Falling off the Edge of the World
Posted by damora96 334 days ago (Story)FALLING OFF THE EDGE OF THE WORLD
by
Monica Danetiu-Pana
One day she was gone.
It didn’t really surprise Jason. No matter how good she’d been at the job, she’d always wanted a different life. A simple kind of life with a man who loved her and didn’t have to hide it, a man who didn’t live in the shadows.
She hadn’t taken anything with her. Her apartment seemed perfectly untouched. Her ID showed up in a garbage can at the Dulles International Airport, the first clue that she’d done anything other than just walk away.
Roger Cook, their superior officer, an orderly man his late fifties, with salt-and-pepper hair and bright blue eyes still too sharp to require glasses, handed the ID card to Jason. “We’ll find out what happened,” he assured him.
Jason just shook his head, not showing his pain beyond that.
Roger patted his shoulder. “You know Nicky,” he said. “She can get out of anything.”
Anything but this life, Jason thought to himself. But maybe she had.
They’d tried to love each other and carve out a life together, but that hadn’t been possible while living a double life and walking a tightrope between the real world and the CIA’s special operations unit. He’d been her team leader and they had kept their growing feelings secret from everyone. Their relationship had been a direct violation of the regulations.
How could they live normal lives when they were who they were? The very things Nicky longed most to escape from were the ones that had brought Jason into her life and her into his. The Great Game, the Russians called it. When they were together, they always had to pretend, and in time, the lies they told themselves grew so heavy the relationship simply crumpled.
Until he had met Nicky Edmund, Jason Wolfe’s life was proceeding as he had long intended. He’d planned to excel in prep school as a student and at sports, and did. After college, he had planned to become a CIA agent, and he had. He was one of the best, his dark good looks, wry humor, and quickness of mind matched by a self-discipline that wrung every last particle out of the talents he possessed. Only once, with Nicky, had nothing mattered but another person; an experience so frightening, exhilarating, and, in the end, scarifying that he had endured it only by clinging to his plans until he became who he was.
From the moment Jason first saw Nicky, he felt an incandescent spark igniting and it never died, despite his best efforts. On a bleak February evening, he was invited as an observer to a briefing debating whether or not the CIA should attack a Colombian village where, accordingly to the latest Intel, the headquarters of Alessandro Santiago’s cartel was located. Santiago was one of the most powerful drug lords that the CIA was trying to bring to justice, and until that huge breakthrough regarding his whereabouts, he had been nothing more than a ghost. But the village was also heavily populated, and the innocent women and children were Santiago’s best defense.
When Jason entered the briefing room, the debate was already on, but what drew his attention was the woman scornfully interrupting Roger’s assertion that “collaterals are acceptable, as long as the mission’s objectives are met.”
“Since when,” she inquired, “can we wage a life against another?”
Jason struggled to suppress a smile at Roger’s discomfiture. And then he realized that the woman was now contemplating him with an appraisal at once leisurely and disdainful. He returned her gaze, allowing his amused expression to linger. How long, he silently asked her, do you want to keep this up? He then sat, comfortably away from the table, and began to study the woman in earnest.
It was worth his time. She was slim and startlingly pretty – a full mouth, sculpted face, auburn hair pulled back at the nape of her neck, intense blue eyes – the type of white-skinned beauty to which Jason had always felt a chemical attraction he both savored and distrusted. But as the discussion continued, what engaged him even more was her vividness in debate, an arresting quickness in thought and speech accented by a vibrant animation. Nothing about her was inscrutable. Not the swift, sardonic smile, nor the look of displeasure with which she regarded her antagonists, head tilted, eyes narrowing in skepticism, and the full line of her mouth depressing slightly, as though to restrain some biting interjection.
At the end of the briefing, Jason lingered, still watching her. In private conversation her manner seemed to soften, the directness of her gaze leavened by attentiveness and flashes of humor. At length, Jason angled through the crowd until he stood in front of her.
Her upward gaze held the same disconcerting directness she had trained on him before. “You found all this amusing, I noticed.”
