“You mean you want an edge,” Dom joked, still bleary-eyed.

Jack shook his head. “Don’t quit your day job.”

Before they landed, Dom had called Martinez for advice, and within the week today’s private instruction had been arranged.

—

Dom and Jack knelt barefoot on the thick dojo sparring mat, waiting for Martinez and the special instructor to arrive. They waited in silence out of respect for the traditions of the dojo, and also in their practice of mindfulness—a spiritual discipline Adara had introduced to The Campus recently. Mindfulness helped foster focus, creativity, and awareness, making the team more productive in every aspect of their work, including combat.

Jack and Dom wore heavy gym shorts and shirts for the training. Their legs, arms, and hands bore purpling bruises and scrapes from the rescue operation. Jack had a black eye from where his head had slammed into the ladder, too.

Bone-tired and sore, Jack still leaped at the opportunity to fill in a chink in his combat armor. Around his neck he wore a small silver pendant engraved with the Japanese ideographs for kaizen—continuous improvement. It was more than a piece of token jewelry. It symbolized his personal drive to be the very best he could be at everything, no matter the cost.

Jack’s exhausted mind began to wander. He knew part of his incessant drive for personal excellence was because of his dad, Jack Senior. Not that his dad ever forced him to do anything or held him up to some impossibly high standard. Just the opposite. His father had only shown him unconditional love and support as he grew up.

There was the old saying that “familiarity breeds contempt,” but in Jack Junior’s case, just the opposite was true. He saw his dad as a heroic figure even before he was privy to all of the clandestine work Senior had accomplished when Junior was only a kid. So it was hard for Jack Junior not to try to live up to the example his father lived in front of him—not in order to earn his love and respect, but rather out of love and respect for the man he had the privilege of calling Dad.

His mother worried when Junior was younger that he was trying too hard to compare himself to his father. “Well? What did you expect when you named me Junior?” he once joked with her. She shrugged, conceding the point. As the chief of ophthalmology at Johns Hopkins, she was no slouch herself. His parents demonstrated the value of disciplined lives devoted to the service of others. It was the best inheritance any kid ever received from any parent, and he and his siblings started collecting that inheritance the day they were born into the family.