She held her silence for seconds before she answered with the truth. “Yes, I want to know,” she said simply, moving toward him again. “That’s who I am, and you know that. You used to love that I don’t give up, I keep pushing—”
“I don’t have to like it, Vanessa, not when it’s me you’re pushing.” He shook his head, and then, as if at a loss, he reached into his shirt pocket and absently pulled out a crumpled pack of Dunhills, fumbling for a cigarette.
She reached him—he didn’t step away—taking the pack gently from his hands. “We’re in a U.S. hotel room, Khoury.” As her fingers closed around paper and cellophane, she met his eyes. “What’s going on, what’s wrong? You’re not yourself. You’re not okay, so don’t try to tell me you’re fine.” She saw she’d surprised him with her questioning, and she tried to close the emotional distance between them with words. “I know I should have asked before, in Cairo. I should have pushed. I’m so sorry I didn’t. But I’m asking now. I want to help. If you’ll tell me, I’m listening.”
For a few seconds he seemed thrown, his almond-shaped eyes narrowing with uncertainty. He looked past her, toward the window. When he met her eyes again, he’d shut down.
“There’s nothing to tell. Not now. It’s something I have to handle on my own.” He shook his head sharply, backing away. “Let’s kill the suspense. I did what you asked, and a friend of mine came through for you. A simple job if you’re a scholar who studies archaic Persian manuscripts and speaks fluent Farsi. The Persian Book of Kings, the Shahnameh, specifically the Khaleghi-Motlagh edition, that’s your code bible.”
He might have been talking to a stranger now, Vanessa thought, watching him closely.
He said, “The verses come from the heroic tales of Simorgh, a bird so huge she darkens the sky with her wings, and the human child she raised, Zal”—he closed his eyes for barely an instant—“I remember the stories from my childhood.” He opened his eyes again, shrugging off the memory. “It’s all in here.” He dug into his pocket, producing a flash drive. He held it out on his palm, and then, before she reached for it, he tossed it toward the bed. It landed on the pristine spread next to the robe. “That’s the bottom line with you. I should know by now.”
“But this isn’t you—”
“Really?” His body stiffened. “What do you know about me? We see each other every few months if we’re lucky. Are you sure you can even trust me?”
She flinched. “Why would you ask that, David? Of course I trust you.”
He swung around, walking quickly to the door, setting his hand on the knob. “I don’t want to hear from you, Vanessa. Not until I can sort things out. Do us both a favor and don’t contact me again.”
The door slammed in his wake.
Vanessa stood speechless.
You came through, Khoury, but you were wrong. Everything I needed wasn’t here waiting.
She pictured another hotel room, Cairo, the moment when he almost opened up to her. Instead of staying with him, inviting his confidence, she had let the moment pass.
She walked slowly to the bed to retrieve the flash drive.
After six years, there was still a lot they didn’t know about each other. But even as the thought raced through her mind, she felt the insubstantial weight of the tiny drive in her palm.
What did you give us, Arash?
She needed to know.
She picked up her bag and walked to the door without looking back. On the way out, she snapped the light off.
At 0630 hours the door to Chris’s office stood open, and Vanessa barely slowed to deliver a cursory knock as she walked in, pulling it shut.
From behind his laptop, Chris looked up over his glasses—frowning, sleep-deprived, badly in need of a shave—a man who appeared older than his thirty-eight years. Once, a few years ago when they were working past midnight, he’d confided in Vanessa how much he hungered to be back in the field, how much he missed it. Anything but surprising, given the present atmosphere—frequent shifts in management, congressional probes, even the best of the best hunkering down defensively. But he was stuck at Headquarters for a few more years in order to take care of his aging parents.
“I heard you just got back,” he said, his gaze narrowing intently as she stood facing him.
“I hand-delivered my asset’s phone and BlackBerry to Tech, and the files to Lee in financial analysis, and I think some of the data will turn out to be pivotal for Operation Ghost Hunt.”
Chris nodded but he looked distracted, almost as if he hadn’t heard her, and Vanessa pulled up internally.
