Breakwater

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? Hell, Diego, he and Crawford—”

“Friends since they were roommates at Princeton twenty years ago.”

“The cottage?”

“It’s owned by a woman named Quinn Harlowe. Expert in transnational crime. She worked under Lattimore until January. Now she’s consulting. I heard she’s teaching a class or something at the FBI Academy.” Diego pointed toward the water, as if they were discussing fishing. “She helped get Alicia Miller her job at Justice.”

“So they were friends before they worked together. Any word on Miller?”

Diego didn’t answer.

That meant no.

Alicia Miller had turned up at Breakwater early that morning—just past dawn—and yelled incoherently at the front gate. A couple of Crawford’s existing security guys took her back to her cottage. They told Huck, who never saw Alicia, the basics—her name, that she’d spent the weekend in the cottage across the marsh and didn’t approve of Oliver Crawford turning his estate into a new private security firm.

Follow-up questions weren’t invited. Since he had a role to play, Huck shrugged off the incident and spent the morning settling in at Breakwater. At lunch, he took off for the village and found Clemente. They relied on face-to-face communication. It had its risks, but given the technical expertise of the people they were investigating, Huck and Diego both agreed—and got their superiors to agree—that primitive communication methods were safest.

Like Huck, Diego didn’t believe Alicia Miller had shown up at Breakwater at dawn just to make a protest, either. He promised to find out what he could about her. Huck had returned to Breakwater. Now, he was back, talking to Diego for a second time—a risk, but a necessary one.

“The Breakwater guys said Miller calmed down and went back to D.C.,” Huck said.

Diego took a token drag on his cigarette. “Maybe.” He tossed the cigarette onto the pavement, grinding it out under one foot. “She doesn’t fit the profile of the typical crack-of-dawn protester. How incoherent was she?”

“I don’t know. Nobody’s saying. What about her boss, Lattimore? What does he know about our investigation?”

“Nothing. He’s out of the loop. Nobody knows about you who didn’t know before this morning. You’re not compromised. Whatever Alicia Miller was up to at Breakwater—we’ll find out.” Diego cracked a small smile. “Maybe she was protesting.”

Not exactly reassured, Huck left Diego to his fisherman’s life and resumed his slow jog around Yorkville.

Very few people were aware of the existence of the task force looking into a particularly violent group of vigilante mercenaries operating in the U.S. and abroad, breaking the law when they saw fit. Their ends justified their means. They were responsible for kidnappings, tortures, extortion, smuggling, illegal interrogations, breakouts and murder.

Definitely bad guys, Huck thought.

Only a handful of the members of the task force had been informed of his presence in Yorkville. Very, very few people were aware that a federal agent was on the verge of penetrating the vigilantes.

Huck preferred it that way. The fewer people who knew about him, the safer he was. The law of averages. He wasn’t handpicked by the vigilante task force—he’d pretty much stumbled into the job. He’d gone undercover in California to search for a violent fugitive wanted by state and federal authorities. In the process of finding his fugitive and taking him into custody, Huck had managed to infiltrate the vigilante network. That brought him to the attention of the Washington-based task force. They offered him the most dangerous, tricky and bizarre assignment of his law enforcement career.

His lucky day, Huck thought with mild sarcasm.

That was back in January. For four long months he’d worked hard to earn the trust of the paranoid, ideological vigilantes and hard-core thugs who’d cheerfully slit his throat if they knew who he really was.

A half mile up the loop road from Diego’s motel, a black Breakwater Security SUV pulled alongside him. Vern Glover was at the wheel. Vern was Huck’s main lifeline to the vigilantes network. Scrubbed, freckled and auburn-haired, Vern was already half-bald at thirty and never would be anyone’s idea of good-looking. He was also one unpleasant individual.

He rolled down the passenger window. “Get in. Storm’s about to hit. You don’t want to get struck by lightning.”

Huck grinned. “Lightning bolts would bounce off me.”

