Free The Mayan Conspiracy by Graham Brown

who have it out for me. The right words are said, specific assurancesare given and the problems disappear. Then I can go home again. Start living a normal life.”
    It was hard to look at him and think of a person living a normal life. It didn’t suit him, or really even seem possible that he could have relatives, family and friends somewhere. His file was blacked out, partially to protect the innocent, of course, but it gave the impression of a person with no past, as if he’d just come into existence out of the ether, fully formed as the man she saw in front of her.
    “So you help me see this thing through,” she said, “and I get them to forget your past. So you can go back to Kansas with Toto and Dorothy and Auntie Em? Am I understanding this right?”
    He laughed. “More likely somewhere with a beach, and if Dorothy is there, she’d better be wearing a blue and white plaid bikini and sharing a cold beer with me, but yeah, that’s the general idea.”
    It didn’t cost her a thing to promise, but she wasn’t sure she could deliver, and in a strange onset of conscience found she didn’t want to lie. “What makes you think I can do all that? I can’t even find out what you did to get yourself into this mess.”
    “If this thing’s as important as I think it is, you’ll have carte blanche. You probably do now. You just don’t know it yet.”
    She thought about that. Gibbs’ obsession with the project suggested he was right.
    Hawker elaborated. “Somewhere back in Washington there’s a file you’ll never see, with the letters R.O.C. stamped in one corner. Those are mission attainment parameters. R.O.C., depending on who you ask, means
Regardless of Cost
or
Regardless of Consequences
. It means this thing is the express train and everything else gets out of the way. You want to pay someone off, done. You want someone to disappear, done. You want to cut a deal with a tragically misunderstood, ruggedly handsome fugitive, fine, just bring us what we want and don’t ask why.”
    “Handsome?”
    He glared at her in mock disappointment. “You could do worse.”
    She nodded. “I suppose.”
    “The point is, they don’t tell you about things like that when you’re in the field, but after a while you start to know. I’ll bet your old partner knew.”
    Silently, she agreed. Gibbs had given them everything they’d asked for without batting an eye, everything except allowing Moore to stay on. Perhaps Moore
had
known too much. “You’ll be in the dark,” she said.
    “I do my best work that way,” he said. “Just tell me what you think I should know. You can start by giving me some info on the guy we met with tonight. I’ll find out who he associates with. Maybe we can figure out who paid him off, or who the payment came through. He seemed like a nervous type, probably not doing this by pure choice. Beyond that, I can arrange a new charter, with someone I know and trust.”
    “And how do I know I can trust you?” she asked.
    “You can’t,” he said. “Not the way I trust these guys.” He nodded toward the center of the club, indicating the friends who worked and owned the club, providers of their temporary refuge. “But you can trust people to act in their own self-interest. And at this pointyou have something to offer me that no one else can match.”
    “And assuming that’s true, what makes you think you can trust me?”
    Hawker leaned back in his chair and smiled at her. It was the look of a rogue and a cheat, the look of a man who knew just what the next card would bring and had been waiting forever to see it played. Somehow it was charming just the same.
    “My options are more limited,” he said. “I can walk away and keep scratching out a life down here or I can take a chance on you. So there it is,” he finished. “Time to roll the bones.”
    Danielle failed to suppress a grin. It made sense to her. It fact, it actually seemed fair. The bargain itself would probably infuriate Gibbs,