Page 86 of Bonded in Death

“Quick enough. I wouldn’t say he could make a good living at the work, but quick enough. Better with strategy, tactics, weapons—and he liked the sharp ones. And the ladies. They didn’t have to be sharp ones for him.”

“So you spent time with him outside HQ, and off-mission.”

“Rabbit gave the green on it, and I didn’t mind the company. I’ve got a rash knowing the company I kept. Embarrassed, you could say. Thanks, Brown Eyes.”

He took the pint, and a good gulp of it. “That goes down easy.”

“You ever have a pint with Potter?”

“We raised a few. A dark pub, a pint, some toad in the hole or stotty cake sandwiches with ham and pease pudding.”

“I assume that’s food.”

“You Yanks.” Shaking his head, Harry drank again.

“I know what stotty cake is. My boyfriend’s from Scotland. It’s bread, Lieutenant, and makes great sandwiches.”

“I’ll keep that in mind. So you’d have a pub meal and pint with him. What did you talk about?”

“Not the work. You never know where the ears might be. Or if we did, we used a kind of code. We’d talk about women, as men will do, about how when it was all over, we’d go somewhere hot and sunny.”

“Hot and sunny.”

“I’d never been out of London at that time. He’d been some places, and he talked about going off to live in the hot and sunny, which sounded just the trick to me.”

“Anywhere specific?”

“France was his big one, as he thought it sophisticated. But when it was the hot and sunny, Costa Rica was one. He said there were plenty of expats down there, and a man could live like a prince. But you could still have fair-skinned women who spoke the King’s English.

“The man was a prick—I could see that even then—but he knew things. And he always paid for the pint. I wanted to know things, and whatever I stole went for the cause, so I couldn’t pay for many pints me own self.”

“Did he ever mention any names—his contacts, friends?”

“He was cagey there. If he talked about the work he did before he came on board our train, he was always the smartest in the room, the best in the field. I knew it was bollocks, but he was smart, and I learned as well as taught.”

He looked down at his beer. “He bought me a pint not twenty-four hours before he killed two of my friends. Would’ve killed me if he’d got the chance. Before he betrayed us all.

“‘Here’s to success, Harry,’” says he. “And I drank to that, drank with him, and what I drank to wasn’t what he drank to.”

Pausing, he seemed to gather himself.

“I knew that, twenty-four hours later, when I pulled Alice, bleeding, broken, barely living, out of the rubble. And me weeping over her like a baby.”

His eyes, hard, shiny with the mix of rage and grief, met Eve’s.

“He’d signaled me, you see. Heard something at my eleven o’clock. So I moved from my post, thirty, forty seconds to check. That’s when he slipped by me.”

He looked up again, and while the rage had dulled, tears sheened his eyes. “He couldn’t do for me first, you see, in case HQ signaled. He had to kill Hawk and Fawn, then get out far enough to set off the charges, then he’d know I’d run in, as they hadn’t come out. He could do for me then and be off.”

“It didn’t happen that way.”

“Alice changed it. I heard her, but it was garbled some. He’d messed with my comm. But I knew something went wrong. You’re never supposed to leave your post, but I knew something was wrong. I signaled Shark, but he didn’t answer. Then I started over, and I saw him—didn’t know at first it was Shark—running out. So I started to signal, started to run. And it all blew. It all blew, and blowing tossed me back and on my arse.

“I left my post because I trusted him. Then I didn’t leave it soon enough to help my friends, or stop the bleeding fuck who killed them.”

When she’d finished, she told Harry to ask Roarke to come up.

“We’re taking ten before the last interviews.”

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