"He doesn't know anything."
"You believe him?"
"Yeah." I run the rod through the barrel. "He was embarrassed about it. The man likes to be useful."
Sisco comes in and leans against the far wall, which means he's staying awhile. He does that, finds a surface and holds it up and waits. It used to feel like pressure. Now I know it's just how he is. He has more patience than anyone I've ever met, and he spends it the same way a good card player spends his chips: carefully, where it counts.
"Templar's calling church at eight," he says.
"With what?"
"With nothing. Same as last week." He takes a sip. "You eat tonight?"
"I'm fine."
"That's not what I asked."
I set the rod down and look at him. He looks back, unhurried, like he's got all night and probably does.
"Kourtney left a plate for you in the kitchen," he says. "Just letting you know."
"I'll get it."
He nods and doesn't push it. That's the thing about Sisco. He delivers the information and gets out of the way of it. Told me once that his job is making sure people have what they need to make good decisions, not making the decisions for them. I've thought about that more times than I can count.
"Grudge was in the parking lot again tonight," he says. "Just standing there. Kourtney went out to him."
"He come inside?"
"Eventually."
I look down at the bench. The pieces of the rifle laid out in a clean row, every one doing exactly what it's supposed to do.
"Tell me we have something," I say. "Anything."
Sisco is quiet for a moment. "Sting is still running the financial angle. That truck rental place on Route 49, the manager got back from vacation today. Sting's going in first thing."
"That's something."
"It's thin."
"It's something," I say again, because right now thin is what I've got.
He finishes his coffee, sets the mug on the edge of the bench, and pushes off the wall. "Get the plate. Sleep if you can. Eight o'clock."
"Yeah."
"Judge." He stops in the doorway and looks at me. "We're going to find them."
I don't answer. He doesn't wait for one. He already knows the only answer I have is to keep working, and that's not the kind of thing you say out loud without making it smaller than it is. He goes back down the hall, and a few seconds later I hear his chair creak and his keyboard start back up.
I pick up the next piece.
I was six years Special Forces before I came to the Saints. Three tours, two of them back to back, and all of it built on the understanding that the mission is the thing. You go where they send you, you do what needs doing, you bring your people home. That's the whole job. I was good at it.
I was good at it until Op Nightfall, and then I was good at it the way a cracked bone is good: still functional, still load-bearing, but wrong in a way that announces itself every time the weather changes.
Kandahar. A classified extraction through a route with three confirmations, two redundant intelligence sources, and every box checked. The first shot came from the wrong direction, and I knew. Not suspected. Knew, the way you know things when your whole system has been trained to read a situation in the half-second before it kills you. Somebody sold the route. Somebody with access and motive and enough distance from the consequences to keep living comfortably with what they'd done.
