He read the text again. “Need you.”
Yes you do, he thought. And I need the Legion. That’s what I need.
Jean-Jacques rubbed at the teardrop under his shirt, once, twice, a third time just because. Then he turned on the car and drove to the expressway, toward his cousin’s appeal.
CHAPTER 10
THE BLINDFOLD BROUGHT familiarity to Sebastian. He could see just enough through the threadbare. It didn’t feel quite natural, but it didn’t feel totally alien, either. Like riding a bike, if you’d feared and brooded over your last ride so much that frequent, crushing nightmares resulted from it, and you’d spent the years since in a drunken daze trying to ice the memories. Yes, he’d done this hostage thing before, and he’d done it for twenty-six days. He would survive this, as he had in Tripoli. He’d survived there, from having to shit into a cardboard box to the Palestinian chair exercise the guy with the asterisk scar liked putting him through until his muscles turned to jelly and he collapsed into his own filth. He would survive this. He would because he could. One second, one minute, one conversation at a time.
First things first, Sebastian told himself. Keep your leg from twitching.
His leg did not keep from twitching. He wished he could reach the box of Valium in his pocket, but somehow doubted the Home Guard or whoever had seized the ballroom would help with that.
As he sat on his knees against a back wall, a cable tie around his wrists and black sheer cut from pantyhose around his head, Sebastian’s mind drifted. He thought about the crippled vet he’d met earlier that night among all the parade soldiers, the one with the pretty wife. Could he, well. Could he still fuck? Speaking of, Mia and Pete, in Germany… he’d never have guessed. Was he even her type? She tended to be really picky. But I guess Pete’s everyone’s type, he thought.
Sebastian had a rotten habit of picturing the bedroom scenes of his friends.
His mind returned to his first captivity. The afternoon before his rescue, day 25—he’d kept track with floss shreds in his grooming kit—the insurgents had unbound him from the metal pipe in the basement and told him to enter the password for his laptop. They didn’t believe his story about being an intern with an identity crisis looking for his probably dead cousin’s body. Why would they? They were convinced he was an American spy, and thought something in the laptop might prove that. Sebastian inputted the password. Objecting would only heighten their suspicions. Besides, they had guns.
They looked through everything. They found his thesis on the Spanish Civil War, hapless American volunteers dying for someone else’s cause. They laughed as he tried to explain. They found old photographs from a school trip to Kurdistan, making fun of the Kurds as donkey people and wondering why he took so many shots of mountain roads. “If you’re in the ocean,” the one with the crooked smile asked, “do you take pictures of water?”
Then they found the video file labeled “Your_Eyes_Only.”
A fellow intern had made it for him before he flew to the Near East, with the express promise that he delete it. He hadn’t, of course. She’d done it because she thought it brave, his going to the war. He’d asked because he’d believed the same. Still, as he again watched his lady friend smile at the camera with a coy, light heart and then coo his name with something else, he wished more than anything that he’d listened to her. Because she’d done this for him, him alone, and sharing it with anyone was a violation beyond words, let alone sharing it with dirty, horny terrorists in a Tripoli basement who were breathing like asthmatics behind him as she reached down under her panties.
“Number one, sex,” the one with the crooked smile had told Sebastian, patting him on the back. They thought it was a moment of kinship, somehow. The intern/sort-of girlfriend was naked as the sun and touching herself at this point. “Sex, so good, number one. So good.” Then he made the fisting motion and said something in Arabic and the others laughed.
The venom of shame coursed through Sebastian, first in the basement and years later in the ballroom. Shame for not attacking the laughing Arabs. Shame for not being able to in the first place, not unless he wanted to turn departed by a bullet to the skull. Shame for even having the video, for being the type of person who wanted a video like that and asked for it from someone who cared about him, someone who trusted him. Shame at being impotent and virile all at once, yet not enough of either to do anything but sit there and watch others watch something that was supposed to be only for him.
The laptop was destroyed during the rescue the next day. Sebastian never mentioned it to his soon-to-be-ex sort-of girlfriend, even when they were still talking and trying to find in each other what had been lost. Superstitious as he was—though he liked to think it was more providential than that, because of God and stuff—he’d come to believe it ended because of the video. He’d failed her then by not protecting her at her most vulnerable, so he’d go on to fail her more after he returned home. If she hadn’t left him when she did, he’d just continue failing her again and again, like two star-crossed travelers stuck in a loop.
Ignoring her, and her life, and her hopes, and her ideas. Refusing to leave his apartment for anything but the laundromat and bars. To Sebastian’s mind, those weren’t reasons for why it ended, but the means. He’d wanted to explain to her about the video, because then maybe she’d understand like he did. But he never had. Whenever he’d opened his mouth to try, all that came out was garble.
* * *
Sebastian found out Mia was kneeling next to him in the ballroom when he whispered, “Mia, you there?” and the person to his right said “No,” but the person to his left said “Yeah.”
“Are you okay?”
“I am.” A couple seconds passed. “Are you?”
“Uh-huh.”
It seemed like as soon as the ballroom went dark, even before the cell phones got confiscated, they’d been surrounded by Home Guardsmen with rifle-lasers dancing on Pete. Well, men in Home Guard uniforms. Who knows who these jokers really are, Sebastian thought. Western separatists, maybe. Greek militants still angry about Crete accidentally getting nuked. Disgruntled employees who wanted a 401(k) plan. Homegrown jihadists? That was a terrifying idea. Regardless, Pete had been marched off and everyone else ordered to remain still and silent.
Some were better at it than others.
Sebastian swallowed to wet his throat. “Mia,” he whispered again.
“Yes.”
It wasn’t the right time for this question but he’d been wanting to ask it since learning he hadn’t been the Rangers’ main priority. “Did you know it was me there? In Tripoli.”
Seconds passed, then: “Why do you think I volunteered for it?”
“Thank you.”
“You’re welcome. Now. Sshh.”
It was good advice, Sebastian knew. And he believed her. Not just cause she was a good friend—though she is, he reminded himself. But because the alternative defied the odds of chance. She’d come for him, on her helo, freely, he thought. Which meant something he knew about that day was still true.
She’d lost her leg that day. Because of that choice, because of him.