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“Holy shit.” Jack’s voice was bursting with that weird excitement again. “I knew it. Gale and Gavin. Hannah and Hogan. And now Ice and Indy? What are the chances?”
Indy stared at Ice, then closed her eyes and stared inside herself, into that dark space where names spun around like glowing neon signs which were alive and kicking, grinning and licking. The names were all connected with glowing threads of sparkling energy, puppet-strings being pulled by a coyote-headed wolf-eyed spirit-man in a tailored suit.
Indy forced her eyelids to open, somehow reminding herself she was on a drug which made everything seem meaningful and connected when really it wasn’t. It took some effort, but she kinda-sorta convinced herself.
“Are you convinced now?” Jack was saying. “Now do you believe what the other Darkwater guys were saying at Hogan’s bachelor party?”
“You mean that night in Atlantic City when you passed out naked in the Borgata’s fountain and we had to call in a favor with the Jersey cops to drop charges of indecent exposure?” Ice snorted. “Grow up, Jack. And get your head out of the clouds and back in the game. This is serious. Now, I need you to do one more thing for me.”
Jack sighed heavily into the phone. “Yeah, all right, what is it?”
Ice cocked his head towards Indy now, his eyes hardening for a moment, then flashing with what felt suspiciously like an advance apology. “Pull the CIA personnel file for Rhett Rodgers. Send it to my burner phone.” He paused, swallowed, blinked, his voice dropping suspiciously low. “And make sure you include the guy’s photograph.”
Indy frowned when she saw that almost-anxious advance-apology in Ice’s gaze, heard the emphasis on the photograph in his voice, tasted vile sickness in the back of her throat where that dark mass of unnamable emotion had tried to choke her with its secret.
Though at some hideous level Indy knew the secret.
And she knew the emotion wasn’t so unnamable after all.
It had a name.
A name that was both coincidenceandcunning, providenceandplanning, OCDandOMG.
“You don’t seriously think Rhett Rodgers is my . . .” Indy stammered when Ice hung up the phone, then squinted at its tiny screen, watching for an incoming message. “I mean, it just can’t be. What . . . what are you trying to do, Ice? What do you think is going to happen when I see Rhett's photograph?”
Ice shrugged noncommittally, rubbed the back of his head, kept staring at the phone like he couldn’t look at her. “Probably nothing. If there was something still buried in your subconscious, you’d know it by now—after all, if the drug unearthed that memory of your mother, surely if there was something that intense with your father, you’d . . . you’d know it by now.”
Indy felt that tightness constricting her throat again. “I thought you didn’t believe Scarlet was my mother.” She glared at the side of Ice’s head as he stared at his phone, which had just beeped out an incoming message warning. “Also, what was Jack saying about the Darkwater names? Who are Gavin and Gale? Who are Hogan and Hannah? What the hell is going on, Ice? Talk to me, dammit. Fuckingtalkto me!”
“I don’t know,” Ice whispered, looking up from the phone and into her eyes, locking his gaze onto hers so deeply Indy saw right into him, saw that he was just as turned around as she, just as messed up, just as terrified.
Just as terrified of the truth.
“I don’t know,” Ice said again, his voice barely a whisper but so intense it felt louder than a scream. “All I know is that there’s something really damn strange about Benson and this Darkwater thing. Something that I’m . . . I’m starting to understand but still can’t explain.” He blinked, took a deep breath, let it out slow. “Look, I’m barely hanging on to a thread of sanity here, Indy. But there is something eerie about the way the names have lined up in the previous Darkwater missions, before Jack and I came on board. Some of it is coincidence for sure. Some of it is Benson’s OCD thing for sure. But there’s also something more to it that Benson couldn’t possibly predict, sure as hell couldn’t control.”
“Like . . . like what?” Indy stammered.
“Like this.” Ice leaned over and kissed her gently, softly, carefully, holding his lips against hers long enough to communicate what words couldn’t articulate, what images couldn’t capture, what the five senses couldn’t describe. “He couldn’t predict this, Indy. Couldn’t predict us. But at the same time he put us together like . . . like he wanted to see what would happen, how it would play out. It sounds crazy—and hell, Bensoniscrazy in a way—but I think he’s setting up that final meeting to create what the other Darkwater guys described as a vortex of energy, something that will draw in all the players and force the endgame. And you’re at the center of it, Indy. You and I. We have to be there, but we have to cross some emotional frontier before we’rereadyto be there,readyto swing this game in our direction,readyto end this mission our way.” He paused a beat, swallowed thickly, hesitating like he knew what he said next couldn’t be taken back. “It sounds insane, something my woo-woo parents would come up with after eating magic mushrooms and washing it down with electric Kool-Aid. But it feels terrifyingly real right now.”
Indy stared dumbly into Ice’s eyes, the heat of his kiss still burning her lips. Her mind was moving at warp speed but somehow in slow motion at the same time, his words swirling around like three-dimensional puzzle pieces.
She watched in her mind’s eye those pieces clicking into place to form a throbbing gasping pulsing psychedelic jigsaw of strange symbolism and mystical meaning, providential patterns and cunning coincidences. She stared in cosmic awe as the pieces snapped together in multi-dimensional ways that couldn’t be comprehended by simple logic but made perfect sense when seen from the edge of insanity.
But there was one last piece that could only be understood frombeyondthe edge of insanity.
One jagged wretched stained stinking piece still spinning through the surreal space, searching for its potent place, a wicked grin upon its face.
“Show me his face,” Indy managed to mutter. “The photograph, Ice. Rhett Rodgers. Show me his damn face.”
But even before Ice pulled up the image Indy knew.
She knew it from the way that ball of filthy dark emotion rose up in her throat again.
Yes, she knew it.
And she also knew that slicing open that tightly wound ball of festered feelings, repressed rage, demonic despair would throw her headfirst past the edge of insanity, to a place she might never find her way back from.
Not without him.
