The Grays Read Online Free

those eyes. White-gray. Unique.
    Dad’s people. His coworkers. She shook her head, considering the little collection of silent men.
    She went into her bedroom and lay down, closing her eyes and contemplating what the voyage of her life would be like now.
    Dad had had one of those stealth tempers that would boil up out of nowhere and, for a few minutes, rock the world. He had been bitter about never making general. “It’s the damn work I do, nobody else can do it and it’s not a general’s job.” He had hated it and loved it. He would drink at the kitchen table, lifting shots of vodka, and then he would be poetic, which was beautiful and awesome and scary, because he had such a huge memory for quotations, and because when he was like that, being with him was like looking into the darkest room in the world.
    “When in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes,” she could hear him reciting, “I all alone beweep my outcast state . . .” and then looking at her and adding, “pardon my bathos.”
    “Oh, hell,” she said, “I’m going to miss you! I am going to
miss you!”
    How could he be dead? How in God’s name do you get KIAed in Indianapolis?
    Well, hell. As far as he was concerned, the day she received her commission, she had been on her way to general. He would manage her career. “You can’t fly combat, so you need to get on a hot staff.”
    He had stared at her orders to report to the supplies depot for a long time. Stood there and stared, so still she thought he might have gone to sleep on his feet. He put them down far too carefully, on the back of the couch. Then he had marched off into his office. She’d heard him yelling, and gone to his door, which was not right, she knew, but she was involved, for God’s sake. She’d only heard one thing, but it had been repeated a number of times, “put her on ice.” And he’d cursed the person at the other end of the line with a venom that was far beyond his worst tantrums, that had frightened her because it had implied that the hidden thing in his life somehow also involved her.
    Thinking back, she closed her eyes for a moment. Fortune and men’s eyes . . .
    There had also been another thing between her and Dad, that would come at moments of silence and his strange sorrow, a kind of bond that would seem to enter the air between them, almost as if they could somehow link their minds. Or so she imagined.
    The phone rang. She looked at the incoming number. Base call. Could it be the guy from Dad’s funeral? Could he actually be pressing her this hard, on this day? She didn’t believe it.
    “Hello?”
    “Lieutenant—”
    “Look, mister, are you somewhere in the chain of command, because if you aren’t, very frankly, I am here trying to deal with the death of my father and really my only friend, and I am just not doing this.”
    There was a silence. It extended. “I am in the chain of command,” he said at last. “My orders are legal.”
    Could this be real? Could this guy really, actually be on the phone pushing her around like this now?
    “I’d like to do this tomorrow.”
    “You have your orders, Lieutenant.”
    She hung up the phone and wanted, very badly, to do something hurtful to this man. But that was military life, wasn’t it? You weren’t here to grieve.
    She reported to an impressive but sterile office suite that had all the anonymous earmarks of being some kind of official visitor’s lair. She was called in immediately.
    With Mr. Crew was the younger of the two colonels, Langford. She was just as glad—the older one had exuded something that had made her uneasy, Wilkes or whatever his name was.
    The office was large and the furniture real wood, but there wasn’t a single citation on the walls, nor a photograph, nor anything that might identify him further. Obviously, a spook, but not Air Force or he’d be in uniform.
    She saluted the colonel. He returned. “At ease, Lieutenant,” he said, smiling and shaking his head