Baron laughed a little, shaking his head. “Sorry, partner. My Aztec doesn’t have that kind of range.”
“Yeah, I was hoping we might borrow something that does. Maybe a G.”
Baron’s expression was solemn. “Wow. Taking someone’s Gulfstream. You’d really have to hate a guy to do that.” His face suddenly lit up with a broad smile. “And I know just the fella. Gimme a minute.” He took out his phone and moved away a few yards.
“I’m so fired,” Baron sang to the tune of ‘I Got A Woman.’ “Yeah, I’m so fired! I’m so fired and I don’t caaaaaaaaare!” On the last note, the jet lifted into the air, then banked gently as Baron put the last faint glow of sunset behind them.
In spite of everything, Danny smiled as she continued tending to Henry’s various cuts and abrasions. The Gulfstream’s medikit was quite extensive, which was a good thing since Henry’s injuries were, too. Danny had had to pick more than a few chunks of dirt and grit out of the long, deep scrape on his outer thigh. It was an awful process but Henry barely flinched. And he’d seemed all but unaware of all the cuts on his arms and just below his collarbone.
But the worst injury besides his leg was the one she was working on now, a gash where something sharp had been driven into his face scarily close to his eye. She used a cotton ball soaked in witch hazel to clean away the dried blood and dirt caked around it so she could see exactly how bad it was. It wasn’t long but it was deep. She saturated another cotton ball with hydrogen peroxide and warned him it was going to sting before applying it to the wound.
He winced a bit but that was all. She supposed a little sting was nothing compared to getting bike-fu’ed by a homicidal maniac—but not just any homicidal maniac. She knew Henry had seen his face. And vice versa, although Henry had been so covered with dirt and blood, the other guy may not have spotted the resemblance. Hell, she might not have recognized Henry herself if they hadn’t already met.
“Henry?” she said tentatively. No answer; he didn’t want to discuss it but Danny decided to plunge ahead anyway. What the hell, she was wiping up his blood; she was entitled to some answers. “Did you ever have a kid? A son, maybe?”
He gazed at her through hooded eyes. “No, why?”
“The guy on the motorcycle—did you notice anything funny about him?”
“Yeah,” Henry said. “I noticed he was very good.”
“I meant his face,” she said, applying the first butterfly bandage to his cheek. Stitches would have been better but she wasn’t skilled enough at facial sutures so butterflies would have to do. “The similarity?”
Henry gave a resigned sigh. “Yeah, I noticed that, too.”
“So you never had a long-term relationship?” she asked, putting on the next bandage.
“Not unless we count you.”
Danny couldn’t help laughing at that one. “Is it possible you had a kid without knowing it?”
“No,” he said firmly. “Zero chance.”
“Then…?”
“Danny.” He hadn’t raised his voice but she got the hint. Instead of pushing him, she tucked two bloody cotton balls into a small plastic bag and pushed it under her seat with the other item she was hanging onto.
“Thank you, by the way,” she said.
Henry’s eyebrows went up. “For what?”
“Leaving Baron’s apartment so he and I wouldn’t be targets,” she replied. “Also for coming to get me in Georgia when you could have just run for your life.”
Henry chuckled. “Just wanted to put you on a private plane and give you a free trip to Hungary.”
“Where I’m going to find…?”
“Hungarians,” Henry said. “When I saw him it was like I was seeing a ghost.”
“A ghost with a gun?” Danny said.
“It was like it was every trigger I ever pulled,” he said, surprising the hell out of her.
She was still trying to figure out what to say to that when he lay back and closed his eyes. The conversation, like the first aid, was over.
CHAPTER 13
The mansion Clay Verris called home was one of many stately old houses that Savannah was famous for, although it wasn’t actually in the city itself but several miles away in the countryside, well off the beaten path followed by historic tours. It sat on several well-kept and heavily-surveilled acres of land and had its own lake just a few steps from the front door. The clear placid water reflected the place perfectly, so that from a certain distance, the house seemed to be sitting directly above its upside-down double. It was the kind of image many photographers found irresistible but the very few people allowed within Verris’s established perimeter knew better than to bring a camera.
In the twenty-three years Clay Verris had been in residence with his son, there had been very few intrusions. The security details stationed well away from the house had occasionally redirected hikers with broken compasses and, on one occasion, escorted someone claiming to be a herbalist off the property. But no one had ever come close to breaking into the house.
Nonetheless, Verris had put in an alarm system, just in case. The Gemini personnel he had tasked with the installation told him that it was a bit tricky to install something so high-tech without compromising the house’s historic character. Verris had told them this meant either the tech wasn’t high-tech enough or they didn’t know what they were doing; which was it?
The alarm system had gone in without a problem, and so had all the updates. Verris tested it from time to time and was satisfied that there was no way anyone could get into his home without being invited.
So when he woke just before dawn, he knew something was wrong. He was a man who slept soundly and well; thoroughly was the word he liked to use. His training and conditioning were also thorough, and as a result, he had an extremely heightened awareness, which was how he knew he had awakened because there was someone else in the house.
He lay very still, waiting for noises that might give some indication of how many hostiles he might have to deal with and where each of them was. Later he would determine how they had breached the perimeter and broken in without setting off the in-house alarm. The overnight security team would regret their negligence for the rest of their miserable lives, if not longer.
It seemed like an hour before he finally heard another sound, this time from his son’s bedroom. Verris tensed; was this some kind of drunken prank? There had been an incident before, but that had been in his office in the compound. At times, personnel got rowdy there but they wouldn’t dare break into his house, he was sure of that. If this was an outsider, though, a lot of heads were going to roll.
Without making a sound, Verris got up, put on his dressing gown and crept down the stairs. The light in Junior’s room was on and shouldn’t have been. His son was still out of the country; after his mission to take out Brogan had gone pear-shaped, Verris had told him to sit tight in a Colombian safe house and await new orders. He had issued that command personally and his son was nothing if not reliable and obedient.
Verris drew the pistol in the pocket of his dressing gown and, hugging the wall outside his son’s room, peeked around the open doorway.
The man sitting on the bed was the spitting image of Henry Brogan as he had been at the age of twenty-five, and he was alternating between tweezers and a pair of angled metal tongs to pick shrapnel out of his side, dropping the fragments on a monogrammed towel.
It was a tedious, awkward process, complicated by the attendant bleeding. Every time he removed one of the larger pieces, a little more blood would dribble down his side—not so much that he was in danger of losing consciousness, just enough to make a messy job that much messier.