Riley nodded. It certainly put his own pain in perspective. Maybe horrific things had been done to him, but at least he was still alive.

A knock on the door drew his attention. Khadi came in, and Hicks limped in behind her.

“Riley, you’re awake,” said Khadi, whose concern was evidenced by how quickly she walked to his bedside. She rested her hand on his arm as she struggled to compose herself.

Riley managed a small smile for her.

“Yeah, he just popped his eyes open about five minutes ago,” Scott explained. “I’ve been telling him about Gilly and Brad.”

“Jim, I’m so sorry about Brad,” Riley said. “I… if I had…”

“He did it willingly,” Hicks replied. “When he saw your tape, you won him over. You won all of us over. But even if he hadn’t seen the tape, Brad knew what he was getting into. He died a hero.”

The room was silent for a couple of minutes. Khadi pulled a chair near Riley’s bed and slowly stroked his arm. The friction was shooting needles of pain through Riley’s overly sensitive nerve endings, but he refused to stop her. Gentle human contact, in contrast to what he had experienced over the last days, was worth the price.

Hicks hobbled over to the windowsill. He shifted a few times, trying to find a sitting position that was comfortable. Finally he gave up and stood against the wall.

Khadi spoke up. “So, did Scott tell you what the doctors have said about you?”

“No, but let me guess. Pneumonia or something in the right lung. Infected lacerations on my chest and side. Various contusions and abrasions.”

“Not bad, Dr. Covington,” Scott said. “But you missed the bruised kidney and the mild concussion.”

“The doctors want to keep you here for observation and recovery,” Khadi informed him.

“How long?”

“They’re talking about a week.”

Riley shook his head and turned to Hicks. “When are we heading out of here?”

The movement of Khadi’s hand on Riley’s arm abruptly stopped.

“You need to listen to the doctors, Riley,” Hicks answered. “Pneumonia’s nothing to be-”

“Blah, blah, blah. Give me a break, Jim. What would you do in my position? Would you just lie back in a hospital bed while your team put their lives on the line?” A fit of coughing stopped Riley’s words for a moment, as if audibly protesting against everything that he was saying. Eventually he continued, his voice grating in his throat. “And what would you do if you found out that your best friend was actually your worst enemy? Come on; nobody knows Sal like I do. You know that. You need me there, and I need to be there. So tell them to load me up with penicillin and get me out of here.”

Hicks was silent. There was no question as to what he would do if he were in Riley’s situation. But he still looked far from convinced that it was the right thing.

Khadi stared at him with fire in her eyes. “Jim, you’re not actually considering this? Tell him he needs to be in a hospital where the doctors can monitor him! Tell him he needs to-”

“Okay, Riley,” Hicks interrupted. “The commander here, Colonel Mark Amel, and I go way back together-all the way to Cambodia in ’72. Let me talk to him.”

Khadi stood up and gave Hicks a look that would have bristled the hair off a warthog, then stormed out of the room without another word to Riley or anyone else.

“I’m no great judge of the subtle signals that women give,” Scott said, “but I’m thinking that Khadi might not agree with your decision.”

Hicks chuckled, and Riley tried to squeeze out a smile.

“Well, I’m going to go track the colonel down,” Hicks said as he walked to the door, but suddenly he stopped himself short. “I almost forgot the whole reason I came to find you, Scott. Riley, this’ll interest you, too. Stan Porter got us all-access at the PFL Cup from the Secret Service. Now we just have to figure out how we’re going to use it. Also, how’s this for a little twist: apparently Secretary Moss wants us to bring al-’Aqran back to the States so he can put on a show trial.”

“He wants what?” Scott cried. “We might as well paint a giant bull’s-eye for the terrorists on whatever city hosts those proceedings. It’ll be a regular old bomb-o-rama.”

“Yeah, that’s what Porter figured. So his recommendation was that we accidentally lose the Scorpion in one of the CIA’s black-site prisons.”

“Wait,” Riley interjected, “are those the supposed secret Eastern European facilities? I remember hearing about them on the news. The CIA’s line was that they don’t really exist.”

“They’re right; those prisons don’t exist,” Hicks confirmed. “And once the Scorpion is incarcerated in one, neither will he.”

Sunday, January 25

Federal Bureau of Investigation, Los Angeles Field Office

Los Angeles, California

Jim Hicks wondered if he had made the right decision. Riley’s cough hadn’t been too bad the day after they left the hospital in Germany. However, since then, it had steadily gotten worse. He knew it was distracting Khadi from her job. And Skeeter was inseparable from the man.

When Hicks had gone into the men’s restroom a few hours ago, Skeeter had been sitting up on the sink area. Instinctively, Hicks had looked toward the stalls, and sure enough, under the third door were Riley’s ever-present Merrell nubuck mocs.

“Hey, Riley,” Hicks had greeted him.

“Jim, make him go away,” Riley pleaded.

Hicks looked at Skeeter, who defiantly looked back. “Sorry, man, you’re on your own. I don’t fight battles I can’t win.”

The recollection made Hicks smile. He knew that he had made the only decision he could make regarding Riley, who was the one man he’d ever met whose stubbornness could come close to matching his own. As he glanced over at him, Hicks’s eye caught Khadi’s. She was sitting at the workstation across from Riley. She glared at him and turned back to her computer screen.

Hicks wondered if Khadi might need to be pulled off the team. She was excellent at what she did, but she seemed to have lost all objectivity where Riley Covington was concerned. But she’s too good an agent, and she has way too good a head on her shoulders to let her personal feelings get in the way of the overall objective, he thought. Still…

That final still weighed heavily on his mind.

The crack of a can opening caught his attention. Hicks looked over in time to see Scott pouring a soda into a large plastic Dodgers cup as he walked over to Hicks’s desk.

Scott snapped the cup’s lid back on. As he was about to speak, a deep, throaty cough echoed through the room. He nodded toward Riley and asked Hicks, “How’s he doing?”

“About the way he sounds. I figure he’ll end up either better, in the hospital, or dead. Any way you look at it, I think the decision’s out of my hands.”

“What about next Sunday?”

“Obviously, if he’s coughing like that, there’s no chance of him being on the PFL Cup ops team. But even so, we’d probably be able use him as Mother, coordinating the action.”

Suddenly Riley looked up from his computer and spotted the two men watching him. He gave a small smile and a nod of his head as if he knew what their discussion had been about and agreed with their conclusions. Then he went back to work.

“And I thought you were a hard guy to figure out,” Hicks said to Scott.

“True that,” Scott replied.

“Huh?”

“Oh, sorry. I just got off a conference call with my little cadre of postmodern Gen Xers back in the Room of Understanding. Sometimes it rubs off. But that does remind me of why I came here. Virgil Hernandez came across a murder in East L.A. Guy’s name was Valentín Joaquín de Herrera. Now, you’re probably thinking, Mexican guy turning up dead in East L.A.? Not that unusual. True, except this guy had a rep as a coyote. A coyote’s one of the dudes who escorts folks across the border.”