Week three, Don Tavo brought me to meet a buyer.
The venue was a private hangar outside Marfa, the kind of strip where charter planes never get logged. Linen tablecloths on the tarmac. A jazz trio. Champagne in flutes that caught the runway lights.
The buyer's name was Wexler Hawthorne. He was sixty. He wore an unstructured cream jacket and rimless glasses. He sat on the board of a methadone foundation in El Paso and his face was on a bus bench outside the federal courthouse, smiling at a child.
He raised his flute when he saw me.
"Agent Vance. Charmed."
My fingers tightened on the stem.
Don Tavo laughed. "Don't be tense. He's family."
Hawthorne slid a folder across the linen.
Inside was my federal warrant. Desertion. Compromise of classified intelligence. Homicide of a confidential informant.
Each charge alone was enough to bury me.
I looked at Don Tavo.
"What is this?"
He laid one hand on my shoulder.
"We do the show all the way down to the studs. After tonight, you can't walk it back."
There was a scuffle from the cargo door. Two men dragged in a woman.
Her face was already a mess of blood. She was still yelling.
"Hawthorne — you'll burn for this!"
My pupils shrank.
Renata Solorio. A counselor at a Juárez harm-reduction clinic. A federally cleared peripheral witness. She had two years of laundered-money paperwork through the foundation board.
Hawthorne adjusted a cufflink, calm.
"Ms. Vance. I'm told you shoot well."
I didn't take the pistol.
Don Tavo's smile thinned.
Cass stood at my left, silent as a wall.
Renata saw me. She grabbed at the last light in the room.
"You're a cop — help me—"
Hawthorne laughed.
"She isn't anymore."
Somebody pressed the pistol into my hand.
I saw Cass's knuckles tap the rim of his champagne flute. Two short, one long.
The Quantico distress cadence. The one drilled into every Academy class and never used outside the building.
Stall.
The bottom of my skull went bright.
Cass wasn't looking at me. He picked up his flute and lifted it to block Don Tavo's line of sight.
I brought the pistol up. Renata closed her eyes.
The round took the floodlight behind Hawthorne instead of her. Glass came down in a clean white rain. Her ear was burnt by the pass. The hangar went dark in the same second.
Cass moved.
The hangar went to red emergency strips. I hauled Renata up under the arm and ran her toward the loading bay.
Rounds chased us. A panel of corrugated wall to my right opened into daylight-shaped holes.
Renata's knees were going. I was carrying half her weight.
"Who are you?" she sobbed into my collarbone.
"Shut up if you want to live."
At the corner of the maintenance corridor, a guard came around the angle with his rifle up.
I hadn't put my finger on the trigger when his forehead opened.
Cass came out of the dark behind him.
I swung my muzzle onto him.
"Two short, one long. Who taught you that cadence?"
He didn't answer. He reached for Renata.
I didn't let go of her.
His eyes went very black.
"Maren. This is not the part where you debrief me."
"Then when is it? When you shot Migs? When you said my father's name?"
His face moved for the first time.
The hangar PA cut in. Don Tavo, calm and amplified.
"Cass. Maren. There is a version of this where you both explain yourselves."
Floodlights stripped the loading bay. We were pinned against the bay door, the open black of the desert behind us.
Hawthorne came through the inner door holding his shoulder.
"Kill them!"
Cass pushed Renata into my chest.
"Truck. Back of it. Now."
A produce truck idled outside the bay, reefer running, ranch-road dust on its flanks. The roll-up door at its back was already three-quarters open.
I looked at the rectangle of darkness inside it.
"What about you?"
His mouth twitched.
"Somebody has to mop up."
I didn't move.
He hooked the back of my neck and kissed me.
It tasted of blood and diesel. It was short, and there was nothing in it except a hand on the back of my neck and a man saying goodbye through his teeth.
Before I could react he turned me by the shoulders and shoved both of us off the loading dock into the truck.
The roll-up door came down behind us.
The truck lurched. I came up onto my elbow against a wall of crates.
Through the slit of the door, before it sealed, I saw him standing on the dock putting himself between us and every rifle in the bay.
His mouth shaped a word.
I didn't catch it.
Later, going over it, I read the shape off his teeth.
Live.
The truck dropped us at a ranch turnout outside Fort Hancock just before dawn. I walked Renata to the highway and flagged a Border Patrol unit.
Holroyd met me at the safehouse himself.
The first thing he said was not about my shoulder.
"Where's Ardent?"
I had a foil blanket around me. I looked at him over the top of it.
"You know him. By name."
He took two seconds too long.
"I don't."
"You're lying."
I handed Renata off to the medic and got my hand around the lapel of his suit jacket.
Half the agents in the room stopped what they were doing.
Holroyd lowered his voice.
