five years later…

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Jake Harrington whistled under his breath as he stepped into a literal cave lit mostly by the glow of the many computer monitors lining the football field–size floor. There were caves, and then there were caves.

“Welcome to H.O.T. Watch Ops, Major Harrington,” a familiar voice said from nearby. “It’s an honor to meet a legend like you.”

A legend? Hardly. He replied, “No one calls me by my name. My Blackjack handle is “Howdy.”

“Howdy, Howdy!”

As if he hadn’t heard that a million times. He looked across the cave for the source of the lame greeting. Navy Commander, Brady Hathaway. A hell of a soldier. Hell of a man. They shook hands and clapped each other on the shoulders.

“How’ve you been?” Hathaway asked warmly.

Jake let a rare hint of a smile light his eyes for his former comrade-in-arms. “I’m good. You’re looking…tan.”

“It’s a real hardship tour living on a gorgeous Caribbean island like this, but someone’s gotta run this new Blackjack Ops facility. Code name is H.O.T. Watch.”

“What does H.O.T. stand for?”

“Hot Operator Team, of course.”

Jake snorted.

“What’ve you been up to, Howdy? Still too strong and silent to succumb to a woman?”

Jake threw him a withering look. In his line of work a social life was impossible, let alone a love life. It wasn’t that he didn’t crave being a normal guy from time to time. He would love to meet a woman and pursue a real relationship. But it just wasn’t possible.

Hathaway laughed at his sour expression. “It’s good to see you haven’t changed.”

Jake was used to being accused of having no sense of humor. Hell, they usually accused him of having no personality. Thing was, he couldn’t imagine running around being Mr. Chatty Cheerful while he killed people for a living. It seemed…disrespectful.

Besides, his work required him to exercise reserves of discipline that most people couldn’t even fathom. It wasn’t uncommon for him to lie still in the same place for three days at a time. And by still, he meant not a twitch. Not to scratch his nose, not to eat, not to stretch out a cramp. He barely blinked in such hides. Over the years, that capacity for utter physical stillness had translated into a capacity for utter emotional stillness.

His life was a glassy smooth lake. Unruffled. Serene. Yeah, and bland, boring and lonely. But a guy had to take the bad with the good.

Hathaway led him into the middle of the cave through rows of computer terminals and analysts. It looked like a NASA control room. Hathaway stopped in front of a man working at three flat-screen monitors each the size of his television at home and said, “Jake, this is Carter Baigneaux. His handle’s Boudreaux or just Boo. Carter, this is Jake Harrington, the sniper I told you about. Field handle Howdy.”

The man at the console nodded at Jake and pulled several thick manila folders that looked stuffed with mostly photographs out of a file drawer at his knee.

Hathaway continued, “Carter’s a Special Forces man, himself. He spotted what we’re about to show you.”

Jake frowned. Then why did they need him to look at whatever it was?

Hathaway picked up a slim red folder. “Take a look at this.”

Jake opened the file and picked up the top photograph inside. It was a grainy close-up of a man. A man he knew all too well. But why he’d been brought all the way out to this super secret island to look at a picture of a dead man mystified him. He thumbed through the rest of the pictures, all of them surveillance photos of the same individual.

He glanced up at Hathaway, frowning. “That’s Eduardo Ferrare, a drug lord my teammates and I tracked down and killed about five years back. Where’d you get these? I thought I’d seen every photo in existence of the guy, but I don’t remember these shots.”

Hathaway and Baigneaux exchanged significant looks with each other, and the atmosphere around the two men abruptly crackled with tension.

“What’s going on?” Jake bit out, dropping the file onto Carter’s desk.

Hathaway said heavily, “I’d better start at the beginning.” He gestured at a pair of empty chairs beside Carter, and Jake sank into one. He stretched out his legs to ease a sharp pain in his bum knee and crossed his arms. Once comfortable, he settled into his usual statue-like stillness.

Hathaway gestured around him. “This facility was built to allow us to do high-grade surveillance and monitoring of the Caribbean, and Central and South America. From here, we can see a gnat on a goat anywhere in this part of the world.”

Carter grinned and corrected, “We can see the gnat’s gonads.”

Jake sent a mild but quelling glance over at the Cajun. The guy subsided, muttering good-naturedly about seeing what Hathaway meant when he said Harrington was no fun.

Hathaway continued. “Carter picked up some interesting traffic patterns around a house in St. George, Gavarone, a few months ago. He ID’d several known drug dealers going in and out of the place. Not street punks, mind you. Players.”

Jake nodded tersely. Men like Eduardo Ferrare had been before the Blackjacks blew him up and burned his body almost past recognition.

“Carter started a photo dossier and inventoried all the visitors to the place over a two-month period. He got images of about twenty targets from a high-resolution satellite camera, and commenced identifying them. Boo, here, happens to have developed some badass facial recognition software. It was all going along swimmingly until he ran into one guy. When the facial-rec program popped up the ID, we knew there had to be an error.”

When Hathaway quit talking and showed no inclination to continue, Jake sighed and reluctantly took the bait. “And you knew it was an error because?”

“Because the guy in the picture is dead.”

Disquiet erupted in his gut. He sawwhere this was going, and it was impossible. When the Blackjacks killed someone, the target didn’t get back up. Ever. They confirmed all of their kills.

Jake leaned forward. “Are you telling me you think Ferrare is still alive?”

“You tell me. You just ID’d the guy off pictures taken three weeks ago.”

It took every ounce of his self-discipline not to leap out of his chair. No way was Eduardo Ferrare still alive! Fury jostled with dismay in his gut, but disbelief ultimately beat them both out.

“We pulled up the dossier on Ferrare,” Hathaway continued, “and saw that the Blackjacks ran an infiltration on his home a while back. Since you’re the only guy from that team still active with the Blackjacks, we wanted to show you Carter’s pictures to see what you made of them.”

He picked up the file and held it out to Jake again. “Take another look. Tell me if you can say that this isn’t Eduardo Ferrare.”

Frowning, Jake took the folder. He flipped it open. Studied the first picture intently. It showed a white stucco portico with a black Mercedes parked in front of it. The car sat low and heavy. Armored, he noted absently. A big guy stood in front of it, his back to the vehicle, in a classic bodyguard pose. Behind the vehicle was a similar guy. Beside the rear passenger door stood three men in a cluster. Two had their backs to the camera, but the third one’s face was clearly visible from this angle.

A face he knew as well as his own. A face he’d studied for hundreds of hours, both in pictures and through the sights of his sniper rifle. From every conceivable angle, displaying every conceivable expression.

He breathed, “Sonofabitch.”

Hathaway said dryly, “I gather you stand by your initial identification, then?”

Jake looked up, grim. “Yeah. That’s Eduardo Ferrare. But—” He broke off. It took a hell of a lot to shock him, and he was nigh unto speechless right now.

Hathaway finished for him. “—but Ferrare definitely died in Gavarone five years ago.”

Jake blurted, “I watched the guy’s house blow up around him. Hell, he died in Joe Rodriguez’s arms. We had the guy’s body. The clothes, the jewelry, the dental records… We had a positive ID. Eduardo Ferrare is dead.”

Hathaway spoke quietly. “Then who in the hell is the man in that picture?”