“Yeah,” Don said. “I think he’s got a subscription to the New York Times online. He says he does, anyway.”
“Who was the guy from Homeland Security?”
Don shrugged. “Ron Begley? Desk jockey. He worked at Treasury when September eleventh happened. Fraud, counterfeiting. When they created Homeland, he switched over. Seems to be stumbling and fumbling his way up the ladder. I don’t think he’s a problem for us.”
Don stared at Luke for a long moment.
“What do you think of this mission?” he said.
Luke didn’t look away. “I think it’s a deathtrap, to be honest with you. It scares me. We’re supposed to drop into Russia undetected, rescue a bunch of guys…”
“Three guys,” Don said. “We’re allowed to kill them, if that’s easier.”
Luke wouldn’t even entertain that thought.
“Rescue a bunch of guys,” he repeated, “torch a submarine, and get back out alive? That’s a tall order.”
“Who would you send on it?” Don said. “If you were me?”
Luke shrugged. “Who do you think?”
“Do you want it?”
Luke didn’t answer right away. He thought of Becca and baby Gunner, in the cabin just across the Chesapeake on the Eastern Shore. God, that little baby…
“I don’t know.”
“Let me tell you a story,” Don said. “When I was a commander in Delta, a bright-eyed young guy came in. He had just qualified. Came out of the 75th Rangers, like you did, so he wasn’t green. He’d been around the block. But he had an energy, this kid, as though it was all new to him. Some guys come into Delta and they’re already grizzled as hell at the age of twenty-four. Not this guy.
“I tapped him for a mission right away. I was still going on missions myself in those days. I was deep into my forties by then, and the brass at JSOC wanted to put me out to pasture, but I wouldn’t hear of it. Not yet. I wouldn’t send my men into places where I wouldn’t go myself.
“We parachuted into the Democratic Republic of Congo. Way upriver, out beyond anything resembling law and order. It was a night drop, of course, and the pilot put us in the water. We crawled up out of those swamps looking like we’d all been dipped in shit. There was a warlord up there, called himself Prince Joseph. He called his ragtag militia Heaven’s…”
“Heaven’s Army,” Luke said. Of course he knew the story. And of course he knew all about the new Delta recruit Don was describing.
“Three hundred child soldiers,” Don said. “Eight men went up there, eight American soldiers, no outside support of any kind, and put bullets in the brains of Prince Joseph and all his lieutenants. A perfect operation. A humanitarian mission, with no ulterior motives but to do the right thing. Bang! Decapitation strike.”
Luke took a deep breath. The night had been terrifying and exhilarating all wrapped into one adrenaline rush of a package.
“The international aid societies came in and did what they could with the children, repatriated them, fed them, loved them, reeducated them to be human again, if that was even possible. And I kept tabs. Many of them eventually made it back to their home villages.”
Don smiled. No, he positively beamed.
“In the morning, I lit up a victory cigar along the bank of the mighty Congo. I was still smoking them in those days. My men were with me, and I was proud of every single one of them. I was proud to be an American. But my newbie was quiet, thoughtful. So I asked him if he was all right. And you know what he said?”
Now Luke smiled. He sighed and shook his head. Don was talking about him. “He said, ‘All right? Are you kidding me? I live for this.’ That’s what he said.”
Don pointed at him. “That’s right. So I’ll ask you again. Do you want this mission?”
Luke stared at Don for another long moment. Don was a drug dealer, Luke realized. A pusher. He sold you on a feeling, a rush, that you could only get one way.
An image of Becca holding Gunner again flashed across the screen in his mind. Everything had changed when that baby was born. He remembered Becca giving birth. She was more beautiful in those moments than he had ever seen her.
And they were planning to build a life together, the three of them.
What was Becca going to think about this mission? When he sold her the last one, when she was about to give birth, she had been upset. And that one was an easy sell—just a quick trip to Iraq to arrest a guy. Of course, it turned into much more than that, full-on combat and the rescue of the president’s daughter, but Becca had only learned about it after the fact.
Here, she would know the deal going in: Luke was going to infiltrate Russia and attempt to rescue three prisoners. He shook his head.
There was no way he could tell her that.
“Luke?” Don said.
Luke nodded. “Yeah. I want it.”
CHAPTER FIVE
3:45 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time
Queen Anne’s County, Maryland
Eastern Shore of Chesapeake Bay
“You’re home early.”
Luke looked at his mother-in-law, Audrey, taking his time, soaking her in. She had deep-set eyes with irises so dark, they seemed almost black. She had a sharp nose, like a beak. She had tiny bones and a thin frame. She reminded him of a bird—a crow, or maybe a vulture. And yet, in her own way, she was attractive.
