Ostensibly.
As he looked out at the water, he decided he could do worse than Virginia in springtime. He noticed that some kind of bird had built a giant mess of a nest on a buoy out at the mouth of the small cove. An osprey nest, he thought. The Northern Neck, a tidewater peninsula tucked between the Potomac and the Rappahannock Rivers, was on the Atlantic Flyway, making it popular with bird-watchers.
A Californian, Huck was getting used to the lay of the gentle land with its rolling hills, creeks, marshes, nature preserves, historic sites and small towns. Washington and Lee country. Life was slower here. He could picture George Washington and Robert E. Lee as little boys, fishing the same rivers, praying in the same churches that were still scattered across the landscape.
Or not-Huck didn’t know what Washington and Lee did as boys or if the places he’d seen on his way to Yorkville had existed in their day. History had never been his long suit.
He was better at catching fugitives.
It was, after all, a fugitive who had inadvertently led him to the Northern Neck in the first place.
But he shut off that line of thinking, as if it might betray him, and jogged back down to the loop road, passing the second cottage, a sister to the one where Alicia Miller had stayed. He kept his pace slow, following the wider, but still quiet, road along the water, feeling the humidity building in the midafternoon air.
He came to a small, old-fashioned motel with its own dock. A couple of old guys in baseball caps smoked cigarettes on two benches above the water, watching fishing boats tie up for the day.
At first, even Huck didn’t recognized Diego Clemente, his partner and backup, also an undercover deputy U.S. marshal. Clemente-also a Californian-looked as if he’d been fishing the Chesapeake Bay his entire life. He hopped off his boat onto the rickety dock wearing a New York Yankees cap, a bright yellow anorak, cargo pants and beat-up boat shoes. His brown skin and black hair set off a killer smile and killer eyes. Women liked Diego, but he and Huck had both sworn off women until they were back home, their current assignment behind them.
Breakwater Security wasn’t necessarily the legitimate security company it purported to be. Diego was posing as a guy from up North who’d taken a month off to fish and get over his recent divorce, a cover designed to explain why he kept to himself. Not that there was a hell of a lot to do in Yorkville, Virginia.
Locked in Diego’s boat, Huck knew, were state-of-the-art communications equipment, tactical gear and weapons, including, no doubt, Clemente’s favorite MP5. If things went bad at Breakwater Security, Huck knew he could count on Diego Clemente to help him kick ass and stay alive.
Huck pretended to pause to catch his breath, although it would take more than a five-mile run to really wind him. He worked his butt off on a regular basis to stay in shape.
Standing next to him, Diego tapped out a cigarette, then held up the pack to Huck. Huck shook his head. “Smoking’ll kill you.”
“So will women, and still the knowledge of my impending doom doesn’t stop me,” Diego replied.
In his regular life, Diego didn’t smoke. He was a nuts-and-seeds type. He pulled a small lighter from his pocket. “Storm’s brewing. You can feel it in the air, can’t you?”
“It’s East Coast air. I can’t tell.”
Diego lit his cigarette and inhaled, blowing out smoke. “I talked to Nate Winter.” Winter was leading the investigation into Breakwater Security’s activities. “I don’t have many answers for you. Alicia Miller is an attorney at Justice. She works under Deputy Assistant AG Lattimore.”
“Gerard Lattimore? Hell, Diego, he and Crawford-”
“Friends since they were roommates at Princeton twenty years ago.”
“The cottage?”
“It’s owned by a woman named Quinn Harlowe. Expert in transnational crime. She worked under Lattimore until January. Now she’s consulting. I heard she’s teaching a class or something at the FBI Academy.” Diego pointed toward the water, as if they were discussing fishing. “She helped get Alicia Miller her job at Justice.”
“So they were friends before they worked together. Any word on Miller?”
Diego didn’t answer.
That meant no.