“Death is not amusing,” he answered evenly, eliciting a first, faint smile from her. Jason steeled himself to make a suggestion that he found surprisingly difficult. “I’d like to talk to you some more.”
For an instant, she looked genuinely startled. Then, she stared at him so deeply that it seemed she could gaze into his soul. “Perhaps lunch,” she murmured at last, glancing around her. “Somewhere less incendiary.”
Jason felt a tingle of surprise. “Lunch,” he said, and their private history began.
***
She didn’t think of Jason that often, but always with a sense of melancholy. She had a picture of him somewhere, although not one of them together. Their relationship had always remained hidden somewhere in the background.
It wasn’t like that with Felix. Felix had no past. He made no demands, had no expectations, and passed no judgments. Felix believed in nothing. He was smooth and cool, and hard as a river stone. He was empty and he didn’t hurt. Nicky had had enough of hurting.
She didn’t fool herself, either; she knew Felix was feral. She’d read the file that the CIA had on him; a complex document put together following the depositions of Carlo Benedictto, an Italian arms dealer they had picked up a year before.
Carlo had found Felix curled in a nest of scavenged bedding in a corner of a warehouse where he’d arranged to inspect and purchase stolen weapons from the ex Soviet Union. Dirty blond little boy with blue eyes, already too knowing for any age. Two weeks had passed before he’d do more than snarl and curse, kick and fight and bite whenever anyone tried to touch him. Food, clothes, and a warm place to sleep didn’t win Carlo any trust at all. Felix stayed, but he belonged to no one but himself. It took time and effort to win even the faintest vestige of loyalty from him. At six, he’d already been betrayed by everyone who should have kept him safe. His body had been abandoned, beaten, and sold.
Hunting down who he was and erasing every record of his existence hadn’t been hard. Carlo had put a bullet between the eyes of the foster father who had sold the boy to one of his friends. He would have killed the pedophile too, but the boy had already done it, slicing a piece of broken whiskey bottle through the man’s throat before bolting for the street. He’d survived there, with all the amoral tenacity of a starving alley cat, until Carlo picked him up. Once he’d erased his past, he had to decide what his future would be.
The boy was a survivor, smart, quick, and hungry. He was a killer. Carlo decided there was little use in trying to send him back to normal life, so instead, he decided that he would be trained. He had a gift for any kind of illegal business, absorbing Carlo’s lessons along with any other knowledge available. For him there was no good and bad, except in the context of success and failure.
When he was ten, Felix became Carlo’s courier, using a cover alias of going to, or returning from boarding school and visiting relatives. His youth, angel face, and perfectly learned manners beguiled anyone who questioned him.
When he was fourteen, he accompanied Carlo on a meet in Estonia, brokering explosive detonators in exchange for purloined Russian chemical warheads. When the radicals they were dealing with attempted to renege on the deal, he calmly shot two of them at Carlo’s order.
The first time Nicky had slept with Felix, she cried later in the bathroom sitting on the cold tile floor. She tried to imagine what Jason would have said if he’d known what she’d done. But being with Felix was so simple, so uncomplicated. He hadn’t asked any questions when she came to his hotel room or offered any protest when she left his bed afterward. They made no promises to one another. The next night they could very well work against each other, since Felix was one of the best thieves in the world and her job was to bring him down, but the time spent in his bed was time out of their real lives. Nothing they did there affected anything else. She didn’t want it any other way.
She saw Felix again in Paris, while on a mission to protect an exhibition featuring most of Picasso’s paintings. He slipped away before she could turn her gun’s sight on him, and she continued with her own mission.
In an airport hotel, while waiting for the morning flight back to Washington, he knocked on her door and she let him in. They didn’t speak aloud, only with hands and lips, and skin on skin. She loved the way he touched her, but didn’t love him. She didn’t.
They parted the next morning without words, only the slow trail of his fingers along her bare arm.
During debrief, she reported sighting Felix while in the course of her own mission and his escape. She didn’t say anything else about him. Nor did she express her true feelings about the second phase of the mission either, which had involved compromising a businessman in order to blackmail him into feeding classified information to the CIA.
