Page 91 of The Drifter

"Where's my mother?"

"I told you already." He sipped. "She's safe. Why don't we sit down?"

He gestured with the mug toward the living room. The room where we'd played cards on the floor and watched the one channel the antenna caught and caused, per my mother's ruling, more ruckus than any seven boys since the Old Testament.

"I'd rather stand."

Craine shrugged, easy, like the preference of furniture. "Suit yourself."

He looked at me a while. Time ticked. He let it tick, comfortable in it, the way he'd been comfortable in the silence on the phone. I gave him back nothing. We stood in my mother's kitchen taking each other's measure while the windmill creaked somewhere outside.

"I am sorry it's come to this," he said, finally. "I want you to know that. But the Danes are a stubborn family. I've tried every civilized channel. It seems the only way to make your people listen is to make things personal." He spread one hand, taking in the room, the ranch, the day. "So. Here we are."

He tilted his head at Sasha.

"Would you prefer Ms. Benning step into another room? Or you and I could take the air out back. There are things about to be said that she doesn't strictly need to hear."

"No." I didn't look at her. "She's here. She might as well listen."

Another shrug. He finished his coffee.

Then, he did a thing I will be a long time forgetting.

He turned to the sink, and ran the water, and picked up the sponge and the dish soap, and washed my mother's mug. Thorough. He rinsed it and took the towel off the oven handle and dried it, turning it in the cloth, and opened the cabinet—the right cabinet, the one where the mugs had always lived, he knew where the mugs lived—and put it away, and folded the towel back over the handle.

The whole performance said one thing, and it said it fluently. I am in charge here. Of the house. Of the day. Of the clock. Of you. He didn't need the mug washed. He needed me to stand there and watch him be comfortable in my mother's kitchen. I stood there and watched. While I watched, I measured.

Nine feet between us. The knife drawer, second down, left of the sink—though I didn't need a knife. My hands would do. My hands have done it before, on men harder to kill than a silver-templed lawyer in city shoes, and my hands were loose at my sides and very patient.

But there were eyes on the rise, and a rifle at the fence, and my mother somewhere at the end of his sentence, and Sasha breathing quietly three feet to my left. So, my hands stayed hands.

"It's Byron's fault, really," Craine said, turning back around. Conversational. "All of it. Your father could have ended this at any point by simply giving it up. My asks were never complicated. The complete files on Project Trueborn. The assets of Dominion Hall—which, let's be honest with each other, were stolen. Every dollar. Which makes recovering them less theft than repatriation." He straightened his cuff. "Had he agreed, I'd have let all of you go. Truly. Back here to Valentine, back to Montana, back into the service if the service would have you. Farms and quiet lives. What would you actually have lost? Money that was never yours."

He shook his head, a man mourning reasonableness itself.

"But it's too late for that now, isn't it? So, here we are. In your childhood home. Using two women as insurance. And all we have left is war." He said the word without heat, like a season. "You're here, Clint, so I can tell you—so you can tell all of them—that this idea you've hurt me? That you have me on the run?" He smiled. "You've helped me. Every move your family has made has helped me convince my superiors of exactly what I've been telling them. That Dominion Hall is a threat. A private army, illegally funded, unaccountable, sitting on American soil. And that it's time to dismantle it the old-fashioned way. With the full, heavy hand of the federal government."

"You're bluffing."

I said it level. My father's people had been clear, and their sources ran deep—Craine was the black sheep now. A man burning his last capital, running from his own building, power gone.

Craine laughed. Real, easy, delighted.

"Let me guess." He leaned back against the counter. "Certain people in Washington have assured your father I'm washed up. Corrupted. On my way out. A dead man walking the halls." He watched my face and found what he wanted in it. "That is exactly what I paid to have them told. Clint. You think your family has friends in Washington? Friends." He said it like a word from a children's book. "I have allies. Allies are better. Friends want you to be good. Allies want you to win, because they've been promised a share. And a share of what's under your father's floorboards buys allies at every altitude of that town. Power is the only currency that spends there. I've promised it, and they want it. So, now, I'm afraid, your family learns the hard way."

He straightened off the counter and buttoned his jacket, one button.

"No hard feelings, incidentally. I mean that. I've read your file—you're an honorable man, more than most in it. You've simply been swept up into something much bigger than you, and for that, blame your father. He started this. He and his—" a small, savoring pause, "—Project Trueborn. You know, if the public ever heard those two words, they'd call it science fiction. Bred soldiers. Engineered bloodlines. Nonsense from a paperback." He smiled wider. "And yet. This sort of thing has gone on for centuries, in every empire worth the name. Private money moves through dark channels into projects that concentrate power for the few. The only thing that ever changes is who the few are." He touched his own chest, light, two fingers. "I'm one of the few now. It took a career, but here I am."

He reached into his jacket pocket.

I froze. Weight to the balls of my feet, hands coming alive, nine feet collapsing to a number I liked⁠—

Craine laughed.

"Relax." He drew his hand out slowly, showing me, and tossed something small and glinting through the air.

I caught it without looking away from him.