Chapter 26
TOMMY
The first mile, I had a tail.
Not an obvious one. Whoever Craine had on me had been told be there but don't be seen, and the man working the assignment was good enough to keep a quarter mile back on a Charleston sidewalk and use the foot traffic the way people who'd been to that particular school used foot traffic.
He blended. He matched my pace without seeming to. He picked his sightlines off the parked cars and the corner storefronts and the angle of the sun coming low over the harbor.
He'd been good. Just not better than me.
I clocked him at the first turn, confirmed him at the second, and ran the next three blocks at a pace designed to test him without telling him I'd made him.
He held it. By the fourth block he was sweating, but he was holding it.
Fitness wasn't the limit of his game. He was an actual athlete on top of being an actual operator, which told me Craine had upgraded the surveillance personnel sometime in the last twenty-four hours.
Fine.
I let him hold it.
Then, I let him go.
I didn't lose him cleverly. I didn't dive into a coffee shop with two exits or cut through a hotel lobby.
I just opened up. Operators in three vehicles and a man in a windbreaker had told me yesterday morning that Craine wanted me to know I was being watched.
So, today, on foot, in the Charleston cold, with the harbor on my left and the historic district sliding past on my right, I let his man see me run away from him at a speed his man could not match.
I gave him the message I wanted Craine to have, which was I am still the kind of man who does this for a living, and your guy is not.
By the second mile, the sidewalk behind me was clear.
By the third mile, my head had started to clear with it.
The world settled on a run the way it always settled.
The body found the rhythm—stride, breath, stride, breath—and the brain rode the rhythm, and somewhere between the chemicals my legs were producing and the cold air going in through my nose, the noise turned down enough that I could hear myself think.
Craine.
Ask Dominion Hall about your father.
I ran with it for a long time.
There were two possibilities. The first was the obvious one.
The thing was true. My father was alive.
He had been hiding for years. The man who had sat me down in a parlor and talked of family knew where he was, and he had not told me, and the not-telling was either a thing Lucas had been instructed to keep from me or a thing Lucas himself had learned only after Wyatt and Grant had shown up at Dominion Hall with the same question I was now carrying.
The second possibility was that the thing was a play.
Craine had nothing concrete on Dominion Hall and he knew it.
If he could get me to walk into Lucas's parlor accusing the family of harboring my father, he could split me from the only structure standing between me and his investigation.
Brothers turned on each other faster than uncles or strangers.
Tommy Dane—wedge product. Cheap and effective, if it worked.
Both were possible.
Both played out the same way, near as I could tell.
Either Lucas knew something and would lie to me, in which case I'd see it on his face. Or Lucas knew something and would tell me, in which case I'd have a piece of information I needed. Or Lucas knew nothing, in which case I'd have a face on him I could trust the next time I needed to read it.
The bait was the bait. I knew it was the bait. Craine knew I knew. The question was whether the meal underneath the hook was real.
There was only one way to find out, and it was to take the bite.
That was the thing about being a maverick.
Mavericks didn't avoid traps. Mavericks walked into traps with their eyes open and a plan for the second after the trap closed.
Half the work I'd done in my career had been inside boxes set for me by men who'd thought they were the ones holding the key. The ones who thought they’d walk away thinking they'd outsmarted me had usually never walked away at all.
I ran all day.
By the third time I stopped for water and checked for tails, I had the start of a plan for Craine.
Not the whole thing. Plans came together in pieces. But I had the shape of the thing—where I was going to push, what I'd give him to make him push back in the direction I wanted. I had a list of three or four favors I was going to need to call in. The first one was the one I was running toward.
By the time night fell, I was at the gate.
Dominion Hall opened for me without anyone visibly opening it.
I walked up the white drive.
A butler answered the door before I got to the top step.
I'd seen butlers in movies. I had not, in my actual life, dealt with a man in butler attire at a private door before, and I will say there was a part of me that wanted to crack a joke and a larger part of me that decided not to, because the man's posture told me he was the kind of professional who'd heard every joke I had three times each from younger and richer men than me and had retired his patience for that flavor of humor sometime during the second Bush administration.
He was in his sixties. Salt-and-pepper hair. Bearing of a man who'd served in something before he'd served in this. The eyes of a man who'd seen the inside of more powerful rooms in his life than I'd seen the inside of in any of mine.
He inclined his head.
"Mr. Dane."
"Evening."
"How may I be of service?"
"I'm here for my room."
He stepped back from the door without ceremony.
"Of course, sir."
He didn't ask my name. He didn't ask for ID.
He didn't check a list. I'd been scanned somewhere on the way in—face, gait, probably the heart-rate spike from the run—by a system whose existence I would not be told about until somebody decided I was ready to know, and the system had cleared me, and the butler had been informed.
I crossed the marble.
The viper was still in the foyer. Tongue still doing its slow, careful test of the air. I tipped my chin at it the way I'd tipped my chin at the ex-Marine driver yesterday morning. The viper did not return the gesture, which I respected.
"Sir," the butler said behind me. "Will you require anything before you go up?"
I stopped on the bottom step of the staircase.
"Yes, actually."
"Of course."
"I'd like some clothes, please. Jeans, t-shirt, nothing fancy. I went out the door this morning in workout gear and I'd like to be a man in pants when I'm having my next conversation."
"Of course, sir. They'll be in the dressing room of your suite by the time you've finished your shower."
"Appreciate it."
