Chapter 13 #2
“I will. I’m going to talk to you about the file in a minute. But I’m going to say one thing first, and I’m going to say it once and not again, and then we’re going to drink our tea and order lunch.”
“Go ahead.”
Ronan put his iced tea down.
“I made the same call you’re making, Vale.
I made it on a Monday in October two years ago in a flower shop on Main Street in this town.
I know what it costs to be the man holding the file and to be the man falling in love with somebody who’s in it.
I know how it ends if you handle it well, and I know how it ends if you handle it badly.
So I'm not going to tell you not to. I am going to tell you to read the file like the operational document it is, and to handle the woman like the woman she is, and to never confuse which one you're doing at any given moment. That’s it. That’s the one thing. ”
Ethan took a long breath.
“All right.”
“Okay.”
Ronan picked up his tea and took a longer drink this time.
“Let's chat about the file.”
“Doyle’s phone went quiet Friday afternoon at four-oh-six,” Ronan said. “He hasn’t had a call from the principal’s network since. He’s been on his boat, on his foredeck, pretending to read a newspaper. He hasn’t left the marina.”
“I’ve been watching him.”
“I know. We have him on three of your camera angles, and I’ve got a man in a sedan on Lake Road who has him on the fourth.”
“Ronan.”
“Graham put him there last night. Sloane Mercer doesn’t know he’s there. He won’t be visible from the marina.”
Ethan absorbed that. The operation had moved a piece onto Sloane’s road without telling her. He’d known that it was coming, and he hadn’t known it had come.
“Go on.”
“The principal’s clearing the books because somebody on his end has told him the federal side knows about the maritime piece.
He’s not sure how much we know. He’s acting like we know more than we do, which is the move of a man who’s scared, and a scared principal moves fast. Caleb’s now estimating the window at eight to ten days. ”
“Okay. That's much faster than we thought.”
“I’d plan for eight, hope for ten, but not plan past it.”
Ethan drank his tea.
“Which means Doyle’s going to do something inside that window,” he said. “Because the principal’s going to tell him to. He’s either going to be ordered to move a last shipment, or he’s going to be ordered to disappear.”
“Or the principal will burn him to slow us down. That’s the third option.”
“Burn him how?”
“Drop a body, or drop a piece of intel that makes Doyle look like the principal, and run while we’re chasing it. That’s why I’m here, Vale. We need Doyle alive and in our hands, and the man at slip nine just became the most expensive asset in the operation. Which means he just became a target.”
Ethan watched the condensation run down his iced tea.
“And Sloane’s marina is the place he’s sitting.”
“Yes.”
Ethan let glanced at the menu, then asked the question he didn’t want the answer to.
“Are we ready to move on him?”
“Almost. We need the principal’s next call to Doyle, or a movement order, or an exfiltration order. Something concrete that links them inside this window. Caleb thinks it’ll come by Wednesday or Thursday. When it does, we move within the hour.”
“Okay, I'll be ready.”
“We can’t give Doyle time to call anyone or move anything. That’s why Graham’s in motion.”
“Okay, is he staying invisible?”
“He’s ten minutes out. He’ll be staged closer by Wednesday morning. He’s ready if you need him, Vale. He’ll be in the boat with you, on the dock with you, or in the truck behind you, depending on the configuration. You tell us what you need and you’ll have it.”
Ethan sat with that.
Graham coming meant the team had decided the operation might require the kind of medical capability you didn’t bring unless you thought you might need it.
Graham was the man you put in a scene when somebody might bleed.
The decision to stage him meant Ronan had run the math, and the math had not come out as cleanly as he’d wanted it to.
“Doyle won’t go quietly,” Ethan said.
“Doyle was a Navy boatswain who’s been running cargo for a man who burns assets. Doyle is going to do exactly what a man does when he hears the federal door come open, which is either run hard or fight hard. Graham’s for the fight option.”
“And Sloane?”
Ronan put both hands on the table and looked at him.
“Vale.”
