Page 19 of The Jackal

I let it go. But it left the splinter behind, the way he always did.

And because I am only human, I let myself think about him for a second, standing in that hall of soldiers—how much he'd have hated it and how completely he'd have belonged, a quiet, hard man among quiet, hard men.

"My husband's people," Claire said, appearing at my shoulder, light, but she'd caught me looking and something in her had gone briefly watchful, that journalist's stillness. "They take the whole soldier thing very seriously."

"I can tell," I said. "It's a good wall." And I meant it, and I moved on, and she let me, and we didn't talk about the name.

She walked me out after a glass of sweet tea I wasn't allowed to refuse and a string of promises extracted under duress—that I'd come back for the wine she'd threatened me with, that I'd come to a dinner, that I'd let this loud, bright woman fold me into whatever her life was, because she'd decided I was hers now and Claire Dixon, I was learning, did not lose arguments. Joy made me swear to return and see more flowers.

We came out into the heat, down the steps toward my dusty car sitting forlorn among all that dark, expensive metal.

"You're good people, Maggie Bennett." Claire hugged me, fierce and quick. "This town's going to be lucky to keep you. Now go—go while it's quiet, before the men get back and the whole place turns into a barracks. I love them, but they arrive like weather."

I laughed and reached for my door handle.

A low note sounded from the guardhouse, electronic, almost polite. Claire's face changed.

"Oh," she said. "Too late."

They came up the drive in a line—three blacked-out SUVs, big and dark and moving with intent, sweeping in off the road and filling the courtyard in a tight, unhurried arc, rolling to a stop between me and the gate like men who covered angles without thinking about it. There was nowhere to go. Doors opened. They started getting out.

Big men, all of them, unfolding from the cars one after another the way the photographs in that hallway had promised—soldiers in plain clothes, the same set to the shoulders, the same habit of reading a space the instant they entered it. Every one of them clocked me, the stranger by the dusty car, in the first half-second, filed me as no threat, and moved on. I stood there with my hand still on the door handle and my heart doing something stupid, suddenly and painfully aware of the dog hair on my clean shirt and the clipboard in my fist and the simple fact that I did not belong here, among these people.

"Stay a second," Claire said, her hand light and immovable on my arm, and there was something gone careful in her voice, a woman watching something.

But I'd quit listening. Because one of them had come around the back of the last car and stopped. Just stopped, gone still in a way the others weren't, the sun behind him so that he was only a hard, dark shape against the glare. I couldn't see his face. It didn't matter. The stillness reached all the way across that courtyard and found me. Something in my body sat up that hadn't sat up in a long time—some old, animal recognition that ran out ahead of my mind and left it scrambling to catch up.

I didn't move.

10

CASH

I'd put money on the Rolls.

I came down to the curb at nine sharp, pack on my shoulder out of habit even though I had nowhere I knew of to take it. I'll admit, I half expected to find Brock leaning on that black coupe again, getting rained on for the pleasure of it. But the weather had turned overnight. The storm had blown through and left the sky scrubbed and hard and already hot at nine in the morning, the kind of Lowcountry heat that means business well before noon.

No Rolls.

Three SUVs instead. Blacked out, big, sitting at the curb in a line with their engines running, and for about one second, the sight of them put a small surprise in me before I set it back down. There was a driver in the first one I didn't know and wasn't going to be introduced to. The back window of the middle one came down, and there was my brother.

"Get in," Brock said.

I got in.

I didn't ask about the escort. I'd learned the rhythm by now—Brock would hand me what I needed when I needed it, and a question before then was just noise. But I clocked it. Three vehicles, spaced, the lead and the trail both carrying men I could feel more than see through the tint.

It had the shape of something I knew in my body from another life. A roll through downtown Baghdad, minus the dust and the dinged-up 4Runners and the pucker of wondering which heap of trash on the shoulder was about to come apart. The shape was the same. You don't run a package through a city in a three-vehicle box unless you've already decided the city is hostile.

That told me plenty.

"We're going to a place called Dominion Hall," Brock said.

He said it and then looked at me, sidelong, the way you look at a man when you've set a word in front of him and you're waiting to see it land. I didn't have a reaction for him. I'd never heard it.

"Never heard of it," I said.

Something moved behind his eyes. Not quite surprise—something more careful than that—and then it was gone. "It's where we work out of," he said. "Where some of us live. You'll see."