Breakwater

7

Huck cranked open the tall, narrow casement window in his dorm-style room at Breakwater and let in the cool, poststorm breeze off the bay. The unnaturally still gray-blue water lay past the immaculate lawn and over a barbed-wire fence. Supposedly, erosion had brought the Chesapeake Bay closer to the converted barn than when it was built in 1858. A plaque at the main gate gave a brief history of the house, barn and surrounding hundred acres.

The place felt like a summer camp.

Huck reminded himself he wasn’t there for the accommodations. He was there to penetrate an elusive, violent criminal network and find out who they were and what they were up to. Had Oliver Crawford set up Breakwater Security to train vigilante recruits for future operations? Was he being used? Are we all on a wild goose chase?

Vern Glover appeared in the doorway. “The Riccardis want to see you.”

“Now?”

“Yeah, now.”

Huck knew he got under Vern’s skin. “Where?”

“Outside.”

“Vern, that leaves about a hundred acres-”

“You’re an asshole, Boone, aren’t you?”

Boone. Huck didn’t flinch at the phony name. He’d gotten used to it during his months of deep-undercover work. “Who, me?”

“Be outside in three minutes.”

He almost asked why three-why not two? Why not five? That kind of deliberate effort to get under a person’s skin was more natural to him than he cared to admit, but he also knew it helped with his cover, the persona he’d established when he’d first gone undercover after his fugitive. Breakwater Security had done a thorough background check on him before letting him into their Yorkville compound. The U.S. Marshals Service and the FBI together made sure any paperwork and people needed to verify his new identity were in place, down to a retired deputy who posed as Huck’s former first-grade teacher. That little Boone boy. What a corker.

Glover left Huck to what remained of the three minutes. He got a clean shirt from his built-in dresser. Because he was working for a private security firm, he got to carry his Glock 23 in his belt holster and a snub-nosed.38 revolver on his ankle. He had the proper paperwork as Huck Boone, bodyguard extraordinaire, so he couldn’t arrest himself for gun-law violations. His Breakwater colleagues all were good with their paperwork-not that he would arrest them for low-level gun violations. There were rumors the vigilantes had shoulder-fired missiles, grenades, chemical sprays, illegal explosives-a long list.

Supposedly, they wanted to buy an armored helicopter.

The task force didn’t want him blowing the whistle too soon.

Most of all, they wanted to know names and plans. Who were these guys, and what were they up to?

He sat on the edge of his bed. White no-iron sheets, cotton blanket, one pillow. He could feel the metal springs through the thin mattress. He was five-ten, one-eighty. On a good day, he had a face that scared children and small dogs.

An extra blanket was up on a closet shelf for cool nights. He had three Breakwater Security shirts, one sweatshirt and one windbreaker. A navy blue suit hung in his closet, and on the floor were running shoes, water shoes, lightweight combat boots and black dress shoes. If he needed anything else, he’d have to find a store.

When he ventured outside, the air smelled of wet earth and bay, but it was fresh and clean, the storm having blown out any remaining rain and humidity. The grounds of the Crawford compound were old-Virginia lush, with trim grass, flowering trees and shrubs, spring bulbs-certainly not the kind of landscape anyone would picture when imagining a start-up private security firm.

The sprawling main house, white clapboards with black shutters, overlooked the bay, a spot most people would be content to live. Not Oliver Crawford. He’d stirred up Yorkville when he announced that he was converting his picturesque country estate into Breakwater Security. Although people still had their doubts, outright protest was short-lived, at least partly because Crawford had only recently survived his harrowing kidnapping and his Yorkville neighbors understood his need to take action-except, perhaps, for Alicia Miller.

Huck stepped over a puddle left over from the storms. The late-afternoon sun angled through a stray gray cloud. It’d been a rough series of storms, rain and wind slapping the converted barn’s windows, trees swaying outside, flashes of lightning, claps of thunder-the works. Diego had brought in his boat just in time.

The Riccardis, the couple who ran Breakwater Security, walked down the stone path to the converted barn. Joe had let his iron-gray hair grow out maybe a quarter-inch since he’d retired from the army. He was forty-two, six feet even and without any obvious excess fat. He had on a navy polo with the Breakwater Security logo embroidered in gold, pressed khaki pants and black running shoes. He wore his Glock on a shoulder holster. His wife, Sharon, was thirty-five and pretty, even delicate, with her dyed blond hair and blue eyes. She was unarmed and wore a skirted suit. Navy blue. She had worked as Oliver Crawford’s executive assistant for fifteen years but now oversaw everything nonoperational for Breakwater Security.

Sharon spoke first. “How’re you doing, Mr. Boone? Settling in?”

“Doing just fine, thanks.”

Huck didn’t have a solid read on the Riccardis, athough the task force had provided Huck with a brief workup on them. They were married last summer right there at Breakwater. Sharon ’s first marriage, Joe’s second. He had two kids in college in Colorado. Nothing in their backgrounds shouted vigilante.

