Ty and Digger ducked inside to safety, and Zane covered Owen until he joined them.
“Was that you?” Ty asked Owen.
Owen’s eyes were wide. “What?”
“The screams. Was that you?”
Owen jerked his head. “I got one, but he died quiet. I was hoping it was one of you. Almost pissed myself with the first one.”
Ty paled and met Zane’s eyes. Zane sort of felt sick, realizing none of them had been responsible for the dying pleas of the men in the woods.
Earl set his rifle down, glancing around the house. “Where’s Dad?” he asked Mara.
The back screen popped open before she could answer, and everyone who was still armed raised their weapons again, waiting breathlessly for the heavy footsteps to draw near. Chester came around the corner, a rag in his hands, wiping them clean. His shovel was held in the crook of his elbow, the shaft resting on his shoulder. Blood dripped from the sharpened tip of the blade.
“Got me a couple,” he said with a pleased grin.
Kelly threw himself into a chair in the corner of the living room of a ratty, old safe house just outside Charlottesville, where they’d agreed to meet the other team. Nick watched him surreptitiously as he rolled his head around and made his neck pop.
“This shit is getting on my nerves,” Kelly finally said. “I liked it better when they showed us a picture, and we went in and killed it.”
Nick raised an eyebrow.
“What? It was sort of fun.”
“If it was only sort of fun, you were doing it wrong,” Liam offered.
“I’ve decided I like you,” Julian said as he passed through the living room to the kitchen.
Liam frowned as if that didn’t sit right with him. “It took you this long?”
“I don’t make rash decisions.”
Nick sat down hard and stretched his aching legs out in front of him. The cold never did good things to the shrapnel in his thigh, and tension was adding to it. His eyes closed and the voices of the others faded.
Liam’s hand landed on his elbow, and Nick had his gun against Liam’s chest before he even realized he’d been asleep.
Liam put both hands up slowly. “Mate. Not cool.”
Nick flicked the safety on with his thumb, lowering the gun to his lap and eyeing the room. Julian had gone off somewhere, but Kelly was standing nearby, shoulders tense, watching with wide eyes. He either hadn’t expected Nick to wake like that, or he’d fully anticipated Nick shooting Liam in the face and was disappointed it hadn’t happened.
“You okay?” Kelly asked carefully.
Nick nodded, glancing up at Liam. From the look in the man’s eyes, he knew he’d almost died.
“The others are here, looks like they ran into some trouble,” Liam told him.
Nick hefted himself out of the chair and peered through the front window. The landscaper’s truck Ty had been driving wasn’t out there, and the old SUV they’d acquired was sporting West Virginia plates.
Nick went to the door as they trudged up the walk. “What happened?”
“NIA,” Ty answered.
Zane was halfway grinning when he added, “Digger got to blow shit up.”
Nick shook his head in confusion as he stepped aside, letting them file in.
Once they’d locked up the safe house again, Ty related what had gone down in Bluefield. “We sent my family to Texas.”
“Texas?” Kelly asked.
Ty nodded. “Zane’s ranch. I got in touch with Preston, he convinced the CIA to put agents from Austin down there to keep an eye out.”
Julian perked up at the mention of the name. “Is Preston joining us?”
“He’ll be here any minute. He said he has a job for you.”
“Excellent,” Julian said with a huge grin.
“How’d Tanner pan out?” Zane asked.
“He knew about the safe,” Kelly answered. “Said a man claiming to be Burns’s son came to him, asking about hiding spots. He told him where the safe was.”
Nick was wincing and shaking his head as Kelly spoke. Something about Tanner’s story hadn’t settled right, but he wasn’t sure what.
“Irish?” Ty asked.
Nick raised his head, surprised to find all of them looking at him. He sighed heavily. “I think he was lying as a misdirect so we’d think it was the cartel.”
Nick had a hard time looking at Kelly, who had difficulty concealing his surprise. Nick wasn’t used to playing his cards this close to the vest, and he could see it driving a wedge between him and Kelly with every passing minute.
