“You son of a bitch!” Emerson said.

Gannon nodded.

“You better believe it,” he said. “I’m about as nasty a son of a bitch the friendly neighborhood psychopaths of the Naval Special Warfare Command and Joint Special Operations Command and the theater of combat ever created.”

Gannon shook his head as he laughed.

“And what do you know? You and your genius boss just pulled me out of retirement,” he said.

91

The most important briefing in Reyland’s life took place at eleven thirty in the morning off-site in a ruddy brick antique furniture warehouse in the Camden section of London.

Reyland rolled into its rainy cobblestone courtyard with his new team in two Range Rovers at eleven fifteen. There were eight men in his new British operational detail. He thought they looked much like his old American team only they were paler and better dressed.

He left his new men on the ground floor and came up the warehouse’s creaking stairs alone. Coming along the grim and grubby walls, Reyland thought the massive furniture-filled space looked old enough to have stored the tea bags that started the Revolutionary War.

He took a breath and sneezed. It even smelled old. There had been a consignment shop just down the road from where they’d summer sometimes with his grandparents in the rural hick kingdom of southeast Indiana, and it smelled like that. Like old church ladies’ coats that had been sitting up in a hot, dusty attic.

Reyland was standing by the window when his MI6 counterpart arrived with her people at twenty past. Reyland smiled as he watched her clop over between the old sideboards and rolled-up rugs in her ridiculous heels. Brooke Wrenhall was shorter in person than she had seemed in the SCIF screen, and her makeup was even more garish.

For a moment, they watched the rain pissing into the green water of the Regent’s Canal outside the dusty old arched window.

“Ah, another sunny day in London,” Reyland said.

Wrenhall took a fat file folder out of her bag and slapped it onto the top of a tarp-covered desk they were standing beside.

Reyland didn’t even have to look at the title beneath the national security designation to know it was Michael Gannon’s covert military records file. He had just read some of it himself on the plane. He’d actually asked the Pentagon for a completely unredacted version and had straight up been denied. There was no love lost between them and the DIA.

“Doing a little light reading?” Reyland said.

“I just got off the phone with a friend of mine in California about this Gannon. This Michael Gannon,” Wrenhall said.

Reyland lifted his chin.

“Interesting conversation, was it? How’s the weather out there?”

“Do you know Bill McKendry?”

“The recently retired head of JSOC? I’ve met the admiral,” Reyland said, nodding.

Wrenhall patted the fat file folder.

“Bill says this Michael Gannon was a legend among legends in the SEAL community and was nice enough to send me some of his records. He’s been through the CIA’s Farm, did you know that? He has tradecraft.”