The Island (24 page)

“I don’t want them to know what happened to me,” Lee said at last, his voice strained.

“I know,” Shaw said. “You tell them what you think they need to know when you see them, and keep what you need a secret. You look out for yourself first, Lee.”

Fuck. That was harsh. For all he knew, Mom and Dad Anderson were the kindest, most loving, most understanding parents on the planet. For all he knew, they both had advanced degrees in psychology. And what was Shaw’s stellar advice? Avoidance. That was the best thing about avoidance, though. You got to avoid shit.

You sure you should be giving advice on mental-health coping mechanisms, king of the night terrors?

And there was that look again: full of trust and hope. Shaw hated that look.

“I’m going to tell you something,” Shaw said, “and I want you to really try and listen, okay?”

“Okay,” Lee murmured.

“When I get home,” Shaw said, “to my flat, I mean, not just Sydney, the first thing I’ll do is get undressed and get in the shower. And then I’ll take the dog for a walk to the dry cleaners. And when I get those clothes back, I won’t wear them. I’ll put them in a box at the back of my cupboard. Those are my work clothes. Suits, boxers, T-shirts, it doesn’t matter. I won’t wear them except for work. I won’t even look at them. You understand?”

Lee narrowed his eyes. “You mean I should put everything that happened to me in a box in the back of a cupboard?”

“If you have to,” Shaw said. “Not forever, not always. Just until you need to take it out again.”

Lee wrinkled his nose. “I thought you were James Bond, not Dr. Phil.”

“You and me, Lee,” Shaw said. “We’re out of Dr. Phil’s pay grade.”

Lee’s lips quirked.

“Everything that happened,” Shaw said, “it will always be there. But you have to learn how to put it away. I’m not the same guy I was on that island. That was work, and shit, Lee, I hope you know that. I hope you know that me, the real me, wouldn’t have let it go that far.”

His heart was thumping. Shit. What was that? He hadn’t meant to unburden himself like that. Lee didn’t need to have the passenger seat on Shaw’s personal guilt trip along with everything else.

“You saved me,” Lee said. He blinked in confusion.

Shaw knew his regret showed on his face. “Lee, I could have saved you the night I met you.”

Lee shrank back. His mouth worked for a moment, but nothing came. The look on his face, Shaw thought—stricken, trapped—must have been the one Vornis saw in Colombia. The one when Lee came face-to-face with a monster.

Shaw gazed back.
I want you, Lee, but you deserve better. You have to know that. You have to know what I am.

Someone has to.

“I understand,” Lee said at last. “You think I don’t, but I do. I know why you waited. I know it was important.”

Shaw frowned slightly. “No, you don’t understand. I’m not your savior, and I’m sure as hell not your redemption. You need to remember that I let Vornis take you back all those times without a single objection.”

“What difference does that make?” Lee scowled, jutting out his chin. “A few more sessions after so many. What difference is it?”

Aggression, Shaw thought; that’s interesting.

Shaw folded his arms across his chest. “It doesn’t make a difference to you, Lee, not in the long run, but it makes a difference to
us
. You trust me because your head isn’t in the right place yet. But when it is, you’ll see exactly what went down on that island. At the moment, you don’t understand what I mean.”

You’ll see exactly how I failed you.

“Don’t tell me what I’ll see,” Lee said. He was breathing heavily. “Don’t tell me what I’ll feel. You are the only one who looked me in the eye in that place. You are the only one who saw
me
. And you saved me.”

“I did,” Shaw said. “But not soon enough.”

Not soon enough to deserve you.

“I don’t—” Lee managed, and couldn’t finish the thought:
I don’t understand.

Shaw smiled slightly. He’d proven himself right, and there was a sort of a grim satisfaction in that. God knows it was the only satisfaction he warranted out of this whole sorry incident.

Lee chewed on his lower lip, and hell, that was distracting.

“There’s something else,” he said, keeping his tone gentle.

Lee’s brilliant green eyes flicked up and down but not before Shaw saw the tears.

Shaw’s stomach churned. “You’ll be okay,” he said. “You will be. You’ll go home, and you’ll see your parents, and you’ll see a shrink, and you’ll be okay. You’ve done your time, Lee. You get to relax now. You get to have your life back. Any life you want.”

