Page 18

August 2015 · Post-AIIB Mission, Month 1

D ust had been half asleep since the 45-minute flight from Hanoi, and it was still another 90 minutes by car to Vinh Hy Bay and their final destination.

No one could blame him for drowsing. The flight over had been grueling: a 13-hour flight from Las Abras to Taipei, an overnight layover, and then the flight into Hanoi and the long taxi ride with Leta translating. They’d been incognito the entire time, handing over fake passports, constantly looking over their shoulders and greasing palms to make it through what felt like endless customs lines.

Add to that the lingering effects of Dust’s head injury and it made for several miserable, exhausting days of travel.

Or, at least, Carrow would’ve expected Dust to be miserable.

Instead, every time someone from The Company woke him, he seemed relieved all over again, like an amnesiac who had forgotten that they’d all forgiven him for what had transpired during those last days in Las Abras.

“Chào bu?i sáng, Dust,” Leta said, carding her hands through his hair. He’d fallen asleep in the back of the little bus with his feet in Carrow’s lap and his head in Leta’s. But now they’d arrived at their villa, and it was time to unpack.

“Hmmm,” he said, waking up slowly. A smile played over his lips, and he looked up at The Company’s second in command as if she were the most welcomed sight in the whole universe. He leaned into her touch and closed his eyes again. “Good morning to you, too.”

Carrow shot her an incredulous look.

“Don’t tell me you already taught him goddamn Vietnamese on the trip over.”

She shrugged, smiling.

“Maybe he’s more open to new languages when he’s half asleep.”

“I can hear you two, you know,” he said, eyes still closed. They both chuckled. “It wouldn’t hurt you to try and pick up a few of the local phrases, boss.”

“See?” Leta said, fanning out a hand.

“Don’t you gang up on me.”

“There’s at least one thing he needs to learn,” Dust said, looking up and smiling at Leta.

“What — how to ask for the check?” Carrow ventured.

Leta snorted.

“As if you resent picking up the bill,” she said. “What were you going to suggest, Dust?”

“Tên ti?ng Viet c?a t?i x?u.”

Leta laughed hard at that.

“Oh Christ. Do I even want to know what that translates to?” Carrow asked.

“It means ‘My Vietnamese is bad.’”

“OK. Well… fair enough,” Carrow said. “Say that one again. Slower, please.”

Leta — the only one of them fluent in Vietnamese — had made their travel arrangements from the safehouse in the middle of the first night that Dust was back.

Carrow had shocked them, pushing back through the porch door as suddenly as he had left them, barking at Herron to call up McBride and get her there, fast. They hadn’t even finished cleaning up from the dinner that had been interrupted.

And then The Company had seen who Carrow had with him.

Battered and bloodied. Against all odds.

Wayles had been the first to reach him, feeling every plane of Dust’s body with his hands as if he didn’t fully believe that his friend was back from the dead. Then he’d grabbed Dust hard and kissed him again and again — covering his face with kisses until Dust was laughing and clutching his ribs and begging the other man to stop.

Vashvi cried. Leta cried. Herron went so still and quiet that Carrow suspected they, too, were fighting tears.

In the quiet of the safehouse, they welcomed that ghost back into their midst.

They were angry and confused and betrayed and relieved.

That night, The Company had become a family again.

“Carrow was ready to fire us all before you came back,” Wayles had said, cutting his eyes at Carrow.

McBride had come and gone, patching Dust up, binding his ankle and wrist, giving him several stitches, a lot of antibiotics, and some painkillers .

Then they’d fed him what was left of the meal Leta made, plying him with anything they could find in the safehouse after he relayed to them the long, strange journey he’d been on since leaving the penthouse garage.

“I’ve changed my mind,” Carrow said, smoothly. “But there’s a new plan.”

He insisted that they take a vacation.

They’d go somewhere as remote as possible. They would take the cartel helicopter back to the penthouse, gather whatever they could, lock it down to the best of their abilities, and then they would find somewhere to lay low for a few months.

Carrow could quietly arrange repairs to the ruined home from wherever they went.

Let the cartel think that they’d won. Let the scene in Las Abras cool off.

Let someone else fix their penthouse while they were far out of the reach of their enemies.

The Company had earned a vacation, after all.

They could’ve just rented a few villas. But when Carrow had seen the roundabout way that visitors had to take to access Vinh Hy Bay — when he’d realized how easily defensible the Ninh Thuan coast would be — he’d told Leta to ask the concierge if they had any options for purchase.

Without another thought, he’d purchased The Company a furnished five-bedroom villa. Now, at least, they could say that they operated on two different continents.

The spot had something for all of them.

