After the Rain

But…

All the little hairs on the back of his neck had stayed at full alert since Jeff called. Because Nina wasn’t just your ordinary insanely driven, ambitious soldier gal clawing for recognition…

His cell phone rang. Thinking it was Jane again, he fumbled at it one-handed and barked, “Now what?”

“Phillip?”

He sagged and caught his breath. Only his mother called him that. “Hi, Mom.”

“Do you know more yet? About Kit?”

“I just talked to her. She sounded fine. I’m almost there. I guess Nina got called away quick…”

“It’s not her fault. She really can’t help it.” Irene Broker said. “Nina’s a triple fire sign and-”

“Yeah, Mom. You already told me.” Mom had a Merlinesque faith in astrology and believed that Nina was in thrall to her heroic stars.

“Her basic energy comes from Sun in Aries. Her inner feelings come from Moon in Sagittarius. And her behavior is anchored in Mars in Leo.”

Aries, Mars. He didn’t need a starbook to plot that trajectory. Plus she had the Scots bloodline. Well, fuck Nina and the meteor she rode in on. He pictured her going naked into battle, like her ancestors, with her pubes dipped in blue woad.

“C’mon, Mom, give me a break,” he said. Sun in Aries. Right. He looked up to where the sun should be and saw only gray woolly clouds.

“Well, are you going to drive Kit back? Because if you’re not for some reason,” she said presciently, knowing her son and the kind of work he still sometimes performed, “your dad is talking to Doc Harris about flying in and picking her up.”

“That’d be good to follow up, Mom.”

“I thought so. Now, just don’t get ahead of yourself. And give her a chance to explain. You know, practice your listening.”

“I will.”

“Good. Well, keep us posted.”

“Right, Mom.”

“And, Phillip, remember to listen.” Said it like she used to say “Make your bed. Wear a hat. Don’t talk back to your father”-the tone of her voice reducing him to about twelve years old.

“Goodbye, Mom.”

Broker ended the call and stared at the moody cloud cover. Calm down. Think. Listen. Okay.

Nina was not dishonest. She just omitted virtually everything about her last assignment to a classified military unit popularly known as the Delta Force. But ever since 9/11, communication with Nina had been increasingly spotty.

Broker was not dishonest either. But he also left a lot of things out. When people met Broker casually, he’d angle around direct answers. A sketch emerged of him suggesting a background involving a successful landscaping business in the St. Croix Valley to the east of the Twin Cities. Then he’d drop a few hints how he’d got out of landscaping and put his money in a little resort up on Lake Superior before the real estate up there went through the roof. This was the truth, up to a point; but the landscaping gig was a cover. In fact, Broker had left the St. Paul cops and joined the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension fifteen years ago. Then he proceeded to clock the longest run of deep undercover work in the history of Minnesota law enforcement.

Then, about eight years ago, Nina Pryce had launched a genteel bayonet charge into his life. She had an agenda. She had a skull and crossbones tattooed on her shoulder. She had a map to buried gold in her hip pocket.

Broker followed her to Vietnam, where they found several tons of Imperial gold ingots on a beach on the South China Sea.

They came home quietly rich, pregnant, and eventually married. More than two tons of the gold found its way into a bank account in Hong Kong. Broker lived on credit cards linked to that account.

Five years ago he’d helped the FBI penetrate the Russian Mafia. An informal arrangement evolved. The Feds let him keep his loot as a kind of open-ended retainer.

Broker and Nina’s marriage, conceived in high adventure, could not survive ordinary life. After Kit was born, Nina nursed her for six months, woke up one morning, saw the dishes in the kitchen sink, experienced a panic attack, and hurried back into the Army.

Some cops in Minnesota, who were not exactly fans of Phil Broker, saw a measure of poetic justice in the complications of his marriage.

Karma coming back to him, stuff like that.

So.

For a number of reasons, all of them having to do with airport security, Broker had decided not to fly into Grand Forks. And though he still had a deputy badge and ID, a routine phone check with the Washington County Sheriff’s office would elicit the friendly reminder that he should have turned the badge in yesterday. These minor details would complicate flying commercial with the.45-caliber automatic, the two magazines, and the box of ammunition he had tucked under the front seat.

The circumstances he was driving into struck him as very odd. Broker was familiar with Nina Pryce’s flaws. But those flaws ran to vainglory, arrogance, and compulsive overachievement. Quitting on any task or abandoning her people were taboos in her strict warrior code. He could not imagine Nina abandoning her daughter as long as there was still breath in her body…Broker knit his bushy eyebrows and smiled an unhappy intuitive smile…But she was capable of using their daughter in some cockeyed special-ops ploy, if the stakes were high enough.

Goddamn sonofabitch!

But even angry, wounded, and full of painkillers, Broker remained focused. He took several deep breaths and let his eyes travel over the empty landscape.

He was driving through some of the least populated territory in the United States. So what was a Delta Force operator doing in Langdon, North Dakota?…His eyes drifted north, past the wheatfields to his right. For the second time he flashed his unhappy grin as a line from The Magnificent Seven time-traveled into his mind. He heard the sound track, saw Yul Brenner and Steve McQueen banter back and forth about something they had going…

“…in this little town below…

“…the longest undefended international border in the world.”

So. When it came down to it, he wasn’t in a mood to rely on other people to protect his daughter.

Twenty minutes later, two blue water towers, some grain elevators and a micro dish antenna rose out of the fields and he drove into Langdon, North Dakota. It was one-thirty on a Sunday afternoon, no sun, gray clouds like an overcoat over ninety-seven humid degrees. The air was heavy and sweaty, hovering over a million acres of ripening wheat.

The first thing he saw was the four new white Tahoes with Border Patrol markings parked at the motel. Okay…

The county building was low red brick on his right. A leafy main street nestled in shadow on his left. Keep going? Find the pool? Or talk to the cops?

Kit was waiting in the park two blocks away. Broker doubted that Jane was alone. Assuming Jane and company were Nina’s comrades, Broker figured his daughter was at this moment the most well-defended child in North Dakota. She could last another half-hour.

Broker reverted to one of his basic commonsense rules, which in this case was the Waco Rule of Thumb. The WRT posited that in 99.9 percent of all cases the locals knew the ground far better than the federal interlopers, were less arrogant, and would return straight talk in kind.

So he ignored mysterious Jane’s admonition to check in with her first. He drove around the county offices until he spotted a small sign on a rear entrance by the parking lot: SHERIFF’S OFFICE. He parked, checked the note he’d scribbled to himself again. Sheriff Norman Wales. Then he went in through the door.

Something had to be up. Why else would the sheriff be in his office on a muggy Sunday afternoon?