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time when he’d used his bulk to intimidate people. Even though McBride was three inches shorter and thirty pounds lighter, Nathan had been all but intimidated. After an ill-advised fistfight in which he hadn’t landed a single punch, Toby had been bloodied, broken, and completely defenseless. He remembered looking up at McBride and thinking, This guy’s going to beat the living hell out of me , but something quite different had happened—something he’d never forgotten.
    He couldn’t remember all of McBride’s advice that night, but one thing had stuck with Toby: Life is full of details. Start noticing them. And notice them he had, starting with a thorough self-examination. Toby had been so impressed with McBride and his friend Harvey Fontana that he’d followed in their footsteps and enlisted in the Marines, where he’d spent two years as an MP until a car crash ended his career.
    Six months later, after his physical therapy ended, he’d applied for a security guard position at McBride’s company but hadn’t passed the background check. Although he didn’t have a criminal record, he had a really lousy credit score, and if you wanted to work for First Security, Incorporated, you needed near-flawless credit.
    But to Toby’s surprise, failing the credit check hadn’t been the end of it.
    The following day, he’d received a call from Nathan McBride. Not only was Toby going to have the chance to be a security guard—he’d be attending a security guard academy. Toby hadn’t known such things existed, but this school was the best in the country—the prestigious Beaumont Academy in Gallup, New Mexico. McBride was offering Toby a personal loan on nothing more than a verbal promise to repay it after he graduated and landed a job.
    Now there was no guarantee of employment after graduating, much less with the esteemed Beaumont Specialists, Inc., one of the country’s biggest private military contractors. Determined despite the odds, Toby applied himself and advanced to the top of his class. Smaller security companies would’ve hired him hands down, but he wanted to work for BSI. And so he finally got hired. Since his first BSI paycheck, he hadn’t missed a single payment to McBride.
    Toby smiled at the memory, waiting for the gas pump to click. He glanced at his watch. He had forty-five minutes before his 1:00 AM shift started. Patchy fog and a near-freezing mist had descended upon the city. Out-of-towners would have a hard time believing San Diego’s weather could be like this. A few degrees colder and it would be snowing.
    On the opposite side of the intersection, approaching headlights caught his attention. A silver SUV rolled through the green light and pulled into a competing gas station across the road. The vehicle looked familiar—it was the same make, color, and model that BSI used for company vehicles.
    Interesting . . . Toby had never bumped into a colleague in this neighborhood. Mildly curious, he tried to glimpse the driver. Another surprise. The driver wasn’t merely a colleague of Toby’s; he was Chip Hahn, right-hand man and personal bodyguard to BSI Chief of Security Tanner Mason. Toby had often wondered why Mason needed a bodyguard, but he’d never mustered the nerve to ask. Questions like that tended to strangle careers—as would gawking at your boss from the shadows instead of waving hello.
    Hahn wore his signature ball cap and sunglasses. In the eighteen months Toby had worked as a private security officer for BSI, he’d never seen Hahn’s eyes. Ever. He’d also never seen the man smile.
    Toby took an instinctive step back into the concealment of the gas pump and chided himself: If you’re not going to say hello, you’d better not get caught watching the man . He knew he should mind his own business, but something about Hahn felt . . . off. More than usual.
    The rear windows of Hahn’s SUV were darkly tinted, screening any occupants. Who besides Mason could Hahn be driving