Tomas and Eliot were hard at work reviewing the results of their first war game in Tomas’s office. While the exercise had been a success, there was room for improvement both in the game and in the elite unit. The top of the desk was covered in an array of maps, surveillance photos, and highly classified files. They had been reviewing film for the past two hours, pointing out errors and hesitations, and the occasional comically wild miss. If the UN had known what they were up to, they definitely would have sent in a peace-keeping force.
That was the scene Minister of Defense Roberto Flores beheld when he arrived, unannounced, at the office.
“Gentlemen,” he said, bringing both men back to the present. “There has been brought to my attention a…Spencer, I believe you would call it a situation.”
“Is something wrong, sir?”
General Flores struggled for a moment with how to phrase this, exactly. Finally, he put a handful of photographs down on the desk and stepped back. His lack of additional commentary was unnerving.
“Oh my gosh, Amalia, look at these!”
If Eliot had a nickel for every conversation that started that way between the two of them, he could have bought San Lorenzo. If he had another for every time Amalia gasped like that, he…he wasn’t sure what he’d do with it.
“Those are beautiful!” Amalia answered. “How do they work?”
He didn’t hear any more after that, because Tomas called with a question about their upcoming exercise. Focusing on a military exercise was likely to be far less stressful than whatever the girls had come up with this time, he was pretty sure. He didn’t think about it again.
“I had heard reports,” General Flores said slowly. Tomas raised his gaze to his father-in-law; Eliot continued to stare at the pictures. “At first I dismissed them as…how you say…insane.”
Amalia answered her phone before the first chorus had finished playing. If the other patrons in the shop were disturbed by American Woman suddenly blaring from her phone, they said nothing. It wouldn’t have mattered if they had.
“They’re here!” Ophelia announced. “Come over. Drop literally whatever you’re doing and get out here!”
“Did you tell anyone?”
“Not even Devil. Cross my heart.”
She breezed past Eliot, who after hearing the front door slam open then shut wasn’t surprised to see her striding briskly down his hallway headed for the back door. He had to fight most of his instincts to keep from waiting in the nearest doorway to swing a heavy object at her, especially now that Ophelia and Mikel Dayan were corresponding on a regular basis. In the end, he decided it was an exercise in patience, gritted his teeth, and put away the baseball bat.
“She’s down at the cabin,” Eliot called. “Is Tomas coming for dinner tonight?”
“He did not say you had invited us for dinner,” she said, almost slowing down as she answered. “I will murder him.”
“I hadn’t asked,” Eliot shouted back, louder this time. “It’s just that you’re here. You go on down; I’ll call him myself.”
The only answer he got was the back door slamming shut behind her.
<Jones>: Amalia incoming
<Phee>: Thanks babe!
<Jones>: Calling to invite Tomas to dinner. Want anything in particular?
<Phee>: That thing with the thing?
<Jones>: With the salad? Or without?
<Phee>: Definitely with.
“Let me see!” Amalia demanded. “How did you get these in without telling Eliot? Or will he grill you later?”
“The only thing he’s grilling later are some peaches,” Ophelia promised. “He doesn’t even ask when boxes show up here.”
Although he did look up the return addresses on them, just to make sure the address was connected with a seller and not, for example, an international terrorist organization. Or an Israeli assassin. She had no idea, which was how he liked it. He told himself that if she didn’t know, she wouldn’t be concerned. Even he thought that was pretty weak as excuses went.
“You want me to believe—“
“Look at these!” Ophelia interrupted. “I can’t believe it!”
The girls stood and stared and marveled. And dissolved into laughter that would have made UN peace keepers break out in a cold sweat.
Tomas arrived that evening having changed from his work clothes into something more casual. Dinner with friends didn’t require even fatigues. Unlike his wife, who had a tendency to burst through doors and damn the consequences, he knocked. It was courteous. It was polite. It gave Spencer time to put down whatever weapon he was holding. Eliot and Devil greeted him with a drink.
“What is it this time,” he asked wearily. A drink sounded like an excellent idea. He waited to move until Devil had determined he wasn’t carrying anything edible or illegal. He wasn’t actually sure he believed Eliot’s story that Devil was a trained drug dog, but he couldn’t be bothered to look into it either. He felt like the less he knew about the Spencers, the better off everyone would be.
“Not even sure,” Eliot said. “Can’t get an x-ray machine. They’ve been down at the cabin all day.”
“This is good? At least they did not leave?”
