LITMIR.BIZ

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by her apartment and see if she’s there. I don’t want to make matters worse. She took off before I could get much of anything out of her, at least anything that made any sense.”

      Good, Steve thought. Quinn was dismissing or at least couldn’t put together whatever Alicia had told her. He cleared his throat, wishing he could get the squeak out of his voice. “I’m sorry she was that upset.”

      “Me, too. If she shows up there, or if she calls, will you let me know?”

      “Absolutely.” His wet shirt felt cold now. “If there’s anything else I can do, call me. I’m just here toiling in the trenches.”

      He didn’t get even a chuckle out of Quinn. She thanked him, promised to be in touch if there was news and hung up.

      Steve slumped in his chair and blinked back tears. Hell. What a scumbag he was. He had met Quinn a few times at get-togethers after work with his colleagues, her former colleagues. She had a sense of humor and although she was very good at what she did, she wasn’t calculating and superambitious, common ailments among Washington types.

      Wherever the Nazis were taking Alicia—whatever her transgressions were—he wished he could believe she’d be okay.

      It’s out of my hands.

      His calendar alert dinged. Five minutes until his afternoon meeting. Steve couldn’t even remember what it was about. Would Lattimore be there?

      Swearing to himself, he opened up a bottle of water and drank it down without once coming up for air. He felt better, and got back to work on behalf of the American people.

      3

      Something was wrong.

      Huck McCabe paused to do a few leg stretches, a couple miles into his midafternoon run. He’d come to the end of a narrow road, a short spoke off the loop road that encircled the small Chesapeake Bay village of Yorkville, Virginia. In his forty-eight hours there, Huck had discovered that getting around the picturesque village didn’t take impressive navigational skills. It had a main street lined with cute shops and an old-fashioned diner. It had the waterfront with lots of modest cottages. It had a couple of marinas and a smattering of restaurants that each served its own private family recipe for crab cakes, and it had three bait-and-tackle shops that offered up everything a fisherman could possibly need for anything from a weekend to a lifetime on the Chesapeake.

      There were no giant trophy houses in Yorkville. Most of the houses—year-round or second home—were built in the 1940s and 1950s. If he ran the town for a day, Huck would outlaw chain-link fences. It seemed every house had one, and he thought they were damn ugly, the only real blot on the otherwise quaint town.

      The cottage where Alicia Miller had spent the weekend was the second of two small, older cottages on the dead-end road. It had no fence. Its ground-level front porch was low enough not to need a balustrade, allowing an unimpeded view of the water from its clean white wicker chairs.

      Huck had noticed there was no car in the short dirt driveway. Nor was there any sign of life inside, although he hadn’t gone so far as to knock on the front or side doors or peek in the windows.

      He finished his stretches. He could have skipped them, but they gave him an excuse to check out the area. The road dead-ended at a salt marsh. On the other side of the marsh, about three-quarters of a mile farther up the bay, was Breakwater, known locally as the Crawford compound, the hundred-acre waterfront estate owned by wealthy Washington entrepreneur Oliver Crawford. Crawford had made his fortune in real estate and bought Breakwater five years ago. Most locals expected him to renovate the pre-Civil War house and retire there.

      They were wrong. Crawford changed his plans for his bayside property after he was kidnapped off his boat in the Caribbean last December. His own security people rescued him after fifteen days of captivity. He was kept under grueling conditions and constant fear of a bullet in the head. His kidnappers got away. Traumatized, determined to help other businessmen avoid such horrors, Crawford decided to start his own elite private security company. Never mind that he knew little to nothing about the private security industry. He set about converting his bayside country estate into Breakwater Security, bringing in the people and equipment he needed, building the right facilities, sparing no expense.

      Huck was a new Breakwater Security hire.

      Ostensibly.

      As he looked out at the water, he decided he could do worse than Virginia in springtime. He noticed that some kind of bird had built a giant mess of a nest on a buoy out at the mouth of the small cove. An osprey nest, he thought. The Northern Neck, a tidewater peninsula tucked between the Potomac and the Rappahannock Rivers, was on the Atlantic Flyway, making it popular with bird-watchers.

      A Californian, Huck was getting used to the lay of the gentle land with its rolling hills, creeks, marshes, nature preserves, historic sites and small towns. Washington and Lee country. Life was slower here. He could picture George Washington and Robert E. Lee as little boys, fishing the same rivers, praying in the same churches that were still scattered across the landscape.

      Or not—Huck didn’t know what Washington and Lee did as boys or if the places he’d seen on his way to Yorkville had existed in their day. History had never been his long suit.

      He was better at catching fugitives.

      It was, after all, a fugitive who had inadvertently led him to the Northern Neck in the first place.

      But he shut off that line of thinking, as if it might betray him, and jogged back down to the loop road, passing the second cottage, a sister to the one where Alicia Miller had stayed. He kept his pace slow, following the wider, but still quiet, road along the water, feeling the humidity building in the midafternoon air.

      He came to a small, old-fashioned motel with its own dock. A couple of old guys in baseball caps smoked cigarettes on two benches above the water, watching fishing boats tie up for the day.

      At first, even Huck didn’t recognized Diego Clemente, his partner and backup, also an undercover deputy U.S. marshal. Clemente—also a Californian—looked as if he’d been fishing the Chesapeake Bay his entire life. He hopped off his boat onto the rickety dock wearing a New York Yankees cap, a bright yellow anorak, cargo pants and beat-up boat shoes. His brown skin and black hair set off a killer smile and killer eyes. Women liked Diego, but he and Huck had both sworn off women until they were back home, their current assignment behind them.

      Breakwater Security wasn’t necessarily the legitimate security company it purported to be. Diego was posing as a guy from up North who’d taken a month off to fish and get over his recent divorce, a cover designed to explain why he kept to himself. Not that there was a hell of a lot to do in Yorkville, Virginia.

      Locked in Diego’s boat, Huck knew, were state-of-the-art communications equipment, tactical gear and weapons, including, no doubt, Clemente’s favorite MP5. If things went bad at Breakwater Security, Huck knew he could count on Diego Clemente to help him kick ass and stay alive.

      Huck pretended to pause to catch his breath, although it would take more than a five-mile run to really wind him. He worked his butt off on a regular basis to stay in shape.

      Standing next to him, Diego tapped out a cigarette, then held up the pack to Huck. Huck shook his head. “Smoking’ll kill you.”

      “So will women, and still the knowledge of my impending doom doesn’t stop me,” Diego replied.

      In his regular life, Diego didn’t smoke. He was a nuts-and-seeds type. He pulled a small lighter from his pocket. “Storm’s brewing. You can feel it in the air, can’t you?”

      “It’s East Coast air. I can’t tell.”

      Diego lit his cigarette and inhaled, blowing out smoke. “I talked to Nate Winter.” Winter was leading the investigation into Breakwater Security’s activities. “I don’t have many answers for you. Alicia Miller is an attorney at Justice. She works under Deputy Assistant AG Lattimore.”

      “Gerard Lattimore?

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