“Mr. Crawford is arriving from his Washington home in the morning,” Sharon said. “He’ll want to see what all we’ve accomplished in the week since his last visit. Joe will go over the details with you tonight at dinner.”

Huck had yet to meet Crawford. He and Diego had read a write-up on him, too, but nothing in it indicated any wing nut vigilante propensities. Then again, who knew what a terrifying ordeal like a kidnapping could do to a man.

A towheaded kid of maybe twenty-two burst out of the barn. Sharon Riccardi gave an impatient sigh, but her husband greeted him pleasantly and shook his hand, welcoming him to Breakwater. The kid all but saluted. Joe couldn’t stop a smile. “Relax, O’Dell. You’re not in the army anymore. Boone, Glover-meet Cully O’Dell, our newest recruit. He’s from the Neck. A local boy. He can tell you the best fishing spots, and you can show him around the property.”

O’Dell shook hands with Vern, then Boone. The kid seemed to have a sunny disposition and was obviously excited about entering the high-stakes, high-possibilities world of private security. Vern didn’t look thrilled at having to help show Cully O’Dell around Breakwater, but one thing Huck had discovered in his two days in Yorkville-he was never left to wander around the property on his own. Someone was always watching.

Being senior, Vern gave O’Dell the quick rundown of the various buildings and what was up and running and what was only in the planning stages.

No mention of private interrogation chambers and thumbscrews.

No mention of a plot to destroy the federal government, to assassinate judges or to snatch bad guys off the streets and toss them into their own private jail cells.

Vern talked about maintaining the highest standards of professionalism, ethics and training as they provided individual and corporate security ranging from routine background checks and threat assessment to investigations, protection, surveillance and crisis management. Those who started now, when the company was still more dream than reality, would have the opportunity to move up as Breakwater Security grew.

“Cool,” the new recruit said under his breath.

Huck grimaced. If Cully O’Dell was a budding psycho vigilante, Huck would cut off his big toe. In the meantime, he’d try to make sure nothing happened to the kid.

They started up the stone path to a new, perfunctory structure that was out of keeping with the aesthetic of the estate. It housed classrooms and the gun vault. Huck figured if Breakwater had any shoulder-fired missiles, illegal explosives, illegal chemicals or vials of anthrax, they’d be in the vault. He wanted to get in there on his own, but it wouldn’t be easy.

On the other hand, if he’d wanted easy, he would never have worked undercover at all.

They ran into the Riccardis again on their way down to the indoor firing range.

“I forgot to ask,” Huck said. “Any word on the woman who was out here this morning? Miller-Alicia Miller, right?”

“She went back to Washington,” Sharon said stiffly.

“That’s what I heard. Did she drive herself?”

“I don’t know if she did or didn’t drive herself. She objects to Breakwater Security having its headquarters and training facility out here. This morning’s histrionics were nothing but a rude, inappropriate protest.”

“Was she drunk?”

“I have no idea.” Sharon caught herself, softening. “I don’t mean to sound cruel. Obviously Alicia Miller’s a troubled woman.”

Joe touched his wife’s elbow. “We should get back to the house. Didn’t you say Oliver was calling at seven?”

“Right. Yes, of course.” She shifted her attention to Vern and O’Dell. “Mr. O’Dell? What do you think of Breakwater so far?”

The kid beamed. “Awesome.”

Quinn buttoned her sweater and crossed her arms against the cold early-April wind as she stood at the water’s edge across from her bayside cottage. Even in the small cove, the bay was choppy after the line of thunderstorms had blown across the Northern Neck and off to the northeast. The heavy rain had slowed her drive to Yorkville but left behind dry, fresh, much cooler air.

She’d arrived thirty minutes ago, parking her silver Saab practically in the branches of her huge holly, her hope of finding Alicia’s ten-year-old BMW in the driveway or even the black sedan that had picked her up immediately dashed. The side door to the cottage was locked. Alicia had cleared out of the cottage-the only traces of her weekend stay were the hastily made bed in the guest room, towels in the bathroom hamper and an unopened nonfat, sugar-free strawberry yogurt in the refrigerator.

Quinn had walked next door to the only other cottage on the quiet, dead-end road, but the Scanlons, the couple who’d retired to Yorkville just before Quinn bought her place, were still not home.

A wasted trip, she thought, watching an osprey-a female-swoop up from the marsh into the clear sky above the bay. In spite of her concern for Alicia, Quinn felt some of her tension ease at the familiar sight of the huge bird. Once facing extinction, ospreys had become opportunistic in choosing their nesting sites, using channel markers, buoys, old dock posts and even the occasional bench on a quiet private dock. The nests could only be removed with a permit.

The two young ospreys that had constructed the oversize mess of a nest on a marker at the mouth of Quinn’s cove had returned. The nest had survived several fierce winter storms. With luck, the ospreys, mates for life, would have baby ospreys in a matter of weeks.

But they were raptors-birds of prey. Although they dined primarily on fish, if Alicia had indeed walked out to the water early one morning and saw an osprey scoop up an unsuspecting duckling in front of her, she would have been horrified. Stressed out as she was from the pressures of her job, perhaps on the verge of a breakdown, she could have latched onto such a gruesome sight as she’d melted down, twisting it into a metaphor for all her fears and troubles.

