She asked Cox what would happen next, after the final identification of Hynd’s body. When he told her, she had insisted that she be here for this. She wanted to watch him burn, not to appease that anger, but to know that he and the evil he carried were gone.
She nodded to the technician—a man in a black suit and a white shirt with no tie—and stepped back.
He moved toward the body and she put her hand on his. “Hold on,” she said.
The ring. She’d never taken it off. She never noticed it anymore. It was just a part of her. She slipped it over the knuckle and looked at the skin beneath it—paler and smooth, like scar tissue. The skin felt strangely cold. She put the ring on his chest, just beside the stitches of the Y incision, and stepped back.
A moment later, the conveyor carried the body away. Through a plate-glass window she watched the flames rise, bright blue. She let all the rage—from Paul, from the past—burn away with it. She’d given a power of attorney to sell her house to a local real-estate agent she knew from the bakery. She picked up a few photos of her mother and left the rest of her belongings to be auctioned or given away.
She was done. She would leave it all behind and begin again, like she had a dozen times before, but this time it wouldn’t be as a new cover.
The hot August air wrapped around her as she stepped outside. She had a backpack with two changes of clothes and a few necessities.
Cox had sent a car for her, and she climbed into the back of the Suburban. An older black man looked at her in the rearview. “Where are we going today, ma’am?”
He had a Creole accent—Belize, she guessed.
“Dulles,” she said. The international airport.
Someplace warm. She had a ticket to St. Lucia. She had found a cheap spot away from the crowds and was going to take a break, to heal. And then—she didn’t know. She wanted a place she could plant a garden, a place she could keep horses. Maybe she’d try some executive recruiting.
“All right, then,” the man said. “My name is Gerald. Pleased to meet you.”
She looked at him, and it took all of her will to push back against the lessons they had forced on her: Erase yourself; never give them your name. She smiled.
“You too. I’m Claire.”
Chapter 69
HAYES WAITED UNTIL he was sure Lauren was asleep. He stared into the darkness for another twenty minutes as she flinched slightly, then settled in to rest. Her breath slowed, became deep and even.
He couldn’t sleep. He’d met with Cox in Washington the week before. There was good news: They had been able to trace back the patterns of Hynd’s communications and movements, and he had never come within fifty miles of this house, never laid eyes on it.
His family was safe, for now. His feet touched the cold hardwood floor and he moved silently through the doorway, then downstairs. If he stayed beside Lauren when he couldn’t sleep, she would always wake, always feel the restlessness in him.
Hayes stopped at the window, and his reflection seemed to float out ahead of him in the inky contours of the maple trees. There were four men he trusted like brothers hiding in the woods with SIG rifles, ready to kill anyone who came for his family. He’d run a two-hour countersurveillance routine to get here from the meet with Cox.
Cox had offered to bring them all onto a base, but that was a prison with no end in sight, and Hayes had already asked too much of his family. It was his war, not theirs.
He ran his hand over the window trim. It was laid in straight, and in the corner he saw the coping fit perfectly, without room for a hair. Lauren had finished it while he was out there, hunting the men behind these attacks.
Cox had shown him a list. It was true. There was a bounty for Hayes’s life. He was the number-one target of the network that had paid Hynd to kill Cold Harvest. Hayes would never be safe, and anyone near him was in danger.
It was hubris that led him to think that he could build this place, could sit at home at peace and take the war pick-and-choose like most of his countrymen. No. He hadn’t even finished painting before the violence came for them. He’d tried to protect them, and twice he had brought the threat to their door.
“You want what we all want, to be with your family and to keep them safe,” Cox had said.
And Hayes knew without being told that he had to choose one or the other: being with his family or keeping them safe. The enemy would never stop hunting him. Protecting them meant leaving.
The sound was barely audible—a soft footfall—but Hayes spun and his hands came forward.
His daughter came down the stairs, one careful step at a time. The black dog padded down beside her.
“Hey, sweetie. What’s going on?”
“I couldn’t sleep.”
“Me neither. Something scare you?”
“No. Did it scare you?”
He laughed quietly and looked at her for a long moment. “No,” he said, and he lifted her into his arms.
He checked the clock. Four thirty in the morning, and here she was, ready to roll and looking out for the other guy. “You’d be a good Marine,” he said, and he kissed the top of her head.
“Don’t even start on that,” a voice said. Lauren was coming down the steps. “You all right?” she asked.
“Yes, but you all should go back to bed. It’s late.”
“Or early,” she said as she came over and stood next to him. Maggie fidgeted and Hayes put her down. She went to the kitchen and climbed onto one of the stools at the island.
