Page 5 of The Big Fix

Normally, I couldn’t take trips like this at a moment’s notice. When I started Torus Intercession after I left the Army, I had to be there, wrangling fixers and deciding which jobs I would take and which I should decline. But now, one of my men, Shaw James, had started to run the Chicago office for me, and along with his soon-to-be husband, Benji Grace, who was a psychiatrist, they were doing very well vetting new clients. The important part of the equation was that I trusted the two of them to make decisions, and I hadn’t had that before. It freed me to focus on the international side of Torus, on assisting people who reached out with global concerns. As a rule, Torus Intercession was a domestic agency, but I could now take advantage of the wide network I’d developed over the years and do some good.

After West Point, I went into the Army, eventually moving up the ranks to colonel by forty-eight. In parallel, I was with INSCOM, US Army Intelligence and Security Command, and we worked hand in hand with the CIA in counterterrorism. I retired at fifty-one, from all of it, with the understanding, that all operatives had, that if I was needed, I would return to service. It was interesting that everyone who worked for me thought I’d worked exclusively for the CIA even though they knew I’d been in the Army. How they imagined I could have operated at the agency and been a member of the active military at the same time, was beyond me. It didn’t work like that. I worked for INSCOM, and ACC-DTA, Army Contracting Command-Detroit Arsenal. But all that was a lot for people, and because I was assigned to work with the CIA, was attached to missions, it was easier to just say that yes, I was a retired spook.

When I started Torus and the people I hired asked questions, I explained about my service, but what they retained, again, was CIA. I understood. Three letters were easier to remember than the longer moniker. And the important part was the opportunity I was offering. Leaving the service, I found that my need to help others didn’t abate. I needed to retire, yes, because I wasn’t my own boss and couldn’t choose the best outcome for all those involved. And it wasn’t that I had a God complex, but there was acting for the greater good and then there was simply doing what was right and good. I was now firmly in the latter category.

In creating Torus Intercession, I had a clear mission, which was to be a fixer for others. If people needed protection, mentoring, coaching, or someone to be their advocate, that was what Torus was about. We would always leave a situation better than we found it, and would not leave until the job was complete. What I never imagined was that when people saw their lives changing for the better, the person responsible for that metamorphosis would be the person they wanted to stay with them for the rest of their lives. I lost more fixers to love than injury. I had a definite Cupid problem.

It had been alluded to over the years, especially by Nash Miller, my longest-tenured employee, that perhaps I was running a matchmaking service. For the record, I was not. But it made sense that the person who came to help you, who assisted you in fixing your life, either by guarding you or finding avenues to improve your outlook and state of being, would be the person you would fall head over heels for. When I started out, the turnover of personnel was not something I had accounted for. Now I expected it. And it was always surprising to see who left. The person I was certain no one could love, that no one could get through their considerable armor, was, inevitably, the one love caught up with. Astounding to get that phone call saying: I’m staying here. Thank you for everything.

Honestly, now and then, I did know that sending a fixer somewhere was more for them than anything else. I would send a guy who’d never had a family out to a place where all the family needed was that one person to make them complete. At times, I could see that my fixer was the one who needed fixing. I tended to hire people who were broken in different ways and sent them out to be heroes. At other times, the person asking for help needed more than they thought, because beyond the protection or babysitting, it was connection. Mostly, my people drew others back into the world, which allowed them to see those around them who’d always been there, ready.

At the moment, I had four fixers I could send out into the field, but I had Shaw and Benji looking to hire two more. Six was my comfort spot so they could provide backup to one another if necessary, and I could send someone from Chicago, where we were based, to the opposite side of the country. I liked being able to handle client issues if emergencies arose. It was important to me to be able to help. It was my mandate at Torus to bring syzygy—connection and alignment—to everything we did. I found that lives were saved, either literally or mentally and emotionally. And every now and then, I got my fixer back too. Maybe that was what was on Owen’s mind as well.

Love.

He saw people he worked with fall in love and leave all the time. Perhaps that was weighing on him, the desire for connection. I had no idea. But when I saw him next, certainly before he left for Thailand, I would find out what was wrong with the man I shared a home with.

TWO

“Well now, Mr. Colter. Can you identify him? Is it Mr. Moss?” asked the police surgeon, a slight man in his midfifties, of Taiwanese descent.

