Nemesis

Sherlock shook her head. “Not right now, Arlo. I’d really like to speak to Nasim right away.”

Giusti said, “Look over there, Sherlock.”

Nasim Conklin sat in front of her on a high-definition monitor hung at eye height on the living room wall. “He’s in the back bedroom,” Jo said. “You see he’s shackled to a chair, watching TV. He watches the news. Other than that he reads—newspapers, magazines, whatever we give him. He doesn’t sleep much, hasn’t eaten much. When he’s not reading or watching the news, he sits there looking like the world is over. I suppose it is for him, and he knows it. He leaves that room to use the bathroom, and the half-hour we gave him outside last night when it was full-on dark.”

Giusti said, “We’ll wait out here.”

Jo escorted Sherlock to the back bedroom, unlocked the door, and pushed it wide. “Nasim, here’s your Agent Sherlock,” she said, and stepped aside to let Sherlock pass. She started to close the door, but Cal shook his head and followed Sherlock into the bedroom. It was a small room with little furniture; a single bed in the middle was covered with a dark blue spread. Nasim Conklin had to ask to be moved from the chair to the bed, and those were his only choices. A pile of magazines, books, and newspapers was beside him.

Sherlock walked directly to Nasim Conklin and stopped in front of him.

“Hello, Nasim. I’m still amazed the grenade didn’t blow us both to bits.”

He slowly raised his head, stared at her, his eyes shining with intelligence, but also with pain. Agent Hoag was right. Nasim Conklin looked like he knew this was the end of the road for him. But how he’d gotten to this point, that was what Sherlock had to find out.

“No,” he said, his voice matter-of-fact. “I don’t think you were close enough, but you’d have had to wash me off you.” He gave a laugh, raw and bitter. “That is if I’d had courage enough to use it.” He spoke in fluent British English, but with a French accent, and something else. She knew his origins were Syrian.

She sat down on the edge of the bed. “It did blow eventually—thankfully, in the bomb box.”

She saw his hands were cuffed loosely together in front of him, fastened to a belt he wore, allowing him only enough movement to turn book pages and scratch his nose. The wrist she’d broken at JFK was in a thin cast.

“I could have thrown it at you, watched you explode into a million bloody bits right before my eyes.”

“Now, there’s a visual,” Sherlock said. “I’ve got to say, I’m glad you didn’t.”

He nodded toward Cal, who stood against the door, his arms folded over his chest. “I don’t want him here. Make him go away. Just you.”

“Pretend I’m not here,” Cal said.

“You her bodyguard?” Nasim rattled his shackles. “I can’t do much of anything to her now.”

Cal leaned back against the closed door, his arms still crossed over his chest. “As I recall, you couldn’t do much of anything to her the first time.”

Nasim smiled, let it fall away. “A pity, perhaps, but you’re right.” He studied Cal for another full minute, then turned back to Sherlock.

“Why didn’t you talk to the other agents, Nasim? Why me?”

He looked at her full-on and said simply, “Because you don’t fear death.”

The words hovered in the still air between them. Sherlock didn’t know what she’d expected him to say, but not this. She shook her head. “You’re wrong, Nasim. Everyone who has both feet in this world fears death.”

“But you came after me regardless.”

No one had asked her about that. “Actually, the truth is pretty simple. Everything happened so fast. I only knew I had to stop you from killing Melissa and all those other innocent people. My job is to protect, you know that.”

“You even remember that woman’s name—Melissa. I should never have grabbed her. I should have thrown the grenade and ended it.”

“But you didn’t.”

“I failed at the airport because I was afraid to die.”

“Perhaps it wasn’t fear that stopped you. Perhaps you couldn’t convince yourself to kill all those people.”

He began picking his thumbnail. “I heard the agents talk about your little boy. You have both a husband and a son, yet you acted, knowing you could die. Don’t you care about what would happen to them? How they would grieve for you?”

Where was this coming from? Did Cal and the agents in the living room wonder as well?