Free US Marshall 03 - The Rapids by Carla Neggers Page A

managed to find out in the short months of their acquaintance. “Spencer must not know or she wouldn’t have let you go the way she did.”
    Raleigh didn’t react. He was like that. He didn’t act on emotion. Which was what made his contact with Maggie Spencer so weird—it was all emotion. That was the only explanation that made sense.
    “Right now,” Raleigh said, “it doesn’t seem prudent or necessary to alert Maggie to all of our actions. I gave her a small mission.”
    “What small mission?”
    “I’d like to keep that to myself for now.”
    The old man was getting testy. Ethan let it slide. He was thinking he should head for the American embassy and throw himself at their mercy for ever getting hooked up with this guy.
    Raleigh pulled himself away from the fence. There was a slight tremble in his hand.
    “You’re not hitting the bottle, are you?” Ethan asked, and when Raleigh didn’t answer, added, “People say you’re a bottle-and-breakdown case.”
    “People say a lot of things. They don’t know me.” Raleigh glanced sideways at Ethan and smiled, not nicely. “You don’t know me.”
    It was a fair point. “I want answers about mywife’s death. All the answers. That’s it. That’s all I’m about.”
    “We’re not about to take the law into our own hands,” Raleigh said.
    “I think we already have.”
    He regarded Ethan with paternal insight. “Is that what you think?”
    “If I had a clue who killed Kopac, I’d be knocking on the door to the American embassy and asking them what the hell to do with what I knew.”
    “I don’t have a clue, either, Major.”
    Major. Some months ago, Ethan had stopped thinking of himself as a West Point graduate, an army major who’d led covert special operations missions. In the past, he’d done his best to accomplish the mission tasked to him and his men.
    His wife’s death had changed all that.
    Char.
    The gut-wrenching anger, grief and guilt weren’t there anymore. Just the determination to expose Nicholas Janssen as the person behind her death, and why. All of it, all the answers. Her actual killer—one of the two men Janssen had sent to the U.S. in May—was dead. Nick Janssen himself was behind bars.
    It was a start.
    Ethan hadn’t seen Kopac’s murder coming that morning. He’d have stopped it if he had. It had totally blindsided him.
    He wasn’t sure about William Raleigh.
    “Tom Kopac was a good guy?” Ethan asked.
    Raleigh didn’t hesitate. “Yes.”
    “Raleigh…” Ethan turned away from the river. “You’d better be who and what I think you are.”
    Which was a spy. For what agency, even what country, Ethan couldn’t be sure. But he’d spent a dozen years in the U.S. Special Forces and thought he could recognize an intelligence operative when he saw one. They’d met earlier in the summer when Ethan’s personal mission of tracking down Nick Janssen and Raleigh’s mission—unknown—had converged.
    Unsettling stories about the supposed economist’s drinking and mental health problems had reached Ethan, and he hoped he hadn’t misplaced his trust. He didn’t want to be duped by a delusional man haunted by his own wrongdoings, trying to dig his way back to some measure of self-respect.
    “You’re sure you shouldn’t be in a home?”
    Raleigh’s eyes twinkled with sudden amusement, the kind of insight that made Ethan continue to work with him. “You are quite a direct man, Major Brooker. If you weren’t, I fear I wouldn’t have made it out of St. John’s today.”
    “Spencer and the marshal never saw me. If they had—”
    “You’d still have found a way out.”
    “I don’t know about that.” Ethan was a search-and-destroy specialist, not someone who hid from federalagents—they were all supposed to be on the same side. “I was just playing the hand dealt us back there.”
    “Yes.”
    Raleigh grew thoughtful, and Ethan could see he needed rest and a good meal—they both did. “Come on. I’ll buy you