by Titan Books
“I guess I don’t have to ask how business is,” Henry said with a laugh as he looked around.
“It could have been yours. I only asked you ten times.” Jack’s laugh was a bit sheepish and Henry realized he was on edge as well. “Good to see you, Henry.”
“Yeah, you, too,” Henry replied, meaning it.
They hugged, and that was an awkward moment for both of them. But after what they’d been through together, a little awkwardness was no big deal.
“What are you doing now? Feelin’ sexy?” Henry nodded at the open shirt.
Jack laughed again as they moved into the cabin. “Thanks for coming so quickly.”
“Still married?” Henry asked.
“Yeah,” Jack said. “My wife’s on a shopping trip in Paris and my son is in a Swiss boarding school. You?”
Henry shook his head. “No wife. No son. No Paris.”
Jack went behind a polished wooden bar and took a couple of beers from a small fridge. He opened them, handed one to Henry, and they raised their bottles in a familiar toast.
“Here’s to the next war,” Jack said. “Which is no war.”
“No war,” Henry agreed. They clinked bottles and drank. It had been over twenty years since the last time they had done this. Henry wished he could take more time to savor the moment but neither of them had come out here just to have a few beers and catch up on each other’s domestic status. “Okay, so what have you got?”
Jack laughed. “Still not one for smelling the roses, are you?”
Henry dipped his head to one side noncommittally. “I’m trying, brother. But you did say it was urgent.”
Jack nodded and led him out to the stern, grabbing a laptop from a built-in shelf on the way. They sat down with their backs to the cabin and Jack opened the laptop. The screen came to life immediately. “Recognize him?” he asked.
Henry did; he had seen the photo only yesterday, when he had set fire to it and left the ashes in a fishbowl. He was careful to keep his expression neutral as he turned from the screen to Jack. “Who’s asking?”
“Your old friend who’s afraid you’re in trouble.” Jack’s weathered face wore the kind of serious expression Henry hadn’t seen for many years, and had hoped he would never have to see again. “So, do you? Recognize him?”
“Yeah. I AMF’ed him in Liège a few days ago.”
“Did they tell you who he was?”
Henry frowned. Of course they had—the agency always told you who the target was. Jack knew that. “Valery Dormov, terrorist.”
Jack’s expression was pained. “No, Valery Dormov, molecular biologist,” he said, his voice heavy. “Who worked here in the States for over thirty years.” He tapped the touchpad with one finger; the image shrank and became the photo on Dormov’s driver’s license, issued in Georgia and not yet expired.
“But I read his file,” Henry said. He felt as if he had a large, icy lump in his stomach. “It said he was a bioterrorist.”
“The file was spiked,” Jack told him. “I don’t know by whom.”
The yacht was barely moving in the calm waters of Buttermilk Sound but Henry felt as if the world were tilting sideways. He half-expected to see the horizon was now on a slant but everything looked normal. Except it wasn’t, not if Del Patterson had lied to him.
For two and a half decades, Henry had put his life in Patterson’s hands without a second thought, never less than a hundred percent certain that he could trust him, that the information Patterson gave him was solid, that he and Patterson and everyone else on the team were all doing the same job for the same side.
If he had heard this from anyone other than Jack Willis, Henry wouldn’t have even considered the possibility. But Jack was his brother; he wouldn’t have come to Henry after so many years to drop this on him unless he was more than solid on the facts.
“Why?” Henry managed after a bit.
Jack shrugged, looking apologetic. “Don’t know that either, I’m afraid. But a lot of alarms went off when Dormov switched teams.”
Henry’s thoughts were racing now. What if Patterson hadn’t lied? Maybe he had been deceived by someone higher up. Was Patterson a cunning traitor or a clueless dupe? Neither option fit the man Henry knew.
“Who told you all this?” he asked.
Jack hesitated, like he had to choose his words carefully. “A friend from the other side.”