“Yes, it’s him,” I answered, my voice trembling as a tsunami of emotions overtook my laryngeal muscles, forcing my voice to crack. My relief was as overwhelming as my grief had been two days earlier when I got the call that Owen was dead.

I had been with an old friend, one of my best, Darius Hawthorne, who, it turned out, was also in Paris on business. As I was fretting over the radio silence from Owen, Darius was trying to take my mind off the situation by taking me to the most outlandish places for dinner he could think of. I loved him for it as well as for the daily check-ins. To say he was busy was an understatement, so the fact that he was making so much time for me, was telling. When I got a call from a number I didn’t recognize, I turned the screen so Darius could see.

“That’s Thailand’s country code,” he told me. “Isn’t that where Owen is?”

When I answered and was given the news, I couldn’t breathe. I didn’t even have to reach for my friend; he was there in an instant, holding me up.

He was dead. Owen was dead.

I couldn’t grip my phone, and it fell, hitting first the table and then the floor. Before I could even think to pick it up, Darius had snatched it and put it to his ear. He listened, spoke, then listened again. When he hung up, his bright-green eyes met mine.

“Get up,” he ordered. “You have to go bring him home.”

How many men, how many intelligence assets, friends, brothers, had we made sure to bring home? The number had to be in the hundreds. And now it was Owen’s turn.

“On your feet,” he directed, and there was steel in his voice as he stood and left a couple hundred euros on the table, which more than covered our bill and the tip. It was rude, leaving like that, but I didn’t care, couldn’t focus. Only his voice centered me. The person I loved most in the world was gone.

Darius would have flown with me to Bangkok, but he knew better. Knew that was a trip I had to make alone. Still, he made sure to put me on his private jet so I didn’t have to wait for mine. It felt like the greatest gift he’d ever bestowed.

And now I could report back that Owen Moss was, in fact, not dead. The emotion, though, the relief, felt just like grief. I couldn’t parse it from sadness. It was hard to tell the difference. But the man standing in front of me didn’t need to know what I was feeling. Better for him to think he was looking at anguish.

Most people would have let the man know immediately: “No, thank God, that’s not the person I love,” but I wasn’t most people. The fact of the matter was, Owen’s wallet and phone were found on this man. Fingerprints were a match, as was the DNA—at least, that’s what their report said. Someone had gone to a lot of trouble to make me believe this was Owen. I might even have bought the charade, but my eyes knew the difference. If I’d argued, facts would have been thrown at me. Better to fake acceptance and find out who this man on the slab truly was. More to the point, I wasn’t leaving him behind. His family, whoever they were, needed closure as well. But now I was left trusting no one.

Finally, I met the police surgeon’s gaze and repeated woodenly, “It’s Owen.” I felt lost, unable to shake off the cold chill of the morgue as we stood over a stranger’s lifeless corpse. Glancing around the room, at the walls, at the body, I felt haunted. Other ghosts, other times. “Where was he found?” I didn’t try and conceal the tears in my eyes. My gaze returned to the deep Y-shaped incision on the man’s trunk, to his swollen, lifeless eyes.

“Water bus found him floating in the Saen Saep canal. Death by drowning. Appears accidental.” The Khlong Saen Saep was one of the city’s heaviest water arteries, running some eighteen kilometers through central Bangkok.

“How long was the body in the water?” I asked, wanting to hear his answer. The body—not Owen’s body, not his body—was in terrible shape, so my guess was a week at least.

“Three days by my estimate.”

The condition of the body was shocking. It was badly mutilated from being struck repeatedly by canal traffic, and decomposed to the point of being unrecognizable. The days Saen Saep canal was clean enough to wash clothes, bathe, or swim in were long gone, as Bangkok’s canals were so heavily polluted, they were considered environmentally toxic.

“May I see his dossier?”

The surgeon looked surprised by my request. I was betting most people didn’t ask to peruse the chart. He turned away from me, toward the third man in the room, who had remained suspiciously quiet the entire time, not even breaking his silence to introduce himself. Easy to figure out I was looking at the surgeon’s boss. He was official-looking, the dark suit and polished shoes out of place in the morgue. He’d stood mostly hidden in the shadows of the surgical lamps’ bright halo of white light.