Either you die, or you don’t.
Could there be a more straightforward truth in the universe? There is no ambiguity, no room for debate or dismissal. You’re dead, or you’re not. Even on a goddamn operating table where it’s always fifty-fifty, it remains the bottom line. You’re in, or you’re out.
It’s what I believed when I crashed through that crack in the ice. What had to be as I stared up at that frosted mantel, blue as the sky, ringed white with snow and tinged red from the streams of red existing the bullet holes in my chest—a cold, watery stone sealing a sodden grave.
I had to be dead. Dead as the winter woods around me —drowned in the murky depths of that frozen pond.
So why was I still thinking?
Why was I still gripped in the chaos of my final moments? I wondered if this was how things were. You transcend the threshold of everyday existence, body but not soul. Why did I continue to reason? From what stubborn reservoir of consciousness did I clamor for explanations and rationalizations as I floated in the cold void of that pond, face-up, my unblinking eyes calmly considering the past, present and future? Hell, what future does a dead man have?
Damn! The mistakes I made!
As I floated weightless, powerless, I saw her again. Chiefly those piercing green eyes shining out of the dark, beautiful but deadly. I should have killed her when I had the chance. Only planting a .45 in the head of a naked woman still wet with the love you shared wasn’t my style.
Ona knew that, knew it and used it.
She laughed at my weakness, a weakness she didn’t have. Alive or dead, I remembered every minute.
Ona rolled from our bed, unashamed of her splendid nakedness, unphased by my repressed intent. She dressed, lingering long and seductively over her nylons, smiling at me as Eve must have smiled at Adam.
“I will have to kill you one day,” she said.
“You’re going to try.”
“I will give you that, lover,” Ona returned as fresh lipstick wiped away the imprint of my lips. She blew me a kiss, her eyes reflecting her soulless resolve. I found myself laughing.
“Bed a killer, you get what you deserve,” I told her.
“Takes one to know one, darling.”
“Any idea how you’ll do it with half a world between us? The state department is pulling me out of this shithole in the morning. Your people, well, you haven’t discussed your plans.”
Ona pursed her mouth and titled her head.
“I don’t know. I’ll have to work on that. I’m only spontaneous when making love. Not when I kill.”
I grinned.
“I might do it from cover,” Ona continued. “I might walk right up to you on a busy street and put a single shell in your not-so-rotten heart.”
“Not so rotten?”
“It’s our profession darling.”
“I get it. Another time, another place.”
“Can I ask you one unprofessional question?” Ona asked. I nodded, and she smiled so sweet it could melt brick. “Right now, under your pillow. You have the gun and the opportunity. You know the fate you’ve invited, what my superiors will demand.”
“So why not avoid the inevitable and shoot you now?”
“Yes, why.”
“Because, like you said, it’s our profession, Ona. I don’t have an order to kill you. Besides, who the hell am I to refuse such an interesting challenge? Sure, I could shoot, walk out of here with your brains on the pillow and not look back. But we came here on the same assignment: stop the third-side chaos. It made sense for us to team up. We made a pact. If I don’t respect that, what kind of man am I?”
“You aren’t a man, my love. You’re an agent, the same as I am. Our lives are about chaos. Create or stop it. It’s what we do. Go against those instincts; well, it’s a mistake we may not live to regret.”
“The passion we sparked,” I answered. “Was that a mistake, or part of the chaos?”
Ona looked perplexed, as though no one had ever talked to her like that before.
“Don’t try to analyze it,” I told her. “It’s the animal in both of us. Something deep wants you to come after me. I get it. It’s interesting. You asked why don’t I kill you now before you can kill me? Well, maybe it’s because I’ve always been the hunter. Maybe I want the thrill of being the prey.”
“The rabbit that gets the fox?”
I laughed. Ona smiled.
She left, defying me to stop my murder.
The frozen hole above slowly shrunk and grew distant as I sifted down like so much silt in the water. I thought to try swimming upwards, but my limbs refused to respond. I floated rigid as a paid-off politician, my body dropping ever lower.
It made no sense, but my odd clarity of mind persisted. I came to wonder if perhaps nothing strange existed here at all. What I experienced was the natural transition from life to death. After all, I had never died before; how could I know?
It would be ironic if the last fleeting moments of life consisted solely of false hope and remorse —a slow descent into obscurity as sure as my descent into the dark depths of that pond.
