Alex Scarrow - October skies

‘Yeah, this is my flight. You’ll meet me at Reno?’

Rose sounded tired. ‘Yup,’ she mumbled.

‘Okay then, I’ll see you later on today,’ he replied. Then as an afterthought, ‘We’ve got a lot to talk about.’ It was a probing, throwaway comment. Of course there was much to talk about, and not all of it would be about work.

‘Sure,’ she replied in a non-committal way, ‘be good to have you back,’ she said.

They said goodbye in the same professionally familiar way that they always had before… before the other night.

Of course, friendly and laissez-faire as always. He got up, grabbed his bag and ambled towards the growing, ill-defined, meandering queue in front of the gate, pondering that last comment of hers.

Good to have you back.

He found himself replaying that in his head and trying to analyse the tone and timbre of her voice for the slightest clue on how exactly she meant that; how she felt about him. He shook his head at the ridiculousness of it all. Saturday night in that diner, they’d been mildly juiced on the beer, well and truly on a high over the discovery of Lambert’s journal, and yes, they’d flirted a little — that’s all. End of story.

This is getting stupid.

They knew each other well, better perhaps than most married couples. They’d worked out of each other’s back pockets these last few years, on too many occasions wearily propping each other up with black coffee and trench-banter as they pushed a thirty-six-hour shift to rush together a last-minute edit. There had been the unavoidable intimacy of shooting footage from a variety of uncomfortable places, arms, legs and cables tangled round each other for lack of wriggle room. They had shared the exhilaration of seeing their work aired on BBC2, and the disappointment of sliding into the obscurity of various digital channels. They had got pissed together God knows how many times, swapped CDs and regularly derided each other’s taste in music, slept together in the back of a touring Transit van with a sweaty teenage grunge band, and cowered together at the back of an equally sweaty BNP rally.

Not once had they ever flirted with the idea of something more.. until the other night, that is. Since then he’d been troubled with the notion that he felt a lot more for her than he’d realised. The idea scared him. He enjoyed the security of the tight, solitary bubble in which he had lived most of his life, no one ever getting too close, no one ever hurting him.

Now here was Rose. The thought of folding her in his arms, stooping down to kiss her, feeling the tickle of her hair on his face, the trembling warmth of her body pressed against his… terrified him.

This is ridiculous.

‘We need to talk,’ he muttered to himself. A bull-necked man with a shaved head and a Rooney football shirt, standing to his left, shot him a bemused expression.

‘Uh, sorry,’ Julian smiled awkwardly, ‘just talking to myself. I.. uh… do that sometimes.’

The man shook his head and pressed forward into the shuffling queue with his boarding pass ready.

Julian decided enough was enough. The first thing he and Rose were going to discuss in the car on the way back to Blue Valley was whether there was something more between them, and whether they wanted that, or not.

‘Hey!’

Julian felt a tap on his arm and turned round to see a man holding something out to him.

‘What?’

‘You left this on the seat.’

Julian looked down to see the man was holding his BlackBerry.

‘Oh bugger! That was stupid,’ he admitted and smiled dumbly as he grabbed it. ‘Hey, thanks for-’

The man had already turned away, in a hurry to get where he was going. Julian wanted to thank him for not running off with it. He watched the man push his way out of the scrum; just another executive drone in a dark suit, nothing visible but the back of his head, and his raised hand holding a boarding pass. His eyes picked out an incongruous detail — a faint and blurred tattoo across the back of his hand. It looked very much like a fox’s head.

Odd tattoo, he thought, and then his mind was back again on Rose.

He had an ideal seat, across the aisle and two rows back from Cooke. It allowed him to keep an eye on him, but remain outside Cooke’s field of vision for the duration of the flight. Important fact: on an eight-hour flight, one can get very familiar with the few faces visible between the headrests; familiar enough to recognise that face for quite some time afterwards, even in an entirely different context — a crowded street, a shopping mall, on a bus, or a train.

He studied the man.

Cooke. He preferred never to use the Christian name of a target, just the surname; it preserved a formal distance. It made a great deal of sense to maintain that distance for a target he would be required, at some point, to finish off.

He allowed himself to relax. Cooke was tagged now. The discreet little pin he’d inserted beneath the BlackBerry’s fascia had a minute lithium battery that kept the thing quietly chirping a signal for months. It was good only for a short range of a few miles, depending on line-of-sight intrusions, but good enough for the job, and perhaps not even necessary in the circumstances. Cooke was behaving as planned and heading where he was wanted — a discreet meeting with Mr Shepherd in some middle-of-nowhere, blink-and-you’ll-miss-it place called Blue Valley.

He wondered whether Mr Shepherd was taking an exceptional risk agreeing to meet Cooke like this. Even under the pseudonym and a little disguise, Shepherd’s face was becoming too recognisable.

He closed his eyes.

Mr Shepherd knows best.

The man had a keen tactical mind, one of the many things Carl respected about him; that and the courage to say the things most of the other parasites running for office this time around were too frightened to say. Even if this wasn’t a paid job, he’d happily consider doing this one for free to ensure a smooth ride for his man into the White House.

Shepherd was exactly what this ailing, fucked-up country needed. Someone driven solely by the crackling energy of belief, instead of flip-flopping over the latest, fickle, issue-of-the-day poll results. In many ways, thought Carl, Shepherd reminded him of Kennedy: a conviction politician, a man ready to jump up, grab the steering wheel and pull this lumbering juggernaut back on track before it was too late.

As far as Carl was concerned, the Clintons and the Bushes had, between them, fucked over his country good and proper. Someone fresh, someone new, was needed to break the back-and-forth grasp the two main parties had over the reins of power.

Two different flavours of go-fuck-you.

He smiled. That was one of the favourite trash-talk sayings of his squad. Now, who the hell had first come up with it? He racked his mind, side-stepping fleeting memories — images he’d rather not call to mind — and finally it came to him.

Steve. Technical Sergeant S.T. Petray. It was his cracked-arse version of between a rock and a hard place. Another time, another life. He’d left too many of those strong, patriotic young men of his squad dead or dying in the shit-smelling back streets of a fucking Iraqi town, the name of which nobody on FOX, CNN or MSNBC had ever needed to learn how to pronounce.

Carl absent-mindedly caressed the fading tattoo on the back of his hand. The personal motif of their team — a desert fox.

He watched Cooke tucking into his in-flight meal, and saw in the willowy, bespectacled, dark-haired man across the aisle the personification of everything that was fucking well strangling his country; goddamned liberal media more concerned with the rights of terrorists than the families of fallen servicemen, more concerned with Nielsen viewer ratings than a moral message.