By Paths Coincident

Chapter 18

Sophie settled herself on one of the terrace chairs overlooking the Harbour. Fortunately it was a warm evening for early autumn, so she was not going to freeze.

"Tell me."

"This has to do with that time when I did stuff for Damian Moreau."

Sophie shivered. She hated Moreau for many things but none more than the way he had made Eliot look when he had confessed to working for that monster. Eliot always spoke about his time with Moreau like a man drawing knives through his flesh.

She expected long silences now. Eliot never filled the air with words to cover his reluctance to reveal anything of himself. She expected to have to ease his story out of him, like fine shards of glass from hidden wounds.

Eliot shared so little of his past with them.

He was a man of iron nerve under fire, capable of making the most appalling decisions regarding his own personal safety. If he considered it necessary to protect one of them, their hitter would face all enemies, all weapons, unflinching. When the stakes were emotional rather than physical, Eliot was even more obdurate. He gave away nothing, betrayed no weakness. Everything that had made him who he was, Eliot kept sealed in internal vaults that not even Parker could crack.

But this time he spoke as though the words were rehearsed—as though all the fight in him had been spent and his choices had been made. The gentle good humor with which he occasionally described to her his flaws, the smoldering anger with which he usually masked his self-loathing, all were in abeyance. He told his story as though it had happened to someone else.

"About 11 years ago, Moreau sent me to stop a NATO attempt to interfere in one of his shipments of nuclear materials to Iraq. At that time a woman named Colonel Eve Baird was in charge of the team I had been ordered to take down. My mission went according to plan. Her team separated into smaller groups making it easy for me to kill them. I saved her for last, judging that, as their leader, she would be the most formidable opponent, which proved to be the case. I left her with neither breath nor pulse and escaped rather badly injured, myself."

His voice was emotionless, but Sophie could picture the look in his eyes. He never talked about actually killing people. Never. Even though they all knew he had. She wished they were not half a world apart, and that she could just hold him.

"So you can see why I was shocked when that same Colonel Eve Baird walked into the Brew Pub last night, having somehow survived, accompanied by a group of people including my cousin Jacob Stone, all of whom apparently work at a Portland Annex of the New York Metropolitan Library."

"That's good, then," Sophie said softly. "That she didn't die."

"Yes," Eliot said. "I'm glad to have failed, for once. But the problem is my cousin."

Perplexed, Sophie waited for him to explain.

"We look as alike as two bookends. If you met him, you'd swear he was me."

"A twin?" Sophie said, delighted. "There's two of you?" And wasn't that a picture to enthrall the imagination. Eliot had told them next to nothing about his family. Nate was really going to have no choice about that stopover in Portland. "Eliot, that's wonderful!"

"No, it's pretty much the worst possible luck," Eliot growled. "Think about it, Sophie. How many people would like to collect the bounty on my head? And my cousin shares that head. Up until this point Jake was super-glued to his hometown in the middle of nowhere Oklahoma. But now he suddenly decides to do something with his life, and here he is, parading about the same world as me with a target painted on his back that he doesn't even know about."