“Something he said, about the safe in the floor. He made a joke.”
“Jack Tanner was nothing but a big walking joke,” Zane told him. “He was always really sarcastic. Maybe he hit you wrong?”
Nick shrugged. “It was a reference to ‘The Tell-Tale Heart.’”
“So?” Owen asked.
“The book we found in the safe,” Ty answered. “It was a collection of Edgar Allan Poe stories.”
“Why the hell didn’t you point this out earlier?” Liam demanded of Nick.
“Because I hate you, shut up,” Nick grunted. He rubbed his eyes.
“If Tanner suspected you weren’t who you said, he could have been playing with you.” Zane sounded almost hopeful. He glanced at Ty. “Damn it, we should have gone to him, he would have known us.”
Ty didn’t respond, and his frown deepened.
“What’s the plan now?” Digger finally asked.
The room was silent, everyone uncomfortable and tense without a solid answer.
Without a viable next step, the group decided there was no time like the present to gather their resources and get some sleep. They’d taken many extra hours making sure they hadn’t been tailed to this location. They were safe here, for now. Ty couldn’t shake off the sense that something was fundamentally wrong, but he supposed sitting here and staring at Liam while his chest throbbed from the beanbag he’d run into was bound to make him inherently uneasy.
Preston showed up not long after they did. He brought a folder with him that he silently handed to Ty.
“What’s this?” Ty asked.
“The information you asked for,” Preston told him, then turned to Julian, a smile spreading over his face. The two men embraced, holding on to each other for a long time.
Ty left them to their reunion, taking the folder over to Zane and sitting beside him at the card table in the kitchen.
“Is that the replacement cipher?” Zane asked, sounding impressed. They’d sent Preston copies of the printouts from the photos, and told him what book he needed for the key. It paid to have the CIA breathing down your neck, apparently.
Ty laid the papers out, and he and Zane bowed their heads together to study them.
“This is bank routing information,” Zane said almost immediately.
“Send this shit to Clancy, tell them to get their hands on that money!”
But Zane was shaking his head, deep furrows in his brow. “We’re missing information.”
“What information?”
“This is what’s called a numbered account at a Swiss bank,” Zane told him, tapping the information. “Basically, the name of the account holder is shielded from all but the highest bank officials. You have to give them a code word to get into the account. Without that word, this information won’t even tell us what bank it’s at.”
Ty rested his head in his hands, watching Zane through his fingers.
“And look at the file names of Burns’s photos,” Zane continued. “They’re in numerical order. Three of the numbers aren’t here. I think he erased those three photos, and whatever was in them, that’s what we need to get into that numbered account.”
“God damn it. So, he used this to keep his name off the radar.”
Zane nodded, sighing as he crossed his arms on the table. “We’re doing this ass-backwards. Usually, we’re trying to find the name on the account. We already know it was his.”
r />
“What if it’s yours?” Ty asked before he could stop himself.
Zane met his eyes as he ran a hand through his hair. “Then I’d go down for everything.”
Ty lowered his head, closing his eyes.
“But if it is my name . . . all we’d have to do is figure out the code word, and I’d have access to the money. We get to it first, get it to the CIA, then this all goes away. We’re in the clear.”
Ty nodded, leaning closer until their shoulders brushed, until Zane’s warmth was seeping into him. “We could take this to the CIA now. Let them handle it with what we’ve gleaned.”
“And if they don’t?” Zane posed. “They have no reason to go to bat for us, they could throw us under the bus just as easily as Burns did. Hell, more easily. And if it’s my name on there, they wouldn’t even have to work to put me away.”
Ty nodded, fighting the constriction of encroaching panic in his chest. Over the last few years, basically every person in power Ty had ever trusted had turned out to be a horrible person who’d been trying to kill him. He wasn’t about to take what they had to anyone until they were damn sure he and Zane would both come out the other end unscathed. He was beginning to realize that he’d never been out there on the wire without a backup. He’d always trusted Burns to do whatever was in his power to save him, and now, without that safety net, the world felt a lot bigger.
