She opened her hand, unfolded the sunglasses and then, using both hands, put them back on her face. Her mouth was closed, still angry.
"I am not a monster, I am not some freak who can only achieve climax through another's pain or death. I am – I was- an assassin. Everyone who has died by my hand, they died for a very specific reason, either because they were the mark, because they led to the mark, or because they were trying to kill me."
She turned her head to see my expression, but I kept my eyes on the divers in the water.
"I do not torture animals," she said.
We watched the skin divers in the water for a while as they surfaced and dove and surfaced again.
"Why does Oxford want to kill you?" I asked her.
"Because of you," she said, and turned and walked away, calling for Miata to follow her.
"Bullshit," I told the Caribbean.
"I should have killed you," Drama said. "I should have gone through the door after the explosion, and shot you, and Dale Matsui, and Pugh."
"You would have died, too."
"Yes. But that should not have stopped me."
We had moved back into the house, into the kitchen, which was a narrow rectangle with the same earth-toned tile that covered the second floor. Drama was washing the dishes from breakfast, dumping the grounds from the French press into a trash can beneath the double sink. For a moment, I flashed on her as a kind of lethal Donna Reed, and the mental image had me grinning without meaning to.
She saw it and frowned. "When I was younger, Atticus, when I was training, death did not frighten me. Now it does. I knew if I went through the door, if I finished the job and killed you and Pugh, I would die as a result. And I wanted to live. So I ran."
A stainless steel bowl was on the floor by her feet, and she picked it up, then filled it with fresh water from the tap. When she bent to grab it, the muscles in her legs were taut and defined. I realized that she shaved her legs and pits, found that surprising. The bullet she'd taken to the thigh was a through-and-through, and it looked like she'd been lucky, that the round hadn't expanded as it passed through her body. It made me remember when I'd been shot.
"Then your friend, Chris Havel, she writes this book," Drama said. "I should have stopped her. I didn't. I should have come back and killed her, and you, and Dale, and Natalie, and Corry. I should have made the statement."
"Why didn't you?" I asked.
She moved her eyes from me, looking out the window. The breeze had picked up, and shadows came and went as the branches randomly blocked the sunlight. After a minute, I realized she wasn't going to answer.
"Why did you tell me where you live?" I asked.
Still no reply.
"Alena," I said.
Her head whipped around, and there was the hint of distraction in her look, as if I'd caught her attention by accident, as if the usage of the name amused her. Her lips came together, the corner of her mouth rose briefly.
"You will laugh," she said. "I didn't like Pugh, but I saw things in you that I saw in myself. You understand this, I know you do, it happens in your profession as well. The sense of artificial intimacy. I watched you for several weeks, and although I knew it was false, I felt it anyway. So I wanted to give you something that was special to me, something that no one else had. I gave you my home."
I nodded, thinking that I should be surprised, and finding that I wasn't. What she was describing wasn't that unique a phenomenon. There was a reason, after all, that so many bodyguards ended up sleeping with, romancing, or in some cases, marrying their principals. The nature of the relationship is intimate and high stress, and in such an environment connections between individuals develop in unexpected ways and with an alarming intensity. More than once I'd had a principal indicate a willingness to let our relationship stray from professional to personal, and I knew that Natalie had experienced the same thing with an even greater frequency. What Drama did and what I did were different sides of the same coin.
I thought about the last night I'd spent with Bridgett, the argument we'd had.
Alena took a blue-and-white dish towel from the hook by the sink. She started drying the dishes.
"By letting Havel publish her book, I made myself a target," she said. "There is too much truth in it. It generates interest, attention, pressure. And it marks me specifically. An assassin is supposed to be invisible. I let Havel inform the world about me."
"And Oxford's been hired to keep the world from learning anything more?"
"Oxford will try to discredit Havel, and possibly you as well. He will most certainly destroy me."
"So it's in my best interest to help you?"
"It is in your best interest to keep Oxford from succeeding. Keeping me alive is only part of that." She assembled the now clean and dry French press and folded the towel. "You believe I should die?"
"I believe you should be punished for what you've done," I answered. "Thirty-seven people are dead because of you, eleven of them murdered to line your own pockets."
"General Augustus Ndanga," she said.
"Who?"
"General Augustus Albertus Usuf Kiwane Ndanga, Uganda, four years ago. I shot him through the head at six hundred and forty meters."
"Nice shot."
She moved closer, leaning on the counter to meet my eyes. "Ndanga would enter villages with his army and murder all the men, even the boys, even the infant boys. He would kill the women, even the little girls, but those who could bear children, he would rape them repeatedly, until he was certain he had made them pregnant. I killed him. I should die for that?"
"Depends who hired you for the job."
"The CIA paid me four million dollars for his death," she replied. "You have killed. You must understand."
"Yes. I have killed. But I have never committed murder. If a man comes at my principal, I'll draw my gun not to kill him but to stop him, and there is a world of difference in that. For me a gun is a tool, used to force an assailant to stop their assault. For you, it's a means of ending a life as efficiently as possible."
"You shot Erika Wyatt's mother, four times. One bullet would have stopped her."
"One bullet might have stopped her," I said, more harshly than I intended. "She had a gun and I had to be sure."
"And being sure, that is more or less a reason to kill than organizing the rape of a whole people?"
"I'm not about to argue the necessity of Hitter's death, or Stalin's. We had this conversation the first time we met. What I do and what you do are very different."
She stared at me for a moment longer, then moved away from the counter, back to the sink. I'd seen nothing in her eyes. She hung the dish towel on the hook.
"Has it not occurred to you that I didn't kill anyone when I took Lady Ainsley-Hunter from you?" she asked. "That I did not kill you, or Natalie Trent, or Corry Herrera? That I did not kill Bridgett Logan or Dale Matsui or Robert Moore?"
"It has occurred to me. And I think the only reason you didn't is because you want something from me, and you know that if you'd killed any of them, I'd make it my mission in life to…" and I shut up, because I realized what it was I was about to say.
She didn't press it, just opened the refrigerator and, after viewing the contents, asked me if I wanted fish for lunch.
We ate on the patio, grilled yellowtail with thick slices of pineapple. It was the kind of lunch I'd have chased with a beer if she'd had any, but there was no alcohol in the house, so we both drank water. The Walther stayed by my plate, but I was getting tired of lugging it around, which I supposed was one of the things she'd thought would happen.
She'd put music on her little stereo before taking her seat, and I could hear the Beatles singing softly inside. The album was Rubber Soul.
"I couldn't simply approach you in New York and ask to hire you," Alena said. "You understand why I had to do it this way."