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“Everybody in this room knows how hard it is,” Isaac said, sounding as pissed as Bethan figured they all felt. “Just like we all know what kind of loser prefers to turn it off just to make a dime.”

“Translation,” Griffin said coolly. “We don’t like this guy.”

There was a rumble of agreement throughout the room, because everyone here was still a little idealistic, or else they would have quit when they left the service. Even Jonas, Bethan thought, whether he knew it or not.

“He made my skin crawl,” she said when the rumbling died down. She did her best not to look at Jonas. “And that was before I knew who he was. Before I knew that he’d tried to kill me once already. I couldn’t get my head around the timing. What changed between our arrival and the appearance of those cameras? Then I remembered that I’d hada flashback of what happened to our convoy.” She couldn’t keep herself from looking at Jonas then, which was better than paying too close attention to all the other very serious gazes trained on her. “I thought it was random, but then I remembered there was a man, running away, off in my peripheral vision. The cameras appeared later that same evening.”

“You think he saw you doing a drive-by?” Isaac asked.

Bethan shrugged. “The options are that he already knew who I was, or that he saw me in that car before I saw him. Both are possibilities. Either way, he installed cameras in the room and then, at the reception, went out of his way to come up and get in my face.”

She let that sink in.

“Yeah,” Templeton drawled, and let the chair he usually kept tipped back thud to the floor. “Not a fan of this guy.”

“Judson Kerrigone doesn’t have a lot to recommend him,” Oz agreed. “Probably why he decided that after meeting Bethan in the desert—”

“Bethan and her gun,” Jonas said, with a lethal satisfaction.

Everyone else nodded at that, even Griffin, the best sniper Bethan knew.

“That seems to have been a turning point for our guy,” Isaac said. “Because after somehow surviving Bethan, Judson Kerrigone disappeared. And not long after, Dominic Carter took his place. With a bright-and-shiny interest in the sorts of things that Judson Kerrigone would know all about but could no longer touch, because everybody knew the kind of nasty character he was.”

“I spent a lot of time digging into the life and times of our boy Judson,” Oz chimed in. “He left a trail of petty destruction behind him, a couple of kids, and overlapping wives. The individual the wives knew was all about the steroids, pumping iron in the gym, and a lot of strutting around, making himself the center of attention.”

Kate shook her head. “It fascinates me that he made this re-creation of himself so...”

“Soft,” Jonas supplied, his voice like a whip. The wordsoftsounding like a curse. “He deliberately makes himself seem smaller than he is. He wants to be mistaken for an easily forgotten pencil pusher. But he must have known that a single handshake would blow his cover.”

“Does that mean he made you, too?” Benedict asked.

Jonas considered. “Not much to make. I wasn’t pretending I didn’t have a military background. He was.”

“Whatever he’s doing, he was playing with us,” Bethan added. “I can’t shake my interaction with him. It was too deliberate. And again, the options are that he either suspected I already knew who he was and rolled right up to me like that, or thought it was entertaining to flaunt himself in front of me knowing that he almost killed me. Either way.”

There was another low sound throughout the room, the kind of growling male assent that Bethan knew was about the highest level of support these colleagues of hers had to offer.

Which was why Alaska Force was so much more than a job. It was home.

Oz changed the photos on the big screen. “I looked for the kind of places Judson Kerrigone might stash not just our scientist and his sister but a lab where Sowande could create any practical applications of his research. Two possibilities jump out.”

“Two?” Templeton laughed, loud and long. “I don’t have a single place in my life that could contain a science lab. Didn’t realize it might be required.”

“Only if you’re a psycho,” Blue said.

That only made Templeton laugh harder.

“As an at-risk teenager, he spent some time at his uncle’s orchard in Upstate New York,” Oz told the group. “It was supposed to cure him of petty theft, vandalism, andtruancy, but it didn’t take. And for about six months while he still thought he could convince a branch of the military to let him enlist, he spent a lot of time making like Rocky in a warehouse in New Jersey.”

“A warehouse in New Jersey?” Templeton asked. “Isn’t that a fate worse than death?”

“Itisdeath. Straight up,” Lucas retorted.

Kate laughed. “I’m happy to say I haven’t spent enough time—by which I mean any time—in or around New Jersey.”

“Yeah, yeah, you’re an Alaskan by birth, we get it,” Templeton rumbled at her, which made them both grin.

A great many aspersions were cast upon the great state of New Jersey then, while Lucas, the only person in the room who had spent any time there—or would admit to it—mounted what could only be called, at best, an anemic defense.