I saw my past and my present. I had no future. The present had been a flash of violence, dropping me into this damned ice-covered pond with two bullets lodged in my heart—the frigid, stinging waters rushing in to fill my lungs. Floating face up with one long, last trickle of blood seeping from my chest and spreading in a red film under the icy shelf, I wondered if this was heaven or hell, momentary or eternal.
I noticed my spreading blood resembled an angel’s wings. My dead lips smiled.
Immersed in blackness, I resigned myself to the murky depths from which no human could or should rise. Then, without logical reason, my descent ceased. My body somehow righted, correcting itself until I floated erect as if treading water but without motion. My eyes blinked, my chest heaved. I sucked in air free of the inward rush of water. I touched a hand to the black swathe of my wound. No pain. The bleeding had stopped. My heart, though bullet pierced, pumped strong and steady.
Animated corpse or last lingering illusion? I lived. But how, why?
I thought of all the wrong turns, the bad choices, the mistakes that had piled one upon the other in my life. There were so many, but Ona had been the worst. The totality of that long journey crawled into focus: the job, the trail, the explosive climax. I drifted back . . .
Killing time in the city took on a new meaning for me.
I had no assignment and did not expect a new one for several weeks as Headquarters digested my report. Weeks became months. Summer became fall, became winter. I wondered about Ona’s promise, never dismissing or forgetting her ability to carry it out. Patience was a quality our governments looked for in their assassins.
Movies didn’t cut it for me; they were too claustrophobic. Neither did a football game or a similar open-air venue where Ona could pick me off at a distance, though I had the gut feeling she would opt for her walk-up and plug-my-ass scenario. When ready. That seemed more in character for her than an artistic shot from a distant blind.
She’d want me to know she’d won.
So I walked a lot of city streets where people crowded. Where the press of bodies offered her the thrill of the hunt, the challenge of the approach. I walked collar up, guard up. I kept my eyes open, and my senses keyed almost to a fever pitch. My gun sat parked in my right pocket, gripped and ready. It either came out to play or stayed hidden but always primed. No holster, no shoulder harness until this business ended, one way or the other.
Ours was a private war, with no bombs, cascading shells or planted mines. We played this game close to the vest, secretive and lethal. You stopped the other side because they represented evil. They returned the favor because their dossier labeled you the same. The semantics didn’t matter. We had jobs to do, and the results made you an asset or a failure. Effort counted for nothing.
Not much of a life, constantly looking over your shoulder, feeling eyes or imagining eyes lurking in every alley, peering down from every window, hiding behind every smile. Every passing nod could be a killer’s salute.
In the present scenario, who found who first was the fine line between success and failure. Who lived, and who died.
Alternatives? Hell, I could quit, retire, fade into obscurity, a worthless target. And do what? Run through my savings and find work flipping burgers?
Not a chance. Ona would find me there, too. She was that damn good. To live, I had to be better.
I don’t remember the exact day of the week. They blurred, but I remember getting hungry and opting for the first reasonable delicatessen passed. The place had an old-world feel. I liked that. Corned beef on rye reminded me of my childhood. It wasn’t a happy or satisfying youth, but I remember it as safe. I hadn’t felt safe since I stepped into the recruiting office and signed.
Talented, Intelligence material, they said. They trained me and deployed me. In a day and age where diplomats worked an unspoken underground of understanding, I became an outdated relic of a Cold War that ended with the internet, laptops, cell phones and diplomats in Cuba. Secrets, state or military, went as archaic as me. But terror, the need for chaos, ever bolder and more horrific, became the new threat. Online chatter was the new pipeline. That was when I got the call to kill. When all other options stood exhausted, my handlers gave the order. They called it an assassination. More semantics
The upshot? Rise to the top of your profession and become too dangerous for the other side to tolerate. Death became the cost of living, the price of doing business.
I sat and ate my sandwich, coat left on with collar up around my face, less revealing. Ten or twelve customers came and went, all commenting on the cold, all strangers, None of them Ona.
She hadn’t been any face anywhere since that day. Did I feel stupid or absurd? In my business, stupid is vain, and vanity gets you dead.
