by Marc Cameron
“It would seem so,” Lodygin said.
Rostov mulled this over. If the Bratva—the Russian Mafia—were involved in the theft of New Archangel, there was a chance the burden of blame would fall somewhere else. Rostov might actually be on the other end of the gun during that long walk down the dead-end hallway.
He glanced up at Lodygin.
“Brighton Beach, you say?”
The captain licked his lips as he perused the Internet information regarding Volodin’s son. “Yes. In New York City.”
Rostov thrummed his fingers against the counter, thinking of ways he might avoid a bullet. “We must send someone to visit this Petyr the Wolf.”
Chapter 9
Anchorage, 5:30 p.m.
There were countless times when Quinn and Garcia had been supremely content to sit together and say nothing at all. This was not one of those times. Thankfully, Quinn’s daughter jabbered away nonstop all the way to the dance recital in the backseat of the crew cab GMC Quinn had borrowed from his mother.
Outside the pickup, gray clouds loomed lower and darker than they had during the earlier motorcycle ride—threatening an all-out storm, just like Garcia’s demeanor.
Mattie had just finished telling them about a new boy from school named Zane who only ate peanut butter sandwiches, when they pulled up in front of his parents’ house. The story made Quinn wonder what kind of a father he’d be when she started dating. Luckily for the boys who were sure to fall in love with her, he probably wouldn’t live that long.
The front door opened as soon as they drove up. Kim walked out, making her way toward the driver’s side of the pickup, waving serenely at Jericho. She wore a zippered white hoodie jacket, open at the front despite the evening chill and threat of rain. Her blue Alaska Grown T-shirt was tight enough to show off her trim figure. Gray capris revealed the metal works of a high-tech prosthetic leg fitted to her above-the-knee amputation. The sniper who had shot her was dead, her neck broken by Quinn in Japan, but that didn’t excuse him from being the reason that sniper had come after Kim in the first place. Still, enough time had passed that Kim appeared to have forgiven him, or at the very least, nacred over any anger she still harbored like a pearl formed over a nasty irritation.
Mattie unsnapped her seatbelt and leaned in between the bucket seats. Deep brown curls fell across her face as she look back and forth between Quinn and Garcia. But for the dark hair she’d inherited from Jericho, she was a mini-me to Kim. “Are you guys having a fight?” she said, swaying back and forth between the two seats. Like her father, she’d never been one to sit still. “Because it seems like you’re having a fight.”
Garcia looked out the window, nodding toward Quinn’s ex-wife. “It looks like Kim wants to talk to you,” she said. Her passive-aggressive expression brightened as she turned to give Mattie a wink. “How about you play me that song again on the piano?”
Mattie shrugged. “Yep,” she said. “You’re having a fight all right.”
Quinn pressed the button on the armrest. The driver’s side window came down with an electronic whir. Mattie stopped to talk with her mom for a moment before dragging Garcia inside the house by the hand. Window down, a moist evening breeze hit him in the face, carrying the beginning mists of an approaching rain and the familiar scent of the towering blue spruce that dominated the Quinn’s front yard. It had seemed so big when Jericho and Bo were boys. Over the years, the brothers had lost at least two good hatchets, countless knives, and a half dozen of their father’s screwdrivers, throwing them at targets set up with the spruce as a backdrop. Now as tall as the chimney, the tree cast a huge shadow across the two-car driveway. Its rustling boughs sheltered Kim from the brunt of the north wind.
“Don’t you have dinner reservations?” Kim asked, leaning in so her forearms rested along the doorframe.
Quinn let his head loll back against the headrest. “We do,” he said, raising his wrist so he could see the time on his Tag Aquaracer. “Marx Brothers. In a little over a half an hour.”
“I love that place,” Kim said. “Great Caesar salads.”
She rested her chin on her arms, looking up at Quinn with the big blue eyes that had caught him back when they were still in high school. She stood in silence for a long time, working up to something. Quinn was used to it. There had been many silences between them over the years. Most of them, he deserved. The tiniest hint of a smile perked her lips when she finally decided to speak.
“From the look on your face I’m guessing you haven’t asked her yet,” she said.