“The last time I saw two people that happy, they’d just acquired a nuclear weapon. And I was the one who had to go in and take it back. Come on outside, I gotta flip some peaches.”
Tomas liked Eliot well enough, although he doubted they would have ever been on the same side of a conflict had they met otherwise. He was not unwise to his father-in-law’s adventures before becoming the Minister of Defense, so by extension knew a lot about Eliot Spencer’s previous life. As a courtesy to both of them and to both Ophelia and Amalia, he did not look further than the facts he already knew. It was true he had saved the general from Ribera, and also true that he was fiercely protective of his wife. Beyond that was the path to madness. Tomas couldn’t even, which was a phrase he had picked up from Ophelia despite his best efforts.
Eliot grabbed a metal spatula out of a drawer before opening the door to the back deck where the massive grill lived.
“By the way,” he said casually.
Tomas groaned.
“Phee has come up with a plan for while we’re gone.”
“In this plan, will she do the sensible thing? Because Amalia has a plan as well.” There was very little doubt what he thought of his wife’s plan, and he didn’t expect her best friend to have a better one. As in most things, he wouldn’t find out what Spencer was thinking until the man said something. Trying to read Eliot was like trying to read a brick wall.
“It’s not all bad,” Eliot grudgingly admitted. “She put a lot of thought and effort into it. It’s not what I would prefer she do, but we agreed on it, and she’s definitely going to bring it up to you tonight.”
“I could have them both arrested,” Tomas offered.
“Don’t you think that’s a little rough on the police?”
Tomas looked at the photos again, then at General Flores.
“Does anyone else know?”
“When will we try them?” Amalia asked.
“When they start really planning their first war game,” Ophelia decided. “Eliot said they’d be working pretty steady for two weeks getting all the whatever it is together.”
For the life of him, Eliot did not understand how she was upset with him.
“We agreed!” she reminded him, again, for about the tenth time in this conversation. “You said, Eliot, that if we stayed here, we’d have guards around the house at night, and not more than three, and that if we went out and it got dark we’d stay at the palace! You never said anything about drone surveillance!”
“Phee, I swear to god I didn’t ask for any drones. You were here and told Tomas about this plan yourself, and he agreed to it. But I told you it was a bad idea for the two of you to be alone here.”
At this point, Devil barked at Eliot from his place on Ophelia’s couch.
“I know you were here,” Eliot conceded. “But you don’t carry a weapon.”
“So Tomas asked for drones?! That’s not better!”
Right now, he was just glad Amalia wasn’t here too, so he was only getting an earful in one language. Amalia had a tendency to shout in multiple languages when she was excited or angry. He couldn’t imagine this conversation was going better at their house right now.
“That means he agreed to my face and then used military equipment to…to…to…spy on a US citizen!”
“I don’t think Tomas asked for drone coverage either,” he said, carefully avoiding the idea that she should calm down, despite that he really thought she should. “Although I gotta say, Princess, if we’d had any idea you two were going to dress as mermaids and hang around in the lagoon, I probably would have.”
“Eliot!”
“What? It would have been a morale booster.” He sat back with his drink and watched her review his statement, looking for the part in it with which she’d argue. Because she definitely was not finished arguing yet. “For me, anyway.”
Very much to his surprise, she turned on one heel and went to the bookcase, yanking a volume off the shelves with more force than was necessary. Then she marched back across the room.
“Swear on Herman Wouk,” she didn’t even check to see that she had the right book. Eliot was not surprised that she pulled the exact volume she had intended. “That did you not order drones to fly over the lagoon so you could watch us while you were gone.”
“Seriously?”
“Do the carnival and I sound like we’re joking?”
He rose from the chair, placing his left hand on the book. He was still holding his drink in his right hand, because damned if he was going to give it up right now.
“You’re not left handed,” she pointed out.
“My understanding is that you now want to stop arguing about drones and start arguing about which hand I can use better, is that right?”
“Fine,” she relented.
“I solemnly swear I did not have drones fly over while we were gone because we agreed on a plan before I ever left and I did not unilaterally change the terms of the deal once I was out of the house because that would be wrong even though I really felt like a little more security would not have killed you.”
She raised an eyebrow at him. Just one.
“But I trusted you both and you were right, everything was fine. Except for the two of you getting caught by drones being mermaids.”
