CHAPTER ONE
HE SHOULD HAVE never left Alaska.
Sure, in Alaska Orion woke to his breath in a hover of mist over his face, his fireplace having simmered to a low flame, the room lit in gray, the sun denting the eternal night. But he belonged in all that cold and darkness, under the shadow of unforgiving Denali, buried under a numbing layer of ice and snow.
There, his anger couldn’t break through, couldn’t ignite with the injustice of the daily news.
Couldn’t consume him with helplessness.
It was better to be cold.
The vast aloneness of Alaska allowed him to breathe, despite the stinging cold in his lungs. Allowed him to scream without anyone knowing.
“I hate New York City,” Orion muttered now, just below his breath, but loud enough for Ham to hear as they boarded the 4 train.
“You just need coffee,” Ham said.
“Vats of it.” Orion tried to ignore the man who knocked into him, bumping him into the subway pole.
Orion wanted to blame his dark mood on the ache in his bum knee, the fact that his body should still be sleeping, the static in his brain evidence of his jet lag. Maybe he should attribute his general sour attitude about humanity at large on the fact that his buddy Ham had insisted they route through Memorial Park to spend a few moments staring into the acre-wide footprint of the North Tower.
Orion had fisted his hands into his canvas jacket, the wind bullying him, the sun glaring off the glass of One World Trade Center, and watched as the waterfalls stirred up a mist into the brisk April air.
He couldn’t escape the thud in his chest.
The start of the War on Terror, right here—a war that still hadn’t been won, despite the casualties, the sacrifices, the personal losses.
All of it put Orion into a humdinger of a stormy mood.
Then he spotted the punk kid with the look of a thug slide through the closing doors of the subway car.
He didn’t know why, but all the hackles rose on the back of his neck.
White, midtwenties, rail thin, the young man wore a grimy Knicks jersey, a pair of ripped jeans, and the fuzz of a few nights on his chin. He radiated an odor that suggested a night or two spent in the same clothing.
Maybe the guy was homeless—Orion shouldn’t be so quick to judge. Clearly he’d watched one too many episodes of Law & Order during his months in rehab. Orion had probably looked the same way when he arrived at LaGuardia, freshly out of hibernation at his homestead under the loom of Denali.
Orion dismissed the kid and hung on to the bar overhead as the train pulled away from Fulton station. “We could have walked to Foley Square,” he muttered to Ham, who leaned his shoulder against the pole, clearly used to the jerk and roll of the New York metro.
Ham’s gaze was tracking Knicks as he moved halfway down the car.
So Orion wasn’t the only one whose instincts fired.
“You’re limping,” Ham said, not looking at him. He sounded as grumpy as Orion. “And we’re late. The rally has already started.”
“I’m not an invalid. My knee just doesn’t like eight hours on a plane.” He watched as the guy nudged up behind what looked like a college student—brown hair, fuzz on his chin, clean-cut, a black backpack with a purple NYU logo on the flap hanging over his shoulder. “I hope White has answers.”
“If anyone can track down Royal, it’s Senator White. He’s on the Armed Services Committee.”
Orion glanced away, toward the other side of the car. A couple women sat with their bags clutched on their laps. Another woman stood, her bag over her shoulder, scrolling through her phone. A man in a suit coat holding a satchel was reading the paper folded in half in his grip.
Behind them a young man wearing a black hoodie, earbuds affixed, bobbed his head to music. He caught Orion’s eye, then looked away.
“You should have told me that you went to rescue Royal and Thorne,” Orion said, looking at Ham.
Ham met him with a frown. “It wasn’t my information to give.”
Orion’s mouth tightened. “I wasn’t thrilled when Logan Thorne landed on my doorstep last summer, very alive and packing a conspiracy theory.”
Ham turned to face him, as if ready to share answers as to why a former Navy SEAL who’d been taken by the Taliban in Afghanistan some three years ago had appeared alive, although shot, and in the backwoods of Alaska. Thorne surfaced with stories of an off-the-books rescue mission, a CIA cover-up, and the desperate fear that someone was still out to get him.
Thorne’s story sat in Orion’s gut and chewed at him until, some five months later, he finally contacted former SEAL Hamilton Jones.
Ham invited him to NYC to tell his story to Senator Isaac White, who served on the Senate Armed Services Committee and had ties to the CIA. If anyone could find Royal, it was the people who’d been behind his disappearance. Besides, they owed Orion answers about a number of things. So yes, he’d emerged from the woods for a face to face with White.
Ham had been bugging him anyway to join his private international SAR team, Jones, Inc.
Hello, no. The last thing Orion wanted was to dive back into the world of spec ops and medical tragedies. He’d barely survived the last go-round.
Had left behind buddies, pieces of himself, and a broken heart.
“Listen, that rescue mission blew up in everyone’s faces and got a good man killed, so no, my first thought wasn’t to call you,” Ham said. “Besides, if I remember correctly, you were still in Germany—”
“Knock it off.”
The sharp voice turned both Ham and Orion. Knicks had jostled NYU enough to get a rise out of the college kid. “Step back.”
Knicks, however, came up on him, gave the student a push. “What? You got a problem with me?”
Ham stiffened.
NYU moved away, hands up. “I don’t want any trouble.”
What he said. Orion’s jaw tightened. Please don’t let the kid be armed.
The car swayed as it screamed through the tunnels. Orion glanced at the next stop on the map above the door—Brooklyn Bridge–City Hall station, still three minutes away.
A couple people pulled out their phones.
A ripple of fear silenced the subway as Knicks took another step toward NYU. Then he got in his face with a string of expletives that even Orion hadn’t heard before. And he’d been to spec ops boot camp, a special kind of H-E-double-hockey-sticks.
Yikes.
Orion’s code of honor made him glance, almost in apology, at the women standing in the back of the car and—wait, what?
Knicks and the man in the hoodie might be working in tandem because hoodie slipped past one of the women with what looked like her wallet disappearing into his front pocket.
Aw, shoot. The last thing Orion wanted was to get tangled up in other people’s trouble.
On the other side of the car, the altercation erupted. Knicks cornered the pale, yet angry NYU student, who was trying to bump past him.
When Knicks shoved the kid against the door, Ham moved.
Orion should have expected it. Ham wasn’t the sit-around type—even when they were serving at their base in Asadabad, Ham got to know the locals, as well as everyone on base. The man was the base party coordinator—he’d fashioned a basketball hoop and nailed it to a pole, even dragged in music.
He’d also started a prayer meeting, but that was Ham, the rescuer of lost souls.