Vern ignored him and rolled up the window. No sense of humor. Huck climbed into the passenger’s seat. Vern’s best buddy was Huck’s now-incarcerated fugitive, due to go on trial for drug dealing, rape, armed robbery and attempted murder. Although Vern had no criminal record, Huck presumed that his new friend hadn’t exactly led a clean and quiet life. Occasionally, Vern would bitch to him about the bastard who’d turned his buddy into the feds and how he was going to find out who it was and kill him.

But Vernon Glover saw himself as one of an elite cadre of mercenaries who would save the U.S. from its enemies within its borders and beyond. A tall order, but Vern seemed determined and confident—a scary thought as far as Huck was concerned, because it meant Vern and his cohorts either had plans or were completely delusional. Or both.

Thunder rumbled off to the west.

Vern turned around at the small motel, practically in front of Diego Clemente’s truck with its New York plates, and drove out toward Quinn Harlowe’s road, bypassing it since it was a dead end. Huck could see the cute waterfront cottage. Still no car, still no sign of life.

“That an osprey nest?” he asked, pointing to the buoy in the quiet cove, giving Vern a reason for him to be peering in that direction.

Vern made a face. “Yeah. It’s protected. Birds have more rights these days than people.”

Always the optimist, Vern was. Huck said nothing. He had the same feeling he’d had on his run. Something was wrong. He just couldn’t pinpoint what.

4

Quinn rang the doorbell to Alicia’s first-floor Georgetown apartment for a third time, but she instinctively knew her friend wasn’t there. When Alicia moved to Washington, as far as she was concerned, only one address would do—somewhere, anywhere, in Georgetown. With a trust fund her grandfather, a prominent Chicago doctor, had established for her, she bought a small condo in a black-shuttered brick townhouse on a narrow street of the historic, prestigious neighborhood.

Quinn realized Alicia wouldn’t be coming to her front door at all—let alone acting like herself again, explaining that the stress of her job had finally gotten to her and she’d simply freaked out that morning.

Quinn descended the steps down to the street, recalling her last visit to Alicia’s just after New Year’s, when she had broken the news that she was quitting her job at Justice and going out on her own. Alicia, adept at concealing her true feelings, had claimed she wasn’t surprised and wished Quinn well, then let it be known through mutual friends that she viewed Quinn’s departure as something of a betrayal and resented her ability to make the jump into working for herself.

Quinn noticed the flower boxes on the front windows, which last spring Alicia had planted with a mix of bright flowers but now were filled with dead leaves and stale, dry dirt. She loved her home. Jobs and men might come and go, she’d say, but she always had her refuge.

The neglected window boxes were just another sign, if a trivial one, of Alicia’s mounting burnout. In law school, she’d ended up in treatment for depression. The medication she was given didn’t agree with her, but therapy by itself did the trick, and she got better. The entire experience wasn’t something she shared with many people, but Quinn had been there. Now, given Alicia’s bizarre behavior earlier, Quinn wondered if her friend ought to seek treatment for whatever was going on with her—it might not be just some funk she could snap out of on her own. If she was suffering from depression or some other mental illness, she needed to see a doctor. Period.

But Quinn recognized she didn’t have the expertise to make a diagnosis herself.

Debating what else she could do, she walked back down to M Street, Georgetown’s main commercial street. After giving up on chasing the black sedan, she’d stopped at her office, in case Alicia had asked her driver to drop her off there, but no luck. Now she wasn’t at her apartment, either. And Steve Eisenhardt, who worked with Alicia at Justice, hadn’t called back with any news of her.

If she called the police, Quinn knew they’d ask if Alicia had gotten into the black car voluntarily, and she would have to say yes. Alicia hadn’t screamed for help. She’d been agitated and semicoherent, but she’d somehow found her way from Yorkville to Washington and Quinn’s office, then her favorite coffee shop. If Alicia was having some kind of breakdown, she wouldn’t want the police involved. And Quinn wanted to help, not to make Alicia’s life more difficult.