Oh, Jesus. He had a sudden vision of Lee, old and fat and happy. And it made him want to laugh. It made him want to be the other old, fat, happy guy in that mental picture. He wanted them to take turns yelling at kids to get off their lawn.

“Maybe…maybe it’s you that doesn’t understand,” Lee said, blinking away his tears. “I know you think I’m just a weak kid. I mean, I am, I know that, but you made me stronger. You didn’t hurt me. I believed you when you said you’d help me. I didn’t expect you to save me. I thought you’d just make a call, like you said, and that was more than I could have hoped for. You think I didn’t know what you were risking by telling me you’d help me? I might not have known what you were, but I knew Vornis would kill you as well.”

Shaw had no answer for that.

Lee trailed his fingers across the keys of the laptop. “You think he didn’t ask me about you? You know what he couldn’t get over? The number of times you showered. Know what I told him?”

Shaw shook his head.

“I told him you liked to force my head back and see how long it took before I started to choke under the water.” Lee shivered. “He got a kick out of that.”

Shaw swallowed with difficulty.

Lee looked up at him. “So don’t tell me that I don’t understand what was going on. I was your fucking accomplice every time I was with Vornis.” He frowned, and his eyes flashed. “And don’t ever tell me that you didn’t save me, because that is bullshit!”

“Okay,” Shaw said. Lee’s sudden fierceness surprised him. He reached out and took Lee’s hand again. “Okay, Lee.”

Lee pulled his hand back quickly, like he’d been stung. He breathed heavily for a moment. His teeth were clenched, and there was a tic in his jaw. “Don’t do that.”

“Okay,” Shaw said again. He fought to keep his face impassive.

Lee swallowed. “I just mean, when you touch me, I want more.”

Holy shit
. From any other guy in any other circumstances, Shaw would have been flashing a cocky grin:
I know it
! But this wasn’t right. This whole conversation had been a mistake. It wasn’t Lee’s job to soothe Shaw’s conscience, and it wasn’t fair of Shaw to put this shit on him now. He should have just shut his mouth until Sydney and walked away. Because that was all that could happen. “Write your e-mail.”

Lee nodded, relaxing his jaw. “Okay.”

Shaw looked away.

He’d chosen this job. And he’d been good at it, until Lee. And he’d always known that with this job there were things he couldn’t have. Normal things. And it hadn’t bothered him, not really. Until Lee.

* * * *

“Huh,” was all Zev said when he came by Shaw’s cabin later that night and found Lee asleep in Shaw’s bunk. “Come for a cigarette with me, Shaw.”

Shaw rose from the chair he’d been dozing in and stretched. He didn’t really care what Zev thought. Lee needed the reassurance of Shaw’s company, as simple as that. If he slept better in Shaw’s cabin, what of it? It was no business of anyone’s.

Except it would be, in Sydney.

Shaw sighed and followed Zev outside. Zev’s escort was waiting in the hallway. He looked young and spotty enough to still be a teenager.

“Get lost, kid,” Zev said. “Shoo!”

Shaw nodded at the kid. “I’ll make sure he doesn’t steal the silverware.”

“Yes, sir.” The kid vanished.

Zev rolled his eyes. “What if you tell the captain I am a perfectly nice spy and not at all planning on building a machine to control the weather?”

“His boat, his rules,” Shaw told him.

They headed up on deck.

Shaw sniffed the salt air. He loved the Pacific. It had always felt like home. The stars were brilliant. They felt close enough that Shaw imagined he could reach up and snag them with his fingertips.

“Are you gonna ask me why Lee’s sleeping in my bunk?” Shaw leaned on the rail.

Zev shrugged as he lit a cigarette. “Seems like that’s none of my business now.” He exhaled pale smoke that was lost in the night air. “You know what I don’t like about this work?”

Jesus, where to start? Shaw could think of a hundred things.

“I get homesick,” Zev said. “And then, when I get home, I get restless.”

Shaw nodded. He knew that contradictory feeling well.

“My wife is a schoolteacher,” Zev said. “I don’t think I’ve ever told you that.”

“I didn’t even know you were married,” Shaw said.

“I would show you a picture, if I could carry one,” Zev said. “She’s my other half, I tell people, but it’s not true.”

Shaw raised his eyebrows.

“I wish she was,” Zev said. “But my other half is whoever they tell me it is. Do you understand?”

