No Safe Country

The muzzle settled on my chest. I kept my hands open.

“Look at the boy behind me,” I told the officer, pitching it low so his radio wouldn't be the loudest voice in the room. “If you fire through me, there's nothing between him and your bullet. Let his mother move him before you decide what your radio means.”

He glanced past my shoulder. It wasn't much, but Major Maris Baptiste saw it.

“Corporal Grant. Muzzle down.” She stepped beside him, close enough to touch his sleeve. “That's my instruction. You heard the people refuse. You heard who threatened them afterward. Don't make me explain which of those things you witnessed.”

He swallowed. Felix Grant was the young corporal whose mother had called him about the banks, and the weapon didn't move.

“The ministry channel authenticated it, Major. It names the building. It names her.” His voice climbed and he dragged it back down. “If I ignore it and they cut the clinic off completely, what do I tell the people in there? Josiane's got a man on oxygen. I carried the tank across for her myself. He thanked me. He made me write my name on his cast so his granddaughter would know who to blame if the tank was empty.”

“You tell them the truth.” Her hand stayed on his sleeve. “You didn't surrender their neighbors to keep the lamps on.”

“That won't sound like much to a man on oxygen. It doesn't sound like much to me, Major, and I'm the one holding the gun.”

“No. It'll sound like the truth.” Baptiste didn't raise her voice. “Those are often different experiences, Felix. Look at me, not at her.”

The woman with the toy ferry pulled her son toward the kitchen. Rafi, the captain who'd met us at the airport, moved with them and kept his body between the boy and the doorway. Nomi stayed seated with her injured left leg up on a second chair and held out her hand.

“Come show me where the passengers sit, sweetheart. I'm very particular about passengers.” She kept her eyes on the boy, which meant she didn't have to look at the gun. “Your mother can tell me whether you're any good at taking instructions.”

“He isn't,” his mother managed from the kitchen doorway. “He climbed the harbor wall last week because I told him not to.”

“Then we'll get along.” Nomi patted the chair beside her. “I'm terrible at it too.”

Ilias Vale stood beside me, close enough that I felt him decide not to step in front of the pistol. We'd had that argument in more countries than I liked and at least one bed, and he'd lost it with good grace.

“So much for ordinary,” he murmured, too low for Grant. “I did promise you ordinary until the briefing.”

“The briefing's over. Adrienne Sorn is on every screen on this island telling people they need her permission to talk.” I didn't look away from the corporal. “I'm calling your promise kept on a technicality.”

“I'll accept a technicality. I've lived on them for years.” He still didn't move. “The side door's open. I can get the people at the table through it.”

“Tell them where you're taking them. Let them choose. Some of them will want to stay with the major, and that's theirs to decide.”

“I will.” His eyes went to the corporal's trigger finger and back to me. “And you tell me before you choose anything that leaves you in this room.”

“I'll tell you. You'll hate it, but I'll tell you.”

“Before, Sable. Not during.”

Nobody else in the room moved. The man from the harbor still had his cap crushed in both hands, and the cook stood in the kitchen doorway with a ladle she'd forgotten she was holding.

Leila Daniels moved her written record away from the handset as if it might be contagious. She was the Directorate officer who'd contested the order to kill Ilias, and she held her pen the way other people hold a badge.

“Her field warrant is suspended, Corporal. Her pistol is in police custody. She surrendered her credential, and I've got the receipt in this folder with both our signatures on it.” Daniels tapped the folder once. “Nothing you've received makes her armed. Nothing gives anyone consent to collect these people. If somebody on that channel wants to argue otherwise, they can send me a name I can write down.”

“Then why does it say she obstructed recovery?” The muzzle wavered a finger's width. “Why would it say that if she didn't?”

“Because I refused to sign for them.” I kept my hands where they were. “You can take my statement here. You can keep me where you can see me while they move. I won't enter a vehicle or a room whose destination nobody will name.”

Ilias looked at me. Before, not during. I held his eyes until he gave me the smallest nod.

“That's what I'm offering.” I turned my open palms a little toward him. “A statement in front of witnesses. Not a private bargain.”

“And if they tell me a statement isn't enough? They don't explain things on that channel, ma'am. They just say it again, louder.”

“Then they can come and tell me that in front of the same witnesses.” I let him hear that I wasn't angry with him. “People who mean what they're ordering don't usually mind being watched while they order it.”

Grant's pistol lowered enough for me to breathe properly. Somewhere under the table the boy had stopped crying and started asking Nomi questions about life jackets, and she was answering every one of them as if the gun had never been in the room.

The outer door struck its stop. A man in a gray contractor's jacket pushed past the guard, a short weapon held against his thigh. He looked at Grant's pistol, then at me, the way a supervisor looks at a shelf somebody has stocked in the wrong order.

