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Adam had an unfortunate compulsion to feel John in the landscape. He never crossed a jungle, or a desolate hillside, without thinking on what John would see, how he would crouch to the earth and become hidden among its native patterns. Or what peculiar wildlife he would find to eat. To walk the earth was to find himself treading in John's footsteps. There was no solace there. For peace, Adam had only been able to look to the sea.
And now that was gone too.
He'd seen Mother Base only in grainy, stolen spy satellite photographs, but in his mind it was a ghost ship, appearing off every coast, in every inlet. It was therefore with great annoyance that he'd tracked Eva's location to a yacht moored off Cape Verde, which he'd boarded like a common pirate. She was ready, of course, a gun in each hand - she could have killed him if she'd tried. He had this odd faith that she would never shoot before she thought.
She seemed pleased to see him, and he simmered.
It was very unsettling for John to do something so dramatic without Adam's involvement. He felt cut adrift. He felt rejected. His one comfort had been that Eva was equally cast aside - having that illusion ripped away had been unpleasant.
And now, she could only be hospitable. Cigarettes and cold gin. She stretched out on the deck in a bikini and shades, for all the world like she was just there to work on her tan. A Mauser tucked under one arm was the only hint of business.
She smiled, as if to spread her upper hand like a fan. "So how did you find out about my little bird?"
"That's none of your god damned business." Did she really think she could force him into an error, just because he was angry? His knowledge came of long planned chance. She had to know, surely. Most likely she was spying on him as carefully as he was spying on her. She knew that she'd done what he'd failed to do.
She'd reached John again.
Every intelligence faction in the world had infiltrated Mother Base. The trouble was, none of Adam's agents - or anyone else's - had remained loyal in the face of John's magnetic charisma. Even Zero's mole was wavering. It took a very unusual mind to hold to their own agenda where John was concerned; flighty, quick and unmoored from politics. A little bird.
He was forced to admit that the French girl had been a uniquely good catch on Eva's part. Proof against John for long enough to be useful - while the many agents Ocelot had sent had all gone dark after making contact. One in the hand was worth two in the bush, and he simmered at her victory.
"And you told him about space rockets? He doesn't care about all that." He doesn't care about you, he wanted to scream. He doesn't care about anyone, but that wasn't true, was it? He wanted her to understand the truth, but she already did understand.
John didn't need either of them.
She turned away, toward the setting sun. Maybe she, too, saw its ugly outline on the horizon. "I needed him to know the truth."
"You've never cared if he knew the truth," he hissed. That wasn't why she'd unburdened herself. She wanted to touch him again. Oh, how well he knew that feeling of being desperate to matter. "Did he reply?" he asked cruelly.
She glanced back to him, thence to the far horizon.
Adam wanted it to hurt her. He wanted everything the damned French girl told her to hurt her. It was the secret of all torture. Information, and long silences, interspersed with physical pain. Drips of betrayal. He could break anyone that way.
Yet he was not at all sure he could have broken her. He could picture her weeping under his needles. He remembered hearing her scream in Volgin's hands.
He wondered if she had ever been broken, if she ever could be.
He knew where to find her these days. She was taking a risk, building a nest made of wires and thin allegiances in the borderlands of Eastern Europe. It would have been wiser to stay on the move. But he knew the prevailing weather here suited her; one thing they had in common, unlike the other four former so-called Patriots, was that they had both been raised for totalitarianism. They knew the needs of the regime better than they knew themselves. These little tyrannies with their armies of informants were their native jungle. Secret police were like crocodiles, a known factor lurking in the water, and good eating, if they didn't snap you up first. Nostalgia might have driven her here. It might have driven him after her, so he could hardly judge.
It was an odd weakness of character he'd developed, to antagonise her at good times and confide in her at ill times. But it helped him work over his most intractable dilemmas. She responded to his proclamations in ways he didn't dare.
He slipped in at her window, and she met him with a gunbarrel and a cherry-red lipstick smile. She was dressed like a local, in a conservative work dress and a hat, which she slipped off and hung over the end of a rifle that leaned on the wall by the window; underneath, her hair was tightly curled. She was Tatiana again, but twenty years older, more worn and tight and brittle.
And she wasn't pleased to see him. She'd heard, and he quickly explained what she'd heard; unlike Kazuhira, she deserved the truth.
"You have him back," she said finally. Her cigarette was clenched so tight between her fingers that the knuckles turned dead white. She was angry, and more than that, she was confused. Let her stew in it. "Our work is over?"
Our work. As if she were straining to touch that whole steel tangle of lies. Her networks had been very, very helpful in keeping John's body protected, but he knew she'd lost sight of him as soon as they'd left Malta. Adam shrugged. "I doubt it. Venom can only draw their fire for so long."
Her eyes narrowed, as if she had heard, in his flatness and apathy, what he hadn't admitted to her. Which was all he wanted her to know. All he'd come to her for. What, at this end of it all, had been the point? Did she see this part of him that wanted to give it all up?
Perhaps he'd only lied to himself too well. He'd set John so firmly in the past tense; Adam had no rational reason to believe he would ever awaken, in spite of the protestations of that other tiny clamouring part of him that was fixed to John's consciousness like a flower to the sun and could not for a second believe it would not rise again. That habit had served him well; he had avoided conflict with Kazuhira, buried the cause of his lack of interest in Venom. He had played his interest so very past-tense.
But one moment on the roadside. John didn't need to ask him for a light; Adam didn't need to ask him for a kiss, either. They'd waited nine years already.
It had only been a kiss. What more could he expect, now? Would John risk further contact - late night calls, coded whispers, skin to skin? Was, god damn it, his cigar just a cigar?
He lit his own cigarette, filling her impotent silence with smoke. "I'm sure there's still a role here for your little army." He sought to mock more than ameliorate. "Paradise Lost, eh? Good name." As if it were chosen for John's restoration of heaven, and not because she was mourning something that never was. Like a damned fool.
"I just want him back, Adam."
He set his cigarette on the ashtray, and stared at her, vaguely disgusted by her brazen emotions and the echoes stirring inside him.
It was with a mindless sort of compassion that he reached his hand to dry her tears - tears he'd squeezed out of her with his own cruelty. She leaned into the palm of her hand, and he felt her breath grate over his heartline. She didn't lack control, he knew that now. She kept her control like a hunting dog, leashing and loosing it as the game required it.
Her red lips against his thumb felt wind-roughened and dry as the desert.
She clutched his hand tight at the wrist, and she kissed him, shifting her lips from the heel of its thumb to the tip, suckling and staining red, teasing the tip of her tongue over the nail.
He didn't move an inch. Her lips slipped down to his first knuckle.
"Can you taste him?" he asked her.
It was cruel. It was petty, telling her how she picked through secondhand trash for her affections, and what did that make him? She gripped his wrist harder, and she lowered his right hand slowly to the tabletop, seized the dwindling cigarette and stubbed it against his hand. With all his will, he did not move.