He said, “Cyprus turned into a hell of a mess.”
“Bad, yeah.” She was walking a very thin line—Cyprus was a mess, and Chris didn’t know the half of it. She couldn’t shrug off the gravity of her emotions, but she didn’t want to give Chris time to dig into her, so she kept going. “But right now I’ve got something else.” She set the palm of one hand deliberately on his desktop. With her other hand she pushed a thin manila folder across to him. Now she let the glimmer of exhilaration she experienced override her exhaustion.
He marked the moment with a kind of wired stillness before he nudged himself away from his computer and opened the folder. It contained fifteen pages: a copy of Arash Farah’s original text of 105 characters of archaic Persian. Most important, the last four pages displayed columns of the Persian characters and corresponding columns of numbers.
While he riffled slowly through them, Vanessa waited—now using the rev of internal excitement to drown out a deeper sense of apprehension. She stood almost still while he tracked through the documents for most of a minute.
Finally, Chris set down the pages, inhaling audibly. “Where did you get these?”
“I know,” Vanessa said quickly, ahead of him. “It’s what we’re looking for. My asset’s original page from the cigarette pack had fragments of verses copied from—I’m sorry I’m going to butcher these names—the Khaleghi-Motlagh edition of the Shahnameh, the Persian Book of Kings, which was written sometime in the tenth century. Anyway, the thing is, Arash didn’t use a code, he used a cipher. So the characters correspond to numbers and the first few lines present the key. With these pages to go on, the code guys should be able to figure it out very quickly.”
Chris’s dark eyebrows pulled together and he punctuated his words: “How did you get it, Vanessa? Don’t try to case-officer me.”
An old saying that meant cut the bullshit already—her pulse spiked and sudden heat pricked her skin, but she didn’t skip a beat. “We need the guys at Fort Meade to verify coordinates, and they should have done it yesterday, Chris. We’re five days away from D-day on Operation Ghost Hunt.” She jutted her chin toward the pages on his desk. “Is this what we need to pinpoint the location of the facility and get Bhoot? That’s what matters now.”
“But if you want me to cover your ass, I need to know how far out you’re hanging on this one.”
She swallowed slowly. “David Khoury.”
“Jesus, Vanessa. Damn.” He shook his head, stepping abruptly back.
“But look at what we got.”
“You’re acting like a goddamn cowboy—I can’t begin to list your sins, but, Christ, you’ve shared classified intel with someone outside this op, and you did it without authority. What the hell does David know about Operation Ghost Hunt?”
“Nothing. I told him he had to fly blind when I asked for his help.” She shook her head. “He was the logical choice, a linguist, and with his contacts, it made sense. And look, the results are good.”
Chris eyed her sharply, his expression direct, his words matter-of-fact. “If there is something more to this, then you need to tell me now.”
She tried to swallow, but her throat had gone suddenly, painfully dry. “There is nothing more to this, Chris, believe me.” But the lie made her feel sick to her stomach.
“That better
be the whole story,” he said slowly. “Because if there’s more, a relationship . . . trust me, Vanessa, then you’re out where I can’t help you.”
For a moment she thought she would confess the truth—how clean it would feel not to carry the lie any longer. But the next moment brought realization—if she did confess, this would become about her failures instead of being about Operation Ghost Hunt and bringing down Bhoot. She would let go of Khoury, she told herself quickly, silently. She was strong enough. She would do what was ultimately best for both of them and end the relationship, and Chris never had to know anything about it. She took a quick breath and, hating to do it, forced out one more lie. “I swear, Chris, I’ve told you all there is to know.”
His eyes stayed on her, his silent question almost tangible. Finally, he said, “All I need to know and all there is. I hope they are the same.”
“You know me, Chris, we have history, go with me on this,” she said softly. “This cost my asset his life.”
He made her wait longer than she wanted before he slid the pages back into the manila folder. “I’ll get it to the right analysts.”