Speculation, Quinn thought, turning away from the water.

Built in the 1940s, her cottage occupied a half-acre lot with lilacs and azaleas, not yet in bloom, and a vegetable garden out back that she meant to revive. Right now, it was mostly weeds. Alicia had promised to rent a tiller and dig up the garden, but Quinn had known it was just well-meaning talk. She loved Yorkville for its simplicity. A picnic, kayaking, walking on the beach, prowling mom-and-pop shops for books and antiques, sitting on her porch and reading. What Quinn enjoyed most about Yorkville, Alicia found lacking. Quinn grew up in the Washington suburbs, but Virginia ’s Northern Neck, with its wide, shallow rivers, its marshes and inlets, its beaches and rich history, spoke to her soul.

She walked across the road and up the stone walk to her cottage, the grass, which needed mowing, wet from the pounding rain. She stepped onto her porch, no railing to impede the view of the water from her wicker chairs. On one of her weekends on the bay, Alicia had put out a blue ceramic pot of yellow pansies as a gift for use of the cottage.

Quinn tucked her hands up into the sleeves of her sweater. Dusk was easing into night, the wind quieting, the air cold and fresh. Shivering, she went inside, her small living room dark enough now that she needed to switch on a lamp.

When she’d bought the cottage, it was a wreck. For two years, she’d poured herself, and coaxed various friends, into fixing it up. The scrubbing and painting and foraging for deals served as a welcome contrast to her days spent researching and analyzing criminal networks with tentacles that knew no borders, no boundaries, no ethics or morals but the lust for power, money and violence. She painted the simple wood floors and replaced the wainscoting, splurged on tile for the bathroom that she had put in herself.

Quinn remembered a sun-filled weekend in Yorkville, shortly after Alicia had moved to Washington. They’d gone on long walks together and had crab cakes at the marina restaurant, then drank wine and talked until midnight on the front porch, rekindling a friendship strained by busy lives and different interests and goals.

It was just before Alicia had introduced Quinn to Brian Castleton, the Washington, D.C., reporter for a Chicago newspaper, and they’d begun an on-again, off-again six months together that now, in retrospect, seemed doomed from the start. Brian found Yorkville too small, too boring, too unsophisticated, too, as he liked to say, 1947. He’d drag himself along with Quinn as she scavenged flea markets and yard sales for bargains-her mishmash of dishes, a Depression glass pitcher and tumblers, a copper pot for kindling, tables and chairs she’d refinished and painted.

The cottage, ultimately, had helped end their relationship. He wanted to buy a boat-he said he might stand the occasional weekend in Yorkville if he had a boat. They’d bought two kayaks together. Then he said a kayak wasn’t the sort of boat he meant.

Before long, he was staying in the city on weekends, and she’d drive out to the bay by herself.

Yet, in spite of how easily and completely they’d drifted apart, Brian was the first to see that she needed to leave the Justice Department and strike out on her own. If she was content to spend a weekend stripping paint off an old chair, he reasoned, the day-to-day grind of her work was getting to her. She needed to take a risk and broaden her horizons. Dare to go out on her own.

“I’m too young,” she’d argue. “I need more experience.”

“You’re from a family of daredevils. Go on, Quinn. Jump.”

It was another month after they broke up for good before she finally turned in her resignation.

Her withering relationship with Brian had put an added strain on her friendship with Alicia, who couldn’t hide her disappointment, even irritation, at Quinn’s decisions. “First you dumped Brian, then you quit your job. What’s next, Quinn? Who’s next?”

She hadn’t dumped Brian, and Alicia knew it. She’d exaggerated. What really got to her was how hard Lattimore had tried to get Quinn to stay at Justice-and then, once she’d made up her mind, how he continued to press her to come back. Last month, when he’d invited Quinn to an informal party at the Yorkville marina restaurant-his first social event without his wife-she had debated not going. The party was a good opportunity to network, but she also found herself wanting to go, hoping she could get Lattimore and Alicia to accept that she’d had to move on-it wasn’t a slap in their faces.

Alicia was at the party. She and Quinn chatted outside on the dock, shivering in the cold as they’d danced around the recent tension between them. Whatever had bothered Alicia about Quinn’s behavior over recent months seemed to have evaporated.

When she asked to use the cottage for a weekend getaway, Quinn hadn’t questioned Alicia’s motives. She’d simply handed her a key and told her to come and go at will.

Not once that night or in the next weeks did she sense that Alicia was seriously troubled or burned out.

“Alicia-where are you?”

Quinn spoke quietly into a cold breeze, shuddering at a sudden sense of loneliness. She’d always felt safe, comfortable, at her cottage. Now, she pictured an osprey swooping down to a fluffy little duckling, heard Alicia screaming in horror and prayed that her friend was all right. But darkness was coming fast, and Quinn knew there was nothing more she could do tonight.