Chapter 2

The morgue in Greystone was in the basement of Town Hall. The fluorescent lights buzzed overhead. The old county coroner on duty was shaking when he handed me the two autopsy reports. I was still wearing Jenkins's uniform shirt and dark duty pants under an old jacket, with a baseball cap pulled low over my brow. The DIA credentials Ghost had planted in the police database were clipped to my chest. The coroner checked the photo and badge number once, then turned away.

There were two reports. Samuel Cross, my father. Eleanor Cross, my mother.

The coroner had marked my father's report with a star. The remains showed two completely different sets of damage. The surface of the bones had old weathering patterns consistent with years underground—normal burial wear. But there were also fresh burns from a strong acid, inflicted recently. The conclusion was obvious. My father had been dug up and desecrated after death.

My mother's cause of death was blood loss. Her arms and legs showed restraint marks and serrated cuts. Estimated time of death: around two months ago. The bathroom vent window had been left open, and the dry, cooler air had slowed decomposition.

I closed the reports.

"The people who came for the bodies had credentials," the coroner said. "Department of Homeland Security. Said it was a classified case and the family wasn't allowed access to the remains. The seal was real. The signature was real. I'm a small-town coroner. What was I supposed to do?"

Homeland Security. Sarah's paperwork. Marcus's signature. Gerald's network.

I thanked him and walked out of the morgue.

Greystone was still asleep. The hardware store sign had faded, but the words Cross & Co. Hardware were still readable. A stranger's pickup truck was parked out front. I kept my hands in the pockets of my old jacket and headed south down Main Street. My fingers brushed the metal band of my mother's wedding ring. Cold.

My phone buzzed in the alley. Ghost.

"Vincent Drake. Marcus Vane's private contractor. After your family was hit, he stayed at the Sunset Motel twelve miles outside Greystone to clean up loose ends and keep watch. Marcus had him monitoring the town—anyone asking about the Cross family, any cops reopening the case. He's been watching for two months. Nothing happened. Yesterday he booked a flight to the Equatorial Islands for the day after tomorrow."

"How long is the room booked?"

"Until noon tomorrow."

I found the dust-covered motorcycle behind an abandoned gas station by the roadside, kicked the engine alive, and headed out of town. I stopped once at a shuttered thrift store, climbed in through the back window, and changed into a pair of dark work pants and a gray hoodie. The prison guard shirt and duty pants were too hot. I stuffed the old clothes into the bike's saddlebags, pulled up the hood, and kept riding toward the motel.

The Sunset Motel sign was missing three letters. There was only one car in the lot, a rented silver sedan. A light was on in the window at the far end of the second floor, and canned laughter from a late-night talk show rolled out in waves. I crossed the lot and went upstairs. The carpet was worn through to the backing. His room was at the end. A thin strip of light spilled through the crack under the door. Inside, I heard metal scraping in a steady rhythm. A hunting knife on a sharpening stone.

I opened the door.

Vincent was sitting on the edge of the bed with his back to me. Half a bottle of whiskey sat on the coffee table beside a half-eaten burger. He heard the door and didn't turn around.

"What'd you bring me this ti—"

Then he looked back. Saw my face.

I didn't give him time to stand. My right fist smashed into his cheekbone, my knee drove into his stomach, and I wrenched his right arm behind his back. Three moves. He folded sideways over the edge of the bed. The hunting knife flew from his hand and buried its tip in the carpet. I reached back and shut the door.

"I knew you'd come." Half his face was mashed into the mattress, and the corner of his mouth twisted into something crooked. "Marcus said you might get out. I said no chance. He said if it were anybody else, he'd bet they died in the desert. But if it was you... he'd keep extra money stashed in an offshore account."

I pulled the knife out of the carpet. There were still dark stains on the blade that hadn't been cleaned off all the way. Two letters were carved into the handle.

S.C. Samuel Cross. My father's hunting knife. He had used my father's knife to kill my mother.

"Where is he?"

"You think I'm gonna tell you?"

I grabbed his left wrist, turned it over, and drew my father's knife across the artery. Blood poured out, but not fast. I'd cut shallow. He still had time.

"About ten minutes. Is that enough time to reconsider?"

He lasted almost eight.

The meeting place between Marcus and El Fantasma was an abandoned cannery fifteen miles west of Santa Estrella. Marcus picked the time. Marcus picked the location. Nothing on paper. But there was one thing he didn't know.

The cannery had been acquired by Shadowblade Security in a federal surplus auction. Officially it was a training site. In reality, CEO Gerald Price had privately converted it into a safe house. Gerald had installed an independent surveillance system inside—not for security, but as leverage. Marcus didn't know the system existed. Only two people did. Gerald himself. And the man who had wired it for him.

That man had spent six years ago crouched in a collapsed fighting position outside Kandahar with two tons of rubble and a support beam on top of him. Command said leave him. I disobeyed orders and took two men in. We dug for four hours. The man we pulled out was named Ghost, then a military intelligence tech lieutenant. He told me his servers would always be open to me.

