He held up his hand. “Shut up, Billie,” he said, but he was smiling. “You need more. It’s taken me four decades to understand it, but I do. I’m not enough for you. Oh, don’t worry, I don’t take it personally. I’m as close as you’ll ever find to what you want. And you’ll come back to me as long as I don’t try to make you stay. So, go.” He dropped his apricot pit into the ashtray on the bedside table and came to stand in front of me.
I put my arms around his neck. “You’re one in a million, Taverner.”
I spent a few minutes showing him my appreciation before he stepped back. He grabbed my bag and zipped it before holding it out to me. “Go on, then. Get out of here and go kill somebody. I’ll be waiting when you get back.”
—
Now,go kill somebodymightnot be a romantic phrase for most couples, but for us it was goddamned poetry. It meant he understood me. Of course, it helped we were in the same line of work. Both of us had been recruited—Taverner after astint in Her Majesty’s Army, me out of college in Austin—to be professional assassins for an organization known as the Museum. Known to outsiders, that is. The real name isn’t important, and you wouldn’t recognize it if I told you. It’s better that way. The fewer people who know who we are and what we do, the safer for everyone. The Museum was born out of the ashes of World War II with a mission to track down Nazis who had escaped justice. If looted art managed to get recovered at the same time, it was a bonus. Hence the nickname. The organization had been created by the disaffected and the lost—former intelligence officers and resistance fighters left without uses for their very specific skills, one or two who’d worked with the Monuments Men to preserve the treasures of Western Europe, some tame psychopaths who liked the idea of killing and not going to jail for it. Every weirdo and misfit found a place at the Museum, hunting Nazis and looted art with equal enthusiasm.
After a few decades, there weren’t many Nazis left to hunt, so the Museum turned its efforts to drug smugglers, arms dealers, human traffickers—folks who needed killing, in other words. I’d been part of a group of four known as Project Sphinx, the first all-female squad in the Museum’s history. The other three, Mary Alice, Helen, and Natalie, were the closest thing I had to sisters. They annoyed the shit out of me, and I loved them enough to take a bullet for any of them—and I had.
In the few years since our last outing together, we’d drifted. We’d always been like that. Our first missions were conducted as a quartet with strict supervision. After we hadproven ourselves, we were let off the leash a little to do jobs with other assassins and the occasional solo mission. Every so often, we’d be assigned a kill that required all four of us, and even if we hadn’t spoken since the last time, we picked up right where we left off. Not that there was ever much to tell on my end. I worked steadily at my cover job of translating textbooks and articles while Mary Alice toiled in accounts payable and spent her free time playing viola in an amateur chamber orchestra. Helen was a stay-at-home society wife in D.C. to a husband with a government job, and Natalie…well, Natalie was the wild card. Her cover was officially “art teacher” but she dabbled in performance art, a number of failed gallery shows, and the same number of ex-husbands. Together we had had a hell of a run, taking out bad guys all around the world, and when we found ourselves in the crosshairs, marked for termination instead of retirement, it was only by banding together that we survived. We’d lived and worked together for an intense few weeks while we sorted that situation out, and I think we all heaved a sigh of relief when it was time to go our separate ways for a while.
It had only been a couple of years since we’d said good-bye, but when I spotted Helen in the scrum at Dulles, I almost didn’t recognize her. She had gained twenty pounds and let her hair go completely white. The last time I’d seen her, she’d been struggling with widowhood and so skinny, I felt like she’d blow away if the wind came in hard. She looked more substantial now. She looked happy.
She came in for a hug and squeezed me tightly. “Let me look at you, Billie,” she said, stepping back to give me theonce-over from head to toe. She wouldn’t find much changed. The head still had the same streaky dishwater blond hair with a handful more silver and the toes were still tucked inside scuffed cowboy boots. “You look good, kid.”
“I was thinking the same about you,” I said, nodding towards her snowy hair.
She smiled. “I’d been covering the grey for so long, I had no idea what color it actually was. Imagine my surprise when it grew out fully white.” She checked the vintage Cartier Tank watch on her wrist. “We have thirty minutes to wait until Mary Alice’s plane arrives and another ten after that for Natalie. Let’s have a drink.”
I expected her to lead me to the nearest airport pub. Instead she made a beeline for a shiny juice bar and ordered up something green and pulpy, taking a deep suck of her straw. She looked up to see me watching her and smiled, waving the cup. “Yes, I’ve given up cocktails. And wine. And entire bottles of straight gin. I am reformed now.”
“I’m glad. I bet your liver is too,” I said, taking a sip from my own cup. Something with strawberries and half a dozen other fruits—a few of which I’d never heard of. She didn’t say anything else, but I was happy she’d finally climbed on the wagon. Widowhood had walloped her hard, and she’d spent months in bed with a bottle of Bombay Sapphire for company. It had taken our retirement mission to shake her out of it, and it looked like the changes had stuck.
We talked about nothing in particular until Mary Alice showed up in a black jumpsuit topped with a buttonless coat in an abstract pattern of black and purple and taupe. Her hairwas a little longer and the bifocals were new, but otherwise she was Mary Alice, curvy and blond with the kind of pouty lips that other women only got by injection. She’d always resembled a pinup, and now she looked like Marilyn Monroe if Marilyn had lived to her sixties and taken up knitting.
We hugged around and said all the usual things until Mary Alice spotted the airmail envelope sticking out of my tote bag. “I see we got the same briefing materials telling us absolutely nothing,” she said.
“Naomi plays her cards close to the vest,” I reminded her.
The pouty mouth thinned. “And she can keep them there. I only came because I wanted to make sure she’s not dragging us into some trouble.”
I wasn’t surprised Mary Alice was the least enthusiastic about this summoning. She had the most to lose, after all. She’d been the last of us to find true love, and when she had, it had knocked her sideways. She had proposed to Akiko on their second date, and they’d been married within six months. Their fifth wedding anniversary was coming up, and I tried to remember what the traditional gift was. Wood? Maybe I’d get them a cat scratching post.
I grinned. “How is Akiko?”
“At home, taking care of Kevin,” Mary Alice said. “And Gary.”
Helen sucked at her straw, making a slurping noise as she hit the bottom of her green sludge. “Gary?”
“Akiko decided Kevin needed a friend, so we adopted Gary. He’s a Scottish Fold. He weighs four pounds and Kevin is scared shitless of him.”
She whipped out her phone to show us her wallpaper. It was a picture of a stunning middle-aged woman with a sharp, asymmetrical black bob cuddling a small grey cat, its ears lying almost flat on its head like a beanie. He was fighting as if to make a getaway, his eyes rolling like a wild horse’s. Behind them stood Kevin, an enormous Norwegian Forest cat who was looking at the newcomer with pure hatred.
“They are struggling a little to bond, but aren’t they handsome boys?” Mary Alice asked.
Helen and I made all the right noises of admiration and Mary Alice tucked her phone away, pursing her lips. “Is Natalie here yet? I suppose she’s missed her plane.”
“She most certainly did not.”
We turned around to find Natalie, curls hanging halfway to her waist, wearing flared, striped pants and half a dozen fringed silk scarves. She threw her arms wide to hug us all.
“You look like a refugee from Cher’sDark Ladyera,” Mary Alice told her as she pulled back.
Natalie clucked her tongue and pinched a bit of fabric from Mary Alice’s jacket. “Something from the Chico’s permanent press collection for elderly travelers?”
“This is Talbots, you bitch,” Mary Alice began.