She faced Felix again in Rome, in a computer control room above a Mafia controlled casino. She had been sent to covertly download the surveillance records that were saved on a separate, non-networked server. He was already there when she came in, and she had her pistol aimed at his head before either of them recognized each other. With the window behind him, he was little more than a silhouette within her sight.
“If I’d only known you were coming, Agent Edmund, I would have arranged tea,” Felix said.
Nicky’s eyes narrowed, but the pistol didn’t waver in her hand.
His eyes descended on her finger where it curled within the trigger guard, then openly caressed her body clad in a formal backless dress. “I like your outfit.” Then he tried to take her head off with a kick.
Nicky spun away and slammed her elbow into his sternum.
“Black always looks good on me,” she answered.
They separated and considered each other, looking for any sign of weakness. Arms grew tired as the first flush of adrenaline started to waver. The situation needed to be amended before a slip on either of their parts prompted a bloody end to this confrontation.
“I won’t ask you to throw away the gun, but if you don’t lower it, I’ll shoot you,” Felix said flatly.
She swung the pistol’s aim to the side and slowly lowered her arm, then stared at him expectantly, equally prepared for him to put away the Glock or shoot her with it.
“Well?”
Felix nodded at the door. “You’re free to go.”
A snort of disbelieving laughter escaped her. “You don’t believe I’m about to do that, do you?”
“Well, no, but I had to make the offer.” He lowered his Glock and stepped back.
Nicky’s eyes darted over the surveillance gear, noting the professionally placed cameras that provided complete coverage of the casino. “So, what’s your business here?”
Felix raised an eyebrow. “And I would tell you, why?”
She stared at him. “You don’t seem surprised to see me.”
Felix blinked, then smiled mockingly. “I was notified you were in Rome. I assume you weren’t expecting to find me here?”
“No.”
“Then we have a dilemma.”
“You have a dilemma.”
“You know,” Felix observed after a short moment of silence, “the possibility exists that we’re not even here for the same objective.”
“Yeah, right,” Nicky replied, but she couldn’t help smiling back as he smiled and raised an eyebrow, that cocky smile giving him the look of a devilish angel.
He got off on the combat, the competition. When she was honest with herself, she knew she did too. No one matched her move for move the way Felix did, whether on a mission or in bed.
“No one could beat us if we worked together,” he said quietly.
Nicky looked at him, blond and lethal and smiling, and thought about it for the first time.
Felix’s eyes widened. “You’re really thinking about it, aren’t you?”
“Why? Aren’t you serious?”
He watched her intently. “Deadly serious, but somehow I never dreamed you would genuinely consider this.”
“I haven’t said yes.”
“Yet.” A boyish look of delight lit his blue eyes.
She couldn’t help wondering what he tasted like…juicy, exotic, yet somewhat familiar. Like something she’d want to devour and savor in the heat of a mid-July day. Like a passionate, carnal open-mouthed kiss. Like a…
“Pomegranate,” it was a whisper, but loud enough for him to hear. “Have you ever had one? They stain,” she continued, lost in her fantasy. “A deep red…the kind of stain that can’t be removed. A lot like blood stains. It’s best, some say, to eat the fruit while nude.”
The last remark caused Felix to sigh, an understanding striking him. She wasn’t crazy, just recessing into that dark place familiar to anyone who’s witnessed death and destruction. A place to which he was not a stranger.
“The Ancient Greeks associated pomegranate with the dead for that very reason,” he stated softly. “They believed the dead needed blood for their strength.”
“Persephone…” Nicky murmured, vaguely remembering that the Greek goddess had accepted and ingested pomegranate seeds from Hades in an apparent symbol of the consummation of their relationship.
“The goddess of the Underworld.”
A giggle rolled up from the back of Nicky’s throat. “Hades was probably one pissed off guy,” she said through laughter.
He tilted his head slightly. “Why do you say that?”
Images of fine sculptures and swirling oil paintings surfaced in her mind, lightning bolts and tridents, long snow-white beards, and tanned, muscular forearms.
She shrugged. “Zeus and Poseidon got much better jobs ruling the sky and the sea. Hades was stuck with the Underworld. What a disappointment that must’ve been.”
