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He hated the nickname because it belonged to another man, to another life. But like a bad smell, the name stuck to him. He wore it without complaint. Toys complained about very little these days. It wasn't that everything satisfied him or that he was too timid to speak his mind. No; it was that he felt he no longer had any right to complain. If he hated his nickname but other, better people wanted to use it, then that was fine. It was a small thread in the cloak of punishment that he wore. That's how he saw it. Any unkind word, any unfortunate accident, any bit of physical damage that came his way was, in some overarching way, his due.
The damned don't have the right to complain. Not about anything.
And Toys did believe that he was damned. His Catholicism, long absent from his life, had come flooding back with irresistible force, bringing with it all of the guilt, the weight of sins, the visions of the Pit, the certainty of his own fall into hell. Things he had scoffed at only a few years ago, things he jeered and made jokes about, were now burning lights in his inner darkness.
He preferred to be alone as often as possible. When he went to work, he spent most of his time in his office with the door shut. Most of the people who worked for him at FreeTech didn't. They were happy in one another's company, and the whole building was alive with their chatter and laughter. To them he was a moody, eccentric, misanthropic loner who seldom smiled, though he never spoke harshly to anyone. Ever.
If they only knew, he often thought. If they knew who they worked for, that happy crowd would transform into a mob of villagers with torches and pitchforks.
A few did know, of course, and an even smaller handful knew all of it.
Junie Flynn was aware. She was Toys's partner in the FreeTech venture. He was the money, the logistics, the big-picture planning. Junie was the one who actually oversaw all of the projects. The company was built around the deliberate and specific repurposing of radical, cutting-edge technologies obtained by the Department of Military Sciences. In short, the DMS took very nasty toys away from terrorist groups, teams of rogue scientists, and utter madmen and then gave the science to FreeTech. It was amazing how much of that deadly science could be realigned to do measurable good. FreeTech deployed teams all over the world to help with water purification, sustainable farming, renewable energy, education, health, and more. They did it very efficiently and they did it very quietly.
That was another part of Toys's job--to keep his company out of the press and to let groups like Doctors Without Borders, Habitat for Humanity, and scores of others take the credit. It would actually have killed Toys if his name somehow wound up on a short list for a Nobel Prize. There was no amount of good he could accomplish that would wash his soul clean. He knew that with absolute certainty.
So he did his job and went home. On the way home, he often stopped at the church. Sometimes for mass. Sometimes to light candles for the souls of everyone that he had killed--directly or by enabling the actions of his former employers. Sometimes he sat in a quiet pew in the most remote corner of the church and wept. He never prayed for forgiveness, because he did not believe he deserved any and because he did not think God was that tolerant. He lived alone, except for a battered old stray cat he'd named Job. He did not have friends. He did not date. He ate alone and he lived his life and he waited for the day he would grow old and die. Toys was a young man, he was fit and healthy, and he understood that the purgatory of being alive was likely to last a long, long time.
So it was in that church, in that pew, on a random Tuesday on another of San Diego's relentlessly sunny days, that he met the woman.
3.
She came and sat down in the next pew up and a little apart. Not next to him, but close enough so that her presence there had to draw his eye.
It did.
He looked at her, assessed her, instinctively ticked off the pertinent details, then looked away. She was in her early thirties. Very thin, very pale, with coal-black hair pulled back into a severe ponytail. Minimal makeup. Middle Eastern features. She looked vaguely familiar, but in the way someone is when they look a little bit like a famous person. A borrowed familiarity.
Toys did not react to her as a woman, merely as a person. She was pretty enough, and fell into the category of the kind he used to go for. Women and men of the subgenre that had once been called heroin chic: borderline emaciated but actually filled with a raw and intense sexual energy. Like him. Or, like he had been once upon a time. That was all past-tense now, and Toys hadn't been with anyone in more than four years. Not that he couldn't have found willing partners, but he was equally aware that he exuded a toxic vibe. Hands off. Or, maybe, unclean. People who began to make passes at him quickly changed their minds and moved off with looks of uncertain disapproval twisting their mouths. That was fine with him. The last thing on earth he wanted was a girlfriend or boyfriend, or even a fling. Living like a monk was more appropriate somehow.
He caught the woman looking at him. He glanced at her and then away, but the memory of dark eyes made him cut another look. This time she smiled. A small, sad little smile.
He nodded to her. She nodded back, her smile fragile. And again there was the flicker of almost-but-not-quite recognition. He'd known so many people in so many places around the world, and he'd spent an enormous amount of time in the Middle East with his former employer, Sebastian Gault. This woman could not have been part of that crowd. Most of them were dead, and the rest were of a life Toys had stepped away from. They called themselves either warriors of God or freedom fighters; the rest of the world called them terrorists. The woman's face touched an old memory, but not in a way that set off his alarm bells.
Toys bent to read from his Bible. Something about someone doing something to someone else. He couldn't concentrate, though. He could feel the woman looking at him, but when he glanced up, she was focused on the pages of a hymnal. Toys tried to read more of the passage but realized that he'd repeated the same verses three times and still had no idea what they said. It was one of Paul's epistles. Dense, pedantic stuff.
"Can I ask you a question?"
He jerked in surprise to find that the woman was no longer sitting in the next pew but was now standing but a few feet away. He could smell her. Some kind of inexpensive perfume. Roses. And soap. She smelled clean. She wore floral shorts and the kind of sandals that were good for walking.
"Sorry, love, did I make too much noise, or--?"
She smiled. "You're English?"
He nodded.
"I was in England for a while. In college."
"Oh."
"I've seen you in here a few times."
"Oh?" He had not noticed her before, though he had not been trying to notice anyone.
"I moved to San Diego a few months ago," she said. "Got a place in Pacific Beach, near that restaurant? You know the one right on the boardwalk? World Famous? I see you in there almost every morning." Her accent was definitely Middle Eastern. Iraqi, he thought, but with a heavy veneer of London English and generic TV American.
"Oh?" he said again, trying not to feed the conversation.
Undeterred, she came and sat down in his pew. He almost flinched, almost slid away from her.