In the game, living or dying always depended on a certain allotment of luck. In this case, a dime. That’s all, just a dime. The last customer to leave dropped one, trying to fumble it into his pant pocket with his wooly gloves. As he stopped to retrieve it, I saw a face, furtive, foreign, out of place, exiting a rented car pulled to the curb. Rented? I saw the plates. I looked for the plates. He had his phone to his ear and cast a narrow-lidded glance towards the deli. He had dark eyes over a hawk nose and reddish lips that he licked continuously. A nervous tick, telling if you understood such things the way I did.
I paid my tab and got up, one hand in my overcoat pocket. Contact with the warm metal imbued me with a reassuring sensation. Would he move when I exited or wait, tailing me in search of a less public spot? I smiled, thinking, “I’m disappointed, Ona. You hired help. Did I scare you that badly?”
Maybe the higher-ups forbade her from leaving the bosom of the homeland. Or perhaps this play had nothing to do with Ona. I had lots of old scores out in the wild that needed settling.
I had the advantage. My adversary did not know I’d spotted him. If he decided to go cowboy, he’d be dead faster than a political promise.
I hit the sidewalk, my fingers gripping the butt of my .45, thumbing the hammer back to half-cock. I crossed the street, passing within inches of my mark. He ignored me and did it well, without a hint of recognition or interest.
“No amateur,” I acknowledged. “He’s no street thug. If he’s with Ona, she hired a pro. I guess I should be flattered.”
I decided to get this business over with fast. An alleyway loomed to my left. It was not a garbage lane but a small thoroughfare with a few off-street shops. It stood empty. I entered. He followed—a crowd of two.
Ten seconds counted out in precise, measured actions: a step, a natural swing of my arm inching the .45 free. The second step and the motions repeated. Step three, I turned, knelt and fired, the explosion like an eighteen-wheeler slamming into a passenger train. My action and timing were perfect for the man with red lips fired first, a silenced round tearing over my head. He had his try; he didn’t get another.
I stood and raced past the body, scarcely noticing the bloody hole between his eyes other than thinking it was a damn good shot. Behind me, the alleyway roared to life. Door opening, windows grinding up, questioning voices replacing the echo of my shot. I made the street and flagged a cab. I gave him my address and closed my eyes. I had no intention of writing a report, but I might deliver one in person if she showed.
“One out-of-town killer hired to take me out, taken out. Sent by the most beautiful killer I’d ever known who had figured it wrong, thinking me an easy target, assuming her worries died with me. I can’t kill her if I’m dead myself.”
As I lay in bed, the cloak of night dropping across my single window, a slow, insidious smile spread my lips.
“Hell,” I thought, “She’s here. My gut knows it. Tomorrow, we see who’s the rabbit and who’s the fox.”
Morning came, at least according to the clock on my nightstand. It never quite arrived outside my window.
The dark of the night stretched into a gloomy morning. The smell of approaching rain penetrated the thick layers of grime, soot and exhaust that made the city a city. I moved to the living room or the other room. I only had two rooms plus a studio kitchen. A distant rumble of thunder sounded its prelude to the storm.
“Perfect day to hunt a tigress.”
Coffee sufficed for breakfast. I showered and dressed, then caught a cab that barreled across town to a local diner to meet my handler. An unimpressive eatery quietly owned by the State where the puppet met the puppeteer to get his strings pulled and paperless instructions exchanged hands over warm bagels and java thick enough to stand a spoon upright. I ordered two coffees and let mine sit untouched. Five minutes later, he walked in. Not because I called or he called, but because, like the postman, bad news made their appointed rounds.
One corpse in an alley. One Bureau identification of a foreign asset. One phone call to the lone agent in the open market.
As men came, Ernie looked like a Brahma Bull. As a go-between, he worked like one. Barriers meant nothing. Walls were things to knock down, and rules were an inconvenience he preferred broken—by Ernie, not me. That took a leap of faith, but you didn’t argue with men who had no last name, like Ernie.
Ernie sat, nodded, inclined his massive chin, and chugged the coffee.
“I got this little voice in my head,” he began with the timber of rockslide. “Police reported a no ID stiff shot dead center forehead. I haven’t seen the ballistics, but that voice I mentioned says it matches your piece. You didn’t report it. My sources put a name to the face the cops didn’t. So, I know who he was. Tell me, why was he after you?”
“She sent him.”
“Ona?”
“Ona.”
