“Didn’t know secret agents had time for leisurely activities like boating,” she said, somewhat playfully.
David smiled. “It wasn’t a boat of leisure, I assure you. But it could have been. It was an element of an escape plan—if I ever needed it. And it came in handy, if you recall.”
“I can’t recall. I wish I could.” She straightened the covers.
She was right; David remembered now. The Immari had drugged her during her interrogation. She remembered very little from his rescue of her and their escape.
“What did you do with it?” she asked.
“The boat? Gave it to a Jakartan fisherman.” He smiled and looked away. “It was a good boat though.” At that moment he wondered where the boat was, if Harto had taken his family from the main island of Java to one of thousands of smaller uninhabited islands in the Java Sea. They would have a chance there. Harto could fish, and his family could gather. The plague couldn’t touch them there and the Immari wouldn’t come after a few people on a deserted island. The way the world was going, they could end up being the last people on earth. Maybe the world would be better off that way, if simple people inherited the earth and lived as humans had for ninety-nine percent of its history.
“Where’d you learn boating? You just pick it up?”
“From my father. He used to take me sailing when I was a kid.”
“You talk to him much?”
David shifted awkwardly on the bed. “No. He died when I was young.”
Kate opened her mouth to speak, but David cut her off. “Don’t worry about it. It was a long time ago. ’83. Lebanon. I was seven.”
“The bombing at the Marine barracks?”
David nodded. His eyes drifted over to the Immari uniform and to the silver wings of a lieutenant colonel. “He was thirty-seven and already a lieutenant colonel. He might have made brigadier general or even higher. That was my dream as a kid. I had this image in my mind of standing in a Marine Corps uniform with a general’s star on my shoulder. It’s funny, I can still see the picture of myself that I held in my mind for so long. It’s amazing how clear your dreams are when you’re a kid and how complicated life gets after that. How a single ambition turns into a hundred desires and details—most of which are about what you want and who you want to be.”
Kate took her eyes away from him, then turned in the bed and lay beside him, looking away.
Was it her way of giving him space? David didn’t know, but he liked having her beside him, how her soft skin felt on his, her warm body heating the places where they touched.
“The day of the funeral, my mother came home and placed the folded-up flag over the mantel. It sat there for the next twenty years, in a triangle-shaped dark wood case with a few too many coats of varnish and a glass door. Beside it she placed two pictures: a headshot of him in his uniform and a picture of them together, somewhere tropical, somewhere they were happy. The house was filled with people that day. They kept saying the same things. I went into the kitchen, got out the biggest black trash bag I could find and filled it with my toys—anything that was a soldier, a tank, or even remotely connected to the military. Then I went in my room and played Nintendo for about the next three years.”
Kate gently kissed his head where his forehead met his hairline. “Zelda?”
“I got the Triforce like two million times.” He looked over at her and smiled. “Then, at some point, I got really interested in history. I read everything I could get my hands on. Military history in particular. Especially European and Middle Eastern history. I wanted to know how the world got to be the way it is. Or maybe I thought being a history teacher would be the safest job in the world, the furthest place on the planet from an actual battlefield. But when 9/11 happened, the only thing I wanted to do was be a soldier. It’s like when my world was turned upside down, I wanted revenge, but I also wanted to do the one thing I thought I would be good at—what I was destined to do all along but afraid to do. Maybe a man can’t escape his fate. No matter what you do, you can’t change what you really are, what’s deep down inside you, supposedly dead and buried, but driving you all along.”
Kate didn’t say anything, and David appreciated that. She simply pressed her body next to his and buried her face in the space between his head and his shoulder.
Sometime later, David felt her breathing slow, and he knew she was asleep.
He kissed her forehead.
As his lips released, he realized just how exhausted he was. Mentally, from discussing Martin’s notes; physically, from his time with Kate; and emotionally, from telling her the things he had never told anyone.
He moved the gun out from the pillow and laid it next to him, where he could get to it more easily. He glanced at the door. He would hear it if it opened. He would have time if anyone came for them. He would just close his eyes for a second.
CHAPTER 71