Page 10 of The Jackal

I'd seen Leonard Beasley. I couldn't have told you a word we said, or what the light was like, or how long we stood there. None of that survives. What I kept was the only thing worth keeping. He was all right. Better than all right. He was lit from somewhere I don't have language for, the way they all are once they've gone through, and he was going to be standing in his own house in Lincoln in some form his people would never see, with them, through the worst of what was coming. Through the flag and the folding of it. Through his mother's knees giving out at the graveside. Through all the long years his friends would spend not understanding—he'd be there. Fine. Waiting on the far side of a door they were all so afraid of.

That's the gift. Not that I get to say goodbye. That I get to come back and know, past any argument a living man could make, what's on the other side. I have stood at that door more times than I could remember, and I have never once seen a thing there worth being afraid of.

The living should be so lucky. Most of them spend their whole lives braced against what turns out to be a homecoming.

Charleston. That was all the pilot had given me when I boarded—a city, not a reason. I'd been to Charleston maybe twice in my life and thought nothing of it. Just another port. Another set of streets to learn and leave.

The plane shook, and I came the rest of the way awake.

We were descending. I knew it before any voice came over the cabin, the way you know weather in your inner ear—the pressure shifting, the engines pulling back. I reached over and lifted the shade.

Cloud. Nothing but cloud, gray and close and shot through with something darker. Then the plane dropped a few feet all at once and caught itself, and I understood we were coming down through real weather. Rain streaked the window sideways. Hard rain. The kind that doesn't fall, so much as collapse.

Just like Aleppo.

I'd left one rain and flown half the world to land in another. The cabin bucked, the wings finding and losing their footing in the dark air. I'm not a man who minds turbulence. The worst that happens is the door opens early, and I've made my peace with the door. I closed the shade. I closed my eyes. And I waited the way I wait for most things, without spending anything on it.

We touched down soft.

When I opened the shade again, we were on the ground and taxiing. There was a car waiting at the end of it.

A Rolls. Even through the rain I knew the shape—long and low and sure of itself, that grille like a held breath. A Spectre, unless I'd lost my eye, and I hadn't. I'm a car man.

It's a strange thing to be, in a life like mine. I almost never drive anything finer than a rental with a cracked dash and a light on the panel. I've made peace with that, too, but I never lost the appreciation. A thing built that well is a kind of prayer. Somebody bent their whole life around getting one curve exactly right. You can feel it standing still in the rain at the end of a runway. This one sat there getting hammered by the weather and looked like it was enjoying it.

We rolled toward it and stopped. A pilot came back, ducking under the cabin, and gave me an easy grin.

"Just a popup shower," he said. "It'll blow through in ten if you'd rather wait it out. Your ride's right outside, though."

"I'm fine."

He nodded like he'd known I'd say it but figured he'd offer. "Figured." He worked the door.

The stairs came down into the rain. I looked out toward the car, and there was a face I knew leaning against it.

Leaning against half a million dollars of British engineering in a downpour, getting soaked to the skin, arms crossed, head tipped back to let the rain hit his face like he'd ordered it special. Not a care in the world. There aren't many things that surprise me anymore—the threshold took most of my capacity for it along with the fear—but I'll admit the sight of my brother set me back on my heels for a second.

Brock.

I shouldered my pack and went down the stairs into it, and the rain hit me, too, warm for rain, Lowcountry-warm. I crossed the wet tarmac to my brother and took him in the way only I can take a man in.

Same Brock. Same slab of a man, same stillness under the easy posture, the kind that means a body knows exactly what it can do and doesn't need to prove it. But changed. There was something different in him, and the gift in me read it the way it reads everything—a lightness where there used to be a load.

The last time we'd sat down together, steins in front of us in a loud Munich hall a couple of years back, Brock had talked the way he fought. Serious. Closed. A man carrying the whole family on his back with no plan to set it down.

Good for him, I said to myself, like a prayer, because most of what I say to myself is.

We came together hard, the way brothers do, more collision than embrace, his hand cracking flat across my back. I held on a second longer than he expected and said the silent thanks I always say. For the reunion. For the breath still in him. For one more time getting to stand in front of a man I love and find him alive. I say thanks for everything. It's the other half of standing so close to the end of things—you stop taking the middle for granted.

"Look at you," Brock said into my shoulder. Then he let go, slapped me hard on the ass, and grinned. "Get in the car, you morbid sonofabitch."

I stowed my pack on the back seat and slid into the passenger side. The door shut behind me with a sound like a vault, and the rain went away. Gone. The whole storm reduced to a soft hush on the roof, the world held out at arm's length.

And the smell.

Leather, first, but not the leather you know. This was leather raised on better grass than I've ever eaten off of, tanned by hands that got paid like surgeons. Under it, wood. Real wood, oiled, warm. Under that, something I can only call the smell of money—which isn't cologne and isn't polish, but the absence of every cheap thing. Every plastic, every shortcut, scrubbed out until all that's left is the quiet of a space where nobody ever once had to make do.

I've smelled the inside of a lot of vehicles. Most of them smelled like men who didn't expect to live. This smelled like a man who expected to live forever and meant to do it comfortably.