DARC Ops: The Complete Series

by Jamie Garrett

  “What’s wrong?” she said.

  He was still frozen, but then finally thawed with a cool shrug. “Don’t you have some work to do somewhere?”

  “Oh,” she said. “Right, of course.”

  He gave her an odd look before swiveling back around in his chair.

  “Of course you would know all about that.”

  Tansy’s head cocked to the side for an instant, then he looked back to work, to his screen, his fingers typing away.

  “Of course you would know every single thing about me,” Macy said, sitting on top of the desk behind him. “Who I talk to, how I talk to them. My schedule, my day-to-day operations.”

  Tansy finally stopped typing.

  “I’m actually interested in your life,” she said.

  “My life?”

  “Your name. Tansy. What’s that, some kind of weird family tradition?”

  Tansy shook his head and went back to typing.

  “What the hell kind of name is that? Tansy? Sounds kind of like pansy.”

  He shook his head again.

  “No? You don’t like that? You don’t like Pansy?”

  Tansy barked into his monitor, “Can I help you with anything? I mean, are you here for a purpose?”

  “I’m just trying to learn everything I can about a new coworker.”

  He stopped typing, sighed, and then reached into his pocket and pulled something out.

  “I’m just a curious girl,” she said, watching him turn to face her again. He held out his hand to her. Inside it was a smart phone.

  “There,” he said. “Take it.”

  She looked at the phone, and then him. His expression was serious, almost sad. She really had nothing personal against him, and he was probably a pretty busy man. Though he still probably knew everything there was to know about her now.

  “Go ahead,” Tansy said, still waving his phone at her. “If you’re so curious about me. Go ahead and take it. Read it, copy it. Whatever.”

  “I don’t want that.”

  “What do you want, then?”

  She thought about the question. What did she really want? At first, it was just to be able to vent. Maybe yell a little bit, make whoever was behind her breach of privacy feel like crap. She didn’t want to do that to someone else, no matter how necessary it was.

  “Do you trust me?” she said.

  “I don’t even know you.” He put the phone back into his pocket. “No one does.”

  “Tucker knows me.”

  “And he trusts you. I hope you don’t think otherwise because of what happened. Sometimes in this business, you have to do things that you hate.”

  Macy knew all about that. The CIA had had no shortage of such tasks for her. “Yeah,” she said quietly.

  “If it makes you feel any better, we did the same thing with all of Tucker’s data.”

  “Okay,” Macy said. “So are you finished with mine?”

  “Yep.”

  “Then it would make me feel better if you destroyed everything.”

  “No problem.”

  “While I watch.”

  Tansy laughed. “No problem.”

  Macy watched as he pulled up her file on his laptop screen. “Here it is,” he said. “How do you want me to destroy it? Or do you want to do it yourself?”

  “No, I trust your means.” She finally smiled. “But I’ll just watch you, though.”

  While he destroyed her file, which consisted of the most anti-climactic and dreary task of typing commands into a black and white text screen, something changed inside her. Like a pressure valve opening up and venting, she felt lighter, looser. If anything, she might have even felt a little sorry for Tucker. The poor guy was stuck in a spot. She understood his orders, and the necessity to follow them. She’d come across many confusing and mixed orders in her time in the CIA, and especially with the St. Louis police. She’d done her fair share of questionable things there regarding Tucker, too. Things she still couldn’t forgive herself for.

  So how could she ever think he would?

  “Hey,” Tansy said. “You catching this? You know what this means?”

  “Yeah.” She watched him type in the commands that would permanently erase all traces of her and her files. The parts that she wasn’t sure about, she relied on something foreign to her: trust.

  Was she really trusting these men?

  “Almost done,” Tansy said, still working, still erasing.

  It felt weird, thinking of perhaps slowing down, sticking around for a while. But what would her future here be? There wasn’t very much in the way of intimate, sensitive secrets on that phone. They didn’t know too much of anything, really. It was just the invasion of her privacy, the idea of it, that she disliked so much.

  “It’s just standard protocol,” Tansy said with a sigh. “It’s harsh and extreme, and it sucks for both parties. Trust me. But it happens to everyone. I searched Tucker’s myself when he was on his own probationary period.”

  “So can you spill the beans about him?”

  He shook his head.

  “Fine,” she said.

  Tansy, with zero trace of sarcasm in his voice, said, “We take this kind of thing pretty seriously.”

  “Alright. So now that I’ve been ‘vetted,’ does this mean I’m part of the team?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “For the next week, at least.”

  Would she go through with it? Would she suck up her pride and be part of the team for a week?

  Aside from the discomfort of the last few hours, which if she let herself admit it, probably was entirely necessary from their point of view, the men of DARC Ops had been good to her. Tucker, especially—despite what he’d done with her phone. And that wasn’t even counting that they’d had a big part in saving her life back in the very beginning. Her life had totally sucked the last few years, but even she could admit that she would have taken that over a death sentence.

  “What do you say?” Tansy asked. “Do you hate us enough to not take us up on the free trip to the United States?”

  A smile formed across her lips. “Will I get an actual room, or will I be stuck in a shipping container?”

