AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Me: Does he?
Goldstein: Not sure. Maybe? He’s creepy, and not only because he’s a zealot and a Sparrow.
Me: You’ve got your in though? He wouldn’t have invited you to the cigar club otherwise, I assume?
Goldstein: You assume right. Gaining his confidence to the point he encourages me to become a Sparrow won’t be easy, but I’m in this for the long haul.
Me: Good. Keep me updated.
Goldstein: Will do.
Having known Goldstein since college, I’d gotten friendly with him while he was an annoying jock who drank too much but who always got his assignments in on time and managed to pass his finals even with a hangover.
As a ‘grown-up,’ he was a dedicated police officer, one who had a skewed sense of justice—my favorite kind—as well as a man who had big enough balls to go deep undercover while taking a sabbatical from Interpol because he saw the potential here…
A potential not just for promotion but to make the world a better place too.
I had to figure that he knew he could ruin his career by doing this unsanctioned, but I also realized that he was as concerned as I was—who in Interpol was a Sparrow?
Who wasn’t one of those dirty bastards?
The New World Sparrows were everywhere and had infiltrated every organization. Nowhere was safe. Not the mafia, the government, the media, or the fucking church.
For all those reasons, that was why he was one of the first people I’d gotten in touch with when Aidan, my oldest brother, had come up with the notion we needed to start bringing officials into the Sparrows—infiltrating to tear the fuckers down from the inside out.
He was the perfect candidate—US-born and patriot-bred—buthe’d left the US after college thanks to a British grandmother from whom he’d inherited a home in the UK’s version of the Hamptons—Sandbanks.
He’d moved to Europe shortly after, gained a job in Interpol, and hadn’t returned stateside since.
I forged him a new identity, one based on his old credentials, and he was a shoo-in for a senator’s aide with majors in American history and psychology and minors in marketing and politics.
The only reason I knew he wasn’t a Sparrow? That skewed sense of justice he had…
Attending college with him had beeninteresting.
A thought occurred to me as I picked out a button-down shirt.
Me: May go quiet.
Goldstein: Why?
Me: Somewhere I need to be.
Me: If I do, my brothers will be in touch.
Goldstein: Should I contact them?
Me: No. They’ll communicate with you when/if the time comes.
Goldstein: What’s going on?
Me: Nothing. Just hedging my bets.
Ignoring his other messages, I dragged on a suit after I used the bathroom. My doorbell was buzzing as I zipped up my fly, and I ignored it to continue with my preparations.
Two squirts of aftershave to the left side of my throat and two squirts to the right.
An old vintage Rolex that had been battered years ago was on my left wrist, a new smartwatch on my right that was of my own making because I already had the government sniffing between my ass cheeks; I didn’t need to invite them into my life with a mass-produced gadget that was nothing more than a tracker.
