Andrew Britton - The American

“You were a professor?” she asked with some surprise. “Aren’t you a bit young for that?”

“I’m only a lowly associate professor. I probably still have a job if I say all the right things and grovel a little. Why? I don’t seem the type, right?”

“No, that’s not it,” she said. “My father taught at Cambridge. He was really well known, a leader in his field. Most people wouldn’t have thought he was the type either.”

“Is that why you moved to the States, because of his teaching?”

She nodded, and Ryan watched an unhappy look come over her face as she stared down at the table. “He was offered a position at Harvard when I was eighteen. He did really well… wrote a few books, secured his tenure. When they offered me a full ride and I turned it down, he was so angry that he didn’t speak to me for a month.” She hesitated before speaking again. “He wanted me to follow in his footsteps, I guess. He was even more disappointed when I joined the Agency.”

“Why did you turn it down?” he asked gently. She finally looked up to meet his gaze.

“I had to earn it, you know? I didn’t want my future handed to me. It seems stupid now, but I really felt strongly about it at the time. He could be stubborn, too, so we didn’t get along too well. It wasn’t like I wanted much. I mean, if he would have talked about me just one time the way he talked about my brothers-”

She stopped in midsentence, pushing back from the table and standing up quickly, her chair tipping back and over in the process. Ryan rose to his feet almost as fast.

“What is it? What’s wrong?”

She was shaking her head, clearly amazed and angry with herself. “Nothing,” she said. “Nothing, really. God, I just prattle on sometimes. I’m sorry, forget it-”

“Naomi.” She was grabbing her coat, turning away from him. “Naomi,” he repeated. He caught her arm as she started to walk away. “If he wasn’t proud,” Ryan said, “then he was wrong.”

She searched his eyes quickly and saw that he meant the words. She hesitated and then moved in close, leaning up to kiss him lightly. She pulled away only slightly afterward, her soft lips close to his like the promise of something more. Then the moment passed and she was walking away, the tap of her heels light against the rough stone as she moved past empty tables toward the hotel.

Ryan was stunned. He stood alone on the terrace, the taste of her sweet on his mouth as the darkness moved in across the bay. God, for that not to have happened. He couldn’t take it back, though, and he had to work with her for a long time yet. Only now did he think about Katie, and that just wasn’t good enough. He forced a mental image to punish himself, and when she appeared, it was on the rocky bluff overlooking Cape Elizabeth, a strong inland wind sweeping her hair back from her face as she looked out over the ocean. Even in his mind, jumbled and confused as it was, the clarity of her features was breathtaking. Then the image shattered into a thousand pieces, and he knew at once that he was responsible.

He shook his head as he walked away from the table. For that not to have happened…

The next morning began early for Ryan. He showered and dressed before the sun came up, stopping on his way down the hall only to slide a scribbled note underneath Naomi’s door. It said nothing about the previous evening, just a few lines to let her know that he was taking the jeep out for some supplies. She had consumed more than her fair share of wine the night before, and he didn’t see the harm in giving her a few hours to recover. He stopped at the hotel’s restaurant to pick up a cup of coffee, then at the front desk to get directions to the stores he needed to visit.

The air outside was brisk, a gentle purple-orange dawn easing the Cape into another day. He knew that it was too early for the shops on the Strand to be open, but he couldn’t take seeing Naomi again just yet. She’s a strange woman, he thought absently. So smart and stubborn, so afraid to show any weakness. He had to let her know that it wasn’t going anywhere, but he still had to be able to work with her afterward. It was a difficult situation. Would it be better, he wondered, to leave it alone? To see what she had to say? She might regret it as much as he did.

Then again, there was that long moment before she had pulled away from him… Ryan wondered if she had waited in her room after leaving the terrace, listening for his knock at the door, a robe slipping down low to reveal her bare shoulders. The image stuck in his mind as he drove the Nissan west toward the industrial section of the city.

The silver Mercedes was there, but in a slightly different spot. Thinking back to Harper’s file on Gray, Ryan remembered that the businessman also owned a town house on the Buitengracht, in addition to numerous properties farther north; there was a good chance that he had spent the night at one of those locations before driving back to the warehouse in the morning. Ryan looked at his watch. Only eight minutes past seven, and the man was already at work. He filed that fact away as he got out of the jeep and took advantage of the empty street to survey the arrangement of the buildings surrounding Gray’s renovated warehouse. The sidewalk opposite was very narrow, almost nonexistent before it rose up into the face of yet another industrial complex.

Ryan’s eyes followed the lines of the building up to the flat roof, and then on an imaginary path cutting down diagonally to the metal-framed door on the other side of the Mercedes. He walked down a litter-strewn alley, the straight cement walls towering on either side of him, and was pleased to find an aluminum fire escape hanging over a Dumpster, which was coated in flaking brown paint.

By standing on the Dumpster, he found he could reach the base of the fire escape. It pulled down easily when he tugged on the lowest rung. It was all he needed for the moment. Satisfied, Ryan returned the retractable ladder to its original place and hopped down from the container, walking back down the narrow space between the buildings toward the jeep. He still had a lot to do before nightfall.

Naomi woke just before ten, the sheets in a tangle at her feet. Crawling out of bed, she was startled to see the sun halfway into its climb through the African sky. She could hear happy shouts of children beneath her window, and she wondered why Ryan had let her sleep for so long. Thinking his name forced her to recall the night before. Sitting on the edge of the bed, her mind scrambled to recollect the events that had transpired.

Oh God.

I can’t believe I did that, she thought. I can’t believe it. Naomi knew she felt something for Ryan, but also knew instinctively that it could never work. He was engaged, and… Well, that was all that was wrong, really, but it was enough. He hadn’t pulled away, though. She could remember that clearly now. She’d given him the opportunity, but he didn’t pull back. All the same, he couldn’t think too much of her after what she had said. Rambling on about her father, feeling sorry for herself. There would be no more of that, she decided. No way in hell.

IRAN

They arrived much earlier than expected, just as the sun was beginning its downward descent over the highest peaks in the mountainous Khondaub region west of Arak. The convoy had picked up speed upon reaching the highway running northwest from Kerman through Yazd and Isfahan. Once the last city faded from view, the surrounding landscape gradually became less populated as the hours passed and the low-lying foothills gave way to rocky escarpments towering far above the desert floor.

There were no private homes within 30 kilometers of the complex, at least none that were occupied. The interior ministry had forced the families out when construction was first started on the heavy-water reactor. They received no compensation for their loss, but they were fortunate enough to have left with their lives. The current regime would have been far less generous.