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  He had to admit, he was itching to get back in that interrogation room with his partner. Birn was fairly certain that if someone was going to just abandon such an expensive amount of product in the middle of the night, there was probably a good reason. He doubted they would be coming back for it anytime soon.

  Even so, whoever had left the cocaine there might come back, or someone else might come looking for it. So Birn knew that it was important to stay there, as annoyed as he was that this happened right when he and Muñoz were finally getting somewhere interesting with their suspect.

  If no one showed up, he and Muñoz would head out there with a ship later that day and search the area to see if the floating cocaine bags were the result of a shipwreck of some kind. Then someone would have to clean up the mess. Loaded pelicans were probably the last thing that Penny and the other residents of the Little Torch Key needed right now when they’d been having so much trouble with dealers that they had to call in MBLIS, to begin with.

  But none of that could come before Birn got in a nap. He could feel himself drifting already, his attention waning in the darkness, the rippling of the water against the dock lulling him into a kind of trance.

  He shook his head to clear it and sat down cross-legged on the edge of the dock, dangling the tips of his fingers down in the water and hoping that the sensation would keep him awake. It worked, for a time, but the sound of the water and the dull light of the moon was enough to keep him on the edge of consciousness more than once throughout the night.

  His attention was brought back to the world in front of him again when he heard a shuffling sound off to his left, back behind the dock. He was immediately at attention again, his hand on his gun at his side in an instant.

  Slowly, Birn stood up and walked back down the dock, making a point to keep his steps light in case whoever it was didn’t see him in the darkness.

  For a moment when he reached the end of the dock, Birn thought that he might have imagined the noise. Perhaps he really had nodded off and had been having a dream without having realized it at first.

  But no, there it was again. The shuffling noise. And it couldn’t have been an animal. There was something distinctly human about it, like the rubber soles of shoes against the coarse sand.

  Birn whipped up his gun and pointed it in the direction of the noise.

  “Show yourself!” he hollered into the darkness. “My name is Agent Lamarr Birn, and I’m with the Military Border Liaison Investigative Services. You’d do well not to mess with me.”

  There was a period of silence, and then the shuffling sound, slightly to the left of where it had been before.

  “Show yourself!” Birn hollered again. “I warn you. I’m armed!”

  The MBLIS agent squinted into the darkness, trying to make out any shapes to match the sounds. But it was too dark, and the moon was shining in the other direction, out on the water.

  Birn shook his head in frustration and prepared to head off in the direction of the sound. But just as he was stepping off the dock, he heard more noises coming from all sides of him now, and the hands grabbing at his midsection.

  He jumped back, falling down on his behind and scrambling on his hands and feet back across the dock, out toward where the moonlight shone again because there was nowhere else for him to go.

  As he grew closer to the light, several faces came into focus in front of him on the dock. Well, not faces exactly. They were all wearing ski masks. But they were there, alright. All four of them.

  Birn scrambled for his gun, but one of the goons got to it first, picking it up and removing the magazine before pocketing it.

  “Nice try, Agent,” the guy sneered, emphasizing Birn’s title as if he took pleasure in attacking a federal agent.

  “Going after someone like me is a federal crime, you know,” Birn pointed out, his heart pounding hard in his chest and nearly drowning out all other sounds in the area.

  “We don’t intend on getting caught,” another of the goons said gruffly, grabbing the MBLIS agent by the armpits and lifting him up haphazardly.

  Birn struggled, flailing and kicking with his arms and legs, and he managed to bop the guy pretty hard in the nose with the back of his head, sending him stumbling back into the water and crying out in pain.

  “You’ll pay for that, Agent,” the other goon, the first one who had spoken to him, barked, no longer all fun and games. He loomed over Birn, pulling out a second gun and pointing it at him. “You’d do well to do as you're told if you want to live to see another day.”

  Birn’s eyes darted around the area, trying to find a way out of this mess, but he didn’t see any. He had a gun pointed at him, and the other two goons were busy fishing the fourth one, the one he’d hit, out of the water.

  Then Birn realized that was his opening. They were distracted, even the one with the gun, who kept looking over Birn’s shoulder at the scuffle in the water.

  The man’s legs were spread wide, and Birn heaved himself up in one quick motion and barreled through them, knocking the man down in the process and sending his gun flying into the water.

  Birn ran down the dock as fast as he could, his heart now practically beating right out of his chest. For a moment, he thought he was going to make it back to his car up in the parking lot away from the beach. But then he heard more rustling sounds behind him, and the full force of a grown man crashed into him from behind, knocking him forward into the sand.

  Birn groaned out loud as the goon wrapped his arms back behind him on the ground, twisting them painfully.

  “I was hoping we could do this quietly, but apparently not,” the guy snarled in his ear, just loudly enough that Birn could hear it over the pounding of his own heart.

  With that, the goon pulled the agent’s head up by the scruff of his neck and stuffed something over his mouth.

  In short order, Birn felt his eyes drooping again, heavy as sleep beckoned him, pulling away from this ordeal he’d found himself in.

  “Sweet dreams,” the goon chuckled in his ear as the world began to swim around him.

