Angel and the Assassin: Be Brave

and walked away.
    All the way back to London the next day she wouldn’t speak to me. I was really
    confused because we always played stupid jokes on each other and we never took it
    like this. I left her alone for a week and then went to her flat to see her. She let me in
    but she was still in a rotten mood. I didn’t have the sense or sensitivity to say I’m
    sorry and ask why she was so upset with me. She was in the kitchen making a cup of
    tea, and I sat in the living room wishing it would all just blow over so we could be
    best mates again. There was a framed photo on the coffee table. It had always been
    there, but I had never asked about who the bloke was in the picture with her. I never
    tended to ask people personal questions. I was always more interested in myself than
    them.
    “Who’s he?” I asked her when she brought the tea in.
    “My brother, Micah.”
    I asked if he was in the forces.
    She asked how I knew because he was wearing civvies in the picture. “The way
    he stands,” I said.

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    Fyn Alexander

    “Where is he, Afghanistan?”
    She said, “He died in the first Gulf War.”
    If I wasn’t clueless I would have said something comforting. But I was clueless
    so I said, “Did he get blown up?”
    “He blew himself up,” she said.
    I asked why he did that and she went ballistic.
    “He was a stupid fuck like you, that’s why. Always acting like an idiot. Always
    trying to be cleverer than everyone else. He thought he could play Russian roulette
    and win.”
    I asked her where and she said he and his mates got their hands on an old
    revolver and bullets in a village outside of Jahra. They had smoked up until they
    couldn’t think straight and then started playing with the gun. “Micah blew his
    fucking brains out. You’re just like him. He was always showing off.”
    “Why are you pissed off at me?” I asked.
    “Because you pretended to be dead and I thought you were dead for a minute,
    and I thought I’d lost another brother. It brought it all back.”
    “It wasn’t your fault he died, mate,” I said, but she was starting to cry and I
    was starting to panic because I had never seen her cry before.
    She said, “It was my fucking fault. I should have stopped him.”
    “How could you? You weren’t there,” I said.
    But she said, “I was there. He was my twin. We were eighteen years old when
    we signed up together and went to war together. I was playing the same stupid
    fucking game, Russian roulette in the desert on a boiling hot night when we were all
    off our fucking heads on dope.” She began to sob. It was the girliest thing she’d ever
    done.
    I didn’t know what to do until she leaned on me so I put my arm around her
    and we sat there until she stopped crying.
    “Don’t do stupid things. Don’t put your life in danger and don’t ever pretend to
    be dead. Got it?”
    “Got it,” I said. She didn’t take her head off my shoulder for ages and if I’d
    known then that that would be our last conversation, I would have held her tighter.

    * * *
    The next morning Kael met Conran at the Starbucks on Palmer Street.

    Conran was sitting alone at a table with two coffees in front of him. When Kael sat
    down, Conran passed him one and sipped his own coffee for a moment. With a
    small, surreptitious look around, he pulled a single sheet of paper from his pocket
    with three addresses scribbled on it in pencil. Kael reached for it, but Conran held
    on to it.

    Angel and the Assassin: Be Brave

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    “You cannot keep this. For one thing, it‟s in my handwriting. There are three
    addresses, and you have thirty seconds to memorize them.” He allowed Kael to take
    the sheet.
    Kael read the addresses silently, one after the next, utilizing his already
    excellent memory and the mnemonic devices he had been taught during training.
    When he handed the sheet back, he knew that ten years from now, he would
    remember every one of them perfectly.
    That done, he pulled the lid off his coffee and drank. “Thank you. I‟m going to
    leave tomorrow, first thing.”
    Conran leaned toward him, saying very quietly. “What do you plan to do with
    the child?”
    “I‟ll bring her back to London and then find out if she has any family she can
    return to.”
    “If not?”
    “I don‟t know. There must be someone in Russia missing her. She must have a
    mother. Or maybe she was from an orphanage. She can tell me what she
    remembers.”
    “She won‟t have a passport, and you plan to