Leta, the polyglot, was happy to relax within the walls of the resort proper, soaking in all of the languages from visitors around the world. Wayles gravitated towards the white sand beaches. Vashvi seemed drawn to the fishing village down the road. Herron bartered for a sputtering motorcycle and raced it up the winding mountain roads.

But for Dust and Carrow, the backdrop didn’t seem to matter.

It was secure. There was no one who knew they were in Vinh Hy Village. They had paid people off along the entire route to the villas — and if anyone speaking English or Spanish came looking for them, Carrow would have word of it from a mile away.

They were safe, at least for the months that they had planned to stay.

The two of them fell into each other .

They were safe. They were whole

For the first week , Carrow and Dust barely left the villa.

Leta had acted as a tour guide for the rest of the company, adeptly showing them around the village, exploring the giant inland nature preserve, and indulging in the best that the real culture surrounding them had to offer.

But for Dust and Carrow, the draw lay within the villa.

The rest of The Company joked about the marathon sex they must be having. But in reality, for the first time, they were really learning about one another.

Dust told Carrow about Charlie Judge. He tried hard not to be ashamed, and the other man never made him feel as if he had anything to hide. They’d all learned what he was, and they’d all decided that his status as Dustin Wrenshall was more important.

He told Carrow about life on the Atlantic Coast, about living in a rotting bungalow and the pace of life in the sleepy town where he had grown up. Carrow, who had never talked about his childhood, opened up too. He’d grown up in small-town Nevada, and the man was fascinated by the idea of living somewhere with so much water. Dust talked about lush palm scrub and kudzu and cicadas. Carrow talked about sandstorms and huge cacti and holiday trips to Lake Tahoe, just he and his mom.

As boss and employee, they had crashed together without ever looking back.

As Ansel and Dust, they wanted to know everything. They wanted to build something on a foundation of truth. They were cautious and thorough and the two of them learned everything there was left to know.

“Earth to Ansel …”

Dust was staring at him. Carrow had no idea for how long.

A breeze wafted through the open window of their room and Carrow took a deep breath, appreciating the unfamiliar smells and the sound of water moving nearby.

Vashvi, Wayles, and Herron had ventured into town to wander the local markets. Leta was out swimming somewhere in the impossibly blue water. She’d never taken much interest in the penthouse pool, but the shallow, clear lagoons were a different story. She’d been enchanted since their arrival.

Everything was perfect there in the present and he chided himself for allowing his thoughts to drift to the past.

“Where’d you go?” Dust asked.

Carrow sighed and tried to decide how to answer that question.

“Back to that day after the day with Emerson,” he admitted, finally. Dust sighed and moved closer to him on top of the sheets.

“The day you thought I was dead? ”

Carrow nodded.

“Why is it bothering you?” he asked.

Carrow flopped to his stomach.

“I don’t know how to explain this to you. I spent decades before I met you under the assumption that I’d never be important to someone. When I thought you were gone, it was like things were falling into place.”

Dust dragged a hand down his back. The touch was warm. Grounding.

“When you were gone, it seemed like things were back to the way they should be.”

Dust hummed, thoughtfully and seemed to get lost in his own distant world then. Carrow let them lay like that, not knowing what else he could say to explain himself.

“A paradigm shift,” Dust said after a few moments of heavy silence.

“What do you mean?”

“It’s when your fundamental assumptions about life change — like a totally new approach to life.”

“I know what a paradigm shift is,” Carrow said, flashing Dust a crooked smile. “But what does it have to do with that day?”

“That was the last day you spent in your old paradigm. You were waiting for proof that you didn’t deserve to be loved — and then you had the proof. But that night, I came back. Irrefutable evidence that the old way you approached life was flawed. So… I forced a paradigm shift.”

“I guess,” Carrow said, not totally convinced, not sure what point Dust was getting at. “Is that supposed to help me get past the feeling that all of this is too good to be true?”

“Yes,” Dust said, firm. “Bad things are still going to happen. Jobs will keep going wrong, people will keep trying to kill us. But the baseline is good. The baseline is us. You can relax a little. ”

“Are you saying that for me or for you?” Carrow asked, raising an eyebrow.

“For both of us,” he said quickly. “I’ve felt like that too. But… we dodged the bullet. At least for now.”

Carrow turned then, gathering Dust up in his arms.

“I never thought the person who broke me would be the same person to bind me back up,” Carrow admitted. “Either way, I’m glad it was you.”

In their second week in the village, The Company had managed to drag Carrow and Dust out to the beach for a walk before dinner. Their collective veganism had been relaxed to include the seafood caught by the village surrounding them. Herron — who had been the instigator for an animal-free diet to begin with — was the first to begin talking about flexibility. They respected the work of the fishermen and wanted to participate in the local culinary traditions.

So, it was settled. Things caught by hand from the sea were back on the menu.