“She’s here?”
“She’s here.”
“And since you figured that today was your time in the confessional, you decided to let it ride.”
I nodded. Ernie sighed, and the table moved.
“The Department figured as much. You know we want her, too.”
“Alive?”
“Not important. Removed from active duty will suffice.” Ernie leaned back slightly, giving me a critical once-over. “You could retire. Leave her to us.”
“The Department kicked that around for me before you got here. What was the vote?”
Ernie couldn’t help but grin.
“One holdout, six to one in favor of retiring you.”
With the gloves off, I took my swings.
“It’s like this, Ernie. I don’t have a contract; I don’t have a directive. But there’s a kill out there needing to happen. Me or her.”
“It’s not that simple.”
“No, it’s personal,” I answered. “You’re not a virgin, Ernie. When an agent starts killing that way, he’s finished as an asset. You can’t trust them to make objective decisions, right decisions. Killing has to be done cold, without emotion, with orders that back it up and keep you viable. You know that. You were in my shoes once.”
“That was a long time ago.”
“Same water running under the bridge now as then. Sure, the tools are more sophisticated and the players more educated, but the results are the same. Someone lives, and someone dies. So be honest, if I came to you with Ona and admitted it was personal, What would the vote be?”
“Unanimous. You were a loose cannon, undependable. Dangerous.”
“The same things that have crossed Ona’s mind. She’s counting on my having no backup.”
Ernie nodded. “I get it. That’s why Ona waited, why she dragged this out. She wanted orders to make the first move.”
“Balls bounced, Ernie. Do I have orders?”
Ernie nodded. “As noted, by one vote.”
“Yours?”
“Mine.”
“Love a democracy.”
Ernie fondled his coffee mug, his face contemplative.
“Things are changing. We both know it. The Cowboys are all dead, save you. Channels and permissions—hell, this job used to be exciting, now it’s excruciating.”
“You thinking of getting out.”
Ernie suddenly looked tired, a hint of age in his eyes I hadn’t seen before, or Ernie hid.
“I want you to kick the Department’s ass for me. I want to walk into that God damn chamber and shove Ona under a half-dozen too-long noses along with my resignation. Do we understand each other?”
I nodded, a sufficient acknowledgment for men of few words.
“There’s a paper exchange going down,” Ernie dove forward. “No one gives a damn what state secrets are being stolen and sold, but we do care about the thieves. Especially the ones playing it from our side.”
I grimaced. Even in my business, a traitor is a special kind of scum.
“This guy is big. Top shelf and untouchable.”
“Big enough to draw Ona across the pond?”
“Big enough. Ona is collecting for the other side. That’s why you got my vote.”
“You got this on a tip?”
“Yes.”
“Reliable,” said Ernie. “It’s not a setup.”
“Who?”
Ernie shook his head. “
“You can’t use him. He’s embedded deep and on the other side of the pond. A hint of exposure, and he’s dead.”
“A hint of exposure, and I’m dead. It occurred to you there could be more than one mole in your circle. The attempt yesterday. I wrote it off to Ona. Maybe the boy you want has sources, too, and Ona pushed him to add a little kick to the game. She wanted me drawn in. Ona has a special skill set.”
Ernie nodded. He got it.
“You’ve had to kill a lot of men in your time. If you’re right, you’ll have to kill a few more to come alive back from this one. You sure you’re up for it.”
“More than sure. It’s Ona. How do I get the details?”
“You shut up and listen.”
The Department had chased the deal for a month.
Across countries, oceans, down alleys, sewers and backroom trysts, a trail that now settled on my shoulders and ran down my back and dragged into two long days of stiff legs, cold hands, and near frost-bitten lips. That led to another twenty-four sleepless hours staked out within the frozen boundaries of Ernie’s Mr. Big country estate, a stubborn hunter in a barren duck blind.
But the anticipated delivery car finally entered the long, winding drive leading to the house. I edged along the estate’s massive pond, following, trying to keep iced-over snow from crunching under my feet. The world about me stood empty. Even the bugs preferred burrowed warmth to the exposed cold.
The car shut down. I waited as the rear occupant exited, marking the briefcase he carried—the time to make my move had come.
