🌁 chapter twenty-two: the black site [let me be your ghost]

“Stone walls do not a prison make, nor iron bars a cage.” -Richard Lovelace

“Stone walls do not a prison make, nor iron bars a cage.”

-Richard Lovelace

previous: about | chapter one | chapter two | chapter three | chapter four | chapter five | chapter six | chapter seven | chapter eight | chapter nine | chapter ten | chapter eleven | chapter twelve | chapter thirteen | chapter fourteen | chapter fifteen | chapter sixteen | chapter seventeen | chapter eighteen | chapter nineteen | chapter twenty | chapter twenty-one

They drove me four hours, a hood over my head as to disorient me, and processed me into a building that did not have a name, and I knew it didn’t have a name because the intake forms had a blank where buildings normally kept theirs.

Somewhere in the high desert, by the temperature. Concrete the color of weather. A corridor of doors with electronic locks and no handles on my side of the world, and a cell—they called it a residence module, which is the most frightening phrase anyone has ever used on me—with a cot, a steel toilet, a slit window too high to see anything through but sky, and a camera in the ceiling corner behind glass, red-dotted, unblinking, on.

I’d spent nine years working for the men behind that eye. Now I lived in it.

No arraignment. No phone call. No Devi Raman slicing through doorways with her scalpel smile—material witness meant I existed in a legal fog bank of my own now, seeded and steered, and the woman with the form-filling voice confirmed my suspicion on day one by answering my request for a lawyer with, “That’s noted,” and nothing else, ever again.

They left me alone for three days to soften. I know the technique. I’d watched Matthew deploy it on targets for nine years from the safe side of the glass. Knowing it and marinating in it are different sciences.

On the fourth day, Matthew came for me.

…

He looked worse than the hospital corridor. The gauze had come off the left side of his face and what it revealed was going to be with him for life—a shiny, raw territory from ear to collar, the skin gone the pink-and-pearl of where the flames had kissed him—and he sat down across the bolted table in my residence module with a folder he never opened, because the folder had stopped being for reading. It was a prop now. A crutch for a man whose scripts had all burned with half his fire.

“You look terrible,” I said.

“Gas fire,” he said as if I didn’t know exactly who had set that fire. The boyish middle-management music was gone out of his voice, and what was left had a saw edge. He crossed the module in two steps, took my jaw in one hand, and turned my face up into the fluorescent light—not gently, fingers digging, a man inspecting a tool for damage—and I made myself let him, because the alternative gave him more ammunition against me. “Look at you. Not a mark. A woman sets a federal agent on fire and sleeps like a baby in custody.” He let go with a small yank, wiping his hand on his slacks like I’d dirtied it. “You always did sleep best in cages. I used to find that helpful. Now I find it disgusting.”

“Where’s my lawyer, Matthew?”

“Where’s my apology?”

“In the same drawer as my three-book contract.”

And that—the contract, the sacred fiction, the load-bearing lie of nine years—did something to his ruined face that I had come all the way to a nameless building to finally see. He laughed. Not the handler laugh, calibrated and warm. Something older and uglier that had been waiting under it the whole time, and when it finished with him he leaned back and looked at me with what I can only call relief. The relief of a man done pretending. Done wearing a mask.

“There was never a third book,” he said, ugliness dripping from his voice. “There was never a finish line, there was never a director’s signature that couldn’t be unsigned, there was never a version, Lola—not one, not in any drawer—where the woman who does what you do gets a cottage and a spice garden and a library card in her own name. Do you know what you are? On paper? You’re equipment. Equipment doesn’t retire. It gets maintained, it gets upgraded, and when it breaks—” he gestured at his own face, at the room, at the sum of me, “—it gets decommissioned. I told them for years you were stable. I staked my job on it. You were my proof that the program worked, and then you fell in love with a target on a classified island and set me on fire at a Chevron.”

“Between the pumps,” I said. “On flat concrete. If I’d aimed at you, you’d have no report to write.”

“That distinction is doing a lot of work in your sentencing memo.”

“There’s going to be a sentencing? I’d love to meet the judge. I’ll wait. I have a nice cozy residence module to sleep well in,” I patted the table in front of me.

Matthew looked at me for a long moment, and then he did the cruelest thing in his entire repertoire, crueler than the folder, crueler than the fire—he got gentle. The handler voice, one last time, warm as cookies coming fresh out of the oven. It fit his new face like a stolen coat.

“You have nobody, Lola. That was always the qualification—it’s why you were recruited, it’s in the file in those words. No family. No friends who know your real name. A bookstore clerk, a chef, a driver—employees of the man you compromised. You are a woman with no address, no history, and no witnesses, in a building with no name.” He leaned in close enough that I could see the burns twist and undulate when his jaw worked. “And before you say it—him. You think he loves you? Even odds. It doesn’t matter. Ezekiel Crane is a dead man walking—the board’s moving on him, our people are moving on him, and whoever gutted his security has been three moves ahead of everyone, including you, for a year. You fell for a corpse with good bone structure. When he’s gone, the only person on earth who’ll remember what you sound like is me.” He stood, collected his prop folder, and knocked twice on the door for the guards to open it. “Tomorrow we start on Crane’s island. Everything you saw, everything he told you, dates and rooms. There are people flying in who ask less politely than I do. Sleep well. You always do.”

The door swallowed him, and I felt a whoosh as all of the air felt as if it was sucked out of the room.

I gripped my hands together on the desk, fighting to keep my face impassive. I knew he was watching, so I shifted my gaze to the camera above me, to that blinking red light. I let my impassive expression harden into a glare. A glare that promised a swift death for him. A glare that promised retribution for the cage he had held the keys for, whistling while I suffered. For years.

And even as I channeled my rage, a smaller feeling was unfurling within me. Fear. Delicate and poisonous. A fear that I had done my initial job too well. That I had given too much to the FBI before I realized my feelings for Eze.

I may have given them the gun and loaded it with the bullets that would end Eze and I forever.

That guilt twisted in my stomach, threatening to tear my insides like swallowed glass, but I sucked in a breath, and tried not to let oblivion take me.

To give into my fear would be too sweet a reprieve for a fighter with the magnitude of the wrongs I had to right.