Chapter 9
CHAPTER NINE
The windshield was a problem. Not the graze on his right arm, which had settled into a deep, steady burn.
Not the blown rear window letting cold air pour through the cab.
Not even the fact that someone with a high-caliber rifle and professional-grade aim had just tried to kill him in a federal parking structure in broad daylight.
The windshield was the problem because the spiderweb of fractures across the driver's side was a beacon. Every car they passed, every pedestrian on the sidewalk, every bored cop running plates on a Sunday—any of them would notice a shot-up SUV rolling through residential Missoula.
Mack checked the mirror. Checked the road. Turned down another side street, keeping to neighborhoods where the houses were spaced far apart and the driveways long.
Beside him, Alyssa was quiet. Her hands were in her lap, fingers stained with his blood. She was staring straight ahead with the particular stillness of someone holding themselves together by sheer force of will.
She'd almost said it.
They just shot the man I l—
He'd heard her catch on the word, watched her pull it back like a hand from a hot stove. But the shape of it was there, the ghost of a syllable that hung between them alongside everything else they weren't saying.
He'd seen the way her eyes had widened when she realized what she'd almost let slip, the quick look away, the cleared throat. The way she'd met his gaze again and pushed forward, harder, fiercer, like she could bury the almost-word under enough determination.
He couldn't think about it right now. Couldn't think about what it meant or what he'd do with it or why the unfinished word was lodged behind his ribs like a piece of shrapnel.
What he could think about was the half-second in the parking structure.
The windshield fracturing. The sound—sharp, splitting—and in the space between that sound and his training kicking in, a single thought so raw and primal it bypassed every circuit he'd built in eight years of combat operations:
Was she hit?
Not: Where's the shooter? Not: What caliber? Not: Exit route, cover, return fire?
Was she hit?
Half a second. Maybe less. His arm was already moving, shoving her into the footwell, his body shifting to put himself between her and the direction of fire.
But that half-second before the training took over—that was the one that told him the truth about himself. The truth he'd been dodging since she'd walked back into his life at that party.
If that bullet had hit her instead of him, he wouldn't have come back from it.
He'd lost people. Morrison, who'd died covering Blake's mistake. Friends in Syria who went home in boxes. His career, his reputation, the future he'd planned. He'd survived all of it because he was built to survive—compartmentalize, file, move forward.
But Alyssa wasn't something he could file. She never had been. She was the one variable in his life that didn't fit in any box, and two years of trying to force his grief over her absence into one hadn't changed that.
His right arm throbbed with renewed urgency.
He flexed his hand on the steering wheel, testing grip strength, and the motion pulled the wound open enough that he felt fresh warmth seep against the gauze.
He needed proper treatment within the hour, or the stiffness would spread into his shoulder, and his reaction time would suffer.
He made another turn. They were twelve minutes from the rendezvous point he'd given Grizzly after contacting Garrett about a new ride. Fourteen from the courthouse, where Claire had told him to meet her, assuming she had the room secured by the time they got there.
"You're bleeding again," Alyssa said.
A small dark bloom was spreading through the bandage she'd wrapped. "It's fine."
"It's not fine." She pulled the med kit from behind his seat again and opened it in her lap.
Her hands were steady now—the trembling was gone, replaced by the focused competence he'd seen in her when she was working.
She carefully peeled back the gauze, examined the wound, and repacked it with a fresh dressing. Her fingers were warm against his skin.
"Tighter this time," he said.
"I will.” She wrapped it firmly, secured it with tape, and sat back. Her eyes lingered on the bandage for a moment before she closed the kit. "How much does it hurt? And don't say it’s 'functional.'"
Despite everything, the corner of his mouth twitched. "On a scale?"
"Sure."
"Four."
"Liar."
"Five."
"Still lying." She set the kit on the floor between her feet. "But I'll take it."
The exchange was so familiar it ached. This was how they'd always been—her calling him on his stoicism, him giving her just enough truth to satisfy her without admitting the full extent of whatever he was dealing with.
She'd done it when he'd come home from deployments with injuries he'd minimized in his emails. She'd done it when his friends died, and he'd told her he was handling it. She'd probably do it until one of them stopped breathing.