  He shrugged. “You can be stuck here in Johannesburg if you want.”

  She nodded toward the screen. “Let’s finish up on these files, then? I’ve got work to do.”

  26

  Tucker

  Word had it that Macy was storming around the offices inside the compound, looking for God knows what. Maybe looking for her data, or what was left of it. Tansy wouldn’t keep it just lying around. The guy might be totally chill when it came to most things, but when the job was on, he was a complete professional.

  He also knew that Macy wouldn’t understand, at least right now.

  “All I know,” Jasper said, “is that she’s still here. That’s got to mean something.”

  “Yeah, but there’s no guarantee that it’s anything good.”

  “What are you saying?” Jasper nodded at the pile of bags up against the EMP tripod. “That she’s gonna sandbag us? I don’t know her as well as you, obviously, but from what I know now . . .”

  “From what you’ve spied from her?”

  “What I’m trying to say, Tucker, is that she wouldn’t have come around here at all if she didn’t want to take part in the mission.”

  “What if she’s just trying to retrieve her personal data?”

  “I think she’s smart enough to know it would be a lost cause,” Jasper said. “And she’s definitely smart. She’s definitely an asset, if we can we win her back.”

  Tucker knew all too well the importance of wining Macy back. He knew what kind of asset she could be to him, to his life moving forward. He wanted to be an asset to her, too. He thought he was, already . . .

  “But whether she shows or not, we need to leave.” Jasper locked eye contact. “No waiting around. You understand that, Tucker?”

  “I do.”

  “No more drama. We can’t hav
e any delays.”

  They’d been hanging around the truck for the last half hour, Tucker feeling restless. He found a piece of broken concrete on the ground, and was kicking it idly with his shoe.

  “So if you need to take care of something, to hash something out with her or whatever, it has to be now. The next hour is game time and it’s full speed ahead, with or without her,” Jasper said.

  Tucker took another look up the steps of the building that housed the cyber warfare room, and Tansy, and Macy’s data. If she would be anywhere, it was in that room—most likely giving Tansy the business.

  “I can hear it from here,” Jasper said. “The gears in your head grinding away.”

  Tucker kept his gaze on the building.

  Jasper laughed. “What are you waiting for, man? Just go.”

  Tucker took his advice, not even turning back to say anything else. He trudged up the stairs, every part of him concentrating, thinking, planning what he’d say first. He was as nervous as the first time, walking up to her hotel room. Only now it was sick, dark nervousness. And guilt. Something he’d destroyed still lingering around and choking like black smoke from an IED blast.

  He found Tansy in the main computer bay. The man had been practically glued to his seat for the last two days. He controlled the hub of the entire mission from his perch—everything from highway traffic monitoring to analyzing the most intimate details of Macy’s data. If anyone had a window into her mindset, it would be him.

  “You ready to roll soon?” Tucker asked him, trying to sound calm about it.

  “Yeah, but hopefully not too soon. I still have almost thirty scenarios to run in the events risk simulator.”

  Tucker had no real idea what that meant. Nor did he really care. He took a seat at the empty workspace next to him, noticing how Tansy almost leaned away from him, from his latest guest. The man seemed truly annoyed at the interruption. He didn’t take it personally. Back in Washington, the man was known to disappear inside his pigsty of an office for weeks at a time while on a case, living entirely on takeout and beer.

  “I won’t bother you too long,” Tucker said.

  “She was just here.”

  It took him a moment to regain his senses, to think of a worthwhile question to ask. “Where did she go?”

  “No idea.”

  “What did she . . . What did she want?”

  Tansy sighed. “She sat right behind me, watching over my shoulder, making sure I deleted everything we had on here. And not just deleted, she made sure I nuked it. Like, scorched earth.”

  “And you did it?”

  “Of course.”

  “Where is she now?”

  “Tucker, I have to say . . .” He finally turned around. “My brain is pretty much, like . . .” He held his hands out, apart, as if demonstrating the size of a fish. “My brain is only in this tight space right now. Outside of this zone, I’m completely clueless.”

  “Yeah,” Tucker said. “That sounds about right.”

  “And now he’s a funny guy,” Tansy said. “A cop and a funny guy.”

  It didn’t register at first, the word “cop,” at least not the specific word and its meaning. There was, however, a nagging sensation along his body like someone had been pinching his skin. All he could say was, “Tansy . . .”

  DARC Ops’ best hacker turned around and looked at him, his face a little tight and apprehensive. “What?”

  “What did you just say?”

  “Relax,” Tansy said, “I just called you a cop.”

  “Yeah. Why?”

  “Weren’t you a cop? I never knew about that. I don’t think anyone did, and I was the one who did the full background on you.”

  So there was no public record of him ever having been on the force in St. Louis. That was weird. Could the police chief have been behind that? There were possibly reasons for him not being on record, he supposed. Probably the same reasons he hadn’t stuck around.

  “You okay?” Tansy said.

  “I wasn’t actually a full-fledged police officer.”

  Tansy just stared at him.

  “Maybe that’s why you didn’t see anything,” Tucker said. “I didn’t make it past probation.”

