“I didn’t have to even let you up here. I could’ve locked the elevator. What are you going to do with me?” Pilcher asked quietly.

“That’s for the people you tried to murder to decide.”

Pilcher’s eyes misted.

As if, for a fleeting moment, he saw himself with clarity.

He looked back at his desk.

At the wall of screens.

His voice became raspy with emotion.

“It got away from me,” he said, and then he blinked, a hardness returning to those small black eyes, like water freezing over.

Pilcher came at Ethan with a short-bladed fighting knife, a sudden, lunging stab aimed straight at Ethan’s gut.

Ethan deflected Pilcher’s wrist, the blade only grazing his side.

Rising to his feet, he rained down a savage left hook that snapped Pilcher’s head around and cracked his cheekbone, the force of the blow driving him off the couch, his head smashing into the edge of the coffee table.

Pilcher shivered out on his back and the knife slipped out of his grasp, clattering to the hardwood floor.

VII

VII

HASSLER

HASSLER

SECRET SERVICE HQ
SEATTLE, WASHINGTON
1,814 YEARS AGO

Hassler enters his corner office in the Columbia Center, happy to see Ethan Burke already seated across from his desk. By his watch, he’s five minutes late. Burke probably arrived five minutes early, which means he’s been waiting at least ten minutes.

Good.

“Sorry to keep you waiting,” Hassler says as he walks past his agent.

“Not a problem.”

“Imagine you’re wondering why I pulled you off that Everett thing.”

“We’re close to an arrest.”

“That’s good to hear, but I have something more pressing for you.”

Hassler takes a seat and studies Ethan across the desk. He isn’t wearing his black-and-whites today. His surveillance outfit is a gray jumpsuit, the shoulders still damp from the late-morning drizzle. He can just see the outline on Ethan’s left side of his concealed shoulder holster.

It crosses Hassler’s mind that he can still pull the plug on this. Until the words leave his mouth, he hasn’t committed a crime.

In his years in law enforcement, interrogating criminals, he’s always hearing about the nebulous line between right and wrong. They were only stealing for their family. They’d only intended to do it once. And his favorite: they didn’t even realize they’d crossed a line until they were deep into enemy territory on the other side, with no hope of ever getting back.

But as Hassler sits on this side of the desk, this side of the line, all that conjecture on the ambiguous nature of right and wrong feels like bullshit.

He sees his choice with crystalline clarity.

If he sends Ethan on this assignment, he has crossed the line forever.

No coming back.