"He came out with a limp, right?" Vincent said. He had lost a lot of blood by then, and his words were starting to blur.

I ignored him.

When Shadowblade took over the cannery, Ghost had been sent in to do the physical install on the surveillance system—fiber runs, concealed camera placement, independent backup power. He left a hard-coded admin account buried at the system level. Gerald didn't even know it was there. After Operation Broken Spine, Ghost got reassigned overseas, and the account slept on the server.

Tonight, he logged in for the first time. Vincent's confession wasn't how I got the footage. It just gave me a cleaner reason to pull it.

On Vincent's phone, I opened the remote access node Ghost had sent me. The cannery surveillance files were organized by date. Twelve days before Operation Broken Spine. 2:17 a.m. East freight corridor. Camera Three.

Marcus walked into frame carrying a briefcase.

A few minutes later, El Fantasma stepped out of the shadows on the west side of the corridor, still wearing the bone-white mask. They stopped face-to-face with an open briefcase between them. Marcus reached into a hidden compartment and handed over a document.

The full deployment summary for Operation Broken Spine.

The codenames of the six informants. Their locations. Their contact phrases. Everything.

The audio was low bitrate, but Ghost had cleaned it up. The cartel boss's voice came through low and heavy. "What do you want?"

Marcus answered without hesitation. "Cross has been digging into me ever since he retired. Broken Spine fails, he takes the fall. But prison isn't enough. I want his whole family. You handle it, I give you the coordinates."

The entire exchange lasted four minutes and twelve seconds. Marcus's face was turned toward Camera Three the whole time. He had no idea there was a lens hidden behind an old overhead pipe. Gerald's camera. Gerald had been recording from the start. Not to save me. To save himself.

I backed up the video file to Ghost's encrypted server and closed the remote session.

Vincent's eyes were half-open now. The last few words leaked out of him. "Safe... Gerald's got a safe... keeps everybody's dirty secrets in there... says it's his retirement fund..."

Then his pulse stopped.

He had killed three people for Marcus. But Marcus had already moved money offshore and was getting ready to run. Now Vincent wanted to drag Gerald down with him. And Marcus too.

I stood and scanned the room. From the moment I opened the door, less than twenty minutes had passed.

I dragged Vincent off the bed and laid him flat on his back on the floor. I turned the cut on his left wrist upward and rested it on the clean unopened dress shirt he'd bought and never unpacked. I put the hunting knife back in his right hand, blade inward, the angle of the grip matching the angle of the wound. I left the whiskey bottle on the nightstand. Only his prints were on it.

Then I checked the room again. No fingerprints from me. No hair. No witnesses. But it wasn't a perfect fake. My punch had left bruising on his cheekbone. The arm lock would leave slight damage in his right wrist. There were drag marks in the carpet from when he went down. Any competent coroner would know this wasn't a clean suicide scene. That was fine. I didn't need perfection. I needed contradiction—a wound consistent with suicide, but physical evidence suggesting outside force.

That would get the case flagged as suspicious. Without enough evidence, it would stall. Then get filed away. And stay dead.

I took his phone, wallet, and passport. I wiped my father's knife clean with the shirt and slid it into the sheath at the back of my waist. Then I turned off the light and pulled the door shut behind me. The lock was an old spring latch. Once it closed from the outside, it locked automatically. I tested the handle once to make sure. Locked.

About forty minutes later, the sky started to pale.

I stopped at a truck pull-off by the highway to fill the tank. The bruising in my lower back had gone stiff from the long ride. The color had shifted from blue-black to a darker purple with yellow starting at the edges. My body was healing.

I switched on the phone. The geek forum glowed against the predawn dark with its muted black background. The post showed up later than I expected—just after five in the morning, almost three hours after I'd left the motel. A housekeeper noticed the light still on under the door while pushing her cart, knocked, got no answer, and called the police.

The first post was careful with its wording. A male body had been found at the Sunset Motel outside Greystone. Identity confirmed as Vincent Drake.

Replies started piling up over the next two hours.

"Horizontal cut. Suicide."

"Horizontal cut doesn't prove suicide. Only suggests handedness."

"Either way, Vincent Drake is dead. Marcus Vane's private contractor. Same morning, a prison guard was found in the salt flats buried up to his head. Uniform came back Blackrock Fortress."

"Less than twelve hours between the two. You still don't get it?"

Then somebody posted an old photo of me in Mogadishu—six years ago, carrying a child out of the rubble, my face streaked with dust and blood. Underneath it was one line: "Frostblade."

I turned off the phone. Ghost's encrypted channel lit up in my earpiece.

"Gerald Price is attending the PMC Industry Association quarterly lunch tomorrow at ten a.m. The safe in his house is in the upstairs study. Biometric fingerprint lock plus mechanical combination. Security system has independent power. Cut the grid and it triggers an alarm."

"I'll handle the mechanical part. Once I have that safe, I have everybody by the throat."

I twisted the throttle.

Up ahead, the desert casino city rose out of the morning light like a stack of gray blocks.