Empire of Ashes — Season 2, Episode 79: Twenty Minutes, Taken Back

0:00 Empire of Ashes. Episode 79. 20 minutes. Taken back. Written by Mia. Lena. Pharaoh found his man within three days, an old associate named Renzo, who'd spent decades doing exactly this kind of quiet, careful work along difficult coastlines before retiring somewhere none of us had thought to ask about, and who apparently owed Pharaoh a debt considerably older than anything the rest of us had ever been part of. How do you know him? I asked, more out of nervous curiosity than any real need to know. A long time ago, and a considerably different life than the one either of us leads now, Pharaoh said, something distant crossing his face. I'll tell you the whole of it someday, over something considerably stronger

0:50 than coffee. Tonight, all that matters is that he's the best I know, and he's already said yes. He asked no questions beyond the ones that actually mattered. Pharaoh told us, spreading Renzo's own corrections onto the map we'd already half memorized. The channel, the tide windows, how many men, how much time. He's done harder extractions than this one, apparently, though he was polite enough not to specify which. Is he trustworthy?

1:20 I asked, unable to keep the question from surfacing, even knowing Pharaoh would never have brought him this far without already answering it himself. Truly, not simply competent. Truly, Pharaoh said. I wouldn't have called him otherwise. I've trusted him with considerably more than a boat trip, in the life we shared before this one. What does he actually want from us? I asked. Payment, I assume. What kind? None, Pharaoh said. He wouldn't take a single coin from me, and made it clear he wouldn't take one from any of you either.

1:54 I asked him why the way I ask everyone now. He said some debts aren't meant to be settled with money, and left it at that. I didn't push further. I think some men have earned the right to keep their own reasons private. When? Dario asked, and I heard something new in his voice, a steadiness I recognized as a decision already made rather than one still being weighed. This coming Tuesday, Farrow said. The supply boat's engine gives us cover for the approach. Vasco's 20 minutes gives us the only window we'll get. I'm going, Dario said, before anyone could ask. I've thought about it since the moment we agreed to this plan. I'm not asking permission. I'm telling all of you.

2:38 So nobody's surprised by it Tuesday morning. Dario. I felt Lena's hand tighten in mine that night, the particular grip of a woman holding two truths at once, pride in a decision, and terror at exactly what the decision actually meant. I need you to come back, she said, simply, without any of the careful language either of us usually reaches for a round fear this large.

3:05 That's the entire request. Everything else, I trust you and Pharaoh and Renzo to handle properly. I will. I said, meaning it more fully than I think I'd ever meant a promise before. I'm not doing this recklessly, Lena. I'm doing it because I finally understand there's a version of staying safely home that would cost me something I'm not willing to spend. I want to be able to tell you, someday, that I was actually there when we brought him back. Then be careful the entire time you're being brave, she said. I don't think those two things have to be opposites, whatever tonight's fear keeps trying to tell me. I'll bring something back for you, I said, needing to give her something lighter to hold onto alongside

3:49 the fear. Not a thing, exactly. A description, at least. Of the exact shape of that sky he's had to ration all this time. I'd like that, she said, something almost like a smile finding its way through. I think I'd like to know what he's actually been looking at all these months before I ever get to ask him myself. We left before dawn on Tuesday. Farrow driving, Renzo quiet and economical in the passenger seat, checking equipment I didn't recognize with the specific, unhurried competence of a man who has done this exact kind of checking a hundred times before.

4:27 Dario. The channel Renzo navigated with a precision that made the boat's earlier reconnaissance visits look like guesswork, hugging a line so narrow I couldn't have found it myself, even knowing exactly where to look. The supply boat's engine carried across the water ahead of us, right on schedule, and Renzo cut our own engine entirely once we were close enough, letting the current and a single or do the rest of the work in near silence. Everything matches, Renzo said quietly.

