Chapter 29
TOMMY
Icame up out of the dark to noise.
Voices. Sharp, professional, the voices of men who knew what they were doing on a worksite. The thud of a fire pump kicking on somewhere down at the water. A radio.
I cracked my eyes.
The first thing I saw was men.
Big men. Broad through the shoulders the way men got broad when their fitness was a job requirement. They moved across the lawn with the easy economy of operators who knew what to do without being told.
Brothers.
A hand came down into my line of sight.
I looked up.
My father was crouched beside me. He pulled me up easy, the way a stronger man pulled a smaller man up out of a hole. He was stronger than I remembered him being.
I got my legs under me.
The pier was gone. Where the yacht had been, there was a black orange roar half-collapsed into the harbor on what was no longer a pier, a fire team working it in the tight choreography of a team that did this for a living.
"Where's Rebecca?"
"Clinic. She caught a nasty cut on her leg. She'll be fine."
"How bad?"
"Looks worse than it is. Bleeding pretty good when they got her up. They're cleaning it under sedation. You should get checked, too."
"I'm fine."
"Tommy."
"I've been knocked out before. No harm, no foul."
He didn't argue. The man had been a soldier once.
"What happened?"
"Best guess, somebody came in underwater."
"And these men." I tipped my chin at the lawn. "They're my brothers?"
He nodded.
"I want to see Rebecca."
"You should let them check you—"
"Walk me."
He looked at me a beat. Then he nodded.
He fell in at my elbow. We crossed the lawn. The men nodded at me as we passed. Small, precise nods, the kind I knew the shape of from the inside of my own life. I gave each one back and didn't stop.
We went into the house. He took me past the foyer, down a corridor I hadn't been down, and then down a service stair I hadn't seen, and the corridor at the bottom opened on a clinic.
Not a medical bay. Not a first-aid room. A clinic. Two trauma bays. A counter with monitors. Past that, a glass partition behind which I could see a smaller room laid out the way a clean room got laid out when surgery happened in it.
Dominion Hall had a goddamn surgical suite.
The resources.
Rebecca was in the second bay. Two nurses settling her on the bed. Her eyes were closed. Her left pant leg had been cut away at the knee and a thick wrapping of gauze ran from her ankle to her mid-thigh, with bright fresh red on the outermost layer.
I went still.
A doctor straightened up at the foot of the bed and gave me the medical pivot of a man trained to read the face of the person who came in with the patient.
"She's going to be fine, Mr. Dane."
"Talk to me."
"Long laceration. Lateral side of the left thigh. Missed the artery wide. She'll walk out of here on her own steam tomorrow."
I nodded. I crossed to the bed and put my hand on the side of her face. I leaned down and kissed her forehead. I told her, low, I'll be back, sweetheart, and the next thing. I love you.
I straightened up.
"Take care of her," I said to my father.
"With my life, son."
A figure came fast down the corridor behind me. Boots. He stopped and held out a hand.
"Elias."
"Tommy."
"Glad to meet you. Wish it was different.
" He didn't waste time. "We've got a small boat running south on the Intracoastal.
Thirty-eight knots, full dark, driver in night optics, second man forward with a long gun.
They're trying to get away. Satellite imagery's tracking them now. Drones are on their way."
"I need a helicopter."
"Already spinning. Same Bell as last night. Noah's in the spotter seat."
"Get me on it. Now."
He was already turning.
I followed him out.
The Bell ate altitude the way the Bell ate altitude, and the city dropped under us, and the harbor opened up, and we were over the Intracoastal in under three minutes.
Noah Dane was in the right rear when I climbed in, gear arranged, long gun across his knees with the muzzle pointed at the floor. Same hairline. Same jaw. He was a couple years younger than me and had a sniper's stillness that made the rest of the cabin feel busy.
"Brother."
"Brother."
That was the introduction.
I rigged up.
The chute was a low-volume rectangle, the kind a man wore when he wanted to come in soft and at an angle.
The night vision goggles were the very good kind—the kind Dominion Hall apparently kept on the rack the way other men kept band-aids—and when I dropped them and toggled the channel, the world came on green and clean.
I clipped my coms.
I checked my weapon. Again, the best short-barrel rifle money could buy.
I leaned out the open door and watched the dark water sliding underneath us.
"On your call, Tommy."
I gave him a beat.
I jumped.
The cold came up hard and fast. I oriented. The boat was a small, bright signature in my optics, north of where I needed to be, running its thirty-eight knots straight at the slot of water I was angling for.
I pulled the chute high.
It opened soft above me.
I rode it down.
Right on cue, the neat tap of Noah's round landed exactly where Noah had wanted it to land, and the outboard went silent.
The boat coughed, sputtered, and held its forward momentum the way every boat held its forward momentum when the engine quit, gliding along the surface with the dumb physics of a thing that hadn't yet been told it was no longer being driven.
It glided into me.
I hit the deck behind the man at the helm, released the chute, and the silk took the wind and went sideways into the water.
The driver was on his knees in front of his dead outboard, cursing.
The second man was forward. He had the long gun.
I read the deck in one sweep through the goggles. Two scuba rebreathers in a rack behind the helm. Wet. Dive knives. A pair of black duffels lashed under the gunwale. These were not fishermen.
I shot the driver in the back of the head.
He went down across his outboard like a man who'd been deciding what to do with his hands, and he was not deciding anymore.
The second man turned. Fast. The rifle came around with him.
I put three in his face.
This was not the movies. You did not shoot to wound when a man was bringing a rifle on you on the deck of a boat that wasn't yours. You ended the negotiation.
He went over the gunwale and dropped to the deck.
The boat slid on its lost momentum, drifted, and rocked in the chop.
I keyed my coms.
"All clear."
"Copy, all clear," Noah said.
I lowered the optics. The deck went back to the harder, plainer dark of moonlight on water.
I clicked on my flashlight, knelt beside the second man and pulled the cloth off his face.
Scraggly beard. Untrimmed. Sun lines of a man who'd spent his life outdoors. Not a federal jaw. Not Charleston. Mountain country. North Carolina or Tennessee, near as I could read it.
I went to the helm and pulled the cloth off the driver.
Same look. Same beard.
That was a mercy and an answer at once. We’d taken a risk. If I'd come down on a boat full of Bureau agents, Dominion Hall had just authorized me to kill two federal employees on the deck of a fifteen-foot outboard, and the morning would have been interesting.
They’d risked it because they’d known.
Or because they’d known I'd handle it, if it went wrong.
I felt around the driver's pockets.
The phone was in the inside pocket of his jacket. I got it out and held it up to his face and the device unlocked.
Photos.
Dominion Hall from a long lens at the front gate.
The yacht at the pier from across the water.
And three of me. Walking out of The Palmetto Rose this morning.
Walking out of Rebecca's apartment yesterday.
Standing on the front steps of Dominion Hall in jeans and a t-shirt about ninety minutes before the yacht went up.
No captions. No instructions. No name on the device. No smoking gun in the contact list.
There didn't need to be.
The pictures were the assignment. These men had been pointed. At me.
I dropped the phone into my inner pocket.
I keyed my coms.
"Noah."
"Go."
"Tell Lucas I'm coming home."
"Copy."
"And tell him."
"Yeah."
"It's time we have a word with our friend at the Bureau."
A short laugh on the other end. Not amusement. Recognition.
"Copy that, brother."
I sat down on the gunwale of a stranger's boat in the cold dark, with two dead men on the deck and a phone in my pocket that told me what I already knew.
The Dominion Hall boat rounded the bend behind me, running dark and quiet, the way a Dominion Hall boat would run.
I got ready to be picked up.