“Maybe Hades was pleased with ruling the Underworld,” Felix pointed out, crossing his arms over his chest. “Perhaps he had no desire to rule the sea or heavens…perhaps he enjoyed his lot in life.”
The statement seemed to carry a world of importance. Nicky pursed her lips and averted her gaze, reflecting on the meaning behind his comment. This was her opportunity to delve deeper into this mystery man, to discover something that might help her gauge his true motives.
She absorbed the sight of him; blue jeans accentuating his long legs and his slim waist, a black shirt embracing his well-defined chest. His face was a sea of mystery. She recognized none of the emotions playing with his features, for she had never seen any of them before. His sarcastic, disdainful smirk was gone, his lips slightly parted in a breathless question. He was leaning lightly forward, looking at her from under creased eyebrows, the thunderstorm in his green eyes raging with the force of a typhoon. She had never seen his eyes so brutally dark.
He lifted a hand and touched her cheek with his thumb, a barely felt brush of flesh that made her shudder. Sliding his hand along her cheek, he threaded his fingers through her hair, and she immediately tried to pull away. He tightened his grip, his other hand catching her arm and pulling her against him.
“No,” she said, trying to sound firm, but the word came out thin and breathy.
He smiled. “Yes,” he said simply, and kissed her.
His mouth wantonly demanded obedience until she was suddenly filling her hands with fistfuls of his shirt and returning the kiss with open-mouthed abandon. Her whole body trembled as his tongue slid wetly over hers, his unic taste mingling with the Bordeaux he’d drunk earlier. Her mouth pulled away from his, trailing wet heat over his jaw, down his neck, her fingers fumbling at his belt.
“Nicky…” he began, even as his own hands brushed down the curves of her body to settle possessively on her hips.
“No,” she whispered, looking pleadingly into his eyes. “Please, don’t say anything. Don’t ruin this. I – I feel something right now, and I know you do too.”
He didn’t say anything, but his fingers tightened on her hips, pulling her more snugly against him. He bent to kiss her again, enjoying the way her hands responded, threading into his hair and gripping at him convulsively with every electric touch of his tongue to hers.
The door behind them bust open and someone shouted in Italian. Felix rolled behind the desk and away from Nicky’s leap after him, his black pistol reappearing in his hand. She ducked as the dark hollow of the muzzle tracked past her face. He fired twice and a sharp cry told her he’d hit his target, but she also knew that security was about to lock down the casino. They were out of time.
“Go,” Felix said with a nod toward the back exit.
He shot her a quick look, frowning, his eyes as icy as she remembered, a silent question poised in them. But as she studied his gaze in return, she found only a trace of caution, lingering there by the force of ingrained habit. He was no more wary of her than she was of him. Not on a professional level. Not now. Perhaps never again. She almost laughed at the absurdity of the revelation. But there was something else in his eyes, something awkwardly familiar she’d seen in her own eyes. He was tired like a ghost who had spied on the living for too long.
She couldn’t see any difference between what she did and Felix did, except who they did it for and how much they were paid. The lines had been so clear once. Now, everything was gray.
She nodded in understanding and bolted out the door, knowing he would have an exit strategy already mapped out.
Later on that day, sitting at a bar and sipping a glass of wine while watching the passing traffic outside, she neared a decision. It should have been momentous, but instead it was more like a recognition of something eroding inside her for years. She had to make a choice and the decision was hers alone. Felix would never try to manipulate her.
Okay, she had to admit it: she liked Felix. But she didn’t love him. Only the way they were together, silent and urgent, offering the only comfort their kind could accept, guarding hearts and giving bodies. She loved that. He was right, they’d make a great team. Unbeatable.
She was still thinking about that when Felix, dressed casual in a white linen shirt and tan pants, a sand colored jacket hiding a gun somewhere, sat down across from her. His hair was more disarrayed than ever, the late afternoon sun tinting it in sepia and gold, the colors of a Byzantine icon.
