As he rode the elevator up with the other man, Zack did his best to act like this sort of shit happened to him every day, but in truth his mind was racing. Why were they pulling him in? Some old op needed a full accounting? Some new op needed the eyes of a veteran to straighten it out?

Was he being offered a way back in CIA?

Hightower didn’t dare hope for this.

A minute later Zack took a seat at a mahogany table in a dark-paneled conference room, and within moments of his sitting down, a side door opened and in walked Jordan Mayes, the second-in-command at NCS.

Zack was surprised to see such a highflier, but more surprised that Jordan Mayes looked like hell, as if he’d been up for forty-eight hours.

Hightower knew Mayes from both of their days in SAD, although Mayes had always been enough rungs higher on the management ladder to where he didn’t need to slum with labor much. From time to time Hightower would find himself face-to-face with Mayes, but he could count those occurrences on one hand.

Zack knew Mayes had always worked directly for Denny Carmichael. He hoped that was no longer the case. Carmichael had fired Zack a couple of years earlier, unceremoniously and cruelly. Hightower had been in intensive care at the time with a gunshot wound to his chest and a dangerous infection in his lungs, and Carmichael sent word down through a low-level flunky that his services would no longer be required. Zack had been devastated by this, but he was a good soldier. He filed no protest; he made no complaint. He just lay alone in the hospital till the doctors released him, then he went home from the hospital to his apartment in Virginia Beach, and did nothing but lay there and watch TV.

For a year.

He had no family other than an ex-wife who lived somewhere in Colorado with a daughter Zack had never met, so he basically sat at home and recuperated, watched the news and wished he was still part of it.

He’d only picked up the hunting guide gig in West Virginia when he ran out of money. He hated shepherding rich assholes through the woods just so they could shoot a fucking pig that wasn’t bothering anybody, but the money was good, and all the hiking, climbing, and shooting had molded Zack into reasonably good shape within a short period of time.

He’d fantasized about getting back on, if not with CIA, at least with some private military company, but Carmichael had stripped Zack’s Top Secret clearance, so Zack knew no real PMC would touch him. He had no interest in doing stateside static security work, so he just kept hauling rich civvies out on wild boar hunts, hoping something interesting would happen in his life.