Page 9 of The Company We Keep

"Because you started to love me, Charlie," Gordon had said.

Dust had protested and railed against the break and screamed and cried and... realized, through it all, that Gordon was right.

The break was for the best. They kept it amicable.

After that, Dustin tried the dim route. That was much worse.

He didn't resent the men and women who he took out, who took him out. He didn't dislike the variety of physical affection he gleaned from the encounters — from platonicshared sleeping spaces to marathon sex. It was all good stress relief, all a welcomed change, and none of it took a toll on him the way that some of his classmates' relaxation methods tended to.

(Abe did a good job of looking the other way when it came to drug use. You could have students who were smart, endlessly productive, and casual drug users, or you could have students who were smart, exhausted to the point of fucking up, but completely clean. Abe chose the former.)

In the end, though, Dust realized he was drifting through one-night stands, no longer interested in second dates or conversations with people who couldn't relate to him on any level.

No one was driven. No one understood.

And so just as some of his classmates would hit a breaking point with their speed use, their coke consumption, so did Dust hit rock bottom with his casual hookups.

He was done. His work with Abe was more important.

Besides: there was no curiosity to be satisfied with sex anymore. The options just presented variations on a theme. Why continue to explore something that could be so adequately satisfied alone in his apartment — especially when the dating alternative was such a time suck?

When the plan toget Dust inside The Company was still gelling, Caroline Leiby brought him a fat binder. She’d been the first person he’d had contact with at the agency more than a decade ago, and she’d proven to be a powerful ally.

She wanted him undercover from the day she met him.

He resisted, working several other operations, getting into theIntelligencewing of AIIB rather than its thrilling, active brother:Investigation. But in the end, the desk jobs andsurveillance felt like a dalliance. He was born for boots-on-the-ground work. Leiby had been right.

"Get intimate with it by Friday," she had said, dropping the binder and turning to go as if she hadn’t just delivered confirmation of the life-changing assignment Dust had spent the past several years hanging his hopes and dreams on.

"Hey — Lee –" Dust said. "This what I think it is?"

Leiby turned, smiling because she was unable to continue pretending like it was just another day for them. She nodded. Dust's future sprawled out before him.

He spent the next several days with the binder, reading it and then learning it and then incorporating it into himself like a new genetic code that could rewrite his DNA.

There they finally were: The Company.

With any luck he’d be spending a sizable chunk of the near future with them. Abe would take care of Nick Short, and when he was out of The Company’s good graces, Charlie Judge would die with him.

For a time, at least.

The binder felt sometimes like a yearbook, sometimes like a roadmap, and always like a love letter to his future. He knew snippets about most of them: Leta Wright with her perfect dark countenance and unflappable smile like she lived perpetually in the calm center of the Bermuda Triangle, Russell Wayles with his toothy grin and impossibly light green irises, and Herron Dent, who Abe had been following for nearly a decade.

But there were surprises tucked into those pages, too. The pages gave him Herron Dent'sreal face— the proof that there had always been a real person behind that eerie mask. They gave him the history of Vashvi Dhillon, which was less exotic than Dust had always imagined but no less interesting for it.

Leta, Wayles, Herron, Vashvi — these were the pieces hefound himself running through his mind until he dreamed about the four of them every night.

For the first 48 hours, he only skimmed the pages about A. R. Carrow. He couldn't find a reason why he wasn't ready to unlock that door. Superstition, maybe, or fear — which was understandable. Because — while he knew the rest of the crew could maim, hurt, or kill him — they only felt like warriors on a battlefield.

Carrow was an atom bomb.

Carrow could erase him. The boss didn't leave loose ends. He left scorched earth.

2

April 2014 • AIIB Mission Month -2

Losing track of Nick Short during a heist was so familiar that Carrow didn't waste his time on it that day. It was like a weeks-old mosquito bite that never quite healed: annoying, but nothing to worry about.

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