Chapter 2
TOMMY
Icame to Zion to kill a man. The hiking was a bonus.
Eight days in, I'd run Angels Landing twice, Observation Point at sunrise, the East Rim Trail when I wanted thirteen miles of nobody, and a few smaller scrambles whose names I'd forgotten the second my boots came off.
The red rock did something to a man, if he let it.
Made him quiet. The kind of quiet you couldn't buy in a city or fake in a chapel.
I'd grown up with sky like this—Valentine, Texas had its own version, flatter and meaner, but the same big lid pressed down over the same kind of small man—and I'd missed it without knowing I had.
It reminded me of home in pieces. The smell of dust warming in the morning sun.
The way the light came in low and stayed gold longer than it had any right to.
The silence between two strangers nodding on a trail, the kind that said we don't have to talk and we don't have to pretend we want to.
Texas had taught me that silence early. Zion just gave it back to me, polished.
I'd been working out of a little rental on the edge of Springdale, biking into the park each morning on an e-bike I'd rented for the week. The town wasn't much—a string of restaurants and outfitters and gear shops pinned along the river—but it was quaint and suited me just fine.
I started every morning at Feel Love Coffee, where a girl with a sunburned nose remembered, after the second day, that I took my Americano black with one shot of vanilla.
I didn't even like vanilla. I'd ordered it that first morning because she'd recommended it, and I hadn't had the heart to undo it.
By day three, she was setting it on the counter before I got to the register.
Breakfast at Oscar's Café when the line wasn't out the door. Dinner most nights at King's Landing Bistro, where the chef made a trout almondine that would've made my mother cry, and a girl named Hannah brought my water before I asked for it.
Mormons, near as I could tell, ran most of the front-of-house in this town.
I'd never seen better service in my life, and I'd been a lot of places.
They asked how your day was and waited for an answer.
They didn't perform politeness; they meant it.
I respected the hell out of it. The only person I'd ever met who could match that brand of warmth was my mother, and she'd been losing pieces of it to a disease she didn't know she had.
I tried not to think about that.
Most days, I succeeded.
This morning, I was excited. The kind of excited you got when work and pleasure lined up clean—rare in my line, rarer in my life.
I'd woken at five, stretched on the worn rug of my rental, made coffee in the little pour-over the owner kept on a shelf next to the cookbooks, and packed my bag with peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and three liters of water and a couple of granola bars in case the day stretched.
PB how to feed myself for eight hours on twenty cents was one of the better ones.
I geared up at the outfitter's just past seven—boots, neoprene waders, a sturdy wooden hiking stick that the kid behind the counter checked twice for splinters, and the kind of thick wool socks that made you feel like a cartoon. Today was the Narrows.
If you don't know the Narrows, you should.
It's a hike that isn't really a hike. You don't walk a trail; you walk a river.
The Virgin River carved a slot canyon over a few million years that runs deep and tight between cliff walls a thousand feet high in places, and you wade through it.
Knee-deep, thigh-deep, hip-deep where the spring runoff hadn't drained yet.
Cold water. Slick rocks. Sun coming down through the canyon in great gold ribbons that fell on the water and lit it up like stained glass.
There was no other way through. You either got in the river or you didn't go.
I was getting in the river.
The bike ride from Springdale into the park was brisk that morning, the air sharp enough to wake my teeth, the canyon walls already going pink at the top where the sun had hit them.
I'd done the ride enough times by now that I knew the bends and the rough patches, which shuttle drivers nodded at me and which ones didn't bother.
I'd been clocking faces all week the way I clocked everything—not paranoid, just trained—and most of them were repeats now.
The German couple with matching backpacks.
The man and his teenage son who fought every morning about whose turn it was to carry the trail map.
The retired Air Force colonel who'd recognized something in me at Feel Love Coffee on day three and given me a small nod, the kind that didn't ask questions and didn't expect answers.
I liked him. I liked all of them, in the loose, anonymous way you liked people you knew you'd never know.
