The Hydra Protocol by David Wellington Page B

clear and bright. She smiled at him, though it looked like a tentative kind of smile. Well, they hadn’t left things very well when he headed down to Miami. In fact, he’d had to walk out in the middle of a pretty nasty fight. Maybe she was still angry.
    “I’m back,” he said.
    “I can see that. I didn’t expect you back so soon. Normally you’re gone a lot longer.”
    The fight they’d had—all the fights they’d had—were about the same thing. Chapel couldn’t tell her what he did when he went to work. He couldn’t even tell her when he was leaving, or when he was coming back. He would just disappear, usually before she woke up in the morning, and reappear when everything was done. Typically he showed up with a new scar or two.
    Every single time he left her sitting in this apartment, wondering if he was ever going to come back, or if he was already dead and she would never get to hear about it. He could never promise her he would be alive from one day to the next. For someone like Julia, it was unbearable. She wanted children. She wanted to grow old with him. He couldn’t promise her anything like that.
    But maybe he could give her something else.
    “I needed to be back here.” He took a step closer and she moved sideways, blocking the doorway to the bedroom, as if she was hiding something. He could see around her, though. He could see a suitcase lying on the bed.
    She wouldn’t meet his gaze.
    “Were you going out? Damn,” he said. “I was really hoping to get some time with you. There’s something I want to talk about.”
    “I’m headed out, yeah.” She did look at him then, and her face fell. “Jim, you look terrible. You’re pale and your eyes are bloodshot. Are you all right?”
    “Fine,” he said. The bends had left him a little weak, but the doctors had said he would make a full recovery in a few days. “Listen, I need to say—”
    “No,” she said. “No, stop. I can’t do this.”
    He was confused. “Do what?”
    “Pretend like everything’s normal.”
    Chapel’s heart sank in his chest. What was going on?
    “I thought it would be easier if I just left. If I wasn’t here when you got back. I thought maybe we could do this on the phone, or . . . I don’t know. By e-mail.”
    “Do what?”
    She sighed and shrank in the doorway. “I’m going to stay with a friend for a while. Please don’t ask me which one. I need to get away. I need—”
    She couldn’t seem to finish her sentence. She shook her head and ducked into the bedroom. Grabbing the handle of the suitcase, she dragged it off the bed. It looked like it was too heavy for her.
    “Let me help you,” he told her. “The car’s just downstairs.”
    Her eyes went wide, and she reached out to put a hand on his chest.
    “Jim,” she said. “Jim.” Tears filled her eyes. “Jim, don’t you get it? I’m leaving you.”
    Blood rushed in his ears. For a second the world’s worst headache burst through his skull. When he could see again, he realized she’d moved past him, dragging her suitcase into the front room.
    He chased after her. “No, no, I know we were fighting, I know it was worse than usual, but—”
    “I can’t do it!” she shouted at him. “I can’t talk about this. I have to go!” She turned around and stared at him as if she were daring him to say something.
    “We can figure this out,” he promised. “I can—I can talk to my boss—”
    “No,” she said. “Please don’t.”
    “Just hear me out! I can quit my job.” When she said nothing, he nodded, eager, because he knew this would fix things. “I can quit. I can stop doing this.”
    “No, you can’t,” Julia said, wiping at her tears. “You shouldn’t.”
    “I can. I really can. I can go back to my old position. My desk job. Don’t you see? I’ll be home every night. You’ll always know where I am. And nobody will be shooting at me, ever again. I did this for—”
    “You hated that job. You said they gave it to you