He ordered a glass of white wine, and when the waitress returned with it, the sun deserted his hair to glow and shatter through the crystal goblet. He wasn’t troubled by her silence. He savored his wine and considered the world beyond the window, just like Nicky had earlier.
People were leaving work, the traffic thickening. A snatch of music escaped a passing car, a piece of china shattered somewhere and someone cursed sharply.
Somehow, these sounds only deepened the quiet between them.
Nicky smiled, thinking that if she’d been sitting with Jason he would have forced himself to say something to make her say something. She preferred Felix’s quiet. A single tear wound down her cheek.
Felix’s eyes followed it. He didn’t brush it away. Not even with a gesture would he offer false comfort. He was uncompromising in his view of the world and expected as much from her. Whatever ideals he had ever held, if he’d ever had them, he’d put them away in favor of clear-headed survival. Anything less would have destroyed him as it had been slowly destroying her. He watched her with pale predator eyes, patiently waiting. He lived in the moment, he’d cut himself free. And Nicky wanted to do that badly.
She took another sip of her wine and stared out the window. The sky was still pale along the horizon, over the edge of the world. But that was another illusion. There was no edge and no dividing line; the world was round. There was no border between the Nicky who was loyal and believed in the justice of her work, and the one watching the sunset with an enemy, a thief wanted internationally, a man who she slept with occasionally.
When the wine was gone, Felix rose and held out his hand. Nicky took it. Her smile made him raise an eyebrow.
“Have I amused you?”
She shook her head.
“Anything you can’t leave behind?” he inquired neutrally.
“Let’s just go.”
It was night now, but the air still held the heat of the day. Felix handed her a plane ticket and a passport with her face and another name when they reached the airport. Their destination was Switzerland.
Nicky knew they’d move on from there. She wondered what Jason would say when he learned about her betrayal.
Felix surprised her when he touched her shoulder. “Don’t look back.”
She didn’t.
***
Jason went on doing his job, his eyes just a little duller, his step somehow slower and heavier, his words colder and harsher than before. Months passed.
He didn’t think anything terrible had happened to her, just that she’d decided to quit and done it the very best way she knew how. He liked to think of her some place quiet, some place she didn’t have to hide the serene beauty of her face, the gentle and kind side of her, where she had those simple things she’d longed to have.
When an ad-hoc briefing was called after the latest in a series of failed missions, everybody was prepared for a brutal debrief from Roger, but the rage on his face took Jason aback. Despite their failure, it seemed out of proportion.
Agent Mike Weiss, a small and wiry man with piercing black eyes, a bald head, and skin drawn tight across his sharp features, scrunched down beside Jason at the table, muttering, “What crawled up his ass?”
Roger placed a file folder down on the black tabletop between them. The edges of several photographs slid out, but not enough to identify their subjects.
“Did you know about this?” Roger snarled at Jason. His glare turned on Weiss. “Did any of you?”
“Know about what, sir?” Jason asked apprehensively.
Roger stabbed a finger at the folder.
Weiss slid it closer and opened it, staring down at the pictured woman like a man turned to stone. He quickly paged through the rest of the pictures, then slapped the folder closed. Only the violence of that movement betrayed any emotion.
“No.” He pushed the folder toward Jason. “I didn’t know,” his voice sounded like he’d swallowed ground glass.
Jason didn’t want to look at the photographs. He couldn’t make himself move.
Roger stared at him. “Agent Moore?”
Jason looked down at last.
Nicky’s lovely face was caught somewhere sunny by a long lens. She was tanned, smiling, wearing a filmy white shirt-dress that glowed in the sunlight. Her auburn hair was loose, her blue eyes were sparkling with happiness. It looked like she was on a boat, for there was a stretch of blue water beyond her and then a slice of a town with the sort of whitewashed architecture seen along the French Riviera.
None of that would have broken Jason, however. It was the other figure in the picture that had done that, made Roger curse, made Jason’s stomach clench with a sudden excess of bile. The man in the pale shirt and faded jeans right next to Nicky. They all recognized the blond, green-eyed man standing with her, one hand tucking a strand of her hair behind her ear with the surety of someone who touched her often.