She walked, more calmly this time, to put the book back in its empty spot on the shelf. He had time to observe that swimming around with a tail had obviously been a workout and took an injudicious moment to wonder if she had planned for that. Constant access to a lagoon with just a slight current had been as much of a workout as he thought she’d needed; her shape had changed noticeably in just the first month they’d been here. The additional workout of propelling her entire body with one motion had already started to pull in her waist. He suspected, but knew this was a bad time to suggest, that she could probably crack walnuts behind her knees now. But planting that idea was more trouble than he wanted to handle.
“There’s nothing else you want to say about this?”
“Oh,” he laughed, “there’s a ton more we’re going to say about this. But we’re going to say it in the lagoon.”
Since it was late and Eliot was home, Devil declined to join them, even after Ophelia explained they might not make it back up to the house tonight. Devil had food and water and the television, so he wasn’t worried; they would come back for breakfast. Besides, there was no food in the cabin anyway; Ophelia had made lunch and Devil had packed it down to the cabin every day Eliot had been gone. The girls were usually so hungry by lunch, there were barely any scraps for a starving dog, a fact that he had relayed to Eliot as soon as he got home. Eliot sympathized, but said any mid-term changes to his diet to make up for lost food would still have to go through Ophelia, who was of the opinion that two generous meals and a double handful of cheese snacks per day were plenty.
“Go change into something you can swim in,” he instructed. “Be ready in 10 minutes.”
To her credit, she didn’t mention that she could be ready in no minutes at all. He’d figure it out sooner or later.
“Where did you even find tails?” he asked. He was leading the way down the dark path to the lagoon. They didn’t normally come down this late, so he hadn’t realized how dark it was in the tunnel of trees. He’d speak to the general about putting some lights in along the trail.
“The internet,” she replied. “They have everything there. It’s not like these are professional tails. They’re just, you know, starter tails.”
He stopped and turned to face her, putting out his hands so she didn’t crash into him in the dark.
“Did you just say that these aren’t professional mermaid tails, Phee?”
“Eliot, on your first day in the army did they just give you the keys to a tank and turn you loose?” she asked, exasperated, like he should have realized something so obvious. If she hadn’t been dangerously annoyed he would have laughed. “We had to see if we could swim with them at all first.”
He sighed and turned his attention back to the path, considering all the possible ways “professional tail” could be interpreted. He got to seven before they reached the cabin, where he dropped his phone on the rail. He couldn’t see hers, so he assumed she’d left it at the house. They needed at least one down here. She waited for him on the beach, stepping out of her sundress to reveal a black two-piece bathing suit.
“All right, little mermaid, now what?”
“Now we swim out to the pier,” she said. “We left them there to dry out.”
It was his turn to be skeptical.
“Trust me,” she assured him, “we did not figure that out the first day.”
He wasn’t sure she was even aware of how much faster she reached the pier than he did until she got to the ladder. She had already started the process of pulling on her tail when he got there.
“It’s a little like watching someone stuff a sausage into the casing,” she said apologetically as she wrestled the material into a bunched-up ring. Eliot frequently watched her put on stockings; this was both weirdly the same and alarmingly different. “I pictured this going differently.”
“Take your time,” he said. “Tell me about it. Do you need help with that?”
“Unless you brought cooking spray or WD-40, I’m not sure what help you can provide. The first day, we did this on the beach.” She was prone on the pier, arching her back at an improbable angle to wriggle the fabric into place over her hips.
“So you had all this and sand,” he offered, helping her sit back up.
“So much sand,” she confirmed. “And then we tried to swim out here.”
He wished there was drone video footage, because that had probably been hilarious.
“Both of you tried to swim from the beach to the pier by yourselves, with your feet and knees basically tied together, wearing a tail full of sand.”
“It was not our best hour. You wanna hear the rest of this or not?”
“Go on,” he invited. Because he absolutely wanted to hear the rest of this. Lucy and Ethel had nothing on these two.
She pulled her knees up to her chest and wrestled her feet into the monofin.
“Do you mind zipping that?” she gestured carefully at him with her feet. “The end of the tail zips around the fin to hold it on.”
To his surprise, it did. She turned and dropped her legs–tail, fin, and all–into the water.
“The first thing we figured out is that you really need two people,” she said. “The second thing we figured out was that we needed to put them on out here, not on the shore. Because swimming back in was, just, a whole lot easier than swimming out.”
“I can see that,” he nodded.