“The only way we’re truly going to be safe is if we have that money in hand,” Zane whispered. “We have to give the CIA what they asked for.”
“Okay. So what do we need?”
“We need the code word.”
“Word!” Digger said as he walked through the kitchen, heading toward the hallway where the bedrooms were.
Ty and Zane watched him, nonplussed. Owen came into the kitchen a moment later, smiling at their confused faces. “Cross and his CIA buddy left.”
“What?” Ty blurted.
“He said they’d be back. Cross said he had a couple hides he could clear out, bring back some major ammunition and cash so we can stay off grid.”
“Good,” Zane grunted as he rubbed his eyes.
Owen sat across the table from them, backward in one of the cheap folding chairs, and leaned his elbows on the back of it. “Have you been watching Nick?” he asked Ty.
Ty scowled. “What do you mean?”
Owen shrugged, pressing his lips tightly together. “He’s bent.”
Ty blinked at Owen, his mind whirring, trying to deal with far too many problems at once.
“Bent?” Zane asked.
Ty took a deep breath. “It was something we used to say, back in service. It’s . . . kind of hard to explain, but it’s not good.”
“Try.”
Ty huffed. “See . . . there’s a bond that can’t be broken when you’ve fought together, and bled together, and cried together.”
Zane slid his hand into Ty’s lap, grasping his fingers and squeezing. He nodded.
“That bond is the only thing that keeps people like us from going insane,” Owen added. “But when that wasn’t enough, when one of us started losing it? We called it bending.”
“You’d push and you’d push,” Ty practically gasped. “And you’d fight and kill, and you’d see things no man should ever have to see. Do things no person should ever be forced to have on their conscience, and your mind would start to bend. You’d get to thinking that was just how life was.”
“Did you ever bend?” Zane asked quietly.
“Hell yeah. It happened to each of us. Sometimes it was slow, we could see it coming, do something to head it off.”
Owen rested his chin on the back of the chair, looking melancholy and distant. “A few nights of leave would help us realize there was a world out there beyond . . . sand and bullets and blood. But sometimes it’d just hit with no warning, one of us would go off the deep end. Hurt people we didn’t need to.”
Zane didn’t speak, and Ty was kind of glad for it. His grip on Zane’s hand tightened.
“Being cruel for no reason other than to see fear in someone’s eyes,” Ty whispered as he met Zane’s eyes with a sad smile. “The thing was, your mind would bend and bend and bend, but it had to break to go back to normal. If it didn’t break, you just bent until you got all twisted inside.”
“We saw that happen too; evil, twisted bastards on both sides of the fighting.”
Zane was frowning so hard it was almost painful to look at him. He rapped his knuckles on the table. “And Nick? Is he . . . bent? Twisted?”
Ty shrugged, his chin still resting in his hand. He moved his water glass around on the table.
“He was usually the one pulling us back from it. He always knew what we could and couldn’t do if we ever wanted cosmic forgiveness,” Owen explained.
“He was . . . like our moral center. I think it weighed heavy on him, but it was his way of anchoring himself. I saw him break once.” Ty fell silent, staring at the water in his glass, lost in the memory somewhere.
“Ty?” Zane whispered.
“He was a scary motherfucker on his way down,” Ty whispered, as if he’d never paused. “You remember how he was in Scotland?”
Zane swallowed hard, nodding. “Are we in danger? Will he hurt one of us if he snaps?”
Owen winced, meeting Ty’s eyes. But Ty shook his head, jarring himself out of the funk. “I don’t think so, no.”
Someone cleared his throat from the doorway, and Ty tensed in expectation of it being Nick eavesdropping. He was almost relieved when it was just Liam. “I wouldn’t be so sure of that, mate.”
“I’m going to bed,” Owen told them, and he stood with a quiet good-night, glaring at Liam in passing.
Liam slid into the chair that Owen had vacated.
Ty straightened, his eyes going hard. “What?”
