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"I need to talk to you," she said crisply.

"I can't imagine why. Didn't you tell me the last time we saw each other that you didn't want to ever lay eyes on me again?"

"Believe me, this wasn't my choice. Can I come in?"

"It's seven o'clock in the morning."

"I know what time it is. This is important."

He debated for another second, then said, "Come in." As he waved her into the one-bedroom condo, which took up the first floor of a townhouse, he still couldn't quite believe he wasn't in the middle of some weird dream. "How did you know where I live?" As an FBI agent, he was careful not to give out his personal address.

She pulled a crinkled scrap of paper out of her pocket and handed it to him.

He frowned, seeing his name and address scrawled across it. "Where did you get this?"

"Jack Barrone. He didn't give it to me. It fell out of his pocket."

"Jack Barrone," he echoed. "I haven't seen Jack in three years."

"Well, I saw him last night in the ER at the East River Veterans Hospital. He was out of his mind, combative, and confused. He was rambling with paranoia and anger. He had to be sedated and restrained."

"What happened?"

"He collapsed on the street two blocks from here. The paramedics saw his ID and brought him to our ER, which is only about a mile away."

"He just passed out? Was he drunk?"

"He was on something, but it wasn't alcohol. We're still waiting on the results of a more detailed tox screen."

His brows drew together as he stared hard at the paper, wondering why on earth Jack would have come looking for him. "I don't get it," he muttered, looking back at her. "Like I told you, Jack and I haven't spoken in three years."

"That surprises me. You served together. You were friends. You were brothers. How many times did you tell me your unit was your family?"

He didn't care for the reminder. "Things changed." Clearing his throat, he added, "Why are you here? Did he send you to get me?"

"No. He disappeared from the hospital a few hours after he was admitted. No one saw him leave. And he wasn't in any condition to go anywhere."

"Well, Jack was never one to stay anywhere he didn't want to be. And if he wanted to see me, he obviously knows where I am. Which brings me back to the question: why are you here?"

"I'm not sure he left the hospital on his own," she said, choosing her words carefully.

"What are you suggesting? That he was kidnapped?"

"I don't know. There was a fire in the fourth-floor stairwell. Apparently, someone was smoking in there. That was the floor Jack was on. The alarms went off. The staff was busy relocating patients in the affected wing, which was not where Jack's room was. No one was paying any attention to him or the monitors for about fifteen to twenty minutes. When I got upstairs to check on him, he was gone. I stopped in to see if security could find him on a camera, but there was a lot of chaos and people in the corridors when the alarm went off. They couldn't verify Jack's image on any of the cameras."

"It sounds like he just left when the alarms went off."

"It's possible, but according to the nurse, he'd been sleepy, exhausted, not really coherent thirty minutes earlier. We'd had to sedate him in the ER, because he was fighting everyone: the doctor, the nurse, me, even the security team. He was yelling about needing someone he could trust and that wasn't me or anyone in the hospital. He was acting like we were trying to hurt him, not help him."

"It definitely sounds like he was under the influence of something."

"It looked that way, but there was something else in his eyes."

"What?" he asked.

She thought for a moment. "Fear."

His stomach tightened. Jack had never been one to admit fear. How many times had Jack told him that fear could never get in the way of the mission?