stared at the folder. After all these years CIA was suddenly going to tell her the truth about her father’s disappearance.
She reached across the desk for the folder, but he pulled it back. Apparently, he wasn’t really going to tell her anything. Now she really didn’t like the man.
Verrill related the reasons her father went under, the reasons for the cover story, his extreme value as an agent. “For an American to have any credibility in a Muslim culture, he has to be one of them. Marry into their world. Live, dress, eat and sleep like they do for a long period of time. Do business. Have a solid bona fide relationship with the people around him. Your father succeeded in all of that. He was well known and well accepted. Once he was in, he began to network.”
She listened to the story and wondered if it was any truer than what she’d believed about her father before. These people were professional deceivers. He wouldn’t have put his own daughter through all that sorrow and pain for a job, even if it was for national security. He would have found some way to contact her. To let her know he was still out there. Alive.
Brock had already told her most of what Verrill was saying about the mission. Everyone, she was sure, was well versed in this story, but no one seemed to have a good reason about her father wanting her to come in after him.
“Why me?”
“I can’t answer that,” Verrill admitted. “We have the highest qualified smoke jumpers in the world. We didn’t need to go to a…civilian.”
You left a word out, Anna thought, but what was it? Female, perhaps?
She felt a little like she’d taken a wrong step and had fallen into the rabbit hole, Alice in Jungleland. She was standing there in the middle of the Pacific with this CIA agent and this Special Ops guy telling her she was going to jump onto some tiny island—an island in the middle of the pirate and terrorist country—in less than twenty-four hours to rescue her father.
It seemed completely unbelievable to her.
There had been times when smoke jumping felt the same way. She went from putting out one small fire to the next, and the next, and after about five or six of them she no longer could think straight.
Perhaps this was one of those times.
“If this is all true, why wouldn’t he have contacted us? We thought he was dead.”
“He couldn’t contact you. Not you, his ex-wife, relatives or friends because that’s the nature of the business he’s in. He took on a different name, different identity. He had to be believed. Any suspicions might have put you and your mother in jeopardy.”
Verrill handed her a photograph. “This was taken two months ago.”
The man in the photo was getting out of a car, wearing Muslim headgear and clothing, deeply tanned, older, but it was her dad. The nose, the shape of the face. Definitely him.
Then Verrill started lecturing her on how critical the mission was, how important it was to get her father out. That the free world was depending on her. He called it Operation Fierce Snake.
She stared at Verrill, but her mind was on her father and that day he’d left and never returned. She remembered him turning as he was getting into a friend’s car. She was getting ready to go to her first year at the University of Colorado. He’d winked, smiled and said, “Be good. Be quick.”
She had laughed. “We have to live up to our name.”
He’d smiled and given her a thumbs-up.
According to Brock, her dad was already remarried by then. He’d never said a thing.
Then Verrill regained her attention. “We’re still getting some weak, random signals from his locator. He’s up on the mountain. He has some contacts on the island and one of them will meet you when you go in. Brock will fill you in on the details.”
Her father had divorced her mother twelve years ago, but he never talked about it, or berated her mother. She’d been one of those very lucky girls to have the greatest of fathers. Anna knew, and apparently so did the CIA, that she’d go anywhere, risk anything, to get him back.
Verrill continued, “Malaysia is off-limits. If you go in, I don’t know anything about it. If you don’t come out, I know nothing about that either.”
Anna glanced at Brock. He was impassive.
Verrill said, “You will go into training immediately and train continuously until you leave. That’s all.”
He stood now and reached out to shake her hand. She shook it, but somehow she knew it was simply a formality. There was nothing friendly about the gesture. “Good luck,” he said, and pulled his hand back.
The way he said it, the dark flicker in his eyes, sent a chill through Anna. She knew he really didn’t believe she could get in there and get her father out.
She’d prove him wrong.
She followed Brock out of the office, through the Quonset hut and back into the heat.
“I would like to call my mother in Colorado.”
“No problem. But you can’t tell her anything about your father or what you’re up to. You should call her soon, because once we start the training you won’t have time to talk to her until after we get back. Plus, you should know that any calls going out of here will be monitored.”
A man coming out of one of the other Quonset huts walked toward them. He had the confident swagger of someone born and bred to run things, as comfortable at the country club as on a secret military base. “Anna Quick, I’m Tom Roca.” He shook hands with her. “Welcome on board. I heard about your saving those college kids. That was very fine work.”
She nodded. “Thanks.”
“Take good care of her, Brock,” Roca said, his eyes shifting for a brief second to Brock.
Brock didn’t answer.
“Great to meet Jason Quick’s daughter,” Roca said. “Enjoy your training.” He gave her a little smile, then walked into Verrill’s hut.
When he was gone, Anna turned to Brock as she climbed into the Humvee. “A friend of yours?”
“Not exactly. CIA. One of Verrill’s boys. Actually, he thinks he’s running this mission,” Brock said sardonically. “Practice before he assumes the job of running the universe.”
Anna smiled. She was starting to like Brock more and more.
They drove on to the village of Quonset huts down the road. She reflected on the tension between Roca and Brock, and Brock’s attitude toward Verrill. Not a happy group. She wondered what had happened to cause such hostility between them, and hoped it wouldn’t affect their chances of a successful operation.
Anna called her mom on a Sat phone Brock gave her—one, no doubt, that scrambled the conversation and made it impossible to be intercepted and decoded. She assured her mom that she was all right and was just going to sleep in for the next few days. Then she finally took a shower. She lingered in the downpour like a starved desert plant under the season’s first rain. She
