Casanova eyed me, taking inventory of the off-market body armor, the computer strapped to my arm, and my various weapons—a pair of Randall Mark 14 Attack knives strapped upside down to my armored vest, a Sig Sauer 9 mm in a shoulder rig, and a gun of a type he’d likely never seen before in my hand. That was a Snellig 22A-Max gas dart gun, which is proprietary tech, made exclusively for Rogue Team International. No one else has it. All Casanova knew was that the barrel of a nasty-looking pistol was pointing at his favorite crotch.

He had a lot of reaction choices, but Casanova opted for nonchalance. He sat back, his shoulders resting against the cold concrete. “You come in here with your dog and … what do you call that? Some kind of ninja costume? All black and scary?” He spat on the floor an inch from my shoe. Not a lot of sputum, but enough to make a statement. “I will tell you what I told the last ten interrogators.”

“Oh,” I said, “and what was that?”

“I told them to go fuck their mothers up their asses,” he said calmly. “And to not bother with lubricant. Really. You should do the same. It’s how your mother likes me to fuck her.”

He grinned. Casanova had large horse teeth, and one of the front ones was gray, evidence of a dead nerve.

“Here’s the thing, buttercup,” I said. “That’s usually a good line if you want to start a fight. And you’re a pretty big lump of shit, so maybe you’ve made somebody piss his pants once upon a time. Maybe you’ve pushed buttons that made other people lose their cool and swing on you, which is a nice way of canceling an interrogation. Blah blah blah. Sad truth is you don’t have the gravitas or the cool to sell that line to someone who’s actually in the game.”

He got slowly to his feet and did his level best to loom. “Fuck you and your mother.”

Ghost stepped forward and gave a menacing growl, but I clicked my tongue, and he immediately sat down. Ears up, tail flat, eyes merciless.

“I’m not afraid of you or that fucking dog,” he said.

“Statements like that speak poorly of your ability to read the room,” I said.

There must have been some quality in my voice because I saw a flicker on his face. He looked me up and down, head cocked to one side as if trying to remember where he might have heard my voice before.

“Who are you?” he asked.