The Last Good Man

An Intervention

We’re already too late, Lincoln thinks.

It’s 0130 in Rabat. He’s standing in True’s empty hotel room in the company of a foreign liaison officer named Nadim Zaman, who ordered the hotel staff to issue him a key card after True failed to respond to a knock on the door.

“She was here,” Zaman proclaims, gesturing at empty air. “The towels and the toiletries have been used. But she has gone out. Perhaps she found another hotel guest with whom to pass the night.”

Rohan is in the doorway. He’s dressed like a civilian in khaki cargo pants and a brown silk shirt with rolled-up sleeves, but his arms are crossed, muscles showing, and he’s got a belligerent look. “That is not what happened,” he says.

Nadim’s eyes narrow. “When a woman disappears in the night, refusing to answer her phone, this is most often what is happening.”

Nadim has made it no secret that he resents their presence here, resents the Warrant of Capture and Rendition that provides legal authority for them to pursue and detain Jon Helm, and resents that he’s been assigned as their liaison. He insisted on a full inspection of their equipment and the leased vehicle they picked up at the airport—an exercise that took over an hour—before finally agreeing to look up the hotel name True had entered on her customs document.

Lincoln works to keep his voice low and his temper in check as he explains the obvious to Nadim. “Our concern is that she may be unable to answer her phone. She would have begun seeking leads on the location of Jon Helm the moment she arrived. It’s possible she asked the wrong questions in the wrong place.”

The story he told Nadim was mostly correct. They’ve come seeking Jon Helm, True arrived before them, they expected to meet up with her. He did not mention that True came on her own or that she may not wish to be found. He did not mention that State granted the warrant only as a least-worst option, to avoid the accusation of prior knowledge of Jon Helm’s identity and the truth of what happened at Nungsan.

“You believe she has already encountered this Jon Helm?” Nadim asks.

“I don’t know,” Lincoln answers.

There’s too much that he doesn’t know; there’s been too little time to prepare.

Only forty-five minutes after they lifted off from Manila, Alex came down the aisle, grim-faced, to tell him what she’d done. There was no outlet for the fury that came boiling up in his throat, not in the packed cabin of a long-haul jet less than an hour into a trans-Pacific crossing, so he clamped his teeth together and he held it down like the worst meal he’d ever eaten. If she sank a knife in his chest, it would have hurt less.

But fuck, he earned it.

He’d learned early who Shaw Walker really was: a self-righteous man, a man of absolutes, a natural leader who possessed a dangerous charisma that made him easy to love and easy to forgive, even when you’d seen his dark side. Shaw demanded everything of his soldiers—but he would do anything for them, too.

True sensed that. She knew Shaw as the last man to stand by Diego, the man who begged to stand in Diego’s place. He was a bridge to her son, and maybe she saw some ghost of Diego within him.

Lincoln failed to respect that, blinded by his own sense of responsibility for what he knew Shaw had done since—his alliance with Al-Furat, the atrocities Miles had witnessed, Renata’s murder. He allowed those things to happen when he’d failed to make a full report on their last action in Kunar Province. Add True’s defection to that list of harmful consequences—but it stops now.

Lincoln engineered this mission, assembling his equipment and his team, from the cramped seats of commercial airliners as he worked his way to North Africa. Chris fought him on the action in a rapid-fire exchange of emails bounced off of satellites.

Chris:

Lincoln:

Chris:

Lincoln:

Chris:

Lincoln:

Chris:

Lincoln:

Chris:

Lincoln:

Chris:

Lincoln:

Tamara gave them a place to begin their search when she reported the results of her dust and pollen analysis. Lincoln knew True would head to Morocco. When his phone logged a missed call from Dove Barhoum—almost ten hours ago now—he took it as confirmation that she was in Rabat.

He called Dove after that—several times—but Dove never picked up, never called back, never tried to contact him again in all the hours since.

One more thing to worry about.

Now he turns his head slightly so that Nadim Zaman appears within the full range of color perceived by his natural eye, and says, “If you could feed her profile to the network of municipal cameras, we could backtrack, find out where she went after she left the hotel.”

“No.” The liaison officer says this in a tone that allows no possibility of negotiation. “I have helped you locate her hotel room as a gesture of good will but I can go no farther. She is present in this country legally and she is not named in your warrant. I have no cause to investigate her activities.”

“She may have information material to our search for Jon Helm,” Lincoln says.

Nadim turns his hands palm up. “She is a professional soldier, yes? She is on your team. Give her time. If she is passing the night in pleasure, she will be here again in the morning. And if she is hunting this Jon Helm, she will contact you when she has a lead. Until then, I suggest you get some sleep.”

The wafer shape of a surveillance beetle clings to the frame of the hotel room window, its camera eye watching the street below and the sky overhead—although at this late hour the city is quiet and no one’s about.

Miles watches the street too, even though he knows ReqOps’ impromptu surveillance network will issue an alert when True shows up.

If she shows up.

He’s here to witness what he hopes will be the last action in the book he’s writing. He wants the narrative to end with Shaw Walker being taken down—but True is missing and he worries he’ll have to describe one more atrocity before he gets to the end.

“They’re coming back,” Felice announces. “They just stepped off the elevator.”

She’s sitting cross-legged on one of the beds, a tablet balanced on her lap as she idly monitors the surveillance feeds. Khalid has been lying beside her, hands behind his head, but he gets up now and goes to the door.

Lincoln booked the team into adjoining rooms with a door open between them, but the three of them gravitated to one side to wait together.

Khalid opens the door, stepping back as Lincoln comes in with Rohan right behind him.

“That Nadim is a real prick,” Lincoln announces.

Rohan affirms this with a fervent “A-men.”

“Did you find anything?” Miles wants to know.

“Nothing in her room,” Rohan says, looking worried. “Not even a toothbrush. I don’t think she’s planning to come back.”

“We can’t know that,” Lincoln counters, irritated. “All she was carrying when she took off was a daypack with a few toys inside. If she went out for any reason, she would have taken that with her. Doesn’t mean she’s not coming back.”

“You want me to launch the copters?” Khalid asks. “Start looking for her?”

They brought four starburst copters with them. Lincoln nods his approval of this suggestion. “Put up two, unarmed, cameras only. Hold the second pair in reserve.”

“Hey,” Felice says, “looks like our friend Nadim wasn’t satisfied with his first inspection of our truck.”

Miles sits down beside her so he can look over her shoulder at the tablet. A video feed shows Nadim crouching beside the rear bumper of their leased SUV—a rugged off-road model, desert tan in color. His hand disappears underneath the bumper. Then he walks swiftly to his own vehicle. “Tracking device,” Felice says. “Got to be.”

“Prick,” Rohan mutters.

“He’s got a job to do,” Miles says. “And you can’t expect him to be happy about a bunch of foreign assholes showing up in his hometown with a special writ of kickass.”

Felice snorts, but Lincoln is somber when he says, “Let’s just hope our pal Nadim is not on Jon Helm’s payroll.”

“Fuck Jon Helm,” Rohan says with feeling. “I don’t give a shit about Jon Helm. We’re not even getting a bounty on him. What I want to know is, where is True?”

It’s almost 0200. Too late at night for pleasant assumptions and comforting excuses. “She’s with him,” Miles says. “Or she’s on her way to him. But she’s found him. Otherwise she’d be here.”

Lincoln’s lip curls. It’s not what he wants to hear. “Help Khalid get the copters up,” he tells Rohan irritably. “And leave the tracker in place for now. We’ll get rid of it when we need to go stealth.”