Quinn sat up, gripping the wheel and looking directly at his ex-wife. The only other person he’d told about the ring was Jacques. His line of work had trained him to be an incredibly skilled liar, but he and Kim had too much history. She knew all his tells. Quinn decided to draw on his SERE training and stick with the original lie no matter what tricks the interrogator pulled. “Ask her what?”
“Come on, Jericho,” Kim said, her face serene. He knew a look of pity when he saw it. She gave a slow shake of her head. “There’s only one thing in the world that can make you jumpy—and that’s getting serious with a woman. I know, cause I was there the first time you ever got serious.”
Quinn fell back in the seat, surrendering to Kim’s wiles. “I have not asked her,” he said. “Not yet, anyway. I’d planned to, then things got . . . complicated.”
“I saw the news,” Kim said. “Figured they would.” She pushed off the door so she was standing up, her face level with Quinn’s now. She bounced her fingers on the doorframe, swishing air back and forth in her puffed cheeks the way she did when deciding whether to say something that she’d been holding back. “I gotta say, Jericho, you are hands down the best human being I know.” She peered at him, head tilted to one side so her blond hair pooled around her neck, still deciding. A resigned sigh told Quinn he was about to get an earful. He knew her tells too. “But I have to admit, there is a righteous stubbornness about you that made me want to pull your hair out a million times over. Lord knows I have no right to give you relationship advice. If I had it to do all over again, I’d try not to be so bitchy while you were out doing whatever it is you do. But I own the choices I’ve made.” Kim wiped away a tear with the forearm of her hoodie and stepped back from the window. The front door slammed as Garcia and Mattie come out of the house. They held hands and skipped toward the truck, jumping the cracks in the sidewalk, singing some nonsensical song.
Kim sighed. “You deserve a little happiness. I think you can have it with Ronnie. Just be patient with her. Because as righteous and perfect as you are, loving you is an awful hard thing to do.”
The boughs of the big spruce whispered and groaned as the wind shifted, bringing great drops of rain to spatter against the windshield. Mattie threw back her head to catch the rain on her tongue.
“She learned that from you,” Kim said. “I never can get her to come in out of the rain—no matter how cold it is. I think she’d rather freeze to death than miss something fun.”
Quinn watched as Garcia stood beside his little girl, head tilted back to catch raindrops on her tongue as well.
Kim patted the doorframe. “Your life is always going to be complicated, Jer. Just do what you need to do. If you wait for it to calm down, it’s going to be a long wait.”
Kim made her way around the truck to walk back inside, expertly navigating the wet pavement on her prosthetic leg, ignoring the rain. She gave Garcia a hug, then shooed Mattie toward the door. For that brief moment Quinn had a view of both women together. He and Garcia had fought, and bled, and even killed side by side. They had shared emotions and events that few human beings even discussed. And still, no one would ever know him as well as Kim.
* * *
For all his pitched battles and bloody hand-to-hand fights, Quinn could imagine nothing quite so fraught with danger as proposing marriage to Veronica Garcia. Since taking up martial arts in middle school, he’d approached everything in his life with the same strate
gic mindset: prepare daily to meet his opponent, then, when an opportunity presented itself, move directly to contact.
The evening had fallen from chilly to cold, along with Garcia’s mood. A pelting rain creased the windshield and turned the asphalt streets of downtown Anchorage into shimmering mirrors of neon lights. Sitting across from Quinn in the plush leather passenger seat, Garcia faced away, staring out the window. She’d hardly said a word since they’d left the house, and Quinn couldn’t help but wonder if he was about to walk into an ambush of emotion.
Three elderly couples in brightly colored rain jackets—the last of the tourists until ski season kicked in—walked from the corner of Fifth Avenue and H Street, toward the Glacier Brewhouse. Even inside the pickup, the smells of wood-fired salmon and hot bread made Quinn’s mouth water. It was a fine restaurant, but his parents had taken him there with Kim to celebrate the night they’d gotten engaged. That alone was enough to make Quinn choose a different place to propose to Ronnie. Marx Brothers was more elegant anyway, tucked into a tiny house on Third Avenue, a little over two blocks away.
