“Dates,” she said once, and “the dinner” another time, and Oliver’s reply, “handled”, with a quick glance to the door. That glance mattered more than the word.
Jonas leaned closer without meaning to, tracking the micro-shifts, the way she flattened a napkin that didn’t need flattening, the almost-invisible twitch toward her bag when Oliver scanned the room. His mind started doing what it always did, building a model: If Oliver was the problem, where was Clara inside it? Complicit? Ignorant? Somewhere in the grayscale between?
That pull again. Not rational. Not convenient. Not welcome.
It threaded under his skin, a sudden acceleration in his chest that had nothing to do with caffeine or adrenaline. Attraction wasn’t new. This edge of it was clean and immediate and dangerous in its lack of context. He shut it down the way he shut down intrusive pop-ups: quick, decisive, leaving no trace in the foreground.
He flicked to the thermal feed of the van. Two heat signatures. He zoomed into the driver’s profile and didn’t need the software; he’d tagged him hours ago on the roof.
Kobus Venter. South African national. Hansen’s man.
The passenger took longer. The angle was wrong, glass reflecting, streetlight flaring. He stepped the image through an enhancement sequence, frame by careful frame. The algorithm chewed. Six seconds. Eight. Ten. A face resolved out of noise, older, heavier around the jaw than the last time Jonas had seen him, but the eyes were the same.
Willem Drost. South African. Diepsloot Township. The day the world split.
The room tipped.
It started the way it always did now, with a small sensory lie, his brain telling his body that the air inside the bolthole had thickened, that the faded radiator heat had bloomed into something heavy and wet. Then came the smell: iron and rot and a human sourness that had no exit. The laptop screen blurred. He curled his fingers against the table edge until pressure bit.
Heat. Not the soft, radiated warmth of old pipes. Heat that carried dust in it, dust that turned to sweat, dust that turned to mud where blood hit the ground.
Footsteps. Not the shuffle of the downstairs tailor sweeping up pins, but heavy, purpose-driven steps on hard-packed earth.
The door splintering. Sunlight knifing into a box of darkness. He flinched from it even here, in this room, because his body remembered before his mind did.
A voice, Val’s, low, coaxing, the kind you used on a wounded animal and a friend at the same time. “Hey, Watchdog, we’ve got you. It’s Valentina.”
He saw it in pieces the way he had then, shapes first: two dogs filling the doorway, vests bristling with light. The glint off a gun far behind them. Hands out, open. His hand up, palm against the wall, stay back, don’t look, don’t see, because shame was its own kind of pain.
Her face came into focus after that. Valentina’s eyes steady with a promise she wouldn’t let herself break. She said his name again, and something gave. Knees, breath, whatever was left of dignity. He fell forward and she caught him, and he hated that he needed her to, even as he clung to her because his legs had forgotten how to hold his weight.
Gunfire popped outside like distant fireworks. Orders snapped over comms. He could feel the rough fabric of a blanket that wasn’t there yet, smell the difference of her clean shirt in the middle of the stink, and for a second, relief was worse than pain.
Then the radio cracked with a sob and the words that knocked the world sideways: He’s dead. He’s dead. They shot him.
No time. No room. Bein shoved clothes into his hands, shirt, pants, shoes, eyes steady, voice giving instructions into rails he could run on. Get dressed. Move. Stay between me and Reid. He followed because following was the only thing he could do. The dogs’ claws scored the dirt. The sun burned his skin after days of darkness. The van door slammed and he was inside, blanket around his shoulders, water in his hand he didn’t remember lifting, numbness not as protection but as absence.
Ping.
The bolthole snapped back into place, the weak radiator cough, the line of tape and SIM, the laptop’s small fan. His shirt stuck to his back. His vision haloed white, then cleared. He worked his jaw, forced his breath to slow, counted in fours the way the therapist had taught him when he’d pretended he wasn’t listening. In through the nose. Hold. Out. Repeat.
Third time this month.
He hated the unpredictability of it. How it stole time and put him back in a room he’d already left. How it snuck up through side doors, smells, sounds, the angle of light on a wall.
He rinsed a glass at the tiny sink, let cold water run over his wrists until feeling reset from “then” to “now.” Checked the locks again, although he knew they were set. Palmed the wall, cool plaster grounding his skin. He opened the window an inch. Night air slid in, thin and ordinary, smelling faintly of wet concrete and takeaway.
The laptop waited, patient and bright. Drost’s name still hovered on the screen like a verdict.
Venter and Drost. Watching Clara. Connected to Oliver. Connected to Hansen, which meant connected to the worst thing that had ever happened to him. If he told the team, Bás would put a plan together in under ten minutes. Damon would drive. Lotus would make a joke that landed like a lifeline. They would throw themselves between Jonas and any bullet a stranger cast his way.
And maybe one of them wouldn’t come back.
He couldn’t bear the arithmetic of that. Not again. Not because of him.
His phone buzzed on the table. He didn’t start; he’d already mapped the vibration in his head as a harmless stimulus, but he glanced down anyway.
Bishop: Sunday dinner still on? Charlie’s making something with too many vowels. 1800.
