by James Hunt
“Sarah, you need to get out of there,” Bryce said. “Your face was just plastered all over the intelligence community’s Most Wanted list.” He paused. “Shit, we’re all on there.”
The six CIA agents suddenly pivoted toward Sarah, their rifles lowered but their eyes locked on her. Sarah spied her holster on the ground where her two Colts lay twenty feet away. She sidestepped toward them, and that was when the agents lifted their rifles, all of them aimed toward her.
“Agent Hill, we need you to stand down and come with us. We have orders to bring you in.” The CIA operative spoke through a black mask that puffed forward with each word. Slowly, the other CIA operatives circled.
“I really thought we had something special, boys.” Sarah deliberately let her guard down, inviting the two agents on either side of her to inch closer. “But hey.” She locked eyes on the leader. “We’ll always have the mountains of western Virginia.”
The agent’s eyebrows lowered in confusion, and when Sarah saw the two hands on either side reach forward, she thrust her hand into the operative’s throat on the left while sweeping the legs from underneath the one on the right, whose rifle flew upward. Sarah snatched it from the air. Before the other agents had time to move, she squeezed rounds into three different legs, one shoulder, and two arms.
All six agents were shot and disarmed before any of them could retaliate, and Sarah kicked their guns out of reach, funneling them together as she aimed the rifle at the lot of them. She tied them up, leaving them to dress their own wounds. “Just make sure to keep pressure on it.” The jest was followed quickly by a few handfuls of insults and curses as she walked over to Grimes, who had sat down, propping himself up against a tree.
Grimes wheezed. His complexion grew pallid, and dark circles spread under his eyes. “No one thought you could be beaten. No one thought you could be brought down. But I told Mallory for the past two years that you were dangerous. That the United States intelligence community is second to none.” He gritted his teeth, a flash of color returning to his cheeks for that last bit.
“Sarah, they have more agents incoming, chopper from the east. You’ve got less than three minutes before they’re right on your location,” Bryce said.
“They’ll kill you for this,” Sarah said, looking at Grimes. “It won’t bring you any glory.”
This triggered a more violent spasm of laughter from Grimes, and he shook his head, coughing and hacking from the pain. “That is where we are the same, Hill. Despite everything I read about you and all of the narcissistic tendencies you have, you don’t like the spotlight. You enjoy the shadows. It’s where you feel the most at home. You and I don’t do this for some type of glory or fame. We do it because it’s in our blood. We do it because without it… We’re nothing.” He glanced down to the pistol in Sarah’s hand. “Do it. I know you want to.”
In a motion so quick that Grimes couldn’t hide the surprise on his face, Sarah placed the pistol’s barrel against his forehead, her finger on the curve of the trigger. “I do.” She applied pressure. Grimes closed his eyes. She knew one more death wouldn’t matter to the body count. But she knew it was what Grimes wanted. And she wasn’t willing to give him the satisfaction. She lowered the weapon.
The blades from the choppers grew louder, and Sarah left Grimes to whatever fate the CIA had in store for him, though she didn’t think he would give himself the chance to be taken alive.
“It’s over, Hill!” Grimes’s voice carried through the woods as Sarah sprinted away. “You don’t have anywhere to run! Your boss, your colleagues, the entire GSF is done! You hear me? Everyone knows your face now! They’re all coming for you! You’re dead!”
Sarah kept the steady pace of her jog, and before she was even a quarter mile from the cabin she heard the sound of the gunshot echo through the forest air. There was only one, as she expected. Grimes’s job was done. But hers was just beginning.
Chapter 13
The mood in the conference room had turned a complete one-eighty from the previous hour. Mack, Mallory, and the NSA, FBI, and Homeland directors remained seated, watching the feed from the body cams on Mallory’s people.
Mack watched Mallory sift through the emails on his phone, confirming what Sarah had seen in Grimes’s cabin, and watching Mallory’s expression. It matched exactly how Mack felt; shocked. And after decades in his profession, he hadn’t thought that was possible anymore.
In hindsight it all made sense. Out of all of the assets that the United States intelligence agency had to boast, there was one that put it a step above, and that was its clout. Grimes didn’t need anything but a vehicle to frame the GSF for the very deplorable acts it was trying to stop. And in one swoop not only did Grimes expose his agency to the world, he pitted the CIA against them to completely sever any and all chances of escape.
Mallory leaned forward and was the first to speak. “Gentlemen, I need the room for a moment.” The NSA director looked as though he was going to speak up but kept his mouth shut. After a lingering pause, the intelligence directors rose from their seats and left the room, shutting the door behind them.
Mack kept his phone underneath the desk, away from Mallory’s field of vision. And while he didn’t turn his gaze from Mallory’s, his fingers moved swiftly over the tiny keyboard.
“I think you know what has to happen now, Mack.”
“I could use a refresher,” Mack said. “For once, I’m in a bit of unfamiliar territory.”
“You saw those emails. You saw what Grimes planted.” Mallory stood, quickly. “Every intelligence agency across the world thinks that you’re the bad guys and Grimes just credited the CIA with ousting you to the world.” He spread both palms against his desk. “That’s not something we can take back.”
Grimes had played his cards well. Using Mallory’s secure account and forging those documents would force the CIA’s hand. If they admitted that the correspondence was fake, then they would be admitting to helping the GSF in its “terrorist” activities.
