Page 20 of Pervade Montego Bay

“I escorted him.” I was trying to remain calm.

Either way, lives were at risk. Mine, specifically.

“James, there’s other ways of entering a country.”

“They can’t know I’m here. If they do…”They’ll move in on him.

“Your career is over. You know that, right?”

From the outside it would appear so. From inside, I was right where I’d been ordered to be. Get Xavier into China unseen. By any means possible.

Nuclear sub it is then.

“You were the youngest Commander this Navy has seen, Ballad.” He made it an accusation. “They’ve ruined you.”

I suppressed a wry smile because I was ruined well before I’d joined the Secret Service.

The years I’d given the Royal Navy flashed through my consciousness. My time with MI6 was wearing thin, too. My boss had talked about Xavier like a commodity. We were pawns to be moved around at will to get the job done. I was getting too old for this shit.

“They’re denying this mission, James.”

“That wouldn’t be a first.”

“I’m destined to take the fall.”

“I’ll take the fall. I outrank you.” I yanked up my oxygen tank. “I’m guessing we’re at the coordinates.”

“This could be a national disaster.”

“My specialty is preventing them.”

“Look, you never got over what happened to Victoria…”

Nice try, buddy, but I was too hardened to care about my widower status. Or my family reputation. I’d always fought against my privileged background and kept it to myself. Getting servicemen to respect my word had nothing to do with the wealth I’d inherited. No amount of money could protect a man destined to live a life of danger. Which meant I lived with a certain code. The kind that brought a level of loneliness most men shied away from. The walls around me were higher than those of the castle I’d been bequeathed.

Still, I had a good life waiting for me on the other side of this. An estate I could wander around, with no chance of getting assassinated.

I intended to live long enough to enjoy it. That castle had a decent supply of wine in the cellar. In my mind I’d uncorked all of them and finished them off, from the Saint-Cernin Blanc I’d been saving to the bottles of Dom Perignon. I couldn’t wait to make that a reality—getting boozed-up and privately wallowing in my grief.

Alone.

Getting home and getting drunk felt like a goddamned luxury at this point.

All that was left was to get this mess over with and find the fucker.

“We believe they have him in their sights,” I replied calmly. “If we don’t retrieve him, that disaster you’re talking about could happen.”

It was unpalatable to tell him I might even bring back Xavier in the form of an inanimate corpse. Especially as I’d be the one to place our agent in that state.

Oliver straightened. “If this crazy plan of yours doesn’t work out, there’ll be hell to pay, Ballad.”

James

You might imagine that finding your missing operative hanging out in the same location where he was last seen—one of the most expensive hotels in the world—would be a good thing.

Not so much.

As soon as I stepped out of the elevator on the top floor of The 13 Hotel and entered the swanky lounge, I spotted Xavier sitting alone at the bar nursing a drink.