“I guess I don’t have to ask how business is,” Henry said with a laugh as he looked around.
“It could have been yours. I only asked you ten times.” Jack’s laugh was a bit sheepish and Henry realized he was on edge as well. “Good to see you, Henry.”
“Yeah, you, too,” Henry replied, meaning it.
They hugged, and that was an awkward moment for both of them. But after what they’d been through together, a little awkwardness was no big deal.
“What are you doing now? Feelin’ sexy?” Henry nodded at the open shirt.
Jack laughed again as they moved into the cabin. “Thanks for coming so quickly.”
“Still married?” Henry asked.
“Yeah,” Jack said. “My wife’s on a shopping trip in Paris and my son is in a Swiss boarding school. You?”
Henry shook his head. “No wife. No son. No Paris.”
Jack went behind a polished wooden bar and took a couple of beers from a small fridge. He opened them, handed one to Henry, and they raised their bottles in a familiar toast.
“Here’s to the next war,” Jack said. “Which is no war.”
“No war,” Henry agreed. They clinked bottles and drank. It had been over twenty years since the last time they had done this. Henry wished he could take more time to savor the moment but neither of them had come out here just to have a few beers and catch up on each other’s domestic status. “Okay, so what have you got?”
Jack laughed. “Still not one for smelling the roses, are you?”
Henry dipped his head to one side noncommittally. “I’m trying, brother. But you did say it was urgent.”
Jack nodded and led him out to the stern, grabbing a laptop from a built-in shelf on the way. They sat down with their backs to the cabin and Jack opened the laptop. The screen came to life immediately. “Recognize him?” he asked.
Henry did; he had seen the photo only yesterday, when he had set fire to it and left the ashes in a fishbowl. He was careful to keep his expression neutral as he turned from the screen to Jack. “Who’s asking?”
“Your old friend who’s afraid you’re in trouble.” Jack’s weathered face wore the kind of serious expression Henry hadn’t seen for many years, and had hoped he would never have to see again. “So, do you? Recognize him?”
“Yeah. I AMF’ed him in Liège a few days ago.”
“Did they tell you who he was?”
Henry frowned. Of course they had—the agency always told you who the target was. Jack knew that. “Valery Dormov, terrorist.”
Jack’s expression was pained. “No, Valery Dormov, molecular biologist,” he said, his voice heavy. “Who worked here in the States for over thirty years.” He tapped the touchpad with one finger; the image shrank and became the photo on Dormov’s driver’s license, issued in Georgia and not yet expired.
“But I read his file,” Henry said. He felt as if he had a large, icy lump in his stomach. “It said he was a bioterrorist.”
“The file was spiked,” Jack told him. “I don’t know by whom.”
The yacht was barely moving in the calm waters of Buttermilk Sound but Henry felt as if the world were tilting sideways. He half-expected to see the horizon was now on a slant but everything looked normal. Except it wasn’t, not if Del Patterson had lied to him.
For two and a half decades, Henry had put his life in Patterson’s hands without a second thought, never less than a hundred percent certain that he could trust him, that the information Patterson gave him was solid, that he and Patterson and everyone else on the team were all doing the same job for the same side.
If he had heard this from anyone other than Jack Willis, Henry wouldn’t have even considered the possibility. But Jack was his brother; he wouldn’t have come to Henry after so many years to drop this on him unless he was more than solid on the facts.
“Why?” Henry managed after a bit.
Jack shrugged, looking apologetic. “Don’t know that either, I’m afraid. But a lot of alarms went off when Dormov switched teams.”
Henry’s thoughts were racing now. What if Patterson hadn’t lied? Maybe he had been deceived by someone higher up. Was Patterson a cunning traitor or a clueless dupe? Neither option fit the man Henry knew.
“Who told you all this?” he asked.
Jack hesitated, like he had to choose his words carefully. “A friend from the other side.”
A ‘friend.’ Henry had a pretty good idea of who that might be and unfortunately, it wasn’t someone he had ever been in direct contact with. He was going to have to rectify that in order to get to the bottom of this mess. Also, to rule out the possibility that Jack had been lied to. That didn’t seem at all likely—Jack had always been able to spot a liar a mile away even in bad weather—but the only way Henry could be absolutely sure was to meet Jack’s source face-to-face. Jack would understand; if their situations had been reversed, Jack would have felt the same.
“I want to talk to this friend,” he said.
Jack choked on a sip of beer. “Oh, sure, no problem! What do you prefer, Skype or FaceTime?”
Henry kept his expression neutral. “I want to talk to him. I have to.”
He could practically see Jack’s mind shift into overdrive, coming up with all the reasons why such a thing was completely impossible and balancing them against the knowledge that Henry would never let it go.
“What the hell—the guy owes me,” Jack said. He put his beer in the cup holder on his left and typed rapidly on the laptop keyboard. Then he turned the screen toward Henry, showing him large black letters on a white background:
Henry was about to thank him when he heard something behind him. He turned to see an extraordinarily beautiful woman had come up the stairs from below deck. As she came out of the cabin, Henry saw that she had a headful of miraculously thick, honey-colored hair and an equally miraculous body not even slightly obscured by the filmy wrap she wore over a bikini that seemed to have been made for her.
She paused for a moment and peered at Jack over the top of her sunglasses with an expression that somehow managed to be both coolly reserved and possessive. Then she turned away and floated gracefully up the ladder to the next deck, a feat Henry wouldn’t have thought possible. He turned to look at Jack; whatever her story was, it had to be fascinating.
Jack grinned and gave a small shrug. “Kitty. To make up for all the things I didn’t do in my DIA years.”
“You think you didn’t do that in your DIA years?” Henry laughed. He considered pointing out that when he and Jack had started working together, this vision of loveliness would have been learning how to color inside the lines with her first set of crayons, but decided against it. It wasn’t like he’d be telling Jack anything he didn’t already know.
Jack showed him around his floating mansion, which was nicer than a few land mansions Henry had been in. The beautiful Kitty didn’t reappear and join them for a drink. As far as Henry could tell, she had vanished without a trace, which was something beautiful ladies often did. It seemed to be their super-power. Jack didn’t mention her again so Henry didn’t, either. When you had shed blood together, you didn’t make an issue out of anyone’s coping strategies, even if it had been two and a half decades since the bleeding had stopped.