She nodded once, careful to mask both her relief and her disquiet. As she turned to leave, she puffed out a quick breath. Her fingers closed around the doorknob, almost clear—
“Vanessa.”
Khoury—she couldn’t afford to go there again, not now. She pushed the door open before she turned again to face Chris.
He held up the folder. “You think this is your card back in? You went outside channels, screwed up royally, and, ultimately, they’ll count that as another strike against you.”
“How do you count it, Chris?”
For a moment, her hope spiked.
But as the seconds ticked by, his silence was answer enough.
She took him in for a moment, seeing a man who was both familiar and a stranger. She’d counted Chris and Khoury as the two men who mattered most in her life next to her father and her brother. Men she trusted absolutely. They had her back. But now she found herself wondering if she’d let them both down badly. She found it difficult to meet Chris’s eyes.
“One more thing before you go, Vanessa.” Chris set the folder on the desk, pulled off his glasses, and massaged the painful pink imprints left by the nose pads. “You need to stop at OMD. Dr. Wright.”
One of the Agency’s shrinks—shit.
“Can’t it wait until we hear back—”
Chris shut her down. “Take care of it now. You’re not doing anything else until OMD’s done with you.”
In the muted glow of the tastefully appointed office in the medical division, Dr. Peyton Wright’s glass-green eyes drilled into Vanessa. “You must know there is concern about your immediate ability to function effectively and safely as a case officer.”
It took all Vanessa’s willpower to stay seated in the soft, padded leather chair, but she knew enough not to interrupt the Agency psychologist’s opening statement. There would be nothing diplomatic or therapeutic about this evaluation. Dr. Wright had an agenda, and Vanessa had one question to answer as quickly as possible: Did the shrink have it in for her, regardless of what happened during this hour or two, or did Vanessa have room to maneuver?
“For the moment, let’s skip over the fact your asset in Prague disappeared seven months ago with a noticeable sum of the taxpayers’ money. Some of your more recent decisions in the field have been, at the very least, questionable.” Dr. Wright held up her slender, manicured index finger. “Failure to obey a direct order to abort a mission, a failure that resulted in the death of your high-level asset in Vienna.”
The statement hit Vanessa with a jolt—Chris must have spoken directly to Dr. Wright. Not exactly a shock, but still . . . a shock. Now she did pull halfway out of the damn chair. “As you must know, I was debriefed by the DDO and Chris Arvanitis directly, and it’s in my official report—when the order to abort came, my asset was within a few meters of me and I made a judgment call to continue the operation at least long enough to hear if he had actionable intel. He risked his life to meet with me—”
“And died because of it,” Dr. Wright finished tersely.
“You don’t know that,” Vanessa shot back. “My asset was targeted, and it’s probable he would have been killed even if I had aborted that meeting, and we would certainly not have his intel now—intel that’s driving a vital CPD op.”
Dr. Wright raised her pen above the clipboard in her trim lap, but she kept her eyes on Vanessa. “You’re right,” she said. “There is no way to know absolutely if your asset would still be alive if you had obeyed orders—but it is possible he would have escaped assassination.”
Vanessa suppressed a shudder, only too aware she was under minute scrutiny—body language, vocal inflection, facial expression.
Where the hell did Peyton Wright get off judging the actions of case officers when she’d no doubt spent most of her fifteen-year career in twelve-by-twelve windowless offices, typing up reports based on soft science? What the hell did she know about the reality of the ops world?
But Vanessa checked herself sharply. Peyton Wright was working her—part of her job as Agency shrink. It wasn’t her job to dole out therapy. If you have issues, resolve them outside these walls or don’t. The only relevant question in here: Can you do your job or not?
And Vanessa could damn well do her job, so she took a breath and eased her hands to her lap. “No one regrets the outcome of the operation in Vienna more than I do.” She kept her voice steady and firm. “First and foremost, I am responsible for the security of the operation and the safety of my assets. Whether I like them or not, I am responsible for their well-being. I am responsible for their lives.” Her voice cracked just a little on the last word. She took another breath and finished what she needed to say. “Their safety is paramount. I never let myself forget that. I not only cared about the asset who died in Vienna, but I also had great respect for him. With that said, I stand by my judgment call.”
