Page 10 of Stars
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Hours later,they set down in Malta after a quick touch-and-go in the desert for Ethan to climb on board the helo. They landed at the midnight-quiet airport—shuttered until dawn, when normal flight ops would resume. A small convoy of SUVs and a lone Maltese army officer waited for them outside the airport’s military apron.
Jack shook the pilot’s hand and thanked him as Pete, Blake, and Ethan clambered off the helo and headed for the SUVs.
A man waited by the lead vehicle, his arms crossed as he leaned against the driver’s door, a Eurotrash fedora perched on his head.
Ethan snorted. Welby still hadn’t tossed that damn fedora. He helped Jack off the helo and then jogged with him to the SUVs and the rest of their team.
Pete and Blake wore broad grins, the satisfaction of a smoothly executed mission. They bickered like siblings as they stripped off their gear and flak vests, broke down their rifles, and stowed their radios. Blake’s cheeks were flushed like he’d run a marathon, and Pete had that wide-eyed look, the adrenaline still coursing through him.
“Good job.” Ethan clapped Pete on the shoulder. “Hard to believe the most badass thing you used to do was fight paper cuts.”
Blake laughed as Pete puffed up under Ethan’s praise. Ethan smiled. Pete had thrown himself into training like a man trying to chase the devil out, as if he were fighting against something he couldn’t catch up to. Ethan had watched and wondered as Pete moved through the three rounds of training: combined army basic and special forces courses, then Secret Service protection tactics, and finally CIA paramilitary training alongside Ethan, Jack, and Blake.
Ethan had had long talks with Jack. He’d wanted to cut Pete from their team.
It took a long weekend together, just him and Pete and a deep heart-to-heart as they practiced climbing and rappelling in New Hampshire, to change his mind.
Pete wasn’t chasing anything. He was running fromeverything. From the White House and the press, from the betrayals that cut him to the quick. From a year and a half of waging war against the world, of being the first line of defense that dealt with every snide comment, every sidelong glare, every slick attack thrown Jack and Ethan’s way. He’d been exhausted to his bones—and angry. Furiously, fantastically angry.
“I’ve known Jack longer than you,” Pete had said to him, breathing hard as they rested halfway up Mount Washington. “I committed myself to his future when he was in the Senate. I thought that would be a political future, but—” Pete had shrugged. Stared at the skyline and chugged water. “I’m not ready to walk away from him. Not yet.”
Over time Pete’s anger seemed to fade. Ethan watched him grow into his training until it seemed like Pete had been born for the role, was always meant to be crouched in the darkness and clutching a weapon at Jack and Ethan’s sides.
Blake had shot into orbit when Ethan called him one day, a million words trying to pour out of him all at once, gibberish that had Ethan holding the phone away from his ear. Blake, like the rest of the country, had watched in disbelief as Jack’s administration imploded. Wide-eyed horror at the coup in Russia lurched into shock at the bombing of the CIA, Jack’s apparent death, and the showdown in the Arctic. Jack’s resurrection and the subsequent congressional hearings bitterly divided the nation, a thousand opinions about what he’d done and what it all meant attached to every moment and every nuance of those hellscaped weeks.
Ethan hadn’t known how Blake would react to his call. They hadn’t kept in touch after Ethan left Des Moines.
But Blake was as fascinated as ever by Ethan, and the call went from one hour to two, to four, to nearly six by the time they were done for the night. And Ethan hadn’t even finished asking if Blake wanted to fly out to DC for the weekend to catch up before Blake was looking at flights.
He was the second man to join their operation, SR Consultants. A banal name for another of the thousand consultancies in DC trying to influence the government or peddle access to the halls of Congress and the White House. A few boasted former presidents and vice presidents in their ranks. Jack setting up a consulting firm wasn’t groundbreaking.
President Wall charging SR Consultants with a sealed executive order to operate as a covert intelligence operations team, answerable to her directly, was.
After Madigan and the United States’ bloody nose and double black eyes, the world had been hungry for more of her blood. Like sharks in the water, the threats had closed in, ominous warnings of a violent future.
Dangling Jack, a disgraced former president supposedly interested in both quick cash and obscurity—anonymity—worked wonders to attract members of the global underworld looking for a direct line to the White House while offering up a handsome fee to Jack for spilling what they knew.
Their first employee had been a surprise. The same day the papers printed a paragraph on page four about their new firm, Luke Welby called and asked to meet. He walked to their new home in DC, which had been doubling as their office and still stuffed to the gills with the belongings and accumulated personal crap of two longtime bachelors trying to make a life together. He’d sat in their box-filled kitchen and asked about the real mission behind SR Consultants. He’d heard enough, being in the Secret Service and on President Wall’s detail, to know something about their operation was unusual.
And he wanted in. Right then and there.
It stopped Ethan in his tracks sometimes, the loyalty Jack inspired in others. As they’d lain in bed that night, he’d said so, whispering to Jack’s biceps as he laid his head on his chest.
“Ethan, Welby isn’t following me. He’s followingyou. I’m only surprised he beat Scott and Levi.”
Ultimately, Scott Collard and Levi Daniels, Ethan’s two best friends, did not join SR Consultants. Levi stayed on as President Wall’s lead detail agent, and Scott happily filled in as Levi’s second-in-command. “I’d like to slow some shitwaydown,” Scott had said. “It’s been a wild ride, but I need to step off it for a while. Spend some time with my family.”
With Welby, Blake, and then Pete, they decided their team was full for the time being. Training began, challenging for everyone but especially for Pete, who had no military or law enforcement experience. Jack had embraced Ethan’s conditioning workouts leading up to the training, and he seemed to enjoy smoking Ethan on the long-distance runs they endured.
They’d all made it through together, and now, on a deserted runway in Malta beneath a sickled waxing moon, they were celebrating their sixth successful operation. Ethan stripped his gear and wiped down with an entire pack of wet wipes as Blake and Pete kept their chatter going and Jack and Welby caught up.
“So,” Pete called as he changed shirts, dumping his polo and his sidearm into his duffel. His sweat-slick T-shirt clung to his chest, and he tugged a ball cap onto his head. His soft political body had morphed into a trim, tight physique. “Two days of freedom, right?”
“Two days of freedom,” Jack said. “We fly back to DC the seventeenth at zero seven hundred. We’ll rendezvous at the Excelsior Grand Hotel at zero five. Our plane will be waiting for us here. Until then, gentlemen.” Jack smiled. “Enjoy yourselves.”
Blake and Pete shared a wild-eyed glance. Both single, Blake’s relationship in Des Moines having fizzled out and Pete declaring that he never had time to devote to doing a relationship properly, the two men thoroughly enjoyed both their operations overseas and, in their downtime, entertaining the ladies in a half dozen European cities. Forty-eight hours of freedom in Malta would bring two bleary-eyed and beaming men to the rendezvous. Jack, Ethan, and Welby always teased them on the way home.