"Maren. Mind your cover."
"My cover's already a pile of ash you set."
My voice cracked. "He knew the Quantico cadence. He said my father's name. He pulled the witness off that floor. Tell me you don't know him."
Holroyd looked past my ear.
A wire snapped, inside my chest.
I understood, all at once, that the people in the dark were not only the cartel. Some of them were in this room.
He walked me back into the safehouse. There was a fresh op packet on the kitchen table.
The cartel had started bleeding itself after Marfa. Don Tavo suspected Cass. Don Tavo suspected me. He didn't have proof.
I was going back in.
I laughed.
"You're insane."
"Maren, it's the only window."
"What about Cass?"
"The cartel will sit on him."
"He'll die."
Holroyd looked at me without moving.
"Deep-cover ops cost informants. That's the work."
I swung. Open palm. It cracked across his cheek.
The room froze.
He did not flinch. He did not block.
I looked at him. I made the words come out one at a time.
"Did you say that to Migs too?"
His face went white.
I turned for the door.
Behind me he said, "Your father's case file is connected to Ardent."
I stopped.
He set a manila envelope down on the table.
"You want the truth, you keep going back in."
Inside the envelope: three photographs.
One: my father, Marcus Vance, sprawled on the loading floor of a Juárez warehouse.
Two: a man in a black balaclava with a pistol, lean shoulders, the right hand visible. On the web of the right hand, between thumb and index, a burn scar in the shape of a broken crescent.
Three: a square of concrete wall with one word smeared across it in my father's blood.
CROW.
I stared at the second photograph a long time.
You couldn't see the face. But I knew the hand.
Cass had the same scar. The same broken crescent on the same patch of skin. I had counted it in a hundred small motions over three months.
Holroyd stood behind me.
"Eight years ago we had a lead that the Iruegas faction had paid a contract shooter to close a leak inside our division. Codename CROW. Your father was the leak."
I crushed the photographs in my hand.
"You already suspected Ardent was CROW."
"Suspected."
"So you put me next to him."
He didn't deny it.
When the rage hit its ceiling it went cold.
"What was my father investigating when he died?"
Holroyd didn't answer.
I turned to look at him.
"You're still keeping that from me?"
He said it slowly. "An internal corruption network. Inside the division."
The room went thin.
After my father was killed, every memorial speech called him a hero. Holroyd had carried the flag at the burial. Holroyd had cried until his knees buckled.
If there had been a dirty cop in his unit, none of it had ever made the file.
"There was a list," Holroyd said. "We think the cartel got it. We never got it back."
I laughed once.
"You suspect Ardent killed my father, took the list, and then handed me to him."
"Maren. You're the right asset for this."
"Because I'm Marcus Vance's daughter, or because I'm dumb enough to keep volunteering?"
His eyes were red around the rims.
"Because the last person your father tried to reach the night he died was you."
I went still.
He slid an old digital voice recorder across the table.
Inside it, my father's breathing, ragged.
"Mae… don't trust…"
It cut.
He never named who.
I walked back into the compound on the third day Cass had been hanging in the basement.
The smell got into my mouth before I was off the stairs.
Don Tavo sat on a folding chair, wiping his hands with a linen square. Cass was strung from a beam by his wrists. His head was down. His hair was over his eyes.
He heard my boots and looked up.
The look was very calm.
Like a man who had always known I would come back.
Don Tavo smiled.
"Agent Vance. Right on time."
He kicked a tactical knife across the floor to my feet.
"You two ran a clean play on the airfield."
I didn't look at Cass.
"I just wanted to live."
"Then prove it."
He pointed at Cass.
"He pulled the witness off my floor. He cost me my buyer. You take one of his hands, I believe you."
Cass laughed.
It came out raw.
"Don Tavo. She doesn't have it in her."
My ribs went tight.
Don Tavo's eyes cooled.
Cass kept going. "She let me kiss her at the airfield."
The basement died.
I understood what he was doing. He was throwing himself in the mud so I had to wash him off in public. He was putting the knife in my hand and clearing the alibi.
I picked up the knife.
He said, under his breath as I stepped in, "Aim it clean."
I lifted my arm.
The point went through the web of his right hand, between thumb and index, through the broken-crescent scar, through the open link in the chain, and into the timber post behind him.
He made one short noise. His forehead went white.
Don Tavo clapped, three slow times.
"That'll do."
I let go of the knife and started to turn.
Behind me Cass said, hoarse, "Maren."
I didn't turn back.
He said, "Your father looked at me like that, too."
I stopped walking.
Don Tavo watched us, interested.
Cass smiled with blood on his teeth.
"He was on his knees. He asked me to leave the daughter alone."
My hand started to shake.
Don Tavo, finally satisfied, nodded.
"Looks like the two of you have a real history."