A ‘friend.’ Henry had a pretty good idea of who that might be and unfortunately, it wasn’t someone he had ever been in direct contact with. He was going to have to rectify that in order to get to the bottom of this mess. Also, to rule out the possibility that Jack had been lied to. That didn’t seem at all likely—Jack had always been able to spot a liar a mile away even in bad weather—but the only way Henry could be absolutely sure was to meet Jack’s source face-to-face. Jack would understand; if their situations had been reversed, Jack would have felt the same.
“I want to talk to this friend,” he said.
Jack choked on a sip of beer. “Oh, sure, no problem! What do you prefer, Skype or FaceTime?”
Henry kept his expression neutral. “I want to talk to him. I have to.”
He could practically see Jack’s mind shift into overdrive, coming up with all the reasons why such a thing was completely impossible and balancing them against the knowledge that Henry would never let it go.
“What the hell—the guy owes me,” Jack said. He put his beer in the cup holder on his left and typed rapidly on the laptop keyboard. Then he turned the screen toward Henry, showing him large black letters on a white background:
YURI KOVAC
BUDAPEST
Henry was about to thank him when he heard something behind him. He turned to see an extraordinarily beautiful woman had come up the stairs from below deck. As she came out of the cabin, Henry saw that she had a headful of miraculously thick, honey-colored hair and an equally miraculous body not even slightly obscured by the filmy wrap she wore over a bikini that seemed to have been made for her.
She paused for a moment and peered at Jack over the top of her sunglasses with an expression that somehow managed to be both coolly reserved and possessive. Then she turned away and floated gracefully up the ladder to the next deck, a feat Henry wouldn’t have thought possible. He turned to look at Jack; whatever her story was, it had to be fascinating.
Jack grinned and gave a small shrug. “Kitty. To make up for all the things I didn’t do in my DIA years.”
“You think you didn’t do that in your DIA years?” Henry laughed. He considered pointing out that when he and Jack had started working together, this vision of loveliness would have been learning how to color inside the lines with her first set of crayons, but decided against it. It wasn’t like he’d be telling Jack anything he didn’t already know.
* * *
Jack showed him around his floating mansion, which was nicer than a few land mansions Henry had been in. The beautiful Kitty didn’t reappear and join them for a drink. As far as Henry could tell, she had vanished without a trace, which was something beautiful ladies often did. It seemed to be their super-power. Jack didn’t mention her again so Henry didn’t, either. When you had shed blood together, you didn’t make an issue out of anyone’s coping strategies, even if it had been two and a half decades since the bleeding had stopped.
They went back to the stern to have another beer together, looking out at the water and enjoying the fact that there was no one and nothing else around them for as far as the eye could see; Henry certainly enjoyed it, anyway. He looked up at the smooth blue bowl of the sky.
Except it wasn’t perfectly smooth. Henry saw a small spark, sunlight on metal. It was like a metal splinter ruining the otherwise flawless blue and for some reason, it gave him a bad feeling. But after what Jack had told him, he thought, there wasn’t much to feel good about.
“You took a big risk contacting me,” Henry said, turning away from the glint far above them. “I wish you hadn’t.”
“Love you, too, man,” Henry replied, now thoroughly disconcerted. Sometimes when you were in the field together, your emotions could blindside you. But Jack had always been one of the steadier guys, good at keeping a lid on his feelings and staying focused on the immediate situation.
But then, this wasn’t the field. Or rather, it wasn’t supposed to be. That glint in the sky, however, suggested otherwise.
CHAPTER 5
“…they tell you who he was?” said Jack’s voice.
“Valery Dormov, terrorist,” said Henry.
“No, Valery Dormov, molecular biologist, who worked here in the States for over thirty years.”
Jack Willis’s voice was as clear as if he’d been right there in Janet Lassiter’s office with her and Clay Verris, and not actually coming in via a live feed from a drone four thousand feet above the yacht and the tiny boat tethered to it in Buttermilk Sound. The camera was zoomed in close enough to give Lassiter and Verris a perfect view of whoever came out on deck.
