The shithead is here.
Westwood made a face. At Big Mike, not at the shithead, because he knew a lot of shitheads and didn’t know who his bodyguard was referring to.
Just as he was about to ask Mike if he could possibly be more specific, another text came through.
Shaw.
Shaw?Thatshithead.
After a little sigh, J.W. typed back quickly.
B right down
Westwood had had his entire day planned, but with that text, he wondered if his entire day was out the fucking window.
—
He took his time descending into the kitchen, and when he did so, he was fully dressed, suit and tie and vest and coiffed hair and expensive cologne.
He saw Big Mike in the kitchen; at six-four he was hard to miss. A former army major and then an overseas high-threat security contractor, he commanded attention without even trying.
The other man in the kitchen, sitting at the table, was the polar opposite. Small, shabbily dressed, and bleary-eyed, he looked to J.W. like a college student who’d been out all night on a bender of cheap beer and Jell-O shots.
Though he was, in fact, thirty years old, Lewis Shaw looked nearly a decade younger. Big Mike put a mug of coffee in front of Lewis, and the younger man looked at it.
“Little cream, lots of sugar,” he said, and Big Mike flashed annoyed eyes to Westwood.
J.W. sighed, then said, “Indulge our guest, please. We’ll warm him up so if I need you to toss him back out into the snow, he won’t catch cold.”
Big Mike headed for the fridge with a hopeful glint in his eyes.
Westwood leaned against the kitchen island, addressing the visitor. “Well…you always look like hell, but today it appears you’ve visited the ninth circle. That mean you didn’t get any sleep last night?”
“What’s sleep?” Lewis Shaw replied without batting an eyelash.
The older man himself did not hesitate in his response. “I’ve got to get to the Center. Have a seven-thirty teleconference with staff in London.”
“You might not, actually.”
“What does that mean?”
Big Mike poured half-and-half into Shaw’s mug, then gave it a long shot of sugar from a pourable container. He put a spoon on the table and Shaw stirred his own coffee.
Though the younger man looked wiped out, he somehow retained anair of confidence. He licked coffee off his spoon and put it down, then tilted his head towards the bodyguard.
“We talkin’ in front of the help?”
“I’m out,” Scardino said, his voice conveying the loathing he felt for the younger man, and then he left the room before Westwood kicked him out.
When he was gone, J.W. sat in front of his guest, who drank the scorching-hot coffee like it was tap water.
The sixty-year-old said, “Why do you always have to be such an asshole to Mike?”
Shaw didn’t hesitate. “He works for Gauntlet Group, what do you want me to say?”
When J.W. just looked at him, the young man said, “I’m a government employee working in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence; he’s a contract goon working for you, but the company he really works for has replaced over four thousand positions in the intelligence community, including over three hundred in my building. A lot of our best and brightest have been let go, replaced with those pricks. What am I supposed to think of a Gauntlet goon like Big Mike?
“Plus, that’s guy’s a bodyguard. I’m data analytics. I’d say we are a different skill set, but what Scardino and the thousands of those Gauntlet security types do isn’t much of a skill, in my opinion.”
