Page 20 of The Jackal

I had nothing for that either, so I gave him nothing, and he let it sit. Dominion Hall. The name meant about as much to me as any two words bolted together. I'd worked for outfits that didn't have names at all, that existed as a voice on a phone and a folder that found you in the dark. A place with a name and a roof was almost quaint.

We pulled out, the box moving as one thing, smooth.

"I had tails last night," I said.

"The van," Brock said, before I'd finished. "When I dropped you. Right?"

"That, first. Then, the van went away and a sedan took its place, single man, rental. Then, I took a walk and a couple picked me up on foot. Good ones. A team behind them I never got eyes on."

Brock nodded along. None of it was news to him. "And after that?"

"Nothing. I went into a church, sat a while, walked back. Nobody on me. Clean the whole way home."

"No visitors? Nobody came up on you? Nobody at the hotel?"

"No."

He grunted. Low, short—the sound a man makes when a piece he's been turning finally drops into its slot. Whatever it meant, it meant something to him and nothing yet to me, and I didn't reach for it. I figured whatever Brock had just worked out would keep until we were somewhere it could be said. Maybe the man up front didn't have the need to know.

So, I left it, and I looked out the window at Charleston.

It was a pretty city in the morning. I'll give it that. The storm had washed it down and the sun had come up to dry it. The old streets steamed faintly, the cobbles and the wrought iron and the houses standing shoulder to shoulder in colors that had no business working together and somehow did. Window boxes. Palmettos throwing their ragged shade. A church spire every few blocks, more churches than a city this size had any reason for, which I respected. People moving slow in the heat the way they do down here, like the air is something you have to wade through.

Then, the city thinned and fell away behind us. We came out along the water, the harbor opening flat and silver on one side, and the houses got farther apart and then scarce, set back behind walls and old trees. The road narrowed and went quiet under a long stand of live oaks that closed over the top of us, so the light came down broken and green. The kind of road that doesn't go to many places and tells you so. A road for people who don't want to be easy to reach.

At the end of it was the gate.

I won't waste your time describing a rich man's gate. It was tall and it was iron and it opened before we reached it, which meant somebody had watched us the whole way in. Beyond it, the drive ran up through more of those old oaks to a house that had given up being a house and become a thing with a different job. Brick and stone, built wide and built to last, set so that whoever stood at its front could see everything that came at it. Walls inside the walls.

I read the place the way I read everything, without trying, and what it told me was that nobody who'd built it had ever once felt safe by accident.

We rolled into a courtyard already full of dark, expensive metal, and the box broke apart, the SUVs fanning to a stop in that easy, unthinking arc men make when covering angles is something their bodies do for them.

And then, they started getting out.

I watched the men come out of the other vehicles, and something in me turned over. Quiet, but it turned. Big men, every one of them, unfolding from the cars with an economy, plain clothes hung on frames built for other work, each of them reading the courtyard the instant his boots hit the stone, the same way I'd read the gate. These weren't contractors. These weren't muscle hired by the day. I know the difference the way you know a real thing from a copy—in the gut, before the head.

This was tier-one. The genuine article, a whole yard of it, and it ran on the kind of money that builds fortresses and flies men across oceans for the asking.

I'm not sure what I'd let myself think before. The Rolls. Brock's easy talk, his you-have-no-idea. Some part of me had filed all of it under my brothers doing well for themselves and getting into something a size too big. Standing in that courtyard, I corrected the file. This was no fly-by-night anything. Whatever my brothers had walked into, it was deep, and it was real, and it was serious all the way to the bone.

What in God's name had they gotten into?

I got out of the SUV with that question turning in me, my head already three moves into the work of it.

And then, a flash of blonde came in at the edge of everything, and the question, the courtyard, the men, the whole hard serious weight of the morning—all of it just went.

I want to tell this part straight, because it's the truest thing I know how to tell.

There is nothing on this earth that moves me fast. That's not a boast. It's a fact about my wiring, paid for in a coin most men never have to spend. I've stood in rooms that would drop an ordinary man to his knees and felt my own pulse stay flat. Whatever happened to me a long time ago took the part of a man that startles, the part that flinches, the part that lurches at a thing it didn't see coming. I don't get surprised. I get informed.

I saw that blonde hair, and my whole body lurched.

My eyes went to it before I told them to and zeroed down the way they do on the one thing in a field that matters, past the men and the cars and the steaming stone, and they found a face, and the face was hers.

Mags.

It was Mags. Standing across that courtyard by a dusty car that didn't match the rest of them, with her hair pulled back, gone still as a struck bell, staring at me like the ground had dropped open.