“Yeah,” Shaw said, wishing he didn’t.

“I can’t tell my wife about my work,” Zev said. “And I think that if I did, I would not like the way she would look at me. And then I think I should have married someone else in my line of work, and then I wonder if I would be able to look at her without always wondering. So I tell myself I am very happy with my schoolteacher wife, and she tells herself she doesn’t need to know what I do.”

Shaw felt regret close in on him. Was that what he had to look forward to? A life of shared solitude, if he was lucky?

“You should get out while you can,” Zev said.

His frankness surprised Shaw. He felt his stomach clench. “Maybe.”

This was Zev’s idea of a pep talk, he supposed. It was probably kinder than the one he’d get from his boss. Frank’s would probably go something like,
Don’t let the door hit you on the arse on the way out
. It surprised him, coming from Zev. Zev was a consummate professional, or at least that was the impression he gave. Shaw supposed he should have stopped being surprised by the impressions people gave years ago.

He didn’t know Zev that well. They’d met a few times before, but crossed paths undercover only once before the island. Pakistan, Shaw remembered. Shaw had been posing as a journalist, and he’d hated it. That was a line he didn’t like to cross, but it had been short notice and only a week. Still, he hated knowing that every time a journalist was accused of being a spy, it was because of men like him.

Zev had been posing as a businessman, and they’d met at a restaurant in Islamabad. Zev had shaken Shaw’s hand enthusiastically and introduced him to the men he was dining with. Coffee and cigars and aliases, Shaw remembered. It had all been very congenial, and then they’d gone their separate ways. Shaw still had no idea what Zev had been doing there, and it was probably mutual.

And once, Shaw had seen Zev torture a man.

Shaw had hardly known Zev before he’d put his trust in him in Vornis’s dungeon. It occurred to him for the first time that he’d taken a leap of faith after all, as desperate as the one Lee had taken.

Shaw looked down into the black water.

“What happened back there,” Zev said, “was a bloodbath. When I’m not smoking, my hands are shaking.”

Shaw looked at his face in the darkness, wondering if it was true. He was never sure with Zev.

“Lucky for you,” Zev said calmly, “there’s a boy in your cabin who saw the whole thing and still wants to be in your bunk.”

“He won’t,” Shaw said with certainty. “Not once he’s back home.”

Zev only shrugged and watched the smoke from his cigarette curl away into the darkness.

* * * *

It was what it was, Shaw thought later. It was two days of artificial happiness. They were adrift on the Pacific, just as he’d always imagined, and it felt right. Lee felt right. He was coming out of his shell. He was smiling. He was relaxing. Shaw wished it could last forever, but he knew better than that.

On the final day, Shaw watched the approaching coastline with a strange mixture of relief and regret. It was good to be home, even if he’d be walking into what Callie had called a shit storm. And he knew he wouldn’t see Lee again. That felt like the biggest waste of all. He was only just starting to know Lee.

He was a baseball fan. That was no surprise, probably, but the night before, they’d sat in front of the TV with some of the crew and watched a few hours of cricket.

“I have no fucking idea what’s going on here,” Lee had announced at last, watching the animated duck stalk along the bottom of the screen as the batsman was dismissed. “This doesn’t make any sense.”

“At least when we have a world series, we’re not the only country in it,” Shaw had told him.

“The World Series was named after a newspaper,” Lee had informed him. “At least we don’t play for ashes!”

Lee gave as good as he got, and Shaw liked that. If he’d met him under different circumstances, he would have wanted to get to know him just for that. It didn’t have to be about beauty and brokenness and protection. It could have been about laughter and desire. Shaw wished they’d met as equals. He wished they could have fucked as equals. It felt like Lee was finding his way again, taking back control, but it was too late for Shaw. Every hour that passed was one less hour they had.

“He’s doing well, I think,” the doc had told Shaw. “I mean, he’ll need psychiatric help, but he’s doing okay for now.”

“Did he tell you what happened?” Shaw asked curiously.

The doctor shook his head. “No, but he didn’t have to. It’s written all over him.”

Lee liked television. They were close enough to pick up the broadcasts from the Australian commercial channels, and Shaw had found Lee sitting in the rec room at three o’clock in the morning watching an old rerun of
Spyforce
.