I’d done it a dozen times before. Take the courier out with one silenced shot to the center forehead. The driver followed the instant his head poked through the open door. A dash across the intervening mound of snowed-over grass and the briefcase, papers and the resulting celebrity became mine. Common sense would have me take the courier’s car and bolt. Destiny and brass balls had me retreating to the pond to wait. If the snitch had told the truth, Ona and two soldiers had holed up in the mansion for a week. That meant three targets at large, including Ona.
“All or nothing,” I told myself. “I miss, well, is there anything more fleeting than celebrity?”
My first action was opening the briefcase, dropping in a rock or two, and tossing the empty bag in the pond. The Department didn’t want the papers back. They wanted the copies kept from the other side. Mission accomplished. That only left part two of my wish list, Ona.
The door to the mansion edged open. I watched from the reeds within fifty feet as Ona emerged alone. Sensing the immediate danger, Ona bent low and used the car to cover her down the portico steps. I made myself ready. I removed the silencer. I wanted Ona to hear it coming.
I smiled as her head came out a fraction too far to check the seat for the briefcase. Just like that, I ended it. But loud as the bark of my gun sounded, it couldn’t cover the click of a cocked hammer behind me. Damn, I had gotten careless. It was the two unaccounted-for soldiers. Where they came from or how didn’t matter.
I stood and spun into a firestorm of singing shells: two men, shadows in commando black and armed with police-issued 9mm Speers. Ona died first, but not without knowing she had me too.
Even in that instant of chaos and death, I cursed myself for an idiot. I even regretted not taking Ernie up on retirement. Too late now.
A sudden surge of adrenaline hit me squarely between my eyes. I found myself laughing, thinking, two against one, hell, my kind of odds. My reflexes responded.
The assassins stood spaced ten feet apart, firing. I dropped, rolled and answered, grimly smiling as I caught one of the thugs squarely in the face as his partner put one in my chest. My target dropped like a safe out of a window. The second man kept firing but, perhaps a little shaken at the sight of his partner caving amongst the frost-stiffened reeds, missed. I didn’t.
I was hurt, but I had been hurt worse and survived. I rose, but my legs buckled, and my entire rocked to the impact of a second bullet. I stiffened, unable to move. The shot had come from the road. I turned, my face a mask of disbelief. With a goddamn bullet in the side of her head, lying flat upon the snow-flecked gravel, Ona squeezed round after round until the gun jammed and dropped from her lifeless fingers.
The pain mounting swift and sure, I stared at the hole blown through my jacket, staining my shirt, my blood oozing out and running down towards my belt. I tried to stagger away. Better I tried to sprout wings and fly.
I stumbled backward towards the pond. Blindness came upon the heels of the pain. The shore crumbled underfoot, the ice a slick side to oblivion. There was a moment of utter blackness, and then my body broke the ice. I splashed through the opened hole. The echo wending strangely to my ears, the proverbial tree in the forest, except I heard it clear as the woodman’s ax.
Then silence. Utter and complete. The world was eerily noiseless. Strange changes crept across my being. My skin felt dry as if I were not submerged or drowning. My mind functioned. My eyes saw; my ears heard.
Time spun out of control and out of context. Was this how the crossing happened? A moment of chaos in advance of what? Was this all some strange introduction to the afterlife? Fate’s final gift of reason, allowing a dying soul to wonder, what next?
How strange I felt, floating alive but lifeless, seeing the moonless night sky through a watery curtain I should never be able to drawback. Never escape. I laughed at how fast it had all transpired. How swift death had intruded into my earthly affairs. A great calm touched me. I reasoned that, more often than not, for people like me, death always came as a sudden and unwanted intrusion. One moment, we wrestle with the trials of love and hate, life and death, duty and conscience. We draw sides and make irrevocable decisions. The next, it all becomes someone else’s burden. It was their pain festering in the tallest buildings and deepest sewers. Their job was to clean the dirtiest streets until Death threw them upon that final highway I now traveled.
So there I floated, drifting across a watery bridge between life and death with the dawning realization I had not wholly stepped through that philosophical door. My body had passed, but my soul lingered. Consciousness bore me forward, beckoning me to hold on to my frail grip upon an earthly shell. But for what purpose? That truth sat as distant as the liquid lid of my tomb.
As I floated, detached, neither here nor there, my bizarre circumstance grew increasingly ordinary as if this were how it always happened. My eyes flickered with a new fire, a new curiosity that animated me and had me reaching out for some sign of what followed, a hint to my journey’s end.