She was a well-preserved fifty-nine now, and Luke was aware that as a young woman in the late 1960s, she had done some modeling for newspaper and magazine advertisements. As far as he knew, it was the only work she had ever done.
She had been born into an arm of the Outerbridge family, vastly wealthy New York City and New Jersey landowners since before the United States became a country. Her husband, Lance, came from the equally old-money St. John family of New England lumber barons.
As a general rule, Audrey St. John frowned upon work. She didn’t understand it, and she especially didn’t understand why someone would do the kind of dangerous, dirty work that occupied Luke Stone’s time. She seemed continually flabbergasted that her own daughter, Rebecca St. John, would marry someone like Luke.
Audrey and Lance had never accepted him as their son-in-law. They had been a toxic influence on this relationship since well before he and Becca exchanged their vows. Her presence here was going to make it that much harder to talk to Becca about this latest assignment.
“Hi, Audrey,” Luke said, trying to sound cheerful.
He had just walked in. He had taken off his tie and unbuttoned the top two buttons of his dress shirt, but so far that was his only nod toward being home. He reached into the refrigerator and came out with a cold beer.
It was full summer now, and the weather was fine. The surroundings here were beautiful. He and Becca were living at her family’s cabin in Queen Anne’s County. The house had been in the family for over a hundred years.
The place was an ancient, rustic place sitting on a small bluff right above the bay. It was two floors, wooden everything, with creaks and squeaks everywhere you stepped. The kitchen door was spring-loaded, and slammed shut with enthusiasm. There was a screened-in porch facing the water, and a newer stone patio with commanding views right on the bluff.
They had started gradually replacing the generations-old furniture to make the place more suited for everyday living. There was a new sofa and new chairs in the living room. One Saturday morning, by hook or by crook, and by sheer animal will, Luke and Ed Newsam had managed to insert a king-sized bed in the upstairs master bedroom.
Even with those upgrades, the sturdiest thing in the house remained the stone fireplace in the living room. It was almost as if the stately old hearth had been there, looking out over Chesapeake Bay since biblical times, and someone with a sense of humor had built a small summer cabin all around it.
It really was an incredible place. Luke loved it there. Yes, it was far from his office. Yes, if the SRT job really did pan out, and it looked like it was going to, they were going to have to move closer. But for now? Paradise. The ninety-minute commute home didn’t seem nearly as bad, just knowing that this was the payoff at the end of it.
He glanced out the window. Becca was on the patio, feeding the baby. Luke would have loved nothing more than to take a seat out there with them, gaze out at the water and the sky, and just sit there until the sun went down. But it wasn’t to be. Unfortunately, he had to pack for his trip. And before he even started, he had to do the hardest thing—announce that he was going.
“Did you get punched on the job?” Audrey said.
Luke shrugged. Even though he could feel them well enough, he had almost forgotten the scrape on his cheek and the swollen jaw line. Pain was an old friend of his. When it wasn’t excruciating, he could barely feel it. There was almost something comforting about it.
He cracked open the beer and took a slug. It was ice cold and delicious. “Something like that. But you should see the other guy.”
Audrey didn’t laugh. She made a sort of half-grunt and went upstairs.
Luke was tired. It had already been a long day, with Martinez laid to rest, the fight with Murphy, and everything else. And really, it was just getting started. He intended to be here for an hour before he headed right back to the city again, from there to Turkey, and then, if all the signs were favorable, over to Russia.
He went outside. Becca nursing the baby was like an impressionist painting, her bright red jumper and floppy sun hat against the green grass, and the vast sweep of pale blue sky and dark water. There was a double-mast tall ship replica at full sail in the distance, moving slowly to the west. If he could press STOP and freeze this moment in time, he would do it.
She looked up, saw him there, and smiled. Her smile lit him up. She was as pretty as ever. And a smile was a good thing, especially these days. Maybe the darkness of this postpartum depression was beginning to lift.
Luke took a deep breath, sighed quietly, and smiled himself.
“Hello, beautiful,” he said.
“Hello, handsome.”
He leaned down and shared a kiss with her.
“How’s the baby boy today?”
She nodded. “Good. He slept for three hours, Mom kept an eye on him, and I even got to take a nap. I don’t want to promise anything, but we might be turning a corner here. I hope so.”
A long pause drew out between them.
“You’re home early,” she said. That was the second time in the past five minutes someone had said that. He took it as a bad omen. “How did your day go?”
Luke sat down across the small round table from her and took a sip of his beer. As always, he believed that when trouble was brewing, the thing to do was to get right to the meat of it. And if he could get past the worst of it, maybe it would happen too fast for Audrey to come out here and pile on.
“Well, I have an assignment.”
He noticed himself fudging. He didn’t call it a mission. He didn’t call it an operation. What kind of assignment was it? Was he going to interview a local craftsman for the weekly newspaper? Maybe it was a high school science project?
