Page 42 of Assassin Anonymous

“Because I do,” she says. “Again, you boys love to brag. I’m good at listening.”

“Are you sure it’s safe?”

“I’m not a damsel.”

She takes her mug and turns to the sink, where she splashes in a little water to make it cool enough to drink. As she touches it to her lips and peeks at me from over the rim of the mug, I am struck by how incredibly attractive she is.

Not that I didn’t notice before. You always notice a woman like Astrid.

But there’s something about this moment, where we can breathe, where we can enjoy a drink together, where she’s putting me in my place, that I feel safe with her. I want to tell her the truth about me. I want to lie down with my head in her lap. I want to kiss her and feel something other than this mix of broken glass and battery acid in my stomach.

Which means what I really need is a meeting.

Twice now I went to speak and the Pale Horse’s voice came out. I’m slipping back into old patterns and routines. It doesn’t feel good.

That’s the thing I keep trying to convince myself.

And I’m doing a bad job at it, so I need a meeting.

“You do your thing, and I have some errands to run myself,” I tell her.

“I’ll text you when I’ve got something.”

“Ten-four,” I say, and go to the bedroom, where I pull out my phone. Still nothing from Kenji, which is making me nervous. I texted him the new number and figured he would have gotten back to me by now. Something is up. If the Russian was in Singapore, then he couldn’t be causing trouble back home. Anyway, Kenji can handle himself.

Still, I pop into the secure email account and leave a note in the drafts folder:

K, could use a check-in. M.

I include my new number, in case the other message didn’t come through. Then I hop onto the Via Maris and navigate to the discussion boards. This is where you go to get into long discussions about the pros and cons of bump stocks, or the best way to dissolve a body, or reviews on survival gear. Nearly all the forums are public, except a few, including Paper Cranes. I input the password and scroll through the list of cities until I land on London.

A thread pops up with just a username: 1DayUK. It’s otherwise closed to comments. I send a private message:

In town and HALTing.

HALT is the AA acronym for hungry, angry, lonely, and tired—because when those needs aren’t being met, we’re particularly susceptible to relapse. I hope they use the same acronyms over here, because I am currently all four of those things.

I jump in the shower and let the hot water sear my skin, then soap up and rinse the wound on my stomach; Astrid repatched it on the boat, and it doesn’t seem too bad. It hurts, but so does the rest of my body. I haven’t been this tired since Hell Week. Five days, twenty hours a day of PT, two hundred miles of running, four hours of sleep a night. Cold, sandy, hungry, and someone screaming in your face the whole time.

I’d trade that for this in a heartbeat.

Which is why I spent most of the trip here alternating between rest and trying to figure out the value of the notebook. The whole thing is written in code, but anyone with a bit of time and half a brain should be able to crack it. I remember most of it and it’s easy enough to eliminate the small-time jobs. Whoever’s doing this is a major player. Which leaves any number of government officials, oligarchs, oil-rich terrorists, and other sundry wealthy psychopaths.

A day later and I’ve got nothing that feels like a solid lead, which is so frustrating I want to scream, so it brings me a modicum of comfort that, when I get out of the shower and check my phone, there’s a meeting and an address waiting for me.

—

It’s a different church and a different basement, but cool water fills my veins as soon as my shoes squeak on the linoleum floor.

Some people think of recovery as a destination. Really, it’s a path you travel for the rest of your life, and the finish line is perpetually over the horizon. You have to learn to be happy with the journey. To be the journey.

As I enter the room, a bear of a man turns to me from a folding table that I expect to be holding coffee and donuts but is in fact holding scones and tea, which is kind of neat. He has sandy hair, a thick beard, and a face that’s taken a lot of punches.

“You the chap who messaged?” he asks, his working-class British accent so heavy it could sink in water. I wonder what brought him to this room; he doesn’t strike me as the MI6 type, more local leg-breaker.

“That’s me,” I tell him.

He opens his arms like he expects a hug, but I don’t know that he really wants one. “Welcome home, brother. American, yeah?”

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