What?" you say. "What's funny?"
"Nothing." He comes across the kitchen and crouches in front of you, careful of the glass, and takes your face in both his hands. His thumbs are warm. "Nothing's funny. It's just. Six years ago I'd have had to carry you out of here."
"And now?"
"Now I think you might have to carry me." He leans his forehead against yours. "My shoulder's pretty bad."
Davis and Morrow are alive. Tranquilized, the both of them, slumped in the car at the bottom of the drive with darts in their necks and a light dusting of snow on their shoulders. The cult didn't want a body count. They wanted you. They wanted to take you back to Spain and put you in a robe and finish what Saddler started, and the dead man on the kitchen floor had a syringe in his jacket full of something dark and moving that Leon looks at for a long time before he seals it in an evidence bag.
The cavalry arrives at dawn when the plows come through. Black SUVs, a helicopter, a lot of very serious men. Hunnigan on Leon's phone, sharp-voiced and relieved and pretending not to be. You sit on the hood of a DSO Suburban in his shirt and a borrowed parka, drinking terrible coffee out of a thermos lid, while a field medic stitches up his shoulder, and you watch the sun come up red over the Shenandoah.
You don't remember falling asleep. You remember a warm weight around your shoulders, and his voice saying something to the medic, and then nothing.
When you wake it's afternoon, and you're in a room you don't recognize, a bedroom in a DSO facility somewhere, with grey walls and a narrow window and blackout curtains half open. Leon is sitting in a chair by the bed with his arm in a sling and a stack of paperwork on his knee, and he's not doing the paperwork. He's watching you.
"Hi," he says.
"Hi."
"Your father called. Four times."
"Oh, God."
"He wanted to know if you were all right." Leon sets the paperwork down. "Then he wanted to know why I'd requested to be removed from your detail at one in the morning. Effective immediately. Conflict of interest."
You sit up. "What did you tell him?"
"I told him the truth." He meets your eyes. "I told him I've been in love with his daughter for about four years, and I couldn't keep doing the job properly, and I wasn't going to lie to him about it. And I told him that you shot two Illuminados and broke a man's arm in a kitchen, so frankly I'm not sure you need a detail at all."
You stare at him.
"Four years," you say.
"Around the third letter. The one about the Senate hearing. You told some committee chairman he could either fund the survivors' program or explain to the families of Harvardville why he hadn't, on camera, and he went purple. You drew a picture of him in the margin." His mouth twitches. "I read that letter about forty times. I still have it. I have all of them. They're in a shoebox in my apartment, in order."
"You kept my letters in a shoebox."
"It's a nice shoebox."
You throw the covers back. You climb out of bed and into his lap, carefully, mindful of the sling, and you put your hands on either side of his face and kiss him, slow this time, so slow, like you've got all the time in the world, because for the first time in six years you think you might.
"What did my father say?" you ask against his mouth.
"He was quiet for a very long time." Leon's good hand slides up your back under the borrowed shirt. "And then he said, Agent Kennedy, I owe you my daughter's life, and I'd like to remind you that I have the nuclear codes."
You laugh into his neck. He laughs too, and then he stops laughing, because you've shifted in his lap and you can feel exactly how much he wants you.
"Ashley." It comes out strained. "There's a guy outside the door."
"So be quiet."
"I'm not the one who's loud."
"Then you'd better keep me busy," you say, and reach down between you.
It's slow and quiet and almost unbearable. He can only use one hand, and he's furious about it, and he makes up for it with his mouth, on your throat, your shoulder, the soft skin under your ear. You ride him in the chair with your hand over your own mouth and his forehead against your chest, barely moving, rocking against him, and every time you make a sound he breathes "shh" against your skin and drives up into you a little harder, which is not, you'd like to point out, how you keep someone quiet. You come with your teeth in his good shoulder. He follows a few strokes later, shuddering, his face pressed into your neck, your name barely a breath.
Afterward you stay curled in his lap, his arm around you, the sling between you.
"So," you say. "What happens now? You're off my detail. You can't protect me anymore."
"Not officially." He kisses your temple. "But I was thinking. The DSO needs a liaison to the Graham Foundation. Somebody to work with survivors, train security for the field offices, keep an eye on Illuminados activity. It's a desk job, mostly." He pauses. "Hunnigan says I'd hate it."
"Would you?"
"Probably." He looks at you. "But I'd get to argue with you every day. In public. With my name on the paperwork."
There's a knock at the door. Two and two. Official. You both look at it.
"Agent Kennedy," says a voice outside. "The President is on the line. He'd like to speak to you about your new assignment. He says, and I quote, that he has some orders for you."
Leon closes his eyes.
You kiss the corner of his mouth, climb off his lap, and pick up the phone yourself.