‘Marilyn,’ he told her, ‘you are to pay no heed to any of that bullshit. Jed had enemies because he sought them out. He was a guy who knew right from wrong and he wasn’t afraid to act on that knowledge. A guy like that, he gets people offside. But he does it for the right reasons. A lot of the things Jed did for this country, people will never know about. You and the kids will never know either. That’s just the way it has to be. But what people can know is that I thought Jed Culver was a good man, and he did the right thing.’
He had to hug Marilyn then, because she teared up and all but fell into his arms.
‘Oh God, Kip. I miss the Jedi Master,’ she said, her voice muffled by tears and the lapel of his suit where she’d buried her face.
Kipper caught his wife’s eye across the drawing room. Barb sent him an unspoken query, asking if he was all right. Did he need her to come and rescue him? The President of the United States shook his head and patted down Marilyn Culver’s hair.
‘It’s okay, buddy,’ he said. ‘You let it all out.’
He had to fend off his protocol chief with a fierce glare at one point, but most people were cool enough to give them some space, even in a very crowded reception room. These were all good people, thought Kip. Real people. The country could do no better than to entrust its future to them.
He felt ashamed about having to lie to them about what had happened in Texas, and the role his main fixer had played down there. But as he stood comforting Jed’s wife, and he thought of how badly things could’ve gone, James Kipper reconciled himself to the necessity of doing wrong for the greater good.
Jed Culver would have been proud of him.
TWO YEARS LATER
‘This is the first and final boarding call for all passengers travelling on Japan Airlines flight 16, Sydney to Tokyo, code shared with our One World partners British Airways and Qantas.’
‘At last,’ said Sofia as she gathered up her magazine and water bottle from the coffee table in the Qantas lounge, stuffing them into the small backpack she would take with her on the plane.
‘What, you’re that keen to be shot of us, are you, mate?’
‘Oh, piss off,’ she replied, but without malice. She had grown used to the Australian sense of humour. ‘You just can’t wait to get rid of me so you can get down the pub early.’
Her Echelon mentor repaid the quick comeback with a smile. ‘You know me too well, Mariela,’ he said, using her cover name. ‘Come on, I’ll walk you down to the gate. Reckon you’ve been just about my worst student ever. Wouldn’t surprise me if you got lost between here and the plane. Fuck knows what’s gonna happen when you get to Tokyo.’
‘Ha. I’ll be unpacking truly epic amounts of awesome and win, that’s what. Probably so much that they’ll just give me my black belt as soon as I turn up at the dojo.’
‘More like they’re gonna hand your arse to you on a sushi platter,’ he said.
‘They’re gonna try,’ she laughed. ‘Caitlin told me all about it.’
Nick Pappas, Echelon’s station chief in Sydney, nodded at that. ‘You’d do well to listen to her advice, Sofia.’
They walked out of the club lounge and joined the flow of foot traffic through Sydney’s international terminal towards the departure gate. Neither of them spoke again for a minute. After eighteen months of training at Echelon’s remote Snowy Mountains campus, Sofia Pieraro was entirely comfortable with the exchange of secrets that could be loaded into an unspoken conversation. She was also more familiar with the woman who had saved her from certain capture and execution in Texas. The woman she had possibly saved when she stormed into Blackstone’s residence, intending to die if it meant a chance to settle the blood debt he owed her.
Caitlin Monroe had been generous about that. Sofia knew her now as both a friend and, somewhat problematically, as an Echelon legend. Almost a figure of mythology. Her own controllers, her trainers and even Pappas - her last mentor and probably her first overwatch controller when she returned from Japan and began to earn her place in the organisation - they had all scoffed at the idea that she’d rescued the infamous Caitlin Monroe. ‘Just got in her fucking way, more likely,’ as Nick had put it. ‘Probably stopped her killing everyone five minutes earlier.’
Sofia had bristled at first. She was a proud if profoundly damaged young woman when they spirited her away from America, disappeared her as effectively as the Wave had taken hundreds of millions of souls five years earlier. She had done something as a mere girl that the mighty Echelon had dispatched and nearly lost its champion to achieve. She had laid a hard vengeance upon Jackson Blackstone for his crimes in Texas and New York.
Although, at the time, she hadn’t given a shit about anything but the blood on his hands from the murder of her family and, she’d presumed, her father. Nick Pappas had set her straight on that. She knew it was a purely calculated move by Echelon, assigning him to mentor her through reception and early training. He had witnessed the death of the man who actually had taken Papa’s life, and who had put poor Maive Aronson into a coma, where she still lay.
Sofia had needed many months to get past the idea that Blackstone had nothing to do with her father’s murder, that it had been this Cesky creature whom Papa had beaten down for causing trouble with Miss Julianne, all those years before in Acapulco. She still remembered very fondly the kind and pretty English lady from the yacht on which they’d all escaped la colapso. For a long time she had wanted to grow up to be just like her. And she still marvelled at the idea that Miss Julianne had killed this Parmenter, shot him and kicked him to death right in front of Pappas, before bringing down the man who had sent him and an unknown number of other assassins out into the world to exact his own petty revenge on those he thought had slighted him.
The idea that a friend of Papa’s, indeed the original saviour of the Pieraro clan, had exacted their revenge for her finally reconciled Sofia to letting go.
She would do now what Miguel Pieraro had always wanted. She would live, and eventually the family would grow again through her. But first she had a debt to pay off. Having been delivered from evil that night in Fort Hood, Sofia had been given to understand, and she accepted without demur, that a responsibility had been laid upon her by that salvation. The premise sat easily with a Catholic. She would devote this first part of her new life to the fight against evil, raking for it where it had always lain, in the hearts of men.
But not men like her father, or Nick Pappas, who guided her now through the crush of the terminal with a paternal hand on her shoulder. They had grown very close. The last time she had spoken with Caitlin, when her saviour had visited the campus in the Snowy Mountains, she’d told Sofia that would happen. Echelon was a family, said Agent Monroe, and in Pappas, of whom she knew and approved, Sofia could be assured that she had somebody she could trust as if he were her own father.
Nick would never replace her papa of course, but Caitlin had been right. As a mentor, he had taken on many of the responsibilities she now understood Miguel Pieraro had carried on his own from the day their family had been taken from them in Madison County. To keep her safe. To protect her from evil. And to prepare her to go out into the world and to fight the good fight.
Sofia was ready.
‘I’ll see you in a year,’ said Pappas, when they reached the gate. He put out his hand, rather formally and uncomfortably, as though forcing restraint on himself.
‘Not if I see you first,’ she replied, grinning and standing on tiptoe to quickly kiss him goodbye on the cheek.
FOUR YEARS LATER
The last refugee family departed from Melton Farm a week before Monique’s fifth birthday. Caitlin and Bret had planned to celebrate the occasion with a small party, but as so often happens with working parents, time got away from them. The animals, as always, needed tending. The Ministry of Resources chose that week to send through a survey team to inspect the progress of their latest GM oat crop. Monique was about to start her prep year of primary school. Her little brother, Harry, was acting out his separation anxieties during his first week at kindergarten. And Caitlin had no idea when she volunteered to sit on the village’s royal wedding committee that the meetings would prove as frustrating and nearly as murderous as the long search for Bilal Baumer had been. So in the end they marked the departure of their last American refugees with a glass of wine on the front porch at the end of a long summer’s day.