CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

Dylan Hart’s office always left Buck Grant cold. It was so damned austere, like the man himself, coldly efficient, everything expensive and in its place. A guy didn’t feel good even bringing a cup of coffee into the room. As a matter of fact, he didn’t think he’d ever seen anybody drinking coffee in Dylan’s office. He’d sure as hell never seen anybody set a coffee cup on Dylan’s desk.

Which was Buck’s problem. He’d brought a cup of coffee with him into Dylan’s private lair, already slopped a little over the edge, and now he didn’t know what in the hell to do with his cup. The finish on the damn desk probably cost more than the wood to build it. Buck was no connoisseur of anything that didn’t have a caliber and require a cartridge, but he was no cretin either.

“Sir,” Dylan said, setting an extra chair down in front of the desk and taking the cup out of his hand.

Hawkins brought his own chair in, too, and shut the door behind him.

Buck got the good chair, and Dylan put his cup on the desk, sloppy drips and all-problem solved. That’s what a second in command did, solve the commander’s problems, and nobody was better at it than the two men in front of him.

Good. They were going to need to be better- better than they’d ever been if they were going to solve the problem he’d brought with him from Washington, and even better than that if they were going to do it without losing the team.

He dropped a pair of files on the desk and sat down. Nothing about the damn thing was going down any easier this morning than it had yesterday afternoon when he’d first seen it. If anything, the longer he’d had to think about it, the more disturbing it had become.

In half an hour, the rest of the team would be assembled in the main office, but Grant had wanted to see Dylan and Hawkins first. They needed to be told first, and there was no easy way to do it.

“We’ve been tagged for an assassination in South America,” he said. Nothing unusual there; that was all in the normal course of SDF’s business, of any Special Ops business. “If you can bring him in, the powers that be would like to talk to the guy, but bringing him in is secondary to retiring him. Four agents have been lost trying to do one or the other, so the idea has been put forth to send in a team, your team.”

Still business as usual-SDF often got tasked with missions other entities had failed to successfully accomplish.

Grant pushed the top file across the desk, but kept his hand on it.

“No matter what you think, this guy is not who you think he is,” he said, and after a moment, during which he hoped to hell those words sunk in, he removed his hand.

He saw the look that passed between the other two men, and he was glad of it. His guys didn’t get paid to be delicate, but the file was asking a lot of anyone-a goddamn helluva lot.

Dylan reached for the file and opened it without hesitation-and then he froze, turned to absofuckinglutely stone. Not a flicker of emotion showed on his face. Nothing. But within that complete stillness, Buck was reading a maelstrom. Dylan’s breathing had missed a beat and started back up too shallow, too fast. Buck didn’t have to guess what his subordinate was struggling with. He knew-utter disbelief, total denial, and fast on its heels, confusion, and in about thirty more seconds, it was all going to coalesce into anger-cold, glacially cold anger.

And then fury, hot, and dangerous, and unacceptable.

Hawkins leaned over, took a look at the photograph stapled inside the folder, and sat back in his chair. After a couple of quiet seconds, he brought his hand up and rested it on his chest, open, relaxed, as if he was feeling the beat of his heart.

He well could be. It was a lot to take in.

Dylan was looking at the photograph, frozen in his chair, and Hawkins was looking at the floor, his hand over his heart-and Grant could have heard a fucking pin drop in the room.

The next move wasn’t his, and he had to wonder why in the hell he’d brought a cup of coffee with him. Hope, he guessed, that somehow this wouldn’t be so goddamn awful that he wouldn’t even be able to drink a goddamn cup of coffee.

Fat chance, and he couldn’t remember a time when he’d hated the politicos in Washington, D.C., more than this moment. He was pretty sure the two men in front of him were feeling the same way, and he could A1 guarantee they were both contemplating assassination-but not of the guy they’d been tasked with killing. No, they’d both be wanting the one who had dreamed up this goatfuck in the first place.

They could do it. Grant’s job was to make sure they didn’t.

Their gazes met again on the other side of the desk, and this time, Grant didn’t have a clue what was passing between them.

When Dylan’s gaze returned to the folder, and he started reading, Grant guessed the coast was nominally clear for a discussion of the situation, or at least a recap of the information he’d already read three times.

“The guy’s name is Conroy Farrel, which, as you will both remember, was one of J. T. Chronopolous’s code names, a situation which was carefully created by one of our government’s darker agencies. It’s a case of identity theft, if you can call it that when it reaches this level and has been sanctioned by the government. He was put into Paraguay by the CIA, though they aren’t the ones who created him. Although, as you may well suspect, I have reason to doubt that denial.”

Neither of his guys was talking, which was the exact situation Grant wanted to avoid. He wanted them to talk, a lot, to figure out how to explain to the rest of the team-to Kid, who’d lost his brother; to Creed, who had almost died losing J.T.-how and why Conroy Farrel had been set in J.T.’s place by their own government, with J.T.’s connections, and J.T.’s clearances, and worst of all, with what looked very much like J.T.’s face. The similarities were eerie, not complete, but eerie. For most dealings, Conroy Farrel could undoubtedly pass as SDF’s first dark angel without batting an eyelash.

Dylan finished reading the first page of the file and handed it over to Hawkins, silently-and so it went, page after page.

“Farrel has gone rogue,” Grant continued. “And the CIA is having a helluva time trying to take him out. The prevailing opinion is that SDF, who knows more about the real J.T. than anyone on the planet, is the team to go get this guy.”

Dylan shook his head. “Not the team,” he said.

“No,” Hawkins agreed, accepting the next page.

Well, that was the last thing Grant had expected, that they would out-and-out refuse to take the mission.

“Hawkins and I will go in and get him for you,” Dylan said, finally lifting his gaze from the folder and meeting Grant’s eyes with his own. “Just the two of us.”

Grant looked to Hawkins, who nodded. “Nobody else needs to be involved.”

Grant knew what they were doing, trying to protect the rest of the team, and he couldn’t fault them for it, but neither could he allow it.

“The CIA has already lost four other agents. I can’t authorize sending another two guys in, when it was the team that was tagged for this. Success is mandatory.”

Dylan’s gaze grew very cold.

“They’ll get their success,” he said.

“But we go in alone,” Hawkins added.

“If funding is an issue-”

“We’ll use the CHF,” Hawkins finished Dylan’s sentence for him.

Oh, hell, the CHF.

“You mean the Contraband Holding Facility?” Grant asked. “That coffee can full of diamonds in Quinn’s kitchen?”

A mission a few years ago involving a load of contraband dinosaur bones had netted the team a cache of diamonds nobody had bothered to officially report, and the windfall had gone into their emergency fund, the CHF.

anything.”

Another glance passed between the two men.

“Nobody needs to know we went in alone,” Dylan said. “Let Hawkins and me do the recon on this thing. That’s all, just the recon. We’ll report back to you with what we find, and the three of us can decide what to do from there.”