wing of the hospital, I have not been in any kind of contact, in any manner whatsoever, with anyone connected to, or pertaining to, my former life, in any way, shape, or form. And certainly not my heretofore dead partner.” It sounded harsh, saying it like that, but the truth was, she still hadn’t—couldn’t—fully process, in any real way, that CJ was alive.
She had his full attention now, his gaze tightly focused on her own. It was a visceral thing, his full attention, even when he was injured and laid up in bed. She found herself shifting back in her seat, almost bracing herself.
“As far as you know, anyway,” he said.
“What on earth does that mean?” she demanded, sitting forward again. “I’m very well aware of who I’m in contact with and who I am not. Unless you’re intimating that the handful of neighbors I’ve befriended since moving here, all valley residents for decades prior to my arrival, are actually a network of undercover foreign operatives…then I believe I can state with fair certainty that I’ve been totally cut off from that world.”
“That was the conclusion I’d drawn as well.”
She clapped her hands several times. “Bravo, then. So, I ask again, why not simply approach me?”
“I was about to do that very thing when I took a dart to the shoulder.”
She sat back again. “How long had you been out there?”
“Before the attack, a week.”
“And watching me for a week is all it took to make certain I wasn’t secretly in cahoots with someone?”
“You know better than that. I ran a thorough search before coming out here.”
“Now, that sounds more like the Derek Cole I knew.” She frowned then, as something else occurred to her. “Why you?”
“What do you mean? CJ contacted me, and only me.”
“Okay, but surely you weren’t going to keep that information to yourself? I mean, it’s a fairly major event, an agent rising, literally, from the dead. You’d need help. Why not put someone else out there in the hills on watch for me? And who tranq’d you?”
“As I started to say earlier, things have changed tremendously in the agency since your departure.”
“Retirement. You can’t say it even now. Do you have such little respect for my decision, even after all this time?”
“Actually,” he said, sounding suddenly weary, “I have far more respect for it now than ever before.”
“What, you thinking about getting out of the game, too?” She’d said it, half-kidding, knowing that their agency was her former boss’s entire life. He’d said so often enough, and said it with pride.
So it came as something of a shock when he responded, quite seriously, “I don’t know. It’s no longer the game I signed on to play.”
Now it was her turn to be intently focused on him. “What are you saying?”
“I’m saying that our agency isn’t what it once was. Our mission, under Mankowicz’s direction, was to use intel that our regular channels of security couldn’t sanction, to privately infiltrate known threats in order to bring an end to similar privately funded, non-military, covert operations against our country.”
“And what’s changed? Are you saying they replaced Mankowicz? But he was the best agent our country ever had. Our agency was his brainchild and he had the blessing—hell, the relief and gratitude—of everyone who knew of our existence. No way did he step down, so—” Her face fell. “Wait, you’re not saying he’s—”
“He’s very much alive, but there was a shift in power, and our agency got caught in the crossfire. Mankowicz was, to all public eyes, promoted to ambassador, which is a polite way of saying he was given a choice of taking a prestigious position, or retiring.”
“Who did they put in his place? And why keep the team at all, if they didn’t think—”
“Oh, they thought we were doing a grand job.”
“Because we were!”
“‘Were’ being the operative word there.”
“What do you mean? We couldn’t possibly—”
“It took me awhile to figure it out. Too long, actually. I was like you.” A brief smile ghosted his bruised lips. “A little cocky and arrogant about our team.”
“I prefer to think of it as pride,” she said, meaning every word. “We earned that right.”
“Well, whatever you want to call it, I never thought, even with Mankowicz out, that things would change all that much. Northam is a controlling, micromanaging asshole, but, push come to shove, he needed me to run the program, because I always have, and successfully so, and it was more important for him to be racking up wins than try and push his way into a situation and job he had little real understanding of, just because he has an ego the size of Asia.”
“Wiley Northam? He—they gave it to him? Why in the hell would anybody give that windbag such a delicate job demanding diplomacy on a level that—” She broke off, rubbed her forehead as she let the information sink in. “Political assignment, clearly, I get it, but still there had to be somewhere else they could stick him and make him feel important without risking our agency.”
“My sentiments exactly, but stick him with us, they did. I wasn’t happy. In fact, I was downright pissed off, but, as I said, I knew if I kept the marks high in the win column, he’d stay out on the golf course with his blowhard cronies and leave running the team to me. I didn’t care if he took all the credit, as long as he left me and the team the hell alone.”
“I’m guessing that didn’t happen.”
“No.” He paused, and shifted slightly, lifting his hand to stop her when she began to rise to help him. “At first, I just chalked it up to him being the asshole we all know he is. But over time…I don’t know. Things weren’t adding up, but I couldn’t figure out why. Our intel was still good, but things weren’t rolling as smoothly.”
“Your intel was good because you developed your own extensive network of informants that only you had access to. Don’t tell me he expected you to hand that information over to him? Even he has to know that the only way that kind of chain works is—”
“No, he didn’t demand anything of me. In fact, that was what was so confusing. He stomped around the agency and tried to act as if he was the one making all the decisions, which I let him, because it was easier on all of us…but then, like I said, the missions started not going smoothly, at least in the areas where they should have, which made it all the more difficult to get anything accomplished in the more deeply embedded operations. With no foundations being built properly, we weren’t getting people inserted at the levels they needed to embed themselves into. Our wins were becoming fewer, and the ones we did get weren’t as impressive.”
“Didn’t the chain of command realize this coincided with Northam’s assignment to the agency and can his windbag ass?”
“I honestly don’t know what command thought, as my requests
