The Land Rover he’d found had been parked with the keys in it and Isaac had gotten behind the wheel and gone gunning. What Jim hadn’t known was that when Matthias and he had left, Isaac had hung back and watched the direction they’d headed.

Something just hadn’t seemed right about the trip out into the dunes: Nobody went anywhere alone with Matthias. It was like asking an Ebola patient to cough on you.

Making big fat sweeps out from camp, he’d found them an hour later a good five miles away from where he’d started: In his night-vision goggles, he’d zeroed in on something moving slowly across a rise, and considering that trolls didn’t really exist, he could only assume it was a man hefting another man through the sand.

As he’d driven over to them, he’d thought about how funny deserts were: Like their polar opposite, the ocean, at night they melded into the sky at the far distance, and it wasn’t until you had a reference point, like a shrub or a ship—or a dumb-ass idea like Jim’s savior shit—that you had visual confirmation the earth was in fact round, and not square.

And that Heaven was not where you were.

He’d been traveling without headlights and he didn’t turn them on. Instead, he took a white undershirt and held the thing out of the window, knowing that Jim would see it and hopefully not think it was the enemy. Fucker had been armed like a tank battalion when he’d left camp.

As Isaac had eased to a halt, he’d gotten out with both hands fully visible and allowed Jim to approach. The guy had looked exhausted, but then he’d been carrying Matthias’s deadweight across his back for God only knew how many miles through the shifting sand.

It had not been a surprise that Jim had glared at the knight-in-shining routine—in spite of their boss’s condition, which was clearly critical.

Just passing through, Isaac had said. Thought I’d take you to dinner.

With a shake, he came back to this night, here in . . . Where was he? Malden?

His voice held the same exhaustion Jim’s had had way back when. “Don’t get yourself killed because of me, okay?”

Jim muttered something that sounded like, A little late for that. But clearly, that hadn’t been the words.

Forcing his head back into the game, Isaac left the past and his emotions in the dust, his focus shifting to the present as he turned away and started walking into the entrance to the building.