LITMIR.BIZ

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Probably the last person he wanted to hear from right now. He’d had Gunner for five days, which was perfectly legal, according to their agreement. Yes, Gunner had been out of school during that time, but the kid was some kind of genius – there was talk of him skipping grades, not falling behind.

      To Luke’s mind, getting him out into the wild, enjoying nature and testing himself both physically and mentally, was good for him – and probably more important than anything he might get up to at home. Kids nowadays – they spent a lot of time staring into video screens. It had its place – those screens were powerful tools, but let’s limit it to that. Let’s not allow them to take the place of family, physicality, fun, or imagination. Let’s not pretend that real adventure, or even experience, took place inside of a computer.

      He called her back, his mind alert, but open. Whatever game she tried to play, he would stay calm and be as reasonable as he could.

      The phone rang once.

      “Luke?”

      “Hi, Becca,” he said, his voice low and friendly, acting like it was the most normal thing in the world to call someone back before sunrise. “How are you?”

      “I’m okay,” she said. Her speech with him was always abrupt, tense. His life with her was over – he recognized that. But his life with his son was just beginning, and he was firm that he would navigate any roadblocks she might try to put in his way.

      He waited.

      “What is Gunner doing?” she said.

      “He’s sleeping. It’s still pretty early here. The sun’s not even quite up yet.”

      “Right,” she said. “I forgot about the time difference.”

      “Don’t worry about it,” he said. “I was awake anyway.” He paused for a few seconds. The first glint of real sun was appearing in the east, a ray of light which peeked over the rim of the canyon and played on the cliff wall to the west, turning it pink and orange.

      “So what can I do for you?”

      She didn’t hesitate. “I need Gunner to come home right away.”

      “Becca – ”

      “Don’t fight me on this, Luke. You know it won’t hold any water with the judge. A special operations agent with diagnosed post traumatic stress disorder and a history of violence wants to take his young son on outdoor adventures, which, by the way, causes his son to miss entire weeks of school. I can’t believe I even agreed to this in the first place. I’ve been so distracted that I – ”

      He interrupted her. “Becca, we’re in the Grand Canyon. We’re rafting. You do realize that, don’t you? Unless a helicopter lands down here to pick us up, we are probably three days from reaching the South Rim. Then a night in the lodge there, and a full day’s drive down to Phoenix. Which sounds about right, because as I recall it, our plane tickets back are scheduled for the twenty-second. And by the way, this whole PTSD diagnosis isn’t real. It never happened. No doctor has ever even suggested it. It’s just something that you’ve manufactured in your – ”

      “Luke, I have cancer.”

      That stopped him in his tracks. In recent days, she had been more agitated than he’d ever seen her before. Of course he had noticed this, but mostly ignored it. It was typical of her, and the amount of pressure she put on herself. Becca was a Grade A stress case. But this was different.

      Luke’s eyes watered, and a thick lump formed in his throat. Could it be true? Whatever had happened between them, this was the woman he had fallen in love with. This was the woman who had carried his child. At one time, he had loved her more than anything in this world, certainly more than he loved himself.

      “Jesus, Becca. I’m so sorry. When did that happen?”

      “I was feeling sick all summer. I lost some weight. At first, it was no big deal, but then it became a surprising amount of weight. I thought it was from all the anxiety, everything that’s happened in the past year – the kidnapping, the train crash, all the time you’ve been away. But things have calmed down a lot, and the sickness didn’t stop. I went for tests starting a couple weeks ago. I had been vomiting. I didn’t want to tell you until I knew more. Now I know more. I saw my doctor yesterday, and she told me everything.”

      “What is it?” he said, though he was not sure he wanted to hear the answer.

      “It’s pancreatic,” she said, dropping perhaps the worst bomb he could have imagined. “Stage Four. Luke, it’s already metastasized. It’s in my colon, in my brain. It’s in my bones…” Her voice trailed off, and he could hear her sob two thousand miles away.

      “I’ve been crying all night,” she said, her voice breaking. “I can’t seem to stop.”

      As bad as he felt, Luke found that his thoughts suddenly weren’t with her – they were with Gunner. “How long?” he said. “Did they give you a timeframe?”

      “Three months,” Becca said. “Maybe six. She told me not to hang my hat on that. A lot of people die very quickly. Sometimes there’s a miracle and the patient lives on and on indefinitely. Either way, she told me I need to get my affairs in order.”

      She paused. “Luke, I’m so afraid.”

      He nodded. “I know you are. We’ll be there as soon as we can. I’m not going to tell Gunner.”

      “Good. I don’t want you to. We can tell him together.”

      “Okay,” Luke said. “I’ll see you soon. I’m very sorry.”

      The hang-up was awkward. If only they hadn’t been fighting all these months. If only she hadn’t been so hostile to him. If these things hadn’t happened, maybe he could have found a way to comfort her, even from this distance. He had become hardened against her, and he didn’t know if there was any softness left.

      He sat on the boulder for several minutes. Light began to fill the sky. He didn’t reminisce about the good memories with her. He didn’t go over all the battles they’d fought this past year, and how vicious and dug in she’d been. His mind was a blank. That was for the best. He needed a way out of this canyon, and he needed to break the news to Ed and Swann that he and Gunner were leaving.

      He pushed off the rock and walked back to camp. Ed was awake and crouched by the fire. He had started it up again and had put the coffee pot on. He was shirtless, wearing nothing but a pair of red boxer briefs and flip-flops. His body was thick rippling muscle and ropey veins, hardly an ounce of fat on him – he looked like a martial arts fighter about to enter the cage. He watched Luke approach, then gestured to the west.

      Over there, the sky was still cobalt blue, the night retreating, being chased away by the light coming from the east. At the very top, the towering walls of the canyon were lit by a sliver of sun now, setting their striations aflame in red, pink, yellow, and orange.

      “Damn, that’s pretty,” Ed said.

      “Ed,” Luke said. “I’ve got bad news.”

      CHAPTER TWO

      9:15 p.m. Greenwich Mean Time (4:15 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time)

      Molenbeek Suburb

      Brussels, Belgium

      The thin man could speak Dutch.

      “Ga weg,” he said under his breath. Go away.

      His name was not Jamal. But that was the name he sometimes gave to people, and the name that many, many people had come to know him by. Most people called him Jamal. Some called him the Phantom.

      He stood in the shadows near an overflowing garbage can, just inside a narrow cobblestone street, smoking a cigarette and watching a police car parked on the main avenue. The street he was on was little more than an alleyway, and as he stood back in the shadows, he felt certain no one could see him there. The empty boulevards and sidewalks and alleys of the infamous Muslim slum were wet from a hard, chilly rain that had stopped maybe ten minutes before.

      The

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