44. CHANCE

“You asked about my scars that first night together,” I say. “Remember?”

Sara nods.

“I got those particular ones on a night with Sully in Mosul. This was back in the aftermath of a round of terror attacks on Assyrian Christians.”

She nods again. “I remember seeing that on the news.”

“Sully and Atlas had been involved with getting Christians out of the city the year before, during the first wave of attacks. That was when I first started doing work for him on my leave. This time, there were rumors that the terrorists behind the attacks were organizing something major.

“One night, Sully came to me with some intel he’d gotten from a local: there was a financier from Qatar meeting with the group to pass along money to up their game. We tracked down their headquarters a few miles from the city and the two of us went in alone.”

Sara’s eyes are saucers. “My God,” she breathes. “That’s…”

“Insane?” I say. “Yeah. Looking back, it was far and away the stupidest thing I’ve ever done. But I was cocky back then, and so was Sully. So anyway, we bust into the place, guns drawn, to find eight Iraqis in their jihadi best and one guy in a suit. Our man from Jordan.

“We got the drop on them, so when they drew on us, it was a foregone conclusion. The guy in the suit wasn’t armed, so we left him alive. We were going to take him to a CIA contact of Sully’s for interrogation.”

Again, Sara goggles. “CIA ties? Holy shit, Chance.”

“I know,” I say, grinning in spite of myself. “Went from shoplifting Zagnuts at the Bi-Rite to rubbing elbows with spooks. Hard to believe, huh?”

She nods. “Go on.”

“I kept my gun on the Jordanian as Sully checked the trunk he’d brought. It was stuffed with hundred-dollar US bills, $16 million in total. As he was looking at the cash, I saw something taped to the inside of the trunk’s lid. It was an IED – improvised explosive device.

“I was off guard for just a second, but that was enough for our new friend to dash forward and grab the IED. I only had a moment to react – I threw Sully behind me and tackled the guy. I managed to climb over the trunk and toss him through a boarded-up window. Momentum carried me through with him. The IED went off when he landed.”

She winces and points at my chest. “And that happened.”

I grin. “You should’ve seen the other guy. Anyway, I came to in an Army hospital with Sully by my bedside. There was a colonel next to him, waiting to ask me questions. ‘I told him that we took care of the terror cell,’ Sully says. 'Got anything to add?’

“I knew Sully well enough by then to know he was telling me to go along. I backed him up, and no one was the wiser about the cash. He stashed it in an Atlas tent for a few months before smuggling it into the States the next time we rotated home.”

Sara sits in silence for a long time. It’s a lot to process, I know. I lived it and even I have a hard time believing it actually happened to me instead of Matt Damon in some movie.

The quiet is just starting to make me nervous when she finally speaks.

“So the expansion was funded by terror money,” she says.

I nod. “We laundered it through some shell corporations first, but yeah.”

“Why bother with the company?” she asks, ever the investigator. “Why not just retire rich?”

“You had to know Sully. He saw a lot in Iraq, especially during those attacks in Mosul. Those people weren’t fighters, they were just ordinary folks trying to live their lives. And they were slaughtered. That’s what sparked the change in focus for Atlas.”

“And you went along with it?”

“Yeah,” I say. “I thought it was the right thing to do. I still do to this day.”

There it is – it’s out there. The question is how will she feel about it? What we did was highly illegal, but as far as I’m concerned, everything Atlas has accomplished since then was worth it and more.

But will she? Either we’ve just gotten a lot closer to each other, or I’ve handed her exactly what Pearce needs to ruin me.

“Who else knows about this?” she asks.

“Including you and me? Nobody.”

She blinks. “Really? Not even Tre?”

“Tre has always given me a nod and a wink when it comes to anything that might be on the fringes of the law. And he didn’t become president until after the money was in place.”

“So this is how you ended up inheriting Sully’s share of the company,” she says. “It wasn’t just that you shared his vision. You were literally the only one he could trust with Atlas.”

I nod. “Desmond – he was the guy who spoke at the board meeting that day – wasn’t overjoyed that Sully had skipped over his own son to give control to me. But he also realized he didn’t have the experience to run Atlas.”

“Terrorists funded the world’s first and only humanitarian security company,” she says.

“That’s the long and short of it, yeah.”

She stares into my eyes for a long moment before taking my head in her hands and laying a soft kiss on my lips.

“I always knew you’d make it big,” she says. “But I never realized you were a genius.”