By accident.
But first, we had to sneak him in.
His mother had a VIP room where Jack could wait during her surgery, so the day should have been easy.
The plan was to get him to the room unnoticed—early, by six that morning—so he could see his mom before they wheeled her out. Then he’d wait there until the surgery was over, while Doghouse and I monitored the hospital halls and the rest of the team snuck out to the Stapletons’ ranch to install a few secret security cameras. Things on our end were simple. All Jack had to do was stay in that room.
“You can’t leave the room,” I explained on the drive over.
“At all?”
“Just stay in the room. It’s not hard.”
“Isn’t that a little much?” Jack asked.
“If you’d read the handout—” I started.
“I’m not a handouts guy.”
“This is a high-threat situation,” I went on. “There are multiple opportunities for you to be seen, recognized, photographed—”
“I get it.”
“Once you’re seen here, everything gets harder. So just do what you’re told.”
“Got it,” Jack said. Then he added, “You should know I’m already good at this, though.”
I looked over.
He said, “I bet the oil guys you usually protect aren’t used to hiding. But I’ve been making myself invisible for years.”
“That can’t be easy,” I said. “Being you.”
“There are tricks. Baseball caps are surprisingly effective. Glasses seem to break up people’s pattern-matching. Not making eye contact helps, too. If you don’t look at people, they tend not to look at you. Though the big thing is to just keep moving. Just keep going. As soon as you break stride, they see you.”
“You do know more than my average oil executive,” I said, letting my voice sound impressed.
“See? And I didn’t even read the handout.”
I glanced over at him. He was doing it all: the baseball cap, and the glasses, plus a gray button-down. But even trying to look as unremarkable as possible, he still just … glowed.
“Those execs have a big advantage over you, though,” I said.
“What’s that?”
“Nobody cares about them except me and the bad guys.”
Then Jack narrowed his eyes and studied me. “Do you care about them?”
“I mean, sort of,” I said.
“That sounds like a no.”
“I care about doing my job right.”
“But you don’t care about the people you’re protecting.”
I shouldn’t be saying any of this. Where was my head? “Not in the traditional sense, no.”
Jack nodded and thought about it.
Did he want me to care about him? What a strange expectation. “Caring about people actually makes it harder to do a good job,” I said then, in my own defense.
“I get it,” Jack said.
Anyway, he wasn’t wrong about himself. He was good at this. He knew exactly how to move through a space without being spotted. We brought him in through a delivery entrance and up the service elevator. The hallway was deserted, and Doghouse and I saw him make it to the door and disappear through it without a hitch.
That was one huge hurdle cleared. The doctors and nurses on his mom’s team had signed nondisclosure agreements. Now all Jack had to do was stay there.
But he didn’t stay there.
Just before lunch, after I’d stood at the end of the hallway long enough to know there were 207 floor tiles from edge to edge, I saw Jack walk out of the room and start meandering off down the hallway, like he was headed to the nurses’ station.
“Hey!” I shout-whispered. “What are you doing?”
But Jack didn’t turn.
What was he thinking? Hadn’t we just talked about this? He couldn’t just wander loose.
I trotted after him. “Hey! Hey! What are you doing? Hey! We talked about this! You’re not supposed to leave the—”
Right then, I caught up, and I grabbed his forearm, and he turned to look at me …
And it wasn’t Jack.
It was his brother. Hank.
“Oh!” I said, the second I saw his face—dropping his arm and stepping back.
Shit.
Now that I saw him, Hank was clearly not Jack. Hank was an inch or so shorter. And a little bit broader. And his hair was a shade or two darker. His sideburns were shorter. And none of those details should have escaped me.
If I’m honest, the smell of the hospital, and the lighting, too, reminded me of when my own mother was sick—which wasn’t all that long ago—and it had me slightly off my game.