They sat on the side of the pier for a while as she swished her tail; he wasn’t sure she realized she was doing it. He could feel the pier moving with the force of the water. If they had been untethered, she would have propelled them out of the lagoon and into the ocean by now.
“And we ended up watching a lot of videos about how professional mermaids do it, because that” she made a swimming gesture with her hand “is not nearly as easy as we thought it was going to be.”
“But you got it worked out?”
“Of course we did,” she scoffed. “Our stuff always works out, except when it doesn’t. Or when we get caught by spy drones.” She splashed him. If he had to guess, more than she intended.
“The” he mimicked her gesture “swimming part and everything?”
“It took a while,” she admitted. “But eventually we got it.”
“I don’t know, Princess,” he teased. “I bet I can swim around the pier faster than you can.”
She laughed.
“I bet you can’t,” she answered.
He grinned and pushed himself off the pier without warning, hearing her outraged shriek as she slithered in after him. As he expected, she caught and passed him on the third side, and was back at the ladder well before he was. She put a hand on the dock to steady herself, leaving the ladder for him. He seated himself, then grabbed her around the waist to pull her between his knees. She still moved her tail back and forth, supporting herself more than he was.
“You know,” he whispered, “mermaids lure men to their deaths.”
“Maybe men shouldn’t be floating around in the dark searching for mysterious sea women. God forbid a girl have a hobby.”
“Your contention is that mermaids aren’t deadly, they’re just bored?”
“No cable in the middle of the ocean, Jones.” She kissed him gently. “Maybe we can do an experiment,” she offered.
“What’s that, Princess?”
“Swim to me.” She let go of him and dropped straight down into the water, resurfacing 20 yards away, near the entrance to the lagoon.
He took a running dive off the other side of the pier, sailing into the water with possibly more enthusiasm than elegance. But how many men had wives willing to dress as mermaids who then went on to challenge them to go get her in a secluded lagoon on the Mediterranean under the moonlight. And of those men, how many really were known for their diving style?
She wasn’t there when he got to the spot he had last seen her. She popped up behind him, putting her hands over his eyes, her body close against his. She was trying very hard not to accidentally drown him, which made him think that possibly mermaids were deadly and not just participating in a hobby.
“Swim to me.” She swam away, flicking her tail at him as she did. He was not quick enough to grab it and pull her back, although he could see she had not even considered that as a possibility. He treaded water, watching carefully for ripples that might indicate where she was headed next, which was also not something she’d planned for. He swam after her, arriving at her next spot just after she popped up. She grinned and kissed him on the chin.
“Swim to me.”
Because she wasn’t naturally mean (a thing Eliot was often glad for, but never more than tonight when he was just as glad to stop swimming), her next destination was the beach. She stretched out on the sand, fanning her hair out so it could dry in the warm night. Eliot flopped onto the beach like a tired seal. He had not expected that the follow-up to a rigorous war game exercise that included sleeping outside for seven nights in a row would have been chasing his newly-finned wife around their private lagoon. He would contemplate that idea longer at another time, because it merited some closer study.
When his breathing returned to something closer to normal, he rolled over on his side and propped his head up on one hand. The gentle waves lapped at his feet and knees, and midway up her tail.
“One thing I can’t figure out,” he said.
“What’s that, Jones?”
“Why on earth you would want to hide this,” he asked earnestly. “Because it seems pretty fun. Is there something I’m missing?”
“Not hide,” she smiled apologetically. “I wanted to have everything figured out for when you got back. I wanted it to be a surprise. And while it might have been a surprise, the first few days weren’t actually very attractive. There was a lot of choking on seawater, and sore everything from my toes up to my shoulders. Plus, learning it was a lot harder than it looked and we underestimated the time it would take.”
“But you’re both strong swimmers,” he pointed out. They were. He was glad they went into this together, but he wasn’t necessarily concerned about either of them. Unless eels got into the lagoon. Then, he figured, they’d both figure out how to run on top of the water pretty fast.
“For people. For something other than people, not so much.”
He’d ask more questions about that later.
“So you think of all this as more of a gift, then?”
“Yeah.” She shrugged, which was something to watch a prone woman try to do. The idea of sand angels swam across his mind. He’d think about that later too. “Unless you don’t. And we certainly didn’t mean for anyone to find out from drone pictures.”
