Persuader

we do?"
    "We'll have to recruit the Syrian."
    "Then we can't bust him."
    "You wanted two-for-one?" I said. "Can't have it. The Syrian is only doing his job. Can't fault him for that. Quinn is the bad guy here." She was quiet for a moment, a little disappointed. Then she shrugged.
    "OK," she said. "But how do we do it? The Syrian will just walk away from us. He's an embassy attaché. He's got diplomatic immunity." I smiled again. "Diplomatic immunity is just a sheet of paper from the State Department.
    The way I did it before was I got hold of the guy and told him to hold a sheet of paper up in front of his gut. Then I pulled my pistol out and asked him if he figured the paper was going to stop a bullet. He said I would get into trouble. I told him however much trouble I got into wasn't going to affect how slowly he bled to death."
    "And he saw it your way?" I nodded. "Played ball like Mickey Mantle." She went quiet again. Then she asked me the first of two questions that much later I wished I had answered differently.
    "Can we see each other socially?" she said.
    It was a private booth in a dark bar. She was cute as hell, and she was sitting there right next to me. I was a young man back then, and I thought I had all the time in the world.
    "You asking me on a date?" I said.
    "Yes," she said.
    I said nothing.
    "We've come a long way, baby," she said. Then she added, "Women, I mean," just in case I wasn't up-to-date with current cigarette advertising.
    I said nothing.
    "I know what I want," she said.
    I nodded. I believed her. And I believed in equality. I believed in it big time. Not long before that I had met a woman Air Force colonel who captained a B52 bomber and cruised the night skies with more explosive power aboard her single plane than all the bombs ever dropped in the whole of human history put together. I figured if she could be trusted with enough power to explode the planet, then Sergeant First Class Dominique Kohl could be trusted to figure out who she wanted to date.
    "So?" she said.
    Questions I wished I had answered differently.
    "No," I said.
    "Why not?"
    "Unprofessional," I said. "You shouldn't do it."
    "Why not?"
    "Because it'll put an asterisk next to your career," I said. "Because you're a talented person who can't get any higher than sergeant major without going to officer candidate school, so you'll go there, and you'll ace it, and you'll be a lieutenant colonel within ten years, because you deserve it, but everybody will be saying that you got it because you dated your captain way back when." She said nothing. Just called the waitress over and ordered us two beers. The room was getting hotter as it got more crowded. I took my jacket off, she took her jacket off. I was wearing an olive-drab T-shirt that had gotten small and thin and faded from being washed a thousand times. Her T-shirt was a boutique item. It was scooped a little lower at the neck than most T-shirts, and the sleeves were cut away at an angle so they rode up on the small deltoid muscles at the top of her arms. The fabric was snow white against her skin.
    And it was slightly translucent. I could see that she was wearing nothing underneath it.
    "Military life is full of sacrifices," I said, more to myself than to her.
    "I'll get over it," she said.
    Then she asked me the second question I wish I had answered differently.
    "Will you let me make the arrest?" she said.
    Ten years later I woke up alone in Duke's bed at six o'clock in the morning. His room was at the front of the house, so I had no view of the sea. I was looking west, at America.
    There was no morning sun. No long dawn shadows. Just dull gray light on the driveway, and the wall, and the granite landscape beyond. The wind was blowing in off the sea. I could see trees moving. I imagined black storm clouds behind me, way out over the Atlantic, moving fast toward the shore. I imagined sea birds fighting the turbulent air with their feathers whipped and ruffled by the gale. Day fifteen, starting out gray and cold and inhospitable, and likely to get worse.
    I showered, but I didn't shave. I dressed in more of Duke's black denim and laced my shoes and carried my jacket and my coat over my arm. Walked quietly down to the kitchen. The cook had already made coffee. She gave me a cup and I took it and sat at the table. She lifted a loaf of bread out of the freezer and put it in the microwave. I figured I would need to evacuate her, at some point before things turned unpleasant.