“I know you think it was me switched those bullets out in New Orleans,” Liam said solemnly. “But I’ve never tried to hurt you, mate, not before, not then. Not now. Someone switched those casings on me, someone who wanted you to die ugly.”
“Are you really accusing Nick of that? Again?” Zane snapped.
“What?” Ty blurted.
Liam held up a hand. “I’m saying, how many people had access between the time you made up that fragmenting round, and when I loaded it into my gun? You two. Me. Sidewinder. And for the briefest of moments, my handler.”
“Who was your handler?” Ty demanded.
“Her name was Anna. And the cartel killed her shortly after she left New Orleans. They framed me for her murder, and that’s why the NIA is tracking my arse down like a dog. If she’d been working for anyone who wanted you dead, she’d still be kicking.”
“Nick didn’t switch those bullets,” Ty declared.
“If you say so, mate.” Liam sounded almost sad. He certainly looked it. “I’m just trying to tell you . . . watch your back. Take it from someone who knows. Friends and enemies? They sometimes wear the same clothes.”
Zane was sitting in the middle of the sparsely furnished living room, helping to assemble their supplies. Cross had checked in a couple times during the night and the following morning, and he sounded certain that he and Preston would be bringing enough firepower to take over a Caribbean island by nightfall.
Until then, they were sorting the supplies they did have, and each of them had been studying Burns’s cipher code, trying to figure out what the missing pieces might be.
So far they’d all come up empty.
Zane watched absently as they divided up and repacked their supplies. He found his eyes following Ty’s hands as his nimble fingers folded, loaded, stacked, and packed. He’d always loved watching the way Ty’s long fingers moved when he worked, and it didn’t matter what Ty was doing for it to get Zane’s attention.
“Need help?” Ty asked Nick, pulling Zane from his wandering thoughts.
Ty frowned as Nick muttered a reply, and Zane switched his focus to Nick’s hands. They were trembling. He was so unstead
y, in fact, that he had to try twice to insert an extra magazine into the elastic catchall on the side of one of the duffel bags.
Ty’s words had drawn Kelly’s attention as well. He craned his neck like a curious prairie dog, scowling at Ty and Nick from where he was sitting between two chairs. “Why do you need help?”
“I don’t need help,” Nick insisted, and he continued his packing, rolling up a piece of clothing so he could stuff it into the bag to cushion whatever explosive goody he’d just packed in there.
“Why are you shaking,” Ty asked him. “I thought that medicine you had took care of the tremor.”
It was obvious Nick had been hoping they’d all just drop it, and he glared at Ty before glancing at Liam, who was sitting on the arm of the couch, loading and checking their few weapons.
Liam looked up when the silence became oppressive, and he narrowed his eyes at each of them. “What?”
“What’d you do?” Kelly asked him. Zane could tell Kelly was getting angry and trying to keep a lid on his temper. He’d been angry ever since he’d arrived in Baltimore, though. He was angry at everything and everyone, including Nick.
Liam scowled, and he seemed confused when he glanced around the room again. He obviously hadn’t been listening to them.
“Why’s Nick shaking?” Kelly asked Liam. “What’d you do?”
“Hey!” Nick shouted. “I didn’t fucking answer the question, means I don’t want it answered!”
Kelly hopped to his feet, but it wasn’t to confront Nick or yell at him. His brow creased in concern.
“Drop it,” Nick grunted, and he went back to his packing, stuffing several bottles of Gatorade into his bag.
Zane realized he was holding his breath, and he met Ty’s eyes across the room. Zane shook his head minutely, then tipped it toward the door. Ty pretended he didn’t understand the gesture, though, and he stood and stepped toward Nick instead. He grabbed Nick’s hand as Nick was reaching for the next Gatorade he intended to try to stuff into that duffel.
Nick’s eyes were wide. Zane could see the tremor in Nick’s palm, the unsteadiness in his fingers, and looking closer at him, Zane could see his jaw tensing, see the exhaustion and fear in his eyes.