Chapter 31
TOMMY
Ileft Rebecca sleeping.
The doctor walked me to the door of the clinic and gave me the medical handshake of a man telling me, without making a thing of it, that the next four hours were ours but the next twenty-four were his.
I told him to come find me, anyway. I told him that the woman in the bed was the woman, full stop, and any change in any direction at any hour was a change I wanted to know about.
He nodded the way doctors at Dominion Hall apparently nodded—once, sharp, understood, no further explanation required—and I walked out.
The corridor at the bottom of the service stair was quiet now. The crisis on the lawn had settled into the second phase of every crisis I'd ever worked, which was the work that happened after the work.
The fire was out. The pier was being assessed.
The men on the perimeter had relaxed by half a click and tightened by another half a click in a different direction.
Somewhere in the front of the house, men I had not yet been formally introduced to were gathering in a room I had not yet been formally invited to, and a man who looked like an older version of me was already there, waiting.
I climbed the stairs.
I crossed the foyer.
The viper did its tongue thing at me. I did not return the gesture. The viper and I had a relationship now, and I respected the viper's place in it.
I'd just gotten to the corridor that led to the parlor when the front door opened behind me.
Two men came through it.
I turned.
Grant. Wyatt.
Grant was first through the door, shoulders coming up, the open spread of his arms before he'd consciously decided to spread them.
Wyatt was a half step behind, slower, the more reserved of the two by a long shot, but his face had done its own thing and the thing was a thing I recognized in my own chest.
I crossed the floor.
We met in the middle.
Grant got me first and he got me hard, both arms around my back, the heavy, hard hug of a brother who'd been worried and had decided not to say so because the saying was not how we handled it.
Wyatt came in a beat later, hand on my shoulder first, then the embrace, shorter than Grant's, but the same temperature underneath.
"Brother."
"Brother."
"Glad you're vertical."
"Glad you're vertical."
I laughed into Grant's shoulder.
We stood back.
"Heard you got blown up," Grant said.
"A little."
"Heard you killed two guys before breakfast."
"I had breakfast yesterday."
Wyatt's mouth did a thing it didn't usually do. "Heard you got introduced to extended family."
"I did."
"How was that?"
"It was a lot."
"It is," Wyatt said. "Was. Will be."
"Where's Rebecca?" Grant asked.
"Clinic. Cut on her leg, but she'll come out of it fine. Sleeping it off."
A beat of silence.
"All right," I said. "I'm on my way to talk to Craine."
"Are you?" Grant asked.
He said it level, but the level was a little flatter than Grant's level usually was. Wyatt, beside him, didn't say anything at all. He was looking at Grant. Grant was looking at me.
"Yeah. I'm going to put the screws to that man and see what this is about. If that doesn’t work, I’ll use my heaps of charm."
Grant and Wyatt shared a look.
I knew the look. I'd given the look. The look was the one you gave another operator who was about to walk into a piece of intel he didn't have yet.
"What?"
Grant scratched the back of his neck.
"It's all over the news, brother."
"What is?"
"The yacht."
I went still.
"Tell me."
"FBI's putting it out as a paramilitary attack.
They're framing Dominion Hall as a private outfit in a turf battle with American militias.
" Grant's mouth turned down, the barest amount.
"It's been on cable since the harbor patrol got a camera on the wreckage two hours ago. Anchors with maps. Talking heads. Retired Bureau guys saying concerning developments. There’s concern for private citizens. "
"Bullshit," Wyatt said. Quiet. To no one.
"Bullshit," Grant agreed.
I worked it.
The math was not hard. The math was almost insulting, it was so easy.
Frame Dominion Hall as a paramilitary outfit beebopping around America causing trouble.
Run a federal investigation under that pretext.
Subpoena records. Walk men with badges through the front door.
Investigate a piece of private property the federal government had no business inside of, and do it with the public sympathy of a country that didn't love private armies.
"Like Blackwater," I said.
"Like Blackwater," Grant said.
"Blackwater all over again," Wyatt said.
We looked at each other.
"All right," I said. "It's a cover. Gives Craine a federal angle to come after us."
"That's right."
"But that doesn't tell us why."
"No," Grant said. "It doesn't."
Grant looked at Wyatt.
Wyatt looked at me.
"That's the question," Wyatt said.
"None of us know yet," Grant said.
"Lucas might."
"Lucas is on his way down."
He was. The footsteps came up the corridor behind us and we turned, and Lucas crossed the marble.
He stopped when he reached us.
"Tommy."
"Lucas."
"Two on the boat. Confirmed. The driver was Earl Hatcher, age thirty-one, last known address a trailer on a piece of private property outside Beckley, West Virginia.
The second man was his cousin, Wade. Same trailer.
Both members of a militia called the Mountain Sovereignty Coalition.
" He paused. "Couple hundred guys, dispersed, no central facility.
They've been on the FBI watch list for six years and not on the FBI's do anything about list for the same six. "
"Surprising," I said.
"Isn't it."
"Online?"
"That's the part I came down here to tell you. The chatter is already pointing at Dominion Hall."
"Already."
