“I chuckle,” Booker said, “when I hear people bitching about traffic on the D.C. Beltway. It ain’t shit compared to this furball.”
“How much longer are you here?” Mercer asked.
“Two more weeks, then I am stateside. They want me to come back, obviously, but I’m not so sure. Stacy would prefer I take an office job, and I’m starting to think I can compromise and become an instructor someplace.”
This was the first Mercer had heard about this. “So she has her hooks that deep into you?”
“She sure as hell beats coming home to Harry White and that stinky old dog of his.”
That was an unarguable point.
Booker Sykes was once among the elite soldiers in the world. From Rangers to Special Forces and on to the indefatigable Delta, his exact number of deployments remained a national secret even after his retirement from the army, but he had seen as much combat as anyone alive — and in places the American public had no idea their nation had a military interest. He had just last year retired after putting in his twenty, to take a much more lucrative job with a private security contractor with the intentionally innocuous name of Gen-D Systems. He was essentially being paid ten times as much for one-tenth the danger of what he’d been doing with the army. What he hadn’t expected was to fall hard for one of the company’s in-house lawyers. Sykes had one failed marriage already, a casualty of his constant deployments, but he wasn’t the same stupid twenty-seven-year-old he’d been then, and he recognized that he wasn’t going to do any better than Stacy Grantham — and that maybe it would be best if his war fighting days were behind him.
“Just tell me where you two are registered and I’ll get you something nice.”
Sykes casually gave Mercer the finger over his broad shoulder, his attention never far from their immediate surroundings. In the bustle of the city anything and everything could be rigged to explode, from the broken-down truck on the side of the road with one of its tires off as though it was being replaced, to the twelve-year-old boy standing at a crosswalk with his hands thrust deep into his pockets.
Mercer would have never considered this trip if it weren’t for his friendship with Book Sykes. The two had met when Sykes was still with Delta and on a training rotation at the air force’s notorious Area 51. Mercer had been there leading a group of miners who were tunneling underground as part of a top-secret physics experiment. He had used Sykes and his team’s unique abilities once or twice since then under the auspices of his role as special science adviser to the president, but since Mercer had lost that job the two met only as friends. Sykes still lived outside of Fort Bragg, Delta’s HQ in North Carolina, and near Gen-D’s offices as well, but he managed to get to Washington whenever he was back in the States.
A day earlier, as soon as he’d gotten off the phone with the Hoover Library, Mercer had called Book’s satellite phone here in Kabul. Sykes then cleared it with his bosses to take Mercer on as a short-term client, but could do nothing about getting him a “friends and relatives” discount. To hire Sykes and three of his men, plus transportation for just a couple of days, ate up the better part of fifty grand. This was a heavy price, but Mercer had been well paid over the years — and to get a crack at Abe’s killers he was willing to pay far more.
It was only after arrangements had been made with Sykes that Mercer reached out to Nate Lowell. As Mercer knew would happen, the FBI agent listened with the studied disinterest of a tollbooth attendant on retirement day, promised to include Mercer’s information from the Hoover Library in his report, and hung up before Mercer could ask about Kelly Hepburn. As Agent Hepburn had said, hers wasn’t the main thrust of the investigation, so to expect anything out of Lowell was a waste of time.
Mercer had then told Harry and Jordan exactly where the next leg of the investigation would take him. Harry was unmoved. He’d been around to see Mercer jet off halfway around the planet too many times to care. On the other hand, Jordan was stunned. It appeared in just the few days they had been together she’d come to rely on his steady presence. He had assured her that the gunmen couldn’t possibly know their identities, so they were perfectly safe — but that wasn’t it. It seemed as though she liked knowing he was nearby, that she could call his name and he’d be there.
Mercer had given Jordan an indulgent smile. There was something about her that excited him — her youthful beauty, her intelligence, her vulnerability…perhaps all three. “Twenty hours flying there, forty on the ground, tops, and twenty back. Let’s call it four days just to be sure. Then I’ll be back — and hopefully with the answers that will end this nightmare.”
“Maybe…” Jordan had said. “But it’s not safe, Mercer, and you know it.” He nodded understandingly, and told her a couple of stories about Booker T. Sykes and his exploits, knowing it would make her feel better to know he had someone like Sykes watching over him.
Upstairs on his closet floor, Mercer kept a packed go bag. The only items he dumped from it, since he was flying commercial, were the folding knife and the Beretta 92 pistol. He trusted Booker could get him replacements in country. Less than sixty minutes after learning where Sample 681 had been unearthed, he was ready to go. He would fly first to London, then New Delhi, and on to Kabul, where Book would meet him and escort him the last couple hundred miles. He didn’t bother shaking Harry’s hand. They were long past that. The old bastard didn’t even get off the bar stool. He just tossed a casual wave over his shoulder without a second glance. Drag greeted Mercer’s departure with even more sangfroid, and snored on while Mercer left the rec room.
Only Jordan had walked him down to the front door, her arm still held against her chest by the sling. Mercer stooped to kiss her on the forehead, but she recoiled from him, a strange look on her face.
“Just how old do you think I am?”
The question shook him and he sputtered a bit before she rescued him by saying, “I know I look really young, Mercer…it’s been a drag most of my life, but I figure when I’m forty it’s going to be awesome. I’m twenty-eight, not eighteen, so if you want to kiss me properly I won’t think you’re a perv or anything.”
He ran the numbers in his head and found her math to be impeccable. He was gentle with her arm, but firm as he pressed her hard body against his and his mouth to hers. With her sling between them it was awkward, but nonetheless rewarding. He had one hand at the base of her neck, tilting her head, the other at her waist and nearly encircling half her body. Her knee pressed gently between his legs, nuzzling, teasing.
He broke the kiss before he no longer had the will to do so and stepped back, panting, sheepish, and more than a little awestruck.
“Wow,” Jordan said, slow to open her eyes.
“Yeah, wow,” he replied, smiling. “I guess I’ll see you in a few days.”
“And we will definitely pick up where we left off.”
He gave her one more short fierce kiss, and then he was out the door, hooking it with an ankle in a practiced maneuver that gave it just enough momentum to close with a solid clunk.
That had been nearly a full day earlier. “Mercer,” Sykes called, startling him back to reality. Sykes pointed to their driver. “I want you to meet Hamid. Hamid, this sad white boy is Philip Mercer, and trust me when I tell you that danger follows this man like the goat stench after a Taliban. Hamid’s brother is our chopper pilot, and Hamid works as a mechanic as well as a driver.”