  Soon, he was out, though that pounding sensation in his chest followed him into his dreams.

  2

  Ethan

  As I brewed my morning coffee, my eyes drifted over to the kitchen table where I had left Grendel’s journal the night before.

  Holm and I had been home from New Orleans for several days at that point, and I had found myself becoming more and more all-consumed by the old pirate’s journal. Or at least, what I had thought was the journal before an old book repairman in the French Quarter had informed me that it was a fake.

  I’d been looking for that journal for months now after a friend of mine had found a few missing pages from it hiding in a wall after an MBLIS mission. I hoped that it would lead me to the Dragon’s Rogue, a long-lost pirate ship that had originally been commissioned for an ancestor of mine, Lord Jonathan Finch-Hatton, and that the grandfather who had raised me had spent decades searching for himself.

  I had finally thought I found the rest of the journal when I learned that it was being housed at a small nautical museum up in Virginia. Unfortunately, however, even though I had DNA evidence that I was a descendent of Finch-Hatton’s, they hadn’t wanted to give it to me, doing everything they could to duck calls from myself and a photojournalist friend of mine who had joined me in the search for the old pirate ship, Tessa Bleu.

  Or at least, that was what I had thought before the journal mysteriously showed up packaged and addressed to me in our Miami MBLIS offices after Holm and I had gotten back from our mission to Haiti a couple of weeks prior. There was a Virginia return address, and I thought I’d struck gold. The museum must’ve gotten sick of Tessa and me harassing them and sent me the journal just to get us off their backs.

  I poured myself a coffee and heaved a sigh before sitting down and beginning to thumb through the old book again. Well, actually, I couldn’t be sure it was that old now. It was just made to look old enough t
o fool me, at least. And it had worked until I talked to that old book repairman.

  The long, blacked-out lines that plagued nearly the entirety of the journal were a stark reminder that this was not the book I had long hoped to find. Shortly after opening the package, I’d realized that large swaths of the journal’s contents were redacted, blacked out so that I couldn’t read them. And far from coincidentally, I was sure, the blacked-out portions were almost all about the movements and whereabouts of the Dragon’s Rogue throughout the ship’s long and storied history, making it all but impossible for me to trace its movements and track down where it could be now.

  I shut the book again and pushed it away from me, not wanting to dwell on the negative for any longer than I already had. I took a sip of my coffee and pinched the bridge of my nose, squeezing my eyes shut.

  Since returning to Miami, my attention had been wholly focused on the journal. I’d stopped trying to contact the museum after they hung up on Tessa the last time, so I was lost as to how to proceed, short of driving up there myself, which I didn’t have the time for right then. Plus, I’d promised Tessa that she could come with me if I did that, and she was stuck out of cell range on assignment in the Yukon, of all places. She really did have an interesting life, taking pictures of all sorts of things for travel magazines all over the world.

  Despite myself, I moved to thumb through the journal yet again, not that there was anything new that I could learn from it. I’d read all the bits that weren’t redacted three times over by then, not that that amounted to much. I might as well have been reading the old pirate Grendel’s grocery lists for all that the splintered words I could make out told me.

  At first, I thought that someone had laid wreckage to the real journal and panicked, thinking it was beyond repair. That’s what brought me to that old book repairman in New Orleans, who came highly recommended from Tessa’s friend, George, who was the one who figured out that Grendel’s journal was in the Virginia museum in the first place.

  When Percy, the book repairman, had told me that the journal was a fake, I didn’t know how to feel. I still didn’t know how to feel. On the one hand, I was relieved that the real journal was still presumably out there somewhere, untouched, and still containing the information I had sought for so long. And on the other, it was incredibly frustrating to think I had the journal in my hands, only to have it unceremoniously ripped away from me, in a way. It felt like taking a huge leap backward after I’d taken one step forward.

  I shut the journal again and stared down at its old, muddied leather cover. I wondered how old it actually was and if whoever had sent it to me had made it look older somehow.

  Not for the first time, I thought about getting in my car and driving up to Virginia without Tessa and without permission from my boss at MBLIS, Diane. I’d asked if I could take some time off, but she told me we were just getting back above water at the agency, and I was needed there. Plus, I’d just been through two back-to-back hair-raising missions, and I needed the rest.

  She wasn’t wrong. I knew that as I sipped my coffee and stared out the window of my houseboat, wishing I was a little less restless. I’d sustained a nasty concussion and even a gunshot wound to the shoulder down in Haiti, and New Orleans wasn’t much less eventful. These past several days at home and doing desk work had been a Godsend for my weary muscles and bones.

  Besides, Diane wasn’t wrong about MBLIS, either. After our near save in New Orleans, where Holm, an undercover FBI agent named Nina Gosse, and I had stopped who knew how many deaths from happening after figuring out that an archaic version of a very dangerous drug was just beginning to circulate around the city, our longstanding funding issues had magically started to disappear.

  The whole affair with the funding started when a Florida Senator got in the pockets of the New York mafia and tried to take us down bureaucratically after we’d gotten in their way a few too many times. Tessa Bleu and I had put a stop to that on a mission that wasn’t exactly authorized by my superiors.

