I stood at the center of the upper floor and looked at what Admiral’s team had built in under twenty-four hours. Yesterday, this had been a boathouse. Now, it was the operational core of an intelligence organization that hadn’t existed a week ago. I’d helped build things before—infrastructure, teams, operational frameworks—but always inside something that already existed. This was different.
The sun had gone downby the time I made my way from the boathouse to Ohkwari.
I pushed the latch and stepped inside, got a fire going in the hearth, and unpacked the gear bag I’d left on the floor last night. Shirts, kit roll, the hard case for the sidearm, the field razor I had carriedsince my first deployment, and a change of boots. I put it all where it belonged.
I’d had three deployments in the last two years, and I’d lived out of that bag for most of them. I knew the weight of it packed, and the weight of it empty, and I’d never once put anything in a drawer and thought of it as a place it lived.
I’d just stored my bag when I heard a sound in the other room. I stepped out of the bedroom to find Beacon standing on the front door’s threshold.
11
BEACON
Itold myself I was going there to finish the conversation.
That was the lie I’d been assembling since Lyra had kissed my cheek in the great room and told me to get some sleep. I’d said I would. I’d gone upstairs. The room Henry had given me was on the second floor of the main camp, and I sat on the edge of the bed and looked at my boots long enough to convince myself I wasn’t going to do what I was already doing.
Then I put my boots on and went down by the kitchen stairs.
I left the crutch against the wall by the door. My knee would pay for it later, but I didn’t care. I wasn’t going to show up at a man’s camp, leaning on a piece of aluminum.
Three small lanterns marked the path through the trees. The cold hit me the second the outer door closedbehind me, and I welcomed it because I needed to focus on something other than the reason I was walking to Ohkwari at ten o’clock at night.
The camp sat in the clearing, with a strip of warm light showing under the door. I climbed the two steps to the porch and grabbed the handle.
When it eased open, I stood on the threshold.
Blackjack was standing near the center of the main room, with a gear bag at his feet. His hair was still damp at the temples. He’d changed into a Henley that was stretched taut over muscles I longed to map with my tongue.
Inside, it was larger than I’d expected. In the main living area, there were two chairs angled toward a stone hearth. There was a low table between them, the kind of space that invited you to stay.
To the left, a small kitchen ran along the wall, open to the room. It had a farmhouse sink and a stretch of butcher block counter. A round table with two chairs sat at the edge of it, close enough to the fire to be warm.
A door on the far wall stood partially open onto what I assumed was the bedroom. Through the gap, Icould see the glow of a second fire. The whole space was topped by a vaulted ceiling that made it feel less like a shelter and more like something that had been here long before any of us and would outlast us all.
“Come in out of the cold.”
I stepped inside. He shut the door behind me and flipped the latch.
“I didn’t come here for what you think.”
“I hear you.”
“I mean it,” I insisted.
“I know you do.”
He didn’t move toward me. He stood with his back against the door, hands loose at his sides, and waited. That was worse than if he’d put his mouth on me the second I was through the door.
“I came to tell you that what happened on the plane can’t happen again. Not while we’re working so closely. Not while every operative in that boathouse is looking to the two of us to run four lanes of an investigation that gets us all killed if we get it wrong.”
“All right.”
“Arrête.Stop.Don’t just agree with me. Argue.”
“You walked out here on a bad knee, with no crutch. If you meant any of that, you’d have waited until morning.”
Putain.
