looking back at the guy, and this time noticing that the man was wearing dog tags just like his—which sure as hell gave his heart a start, seeing a U.S. soldier in a way-too-strange TB sanitarium in Thailand.
By the time the doctor finished showing Jack around, he’d seen over a hundred of the patients under Souk’s care and noticed that a good portion of them were American, but Con was the one Jack had remembered, him and a black Marine officer who’d looked to be dying.
“They want me to help them,” Scout said, bringing him back to the problem at hand.
He turned and looked at her.
“Help them capture Con?”
She nodded, and he looked back out the windshield, swearing under his breath.
After a second, he turned and looked at her again.
“Betray Con?” he asked. “Set him up so these operators can what: Lock him down somewhere and ‘rehabilitate’ him?” He shook his head, growing angrier by the second, then shifted back into his seat and looked out the windshield again. “You know he’s never going to willingly give himself up to these guys, no matter who they are.”
It was too damn late for rehab, and the boss knew it, but Jack didn’t want to be the one to tell Scout.
“No, we don’t know that,” she insisted. “We won’t know until I make my report to him. Once I tell him everything I know, he might want to talk to these guys. I only want what’s best for him, Jack. I’m just not sure what that is yet.”
He understood. It was hard to know what was best for Con, because it was damn near impossible to know what all had been done to him.
Twice he’d been hired by the broker in Taipei to pick up packages at Dr. Souk’s in Bangkok. The first time, he’d seen Con and the Marine officer who’d been in such damn bad shape. The second time, there’d been nothing left of Souk’s “hospital”—and for whatever harebrained reason he’d come up with and long forgotten, he’d decided to check the situation out.
Even years later, the memory of Souk’s basement was enough to make him sweat, but he’d found Con and gotten him out of there alive.
“All I’m saying is that maybe we should be the ones to figure that out,” Scout continued. “That maybe we should be the ones to decide what’s best for him.”
Geezus.
“If you want to do that, babe, then you’ve got more balls than I do.” The two of them going behind Con’s back and setting him up for these assholes?
Jack didn’t think so.
Con Farrel was the toughest son of a bitch Jack had ever met in his life, and Jack had been around the block with some of the world’s best.
Con was also the most incisively tactical person Jack had ever known. Calm, articulate, intelligent, he’d taken Jack’s courier and protection business and shot it into the stratosphere. He’d known how to score bigger commissions off of larger, multinational companies and wealthier private clients. He was a fixer. He knew where to lay money down and where to pick it up, how to hot-wire anything with an engine, and how to fight—definitely knew how to fight—and over the course of the first few months of their partnership, they’d built a war chest.
When Jack had asked him for what, Con had given him a succinct answer: the hunt.
They’d been hunting ever since, and it had all gone down real well, just the way they’d planned, until Con had decided it was time to hunt down Garrett Leesom’s daughter. It had taken them two years to find her, and nothing had been the same for Jack ever since.
A Boy Scout, that’s what he’d been, a damn Boy Scout, curious as hell, wondering what in the world two U.S. Marines had been doing in that hellhole, and wondering if he should check to see if maybe they’d been left behind when Souk had packed up his “hospital” and disappeared off the map.
One had been left behind: Con.
The other had died: Garret Leesom, Scout’s father.
Hell. He’d never told her that he’d been one of the last people to see her father alive.
He shot her a quick glance—and decided that, once again, today was not the day to broach that subject.
Hell.
He reached for his prepaid cellphone.
“Alpha One, come in,” he said into his radio mike, his finger jabbing a curt text message into the phone. “Alpha One, this is Alpha Two. Where the hell are you, Alpha One?”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
“I