4:57 Your fishermen's reports were precise. I've worked from considerably worse intelligence than this. Five guards, Renzo murmured, scope pressed to his eye. Two on the dock for the delivery. Two near the house, one walking the tree line, same rotation as your fisherman's earlier reports. And him, I asked my chest tight. There, Renzo said, and handed me the scope. I found him immediately, thin, white -haired, standing at the edge of the small cove exactly, as every report had described him, facing the water with the particular stillness of a man drinking in something he knows he'll have to surrender again in minutes. My own chest ached, seeing him, thinking of Lena's photograph, of a tobacco tin she still hadn't asked about.

5:47 I lowered the scope for a moment, needing to steady my own breathing before I said anything at all. He looks smaller than I expected, I said quietly. I don't know why that surprises me. I suppose I'd built him up into something considerably larger than an actual man standing on an actual beach. They always do, Renzo said. not unkindly.

6:10 The story gets larger than the person, waiting this long to meet them. He'll still be exactly as real as any of us, once you're actually standing beside him. Now, Renzo said quietly, while the fifth guard's rotation takes him farthest from the water, we won't get a cleaner window than this one. Lena, I sat with Sophia and Nico in our kitchen, the three of us doing nothing useful at all, Simply enduring the particular agony of waiting for news, none of us could hurry along no matter how badly we wanted to. I'd tried, twice, to occupy my hands with something ordinary.

6:50 Tea neither of us drank, a newspaper I read the same paragraph of four times without absorbing a single word of it, before finally giving up and simply sitting, palms flat on the table, the way I ground myself now against every fact too large to hold standing. He'll be fine, Sophia said, for perhaps the fourth time, and I understood she needed to say it as much as I needed to hear it, regardless of whether either of us actually believed it fully in that moment. I know, I said.

7:21 I keep telling myself the same thing. I don't think either of us has ever been particularly good at believing our own reassurances this year. I keep doing the arithmetic instead. I admitted. How long the approach should take. How long the extraction itself. How long before Pharaoh would actually have anything worth calling about? I know it doesn't change anything doing the math.

7:44 I can't seem to stop myself anyway. None of us can, Sophia said. I've been doing my own version of the same thing since the moment they left this morning. Nico said nothing at all, simply sat with us, his presence its own kind of steadiness, a man who has waded through considerably worse mornings than this one and understood. better than either of us, that sometimes the only honest thing to offer was company rather than false certainty. You waited like this before, didn't you? I said to him eventually. Actual mornings like this one, not simply this year's version of it. More than I'd like to count, Nico admitted.

8:24 I learned a long time ago that waiting well isn't about staying calm. It's about staying present, however unsteady the calm actually is underneath it. I've never once managed the first one properly. I've gotten considerably better at the second. How do I get better at it? I asked. You're already doing it, Nico said. Sitting here, instead of somewhere else pretending you're fine. That's most of it, honestly. The rest is simply time doing what time does, whether we're ready for it or not. The phone finally rang two hours later.

8:59 And I answered it before the first ring had even finished, my whole body flooding with a fear so sharp it took me a full second to actually hear what Pharaoh was saying. He's safe, Pharaoh said. Lena, he's safe. We have him. I felt my knees actually give slightly, catching myself against the counter, the sound that came out of me somewhere between a sob and a laugh, entirely beyond my own control. Is he hurt? I managed.

9:26 Is Dario? Dario's fine. Pharaoh said quickly. Everyone's fine. There was a moment, close to the end, when it nearly went wrong. It didn't. I'll let Dario tell you the rest properly. Once we're somewhere safe to actually talk. For now, all you need to know is exactly what I already told you. He's safe. All of them are. I hung up and turned to find Sophia already crying, unashamed, and Nico simply closing his eyes for a long moment. the particular relief of a man setting down a weight he'd been carrying since long before any of the rest of us had known to help him carry it. Dario. The extraction itself took less than ninety seconds, Renzo moving with an economy of motion I'd never seen in anyone

10:14 before, guiding Vasco from the beach into the boat's shadow while I kept the scope trained on the tree line, my heart in my throat the entire time. It was Vasco himself who nearly gave us away. not from carelessness but from the particular disbelief of a man who has spent months rationing twenty minutes of sky at a time suddenly told by strangers that he was actually leaving he made a sound small and involuntary somewhere between a sob and a question and the fifth guards had turned sharply toward it Renzo had him in the boat before the guard had finished turning, and the supply boat's engine, still running at the dock, swallowed whatever sound might have carried afterward. We were around the point,

10:58 and out of sight within a minute, the guard shout, if there was one at all, lost entirely beneath open water and Renzo's own steady, silent oar. You're safe, I told him, once we were clear, watching him shake in the bottom of the boat. thin hands gripping the small leather book he'd apparently never once let go of. My name is Dario.

