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North nodded. “If you ever want to join a team again, Hamilton Jones could probably find a place for you on Jones, Inc.”
Stein glanced at North, then past him to the shore, where the kids now hung out around a bonfire. A family memory nudged him, the many bonfires his dad had made on the beach back at the King’s Inn in Minnesota every summer. He missed those.
“Maybe. For now, I’m into this with Declan.”
Speaking of,the man walked over to them. Greeted North with a handshake. “Thanks for heading down to the islands.”
“Anything to get a tan, sir,” North said, and moved away to stand on the beach.
Declan turned to Stein. “You all right? The dive accident still wired up inside you?”
Stein shook his head. “Thinking about the break-in during the dinner.”
“You still think someone cased my vault? There was nothing on the video screen.”
“No. But we’d definitely been hacked. And someone opened the door to the smugglers’ tunnel.” He kept his voice low. “I think it’s the same woman who stole your blood samples in Barcelona.”
Declan shoved his hands into his pockets. “Avery.”
“Not her real name, but yes.”
Declan eyed him. “You know her?”
Stein’s jaw tightened. He probably should have mentioned this before, but—“I think so.”
Declan’s eyebrow rose.
“I think she was... I think we met in Poland.”
“Where you got injured?”
“Yes. It was... It’s a long story.”
Declan said nothing, watching the kids throw sticks into the bonfire, the breeze lifting his dark hair.
Okay then.“We were there to exfil a Ukrainian asset who had developed a cyber-encryption program,” Stein said. “The Ukrainian embassy had been taken by the Russians and we’d infiltrated, but our team got separated. I was pinned down with the target, and suddenly this woman appeared. She’d been sent in by her organization to do the same thing.”
“Her organization?”
“It’s called the Black Swans. Female-only operative group that specializes in undercover work and information heists. International, but mostly working in Europe. They were created by a former CIA agent, designed to fight terrorism before it birthed onto the world stage. I don’t know what she wanted with our target, but she’d been hiding inside the embassy for a couple days and learned their internal escape system.”
“Internal—”
“The passages behind the walls, sir. Not unlike your secret, um, smugglers’ route.”
Declan nodded.
“We worked together to get out, and she got us to their safe house. The Russian COBRA team, who’d taken the embassy, was searching the city for us.”
“COBRA?”
“Like our CIA Special Operations Group. Affiliated with the FSB, they do intelligence-gathering missions behind enemy lines.”
“And they needed this guy for their communications.”
“Yes. So Phoenix—at least, that’s what she called herself—and I had to work together trying to figure out how to get Luis to safety.” He didn’t let himself linger there—but wow, had she played him. “We finally got ahold of my team and set up a meet. She agreed to hand off Luis.” He folded his arms. “I bought it. But what she’d done was set us up. We walked into an ambush. A backpack bomb went off in the café.”
“Casualties?”