Bishop's Endgame by Michael Frost Beckner

Author:Michael Frost Beckner
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Montrose Station Press LLC
Published: 2022-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

25

LARA VAN EIJK had seen more than she ever wanted, having witnessed firsthand what 98 percent of humanity never experience: human beings killing human beings in armed combat. Murdered children. Islamist extremists whose perverse version of jihad calls for the murder of the infidel. Al-Qaeda-sponsored Ramadan Moon fighting it out with a guy who looked as inconsequential as a worn-out ballplayer, not the cold-blooded executioner who risked his life for morality and for her. The killers died in a manner they’d chosen to live, and Lara struggled in Bishop’s arms, carried out of the incinerated church.

He poured her into the Land Rover. The only thing left her from her father. No picture. No letter. No story or goodbye or excuse why; 1968 would have to mean something to her. Dand van Eijk was the connecting tissue between Lara and her abductor.

Bishop drove through a Chinese community. Lara crunched up into herself beside him. She stared at her hands. If she’d been more brown, or more yellow, or anyone else at all, would life have let her be?

“They would have killed me.”

Bishop didn’t feel a need to respond.

“Did you know they’d killed the Orang Asli boys? Before you started shooting?”

“Stop staring at your hands. I’m sorry I grabbed you. Like that. Like that at the church.”

Lara wouldn’t let him dodge. “If they hadn’t, God might have made the difference.”

“I’m not going to risk God for you.”

“That’s a terrible thing to say. You’re as evil as them.”

“God’s been terrible to me.”

She measured him with a look and judged his mark at zero.

“Let me go. Keep the Rover. I don’t care. I don’t want it. I just want to be free of all this. Of you.”

“Lara, I didn’t choose to be here any more than you. I was assigned to meet your father and exfiltrate him back to the US, where I’d have turned him over to people tasked to find out why every network of spies my father ran for decades vanished. I didn’t choose, bargain, or want a thing of this.”

She scowled. “Muir’s death isn’t coincidental, is it?”

“No.”

Hard as he tried, Bishop couldn’t erase all emotion from his single spoken word. Lara glanced at him, attempting to hunt out that trace of what made him human.

“He was killed over this?”

“And I’m the prime suspect.”

“Why?” She wasn’t surprised.

“Beside the point. The only reason we’re sitting here right now is that he expected it, and the reason it happened has everything to do with what transpired here in 1968. And that’s threatened by what’s happening here right now between you and me.”

“I just don’t understand how he could have known.”

“Because you’re looking at it from the wrong direction. You’re giving meaning to just-in-case contingencies he planted back then precisely because he couldn’t predict the future. You’re making too big a deal out of it.”

“No, you’re just lying.”

“Apparently, an easy club to join in Malaysia.”

“Fuck you.”

“Like I said, ‘join the club.’”

She snapped her head away from him, glaring out the window.

“Because we’re not even talking about the biggest lie we both know is staring right at us,” Bishop pressed.

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