“Cows,” said Baker, raising his brows. “So, you’re what ... a herder?”
“Something like that,” said Mac.
Baker laughed spiritedly. “Well, I never. The great Mac Dekker, a cowherd.” He put a hand on Mac’s arm. “I’m sorry about Will. Damn good man.”
“He was,” said Mac.
“Not sure I could have done what he did.”
“He did what he had to,” said Mac. It was a question that kept him up at night. Where had his son gotten the strength to sacrifice his life? “How ’bout a drink?”
“About time you found your manners,” said Baker, throwing an arm around Mac’s shoulder. “And make it a double, goddamn it.”
They sat in Mac’s study. It was a cozy room with arolla pine walls, a leather sofa in one corner, and a fireplace. Mac found a bottle of scotch with an unpronounceable name that had gathered dust for years.
“I’ll say this,” Baker began, but not before taking a sip. “You came back with a bang. Not a peep for eight years, then ‘Boom!’ There was your face on every camera in Switzerland. Sierre, Zermatt, Zurich. A regular movie star.”
“I didn’t have a choice,” said Mac.
“You look good on camera, by the way,” said Baker. “Especially after you got rid of the beard.”
Ah, the beard, Mac remembered. Part of his effort to look older. No one looked twice at a seventy-year-old with graying hair and bad posture. “I thought you’d come sooner.”
“We considered it,” said Baker. “But it was all over so quickly. What was it? A couple of days? And, by then Ilya was dead and we knew everything.”
“You never knew about him? About Thorpe?”
Thorpe was Calvin Thorpe—formerly CIA station chief for Switzerland—since deceased.
“That he was a double?” Baker grimaced, a bad memory confronted. “There were suspicions. You had lots of friends, me included. It was hard to swallow the story he was peddling.”
“But not too hard,” said Mac.
“It came down to the money,” said Baker. “No one believed the Russians would dump five million into an account just to nail one guy.”
“That’s why they did it,” said Mac. “They knew you’d fall for it every time.”
Baker nodded, a world-weary shrug his only apology. “Goddamn agency,” he said. “It gets crazy on the seventh floor. Someone whispers ‘mole’ and the whole place starts seeing shadows. You know how it is.”
“I was a field guy, Don.”
“The best.”
“Give it a rest,” said Mac. “I’m too old for that.”
“You and me both, buddy.” Baker finished his drink in a swallow, then slammed the glass onto the coffee table. “I’m here to apologize and make good.”
“That right?” Mac laughed cynically. “I don’t blame you, Don. Like you said, it’s how things work.”
“I’m not kidding,” said Baker. “I’ve come to bring you back to life. Officially.”
Mac put down his glass. “How ‘officially’?”
“Clear your name. Take the target off your back. That kind of ‘officially.’”
“Bullshit,” said Mac.
Baker placed his hand over his heart. “Hand to God.”