Quinn waited for another group to cross at the intersection. These were locals, judging from their uniform of Helly Hansen rain gear over fleece jackets, blue jeans, and XTRATUF rubber boots. The windshield wipers thwacked back and forth, adding to the intensity of the silence inside the pickup. He was warm and dry, but Quinn wondered if he might not be happier riding alone in the rain.
He’d purchased the ring nearly two months before, while Garcia was still in the hospital. It started to burn a hole in his pocket immediately after he picked it up, but he knew the time wasn’t right. Ronnie Garcia had a prideful streak. She could take being slapped around by the bad guys, stabbed, or even shot, but she would not accept pity.
So Quinn had been patient, playing a game of watchful waiting, looking for the moment when she felt good enough about herself to feel good about them. In preparation, he’d brought her to Alaska to spend more time with his parents and the wild state that had raised him.
She and Mattie hit it off like long-lost friends. Quinn’s mother spent an entire day with her shopping in downtown Anchorage and getting pedicures together—which to Quinn’s mom had always been a right of passage for any of her sons’ girlfriends. Quinn’s old man, who had never been much of a talker, had invited Ronnie into the sanctum of his mancave, going so far as to open his walk-in gun safe and show her his prized Holland & Holland double rifle. A match to Theodore Roosevelt’s. 500/450 Nitro Express, “Big Stick,” the rifle, was worth well over a hundred thousand dollars. Few people outside the family even knew of its existence, let alone got to hold it in their hands. The old-school double barrel was once tough and ornate, functional and elegant, and a perfect metaphor for the elder Quinn. The fact that their father hunted with a rifle that had no scope and was easily worth twice what he’d paid for their house had caused many a hushed discussion between the two brothers as they grew up. The sacred but old-school Holland & Holland was a personification of their father, and there was a considerable amount of contention between Bo and Jericho over who stood to inherit it.
Quinn’s phone started to buzz inside the pocket of his leather jacket as he pulled alongside the curb in front of a parking meter on Third Avenue a half block from Marx Brothers.
Quinn sighed and answered the phone while Garcia gathered up her purse and raincoat. She’d wait for him to come around and open the door, as was their agreement when they weren’t on the job.
“Hello.”
“Hey, Chair Force, you go through with it yet?” Jacques Thibodaux’s rambunctious Cajun voice spilled out of the phone. Extremely intelligent, Thibodaux had graduated cum laude from LSU and was fluent in French and Italian. Some who didn’t know him took his hulking size and Cajun accent for a sign that he was slow—they were universally mistaken. If Quinn hadn’t known the giant was a square-jawed brute, straight out of a United States Marine Corps recruiting commercial, it would have been easy to picture him as the energetic and bouncy Tigger from the Winnie the Pooh stories he read to Mattie.
“Did ya? Well, did ya?” Thibodaux’s words bounced over the phone. Quinn pressed the device to his ear so they didn’t keep bouncing and wind up in Garcia’s ears. “If you didn’t, you’re a coward, and if you did, you’re an idiot.”
“No,” Quinn said.
“No, you just haven’t gotten around to it yet?” Thibodaux said. “Or no, you’ve come to your senses?”
Quinn gave a wan smile to Garcia, who was hopefully getting only his side of the conversation.
“Not yet,” Quinn said, keeping things noncommittal.
Thibodaux snorted. “Them’s the words of a man who feels compelled to walk up the gallows steps without bein’ ordered to.”
“The arrangement seems to be treating you all right,” Quinn said. There was no need to remind the big Marine of his supremely happy marriage and seven sons.
“It do, it do, l’ami,” Thibodaux said. “But what’s good for the goose . . . well, you know the rest—”
There was an audible click on the line and Thibodaux’s voice cut out for a moment. Quinn looked at his phone and saw it was a call from Palmer.
“I gotta go.”
“Okay,” Thibodaux said. “But seriously, I’m happy for you, beb. Just don’t want you to come crawlin’ to me down the road and say I didn’t give you no warning.”
