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“Salud!”
Jonathan toasts Teddy and tips the champagne flute back.
He knows what they’re doing, of course. The drinks, the drugs; he’s seen it before.
He’s done it before, to Freddy Hamid 10 years ago.
The right mix of alcohol and stimulants will make people feel invincible, euphoric. Then a downer will be introduced, making the target lethargic and relaxed. It’ll lower their inhibitions, blur their focus, and make them talk. With the right approach, the right questions, it’ll make them give up their deepest secrets.
Jonathan knows this.
He has a lot of secrets that Teddy cannot know.
He still chugs the champagne, still snorts the lines of coke. He has to. Matthew Ellis, the rash risk taker and alcoholic adrenaline seeker he’s pretending to be, would not have refused, and Jonathan cannot afford to raise suspicion.
He needs Teddy to trust him.
So he stumbles, playing up the effect it’s having on him while pouring out a drink.
He keeps a tally on how much he’s drinking, and tries to keep track of how much crack they’re giving him.
He checks in on his mental faculties, gauging how close he is to the very fine line between how much he can handle, and how much he’ll need to take to convince them.
He’s a big guy. He’s got muscle mass and tolerance built over time. He even loaded up on carbs before coming here, suspecting there would be alcohol involved.
He didn't account for his own memories coming to haunt him.
When the night starts to turn fuzzy at the edges, he knows they must have given him the downer. It must have been that last glass of champagne, the one Teddy where wouldn't let him tip some out for the dead. The realisation is muddled by the swimming recollection of Teddy's dark eyes, his warmth against Jonathan's back as he urged him to drink it all, his lips against Jonathan's sweaty forehead afterwards.
Jonathan stumbles, this time for real, reaches for the back of a lounge chair to catch himself—and misses, nearly tumbling face first to the ground. With one hand against the decking and the other in a white-knuckled grip on the chair, he tries to steady himself.
The world is moving too fast, then too slow.
The music sounds distant, yet echoes in his skull.
He squeezes his eyes shut, shakes his head.
That’s it. This is the line.
There’s no urgency behind the thought, all anxieties dampened by the drugs. Years of training is what allows him to act on it at all.
He takes a deep breath and looks up, the designer villa a blur around him. Through the shapes of light and dark, he makes out Roxana and Teddy, moving in slow circles together, their images overlapping and shifting out of place until all he sees are dark, dark eyes…
… dark eyes smiling at him, her body stretching languidly among the white sheets…
“You have many different voices, Mr Pine…”
… dark eyes surrounded by bruising, pain in her face…
“I want one of your many selves to sleep with me tonight. You can choose which one.”
… dark eyes open, unseeing, blood spreading across the floor, white sheet billowing as they spread it over her…
He shakes his head sharply, drags in a ragged breath.
No. Not now.
Allowing those memories to come to the surface is too dangerous right now, when he is addled and a slip up would be catastrophic.
Pushing himself up takes more effort than it should.
Roxana is there, suddenly nearby, her dark eyes tearing at his heart. He reaches out, and she staggers under his weight when his knees buckle.
“Help me,” he whispers.
Then his weight shifts off balance and the world tilts on its axis.
He plunges into water lit by red lights, and thinks blood.
They’re there, waiting for him.
Sophie, Marilyn, Jed, Danny… the innocent lives he ruined. The collateral that had to suffer, that he used, as he did the right thing.
Marilyn, who came to him for dreams of escape, who he embraced to make sure there’d be someone to find the bloody remains he was going to leave behind…
Danny, just a sweet child, ripped from his family and left to turn into an angry, young man no one seemed to care to keep close…
Jed, shivering and bruised, a haunted look in her eyes and her voice cracked from screaming after Frisky tortured her…
And Sophie, Sophie who would still be alive if Jonathan hadn’t given those papers to the ambassador, who smiled and said she understood why he did it…
Part of him knows that he’s drunk and drugged, that he’s in a pool and needs to get up, that his oxygen is quickly running out–
He doesn’t move. He hears their voices echo in his ears, feels as if they’re reaching for him from the bottom of the pool.
Take me…
Hands grab him—and pull him up.
He thinks about fighting, about struggling against them, but the thought is distant, fleeting… gone. Instead he lies limp in the shallow waters as they pull him up, hands holding him… patting his cheek… stroking his wet hair from his forehead… embracing him…
The gentle touch pulls him from the depths and quiets the memories.
“Matthew? Matthew? Are you okay?”
Matthew?
“Who are you, Matthew?”
A recollection reaches him through the bloodied waters of drugs and recollections…
“So who am I?”
“Matthew Ellis.”
Banker… a very wealthy man with a penchant for risk… HongKong… Swiss investment outfit…
“Why are you really here?”
He opens his eyes, and finds Teddy leaning over him. Teddy, the arms dealer whose operation Jonathan is infiltrating. Teddy, who is holding him so gently, thumb brushing Jonathan’s cheek. It’s all a ruse, of course; Jonathan knows this, just like he knew what the drugs and the drinks would do.
“You can tell me everything. You’re safe here.”
Jonathan looks up into Teddy’s dark, dark eyes and wonders… when was the last time someone touched him softly like this?
He pushes the thought away, blames it on the drugs.
Drags the tattered remains of his lucidity to the surface.
“I’ve come for you…”
“Really? Why?” A shift in tone, some of that softness slipping away, but the hand stroking his head is still so, so gentle.
“Cleaning the money…”
Normally, creating a fake identity like this takes months. He knows; he did it with Jack Linden, and then Thomas Quince. The time is needed not just to create background records and connections, but also to give the agent time to train, to practice. It takes time, learning to respond to a new name, to move in a different way, reshape the way you speak and react. With Linden and Quince he had months.
Now, as Matthew Ellis, he’s had days.
But then again, Jonathan Pine has not lived as himself for ten years.
He drags Matthew’s story to the surface, feeding it to Teddy in one little confession at a time.
He doesn’t need to fake the slurred speech or wandering focus; whatever downers they gave him, they’re already pulling him into exhaustion, and Teddy’s hand slowly patting his head feels good… He reminds himself it’s all deception, that they’re both deceiving the other, but can’t stop himself from turning his face into the touch.
“I can make you clean,” Teddy says, his hands as drenched in blood as Jonathan's but still so deceptively gentle in their touch.
For a moment, Jonathan wishes the words were true, wishes there were someone who could get the blood off his own hands…
“Make me clean,” he whispers, pleads, looking up into Teddy’s eyes even as he can feel himself losing focus, slipping, being dragged under.
“Make me clean…”