"And, sir."
"Yeah."
"Anything else?"
I held his eye for a second.
"I'd like access to the armory."
His face did not move.
"Of course, sir. Someone will meet you at your room after you get cleaned up."
I waited a beat for a name.
He didn't offer one.
That was its own small message, and I took it the way it was meant. The man would be a name when the house decided he needed to be a name. Today he was a butler, and I was a guest, and the rest would arrive in its own time.
"Appreciate it," I said.
"Of course, sir."
He left me at my offered residence door.
The room they'd given me was on the third floor, end of a wide hallway, behind a heavy paneled door that opened on a suite about the size of Rebecca's whole apartment.
Sitting room. Bedroom. A bathroom in marble that made the marble at The Palmetto Rose look modest. A small writing desk against a window that looked out across the back lawns toward what I could see was an actual riding ring with actual horses in the distance. It was lit up with stadium lighting.
I didn't take it in.
I went into the bathroom and turned the shower on and stripped and stood under the water and let myself think.
I took my time.
Not the way I'd taken my time with Rebecca Lynn in her clawfoot tub. The opposite of that. I took my time the way operators took their time before going into a room they didn't entirely understand—slow, methodical, working the angles out loud to no one.
What was Dominion Hall?
Really?
Lucas had given me the line. Home for wayward warriors.
It was a beautiful line. It was the kind of line that landed smooth and fresh on a man who had spent years running solo missions and burying the part of him that wanted somewhere to come back to, and Lucas had delivered it exactly knowing what it would do.
That was a tell. The line had been engineered.
Lines that got engineered got engineered for a reason.
What was the reason?
The first possibility was that Dominion Hall was what Lucas said it was.
A network. A tight-knit group of men who had served and who now did service of a different kind, paid for by money they had earned somewhere along the way, with a viper in the foyer and a butler at the door because they had taste and could afford it. Wayward warriors. End of story.
The second possibility was that Dominion Hall was a front.
Not for the FBI. I would have read FBI on Lucas in the first sixty seconds and the read would have been clean. Lucas had operator on him, but he had no Bureau on him. Whatever Dominion Hall was, it wasn't federal. At least, not that I could tell.
But that didn't mean it wasn't dangerous.
My brothers were off the board. That was Lucas's phrasing.
Off the board could mean safe in a Dominion Hall asset somewhere.
Off the board could also mean being held in a Dominion Hall asset somewhere.
The difference was a question of consent, and Lucas had not invited me to verify it.
He'd asked me to take the line on faith.
I'd taken it.
Twenty-four hours ago, I'd taken it without a tremor, because the Lucas in the parlor had felt like the Lucas in the parlor, and I'd been raised to read men, and my read had been clean.
A man with Lexi Montgomery in his lap was not, on its face, the kind of man you assumed was running a cartel.
But movie stars married mobsters. The world was littered with that example.
Real powerful men with real powerful enemies had a habit, when they got rich enough, of marrying the most beautiful and famous woman they could find, because beautiful and famous were a kind of armor a man like that could wear in public.
Beautiful-and-famous didn't get shot at outside restaurants.
Beautiful-and-famous got photographed instead.
It was a clean tactic.
I'd respect it if it was the tactic.
I needed to know.
I let the water run over me and worked it.
Plan, then.
I'd play nice. I'd come downstairs in jeans and a t-shirt and an open face, and I'd find Lucas in whatever parlor Lucas was in, and I'd thank him for the helicopter and the limo and the candles in the suite and the staff who'd kept their mouths shut, and I'd make the small, easy, friendly small talk that men in our line of work made when they were working out what to say to each other next.
And then I'd ask the question.
I'd ask it flat. I'd ask it without prelude. Is my father alive?
I'd watch his face.
That was the plan.
I shut off the water. Dried off. Walked into the dressing room with the towel around my waist, and found, exactly as the butler had promised, jeans in my size folded on a shelf, a charcoal t-shirt above them, fresh socks, and a pair of boots that fit me perfectly.
A leather belt rolled neatly beside the jeans.
I dressed.
I checked myself in the mirror once, because I needed to know what face I was bringing to Lucas, and the face was a face I recognized from before I'd put on a uniform—Tommy Dane from Valentine, Texas, in jeans and a t-shirt and a pair of new boots, with no joke ready and his mother's eyes looking back at him out of his own.
There was a knock at the door.
I crossed the suite.
I'd assumed the butler, or the man he'd promised. I had, somewhere in the back of my head, the hope that whoever was on the other side would walk me to the armory first and to Lucas second, because I wanted to be a man with a sidearm when I asked the question I was about to ask.
I opened the door.
The man on the other side was not the butler.
He was not the man the butler had promised.
He was a middle-aged man, weather-cured the way Texas men got weather-cured, with my hairline and my jaw and my hands, standing in the hallway of a Charleston mansion in clean denim and a snap-button shirt with the cuffs rolled twice.
I knew his face.
I had known it before I'd known my own. I had looked at it across the kitchen table in the spring of my eleventh year and gone to bed that night not knowing it would be the last time I'd see it.
Now, it was here.
Now, it was on my doorstep.
Now, it was looking at me with eyes that were filling, slow, with something I would have to take a long time to name.
He opened his mouth.
He didn't get a word out.
I stood in the open door of a suite in Dominion Hall and looked at my father, and the world went very still.
Meanwhile, my phone buzzed in the bedroom. I never heard it.