Still Andy moaned, like he were dying. “We shouldn’t have gone back to the apartment, Matthew. It was a huge mistake.”
“Yeah, like it’s my fault you forgot the bag of memory sticks with the counter-codes. And all we got for our efforts was your leg shot through by that agent’s bullet.”
“I didn’t think we should go back, I told you that. I mean, who cares if we can’t stop anything now? You’re planning on following through on that deal you made with Darius, right?”
“It was insurance,” Matthew said, as he pulled in behind a big eighteen-wheeler. “The counter-codes were my bargaining chips with the Feds if everything suddenly went into the crapper. I told you that. Stop whining.”
Andy moaned again, kept ragging on him, blaming him, not letting up.
Matthew said very politely, never taking his eyes off the road, “If you don’t shut up, Andy, I’m going to shoot you, kill you dead. You deserve it for being so stupid.”
Shocked silence, but it didn’t last. “You rattled me, man. I mean, you killed Ian and Vanessa and then you ordered us out of there.” He added, in a sulky little boy’s voice, “You used my own gasoline mixture but you didn’t even let me torch the place.”
Matthew remembered thinking if he’d given Andy the gasoline can he’d lose it and burn down the neighborhood. It had been a stupid decision on his part to go back. In all that wet rubble, how had he ever expected Andy to find the memory sticks? Still, there was a possibility. It was rotten luck that had those FBI agents come waltzing out of that old lady’s Laundromat. No one could have foreseen that. Bad luck, mistakes. He knew he couldn’t afford any more.
It hit him again like a fist to the gut. Ian was dead, by his hand. He blocked out Andy’s moans, and saw in his mind that first time he’d met Ian, his oldest friend, his only friend, really, after his family had been murdered by those terrorists in 2005. He saw himself again in that little bar near the Ponte Vecchio. He’d felt lost and alone, so filled with rage and impotence he’d wanted to kill himself. And then this beefy Irishman had swaggered in and started a monologue about the football on the bar TV he was looking at, but not watching, he was too miserable. He remembered it was Manchester versus Italy.
“You rooting for our Manchester boys, not those Italian pussies, right?” Matthew didn’t give a crap, but he checked the score, saw Manchester was losing, said, “I am, sadly.”
“Well, glory hallelujah, a man with a brain, and the good Lord behold, he’s a bleeding American to boot.”
The Irishman was a man somewhere in his thirties with sandy brown hair sticking out in all directions, a sunburned nose ready to peel, and wearing a Manchester United jersey.
COE—Celebrants of Earth, the name had been Ian’s brainstorm, he’d believed it sounded highfalutin and righteous, and all of it had started by sharing a pint in an Italian pub with a blue-eyed fanatic Irishman who’d shared Matthew’s hate of radical Islam, whipped him up since his own hatred ran deep as well.
Seven years and a lifetime later, it had ended in a stinking apartment in Brooklyn. It still seemed like a mad dream—Ian dead, burned up, Matthew the one who’d killed him. And Vanessa, lying dead not two feet from him.