Chapter 12
TOMMY
The cab took the curve off East Bay, and the city peeled back, and there it was.
I'd seen a lot of houses in my life. I'd seen oligarch dachas outside Sochi and oilman compounds outside Houston. I'd seen the cartel ranch in Sinaloa where the swimming pool was built around a cottonwood older than the country it was in. I'd seen money that decorated and money that disappeared.
Dominion Hall did neither.
It sat back from the road behind a massive wrought iron gate that opened on a current it picked up out of the air, the way gates did when the men who'd installed them didn't want anyone touching anything.
The drive curved long through live oaks older than the country I served, Spanish moss hanging off them in slow, heavy ropes.
Past the trees, the house came up out of the ground like it had grown there—antebellum stone, multiple stories, ivy on two walls and the third left clean, verandas wrapping the place at every floor.
The windows had the modern depth that told you they were rated for blast and impact, and the cameras were where they were supposed to be, which was nowhere you'd find them unless you knew where to look.
"Lord almighty," the driver said.
"First time through these gates?"
"In thirty years of driving in this town."
"Lucky you."
He glanced at me in the mirror like he was deciding what kind of man rode through gates like that. I didn't help him decide.
I tipped him forty on a fifteen-dollar fare, because the man had given me a real reaction to something I was about to need a real reaction to, and got out.
I stood and looked up at the house.
The man at the front door had been watching me come up the drive.
I'd clocked him from forty yards out—loose stance, hands free, weight on the balls of his feet like a fighter who'd never fully retired the habit.
Auburn hair. Mid-thirties. Build I recognized before he'd opened his mouth, because it was the build of a man whose fitness wasn't a hobby, but a job requirement.
He stepped out at the top of the steps.
"Tommy Dane."
"That's the name."
"Lucas."
He held out a hand. I took it. The grip was what I expected—firm, brief, no message in it. The man had nothing to prove to me, which told me he'd had to prove it to people more dangerous, recently, and didn't feel the need to do it twice in the same week.
"My brothers in there?"
"Not here. Let's talk inside."
I followed him through the front door.
The entryway was a room, not a hallway. Marble underfoot in a pattern that was probably a coat of arms if I'd cared to read it.
Ceiling double-high. A staircase curling away to the right, flanked by paintings that made the walls look thinner than they were.
The whole thing had the careful air of a place where decisions got made by people who didn't shout.
To the left of the staircase, set into a recess in the wall, was a glass tank as long as a small car.
I stopped.
A black snake the length of my leg coiled against the back glass. Diamond head. Body like polished anthracite. Tongue slipping out of its mouth in slow, deliberate intervals, tasting the air.
"That a viper?"
"Yeah."
"You keep a viper in the foyer?"
"He's family."
"He's what?"
"Family," Lucas said again. He didn't elaborate.
It wasn't the deflection of a man who didn't want to answer. It was the answer of a man who'd already decided I'd find out what he meant when I was meant to find out, and not before. I'd worked with men who answered questions that way. I tended to like them.
"All right," I said. "Hi, family."
The viper's tongue flicked. I let it have the moment.
We turned right at the staircase and went down a corridor lined with portraits that all looked vaguely related. Lucas opened a door at the end of it and stood aside.
The room was a parlor. The kind men ran the country out of, in eras when men ran the country out of parlors.
Leather chairs the color of a horse I'd ridden as a boy.
A fireplace with the fire already laid, not lit.
Bookshelves floor to ceiling on two walls, and a rolling bar cart in the corner that had more crystal on it than the apartment of any sensible bachelor.
Lucas went straight for the cart.
"Drink?"
"I never turn down a drink before the hangman's noose goes over my head. It's bad luck."
A small smile. "Bourbon?"
"Bourbon."
He poured two heavy fingers into each of two crystal tumblers. Took his time. Walked back, handed me one.
"What are we drinking to?" he said.
"You're the host. I figured you'd take that one."
He looked at his glass. Looked at me.
"To family."
I clinked my glass against his.
"To family."
We sat. The leather sighed under me the way good leather did, the way the leather on the plane had sighed last night. I was building a small mental file on the texture of Dominion Hall's furniture, and the file was telling me a story I wasn't ready to read yet.
The bourbon hit my tongue and I knew it before I'd swallowed.
"This the same as the plane?"
"Four Branches. Yeah."
"That's good bourbon."
"Owners are friends of ours. Four founders, one out of each branch of the service. We were early investors. They keep us stocked."
I made a small note in my head. Four Branches. Buy a case for the rental in Springdale, if I ever made it back.
I started to say something else.
The door burst open behind me.
I didn't turn fast. I came around in the chair just enough to see, and what I saw was a woman crossing the room toward Lucas at speed with a clipboard in one hand and her phone in the other and her hair pulled back from her face the way women pulled it back when they were halfway through a thing and not finished yet.
Two strides into the room, she registered me.
She stopped.
I'd seen her face before. On a movie poster the size of a building in Times Square last year. On the cover of a magazine in a Dubai newsstand. On a tablet a corporal had been watching in the back of a Chinook outside Mosul.
The face I was looking at, in person, in a parlor in Charleston, on a random afternoon, belonged to Lexi Montgomery.
She gave me about half a second of oh, then gave me the smile—the one that had built her career, gracious and easy and worth, I'd read somewhere, ninety million dollars per movie.
