Killers of a Certain Age(6)

Helen is already buckled in, unzipping her suit to check on the dog, who is barking furiously but apparently unharmed by his adventure. Nat fusses over him while Mary Alice sits back, eyes closed as if in prayer. The men will be collected by a second, smaller chopper, and they will all gather for a post-mission debriefing at an undisclosed location outside of Paris. They will have to go over every minute of the mission in painstaking detail, outlining their mistakes and scrutinizing every decision for how to improve. But for now, they are safe. The first mission is finished with no casualties beyond Nat’s cracked rib and the blood still caked in Mary Alice’s hair.

Without a word, Halliday gestures and Billie unstraps the case, passing it over with the hand still attached, the blood drained away, leaving it pale and limp, like a glove full of vanilla pudding. Halliday ignores the hand. She produces a tool and opens the case, extracting a file. For the next few minutes, she skims the material inside, allowing herself one very small smile as she finishes.

“Good work, Miss Webster,” she says in her clipped accent.

Billie gives her a nod and, without warning, rolls over onto all fours to vomit.

It is the greatest day of her life.

So far.





CHAPTER TWO



Trouble has smelled like a lot of things in my life. A job gone wrong. A one-way street I never should have turned down. A man in faded Levi’s with a smile that broke my heart half a dozen times and loved it back together again. On the Amphitrite, it smelled like gardenias and money. The boat was a beauty, the latest luxury offering from a company that specialized in mini-liners—fifty staterooms including a pair of owners’ suites and a crew member for each of us. The brochures described everything as custom-made or handcrafted or artisanal. They had sent each of us a packet half as thick as a vintage phone book, stuffed with glossy photographs and maps and a welcome letter from the captain on embossed letterhead heavier than a wedding invitation. Everything from the menus for the three on-board restaurants (“featuring the freshest locally sourced seafood and organic, sustainably grown fruits”) to the excursion brochures (“glide above the reefs in your own mini-submersible”) had been chosen to make us feel welcome and pampered. Tucked into the packet was a personalized letter written in turquoise ink, the i’s dotted with tiny starfish.


Dear Mary Alice, Helen, Natalie, and Billie,


It is my pleasure to welcome you aboard the Amphitrite! We understand this is a special occasion for the four of you. Happy retirement! Forty years at the same job is a tremendous accomplishment, and we are so happy you are celebrating this event with us. As you turn the page to the new chapter of your lives, please let us know if there is anything we can do to enhance your cruising experience!


Cordially,

Heather Fanning

Executive Guest Services Coordinator

#retirement #luxurycruises #amphitrite



I shook my head. Forty years on one of the most elite assassin squads on earth and it finished like this, with a free cruise and a bouncy letter from a girl who signed her letters with hashtags.

If you expect me to tell you the name of the organization I work for, stop reading right now. It’s a secret—so secret, in fact, that those of us who work there never use the official title. We always refer to it as “the Museum” and we use museum nomenclature to make it a little less obvious to anybody listening in that our job is to eliminate people who need killing.

The men and women who established the Museum were an international conglomeration of former SOE and OSS agents, French, Polish, and Dutch Resistance, and a few of the leftover Monuments Men who had secured the art collections of Europe while stormtroopers stomped their way around the continent. Basically, everyone who wanted to go hunting Nazis and didn’t have a mandate from their government got together and decided to write their own.

They were the oddballs and eccentrics, the quirky ones who made brilliant leaps in logic and didn’t so much go by the book as fling it out the window. They hunted former members of the Third Reich—everyone from Hitler’s shoeshine boy to Treblinka guards. Through Brazilian jungles, Buenos Aires whorehouses, and villas outside Pretoria, they rode down every last one they could find. When they’d exhausted their list of Nazis to bring to justice, they had turned to others—dictators, arms dealers, drug smugglers, and sex traffickers.

It was the Wild West with no law but natural justice, and I suppose those were the good old days. Not entirely, of course. The Museum, for all its high-minded principles, has been a little slow on social justice. I’ve had my ass grabbed more times than I care to count, and there was exactly one Black field agent in the first twelve years I worked for them. But at least when we joined, there was a hum in the air, the electric fizz of anticipation, of knowing you were doing something worthwhile and doing it better than anybody else.

That’s how they got me, of course. They found me in college with my jeans embroidered with peace signs and they dangled the bait of changing history. I was recruited in late 1978 along with Mary Alice, Helen, and Natalie as part of Project Sphinx, the first all-female squad. I put down my protest signs and stamped out my burning bra and let them make a killer out of me.

Helen doesn’t like that word, but I always ask her, Why bother with anything else? It’s simple and true. We kill for a living. A good living, in case you’re interested, with a solid base salary, bonuses, and benefits—including full dental and a pension. And we kill who we’re told and only who we’re told. Let’s get that clear right up front. We’re not sociopaths. We don’t murder for fun or for free. We kill to get paid. Now, Mary Alice loves her idealism and still clings to the notion of us murdering people who need killing in order to improve society. That was the official line when we were recruited, and even though times have changed—more computers and pencil pushers doing cost-benefit analyses—that part is not negotiable. We only kill people who are specifically targeted by the Museum for extermination and we don’t freelance, ever. We don’t murder on our days off any more than a thoracic surgeon will cut your rib cage open for kicks. We have standards.