The CIA had gone after him time and time again. Nicky had hated him, or said she did. God knew that Felix had gone up against her more than once, so often they’d each come perilously close to killing each other. He was an international criminal, but no one had heard of him for months. In fact, he’d disappeared at the same time Nicky had.
Jason swallowed hard. “I never knew about this,” he choked out. God, how long had she been with Felix? Since she disappeared? Before? When had it started? He felt sick and furious.
He looked at the pictures again. They all showed Felix and Nicky happy together, and made him pinch the bridge of his nose, not sure if he was trying to stave off a headache or tears. She was with Felix, she loved Felix, that much was obvious from how she looked at him. Jason squeezed his eyes shut.
Weiss leafed through the photos again, studying Nicky’s expression, then Felix’s, their body language. Except for a slight wrinkling of his nose and a glint of amusement in his eyes, his face betrayed nothing, his features just another mask.
“Agent Weiss?” Roger demanded. “Do you see anything you need to tell us?”
Weiss raised his gaze to look at their irate superior. “Nicky and Felix are together, that much is clearly visible.” He almost smiled.
“You don’t seem surprised,” Jason accused.
Weiss shrugged. “Whenever we met him during missions, I saw him watch her. I could see that Nicky intrigued him.”
“And that didn’t bother you?” Roger asked curious, not as wounded as Jason, not as involved.
Weiss sighed. “I believe they were sleeping together before Nicky left, but it never impacted a mission and I felt she deserved something better than just being alone.”
“You knew she was sleeping with that—that monster?” Jason exploded, jumping out of his seat and meaning to slam his fist into the other agent’s face.
The glossy photographs slid in a scatter over the conference table.
Weiss pushed his chair back, ready to defend himself. “Face it, Jason, you blew it! You couldn’t deal with her, couldn’t deal with her being able to kick your ass in the field. You walked on her, so you get no say in whatever she did to get by.” Weiss gestured to the photographs. “Even if it was this.”
“I can’t accept it,” Jason said. “Why Felix?”
“He can keep up with her, maybe he’s giving her what you couldn’t. Christ, it’s no wonder half our missions are failing if they’re working together.”
“Interesting analysis, Agent Weiss,” Roger commented, then moved his eyes on Jason. “Don’t think I didn’t catch that you were involved with Agent Edmund, either, Agent Moore. You broke the regulations and initiated a personal relationship with a fellow agent. That very well may have precipitated her subsequent defection. Expect a reprimand and possible suspension once this has been evaluated.”
Roger stormed out even angrier than he’d been on arrival.
Jason sat back down and dropped his face into his hands. “Do you think she’s happy, Weiss?” his voice sounded hollow.
A shuffle of paper.
“Look at her. Look at him.”
Jason knew what Weiss was seeing. He’d seen it, too. The light in Nicky’s blue eyes, the smile on her lips, those had once been for him. Now they were for Felix. She loved the bastard. She was gone forever. And that same light lit the blond thief’s gaze when it rested on Nicky, that same soft smile met hers, a look no one had ever seen on Felix before.
In the last photo, Nicky was standing in Felix’s loose embrace, leaning back against him. Her head was tipped up and he was smiling into her eyes. Neither of them were in disguise. They were just two people who were together, watching the sunset from the deck of a boat. Felix’s eyes were alive in a way Jason wouldn’t have believed before. He really loved her. Nicky would never betray that love, and Felix was too bloody smart to give her up now that he had her. Felix in love would be twice as ruthless as Felix just doing his job. He wouldn’t choose duty over Nicky, either. Maybe that was why she had made him her choice, and maybe it wasn’t such a bad choice.
Felix would be faithful to her, Jason thought ruefully. He was strangely confident of that. He opened his eyes and looked at that last picture once more, then tucked it away in the folder with the rest.
“What kind of life can she have with him?” he asked, his voice bitten by grief.
Weiss patted his shoulder. “Let it go,” he said, his voice sounding hollow. “Just let it go.”
It was that simple, that complicated. She wasn’t coming back, she had fallen off the edge of his world. No one wanted to be alone.
***
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