Hayes put his arm around his wife’s waist and brought her to his side.
He’d spent his whole life living out of a backpack, with foster families and group homes, and he’d joined the Marines when he was seventeen. There was ugliness in his past, but it didn’t poison him. It made him clear-eyed, unsentimental, and grateful, above all. A clean, safe place to live, a family, food, love; they seemed like mirages, and even now he never expected them to last. He didn’t get to have this. And that was fine. He’d never thought he would.
It had been tough, coming home, but he and Lauren were finding their way. The time in exile had changed him, hardened him. They didn’t have to talk about it all, because the choice had been made. He couldn’t stay.
He would still see them, would always be a part of their lives, but it would be on bases, with protection running so that the people who were hunting him wouldn’t ever come near his family. He couldn’t live here. The job would be his home, as it had been for so long. Even before his exile, the deployments and training had kept him away three hundred days a year. Lauren had been the first to point it out—the new arrangement wouldn’t be all that different.
He told her she didn’t have to wait, that he understood if she needed a change, and she told him to be quiet. He knew she couldn’t think about that now, couldn’t stand to hurt him.
She was strong and could hold down this family and this house without him. Her father had been U.S. Army, Tenth Mountain Division. She knew about the work, and they’d always been straight with each other. She would be fine without him. He could see her strength in his daughter too. They would be okay.
The sun was rising, tinting the gray morning red. The shadows of the trees resolved out of the dark and began to stretch out toward him, his home, his family.
He leaned over and kissed her temple. One day he could come home and rest, when his body was too broken down to go on or after he killed the men behind this. But now the trail was going cold, and the fight was calling.
Acknowledgments
Thanks go first to my toughest customers, my family—Heather Burke and Ellen, Greg, Peter, and Michael Quirk—and my agent, Shawn Coyne. Together they saved the day on this one.
And thanks to my editor, Emily Giglierano, for her spot-on revisions. To Pamela Brown, Zea Moscone, and Sabrina Callahan, for introducing John Hayes to the world. To Tracy Roe, a top-flight copyeditor and a doctor, for her fantastic work on the manuscript, to Lauren Harms for a terrific cover, and to Ma
ry Tondorf-Dick, Peggy Freudenthal, and Pamela Marshall for keeping everything running smoothly. And to Josh Kendall, Reagan Arthur, and everyone at Mulholland Books, Little, Brown, and Hachette. It’s a hell of a team, with a phenomenal bench of authors, and I’m enormously grateful to be part of it.
Thanks to the bookstores and communities of readers who welcomed me on the road over the years at Mysterious Galaxy, One More Page, Book People, Murder by the Book, Book Court, Politics and Prose, Rainy Day Books, powerHouse Books, the Holmdel Barnes and Noble, Book Carnival, Vroman’s, and Poisoned Pen.
Thanks to Joe Finder, Alex Berenson, Gregg Hurwitz, Jesse Kellerman, Marcia Clark, Michael Koryta, Ben Coes, Dorothy Fortenberry, Chris Holm, Kim Fay, David Swinson, Kristen Kittscher, Maggie Shipstead, Steph Cha, and Steven Pressfield, for great books and support.
Thanks to Dr. Drew Wilkis and Dr. Steven Davis, Niko Gubernator, Tony Matthews, Captain Cornell Riley, Lieutenant Colonel James Hannibal, Roger Pardo-Maurer, Abe Sutherland, and Sadiqullah Sadiq (whom I also have to thank for introducing me to tapas, the Afghan folk poems). And to Billy Miller, for taking me shooting and offering technical advice on the manuscript.
Thanks to Adam Kushner, Mike Melia, Dan Wagner, Mandy Simon, and Jennie Rothenberg; to Joe and Colleen Euteneuer, for a grand welcome to Kansas City; to John MacGaffin and Peter Higgins, of the FBI and CIA, for sharing their stories. I’m also particularly indebted to Sean Naylor’s Relentless Strike and Mark Mazzetti’s The Way of the Knife for inspiration and background.
I took a few liberties in the text, and I’m sure I managed to sneak in a few mistakes despite all this help.
Finally, thank you to those who will go unnamed here and to everyone who does the selfless work, in its many forms, of looking out for the rest of us.
About the Author
Matthew Quirk studied history and literature at Harvard College. After graduation, he joined the Atlantic and spent five years at the magazine reporting on a variety of subjects including crime, private military contractors, terrorism prosecutions, and international gangs. Quirk’s bestselling first novel, The 500, has been translated into twenty languages. He lives in San Diego.
Also by Matthew Quirk
The 500
The Directive
Cold Barrel Zero
Dead Man Switch Page 23
