Chapter 9 - Pier Seventeen
The pier was deserted except for gulls and one fishing boat rocking against the pilings. Dawn made the water look like steel.
I didn't come alone. Torres waited two blocks away, and Vale had a surveillance team on standby. I had learned long ago that courage without a backup plan was just vanity.
A figure stepped from behind a shipping container. He was thinner than the Ben I remembered, with gray at his temples and a brace under his jeans.
"You look terrible," he said.
"You look dead."
He grinned. Then his smile broke, and so did mine.
We embraced awkwardly. His shoulder was stiff. My back protested. Neither of us let go first.
"I tried to find you," he said. "They moved me through three hospitals under another name. Somebody said you were a traitor."
"They said you were gone."
"I almost was."
He held up the drive. "I took it from your unit after I heard Kessler was alive. I couldn't risk leaving it there."
"You could've called."
"I didn't know who was listening."
Ben watched a gull balance on a railing. "You remember the song Ortiz used to sing?" he asked, referring to himself in the third person, the old joke from deployment. I smiled despite myself. "You never knew the words." "Still don't." For a moment we were twenty-nine again, stealing terrible coffee and pretending we weren't frightened.
We sat on the edge of the pier. Ben explained that the drive contained the original route orders, shipping records, and audio from a meeting where Kessler discussed selling the convoy's location. He'd copied it from a field laptop before the ambush.
"Why didn't you go public?" I asked.
"Because the files are encrypted. The key was split between two people. I had half."
"Who had the other half?"
He looked at me. "You."
I remembered now: a sequence he'd whispered while medics strapped me to a stretcher. I'd repeated it under anesthesia, terrified of forgetting. Later I wrote it inside the cover of a battered paperback and mailed it to myself.
That book was in my apartment.
I reached for my phone to alert Torres.
Before I could dial, Ben saw something beyond my shoulder. His face changed.
"Get down!"
A shot cracked across the pier. Wood splintered beside us. We hit the boards together as a second shot punched through the fishing boat's cabin.
May you like
Someone was firing from the rooftops.
THE SCARS THE ADMIRAL REMEMBERED