"I am so sorry," she said. "I didn't realize Lucas was in here with someone. I'm Lexi."
I was on my feet by then.
"Montgomery," I said, before she could finish.
She tilted her head.
"So, you've heard of me."
"Maybe. There was a low-budget thing a few years back. Guy and his dog. I think you played the dog."
She let out a laugh. The real one. The kind that cracked open across her face before she'd had time to school it.
"I like you."
"That's kind of you, ma'am."
"Don't ma'am me, you sound like a man who knows better."
"Yes, ma'am."
She turned the smile to Lucas.
"Sorry to interrupt. What time are we leaving for Paris?"
He set his bourbon on the side table. Reached for her wrist. Pulled her into his lap with the confidence of a man who did not ask permission from his girl in front of company, but knew his girl.
She landed there like she'd landed there a hundred times.
I sipped my bourbon to give my face something to do.
"Got some things to tie up here," he said. "Then we'll go. Dinner on the plane."
"Mm. Okay."
She put her hand on the back of his neck and kissed him on the cheek, brief and soft, and stood up and turned back to me like the lap had been a parking spot.
"Tommy," she said—he'd given her my name without me noticing—"I hope I'll be seeing you around."
"Likewise, Ms. Montgomery."
She rolled her eyes at the Ms. Montgomery and walked out and closed the door behind her, and I sat back down and looked at Lucas.
Lucas picked his bourbon back up.
He didn't explain.
I waited a polite three seconds.
"So. You and—"
"Married," Lucas said. "Happily."
"Huh."
"Mm."
"Married to Lexi Montgomery?"
"That's the one."
"Huh."
"You said that already."
"I'm savoring it."
He smiled into his glass.
I sat with it. I didn't get rattled, and I definitely didn't let the wife of my host rattle me, but I'd been hit twice in twelve hours by women I hadn't briefed for, and the day was wearing on me. I took another sip. Buried the moment under it.
"Tell me about my brothers."
The smile fell off Lucas's face by degrees. Not a flinch. A slow, professional reset. He set the bourbon down. Leaned forward, elbows on his knees.
"Wyatt and Grant were briefly in FBI custody."
"Briefly."
"It went south. They're safe. But."
"How south?"
He picked his words.
"They were extracted from a federal building in a fake escort.
Two SUVs, men in jackets that said FBI, badges that scanned.
Drove them out of downtown like they were being moved between facilities.
About fifteen minutes in, the lead vehicle pulled off.
Your brothers read it before it broke and put four guys in the dirt. "
"Four?"
"Four contractors. None of them were FBI. We think."
"Real badges?"
"Real badges. Real jackets. Best read we have is that someone inside the Bureau is moving credentials to private operators on contract."
"Rogue?"
"Rogue."
"Where are my brothers now?"
"Off the board. They'll surface when it’s safe."
I didn't push it. I'd worked with men who said off the board the way Lucas said it, and the men who said it that way had earned it.
"Craine?"
He winced. The smallest one. Recovery, immediate.
"Craine's a wrinkle. We don't have his motive yet. We don't know how dirty he is on the spectrum. Could be legit. Could be opportunist. Could be both."
"He came to my hotel suite this morning."
"I heard."
"You let him?"
A flicker. He weighed it. Decided to give me the answer.
"Yeah."
"All right."
"We had a team a floor below. If it had moved an inch toward bad, we'd have been in your hallway in five seconds. We needed to see what he opened with. We got it."
"He opened with friendly. Tried Plan B halfway through. Settled for warning me out of town."
"That's about what we expected."
"How deep do you think it goes?"
He took his time. Looked at his glass. Looked at me.
"If a deputy director of the FBI is making house calls on a guy he's never met, in a hotel he didn't book, in a city he doesn’t own," he said, "the shit goes pretty deep."
It was the right answer. The honest one. The kind a man gave when he'd decided to be useful instead of impressive. I drank to it.
"What do we do?"
"You stay close. Dominion Hall's safe. Palmetto Rose is safe—we own it. Either bed has your name on it tonight. Your call. Past that, we work."
"You let him get to me on purpose?"
"We let him try. He didn't get to you."
"Mm."
"Did he?"
"No."
He nodded.
I rolled the bourbon in the glass and watched the way the light caught it and decided to ask the question I'd been holding since he'd opened the door.
"Have we met before? Something about you is familiar."
He grinned.
It wasn't the social grin. It was a smaller, older one—the kind you saw on a man at a bar when he was getting away with something he'd waited a long time to get away with.
"No. We haven't met."
He didn't elaborate.
I let it sit. I was good at games. As long as my brothers were safe for now, I could play whatever game this man wanted to play. The moment that changed, I'd become a different problem altogether, and everyone in this house would clear the room.
"What is Dominion Hall?"
He grinned again.
"Home for wayward warriors. Could be a home for you, if you want."
"What comes with it?"
"Roof. Three squares. Your brothers. The next-room-over kind."
"My brothers got rooms?"
"Right next to the one we'd give you."
I let that land.
"And besides the roof and the brothers?"
He didn't smile this time.
"Every asset Dominion Hall owns is at your disposal. The moment you say yes."
"Yes to what?"
He set his glass down carefully on the side table.
"Yes to helping us find whoever's fucking with your family."
I looked at him. He looked at me.
I matched his grin.
"Then the answer's easy. Yes. As long as you let me deliver the first blow."
He nodded once.
"I expect nothing less."