  But even then, things moved very slowly in the paperwork department. It seemed like Diane spent half her time screaming on the phone with bureaucratic pencil pushers trying to make our lives miserable. All that changed when Holm and I pretty much saved an entire city, however. The government knew that if the word had gotten out about a mysterious zombie drug from another country making its way into our borders, there was no coming back from that. The news stations would have a field day, and everyone from Miami to Seattle would fly into a panic.

  Now that things were running more smoothly again, Diane would be remiss to let one of her agents run off on a wild goose chase for an old pirate ship. I didn’t blame her for that, especially with Birn and Muñoz out on assignment.

  I checked my watch as I finished up my coffee, watching the soft waves lap up against the side of my houseboat from the window. I had another, more official, address listed for my MBLIS file, but this cozy little boat really was home to me. I couldn’t imagine shacking up anywhere else.

  It was getting to be time to head into work. I stifled a yawn on the back of my hand, more a testament to the extra sleep I’d been getting lately as opposed to the lack thereof, and got up to rinse and put my coffee mug in the dishwasher.

  When I was finished washing it out and hanging it on the top rack, I pulled out my phone to check my messages. There was nothing there. I’d tried to call Tessa several times a day since I got home to tell her about everything, but she’d never answered, her phone always going automatically to voicemail, where, in a cheery tone, she told any possible callers about her current assignment and how she’d be out of cell range for a while.

  I tried again, just in case, if only to hear the calming sound of her voice once more, but nothing. I’d wanted to tell her about the old book repairman, Percy, and what he’d told me about the journal in real-time, but I was bursting to get the story out by then, so I pulled out my tablet and began to craft an email to her so it would be waiting for her when she got back to where there was a Wi-Fi connection.

  I typed out the story several times until I was happy with it, adding a note at the end that I was looking forward to talking to her again very soon and that I’d tell her the rest of the story about Holm and my mission in New Orleans when she got back to New York. I also said I couldn’t wait to hear all about her own expedition to the Yukon and to see all the pictures and read the story she wrote about it when it came out in the National Geographic.

  When I was satisfied, I hesitated over the send button. I really did want to talk to her in real-time, hear her reaction when she learned what I had learned about the journal. I loved that she had been on this journey with me the whole way, ever since we found the remains of Lord Finch-Hatton together in that cave off the coast of Miami and confirmed that I was, in fact, one of his descendants.

  Oh, well. I pressed send and accepted the fact that Tessa and I, despite our closeness, had our separate lives, and she was off on her own adventure in the far reaches of Canada. We would have to talk for real some other time.

  I checked my watch again. It was definitely time to head into work now. I cast one last glance at the journal, sitting so tantalizingly on the table just beyond my tablet, well within reach.

  I reached out my hand to touch it again, to begin to rifle through its pages and get lost in trying to decipher some hidden meaning from the few mundane details of Grendel’s writing that weren’t redacted.

  But then I stopped myself, closing my hand into a fist. This obsession of mine wasn’t helping matters. Fixating on the fake journal wasn’t going to get me any closer to the Dragon’s Rogue. Besides, there was bound to be work to do at the office.

  3

  Ethan

  When I stepped into our small Miami office, just a single room of desks for the agents across from a private office for our boss, Diane, I found only Holm there waiting for me.

  “Birn and Muñoz still in the Keys, then?” I asked Holm, plopping down in my chair at
my desk and blowing out a long sigh.

  I twiddled my thumbs. Being away from the journal, fake or not, had me anxious as of late. Yes, this newfound obsession was definitely becoming unhealthy, I decided.

  “As far as I know,” Holm said with an almost satisfied sigh, leaning back in his chair until the front legs went up in the air and interlocking his hands behind his head. “Man, the Keys. Wouldn’t that be a great vacation? I haven’t been down there in years, which is just about criminal considering I live here in Miami.”

  “You do spend a lot of time away,” I reminded him with a small laugh. “But yeah, the Keys are nice. It’s been years for me, too, and even then, it was just a brief stop at Key West.”

  “Now, that would’ve been a nice place to be stationed,” he mused. “They’ve got a pretty nice Navy base there, don’t they?”

  “Yeah, they do,” I agreed with a nod. “Only seen it the once, though.”

  Holm and I had met when we were in the Navy SEALS and became fast friends. When we retired from there, we decided to stick together and build second careers with MBLIS. Somehow, some of our craziest stories had managed to come out of our post-SEAL careers, especially recently with our wild missions chasing after this so-called zombie drug in Haiti and New Orleans. Ancient voodoo witchcraft and hungry drug cartels had given us a run for our money, but we prevailed in the end. I still couldn’t wait to tell Tessa all about it.

  “How do Birn and Muñoz get all the good missions?” Holm asked bitterly, and I had to laugh out loud at this.

  “All the good missions?” I repeated, incredulous at this. “Holm, aren’t you the one who’s been going on about how these last two missions have been the missions of a lifetime, and you can’t believe our luck? We chased after real-life zombies, took down not one but two notorious drug cartels, saved more lives than anyone could probably count, and found the long lost ship and treasure of Jean Lafitte. What more could you ask for?”