Willis and Brogan were still talking when the woman appeared. Lassiter grimaced; she had almost forgotten Willis hadn’t come to see Brogan alone. It was probably too much to hope that his lady friend would decide to spend the afternoon shopping in Savannah and follow that up with a leisurely, expensive dinner.
The woman climbed to the top deck, removed her cover-up, and settled into a small whirlpool right behind the helm, folding her long legs and fanning her shiny gold hair out on the deck to keep it glamorously dry. Lassiter herself was bewildered as to why anyone would put a whirlpool there of all places.
Well, to show what money could buy, of course. Anyone with enough money could buy a big expensive boat, but why bother if it looked like every other big expensive boat in the catalog? It wasn’t about buying a big expensive boat—it was about buying a big expensive statement. Regular people had to settle for bumper stickers or tattoos.
In any case, Lassiter felt sorry for the woman. She must have taken one look at Jack on that yacht and thought she knew exactly what she was signing up for. But then, she had probably thought she knew who Jack Willis was. She’d had no idea what she was getting herself into, which Lassiter thought was an experience common to a great many women, if not most. Lassiter, however, didn’t consider herself one of them.
She’d had no illusions about the line of work she had chosen. Intelligence had always been a boys’ club and the DIA was no exception. From the outset, Lassiter had known that if she wanted to get anywhere, she would have to claw, push, and punch her way up through the ranks, and she had spent her career doing exactly that. There hadn’t been a glass ceiling—there had been a whole series of them, one after another. The only thing you could do was bang your head against each one until either the ceiling broke, or you did.
The higher you went, the thicker the glass became, and the harder your head had to be, because no one was going to help you. No one—which was to say, no man—was going to weaken the glass for you by giving it a couple of hard whacks, or slip you a glass-cutter on the sly, or show you a secret passageway to get around it, not even your own father. Just as well—then she would never have been anything but Daddy’s Girl.
If any of your male colleagues did actually step up for you, of course, everyone else would say you’d slept your way to the top. Which was ridiculous—Lassiter had seen with her own eyes that women couldn’t sleep their way to the top in the agency. Some managed to sleep their way to the middle, but Lassiter’s goals had always been much loftier.
After a great deal of punching, pushing, and clawing, she was now in the stratosphere, where the air was a whole lot colder and thinner. But she was damned if she’d let anyone see her shivering or gasping for breath. Every morning she got up, put on her game face, and headed into work an hour earlier than everyone else, telling herself that yes, it absolutely, positively, and without a doubt had been worth it; she had no second thoughts, no feelings of disappointment or letdown, none whatsoever. She had made it. She was a director. That was godhood, not a dead end or a sinecure or a hamster wheel designed to make the average, the shortsighted, and the uninspired worker bee believe they were getting somewhere until they keeled over and died.
And if she really was a ‘soulless bitch-demon from the ninth circle of hell,’ as someone had described her to a co-worker in a ladies’ room that hadn’t been as empty as either of them had thought, it was still a lot better than being a gossipy, glorified secretary who called herself an executive assistant.
But the one thing the jumped-up wage slaves from the steno pool had going for them was, none of them ever had to deal with the man who was currently sitting in her office and breathing her air.
When Lassiter had met Clay Verris, it had been enmity at first sight. Repeated contact over the years had deepened her animosity into a profound, unshakable loathing. But she didn’t have to like him. Clay Verris loved himself, no doubt a hell of a lot more than she detested him. He saw himself as a visionary—a Steve Jobs of the military. A weaponized Steve Jobs, locked and loaded, minus the whimsy.
People in intelligence tended to be dispassionate but Clay Verris was cold-blooded on a level that made a python look like a puppy. He could also turn it on and off at will; in a line of work filled with dangerous people, it made him lethal. Lassiter knew she had to tread carefully around him but she refused to be afraid.
“It’s a pity,” Verris said, abrupt but casual, as if he were engaging in a conversation only he could hear. Lassiter wouldn’t have been surprised; she imagined the voices in his head got pretty loud. She waited to see what else was going to come out of him.
“I always liked Henry,” he added.
