The Deceivers

Not Wells. He d gone through in the minimum sixty-two days. He was made for soldiering. Not just because he was strong and lean and quick. Because he knew intuitively how to survive, to narrow his focus. Not to think ahead, not to promise himself that he d get through this day or week but simply to get through.

A most un-Buddhist form of mindfulness.

So Wells went from Dartmouth to the Rangers, the Rangers to the Central Intelligence Agency, Langley to the Hindu Kush, the Kush back to the United States. Only the start of his travels. Two decades of spying and fighting, killing and not quite dying. He d resigned from the agency but discovered he needed it as much as it seemed to need him. He d become a Muslim, too, finding comfort, of sorts, in a faith not his own. And why not? All faiths were foreign in the end, walks through dark woods.

Had he changed? He supposed he must have. From the start, he d been unafraid to kill, to take what he could never give back. Yet his dreams troubled him more than they once had

Need anything? The waitress s smoke-roughened voice. Meaning: You ve been sitting in this booth a while, time to order more or move on. Hungry soldiers waited by the door. Wells hadn t woolgathered this way twenty years ago, that he knew.

Scrambled eggs with cheese. Triple order hash browns.

Triple? Coming up. She offered him a broke-down smile and turned away. The United States had two thousand Waffle Houses, not one in the Northeast or on the West Coast. Places for working people who needed quick food cheap and cheap food quick. The eggs were iffy, but the hash browns were delicious, as long as Wells didn t think about what they were doing to his arteries.

He was waiting for his son. Evan. Though Evan didn t think of Wells as his father. Another man had raised the boy while Wells snaked the world s drains. Yet Evan, a grown man now, had decided to bec