11:21 My wife is Lina Russo. We've been looking for you for months. He looked up at that, something breaking open in his face that I recognized, even before he spoke, as 15 years of a name finally being handed back to him. Lina, he said, barely a whisper. Aldo's Lina. She's alive. She's actually alive. She is, I said, married to me, of all people, which I promise is a considerably longer story than we have time for on this boat. She's waiting for us. She's been waiting for you considerably longer than that, honestly. He laughed then, a broken, disbelieving sound, and pressed the small leather book harder against his chest, as though the news itself needed somewhere physical to land. I kept telling myself she'd be grown,

12:13 he said. I don't think I actually believed it some days. It's easier to hold onto a nine -year old's face than to imagine the woman she must have become. You'll see for yourself soon enough, I said. I don't think either version of her disappoints, for what it's worth. Lena. They brought him to a quiet, secure house Pharaoh had arranged in advance. Not our own home yet, a doctor already waiting there to see to whatever his long captivity had cost him, and I made myself wait one more agonizing hour before Pharaoh finally called to say it was safe for me to come. I found him sitting up in a plain, warm room, thinner than any photograph had ever shown me, his hair entirely white now, but his eyes, the moment they found

13:00 mine, exactly as I remembered them from a back room 15 years gone, patient and searching and entirely, unmistakably himself. Vasco, I said, and found I couldn't say anything else at all for a long moment, simply standing in the doorway, letting fifteen years finally close the distance between us. You grew up, he said, something wet and disbelieving in his voice. I used to wonder, some nights, whether I'd ever actually know that you had. I crossed the room and knelt beside his chair, taking the hand he offered, feeling it tremble slightly in mine. Do you still have it? I asked, my own voice breaking. The tobacco tin, the one you always kept on the corner of the table. He laughed then, a real laugh, thin

13:50 but genuine. and reached with his free hand toward the small pocket of the worn coat someone had given him, producing a battered, ancient tin I recognized instantly, the same one from fifteen years of memory finally, made real again in my own two hands. I never stopped carrying it, he said. I think some part of me always knew someone would eventually come asking. I held the tin in both hands. feeling the same worn dents I remembered from a childhood table, and let myself cry properly for the first time all day, not from fear anymore, but from something considerably gentler finally allowed to arrive. There's so much I need to ask you, I said, once I could speak again, about my father, about what you

14:35 actually know, about whether any of what we suspect about Falcone is true. I don't want to ask any of it tonight. I want a night to simply be this. Then let it be simply this, Vasco said, his hand tightening gently around mine. I've waited a long while to have nothing more urgent to do than sit in a room with Aldo's daughter. I intend to actually let myself have it before either of us goes looking for anything harder. Dario appeared in the doorway then, having given us these first minutes alone, and I watched Vasco's eyes find him. Something like gratitude passing between two men who had, in the space of one impossible morning, become bound to each other in a way neither had expected. Thank you, Vasco

15:21 said simply, for coming, for not giving up on an old man nobody else had reason to remember. You're not nobody, Dario said. You never were. I don't think any of us needed to be told that twice, once we actually understood who you were to her. I looked between the two of them. my husband, and the man who taught me to read a lie hidden inside a column of true numbers and felt, for the first time in longer than I could easily remember, the specific, fragile shape of something that might actually, finally, be close to whole. To be continued. That was episode 79 of Empire of Ashes. If this one has its hooks in you, the next episode is already waiting.

16:04 Subscribe so you don't miss it. The complete book is on Amazon and early episodes plus Dario POV bonus scenes are on my Patreon. Links are in the description. I'm Mia. Thank you for listening.