Winter Lost

“Yes,” they all said with differing degrees of emphasis. Evidently this was something they’d already established and he hadn’t heard.

Well, people asked questions to make certain of things they already knew all the time.

“Good,” Adam said. “Vincent?”

The former marine corporal met his eyes.

“Good job. Thank you.”

The young man took a deep breath and his shoulders relaxed. He looked, Adam thought, about fifteen. Twenty-two was too damned young to be embroiled in this kind of bloody mess.

“Thank you, sir,” Vincent said.

Adam gave him a smile and said, “I’m not an officer—never was.” And withdrew from the virtual meeting before he could say something else that proved he hadn’t been listening to the last ten minutes. Don could finish up; he did diplomacy better than Adam. When they were through, Don would call him and they would have a meeting about the meeting.

Adam called Ben.

“Fucking Canada,” Ben said in a harried voice without greeting. “We think. He’s using a sodding stealth phone again.”

A stealth phone lied to the cell towers about who it was and what it was doing. It switched its own number by various fairly easy and quick methods depending on the make and model. The ones Bonarata had access to were better than anything Adam had heard of.

“Charles got a trace on him just before he hung up, though, and we’re following him,” Ben said with an edge of the moon madness in his voice. A hunt was a hunt.

“In what part of Canada?” Adam asked.

“Montreal,” Ben said. “That is now a for certain. Come on, you—” And some very British and a few American curses boiled out of Adam’s phone.

If Bonarata was in Montreal, he was not in Pasco, where Mercy was. Adam was reasonably certain that she’d be safe in Uncle Mike’s, even from the Lord of Night. Safer, anyway, than when she was in Adam’s company.

He’d done such a good job against Bonarata the last time.

He deliberately loosened his jaw. The past could not be changed. In the present, he carried a few more weapons on his person and in his SUV. Weapons were great equalizers; give him a big enough weapon and he could kill anything. He had also found a new sparring partner to step up his training.

Ben got creative with a few new expletive combinations that would doubtless find their way into the vocabulary of the pack, and ended them with “Lost him.”

“Next time,” Adam said.

“Or the one after that,” Ben agreed with a sigh. “It would be handy if we could keep track of him.”

Adam made a neutral sound. They weren’t going to track him down and destroy him. Bonarata was going to bring himself to them in his own good time. Adam wished he were more certain of the results. In the meantime, knowledge was power.

Ben grunted. “I could put a trace on Mercy’s phone if she’s not going to let us know when he calls her.”

“I know when he calls,” Adam said. “Leave Mercy’s phone alone.”

Ben grunted, but not as if he was unhappy. “How is she?”

“Today?” Adam asked. “Same.”

Neither said how worried he was about Mercy.

“Okay,” Ben said. “Would you let me know if someone—Sherwood or Zee or anyone—figures out how to fix her?”

“I will,” Adam told him, and they disconnected.

Adam stretched and played a few rounds of solitaire on his laptop.

Don phoned about ten minutes before Adam expected him to. This SecDef wasn’t as long-winded as the last one had been, then. Some changes were for the better.

“I was waiting for you to eviscerate him at the start,” Don said without greeting.

Adam grunted. “Looked to me like Vincent had things in hand. SecDef couldn’t throw too much sewage on him without looking like a bully.”

“Hasn’t stopped some of them in the past,” Don said.

“If he’d been one of those, I would have stepped in.”

“Good,” said Don. “I think SecDef might have come a cropper trying to squish him even if he’d really tried. Speaking of the good gentleman, did you really not know who we were talking to?”

“No,” Adam said. There was no excuse for that, so he didn’t bother making one.

Don laughed. “Well, you handled him spot-on. I thought the ‘I don’t talk but my eyes turn scary’ might be a bit much, but SecDef seemed to think that meant we were competent. So thanks for that.”

And the secret for making people think you knew what you were doing was keeping your mouth shut about what had really happened. If Don wanted to believe Adam planned all of that, it was okay by Adam.

“What did you think of Ortega?” asked Don casually.

Orson hadn’t told Adam that Ortega was trans when he’d hired him last year. But though Adam might have let the changes in the Pentagon slip by him, he’d never have okayed a hire without a thorough check.

“That was a good pickup,” Adam said. “You said one of your old friends recommended him?”

Don gave a sudden little laugh. “That boy doesn’t have an ounce of quit in him, does he?” There was a little pause. “He doesn’t bother you? Really?”