"Within twenty minutes of the explosion, Tommy. The dark web boards started lighting up before the fire was out on the pier. A coordinated narrative—Dominion Hall, private militia, the Danes have been recruiting from the wrong side of the country, threat to America."
Grant let out a slow whistle. "They had it ready."
"Yes, they did," Lucas said.
I crossed my arms over my chest.
"Craine wants us off balance," I said. "That's the play."
"Why?" Grant said.
"That's the question."
A voice behind us:
"I can answer that."
We turned.
My father had come up the corridor without any of us hearing him. He had a folder under one arm. His face had gone harder than it had been in the doorway of my suite, and the hardness was the operational hardness of a man who'd spent his life living crisis to crisis.
He stopped six feet from us.
"I just got my own confirmation," he said. "Two minutes ago. Source I trust."
"Confirmation of what?"
"Dominic Craine was a close confidant of Victoria's."
I waited for the name to land.
It didn't, because it couldn't, because I'd never heard it before.
"Dad?"
"Yeah, son."
"Who's Victoria?"
He looked at me for a long second.
Wyatt's face had done the thing again, slower this time. Grant's had set into the careful flat plane of a man who knew the answer and was watching me get there.
My father drew a breath.
"That's a longer story," he said. "I'll tell you the whole thing tonight. Right now, the short version."
"Short version."
"Victoria was part of Project Trueborn. From the beginning.
She was inside the program, then she was kicked out, and then she spent the rest of her life trying to weasel her way back in.
" He paused. "She's dead, Tommy. We thought her sins had gone with her. They didn't. That’s what we’re left with.
Victoria's leftovers, surfacing one at a time. "
"Project Trueborn."
"That's the name, yeah."
I held very still.
"Dad."
“What the hell is Project Trueborn?”
He glanced at Wyatt. Wyatt nodded once.
“Trueborn was a government program. Designed to make a particular kind of soldier.
It tried to do it through engineering and it failed.
It tried to do it through training and it failed.
It worked when it figured out the variable it had been missing, which was the way kids with real childhoods turn into the kind of men no piece of engineering can produce. "
"Real childhoods?"
"Real mothers, son. Real fathers. Real homes. Real brothers." He held my eye. "Real lessons taught at real kitchen tables by real women."
I felt the room do its thing again, the way it had done its thing in my suite earlier. The downward shift in my balance. The recalibration of where my weight was on the floor.
The kitchen table in Valentine.
My mother in her sweater.
The biscuit with the dollop of butter on it that she'd cut in half and given me the bigger piece of.
Real childhoods.
I drew one slow breath.
"Mama."
"She knew, son. She volunteered. They all did."
She knew and never told me, I thought.
The boy on the bunk in Valentine sat up just a little straighter, listening. I told him to settle. I'd come back to him later. There was a piece of operational math on the table that needed to be done first, and the boy could wait for the man to do his work.
"Victoria," I said.
"Was on the inside," my father said. "Was kicked out and then found her way back in."
"And Craine?"
"Was hers. Closely. He was one of the inside men she ran in the federal government. We didn't know it. She fed him information for years. It built his career. He was perfectly placed to serve. Only now, she’s dead. The handler is gone."
"He outlived her."
"He outlived her."
"And now he wants—"
"He wants what she wanted." My father said it level.
"He wants Dominion Hall. He wants Trueborn.
He wants the whole architecture, every brick of it, the men and the program and the protocol that produced them.
He's been lying low since she died. And I think we just watched him decide that the moment to make it was now. "
"Why now?"
"I don’t think that matters. It just is."
I worked it.
The whole shape of it came up clean. The yacht as a message.
The militia framing as a federal pretext.
The dark web chatter, ready to deploy in minutes.
The Tahoes and the windbreaker and the agent at the hotel and the deputy director on the chaise I'm sorry to be the one to put that in your head, but you needed to know.
The whole thing wasn't an investigation.
The investigation was the cover. The thing underneath it was an acquisition.
Craine wanted what Victoria had wanted. He wanted to walk into Dominion Hall under the cover of federal authority and walk out with the keys.
He was going to put us through hell to do it.
I let out a long breath.
"All right," I said.
I looked at the men around me. My father. Lucas. Grant. Wyatt. Four men who were, in some configuration of word and blood and chemistry, my family.
"What do we do?"
There was a pause.
Grant cleared his throat. He looked at our father. He looked at Lucas. He looked at me.
"We need to get the rest of our brothers here," he said. "Before he gets to them first."
The corridor went quiet around the sentence.
Outside, somewhere on the lawn, a generator kicked on and steadied. Somewhere else in the house, a door closed soft, the way doors closed soft in houses where people had been told to be careful about it.
My father nodded.
Lucas nodded.
Wyatt nodded.
I nodded last.
We stood in the corridor of Dominion Hall with the news cycle building somewhere outside and a federal investigation gathering somewhere closer and a deputy director of the FBI running on the assumption that he had us off balance, and I will say, for the record, that the man was about to find out off balance was not the same thing as off our feet.
"All right," I said. "Let's talk to the others. I can’t wait to meet the rest of the family.