“I was born ready,” J.T. said with a shit-eating grin curving his mouth.
Stellar results, Dylan thought.
“Good. We’ve got a mail drop three hundred miles north of Riyadh. I need delivery next week, Thursday.”
“Interesting country up there,” J.T. said.
“Yeah, Hawkins loves it, so you’ll be in good company. The two of you need to be in and out in three days. We’ll have our briefing at fifteen hundred hours here in Dylan’s office.”
“Yes, sir.”
Dylan knew J.T. hadn’t remembered everything about Steele Street, but he hadn’t forgotten anything about being a spec ops warrior. If anything, his years on the run as Conroy Farrel had sharpened his edges and made him even better than he’d been before—and he’d been one of the very best.
Dylan was damn glad to have him back on the team, damn glad to have him home.
“How’s your girl, Jane?” Grant asked, and J.T.’s grin broadened into a true smile.
“Still with me.”
“Glad to hear it, son.” Their eyes met for a moment, then Grant cleared his throat. “Well, I’ve got a lunch date down at that fish shack Loretta loves so much.”
“McCormick’s?” Dylan said, naming one of the city’s premier restaurants.
“Yep,” Grant said. “That’s the one. I’ll see you all back here at fifteen hundred.”
J.T. watched the general leave before turning back to Dylan.
“You okay?” the boss asked—and Dylan was the boss. The fact had been proven to him many times over the last two weeks. Dylan was also his friend, and that fact had also been proven to him many times over the last two weeks.
“Yeah. I’ve got a date, too. Upstairs.”
Dylan nodded. “He and Creed got in late last night. I’m sure he’s waiting for you.”
J.T. was sure of it, too. Everybody here was waiting for him. He’d seen it in all of their faces at the debriefing, which had been a very formal, very tough two days with very little personal interaction.
Dr. Brandt had been watching him like a hawk through the whole ordeal, even preempting General Grant a few times—but nobody had been watching him harder than the chop shop boys. Curiosity, anger, hope, distrust, love, confusion, more hope: He’d seen it in all of their faces. They knew what they’d lost. They just weren’t sure what they’d gotten back.
Neither was he. Being J. T. Chronopolous was still pretty damn new.
The elevator shaft had been repaired, and in a few minutes, he was on the twelfth floor, standing in the middle of what had once been his loft.
He slowly circled around. The place was oddly amazing. He hadn’t known surfboards could be made into wall art, or that snowboards could be made into chairs. One wall of the living area was loaded with racks of skis, cross-country skis, downhill skills, twin tips, a few pairs and sizes of each style. Four bicycles were taking up some of the floor space in the dining room, and four more bicycles were suspended from the ceiling in front of the floor-to-ceiling windows facing the east side of the building.
There was a kayak stuffed behind the couch, ski boots and poles piled here and there, a full-rig climbing harness and bivouac draped across one of the living room walls, and of all things, a life-size painting of a naked man hanging above a large fireplace.
He knew the man.
The guy looked a lot like him, only years younger, and he was sitting in one of the chairs flanking the fireplace, calmly waiting while J.T. looked around.
“So you like to ski,” he finally said.
“You do, too,” the younger man said. “You’re the one who taught me.”
Probably. Sure. That made sense.
“Where did we like to go?” he asked. He was getting his memory back, but there were still plenty of blank spots here and there, some of them damn big.
“A-Basin, the steep and deep, and Vasquez at Mary Jane. Between the two of us, we’ve launched off the gnarliest double black diamonds in the state.”
Yeah, he could see it. A small grin curved the corner of his mouth.
“And lived to tell the tale,” he said, looking over his shoulder at the younger man.
“Or some version thereof, usually embellished,” Kid said with a slight grin of his own, his dark-eyed gaze meeting J.T.’s across the length of the living area.
J.T.’s smile faded.
“I remember you,” he said. “But not the way I wished I did.” So help him God, he didn’t, even with his own face staring right back at him.