Most of the guys look my way like I have a horn sticking out of my forehead, but Travers shakes my hand.

I’m not happy to see him, but I do owe him some thanks. “I appreciate the heads-up back there in the alleyway.”

Travers shrugs. “Was supposed to bring you back alive.”

“Right. So . . . you’re TL now. Congrats.”

He shrugs again, then takes a beer passed to him by one of his teammates. “It’s tough barking orders at these degenerates.” A couple guys laugh, but most of them are still securing their gear.

Then Travers says, “Quick question. The boys and I have a bet you can settle.”

“Okay.”

“Did you schwack Ratko Babic last week? I say yes, most of these other dipshits say no.”

“No,” I reply.

Travers grins, turns to his team. “That means yes!”

One of the other guys says, “It also means no, Chris.”

The Falcon 50 begins taxiing towards the runway while the SAC team argues.

Zack is next to me now, and I can see him looking my way, but I avoid his gaze as long as possible. We take off, and an awful smell fills the air.

I look around for its origin for a moment. I’m not sure, but it seems like one of them either jumped or fell into a canal.

Finally, not ten minutes into the flight, Zack leans over to me.

“I’m missing something here, aren’t I?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean . . . you didn’t want to come back to Langley. But you showed up here, and you let Travers and his team board. You could have gotten that pistol off Sharon. She wasn’t going to shoot you, and you knew that.”

“Your point?”

“You’ve just, basically, shanghaied yourself. Now . . . gotta ask, why would you go and do a thing like that?”

“I needed to get to the States.”

With a quizzical look he says, “Really? You ready to go back to work?”

I shake my head. “Not to go back to work at Poison Apple. I have to do something else first, and I need your help.”

“And Hanley will be cool with it?”

I reach for my beer now. “No, Hanley won’t be cool with it at all.”

Zack drains the last of his Corona and has another passed down his way. When it arrives without a lime he yells back towards the men sitting near the galley, and Sharon grabs an uncut lime and hands it to a Ground Branch guy I heard called Teddy. Teddy tosses the lime the length of the cabin, and Zack catches it, then pulls a pocketknife and cuts off a chunk. “Now, Six, you know me well enough to know I follow orders. And my orders are to get you back to Matt.”

“Well then, I’ll just have to appeal to that hard heart of yours.” This is my plan B, and if possible, it may have an even lower probability for success than my plan A.

Zack squeezes lime juice into his bottle. “Yeah, well, good luck with that.”

“I’m doing the right thing, man. I’ve uncovered something big, something awful, and it involves Americans. I want to stop it.”

Zack replies with one word. “Yawn.”

“I’m targeting a massive sex trafficking consortium.”

He still looks bored by my spiel as he gulps his Mexican beer. “Sex trafficking.”

“I’ve been working with an analyst from Europol. Her sister’s been taken. They run the girls from the east, through the Balkans and then to Italy, where they are sold. We know this particular outfit is making billions of dollars a year, so we estimate they have tens of thousands of victims around the world.”

An eyebrow rises on Hightower’s otherwise impassive bearded face. “That’s bad.”

I nod slowly, looking into his eyes. “A lot of them are just kids, Zack.”

With this he puts his beer down on the table in front of me, and then he looks away. “That’s real bad.”

“Damn right it is. Talyssa and I are this close to breaking it wide open. Right now she is getting intel we can use to pinpoint the leadership of the organization, but we already know they are located somewhere on the West Coast.”

Zack doesn’t respond to this. He’s silent for several seconds, in fact, and I think I’m getting through.

But then he says, “I have orders, Six, and when I have orders I don’t listen to anything else. Sorry, dude. That’s a fucked-up sitrep you just gave me, and your heart’s in the right place, as always, but I do what I’m told.”

I shake my head. “Not this time. This time you are going to help me.”

“You should know better than that by now. Remember when I was tasked with killing you? What did I do?”

“You failed.”

He sighs in frustration. “Fair enough, but I did my fucking best, didn’t I?”

“And I bet you regret that every day.” It was sarcasm, but he doesn’t pick up on that.

“Not once, man. Not once. I don’t ponder over the wisdom of my orders. I joined up with this outfit knowing it wasn’t all about me. You, on the other hand, just go wherever the wind blows you.”

“But you aren’t an Agency employee anymore. You’re a Poison Apple asset, and that means you can, and should, think for yourself. I’m not asking you to do one damn thing against Hanley, the Agency, or America. I’m just asking you to do what’s fucking right.”

He hesitates a moment, but I can tell he’s not giving in. “Sorry, man.”

I want to hit him in the face, and apparently it registers in my eyes.

“Calm down or I’ll get the boys to restrain you.”

I control my urges and lean back in the leather chair. It’s time to play my next card.

“What if I told you Matt Hanley was in on it?”

Zack pauses, then laughs. “Hanley’s a sex trafficker, right.” When I don’t respond, he says, “C’mon, dude. No fucking chance.”

I turn to Travers. “Chris, where did you get the intel that I was near the Casino of Venice tonight at midnight?”

Travers looks to Hightower, not sure if he should tell me. Zack just shrugs like it doesn’t make any difference.

Chris says, “Brewer. I asked where it originated from and she said that was ‘need to know.’”

I look to Zack, and Zack is confused now. To Chris he says, “You are the TL on the ground. You would need to know the origin of the intel so you could evaluate it.”