“You were instructed to isolate the representative. Why is she still directing movement?” He made a disciplinary question sound routine. “Everyone away from the side exit. Face the wall.”

Baptiste put her palm out. “Identify your command and put that weapon on the floor. I have a room full of civilians and a child behind that counter. Nobody fires in here. Not my officer and not you.”

“Continuity security.” He didn't even look at her rank. “You've been superseded.”

“By a voice on your handset? I've been superseded by better than that. Put it down.”

He raised it toward Ilias at the side door.

I drove the table into his knees with my hip. The shot broke the glass cabinet behind Ilias. Grant seized the contractor's forearm while Baptiste caught his shoulder, and the three of them hit the doorframe together with the weapon trapped between their bodies.

“Kitchen!” I shouted over the ringing in my ears. “Get below the counter. Ilias, take them through.”

The boy screamed. His ferry clattered across the tiles toward the men's feet. I caught his mother by the back of her apron and pulled her behind the table before she could follow it, and my left shoulder burned where she grabbed my arm.

“Leave the toy,” I told her, close to her ear. “Look at him. He's with Rafi. He's looking for you, not the boat.”

Another shot struck the ceiling. Plaster came down over Grant's hair. Baptiste forced the contractor against the table edge while Grant tore the weapon out of his grip and stood there holding it as if it had bitten him.

“Hands behind you.” Baptiste was breathless and furious. “You fired in a room full of civilians. That authority's mine to question, not yours to claim.”

The other guard finally moved. He brought restraints, his face the color of the plaster, and fumbled the first cuff twice before it closed. Nobody in the room laughed at him.

The broken cabinet ticked as the last of its glass settled. Beyond the doorway, boots struck the paving in a close, organized rhythm.

“There's a whole team outside,” Grant warned. He was shaking now that the struggle had stopped. “Their van came through the barrier. Nothing else has been let through all day.”

“Then they can wait for an invitation.” Baptiste took the contractor's handset without touching its screen. “Close the door. Keep him here with the guard. Corporal, escort our witnesses through the rear stair. You're responsible for the people you can see.”

“He was going to shoot Mr. Vale.” Grant was talking to the weapon in his hand, not to her. “He just lifted it. Like it was a clipboard.”

“He was. And you put your hand on his arm instead of putting a bullet across a room with a child in it.” She looked at him until he looked back. “Remember which one you chose. You'll want to, later.”

“Major, are you staying?”

“I'm making sure they don't follow you straight down it. Somebody has to stand here and be the person they have to walk through, and it's going to be the one with the rank. Go.”

“I can hold the door with you,” I offered, already measuring the distance to it.

“You can't hold anything with that arm, you don't have a weapon, and I'm not giving you his.” Baptiste didn't turn around. “Your people are going downstairs. That's where you're useful.”

Daniels gathered her papers against her chest. “I'll stay with her. Two named officers and a detained armed man are harder to explain away than one. Take the people downstairs, Sable. Don't turn this into a competition about who stands closest to a gun.”

“I wasn't competing.” I could hear how much I sounded like a woman who had been. “I was standing near a door.”

“You were warming up.” She didn't look up from the folder. “I've read your file. I know what your shoulders do first.”

The kitchen smelled of onions and spilled coffee. People were already crowding the service door, the cook with her apron balled in her fists, the man from the harbor still holding his cap, and every one of them looked at Ilias before they looked at the stair. He'd told them where it went. I watched them choose it.

Ilias waited by the service door with the boy under one arm and Nomi's folded crutches in his other hand. Rafi supported Nomi as she stood, her weight on her good leg. She looked at the staircase, then at me, with the expression she usually saved for airline seating.

“We discussed the rude turn. We didn't discuss doing it with an audience. Tell me there's a chair at the bottom.”

“There'll be a chair. Lale's down there already. She'll have found one and told it off for being in the wrong place.”

“That's a promise you can keep. I like those. Try to make all your promises that size today, baby, it'll be good for my blood pressure.” She took Rafi's arm. “And if I fall, nobody writes it down.”

“I'll write it down,” Rafi told her, steadying her elbow without lifting it. “Only so I can say you got up.”

Below us the stair turned once and disappeared. The emergency lamps along it gave a thin yellow light that made everyone look ill, and somebody had wedged a fire extinguisher against the landing door so it couldn't swing shut behind us. I didn't ask who. Somebody had secured our exit without waiting for an order.

Grant held the fire door open. His pistol stayed pointed at the floor, and he kept glancing at it as if to check it was still obeying him.

“Ms. Voss,” he called after me. “Are you coming willingly?”

I took the crutches from Ilias with my right hand.

“I'm going downstairs to help my friend. You're welcome to walk beside me.”

Behind us, the television repeated my name as if saying it often enough would make it a crime.