He tapped on her bedroom door and called out her name.
“Getting ready to Zoom with a Taiwanese venture capital group,” Tapshaw’s voice barked. “Their birth rate is plummeting. Is it urgent? Is the place on fire? Are you bleeding to death, Travis?”
“No,” he called through the door. “All good. Just don’t forget to eat.” She kept a jar of peanut butter and a stack of celery sticks in a glass with water in her room. She was thinner than a rake and seemed to prefer it that way. She’d told Devine she hadn’t been on a single date in over a year, not even digitally.
“Do as I say, not as I don’t do,” Tapshaw had quipped.
Restless and edgy and not wanting to sleep despite being tired, Devine went to his room, changed into athletic shorts and a T-shirt and Saucony running shoes.
He left the house and had just started his run when a black sedan pulled up beside him.
There were two men inside. Serious-looking men. Suits and shades, even in the gathering darkness.
“Mr. Devine? Travis Devine?” a strange man said for the second time tonight.
He stopped running and said, “Yeah?”
The man flashed a badge, a federal one with an agency Devine instantly recognized. “Your presence is requested, please get in.”
“Requested by who?”
The man moved just enough so Devine could see the pistol in the shoulder holster.
“Get in.”
Devine looked around, and, like the soldier he had once been, he followed orders and got in.
CHAPTER
7
THE RIDE TOOK THIRTY MINUTES. They were heading south, toward the city. Neither man spoke, and Devine knew better than to ask questions. First the NYPD and now the feds; he didn’t like all this personal attention.
They pulled off into a small town much like Mount Kisco, extremely affluent in some parts, just as extremely working-class in others. They drove to the very back of a nondescript office park where there was a single brick building. There were no cars parked out front and no signs on the building. The windows were blacked out and it looked abandoned.
The man parked and got out along with his colleague. He held the car door open for Devine and they walked up to the front of the building. The man flashed an RF card in the face of a reader port and Devine heard the door click open.
This was looking both way too official and far too clandestine. He figured neither boded well for him.
I shot the sheriff, but I did not shoot the deputy.
The driver led the way inside, Devine in the middle, the other guy bringing up the rear. Devine would have expected nothing less. It was the way you transported either prisoners or soon-to-be prisoners.
Automatic lights came on as they walked through an open space.
Devine was led to an interior door. The man knocked and a voice said, “Come.”
The door was opened and the man motioned Devine in. He closed the door and Devine looked around the small space and then at the man sitting behind the desk.
“Sit down, Devine,” said the man. “We have a lot to go over, so pay attention. There is no time to waste.”
Devine sat.
The fellow looked like a well-worn slab of granite. His gray hair was bristly and cut short. His features were chiseled and fierce. The salt-and-pepper eyebrows swooped in all directions. The decades-old suit never had been expensive or of good quality when brand-new, but it was so unremarkable as to still be serviceable now. The red-and-blue-striped tie was too wide for the times, the collared button-down shirt a bit worn around the edges. He couldn’t see the man’s shoes from here, but if he had to guess, Devine would speculate they were black, and pedestrian, and shined to spit-polish perfection.
There was something about him, his bearing, the way he gave commands, because they were commands, the breadth of the shoulders, the ominous thickness of the hands.
He was now a suit who was once a soldier. Devine could just tell. And really still a soldier because it gets into your DNA and there is no way to separate it from you. It becomes you.
The man silently studied him.
Gauging the size of my balls.
Devine stared back, waiting. He had done this so many times with military superiors that it was second nature.
“Exemplary record at West Point. Then Infantry Officer Basic, Ranger School, Jump School, Stryker Battalion out of Fort Lewis. Line platoon company commander for a year and a half with a string of commendations. Made First Lieutenant right on schedule. Company XO for six months. Next up, line platoon commander, Ranger Battalion, so you’re Ranger tabbed and scrolled,” added the man, referring to the fact that Devine had graduated from Ranger School and been assigned to the Seventy-Fifth Ranger Regiment. “Promoted to Captain and got your silver bars right at the four-year mark. Bradley company commander out of Fort Stewart for eighteen months. Then Ranger Battalion out of Hunter Army Airfield. Ranger company commander, then staff officer. All along the way, tours of combat duty in Afghanistan and then Iraq, and special ops missions in ten other shitstorm countries, where if you messed up you get a flag on your coffin and a Dignified Transfer at Dover Air Force Base.”