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I heard the sound of a spoon dropping into an empty bowl. “You want to accuse me of something, go right ahead. I’m done with this conversation. Your time is up.”
I related what she’d told me to the others. Mary Alice sat with her head in her hands while Helen covered her mouth and Natalie swore up a blue streak.
“Those shit-lickingbastards,” she finished. “What if someof the workwedid was part of this freelance bullshit? Someone could have been using us to carry out their dirty little side jobs like we were common hit men.”
It was all too easy to see how it might have been done—money changing hands, dossiers prepared. The board would be briefed on the prospective targets and the field agent assigned. Once it was passed down to us, we’d have no way of knowing if the job was clean or not. We put our faith in Provenance and the board to identify the appropriate targets. Every piece of information, every decision, every action, was a link in the chain we forged together. Any corruption in that chain was unthinkable.
“Not exactly what we signed up for,” Mary Alice said.
“I always told myself we were making the world better, safer,” Helen said finally.
“And we did,” I told her. I looked around at their devastated faces. “Look, I know it feels like a betrayal—”
“Feels?” Natalie’s voice rose.
“It is a betrayal,” I corrected. “But whatever we may have done, it was inadvertent. We believed in the organization. We trusted them. If we’ve made mistakes in who we took out, we can deal with that later. Right now the problem is the board. They’ve decided to make scapegoats of us to save whoever is behind all of this. The question is, what are we going to do about it?”
We looked at each other, and we knew this decision was going to be bigger than the four of us.
We summoned Akiko and Minka and brought them up to speed. I ate a cinnamon bagel while Natalie pulled hers topieces, making little bagel pellets with the insides and flicking them around the room.
“Could you not?” Mary Alice asked, shaking one out of her hair and flicking it back.
“I’m just fidgety,” Natalie said. “I don’t like being on this end of things.”
I looked around the table. “We’re going to be on this end of things forever unless we take control,” I said. “We’ve never been marks before, but we’ve also never had to decide on a target before. That’s always been decided for us. For better or worse, we’ve always been the instrument and not the musician. We don’t choose the tune. And you two,” I said, eyeing Minka and Akiko, “have no idea what it’s like to get your hands dirty.”
Minka gave me a cool look. “I maybe know better than you think.”
“Maybe you do, but that doesn’t change the fact that this is uncharted territory for all of us. We have two choices. One, we can walk away right now. We can get Minka to forge new papers for each of us. This is a big world and with the right documentation, we can disappear. We can start new lives and just let this one go.”
“And do what?” Natalie asked. “I’m broke. Thanks to the board, my pension blew up somewhere in the middle of the Caribbean.”
“Mine too,” said Helen. “After the illness, Kenneth didn’t leave much.”
Mary Alice and Akiko didn’t speak, but the look they exchanged suggested they weren’t much better off.
“We could get jobs,” I pointed out.
“Doing what?” Natalie demanded. “We’ve spent forty years assassinating people, Billie. It’s all we know how to do, and you can’t exactly find clients for that on LinkedIn.”
“I think Craigslist would be a better place to find clients,” Helen put in.
I held up a hand. “I’m just saying, we can try to walk away.”
“Okay, and what would that be like?” Natalie asked. “We’d spend the rest of our lives looking over our shoulders, wondering if we’ve been made, if today is finally the day when somebody gets to cash in a nice fat bonus check for bringing back our hides.”
“I don’t like it any better than you do,” I said. “If it were up to me, we’d already be working up a plan to take out the board and end this. But I don’t think this is something we should rush into. We can take a day to sleep on it—” I started.
“I’m in,” Mary Alice said firmly.
To my surprise, Akiko spoke up. “Me too.”
“Really?” Mary Alice asked, sounding hopeful. Akiko didn’t return her smile, but it was a start.
“Alright,” I said, tallying. “That’s Mary Alice and Akiko in.” I looked around. Minka nodded and Natalie grinned and sat up straight. “What’s the expression the kids use? ‘Hells yeah’? Well, hells yeah. I don’t know how many years I’ve got left and I’ll be damned if I spend them looking over my shoulder for whichever goon the board decides to send next. Besides, we’ve got a score to settle.”
I looked at Helen. She opened her mouth and closed itagain, nodding. She might be less than what she had once been, but she was still worth a hell of a lot.