  “Still, there should have been something.”

  Tansy turned back to his work.

  “How did you find out about it, then?” Tucker asked.

  After a few seconds of typing, Tansy said quietly, “You know how.”

  “Macy? She was a cop, too.”

  “I know,” Tansy said. “Same department.”

  “Yeah. Only she stayed a cop and I didn’t.”

  “I know,” Tansy said.

  “You do?” He didn’t like where the conversation was headed. Tucker rolled his chair closer. “What do you know?”

  “I was just trying to kid around with you, I wasn’t trying to . . . uh, trying to—”

  “I just want to know how you found out. Did she tell you?”

  “It was in her files,” Tansy said.

  “What was?”

  “A document. She wrote about it, like a memoir or something.”

  A fucking memoir . . . why did it have to be of the police in St. Louis? Why that of all things to memorialize? Of all things to focus on and write about. Those times were some of the worst in his life, and probably weren’t too fondly remembered by Macy, either. So what the hell was she doing writing about them?

  Tansy’s voice broke through his thoughts. “Do you really want me to tell you about it?”

  He nodded. “Yes.”

  “She wrote about what happened with you. It’s fucked up.”

  Tucker realized his hands had been squeezing the armrest of his chair so hard it was shaking.

  “And she’s always felt guilty about it. So she wrote about it. I don’t know if it’s supposed to be a book or something, but she had good intentions. Just don’t . . . you know . . .”

  “Don’t what?”

  “Don’t bother her about it.”

  “Oh, I won’t.” Tucker got up from his seat. No, he wouldn’t bother her about it.

  “Where are you going? And can you not start something like this right now? We’re about to head out soon.”

  “I’m not starting anything.”

  “Tucker. The bottom line is that she cleared the background check. She’s good to go. She’s on our side.”

  Tucker took a deep breath, his eyes scanning over to the exit.

  “And she’s on your side,” Tansy said.

  “Yeah, well she was.”

  “I bet she still is.”

  Tucker had no idea. Everything, including the trust—or lack thereof—between them was still there. Only now he had something else to worry about. He could barely let himself think about it, her writing that book and Tansy reading it. And now Tansy saying something about her being on his side . . .

  In St. Louis, when it meant everything, where was she then? He’d been a rookie, unsure about nearly everything. Had Macy been more heavily involved in the shit storm than he’d even realized? If anything, she’d been in tight with the police chief back then. He’d moved on, let it go. Whose side she was on was practically irrelevant now. And yet, it bugged him to think she’d known something, that she’d had a chance to maybe stop it. Tucker shook his head. No. He might not have known the whole story of what happened in St. Louis, but he knew Macy. Still, what did she know that he didn’t?

  He could still hear Tansy’s voice in the background as he sped out of the room, the DARC hacker almost pleading with him now to “take it easy.”

  Sure, he’d take it easy.

  As he walked, he tried thinking again of where her head would be. She’d just had an intimate conversation with Tansy, who was still a relative stranger to her. She’d had her personal information hacked into and scoured over by this same stranger. And then a conversation about her past with Tucker. If she felt even half as confused as he did right then, then perhaps they shouldn’t have a conversatio
n at all. Maybe he should just do what his boys had been telling him, take care of it later. If she agreed to board the ship with them, there’d be several days of uninterrupted time to talk to her.

  He liked that idea, somewhat.

  But there was also the fear of it going wrong, and how wrong it could go stuck together with her on a freighter. Isolated at sea, facing only each other. If things didn’t go right there, it wouldn’t be a peaceful, polite disagreement. No, things would go right or very, very wrong.

  But first, they had to at least get past this and get on with the mission.

  He knew he could do it, the emotions draining away. Pragmatism returning. He’d trained for it.

  But what about her? The CIA would have trained out every inch of emotion. She’d have impeccable control. But then, being on the run for your life for years could easily destroy that.

  Tucker looked up. His feet had walked him to the loading dock while he’d been lost in his thoughts. Jasper was still there, smiling at him now. Right away he knew the reason.

  Macy.

  She was sitting on the tail gate, leaning back on her palms, swinging her legs back and forth like a bored child. And like a bored child, she was playing games, pretending, quite absurdly, not to see Tucker. He walked closer, for sure entering her line of sight. But still no reaction. For a CIA operative, for an agent in the field, a cunning warrior, he knew she had better periphery than that. Though he assumed, in this circumstance, that her field of view was conditional.

  When Jasper acknowledged Tucker with a loud hello, she had no other excuse but to turn and lift her chin in greeting. Despite preparing himself for the worst, her cool greeting ran a shiver through him, through his heart.

  “Ready to go?” Jasper asked.

  Tucker walked up to Macy and stood in front of her, in front of the legs that stopped swinging. “Are you?”

  Macy just shrugged. She didn’t look upset, nor did she look particularly happy. Perhaps this was the new edition of Macy, the professional colleague having finally arrived.

  “Yeah, she’s ready,” Jasper said.

  The way she sat, her body language, gave off the impression that she was no longer available to Tucker as a hot fling, but as just another one of the guys. A dude, almost.