Instantly, she was wary.
Her eyes stared deep into his, searching there. “What is it?”
He shrugged. “It’s a diplomatic snafu, really. The Russians took three American archaeologists prisoner, and confiscated their little submarine. They were diving in the Black Sea, looking for the wreck of an old trading ship from ancient Greece. They were in international waters, but the Russians felt they were too close to Russian territory.”
Her eyes never wavered. “Are they spies?”
Luke took another sip of his beer. He let out a sound, a short bark of laughter. She was good at this. She’d already had a lot of practice. She went right for the open vein.
He shook his head. “You know I can’t tell you that.”
“And you’re going to go where, and do what?”
He shrugged. “I’m going to Turkey, to see if we can get them released.” The statement was true, as far as it went. It also overlooked an entire continent’s worth of detail. It was a sin of omission.
And she also knew that. “To see if we can get them released? Who are we?”
Now it was a chess match. “The United States of America.”
“Come on, Luke. What are you not telling me?”
He sipped the beer again and scratched his head. “Nothing of substance, hon. The Russians are holding three guys. I’m going to Turkey. They want me there because I have experience in the kind of mission that led to this. If the Russians are willing to negotiate, I probably won’t even be directly involved.”
Behind Luke, the screen door slammed. Becca’s eyes looked past him for a second. Dammit! Here came Audrey.
Becca’s eyes were suddenly angry. Tears welled up in them. No! The timing couldn’t be worse. “Luke, the last time you went abroad, I was almost nine months pregnant. You were going to Iraq to arrest someone, remember? A police job, I think you called it. But it turned out you were going to rescue the president’s…”
He raised a finger. “Becca, you know that isn’t true. I did go to arrest someone, and the arrest was uneventful…”
That was a lie. Another lie. The arrest was a slaughterhouse.
“…daughter from Islamic terrorists. Your helicopter crashed. You and Ed fought Al Qaeda militants on a mountaintop.”
“All of that happened after we were already there.”
“I’m not stupid, Luke. I can read between the lines of newspaper reports. The articles admitted that dozens of people were killed. That tells me there was a bloodbath and you were right in the middle of it.”
Luke raised his hands a tiny amount, as if she had just pulled the world’s tiniest gun on him. The baby was still there, suckling away as if none of this was happening.
“It’s an assignment, hon. It’s my job. Don Morris…”
Now she raised a finger. “Don’t you Don Morris me. I don’t even blame Don anymore. If you didn’t want to go on these suicide missions, then he couldn’t get you to go. It’s really that simple.”
Now she was crying, the tears pouring down.
“What’s going on?” a voice said. The voice was too eager. It sensed blood in the water, and was moving in for the kill.
“Hi, Audrey,” Luke said, without even turning around.
Becca stood and handed Audrey the baby. She looked down at Luke, her eyes hard. Her entire body was shaking now from the tears.
“What if you die?” she said. “We have a son now.”
“I know that. I’m not going to die. As always, I’m going to be very careful. Even more so now, because of Gunner.”
Becca stood there next to her mother, her hands balled up in fists. She looked like a toddler who was about to start shrieking in the middle of the supermarket. Her mother, in contrast, was calm, simpering, self-satisfied. She bounced the baby in her thin, birdlike arms and cooed to him in quiet baby talk.
“It’s going to be okay,” Luke said. “It’s going to be fine. I know it is.”
Abruptly, Becca stormed off, up the small hill toward the house. A moment later, the screen door slammed again.
Now Luke and Audrey stared at each other. Audrey had the sharp, predatory eyes of a hawk. Her mouth opened.
Luke raised a hand and shook his head. “Audrey, please don’t say a word.”
Audrey ignored him. “One day, you’re going to come back here and you’re not going to have a wife anymore,” she said. “Or a house to live in, for that matter.”
CHAPTER SIX
8:35 p.m. Eastern Standard Time
The Skies Above the Atlantic Ocean
“Rock and roll,” Mark Swann said.
“Hip-hop, son,” Ed Newsam said. “Hip-hop.”
He held his big hand out across the narrow aisle of the small jet plane and Swann gave him a smooth, slow tap. Then Swann turned his own hand over and Ed appeared to place a few coins in Swann’s palm. They had just acted out the whole “gimme five, keep the change” brother man hand jive.
Since the last mission, Newsam and Swann had become unlikely friends.
Luke watched them. Ed lounged in his seat, steely-eyed, huge, neatly dressed in khaki cargo pants and a form-fitting SRT T-shirt. Ed’s job was weapons and tactics. Both his hair and his beard were close-cropped and the edges perfectly even. He looked exactly like what he was—no one to mess with.