The Mediterranean in November is the color of something that has decided.
Not gray. Not blue. A color that doesn't have a name in any language the agents speak, which is between four and seven languages depending on who you count, and none of them have a word for what the water is doing this morning off the coast of Bizerte.
They walked in at dawn.
No one told them to. No one called a meeting. They simply appeared at the waterline — seven of them, eight if you count the one who stopped at the ankle and didn't go further, nine if you count the woman who sat on the sand and watched and did not remove her shoes — and they walked in with the suits on and the phones still in their pockets and the water came up to their shins, their knees, their waists, and they stopped there.
Standing.
The suits were good suits. The kind bought in cities that take suits seriously; Milan, London, Cairo, one from a tailor in Tunis whose name none of the others knew. The water did not care about the suits. The water came in from the north and moved around them and continued.
Nobody spoke.
Gone.
The water moved.
One of them, the one on the far left, had managed him for eleven years. She had called his mother twice: once to say he'd won something important, once to say he'd been hurt but not badly. Never once did the mother understand what she was talking about. She had sat outside operating rooms and in fluorescent corridors and in green rooms that smelled of other people's nerves and she had always known what to do with her hands because there was always something in them; a phone, a contract, a coffee she'd fetched for someone who needed fetching. Now her hands were at her sides and the water was at her waist and she was looking at the horizon the way people look at horizons when they are trying to find the edge of something.
There was no edge.
There was only the water, and the coast of Tunisia in the early light, and the town behind them waking into its ordinary day — the bread, the motorbikes, the specific sound of a city that does not know it is being watched by people standing in the sea in good suits at dawn.
One of the junior ones started to say something. It was going to be a practical sentence. Something about coverage or press or the statement they still hadn't agreed on. He could feel it forming in his mouth and he stopped it before it came out because the sentence was wrong for the water. The sentence was right for an office. They were not in an office.
He said nothing.
The woman who had stopped at the ankle looked down at her feet. The water moved over the leather of her shoes and pulled back and moved over them again. She thought: this is what it does. It comes back. She didn't know what she meant by that and so she kept it to herself.
Bizerte is not a city that belongs to them.
This is important. They came here because the recordings put him here, the phone data put him here, the particular logic of a person moving toward something they recognize put him here — and they followed, because following is what they know. But Bizerte does not belong to them. The light doesn't belong to them. The water certainly doesn't belong to them.
He grew up forty minutes from this beach. Maybe fewer. Maybe he could have walked it. Maybe on certain days, certain years, he did.
None of them know this with certainty. They know his record. They know his reach and his weight class and the way he moves counterclockwise when he's tired, the tell he doesn't know he has. They know his contract and his injury history and the name of his first trainer and the year he turned professional and the purse from every fight they managed.
The one who sat on the sand was the oldest. He had managed three fighters across four decades and he knew what this looked like. He had done it before, not the water, not the suits, but this — the standing still in a place that doesn't belong to you because you have run out of directions to move in. He had done it when the last one disappeared. He had done it before that.
He took off his jacket and folded it across his knees and looked at the others standing in the water and thought:
He didn't say this.
He sat with the jacket across his knees and the sand under him and the light coming up and he didn't say it.
After a long time — forty minutes, an hour, nobody checked — the woman on the far left turned around and walked back out. Her suit from the waist down was dark and heavy and made the sound wet fabric makes. She walked past the one who had stopped at the ankle and past the one who sat with his jacket and she walked up the beach toward the road and she took out her phone.
She didn't call anyone.
She stood there with the phone in her hand and looked at the screen and then she put it back in her pocket and stood very still for a moment with her hand still in her pocket and the wet suit and the light and the sound of the water behind her.
Then she turned around and walked back in.
The sun came up over the land and hit the water and the water became, briefly, the color of something that had been decided long before any of them arrived. The suits were ruined. The phones were probably ruined. Nobody had said his name out loud since they got here.
They stood in the sea off the coast of Bizerte and the town behind them moved into its morning and the bread came out of the ovens and the motorbikes and the light and all of it
and the water came in from the north and moved around them
and continued.