“Understood,” Sam said, inhaled deeply, and started jogging as quietly down the path as she could, followed by a trained killer hell-bent on protecting his older brother. This is what families do. This is what Ben would do, and the thought comforted her.

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Chapter
TWENTY-EIGHT

Zack had reached the far side of Forest Edge Court, and unbeknownst to him, he’d been less than a third of a mile from his brother before Nick and Sam had left the main path to move back toward Hidden Refuge Drive.

The backpack weighed on him, not just physically, as he wondered what could be so valuable that the intern son of a retired deputy director would be intentionally placed at risk over. As Josh Harper had stated, the entire Intelligence Community leaked like a sieve at times, and Zack had been following it out of a sense of professional curiosity. He despised those who’d betrayed their oath to the Constitution, and it was for that very simple reason that he’d left the agency. He’d found himself bitter to the point of resentment, distracting him from his mission. The fact that the senior executives on the seventh floor were aware of what had transpired with his team and refused to act because the mission had been deemed “a success” had been the straw that broke Zack Chambers’s back. He’d resigned more than six years ago and never once considered returning.

He’d been dating his wife at the time, and he’d told her he worked for the State Department, which was amusing to her when she’d met some of his “coworkers,” actual paramilitary teammates in Special Activities Division. She’d commented to him that they looked like they belonged on a battlefield and not in an office. He’d only kissed her, laughed, and told her that foreign policy was a full-contact sport. She hadn’t believed a word of it, and both of them knew it.

When he’d finally decided to pull the proverbial trigger, the first day after he’d returned from Malta, he’d informed Steph before doing it. The beautiful blonde with green eyes that would become the mother to his two children had known what he was leaving, and she’d asked him to be sure it was the right thing for him, not her. That selfless response had been the final nail in his government coffin, and he’d walked into his boss’s office the next day and walked out of the agency two weeks later. They’d given him a choice, but it wasn’t one that he could accept. The irony that his boss had been Brandon Harper and that the man he’d once respected and served was now back in his life was not lost on him. Maybe it’s some sort of twisted karma, everything coming full circle like some kind of dysfunctional family reunion.