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“The reasons don’t matter, at least as far as you’re concerned. This is need-to-know. And you are no longer among the needy.”
    Zach had to laugh. “Excuse me?”
    “You heard me. You and Cade walk away from this. Right now.”
    “We don’t answer to you,” Zach said.
    “But you do answer to me, Zach,” Prador said. “And I am telling you: you’re done with this.”
    Zach turned to him. “Don’t you even want to know why we were there? What we found?”
    “Judging by the impressive body count, I’m sure you and Cade thought it was important. But frankly, I don’t care,” Prador said. “Whatever it was, this operation takes precedence. I’m going to have to ask you to step back and allow Colonel Graves’s team to take over.”
    Zach looked at Cade, whose mouth curled, just for a split second, at the corner. It was the only way anyone could tell the vampire was amused. Blink and you’d miss it.
    Zach looked back at Prador. “No,” he said.
    “No? I think you misunderstand, Zach. This isn’t a request. You’ve endangered an ongoing mission that has direct implications for national security. I can understand why you have a personal investment in this—”
    “What he’s trying to say is now the grown-ups are in charge,” Graves said. “You can go back to chasing the boogeyman.”
    “He hasn’t been spotted in over a year,” Cade said.
    “We can settle this right now,” Zach said. “Let’s get the president on the phone.”
    Prador shook his head, like he was almost sad at how badly Zach had read the situation. “He doesn’t want that, Zach. And believe me, neither do you. The shipment—the one we were tracking—it came through Archer/Andrews. They were doing renditions for us.”
    And now Zach got it. He felt slow. He really had been out of politics too long.
    Renditions. Such a clean and painless word, and for Archer/Andrews, an extremely profitable one. The military contractor charged millions of dollars to the U.S. government to make travel arrangements for a select group of unwilling passengers. The itineraries were always similar: a group of heavily armed men in black would board a Gulfstream jet in the U.S. and fly halfway across the world, then land at a private airfield in the dead of night. They would pile into a van and kick down the door of someone unlucky enough to be on their list: suspected terrorist, sympathizer, accomplice, or someone whose name was spelled the same as one of the above. The passenger would be bound and gagged, a black hood placed over his head, and taken back to the plane. Then he’d be delivered to another country, usually one where the authorities weren’t so squeamish about the use of cattle prods during questioning.
    Archer/Andrews hired ex-military to do the rougher parts of the job. Starting salary: $150K a year. The ex-soldiers called themselves Archers. Everyone else called them Archies—but never, never to their faces.
    Zach had met a few Archer/Andrews security contractors. Scary guys. And this was the judgment of someone who worked with a vampire on a daily basis. Unlike Blackwater, A/A wasn’t known for pulling the best of the best from the military. They hired from the disciplinary files—the guys who were benched, jailed, discharged or reprimanded for excessive force in places like Iraq and Afghanistan. The company’s unofficial motto was “It’s a mean world out there; we’re meaner.”
    It was a multibillion-dollar private army, and a big part of the War on Terror. Zach was fairly sure there was a photo somewhere of the president shaking hands with the CEO.
    Prador kept talking, of course. He always felt it necessary to ram the point home.
    “When we came into office, we gave orders. Close the secret prisons. No more extraordinary renditions. But the prisoners didn’t just stop existing because we said that. Somebody still had to transport them from place to place. Archer/Andrews stepped in.”
    Zach turned to Graves; he