She was clearly disappointed that they had been outed, and that was just the disappointment she was letting him see. Her anger from earlier, he now understood, stemmed from getting caught doing something she thought he’d appreciate before she was ready to tell him about it. He had a clearer picture of the whole situation and her reaction to it now, because she put a lot of effort into planning surprises for him, no matter how spontaneous they looked. And it was clear they’d spent a lot of time and effort on this to be thwarted by technology they did not expect would be used on them. If he thought about it in any sort of depth, he’d get mad about it too. But that wouldn’t help anyone. Especially not tonight.
“I love it anyway,” he murmured against her temple. “We’ll come back so you can show me during the day, okay?” Whether or not it was a professional tail, she had chosen it because it sparkled. He bet it was really impressive under the sun. “But in the meantime, it’s late. We should go inside.”
“I suppose we should,” she said. “Do you mind unzipping my feet?”
“I do, in fact.” He picked her up easily and carried her back to the cabin, stopping at the outdoor shower for a long time. Making sure the saltwater was rinsed out of her tail was important, he assumed, and who was he to argue with that? Plus, the mental picture of carrying his mermaid wife back to their cabin was too enticing to let go without trying. He was never completely sure what was in her head, but figured her thoughts were running along the same lines as his when she arched in his arms to kiss him under the fresh water. Very briefly, he wondered if this was what it felt like to be on the cover of a romance novel, then wondered if she’d be interested in writing a romance novel. But none of those answer would be as satisfying as kissing his mermaid wife, who tasted like salt and sand and crashing waves and a freedom he’d never expected to have as a married man.
Only after he got to the porch and set her carefully on the swing did he unzip her tail and pull her feet free from her fin, setting it to one side to drain.
“Is getting out of that easier than getting in it?” he asked, then could have kicked himself for breaking the spell. She grinned and shook her head, then stood up and shimmied it all the way down to the floor. She draped it over the rail, smoothing out the wrinkles.
“You said something about a shower before going to bed,” she prompted as she unlocked the cabin door. He had insisted on the lock; he had no idea where she’d pulled the key from tonight.
“It’s like you read my mind,” he laughed. He scooped her up again and carried her inside, kicking the door closed behind them.
“I gotta dry my hair,” she said, sometime after they exited the shower. “I feel like I haven’t dried all the way out in weeks. My shampoo and conditioner usage has gone through the roof.”
“Take all the time you need,” he offered. He was feeling magnanimous tonight as a result of her extended welcome home celebration. “When you’re done you can tell me more about these professional tails.”
“Do you have your phone?” She had wrapped her hair up in a towel like a turban while she buttoned one of his shirts around her. “Because we’ll need it.”
After the hairdryer started, he went to retrieve his phone from the porch and hope Hardison had been telling the truth when he said he wasn’t monitoring either of their phones. If Parker found out Ophelia was living the good life in San Lorenzo as a mermaid, she’d pop up here faster than he could say “Dammit, Hardison!”. He could deal with Ophelia and Amalia. He could deal with Ophelia and Mikel. He could deal with Ophelia and Parker. But if he ever had to deal with more than two of them at a time, any other thing in the universe that wanted to kill him would just have to take a number.
Very late that night, when she was sound asleep, he heard his phone ping with a message. He could only guess at what she dreamed about, but smiled when he saw her feet were twitching in unison. Quietly, he got up to check his message in the living room of the cabin. Whoever was texting him, he didn’t want her waking up to that.
<Tomas>: This is not what I thought was meant by “professional tails”.
<E. Spencer>: Not my first thought either.
<Tomas>: This is occupational hazard?
<E. Spencer>: Sure. Phee’s been showing me videos.
<Tomas>: Yes. Amalia has now explained “professional tail” in three languages. I may return to camp.
<E. Spencer>: Don’t go without a demonstration. You might want to count on lunch here in the next few days.
<Tomas>: I did not order the drones. Although more security would not have killed them.
<E. Spencer>: Agreed. I know you didn’t order them.
<Tomas>: I checked the general’s orders. He did not order them either
Eliot didn’t bother to ask whether that was legal or not.
<E. Spencer>: Guessed it wasn’t.
<Tomas>: It was Mrs. Flores.
<E. Spencer>: She can do that?!
<Tomas>: Apparently there is a loophole in the process.
<E. Spencer>: Gonna have to fix that.
<Tomas>: Too late. She wants to speak to the girls tomorrow.
<E. Spencer>: Shit.
<Tomas>: Si. Going to delete this conversation. You have been warned.
