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Booth was pulling out the drawers on the nightstand. “Sounds like him. Could he really unhook his monitors and walk off without the medical staff knowing?”
“I saw a patient in a wheelchair, sitting outside with her IV pole and smoking a cigarette.” She shrugged.
He walked to the closet and peered inside. “His clothes are gone.” Booth crossed the room and sat on the couch.
She sat beside him and rested her forearms on her knees, matching his posture. “Were you being serious about…you know…WITSEC?”
He didn’t look up but twisted his hands. “Yeah.”
“How long?”
“Three years.”
“You left everything behind? Your friends? Family?”
He nodded.
“Were you…married?”
He breathed a short laugh. “Nope. Never married. No kids. Not many friends in the job I had either. The team here is the closest I’ve had to friends in a long time.”
“What about Crispin?”
“He was dead. We were partners, and I thought he’d been killed.”
And then he’d seen his friend, back from the dead, right here in Booth’s town. Nova couldn’t imagine what that might feel like.
“The rogue CIA faction. Hillbilly militia. Terrorists. Crazy Henry…” She looked at him. “They’re not made-up stories to tell around the campfire, are they?”
He shook his head. “It all happened. I might have changed a few names here and there, but the events are real.”
“Okay, but a military dog who needed a bodyguard from some guy making chemical warfare bombs?” She gave him the side-eye. “Come on. That’s got to be embellished, right?”
“Nope. That dog is still considered a high-value target to this day.”
Nova sat back and pulled one leg underneath her. “Will you tell me how you ended up here? As a smokejumper?”
“Okay, let me think where to start. The entire team was under suspicion because someone was feeding intel to a rogue CIA faction about the location of a missing nuke. Everybody was pointing fingers at everyone else, so Henry planned an off-the-books takedown meant to draw out the mole. At the last minute, I got a call that my mother had suffered a cardiac episode and had to go to the hospital.”
“Oh no.”
“It turned out to be an artery blockage. While I was at the hospital with her, they moved forward with the takedown. The whole operation went wrong somehow. There was a huge explosion that supposedly killed Crispin.” His thumb traced the red scrapes over his knuckles. “I knew everyone would point fingers at me. I mean, Crispin’s dead, Henry’s disappeared, and the nuke is nowhere to be found. Nobody knew who the mole really was.”
Nova nodded. “And you were the last man standing?”
“Right.” Booth scratched his beard. “I was still at the hospital with Mom, planning to confront the supervisors the next day and explain why I wasn’t at the takedown. I wanted to help figure out who was responsible for my friend dying in the explosion.
“A delivery messenger came to the hospital and handed me a manila envelope,” he continued. “Inside was a note saying that when I walked back into work, I’d be labeled a terrorist and charged with treason. Possibly killed.”
“You’d be the scapegoat,” Nova added. She was starting to see how complicated this case really was and why Booth was so invested.
“The note said I should go into hiding here in Ember and wait for Henry to contact me. It was a part of the failsafe plan Henry’d had all along.”
It was starting to make sense. Booth was hiding out, waiting for his redemption. “Something I can’t quite figure out is why you became a smokejumper.”
“I was a volunteer wildland firefighter in high school, helitack crew in college, then parachute infantry in the Army.” Booth shrugged. “I needed a job.”
She’d heard of worse reasons.