Page 1 of Backtrack

PROLOGUE

London, England

Supervisory Deputy US Marshal Arliss Cutter zeroed in on the problem a split second before the clueless couple stepped in front of an oncoming black cab.

Tires screeched. The cab driver laid on his horn. The man, somewhere around sixty, wrapped his arm around a blonde half his age and waved off the cabbie with a derisive sneer. They took their time crossing the street before disappearing into a shadowed alley. It was difficult to tell if he was prouder of the buxom blonde on his arm or the sixty-thousand-dollar Rolex Sea-Dweller on his wrist.

From their vantage point across Maiden Lane, a relatively quiet cross street toward the southern edge of Covent Garden, Cutter and his boss, Chief Deputy Jill Phillips, watched two other men duck in behind the couple following them down the same alley under the feeble glow of a streetlight.

“You see that?” Cutter asked.

Chief Phillips groaned like a mother annoyed with her toddler. “Black hoodie and sideways Manchester United ballcap?”

“Yep,” Cutter said. “Those two mopes are eyeing that idiot and his girlfriend like a couple of Serengeti lions watching a gazelle.”

“Not unlike how you are eyeing the … eye-ers,” the chief said, noting Cutter’s resting mean mug.

“What?”

“You know what I mean.”

The marshals’ contact with New Scotland Yard, Detective Sergeant James Macpherson of the London Metropolitan Police, had warned them as soon as they arrived about roving gangs that targeted people wearing high-end watches. Rolex Rippers. Cutter wasn’t worried. His G-SHOCK didn’t make a very tempting target. Not that anyone in their right mind would have tried to take a watch from him anyway. Six-three and 240, with a face that exuded all the joy of an Easter Island statue, Cutter looked like he might takeyourwatch if you tried to rob him.

He and Phillips picked up the pace across Maiden Lane and turned through the same brick archway into a narrow alley marked BULLINNCOURT. Two hundred feet away, at the other end of the alley, was The Nell Gwynne, a tavern where they were supposed to meet Detective Sergeant Macpherson.

Rich Watch and his girlfriend were well ahead now, halfway down the alley, still seemingly unaware of the two men who’d marked them.

The chief spoke again. “That bozo would get eaten alive back home.”

“Back home in Kentucky?” Cutter asked. “Or back home in Alaska?”

“Take your pick,” Phillips said, her whiskey-smooth accent shining through. “In a plane crash, he and his little girlfriend would be food.”

Cutter gave a rare chuckle. “You’re startin’ to sound like me, Chief.”

Twenty feet ahead, heavy boots slapped the pavement as Hoodie and Ballcap picked up their pace.

Passersby in London’s bustling Covent Garden might have thought Cutter and Phillips were a couple, and they were, of a sort.

The two deputy US marshals were dressed for court—the reason they’d come to the UK in the first place. Commander of the Alaska Fugitive Task Force, Arliss Cutter customarily prepared for outdoor work. Today was, in fact, only the second time he’d worn a business suit in the past six months. The first was when he’d married his widowed sister-in-law four months before, quietly, with zero fanfare.

Phillips, five years younger than Cutter at forty, also wore a suit,the same one she’d worn when she’d attended the Cutters’ marriage, a gabardine outfit Cutter thought of as beige but she called wheat.

If this trip to England had been a run-of-the-mill extradition—moving a prisoner from one country to another—the chief would have assigned the task to a couple of squad-room deputies. Phillips made such a stink about the need for servant leadership, it became standard practice in the District of Alaska to send PODs—plain old deputies—on the very best assignments.

But this same servant leadership was what landed Phillips and Cutter in England. A shortage of deputies on a busy court day several months earlier had seen both of them helping out with prisoner operations. The rank and file referred to it as “hookin’ and haulin’”—prisoner runs to and from the jail, mind-numbing hours sitting in court, prisoner medical appointments. Generally speaking, it was an armed babysitting gig.

Deputy US marshals joined the Service to hunt bad guys, but everyone did their time in Ops.

Cutter happened to be driving the prisoner van when an Irish outlaw named Marvin “Musty” Devlin confessed to a fellow prisoner that he’d procured some electrical switches that were eventually used to manufacture bombs in the UK. Cutter and Phillips overheard the conversation. Cutter noted the information in a report to the USMS international desk and then promptly forgot about it.

Ten months later, Headquarters sent them across the pond to testify at Musty Devlin’s terrorism trial. No hookin’ and haulin’ a prisoner, just twenty hours of travel each way—for twenty minutes in the witness box.

Court had gone quickly, leaving the deputy marshals all dressed up with time to kill. Detective Sergeant Macpherson, busy with Musty Devlin’s trial for the rest of the afternoon, suggested they meet for a drink later that evening at The Nell Gwynne, a “hidden gem of a tavern” named for the favorite mistress of King Charles II, in 1667.

Cutter would have been more than content to hole up in his room and FaceTime with Mim, but the chief was determined to leverage every moment of this short vacation away from her husbandand three-year-old—not to mention a squad room full of needy deputy marshals. She’d planned the rest of the day before they stepped out of the courthouse. First, they’d watch a matinee performance of Agatha Christie’sThe Mousetrapat St. Martin’s Theatre in the West End. They finished dinner at the Oystermen by eight p.m., then took a stroll around the shops in Covent Garden—where Jill Phillips, who Cutter was surprised to learn was a theater major in college, broke into songs fromMy Fair Lady.

Left to his own devices, Cutter would have preferred to visit the Churchill War Rooms or the British Museum, but watching his tough as nails boss channel her inner Eliza Doolittle was an excellent consolation prize.