George gave the man a once-over. He was a neatly trimmed drone in an off-the-rack suit. They stared at each other like two ex-friends who had awkwardly bumped into each other on a street corner. This was the part where George was supposed to yell indignantly, demand a lawyer, make bombastic threats of the “do you know who I am?” variety. He was thirsty, but he didn’t ask for a drink. He had questions, but the suit was too cheap to have the answers to them.

“Can we just skip the overture? Is Titus in there?” George gestured with his head toward the mirror.

This time the drone’s eyebrow contracted slightly. George looked up at the mirror.

“Titus. Is all the pageantry really necessary?”

The drone’s eyes went down to the table, listening to instructions in his earpiece. He stood and left the room without a word.

George waited.

The door opened. A short, stocky man entered. He was only a few years older than George, but those years had been spent outdoors in some of the hardest places on Earth. The sun and elements had charred his skin, and the man had a face like steel wool, deep lines etched into it under a head of sparse hair the color of ash. A vivid scar ran down the man’s jawline from his left ear and disappeared into the collar of his shirt. A souvenir from Tikrit. The pinky and ring fingers were missing from his left hand. Stories varied on how many times the man had been shot, and George believed Titus preferred it that way. Colonel Titus Stonewall Eskridge Jr., founder and CEO of Cold Harbor, was in the myth-making business.

“George.” Titus sat in the recently vacated chair.

“Titus.”

Each man regarded the other. Eskridge’s ties to Lombard went back decades. George hadn’t liked him then, and nothing he’d heard in the intervening years had caused him to reconsider.

Cold Harbor was a midsize private military contractor based east of Mechanicsville, Virginia. It was named for a particularly nasty one-sided battle of the Civil War that had inflicted terrible casualties on Ulysses S. Grant’s forces. Never able to compete with the big boys for the major contracts, Cold Harbor did well for itself by fostering a reputation as an outfit that got the job—any job—done.

Sometimes ruthlessness trumped size.

Titus broke into a grin. “All right, I gotta know. How’d you know I was back there? You spooked my team, Obi-Wan. Was it one of my boys? Were they talking when they should have been listening?”

“No,” George said. “Just a lucky guess.”

“Where are my manners? You must be thirsty,” Titus said and poured a cup of water. He pushed it within inches of George’s fingers. “Was it one of my boys?”

“No. Surprisingly, I just don’t have a lot of enemies.”

“I’m not your enemy,” Titus said.

“Weren’t,” George corrected.