Quinn ended the call and felt a creeping twinge of dread as he answered the next one. The national security advisor to the president wasn’t calling to encourage him on his date with Garcia.
“Ready to go?” Win Palmer said.
“That depends on where I’m going,” Quinn said.
“Don’t you people have television in Alaska?” Palmer said. His voice was pinched and more than a little annoyed.
“I’m not sure what you’re talking about, sir.”
“There’s been a second attack,” Palmer said.
Quinn held the phone away from his ear so Garcia could hear.
“Another deployment of lethal gas,” Palmer continued. “This one happened during the taping of some kind of celebrity-dating reality TV show in Los Angeles. A hundred and three dead at last count—cast, crew, and much of the studio audience. Cameras caught the whole damned thing on live television. It’s not enough that these bastards attack us at home. They have discovered the extra boost of terror from keeping the attacks in the media from the start. Every network and cable channel is running an endless loop of death and carnage—giving them hours of free publicity.”
“I’m with Garcia now,” Quinn said, waiting for the next shoe to drop. Palmer didn’t call just to give him news.
“I may have something for her,” Palmer said. “But I want her back here until we get a better read on her shoulder.”
Ronnie closed her eyes and groaned at the confirmation that she was on the injured list.
“Quinn.” Palmer plowed ahead. “There’s someone I need you to meet.”
Quinn looked at his Aquaracer. “We can catch a flight to Seattle in a hour and a half. Should be able to get a red-eye to DC or Baltimore.”
“Don’t bother,” Palmer said. “She’s already en route to you.”
“Coming to Alaska?” Quinn said. Garcia cocked her head to one side. Thick black hair pooled over her injured shoulder throwing her already dark face into deeper shadows.
“ETA at JBER is just before midnight Alaska time.” JBER was Joint Base Elmendorf Richardson, adjacent to the city of Anchorage. “In the meantime, I need you packed and ready to fly to Nome.”
Quinn shrugged to Garcia. This was odd. Nome, Alaska, wasn’t exactly the cradle of terrorism.
“We’re still putting everything together,” Palmer said. “I’ll brief you all at the same time. I’m not sure how long you’ll be out, but be prepared to act as a guide for a Russian speaker who has never set foot in Alaska. I’ve arranged for a C12 to take you to Nome tonight.”
“Is Jacques co
ming?” Quinn asked.
“I have Thibodaux working on another matter,” Palmer said offering no more on the subject. “Be ready by 2100.”
Quinn returned the phone to his pocket, next to the lump that was the engagement ring.
Garcia turned in her seat so she faced him. “Why do you think he wouldn’t tell you who he’s sending?” she said. “What’s up with that?”
“I am not sure,” Quinn said working through the possibilities.
“Well, I’ll tell you what I’m sure of,” Garcia said, her full lips set, absent their normally humorous perk at each corner. “Palmer knows I speak Russian, but for some reason he has decided I’m not fit enough to go on this mission with you.”
“They nearly killed you,” Quinn said. “You know he’d bench me too if the roles were reversed.”
Garcia scoffed. “No, he wouldn’t. He hasn’t. I’ve seen you beat to hell, and he still let you work.” Her amber eyes narrowed, thick, black lashes fluttering with tension. “What the hell, Jericho? I can play through the pain as well as anyone. And I don’t need you and Palmer to coddle me.”
Quinn bounced the back of his head on the seat, watching rivulets of rainwater braid and crease the windshield. Garcia was right. He’d fought on after being shot, having his ribs broken, even after having a toe snipped off with pruning shears—all without Palmer so much as flinching.
“I guess we’re both just sexist pigs,” Quinn said.
Garcia nodded slowly then turned to stare out the passenger window. She rarely turned away during a conversation, and Quinn had learned to pay attention when she did.
Quinn felt the evening he’d planned so meticulously slipping away. He lived the kind of life where dinner plans were often interrupted or postponed, but he couldn’t help but feel like this was something beyond that. He started the truck and did a quick head check over his shoulder before pulling back out into traffic.
“Being overprotective is in my blood,” Quinn said. “I do it with my brother. I do it with Jacques. There’s zero chance I can turn it off when it comes to you.”