He got back into bed unclear on whether or not he’d like her to notice his return. It had been a long three weeks of planning when he only saw her early in the morning and late at night. She hadn’t exactly gone full June Cleaver, but she made sure he had real food to eat every night when he got home, and always waited for him. Sometimes he’d been so late he would find her and Devil asleep on the couch with all the lights on; it was another of her gestures that warmed his heart. Staying away for seven days had been excruciating. He’d expected it to be annoying; he had been surprised that one of his first moves after staking out the high ground had been to look to see if he could see any part of their house or their beach. It was only three miles away. But part of the reason General Flores had chosen that property was that it was hard to find, even if someone was really looking. And he really had been.
She stirred gently.
“Is something wrong?” she murmured.
“Nothing, Princess. Don’t worry about it.” He kissed her on the temple and twisted a stray curl around his finger. Her hair dried curlier than she usually wore it this close to salt water. A thought occurred to him.
“You know,” he suggested hopefully, “Mermaids are usually portrayed topless.”
“You can thank whoever ordered those drones for the fact that, going forward, we won’t be.”
“Dammit.”
Nearly a month later, a delivery man arrived at the door with a package for Ophelia. She signed for it, despite not knowing what it was, while Devil kept a watchful eye on the driver. Eliot was in the late stages of planning their second exercise, so she didn’t expect him home for a while yet. Time she could use to try to remember what she had ordered. Finally, the suspense got to her; she couldn’t resist opening it.
<Peaches>: !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Eliot glanced at his phone and smiled.
<Jones>: You like it?
<Peaches>: I love it! It’s beautiful! Where did you find it?
<Jones>: The internet. Turns out they do have everything.
Tomas repeated his question, calling Eliot’s thoughts back from the lagoon and into the much less shimmery world of international troop training.
<Phee>: OMG! Look! *photo attached
<Mali>: OMG! Where did you get it?!
<Phee>: Eliot got it for me! Come over, we have to try it out!
Eliot had done some scouting on his own and found a woman in Paris who made tails as fashionable as they were functional. After asking what she found to be a disconcerting number of questions, he forwarded the picture Parker had taken of them at the Faire, circling her wings. The clever woman had made a swishy, flowing tail the exact coppery shade of her wings that he still saw even now. The lady then asked him an astonishing number of questions to which he did not have answers, which made it necessary for them to talk again. After several days of back and forth conducted while planning a military exercise for 30 troops (two things that did not dovetail), they agreed on a design. At his request, the maker sent him pictures all along the process. When they were both satisfied, he’d given her his shipping address.
Ophelia gently lifted the tail from the box, holding it against her while Amalia squeaked in excitement. The tail was a beautiful peach silicon body while the fluke was surrounded by silk shot through with brighter orange streaks and was dripping with luxurious trailing frills. It was simply the most beautiful thing Ophelia had ever seen. Amalia reached for the box to pull it out of the way.
“I think there’s something else in here,” she said. “It’s heavy.”
Ophelia lifted away several layers of tissue to reveal the matching top, which was beaded and jeweled and complex and delicate and she nearly swooned.
“What is it you do for him?” Amalia asked skeptically. “For a man to do this, it is not normal. And you are his wife! Men only act like this with a mistress!”
“Oh, now,” Ophelia scoffed. “Tomas doesn’t have a mistress.”
“Neither did he send me a costume that must have cost as much as a sports car,” she pointed out.
There was a knock at the front door, which sent Devil baying out like an entire pack of hellhounds. Ophelia laid her new tail aside with a gentle stroke of the soft fabric before she went to see if, indeed, hell awaited and also knocked.
“Sorry,” the delivery man grinned. “I had two.”
She signed for the other box and closed the door.
“Amalia, there’s a box for Tomas’s mistress here!”
The other girl rushed out into the hall, ready to be mad if Ophelia was joking.
“Back in the living room,” Ophelia instructed. “So I can drop this. It’s like carrying a refrigerator box.”
Amalia’s tail was no less stunning, in a beautiful, shimmering gold and pearl white, with a top of riotous colors, as if she had raided a pirate’s treasure.
“What do you do for Tomas?” Amalia asked. “He has never done a thing like this! Never!”
“There’s a note,” Ophelia said, fishing the paper out of the sea of green tissue. “It says ‘tell Amalia she’s welcome, Jones.’ So there you go. Tomas still hasn’t done anything like this, so there’s nothing for you to worry about.”
In their shared office, which was a conference room Eliot had commandeered, Tomas looked at his phone.