For a moment, Lassiter wasn’t sure she’d heard him right, then realized she only wished she hadn’t.
“Henry is DIA, Clay,” she said sharply. “He’s one of mine.”
Verris glanced at her, annoyed. “He knows you lied to him.”
“We have a tail on him,” Lassiter replied. “That’s standard protocol for a retiring agent. He’ll be contained.”
“Contained?” Verris gave a short derisive laugh. “Henry Brogan? Did you hear the same conversation I did? He’s got Dormov’s contact now and he’s going to pull that thread until he ends up pointing a gun in our faces.”
Lassiter shook her head. “Still—”
“What about his handler—the bald guy?” Verris asked.
“Patterson?” Lassiter shrugged. “He won’t be happy but he won’t cross me. He’ll fall in line.” She wasn’t actually sure that was true but it would keep Verris from planning Patterson’s death for the time being. At least, she hoped it would.
“I’ll tie this off,” Verris told her. “I can make it look like a Russian op.”
Lassiter felt a surge of anger. “You will do nothing,” she said. “I can handle this. I’ll tell my team that Henry’s gone rogue.”
Verris blew out a contemptuous breath. “After you whiffed four times on Dormov? Forget it. You need Gemini for this.”
Anger surged in her again, more intensely this time. “I will not let you do hits on American soil—”
“You don’t have anyone who can take out Henry Brogan,” Verris said, talking over her loudly. “I do.”
This was one of those times when Lassiter understood the atavistic impulse to take a swing at someone. Verris had a way of bringing it out in her. “We’ll clean up our own messes, thank you,” she said in full-on bitch-demon-from-hell mode.
All expression drained from Verris’s face as he stalked over to her desk and leaned his fists on it. “Everything we’ve worked for is at risk—thanks to your failures.” His gaze bored into hers as if he were willing her to shrivel but the bitch-demon held her ground. “You have one chance to not screw this up. Please surprise me.”
He straightened, still giving her his death-ray look, and then left. S
he stared after him. The bitch-demon still wasn’t scared of him—not yet, at least. But Janet Lassiter was nervous.
* * *
After tying the Ella Mae to the piling on the dock, Henry decided to let Monk finish his solo before he set foot on land again. At some point between the time he had untethered from the Scratched Eight with Jack Willis smiling hopelessly as he waved goodbye and when he’d reached the marina, the glint in the sky had vanished, but that was hardly a positive sign. As glad as Henry had been to see his old friend, Jack’s visit was like that glint—a harbinger of the turbulence to come, after which nothing would be the same. It was all the more reason to steal a few quiet moments while he could.
Henry leaned back, stretching his long legs out on the seat beside him. Monk was working his way up to the finish of ‘Misterioso’ when his gaze fell on the dashboard.
The rudder angle gauge was slightly out of position, as if someone had pried it out of the dash and put it back in a hurry. Henry felt a surge of anger. This was a custom-fitted dash—you weren’t supposed to pop things in and out like Lego. The Ella Mae was a classy lady who wouldn’t be caught dead with a hair—or a dial—out of place, and Henry had always treated her with the respect she deserved, making sure she looked her best. So who had been taking liberties with her, and why?
He worked the gauge out of the polished wood dash, being careful not to rip out the connections, and saw the problem immediately. Son of a bitch, he thought as he disentangled the fiber-optic line from the other wires.
Damn, he should have known better than to think that after twenty-five years with the DIA they would just let him go without pulling some kind of shit. This was one of the tiniest bugs he’d ever seen. It would be sound-only, and he found it hard to believe that it would hear anything other than engine noise, wind, and water, but these days surveillance tech was insanely good. For all he knew, the thing was picking up his pulse and respiration. Which should tell whoever was listening that he was furious.
The agency must have put this in while he was on his way home from Liège, right after Monroe told them he was retiring. Jerry would never have allowed anyone to touch the Ella Mae, so the DIA had gotten rid of him. Henry fervently hoped they had made him a retirement offer too good to pass up. Jerry was a nice guy who deserved a piece of the good life; emphasis on life.
