Chapter Twenty-Six

NICK PARKED BY a playground outlined in blue moonlight and walked up the hill toward the lookout. All of Gloucester sprawled below him—the shipping yards and marinas reaching like gold fingers into the black sea to his left, and to his right a handful of scattered lights, houses, properties, sinking and disappearing as they were consumed by the distant woods. Breecher was sitting on the bumper of her rental car, watching red lights blink out on the sea. Nick went and sat beside her, and in the silence he remembered those long nights in the desert, when the two of them could go three or four hours without speaking, as they watched for planes overhead, or movement on the hills. There were no hellos or goodbyes. The four-man unit had functioned as a singular organism, sometimes stretched across the base, or across a slab of land, but always connected. Since the killings, he had felt Breecher, Master, and Dorrich’s presence across the states and towns that stretched between them. Breecher had been the farthest away, in Chicago, the others closer in. All of them united, a circle of trust. What had happened linked them in a way that would never be severed. So it seemed ridiculous to greet Breecher. They were never really apart.

“Is Bill gonna tell someone?” she asked eventually.

“I don’t think so,” Nick said. He breathed warm mist onto the cold night air. “If he does, it won’t come suddenly. He’ll tell me first, and I’ll tell you.”

“Did he say anything this afternoon?” she asked. “After you got back?”

“He texted.” Nick took his phone out of his pocket. “I tried to avoid him. But he’s right onto it, as I knew he would be. He wants us to track down Master. He says he’s gonna find out what happened with Dorrich. Whether there was a crime scene or whatever.”

They watched the sea, the blinking lights.

“I can’t believe we told someone outside the team,” Breecher said. “It feels like… I don’t know. Now that I’ve heard it told to another person, a regular person—”

“It’s like it wasn’t real.”

“Yeah,” she said. Nick could feel her eyes on him. “Have you ever told anyone else?”

“No,” he said.

“What about your therapist?”

“No.”

“Did you ever say anything to your shrink that they might, you know, be able to piece together—”

“Breecher,” Nick said. “You’re panicking. We can’t panic right now.”

“Hell yeah, I’m panicking,” Breecher said. “Because if this hits the newspapers, the story won’t come out the way it did in that diner today. We won’t look like we were duped, you and me. We’ll look like monsters. And when they find out the rest of it, the stuff we didn’t say today, it’ll be even worse.”

“Hmm.” Nick nodded.

Breecher rubbed her eyes hard with her palms, like she was trying to smudge out the memories. “Your friend Bill only really knows half of the story. But when he learns the whole truth—”

“I know,” Nick said. “He’ll turn on us.”

The two veterans fell quiet. The cooling engine beneath the hood where they sat was quietly ticking, a sensation Nick could feel rather than hear over the breeze.

“We have to make sure he doesn’t find out,” Nick said.