While the psychologist put pen to paper, obviously recording her statement, Vanessa stared at her own hands resting in her lap. Her usually blunt, buffed fingernails looked ragged, several of her knuckles scraped, and even though she’d showered that morning, her skin felt as if it were covered with a layer of grime. She held herself straight and steady in the chair—and for a moment even that much energy seemed too much effort against the deep exhaustion that had overtaken her.
She blinked when Dr. Wright clicked the pen and set it against the clipboard. “I’ve noted your responses. I really do care about getting your side of this, Vanessa. Do you have anything else to add before we continue?”
Vanessa heard an ominous finality in the psychologist’s words. She knew she should respond, but all she could do was give a small, reflexive lift of her fingers: Go ahead.
“Barely one week after your asset was killed in Vienna, you drove to an open location on Cyprus, and you met with a newly assigned asset. You did this even though, less than twenty-four hours earlier, you expressed concerns for this asset’s safety and you requested a surveillance team—a request you made personally to your director of operations.”
Vanessa took a breath against the tightness building behind her ribs. She met the psychologist’s eyes, honestly trying to set aside her resentment. “There is no rule book, no manual that defines what to do in every field situation. It’s my job to make judgment calls—that’s why I’m in operations—and making those judgment calls is a vital part of my ‘fitness for duty’ as a case officer.”
“So you made a judgment call to meet, and what did you find?”
Vanessa glanced down, buying a few seconds. Dr. Wright certainly had access to the reports, but no doubt she wanted to interpret and cross-check Vanessa’s words in the retelling. SOP for psych evaluations, but still offensive—and evidently effective, because Vanessa had to force the words out. “I heard sh
ots as I was proceeding to the site for the meeting. This was outdoor terrain, very rugged. By the time I reached my asset, he was already dead, but his bodyguard was alive and exchanging fire with the sniper.”
“So you took your asset’s briefcase that you hoped contained intel he was going to pass to you.”
“It did contain intel,” Vanessa said flatly. “He’d given me a good indication of what he would deliver.”
“And how did this bodyguard react when you showed up?”
Startled when I pulled out my Five-Seven pistol—Vanessa blinked away the thought and said, “After a few moments he recognized me. He was busy—returning fire to a point about seven or eight hundred meters from where we were.”
“Do you think this is an appropriate time for sarcasm?”
“No, I’m not trying—of course I don’t. I was there. I know what it’s like to be in the line of fire. Do you?”
Dr. Wright ignored the challenge, instead asking, “So you took the intelligence, and then you left the bodyguard at the scene?” Her voice hardened to a tone Vanessa read as accusatory. “Was he still returning fire when you left?”
Vanessa closed her eyes—felt the warm breeze, smelled her own sweat and Sergei’s blood, flinched as she relived the dash from the Queen’s Window to the ancient stairway that ascended the ramparts of the castle wall.
“Vanessa?” The psychologist’s voice seemed to come from far away. “Was the bodyguard alive when you left?”
She felt the sting of her spent muscles as she crouched on the wall, taking aim on the Chechen, tasting how much she wanted to hurt him—to stop him—
“Vanessa.”
Wrenching herself back to the present, she stared at Dr. Wright. After a few more seconds she shook her head. “The bodyguard took a fatal shot just as I retrieved the briefcase.” She swallowed past the accumulating lies. Her mouth felt dry. “So I immediately began my descent to the parking lot and my car.”
Dr. Wright tipped her head, frowning—you could almost see the circuits running at hyper-speed because she’d sensed missing pieces. Vanessa heard the too-slow heartbeat of a clock hidden somewhere out of easy sight while her own heart seemed to stop and then race to catch up with itself. Shit—not here, not a panic attack. She’d never be allowed in the field again. She shifted stiffly in the chair. God, she needed a cigarette. The room seemed smaller now, like a cell.
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