Flashpoint by Suzanne Brockmann

known in some circles as the Antichrist, made the scene.
    Jimmy saw Schroeder’s familiar red hair from where he was sitting with Tess, way in the back, as the prick lugged his duffel bag up the steps and past the driver.
    “Oh, shit,” Jimmy said, and three or four of the God Squad—devoutly religious men and women who bounced from one disaster site to another—turned to give him the profanity stare.
    Yeah, yeah, he was going to hell. Tell him something he didn’t know.
    Deck was across the aisle and up four rows, sitting next to Murphy. He spotted Will Schroeder, too, and turned invisible.
    That was always amazing to watch. Jimmy wasn’t exactly sure how Decker did it, but he definitely became less . . . there. There was no other way to describe it. He took up less space—he actually got smaller. He slumped, hunched, contracted—whatever he did, it was freaking effective. It was possible that he somehow slackened the muscles in his face, too, and that, combined with pulling his hat down over his eyes, was the final touch. His own mother would have looked right past him.
    Jimmy did the only thing he could do—he ducked down and hid behind the nearest woman. Who happened to be Tess.
    Who also appeared to understand the situation without any kind of spoken explanation. She leaned back, effectively hiding him from Will’s view, and pretended to be asleep, draped against him. All he had to do was turn his head a little, and his face was buried in her hair.
    Hair that, despite the endless hours of relentless travel, still managed to smell unbelievably good.
    The bus moved forward with a hiss of releasing brakes, and they were on the road.
    An extremely potholed road, over which they lurched and bumped. Tess braced herself with one hand high on his thigh.
    “Sorry,” she said, pulling back as if she’d been burned.
    It was not the first time she’d put her hand in that particular spot.
    Don’t think about that night. She was sitting much too close for him to start entertaining memories of the way she’d given him back his shirt while they were standing in her overly dairy-cowed kitchen. Now was definitely not the time to recall just how desperate he’d been to lose himself in her, how mind-blowing it had been to do just that.
    Because although Tess was willingly letting him hide behind her, she was trying to do it by touching as little of him as possible.
    Jimmy risked a look toward the front of the bus.
    Sitting beside some unrecognizable, bland little relief worker who was wearing Decker’s shirt, Murphy was a human monolith at rest. He was about as nonplussed as Stonehenge.
    Jimmy would bet his entire stock portfolio that Murph and Will Schroeder had never been introduced. Because Murphy—who could have been the love child of Tiger Woods and Andre the Giant—wasn’t the kind of guy you could meet and then forget.
    Dave was up toward the front of the bus, a few seats behind the driver, no doubt because he’d gotten food poisoning during his stopover in Turkey—what a typical Dave Malkoff thing to do. He probably thought the bus wouldn’t lurch so much if he sat near the front.
    Dream on, Dave. This was K-stan, where fixing the shock absorbers was the dead last thing on the local bus company’s maintenance priority list, just beneath fixing the bullet holes in the windows.
    Will Schroeder was sitting several seats behind Dave—whom he apparently didn’t know, or didn’t recognize.
    Which wasn’t really that absurd a possibility. Jimmy himself hadn’t recognized Dave when they’d come face-to-face at the baggage claim area just a few hours ago.
    Dave had, apparently, taken his departure from the CIA as an opportunity to embrace his inner grunge rocker.
    His hair was shaggy and long enough in the back to be pulled into a ponytail. He hadn’t shaved in at least a week. He wore jeans and a T-shirt that said “Bite Me,” neither of which fit his wiry frame particularly well, but both of which were a