But I was only looking for one face.
I locked the e-bike at the rack near the shuttle stop, slung my pack, and was unfolding my hiking stick when I saw it.
Black Range Rover. California tags. Pulled into a spot like it owned the lot.
The door opened, and out stepped a man in thousand-dollar sunglasses and brand-new gear that you couldn't have rented, if you'd tried.
The pack still had the tags swinging off the zipper.
The boots were so clean they looked photographed.
He moved with the practiced calm of a man who'd decided, sometime in the last twelve months, that he was going to become the kind of man who hiked.
That's expensive gear, I thought. First-class all the way. First class paid for with blood money.
I didn't smile. Didn't look. I bent back over my pack, finished my straps, and didn't register him—same way I hadn't registered him the three previous times we'd been within ten feet of each other this week. He hadn't seen me. I'd seen him every day.
His name was Farzad Davari, and his public record said he ran an art consultancy in Beverly Hills.
The art consultancy was real, in the technical sense that it had a website and an office and a single bored assistant.
What it actually moved was Iranian-made drones and missiles into the hands of men whose names appeared in classified briefings under the heading imminent threat.
He'd been very careful for a very long time.
He'd gotten less careful when he started believing his own publicity.
The fitness kick was new. The hiking was new. He'd told a girlfriend in Malibu he was finding himself, which was rich, since the State Department had been finding him for two years.
It had taken the unit I worked for—the one without a name, the one that doesn't appear in any organizational chart, the one whose budget gets buried inside three other budgets and laundered through a Pentagon line item labeled translation services—two days to figure me out, once I made it through selection.
A guy with a clipboard who never told me his name had watched me run a dummy scenario, written something down, and said the words I'd been waiting to hear without knowing it.
You're a one-man job, Dane.
That was the cleanest read anyone had ever given me. Lone wolf. Sent in for the clean kill or to sow chaos. No backup team waiting in a van. No 9-1-1 to call. No Quick Reaction Force forty minutes out. Just me and my read of the room. If I came out, I came out. If I didn't, I didn't.
It wasn't that I didn't like people. The opposite, actually.
Of all the Dane boys back in Valentine—and there were seven of us—I was the social one.
I could talk to a fence post. I could buy a beer for a man who hated me and have him laughing inside ten minutes.
I liked the world. The world had earned it.
I just didn't want anyone else's life on me when the work got close to the reaper's blade. Why risk a team when you could risk one man? It was a no-brainer. Tommy Dane worked alone. That was the deal.
I shouldered my pack and started up the trail. Last I saw of Davari at the trailhead, he was still cutting the price tags off a new hiking pole.
The riverside trail led through cottonwoods and scrub before the pavement gave out and the canyon swallowed the path.
I took my time. The Narrows ran eight miles up to a place called Big Spring before the technical permit-only stretch began, and Davari—judging by his pace the last few mornings—wouldn't make it past three before he got tired and started looking for a place to sit down.
I'd already picked the place.
A woman in her seventies dropped her hiking stick at the lip of the river, where the gravel gave out and the water began. I bent and picked it up before she could try, handed it back with a smile.
"There you are, ma'am."
"Oh, thank you, sweetheart." She had a face like a pleasant apple. "My husband always says I'd lose my head if it weren't pinned on."
"Husbands are mostly right about wives, ma'am, but not on this. You strike me as a woman who knows where her head is."
She laughed, delighted. "What's your name, darlin'?"
"Stephen," I lied.
"You from Texas, Stephen?"
"That obvious?"
"Only the way you said ma'am."
She patted my arm and waded in ahead of me, her husband shuffling behind with the cautious half-step of a man who'd been told by his cardiologist what the consequences of slipping would be.
I waited a beat, then offered him my elbow on a particularly mean stretch of rounded river rock.
He took it without comment and let it go three steps later, also without comment—the unspoken transaction of two men who both understood that pride was a real thing and so was a broken hip.
"You good, sir?"
"I'm good."
"Atta boy."