Yeah.
That was happy.
Pure and unrepentant.
She made a small sound in her sleep and her face moved against my collarbone, and a piece of her hair fell across my throat. I held real still for a second so as not to wake her and ruin how she'd settled.
I thought about my training.
I couldn't help it. The training was a shape I went back to the way some men went back to a chord progression—involuntary, familiar, useful for orienting yourself when the world had moved.
The unit had figured me out in two days.You're a one-man job, Dane. A maverick.The clipboard guy, the dummy scenario, the words I'd been waiting to hear without knowing it. They had a category for me, and the category had a name, and the name waslone wolf,and the math of being a lone wolf was the math you ran on a man you were sending into a room without backup.He decides. He acts. If he doesn't come out, he doesn't come out.
I'd been good at it. I was still good at it. I had been, just days ago, on a sandstone slab in the Narrows with a sandwich in my hand and a man named Davari working his way up the canyon toward me, and the mathematics of that morning—the angle of the rock, the gap between hiking groups, the weight I'd loaded into my dropping knee—had been the mathematics of a man whose entire professional value sat in his ability to operate inside his own head, alone, on a clock he'd set himself.
Tommy Dane worked alone.
That was the deal.
That had been the deal.
I wondered, lying there with a girl asleep against my chest in a Charleston suite that had been arranged for me by men who'd known my name before I'd known theirs, what my instructors would say if they could see me now.
Bratton, the master sergeant who'd run my selection. Whitlow, the colonel with the limp and the bad coffee who'd done my final interviews. The clipboard guy whose name I never got. They'd watched me come up through the program. They'd put me in the file markeduseful alone.They'd built the version of me that could be inserted into a foreign city by Tuesday andproduce a result by Friday and be eating breakfast in a different country by Saturday morning, and the whole point of building that version of me was that it didn't get attached. Lone wolves didn't get attached. A lone wolf with attachments was a lone wolf with a hostage taped to his back.
If they could see me now.
I almost laughed.
Bratton, who'd never met a feeling he hadn't run a remedial PT program against. Whitlow, who'd been married three times. The clipboard guy, who'd probably have writtenconcerning lapse in operational distanceand stapled it to the front of my folder.
What was this?
I asked it honestly, looking at the dark of the suite ceiling.
Was this a detour? A side bar? A piece of weather I was passing through?
A new road?
I didn't know.
Here was the thing, though.
I'd never been a man who fought the current. That had been the great secret of my work, the part that the men who graded operators tended to miss until they saw it run.
Most of the operators I'd come up with were planners. They wrote the plan in their heads, they ran the plan, they got mad at the plan when the plan went sideways, and they spent the next twenty-four hours adjusting the plan instead of looking at the river. I was different. I'd been built different. I read the river and I went where it was going. I made decisions inside the going. The current was not my enemy. The current was the thing I rode.
If a current as strong as the one this woman had set off in me had picked me up and started pulling me toward a place I'd never been—a place the men who'd built me would have warned me off in language that would have made my mother frown?—
Well.
I was not in the habit of fighting currents.
I was in the habit of going where the river took me, and finding out what it had to offer when I got there.
The river had brought me here.
Here was good.
