“He’s sending a squad of agents down to escort us in, and take charge of the van,” Grace explained. “Want to come meet our boss, Nick?”
“No thanks.” Nick parked in front of the giant Department of Justice structure. “I’m going home. If he insists on talking to me, I guess you can hunt me down at the airport again. I’ll be there for a while.”
“We’ll handle it,” Tim said. He reached over and shook hands with Nick. “Thank you.”
“It was mutually beneficial. There isn’t any other person I trust to hand off that chip to. Don’t forget to go over that USB drive on our Los Alamos traitor who sold it in the first place. He’s probably planning on taking his ill-gotten gains and fleeing the country if he hasn’t already. I sure hope Carol got the word out to detain the asshole when I first told her about the chip.”
“We’ll find out.” Grace hugged Nick from behind. “Go on and get out of here. Call me if you want an update before your flight leaves.”
“If I cared, I’d be going with you.” Nick slipped out of the driver’s seat with pack in hand Tim passed over to him. “See ya’ in the funny papers. I’m sorry Lassie was killed, Tim.”
“Yeah… that was a tough one. Take care, Nick.”
*
The two Marshals watched Nick walk down Pennsylvania Avenue, strapping on his pack, and looking like your average tourist.
“You were bluffing,” Sadun muttered.
Both Tim and Grace enjoyed that statement. Grace patted Sadun’s duct tape wrapped hand. “If you hadn’t said anything, Tim and I would have given the van and your dead buddy over to Nick. We would have received a call from him in maybe half an hour with the name, and then you and the recently deceased Rahil would have disappeared off the earth.”
“My advice,” Tim added. “Make yourself useful to the Attorney General. Try and stay in prison either in Saudi Arabia or Gitmo. If they ever turn you loose, Nick will find you, and believe me, you don’t want that.”
Sadun strained to see out the front windshield. “Who the fuck is he, and why the hell do you two take orders from him?”
“We don’t take orders from Nick,” Grace said, still watching Nick’s retreating figure. “We plan on staying the hell away from him.”
“Hey… I have an idea. Call our bluff,” Tim said. “The AG’s squad won’t be here for at least ten minutes. I bet if I call Nick, he’ll run back here to take you for a van ride.”
Sadun remembered the feel of his wrist bones being pulverized. He cringed down into the seat. “No. I will go with you.”
“You have chosen wisely,” Grace said, remembering one of Nick’s favorite lines.
*
After the initial hellos, Gus and Nick remained quiet for the first few minutes. It was not to last.
“Okay… what the hell is that shit eating grin on your face for, El Muerto?”
Nick kept grinning. “El Muerto… the dead one? Where the hell did you come up with that?”
This time it was Gus’s turn to smile, having been waiting for the first opportunity to spring his new name invention on Nick. “A guy named Javier Hernandez made a comic book character back in 1998. Guess what the character’s name was.”
“This is your show, Guster. Open the curtain, and get to it.”
“Diego de la Muerte. He gets sacrificed to the Aztec Gods when he was twenty-one. How old were you when you made it into Delta Force?”
“You already know the answer, wise guy.”
“Yep… twenty-one. So Diego fools around, gets sacrificed, and his heart is ripped out. He comes back on the scene as El Muerto. One of his powers is he can give life or take it away.”
“So this is what you’ve been doing since I left you on your own, huh? I knew I should have given you a ‘to do’ list before I left.”
“Damn, Nick, I thought that comic character would light you up. There are a lot of coincidences there to drive you nuts, Muerto.”
“You didn’t share this cool new nickname with Jean while walking her to school, did you?”
Gus’s silence sealed the deal. “You no good rotten dog. You knew all along what Jean would make out of a nickname like that.”
“Yeah, she loved the shit out of it, and the whole story, Muerto,” Gus replied happily. “So there. What’s done is done. Now tell me how your superhero gig back east went.”