“I believe this is called encouraging the wrong behavior,” he said sternly, around a grin.
“Maybe it is,” Eliot agreed. “But they’re getting pretty good at it. If we can sell the idea that San Lorenzo has mermaids, we can retire and start charging admission to the lagoon.”
Tomas looked at him sharply, considering all the possible implications of Eliot’s statement.
“This would mean no more camping.”
“Exactly.”
“I apologize, Spencer. I did not see, as you say, the long game. I must apologize, for I have underestimated you.”
He was thoroughly unnerved by Eliot’s grin.
A captain, who looked far younger than Eliot remembered captains being, knocked quietly at the door. His expression said he hoped they didn’t hear him and he could pass this task off to literally anyone else in San Lorenzo.
“Yes, Marco?” Tomas said, hoping Marco hadn’t been listening in the hallway.
“Sir,” the man replied nervously with a barely noticeable look at Eliot, “there is a problem with the camera order.”
“What kind of problem?”
Eliot opened a document on his computer, ready to take notes on the known issues before they left the place with air conditioning and IT support.
The young man cleared his throat nervously.
“There are not enough of them, sir.”
Tomas pulled a piece of paper from the pile on Eliot’s makeshift desk, appearing to give it careful scrutiny. The captain assumed, as Tomas intended, that it was the shipping manifest for the camera order. This was the sort of lack of observational skills Eliot had noted in the debrief from the first exercise: it was obviously a menu from the pizza place from which they had ordered lunch.
“There are only 22,” the captain continued. Eliot thought he could see his upper lip was sweating. He had clearly been the loser when they drew straws to bring this news to their commanding officer. “The order was for 24.”
“I thank you for raising this concern to me, Marco,” his colonel answered as he tried to put the young man at ease. “But there is no issue. Two of these cameras were pulled after the order was received. They are for a different part of the exercise that will not be immediately obvious to the troops on the ground. You may continue to distribute the rest.”
The captain, obviously relieved that he was at least not going to be held responsible for this mess, handed over two cameras and checked off both Eliot and Tomas from his list before he saluted and departed at flank speed.
“Where was I?” Tomas asked.
“Encouraging the wrong behavior,” Eliot mumbled.
Three weeks later, from a spot among the trees, he watched one detail of Tomas’s troops formulate and begin to execute a plan that, while good, was a complete loser as far as this game went. Looked like they were not going to be getting that fresh fruit tonight after all. He reclined against a tree with an apple, watching. Then his phone pinged. It was not the satellite phones they’d been using for these exercises, but his personal phone. Which was at least one reason the detail’s plan was going to fail: they hadn’t bothered to scan for anything with a signal. It was true he would have been gone by the time they had detected his phone, but they hadn’t even tried.
Tomas dropped out of a tree to land lightly beside him.
“I cannot decide if you are confident or arrogant,” Tomas hissed. Eliot barely tore his glance away from the troops making their stealthy way in the wrong direction. “But this is not why I am here.”
“Why are you here?” Eliot asked quietly, still not reaching for his phone. He wanted to give them the benefit of the doubt, at least until they were out of range.
“Who held the camera?”
Finally, it was a question that captured all of his attention. Tomas gestured at Eliot’s phone, which the American had been ignoring. He knew it wasn’t an emergency, therefore any message he had on it could wait until he had time to deal with it. She had sent a video file; he watched, mesmerized. They had clearly been working hard on their technique, because their twirls and flips and underwater frolicking were incredibly graceful and well-choreographed. They were beautiful. The video ended with them blowing bubbles and kisses at the camera, laughing and swimming up and out of the frame.
“Who held the camera?” Tomas repeated.
“I don’t know, man. It was probably the dog. Wouldn’t be the weirdest thing he does.” He turned an ear to listen to the troops now wreaking havoc on some bushes that had done nothing to deserve it and also held no clues. They did, however, hold a flock of small but viciously territorial birds. “You want to go get them before one of them falls off the cliff?”
“They’ll learn,” Tomas shrugged. The evidence was that they would not, in fact, learn. “I wish to discuss this retirement idea of yours some more.”
**Author’s note: This is the last of the San Lorenzo/Portland stories. You can rest knowing that Eliot and Ophelia are living the good life in San Lorenzo with a constant stream of adventures, good food, and good friends. Thank you so much for reading their adventures, and join me and Eliot next week when I roll out the first of the Leverage: Redemption stories set in New Orleans.***