The sun was setting when the six friends walked up to a small crowd gathered on the shore. They were watching two men who had waded out into the bay. Excitement rippled through the crowd. The two young men were up to their chests, dragging something through the water.

“What’s going on?” Carrow asked Leta. She paused a moment to listen to the chatter.

“They’ve got a net,” she said finally.

“They’re seining,” Dust said, something a little bit like awe in his voice.

The men were straining on their way back to shore, dragging the long net between them. When they made it back to the beach, the crowd drew close around them. Dust broke away from The Company without looking back, and the villagers politely made a spot for him. They’d all squatted, talking excitedly about the wriggling fish and sea life there in the net. The men started sorting their catch.

Then, something odd happened.

Dust stepped between the fishermen. He reached down and with two hands he picked up a small fish. It was flopping, gasping, and its scaled body caught the dying sunlight, glimmering like jewels.

"Làm on. Nhìn kìa — nh?," Dust said, holding up the wriggling fish. He pantomimed throwing it out to the sea.

"What the hell is he doing?" Carrow asked, turning to Leta.

"He says that fish is small. He wants to throw it back."

The two men looked at each other.

"Vang, kh?ng sao," one answered, finally, smiling and shrugging.

Dust smiled back and nodded before lobbing the fish back into the bay.

Some of the villagers laughed. Others looked at him like he was crazy.

"The fisherman said 'whatever,'" Leta translated.

"B?n th?t t?t!" Dust said, hurriedly.

A child stepped forward. She squeezed in between Dust and the fishermen, reaching out to pick out her own little fish.

"Làm on?” she asked politely. The same fisherman laughed and nodded at her. She threw the fish back to the bay.

More of the gathered kids stepped forward, and soon there were many hands sorting through the catch, taking out everything that wasn’t good to eat and throwing it back into the water. Crabs and little eels, invertebrates that Carrow didn’t recognize, even clumps of seaweed .

By the time they were done sorting the contents of the net, the two fishermen were laughing, clapping Dust on the back with wet hands and speaking too fast for Leta to catch what they were saying. In his halting Vietnamese, Dust worked out a transaction, accepting a big fish wrapped in newsprint in exchange for some colorful bills.

He jogged back to the others, breathless and holding the big, fresh catch under one arm. His shirt was soaked and he stank like fish. He looked like he was having the time of his life.

“What was that about?” Leta asked. Carrow searched his face, puzzled by the extreme delight he seemed to have taken in sorting through the stinking fish and little animals.

“It was cruel to let everything in the net die when there were so many hands to help sort,” Dust said, hitching a shoulder. “I wanted to see what they caught. And then I wanted to put the castoffs back in the water, where they belonged.”

No one pushed him to explain further — and although he didn’t fully understand it, Carrow knew he’d just witnessed something more important than the sorting habits of a fishing village and a tourist.

When they got back to the villa, Carrow watched Dust clean the fish and filet it with something like reverence across his face.

After dinner , they returned to the beach for a walk, leaving the others in the house to clean up and play xiangqi.

“Do you want to know something?” Carrow asked him, fixing him with a strange look.

Dust nodded.

“I fell in love without any knowledge of the person you were before Dustin Wrenshall. I didn’t think it was possible to love you more than that — to love you as anyone but Dust.”

Carrow pulled him closer, looping him around the waist.

“But the impossible happened. I love you even more now that I understand where you came from.”

“It feels strange to let you know who I was,” Dust admitted, dropping his eyes to the sand.

“You’re you ,” Carrow said quickly. “Even when you were Charlie — you were always you. Dust isn’t some part you played. You know that, right?”

He caught Dust by the chin, eyes full of concern when Dust finally met them.

“I love every part of you,” Carrow said. “The shy kid who grew up in Georgia, the Abe agent who wanted to fix the world, and the cocky asshole who strode into my back booth and was flirting with me before I barely had time to think. I love you , Dust. All of you.”

“You’re sure about that?”

Carrow didn’t bother answering him. There in the moonlight, he held Dust for the millionth time, their bodies fitting together like they were made to do so, toes curling in the fine sand. He drew Dust into a kiss that somehow meant more than a kiss — a meeting of lips that felt like a promise, that spoke of a future together, that bound him together with Carrow through danger and safety, storms and calm seas.

There was still so much ahead of them. El Comandante and his cartel would be waiting for them back in Southern California. AIIB would be planning, undeterred by Emerson’s death and Dust’s defection. Both enemies were guaranteed to be waiting for them and better armed than before.

There on the beach, it didn’t matter what they faced. Together, they would thrive in chaos and they would thrive in peace. The Company would be by their sides. They could face impossible odds and emerge victorious — because their bond and their family was more important than where they came from, more important than their pasts.

It was the sweetest and best crime they’d ever pulled off.

The End