“You should have gotten more fries,” Jake pointed out as he snatched up the last half dozen or so in one big hand.
Trevor chuckled. “If you’d told me you’d be joining me for lunch, I would have.”
Jake shrugged. “I wasn’t planning on it. Jaxson and I were heading down to the pistol range to burn off a little stress when one of Dick’s new muscle-headed asshats walked past us muttering about the damn freaky shifter in the cafeteria. Since there are only three of you guys still hanging around and the others are too new to possess the ability to piss people off quite like you, we figured we’d stop in and say hi.”
“That was mighty kind of you,” Trevor said. “I think.”
“You haven’t heard from Ed since I talked to you last, have you?” Jake asked.
Trevor frowned at the name. Ed Vincent, a former Air Force Pararescue, had been the first man John had teamed up with Trevor when he’d come to work at the DCO eight years ago. Jake had joined them a little while later, and since then, the three of them had traveled the world, covering each other’s backs more times than Trevor could count. When John had been murdered, Ed had up and left without saying anything to anyone, not even Trevor and Jake. Clearly, Ed hadn’t been as tight with him and Jake as Trevor had thought.
“Nah, I haven’t heard from him,” Trevor said. “Maybe once he gets settled.”
Jake nodded but looked doubtful. “Maybe. How about Tate Evers? He and his guys have been gone for weeks.”
“He called about a week ago from a little town just inside the Panamanian border called Cerro Punta,” Trevor said. “Dick has them down there scouring the jungles of Costa Rica and Panama, chasing down rumors about hybrids that might have survived the fighting back in November.”
Jaxson shook his head. “Hunting for hybrids in the middle of the jungle without a shifter to help them track is insane. It will take months.”
No kidding. Hybrids were man-made versions of shifters, and the ones the DCO had fought with down in Costa Rica had been almost rabid. That was what happened when people tried to use science to create something rare and unique.
“I think that’s the idea.” Trevor picked up his bottle of Gatorade and took a swig. “The real DCO teams are out chasing ghosts so they won’t get in the way of the so-called investigation into John’s murder.”
Jake snorted. “Dick has to know those idiots he has gallivanting all over the globe earning frequent flyer miles have no chance in hell of catching a shifter.”
“True that,” Trevor said.
Thank God.
Not that Dick was truly the one giving Tate’s team or any others their orders. The person really pulling the strings was Thomas Thorn.
Since its inception, the DCO had been run from behind the scenes by a shadowy group called the Committee, a nebulous collection of eight current and former House and Senate elites who’d held powerful positions on their respective intelligence panels. While nothing had officially changed within the Committee’s structure, John’s death had scared most of them so much that they’d gladly ceded most, if not all, of their authority to one of their members—Thomas Thorn. Which was a mistake, since Thorn was almost certainly the man who’d had John killed.
“You want to head down to the range and punch a few holes in some targets?” Jake asked. “You can imagine it’s Dick if it helps.”
Trevor chuckled. “Sounds like fun, but Dick asked me to meet him”—he glanced down at his watch—“nearly thirty minutes ago. I guess I should probably get over there before he decides to go ahead and just fire me already.”
Neither of his friends laughed.
“What if he does?” Jake asked. “I mean, I don’t understand why the hell you’re even still working at the DCO. You could walk into the Defense Intel Agency Headquarters at Anacostia-Bolling and walk out with a great job within minutes. Why the hell would you want to hang around this joint and get treated like crap?”
Trevor had asked himself that more than a few times. Pushing back his chair, he stood and picked up his tray.
“It’s complicated,” was all he said.
* * *
The minute Trevor walked into the main DCO administration building and saw the memorial plaque with John’s name, as well as his secretary Olivia’s, on it, he remembered exactly why he stayed and put up with Dick’s and Thorn’s bullshit. Contrary to what he’d told Jake and Jaxson in the cafeteria, it wasn’t complicated at all.
He could have bailed the moment he’d heard John was dead. He’d been up in Maine, dealing with some demented doctors who’d been trying to create hybrids of their own, and it would have been easy to jump the border into Canada and disappear.
Feline shifter Ivy Halliwell and her husband/partner, Landon Donovan, had wanted him to go into hiding with them, and he’d been tempted. He was smart enough to know what life at the DCO would be like without John there. But in the end, he’d wanted to come back and get the son of a bitch who’d killed John. He’d liked and respected John. It was the least he could do for the man.
Admittedly, coming back had been risky. Dick could easily have labeled Trevor one of the conspirators and tossed him in some supermax prison, never to be seen again. Hell, Dick could have had him executed, and no one would ever have known that, either.
Trevor only hoped that Dick wouldn’t realize how closely Trevor was aligned with Ivy and Landon. Outside of one mission in Tajikistan, they’d never officially worked together, so it was possible he might not. Crazy, but possible. Ivy and Landon hadn’t liked the idea of Trevor staying but said they’d help him any way they could.
“If you even think Dick or Thorn are onto you, promise you’ll run, okay?” Ivy had said before she and Landon had gone on the run.