“You’d like to know. We’d all like to know.”
My head turned to the voice, or so I believed it to be, for it was difficult to know if it was a voice or a thought. To all sides of me swam bodies, dozens, a growing crowd of faces pressing close, hideous faces distorted in the same death that had claimed me. I felt no fear, only interest. I began to recognize many among their number. The faces saw it and seemed to cheer. I started to call them out one by one.
“Williams, Barkley, Devon, Antonio . . .
I named them, and a dozen followed behind them, seeking recognition. One by one, I obliged each, for I saw them for who they were, victims from my past. Good kills, long rotted corpses animated again with some incomprehensible form of life.
Bullet-riddled, lawfully executed to save society the cost of a trial—if you subscribed to that dubious expression of justice. I had, with all my heart. I called out to the faces. I called them scum, useless lives with whom I had crossed orbits and taken down one way or another. It was such an odd mix, an odd presence, yet I felt it all quite natural now.
“So many,” said a voice beside me. Though frozen in limbo, I managed to turn.
“Ona!”
Ona grinned through the hole in her cheek slanted upwards towards her brain. I stared at her, doubtful of my sanity. Maybe I wasn’t dead yet; I was still dying. They say your life flashes before you, but this! I had no words. I floundered.
“Your arrogance is deserting you, my love,” Ona murmured. Why did she still look so calm, so beautiful? “But I understand. Down here, in the pond, we’re all equal. As is every man you killed come to pay their respects.”
My body jerked as though physically struck. The pond rippled. The ice moved, crackled and hissed, thickening as if it gained volume from each new corpse rising to face me. I felt a churning in the water, like a current of electricity, shocking me into reality. I shivered, wracked with bewilderment. Ona glowed, and her perfect features changed, taking on the pale blue hue of death. Those pouting lips, porcelain skin, and dark, sensuous eyes were leaving life without remorse. When her lips moved, it was as though she’d read my mind.
“How, Ona,” I demanded. My throat was hoarse. My body quaked. “Where are your kills? Where is your conscience? Where is your regret for those you betrayed and gunned down like so many clay pigeons?”
Her long, dead fingers reached out and seized me by the throat.
“I made my peace long ago. You didn’t. Did you think your damn self-serving style of law would pass without judgment? That there would be no accountability?”
Ona pressed forward and shook me. The corpses from my past stirred violently, circling me in aroused anger. The chaos surrounded me. Ona became the cold hands of Destiny closing over my soul.
One by one, each man in this school of dead humanity recited his quarrel with me. Fear and loathing torched the water, and the ice-bound surface roiled as if gripped by a great storm. When the parade had finished, the bodies drifted away, sinking deep into the depths of the black pool without comment until Ona and I remained alone—two murderers who had murdered each other.
“This pond,” said Ona, “is where the line gets drawn.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I think you do. This pond,” Ona said, waving a delicate hand without rippling the water an iota. “It’s not real. It’s the bridge to the afterlife. It’s you and I suspended between sea and sky, our metaphor of life and death.”
“Or heaven and hell?”
“As you will,” Ona returned with condescending eyes, lips that smiled but a mouth that failed to move. “No matter who we were or what we did, every soul here was part of our conscious choice. To pass on, you must take responsibility for your actions. No more justifications—these bodies around us are your final testimonial. They live in the hell you created, and now, that same hell awaits us.”
“Together?”
“If you wish it.”
“That other time, that other place, with you as my judge, is that it Ona?”
“Not me. That judgment comes from a far higher power. I am the vehicle you chose for your last chance.”
“Last chance at what?”
“Redemption, pardon for you soul, your sins. Peace. The only emotion left unsettled in your life, and the one you can’t fix with a gun.” Ona rolled her eyes toward the dark shelf of iced-over water, locking us into this damnable pond. “The one emotion that prevents us from rising.”
Slowly, a conceding smile stretched my lips. “So you believe there is still a chance?”
“It’s not what I believe. What do you believe?”
Ona closed her eyes and drifted into the inky depths. I watched her go and then sent a long, irreverent laugh in her wake as, with a final gasp of life and an unrepentant heart, I twisted, dove, and followed her to the chaos that awaited us at the bottom of the pond.
It was no mistake.