"How did you get this?"
Harland lounged casually in the uncomfortable, straight-backed diner chair and studied the man sitting across the table. Booth looked like hell, with shadows making craters of his eyes and new, haggard lines carved into his face. A different man might have felt sympathy at the obvious signs of someone reaching the end of their endurance.
Another man might. Harland did not.
He'd kept a close eye on Booth since he first surfaced as a potential adversary, when Ruth Keenan's identity had been discovered hiding in a box of old remains in the Jeffersonian. Always just out of sight, Harland had watched as the carefully hidden details of the Keenan's lives were revealed, every alert lest his own family's history - and their current activity - be uncovered, too. Booth had led them to McVicar, a fact Harland grudgingly acknowledged even as he helped Max finally arrange closure on that particular loose end.
What he saw now in Booth was a man hampered by the law, tied down by the strings of regulation. That man was not one he feared so despite Max's caution and warnings, Harland permitted himself the unusual step of a person-to-person meeting. Instead of sympathy, what he felt was amusement tinged with arrogance.
It showed.
"I have a lot of friends. I ask a lot of questions. Kinda like you. The difference is," he drawled, "I ask the right questions."
He stretched one arm across the back of the chair beside him in a pose that was deliberately nonchalant, as if he and Booth were nothing more than a couple of friends having a chat. Harland scored one point for himself when he saw the flare of irritation in Booth's eyes.
"Funny thing about cops, when they go looking for someone they always want to know where the bad guy has been, instead of starting their search by thinking about where he might go. They shut down the airports, stake out the bus stations, set up their roadblocks, all of that. But they never think about the docks. Which is weird, if you ask me, because if you really want to disappear, that's the way to do it. If you make it out to sea, then you're off the grid for days, maybe weeks, and when you get to port, then you can get lost in whatever foreign country you land in."
"Is that so." Booth's eyes were flat and black, his nostrils flared in a sign of aggression that would have sent a less confident man scuttling away. Harland merely leaned forward and reached for the coffee cup sitting beside Booth's hand.
"May I? I always thought this place had the best coffee." Without waiting for an answer, he took a sip of the fragrant, steaming liquid and murmured in approval. "That's a good brew." Enjoying the way Booth's hard gaze followed every move, Harland set the cup down but kept his fingers loosely curled through the handle, claiming ownership with a gesture he knew had been recognized for what it was. "Now, where was I? The docks, wasn't it? I guess there's always the chance a guy could get caught but the thing about ship's captains is, they're really concerned about making it to port on schedule. A stowaway? Whew, that's a lot of trouble. You report a stowaway in international waters and you've got nothing but delays, delays, delays on your hands. If the guy is lucky, he's got enough money to buy the captain off. If he's unlucky, well, captains that can't be bought off will probably just throw the stowaway overboard."
Harland raised the cup to his lips again, blew across the surface and took another slow sip. When he put it down, he pointed at the photo of Jacob Broadsky.
"Baltimore. Locust Point. I'd tell you which ship but I hear you're some kind of Boy Scout who likes to earn his merit badges by following all the rules so I'll let you figure that one out. I'll tell you something, though. This guy you're looking for? He wasn't wrong."
"He's a murderer."
Harland watched as Booth deliberately lowered his shoulders and relaxed in his own chair in a pose meant to copy the other man's languid composure. The effect was as lethal as a snake curled in the sun but ready to strike at any provocation. When Booth took his coffee cup back and casually topped it off from the carafe before sipping from it himself, Harland couldn't help poking a stick at that snake.
"Eh." One shoulder rose in a dismissive shrug. "Heather Taffet? No one is going to miss her. Some people need to die. I might even say that the world is a safer place without people like her. But then you'd know that, wouldn't you, Mr. Sniper." It wasn't a question, and when rage flamed high in the depths of Booth's black eyes, Harland knew he'd struck a nerve. A hint of triumph showed in the quirk of his lips. "How many confirmed kills do you have? Forty-nine? Fifty? Of course, that number's a little higher now, isn't it?"
Booth said nothing, but a nerve jumped along his tightly-clamped jaw, and beneath the thin cotton of his white shirt, muscles tensed as if he were preparing to jump across the table.
Harland ignored the danger signs. Instead, he flicked at the photo with the tip of one finger.
"See, the real problem with this guy is, he made two mistakes." He paused, waiting, and when Booth simply stared back, leaned forward. "I'll just pretend you said, 'what mistakes?'" He settled back again with his hands folded over his stomach like an old timer about to tell a story. "Number one, he got careless about bystanders. What do you call it in sniper world? Collateral damage? That's not the way it's done, is it? The way it's done is, you go in, take out the target, then get the hell out of Dodge and go home to sleep the sleep of the righteous. That's it, isn't it? That's the way it's done? That's how you get to justify killing the bad guys?"
Harland's eyes flicked down to the table-top when Booth's hand clenched around the coffee cup. He half-expected to see the white ceramic shatter. When it didn't, he had a moment's mild appreciation for the FBI agent's self-control.
It quickly disappeared, however, and when he met Booth's eyes again, the taunting humour in his own gaze was gone. In its place was something flat and ugly, and deadly.
"The second mistake he made, that was the big one. He didn't do his research. It's not just about asking questions, remember? It's about asking the right questions, and he didn't. If he had, he would have known who your girlfriend is. If he'd put a word in the right ear, he would have know that you don't fuck with Max Keenan's kids."
Booth's reaction was not what Harland expected.
He smiled. Like a benchwarmer put in the game for the winning play, victory laced the grin that stretched across his tired face. The unanticipated sight threw Harland off his stride for a moment, as he replayed his words in memory, searching for a reason why, before brushing it off as an attempt by Booth to get under his skin.
"Here's what I'm going to do," Harland said, getting back to the reason he was there. "I'll give you a head's start. You get a chance to earn that shiny new merit badge and catch this guy yourself. Put him in handcuffs, march him out for a perp walk, all that stuff guys like you get off on. But if you don't," he added, as easily as he might have mentioned the rain, "let's just be clear. He's not getting on that boat."
With that, Harland pushed back from the table and got to his feet. "The ship's due to start loading at 7:30 this morning so I'd hurry if I were you."
As he walked toward the door, the chair in which Booth sat creaked as he pushed it back on two legs. "It was you," he called out, now as relaxed as Harland had been when he was sitting there. "Robert Kirby, Garrett Delaney. I knew Max had help. It was you."
Harland's face was blank for the space of a second and then he grinned. "You know what I've always liked about cops? You tell great stories."
The chair thumped back to four legs as Booth stood up. Hands on his hips, he faced Harland with a look that promised a reckoning. "When all this is over, I'm coming after you."
Harland snapped his fingers and took one step back toward the table.
"That reminds me, I should probably take that coffee cup with me. I wouldn't want you to have fingerprints, DNA, that kind of stuff." Then he stopped, pretended to think about it, and waved one hand as if he were brushing away a gnat. "You know what, never mind. I'll give you a head's start there, too. Have fun."
He touched his forehead in a mocking, two-fingered salute, and disappeared into the early morning darkness.
