Damage Control Read Online Free PDF Page A

uphill.
    “We’re ready,” Scorpion said, and an instant later, the man’s grip switched from the front of his T-shirt to the waistband of Tristan’s shorts—at the small of his back—and he jerked the pants up in kind of a power wedgie. Scorpion’s other hand pressed against the back of Tristan’s head, bending the boy into an inverted L. He maintained that position as they fast-walked across the rutted roadway to a rusty beige Toyota SUV.
    Once at the vehicle, Scorpion opened the back door with the hand he’d moved from his head, and then Tristan found himself landing hard on the torn fabric of the bench seat. “On the floor,” he commanded. “Stay there till I tell you to get up.”

C HAPTER F OUR
    W ith the PC secure in the backseat, Jonathan swung his M27 to his shoulder to cover Boxers as the Big Guy tossed his ruck into the backseat, slid into the driver’s seat, and started the engine. “First thing to break our way,” Boxers announced. “Keys were in the ignition.”
    Jonathan opened the door to the shotgun seat, tossed his ruck on top of Boxers’, and they were moving even before he got the door closed. A few seconds later, after a violent J-turn, they were on their way, spewing a rooster tail of dust behind them.
    “You okay, Tristan?” Jonathan shouted. When he didn’t get an answer, he looked behind him into the backseat, where the kid sat in a fetal ball on the floor behind Jonathan. Tall and lean to the point of skinny, the kid was all arms and legs. Filthy and sweaty and blood-smeared, Tristan Wagner’s exhausted expression gave him the look of an old man in a teenager’s body. Good thing he was crouched on the right side of the floor. If he’d been on the left, Boxers might have crushed him as he launched his seat back to make room for his legs.
    The boy appeared to have slipped into that non-place that so many PCs—precious cargoes—retreated to as they grappled with the challenge of understanding the unthinkable.
    “Tristan?”
    The boy’s eyes rocked up to meet Jonathan’s. They were a shade of green that Jonathan associated with cats, not people. He looked ready to cry.
    “It’s almost over for you, son,” he said. “I’m sorry for your friends.” He hoped that that last part hadn’t sounded like a throwaway line. He truly was sorry that they’d been killed, and he truly felt for the emotional grater that lay ahead for the kid. More than that, though, he wanted to keep the reality first and foremost in Tristan’s mind. Jonathan had seen too many rescued hostages slip into crippling denial. No matter how awful the truth might be, it was Jonathan’s experience that embracing it early on caused far less emotional trauma in the long run than did the slide into delusion.
    As Tristan pressed his hands to his eyes and started to cry, Jonathan turned around to face forward.
    “You want to tell me what the hell just happened up there?” Boxers said.
    “I have no idea,” Jonathan said. “You got eyeballs on the guys who joined us. What did you see?”
    “Looked like army to me,” Boxers replied. “Maybe police, I have a hard time telling them apart.”
    “They fired the first shot, right?”
    “That’s the way I saw it. They took out the driver, and then everything came unzipped from there.”
    Jonathan tried to pull the details into some kind of recognizable form. No one was even supposed to know that they were here.
    He’d been contacted the usual way, through a blind email address via a reference from another client. After the security checks were completed, and funds had been deposited in Security Solutions’s offshore account, Jonathan had made contact, via an untraceable prepaid phone, with a Beatrice Almont, who turned out to be the lawyer for the Crystal Palace Cathedral in Scottsdale, Arizona.
    The name sounded familiar to Jonathan, and a quick Internet search reminded him that the Crystal Palace was spiritual home to Reverend Jackie Mitchell, a