Page 3 of It's Always Been You

He threw back the Scotch and welcomed the burn of the alcohol down his throat. He had no time to do this. He blanked his mind for the next few hours to tackle the résumés in front of him.

At about 11:00 p.m., his cell phone buzzed.

“Nate?”

“Are you sitting down?”

“What’s wrong, buddy? Did something happen to Perot?”

“Our detail wrapped up with no problem. Did you check your e-mail?”

“No. What—”

“Check it.”

Frowning at his best friend’s vagueness, Travis opened his email and clicked on the most recent one from Nathan Reece.

The bottom fell out of his gut at the graphic pictures before him. “What the fuck?”

“The fingerprints threw up alarms in the CIA database,” Nate said grimly. “Luckily, I was working out of their station in Frankfurt. I hauled ass to Berlin. That man is John Cooper . . . or was.”

“John Cooper died with my wife,” Travis said, his voice turning hoarse. “How can he be alive?”

“Or recently dead?”

Travis stared at the picture of the man he had hated with every fiber of his being. John Cooper’s blood had been foundat their house the night Sarah had died. Their bodies had been found together.

“He was killed execution style?”

“That’s the initial report. They’re still doing the autopsy.”

“I’ll take the next flight out.”

“Travis, let me handle this. I’m already here. Use me.”

“No!” Travis snapped. “If Cooper is . . . was . . . alive, Sarah—”

“Can you just leave?”

Travis hated the challenge in Nate’s voice because it was true. He had shit to wrap up.

“Give me forty-eight hours. I’ll charter a flight out.”

“There’s something else. I’ll see what I can dig up from here, but Cooper had three passports on him. His American passport says his name is Jase Locke. The other two passports were German and Russian with different names. And Travis?”

“Yeah.”

Nate sighed deeply, twisting the knot in Travis’s gut further.

“What, Nate?”

His friend hesitated another beat before saying, “John Cooper had the same tat on the sole of his foot.”

“Fuck! Are you telling me that—?”

“I’m pretty certain now that specter agents are real.”

“Including Sarah?”

---