HAYES KNELT IN front of the casket. It looked like Burke. They had done a good job, all in all, but there was something off about the hands, like they were two wooden paddles. They never got the hands right. Hayes had buried a lot of his boys. He hated funerals, hated the way the dead men’s faces always looked old and tranquil, at peace. He’d never seen Burke rest easy. Even asleep, he’d been like a coiled spring.
Hayes rose from the kneeler. The funeral would take place at Arlington later that day. Burke’s father and grandfather were buried there. This was an early visitation being held for classified personnel at Fort Belvoir, a base on the Potomac south of DC with a long history of black army intelligence work. Lauren and Maggie were in the sitting room just outside. As Hayes waited to speak to Burke’s widow, he saw an old teammate, a man named Drew Ochoa. He had come up to Team Six through the navy’s explosive-ordnance disposal programs, and he and Hayes had worked together hunting down high-value targets and chemical weapons in Syria.
“Good to see you,” Drew said, then he took Hayes’s hand and wrapped his arm around him. When Drew stepped back, Hayes glanced down at the man’s fingers. Drew flexed them and smiled slightly.
Drew had been taken by the enemy while on a patrol in the eastern deserts, and Hayes had pulled him half dead out of an al-Nusra cell, literally a metal cage, twelve days later. His captors had bound his wrists so tight with battery wire, they’d nearly cut the radial nerve on one hand. The medic thought he might never be able to use it again. Hayes hadn’t run into him since, so he was glad to see it was working.
“Thanks,” Drew said.
“Of course.” Hayes reached up and squeezed his shoulder.
That was it. They didn’t do much talking about the past. Drew dipped his head toward Burke’s wife, Tara, who sat at the end of the front row of chairs on the far side of the coffin. It was Hayes’s turn to offer his condolences. He walked to her.
“I’m John Hayes. I worked with Connor. I’m so sorry for your loss.”
“Thank you for coming,” she said, and then she looked at him more closely. “You were with him…” She raised her hand to her eyes.
“I was.”
“You were one of the men he saved.”
“Yes. I’ll never be able to repay him.”
Her gaze drifted toward the casket. Hayes looked at the last few mourners behind him, waiting. But Tara reached out and touched his arm, raised her face to his. There was something about Hayes that made people trust him.
“People are saying that he jumped,” she said.
“That doesn’t sound like Connor.”
“Then why would he go near those cliffs?”
“I don’t know. But he never gave up and never backed down from anything.”
Five other men had been killed. Burke had been murdered too. He wanted to tell her that he would hunt down whoever had done this. But there was nothing Hayes could say. He had sworn, and sharing these secrets was dangerous.
Hayes hated the evasions, hated holding information back from Lauren, disappearing, waking covered in sweat and not being able to talk about the memories that stalked his sleep. The men he had killed, the men who had left him to die. Deceiving the ones he loved seemed colder than the violence he faced downrange. He could never get used to it.
Tara Burke’s eyes narrowed and she looked at Hayes with something like disdain.
“I know that face. What aren’t you telling me?” She shook her head and looked at his wedding ring. “You men and your lies. Honor isn’t going to raise my kids. You were supposed to protect him. Get out now. Be with your family. The rest is just—”
She buried her face in her hands and took four long breaths.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t know what I’m saying.”
Hayes laid his hand on her shoulder. “It’s okay.”
“He was a good guy,” she said.
“The best.” Hayes put his arm around her and she cried quietly for a moment, then straightened up.
“Thank you for coming,” she said in a flat tone. She was bottling everything up, pushing him away.
Hayes left her with the next mourner. In the entry hall, outside the viewing room, one of Burke’s boys was playing with Hayes’s daughter. He slipped his arm out of the sleeve of his small blazer and then started turning in circles, trying to get it back in.
“How many kids does she have?” Lauren asked Hayes when he joined her.
“Three.”
She shook her head slowly.
“I know. The team wives will take care of her out there, though she might come back to the East Coast to be closer to her family.”
“It doesn’t make sense,” Lauren said. She had been to too many funerals, seen too many young widows. “What’s happening, John?”
He took her to the side.
“Someone is hunting us down. The command wants me to come back,” he said. “To find out who’s behind this, to stop them.”
Hayes had been in exile when his daughter was born. He didn’t see her until she was two, when he was finally able to return home. It took him months to break through with her, for her to stop hiding behind her mother’s legs when he came into the room.
He knew the risks; he didn’t want to leave his wife a widow, like Tara and the others. But he couldn’t stay at home and wait for another silent kill. What if they came for his family? He’d lost the closest thing he had to a father to the network behind the DC attack, and they had threatened his wife and daughter.
Now the enemy was inside the United States. Hayes couldn’t protect his family by sitting on his hands at home. He could protect them by closing on whoever was behind this and putting him in the ground. He knew it would make him a target, that the killers might never stop coming after him. So be it.
His wife was strong. She had family not too far away. She and Maggie had been okay without him. He might not get to see Maggie grow up, but he was willing to pay that price to keep her safe.
“I’m going after them,” he said.
She pressed her lips together tightly and, after a moment, nodded. “All right. I get it. I’ve been to too many of these things, seen too many of these girls wearing black. I can handle it…”
She trailed off, but he knew. She could handle the family solo—for now, forever—if it meant that no more of these young women would have to go through this. Her strength was his.
“Do what you do, John. They need you.”
His daughter walked toward him, and he took her hand. He saw Tara, Burke’s widow, through the open doors as they left.
In the parking lot, Lauren and Maggie went to the car while Hayes hung back. He watched Lauren lift Maggie into the car seat as he took out his phone.
Cox answered on the fourth ring.
“It’s Hayes. I’m in.”
The morning sun was still low in the sky. As Hayes spoke, there was no way he could see the man in the woods on the far side of the highway, watching him and his family through a long lens. He worked for Niko Hynd.