He checked the mirror again. Nothing behind them.
No tail, no pursuit. The shooter had been positioned for a single opportunity—parking structure, elevated, waiting for a target to enter the kill zone.
When Mack reversed out, the shooter lost the angle and didn't reposition.
That meant either the shooter wasn't mobile or there wasn't a backup plan for a missed shot.
"Where are we going?" Alyssa asked.
“We’re meeting a teammate first for a vehicle swap. Then we’ll meet with Claire at an arranged, secure place for the debrief."
"Not the field office?"
"No." He let the word carry the weight of everything it implied. The field office was compromised. Someone had known they were coming. Until he understood how, the field office was off-limits.
She was quiet for a moment, processing. "Someone told them we'd be there."
"That's what I'm thinking."
"Who?"
"Don't know yet, but the list of people who knew our arrival time is short."
He saw her absorb that and the implications—if the leak came from inside the FBI or their operational chain, the circle of people they could trust had just gotten very small.
She didn't ask the follow-up question, the one about whether Claire was on the list of suspects.
He appreciated that. He didn't want to answer it yet.
The sat phone buzzed. He answered.
Claire's voice was clipped, but he could hear the strain underneath.
"Courthouse is secured. Room 114, ground floor, east wing.
Judge Alderman's chambers—he's on vacation and offered the space.
Entry is through the east side door. I'll meet you there with Agent Rojas from the DEA and Special Agent Hendricks from our office. That's it. No one else in the wing."
“And Grizzly?” He used CB’s SPS codename out of habit, but Claire knew them all. “I want him there.”
"He'll post outside. I've also got a marshal on the east entrance."
Good. Small footprint, controlled access. Better than the field office by a wide margin.
“Any info on the shooter?" he asked.
"SWAT cleared the parking structure and found the nest on the fourth level. Shell casings indicate a Remington 700 platform. Looks like a professional setup."
Most likely, but it wasn’t his level of expertise. He’d bet the shooter didn’t have military training. “The leak?" he said.
"Working on it. I've pulled access logs for everyone who knew your ETA. It's a short list.”
“We’ll be at the courthouse soon.” He ended the call.
Alyssa was watching him. He could feel the weight of her attention, the way she catalogued his responses, his expressions, the things he said, and the things he left out.
"You don't entirely trust her," she said. Not an accusation. An observation.
"I trust Claire. I don't trust the system she's operating in right now."
She nodded and looked out the window at the houses drifting past, the quiet residential streets, the absurd normalcy of a Sunday in a neighborhood where no one knew two people with targets on their backs were driving through.
After a moment, she spoke. "Do you remember the cabin at Flathead Lake?"
The question caught him off guard. "What?"
"Flathead Lake. That long weekend, the summer before—" She paused. "Before everything."
He remembered. Of course, he remembered. A rented cabin on the western shore, three days of nothing planned. It had been Alyssa's idea—she'd found the listing online and shown him the photos with so much excitement that he'd have said yes even if the place had been a cardboard box.
"The one with the dock that was falling apart," he said.
"And the canoe with the hole in it."
"That was not a hole. That was a design flaw."
"It was a hole, Mack. Water was coming in. I was bailing with a coffee mug."
"And we still made it across."
"We made it to the middle. Then you had to tow us back because I was sitting in four inches of lake water.
" She was almost smiling. Not quite—the situation they were in wouldn't allow the full thing—but the corners of her mouth had softened, and her voice had lost the tight, controlled quality it had carried since the parking structure.
"You pulled us back one-handed while I held onto the cooler because I was not losing the sandwiches I'd made. "
He remembered that, too. The water sloshing around their ankles, the canoe listing badly to starboard, Alyssa clutching the cooler with both hands, as if it contained classified documents rather than turkey clubs and a bag of chips.
He'd grabbed the dock piling and hauled them in, and they'd sat on the half-rotten planks, soaking wet and laughing so hard his ribs hurt.
"Those were good sandwiches," he said.
"They were terrible sandwiches. I put way too much mustard on yours."
"I like mustard."
"You like mustard the way normal people like mustard. I put enough to strip paint." She glanced at him. "You ate the whole thing anyway."