Blue Warrior

“Then why didn’t she go with her?”

“If you know Cella, you know how fierce she is. She’s devoted to the old man.”

“How did she ever decide to raise a family out here? You’d think she’d move back to Italy just for the sake of her daughter.”

“She’s a complicated lady. You’d have to ask her.”

“That means the noose is tightening around your neck, too, you know.”

“I got a big neck. Stiff one, too.”

“Seriously. You might not walk away from this one.”

“Can’t help that. I’ve been hired to do a job. I’m going to see it through. So would you, if you were me. I think.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Unlike me, a handsome Army Ranger on a grand adventure in the Sahara, you look like a steaming turd recent shat out of a cat’s anus, a dim shadow of the CIA stud I used to know. What the hell happened to you?”

“After the Myers thing, I kinda lost it. Did some shit I probably shouldn’t have done, but had to. You know how it is. “

“Yeah, I do.”

Words like “duty,” “honor,” and “loyalty” were more than just slogans for men like Pearce and Early. Early heard rumors that Pearce had gotten his revenge on the Russian responsible for the death of Myers’s son.

“But it was more than that. You were right about her, Mikey. She was the real deal. I actually started to believe again. And then she was forced to resign. Politics as usual.”

“And then what?”

Pearce blew out a long breath. “I ran, I guess. Hid in the work. At least, the humanitarian stuff.”

“How was that working for you?”

“Okay, until a few days ago.”

“What happened?”

“The last job went sideways. One of my guys got killed.”

“I thought you weren’t working security anymore.”

“That’s the hell of it. We weren’t. For just that reason. We were trying to track a few rhinos. Johnny got killed anyway.” Pearce didn’t describe the condition of Johnny’s corpse when he found it. “I wasn’t there when Johnny needed me. He paid the price.”

“He signed on. He knew what he was in for, working for you.”

“Should’ve been me, not him.”

“Someday, it will be. You know that. So do I. It’s just that his ticket got punched before yours did. You’ve got to let that go.”

Pearce thought about that for a while. “If Cella left, though, you’d leave, right?”

“I’m a huge fan of Mossa, but I’m a bigger fan of my wife and kids. If you can convince her to vamoose, I’m on the next flight out of here with the two of you.”

“I’ll see what I can do.”

Early laughed. “Good luck with that.”

43

Pearce’s cabin

Near the Snake River, Wyoming

10 May

Myers’s body craved a good run, but her common sense told her to stay put and out of sight. Heaven only knew what kind of resources may have been deployed to find her. Even George Clooney owned his own spy satellite these days, but at least he was putting it to good use keeping tabs on African warlords. By now her disappearance had raised alarms with whoever was behind the Tanner suicide. She had to assume they were still looking for her.

Neither she nor Ian had slept in the last few days as they applied digital brute force to the vast data sets she had proposed in their search for the identity of Tanner’s blackmailers. In lieu of sleep, Myers resorted to periodic yoga stretches and body-weight exercises to keep the blood flowing and her muscles taut, fighting the inertia of countless hours of software writing and data analysis. She found a couple of crates and rigged up a crude standing desk to do her computer work. She’d read recently that sitting for more than three hours per day increased heart disease by sixty-four percent, among other pathologies. Sitting, apparently, was the new smoking.

Myers checked the clock on her computer. It was almost time for Ian to check in. She’d passed on her assigned data analyses as they were completed over the last two days, but she still kept crunching data sets, following other leads that popped up. There was no question in her mind that the person or persons behind Tanner’s death were political, and most likely American, though international criminal syndicates had been known to play powerful roles in American political life, especially at the state and local levels both in the past and recently.

The one solid conclusion she had reached was that her old friend was as clean as she thought he had been. She’d known Tanner and his family for years and knew him to be an honorable judge and wonderful father and husband. But Myers was after his killer or killers, so she went after his records hammer and tongs, pulling out all of the stops, digging down to the subatomic level. To her great relief, she found absolutely nothing. With Ian’s help, she had been able to secure Tanner’s FBI background checks — as president, she’d only been briefed on the glowing summaries — and discovered that the FBI couldn’t believe his pristine personal and professional life. More than one of the FBI’s interviewees had referred to him as “Saint Vincent.”