“Yes.”
“Sloane Mercer’s marina is going to be a federal scene by Friday at the latest. There’s no version of this where her dock stays the marina she ran on Sunday morning.
The boat that pulls Doyle off slip nine is going to be a Coast Guard boat, and it’s going to be there with sirens or without sirens depending on whether he comes quiet, but it’s going to be there.
You knew that when you walked onto her dock.
You knew it when she walked onto your boat. ”
“I know.”
“I’m saying it out loud so you’re carrying the right thing when you walk back.
You promised her two weeks. You may have four days.
The conversation she’s expecting at two weeks may have to happen at day eight.
You need to know what you’re going to say to her when the timeline jumps the gun.
You need to know it now, not Thursday at four in the morning. ”
Ethan thought about Sloane on the boardwalk that morning. Whatever is coming, I knew it was coming, and I kissed you anyway.
“I’ll know what to say.”
“You sure?”
“I’ll know what to say.”
Ronan nodded once. He picked up the menu and looked at it blankly.
The operator part of the lunch was done, and they sat together for another fifteen minutes talking about ordinary things, because to leave straight off the hard piece would have been to advertise it to a room with a bar owner in it who already knew too much.
Margo stopped by. "Are you ready to order?"
“Yes, I'll have a cheeseburger. Vale, what about you?”
“I'll have the same and a salad for Sloane before I head back."
Margo nodded, a sly grin raising her lips into a smile that Sloane would have to deal with later.
"Got it." She strutted away, and Ethan hoped he could warn Sloane before Margo stepped inside her office.
"Ronan? Is Sloane safe?"
Ronan's stare was steady. "That will be up to you."
He walked back the long way.
The afternoon light was sharp and white off the Gulf.
He thought about Graham.
Graham was a corpsman who’d watched a girl die in Khost. Graham was a man who took a job seriously enough to ask whether anybody was going to bleed before he agreed to do it, and Graham was on the road now because Ronan had decided somebody might.
Ethan accepted the weight of that with the gratitude an operator felt for a piece of medical capability moving into reach, and he also accepted the other thing it meant, which was that Ronan was no longer willing to assume Doyle would come quietly.
He thought about Sloane on her boardwalk.
He thought about her sentence. “That goes both ways, Ethan. Not just yours. Mine too.”
He’d promised her two weeks. They didn't have that long. The promise had been a true thing in the moment he’d made it, and it would be a true thing in the moment he had to break it, and the gap between those two truths was the place a man like Ronan Cross lived his whole working life.
Ethan was going to learn to live in that gap whether he wanted to or not.
He came down Sunset Beach Road and crossed the marina parking lot, and Sloane was on the dock walking back from the fuel pump with a clipboard in one hand and the canvas jacket she’d worn every morning open over her shirt in the warm afternoon, and she looked up and saw him and her face did the small private lift that was the one she’d been giving him since Sunday at dusk, and he felt it in his chest and made himself smile back.
He stopped in front of her and handed her the bag with the salad.
"Lunch. Don't say anything, just eat it, please. "
She smiled as she took the bag from him, turned and went into the marina, and he turned toward his boat and kept moving.
He went down into the cabin and sat at the dinette in the dim afternoon light and put both hands flat on the wood and breathed.
Two days.
Whatever was going to happen between now and then, he was going to do it inside the small specific window of being a man who was, finally, in love and was also, finally, about to break the heart of the woman he loved in a way she’d see coming and still, somehow, be the kind of man she could forgive on the other side of.
At least he hoped that last part was true.
He didn’t know yet whether he was that kind of man, but he was going to find out.
He picked up his phone and texted Caleb three words:
Met Ronan. Copy.
Then he sat in the cabin until the light shifted on the water and the marina ticked into the early evening, and he thought about a woman with her hands flat on the front of his shirt and a kiss that had been the most honest thing he had done in three years, and he thought about what honesty was going to cost both of them, and he sat with both of those thoughts and didn't put either of them down.