Either way, lots of good agents had read the writing on the wall and bailed. The moment they were gone, Dick had filled their positions with trigger pullers who spent most of their time chasing the rogue shifters or sitting on their asses.
It made Trevor wonder what the hell he was still doing there.
Trevor was still contemplating that—and whether to get another hot dog—when two men walked into the cafeteria and immediately headed for his table. Considering there was a twenty-foot-deep buffer zone of empty tables around Trevor, that might have put him on guard, but since they were among the few friends he had at the DCO, he turned his attention to the plate of french fries just begging to be eaten as Jake Basso and Jaxson West slid out a couple of chairs and joined him.
“Not a good idea for you guys to be seen with me,” Trevor said between bites. “Not only could it be hazardous to your career, but it might end up getting you killed.”
Jake, a former Navy SEAL and technically still a member of Trevor’s counterintelligence/counterespionage team, reached over and snagged a fry off the pile with a laugh. Since Trevor’s team had essentially been disbanded, Jake wasn’t anything but a good friend and coworker now.
“What career?” Jake asked. He was a big guy with dark-blond hair, blue eyes, and a slightly crooked nose thanks to a fight he’d gotten into in high school. “I haven’t done anything but clean weapons at the firing range since everything went to hell around here. I think I’d appreciate someone trying to kill me just to relieve the boredom.”
Yeah, Trevor guessed Jake’s career was already shot. Thanks to him. Something else for Trevor to feel crappy about. But Jake was damn good at his job, and his SEAL background would ensure that he’d land on his feet, even if he wasn’t likely to use anyone around here as a reference on his résumé.
Jaxson West, on the other hand, was kind of screwed. As the DCO’s head of security, he’d answered directly to John when it came to securing both the training facility here on the back side of Quantico as well as the main DCO offices in downtown DC. Given that his boss had been assassinated on his watch—and that Dick hated his guts—Jaxson was in serious trouble. Dick would see that the man was blackballed in the covert community just because he could. But looking at the big, dark-haired guy sitting there so relaxed, you’d be hard-pressed to know the man was counting the days to unemployment.
“You hear anything from Lucy?” Trevor asked.
Jaxson grabbed a handful of fries. “No. But then again, I never expected to. The only reason she stayed at the DCO was because of John. With him gone, there’s nothing to keep her here.”
Even though he tried to cover it up, Trevor knew Jaxson was hurt that Lucy had walked away from the DCO without ever saying a word to him. He’d been closer to Lucy Kwan, the feline shifter that John had found in China, than anyone. Trevor had always assumed Jaxson and Lucy would end up together.
Who knew? Maybe she’d come back someday. It wasn’t like she had to worry about anyone trying to hang the traitor label on her. No one in the organization, not even Dick, would be dumb enough to accuse the petite Asian woman of anything. While she might look like the sweetest angel ever, she was the most cold-blooded, ruthless killer the DCO had ever employed. And that was saying a lot, considering the kind of people the organization had associated with over the years.
“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.”
