White Bone Read Free

I wanted access to the company’s Digital Services department. There’s a tech there, Vinay Kamat. Vinay will do anything for me. But not this time. He stonewalled me.”
    “No one likes being stonewalled.”
    “You see? I knew I should come here, straightaway. If it’s your op, Mr. Winston, then you can request whatever you want from tech services, including putting a source on the text sent to me to confirm beyond a doubt it was from Grace.”
    “She’s fine.” The deep voice came from behind Knox. It belonged to David Dulwich. Prior to joining Brian Primer’s security firm, he’d been Knox’s supervisor for contractor work based out of Kuwait. In recent years, Dulwich had hired Knox on a freelance basis to perform dead drops or kidnapping extractions. Most recently, Dulwich had betrayed Knox and Grace during the Istanbul op, something nearly but not entirely forgiven by Knox.
    “What the hell?” Knox barked at Dulwich. “You’re tracking my reservations now?”
    “I look out for my friends,” Dulwich said. He sat down and waited to be served. “Don’t read too much into it.”
    “Where is she? Did you hear what I told him about her text? A bomb and a question mark.” He closed his eyes to calculate. “Ten, maybe eleven hours ago.” Knox paused. “You got the same text, didn’t you?”
    In the silence, though, Knox reconsidered. Among Dulwich’s many skills, he was completely unreadable, even by a close friend and associate like Knox. “No, you didn’t. And why would that be, one might ask.” He directed this to Winston.
    “I’m merely an observer at this point,” Winston said. “Carry on.”
    “You want to tell him?” Knox asked Dulwich.
    “John’s implying Grace wouldn’t contact me if she feared she’d been blown because it might compromise the op if traced to me or, God forbid, you, sir.”
    “Ah!” Winston said.
    “Loyal to a fault,” Knox said. “That’s our Grace. Contacts me because I have nothing to do with anything you two are up to. Me, because if her text is traced, the trouble stays away from you, and she knows I can handle it.”
    “If you say so,” Dulwich said.
    “So? What now? You call Vinay. We get her twenty and you or I, or both of us for that matter, hunt her down and get her out of whatever hellhole you have her in. Why? Because that’s what she’ll expect.”
    Dulwich sat stoically. The kind of stoicism Knox had no room for. Not when this tired, this concerned.
    “Kenya,” Dulwich said. “The op is in Kenya.”
    “She wouldn’t leave me hanging like that. I should have gotten a second text. Something. Anything.”
    “It is disturbing,” Dulwich said. “Not alarming. Not yet, but disturbing. We both know there are a hundred reasons for it—dead phone battery, loss of reception, loss of phone—none of which are worth getting too worked up over.”
    “Ten, eleven hours.”
    “Understood. But, John, it’s the first I’ve heard of it. Give me a moment, would you?”
    “You wouldn’t take my call! You’d have heard of it sooner if—”
    “Easy!”
    “Primer wouldn’t give me the time of day. Kenya? What the fuck?”
    Dulwich had a gnarly, road-rash kind of face. It looked as if someof his medals for heroism might have been pinned to his right cheek at one point. The scars were, in fact, the result of field sutures and subsequent skin grafts to repair fourth-degree burns over 60 percent of his body. Knox had dragged the man from a burning truck cab in the middle of a desert; that act of selflessness hung between them always, like something ready to detonate.
    “It’s a solo op,” Knox said. “That’s fine. It’s Grace, so it’s mostly forensic accounting. Help me out here.”
    “You’re doing fine on your own. No reason to panic, John,” Dulwich said. “I should have taken your call. Mea culpa.”
    “I can’t take another Istanbul, Sarge. We put that behind us. You fuck with me now and we’ve got problems, you and me. Big