“It would be World War III,” Mallory said, his face gone pale now. “I can’t let that happen.”
“No,” Mack said, finishing up his message and then hitting Send. “I suppose you can’t.”
Mallory walked over to Mack’s side of the table and sat on the edge. “It’ll be a circus in the beginning, but I might be able to convince the committee hearing in charge of our appropriations to give you a trial behind closed doors. It’ll be quick and fairly painless, but you’ll need to cooperate.”
Mack placed the phone on the desk, the screen now completely black, and folded his hands, one on top of the other. “You do what you have to do.”
Less than a minute later, Mack Farr was arrested by the FBI for terrorism and espionage against the United States of America.
***
The communication device in Sarah’s ear fried before she even made it out of the forest, which meant one thing: the GSF had gone dark. She ripped the device from her ear and chucked it into the woods. She navigated through them to a small town, where she hijacked a truck and drove the nine hours back to New York City.
Hidden among the masses on the streets by the unassuming GSF headquarters building in downtown Manhattan, Sarah noticed the sunglasses-wearing figures positioned around the area, watching the entrance from several different locations, including the roof of the adjacent building.
Now dressed in a large overcoat and hat, Sarah looked like just another face in a city of millions. They couldn’t see her, no more than they could see what Grimes had really done. She started to turn away but stopped, her head craning around for one last look at a place she wasn’t sure she would ever see again.
Sarah hoped everyone had gotten out in time. She thought they had. After all, Mack had had plenty of time to sound the alarm once Grimes made his dying confession. Now all she had to do was wait for Bryce to reach out per protocol.
By the time she arrived in Brooklyn, the hunger plaguing her stomach was enough to ma
ke her want to snatch the burrito out of the hands of some kid she passed. However, she restrained the urge and settled for a meal at a small diner on the next street corner.
She had enough cash to go wherever she wanted, but even after she filled the nagging hunger in her stomach, a large portion of her wanted to return to HQ and thump every last one of those CIA badge-carrying cronies on the back of the head, strip off their clothes, and then hang them by their ankles from the side of the building to spell out the words, “The CIA All-Male Nude Revue!” But if she did, the likelihood of her making it out without drawing more attention to herself was zilch.
The waitress came and retrieved the cleared plate of meatloaf, mashed potatoes, and green beans. “Anything else?” The girl had a pleasant smile, but it was the eyes that triggered a thought deep within the recesses of Sarah’s mind. The fact that she hadn’t thought of it sooner soured the food in her stomach and nearly brought it right back up. “Hey, are you all right?”
Sarah fished out a handful of bills and slapped them on the table, not bothering to count it after she noticed the twenty among the cluster, and sprinted out the door. Becca, Sarah thought. Matt, Ella.
If her name and face were plastered around the international intelligence community, then it wouldn’t be long until the world knew about her family. And if they wanted to get to Sarah, then that’s where they would start.
Storefronts passed by in a blur as Sarah ran down the sidewalk, some of the front doors open in the cool spring air, and she heard the faint echo of a phone ring. She slowed her pace, and the ringing stopped. When she approached the next door, another phone rang, and she heard the shopkeeper answer.
“Hello? What?” Confusion and shock riddled the old man’s face as he turned to the front window, locking eyes with Sarah immediately. He lowered the receiver and called out to her, “It’s for you!”
Sarah burst inside, snatched the phone from the old man’s hands without a word, and pressed the receiver to her ear. “Bryce, the kids, I—”
“Mallory already has them,” Bryce said, his tone defeated. “I tried to send out the call to the extraction team nearby, but Mack triggered the blackout sequence before I had a chance. By the time HQ was emptied and I got set up at the satellite location, they were already gone.”
A sinking feeling pulled Sarah’s stomach away from the rest of her body. She tightened the grip on the phone, and her knuckles turned white. “Where did he take them?”
“Langley,” Bryce answered. “That’s where they still have Mack cornered. It’s probably for the best they’re in custody. Because right now, you already have assassins from Russia, Israel, North Korea, China, France, Pakistan, India, and the UK hunting you down.”
Bryce was right. Mallory didn’t have any direct link to what Grimes had done, and taking her family was more for show than anything else. Plus, as long as Mack was alive, he would keep them safe. The old bastard would die before anything happened to them. “When did the other agencies pull the trigger?”
“The moment Grimes sent the emails.”
That meant everyone had at least a ten-hour head start on her, which meant some of those spies were already Stateside. “Can you give me a breakdown of who’s coming?”
“Yeah, and I’ll upload the coordinates of my safe house to your display. Grace is with me. Meet us here, and we can get a game plan going for what to do next.”
“I already have a game plan,” Sarah said. “Be the one who shoots first.”
Agent Hill: In The Shadows
Chapter 1
The harsh din of the alarm wailed in the same spurts as the flashing of the emergency lights that bathed the main floor of the GSF in red. Support agents stood hunched over their keyboards, their eyes darting across the screen as they cleaned their hard drives: classified documents, intelligence briefings, emails, everything. Once finished, they joined the mass exodus of personnel into the tunnels beneath the building that would lead them to their rendezvous points.
One by one, the floor emptied, the hurried pace of footsteps and hastened shouts as deafening as the speakers blasting the evacuation notice, until there were only a few people left.
Bryce Milks stood at his desk to extract the information from their building’s servers, shifting his weight from side to side as his eyes darted over the six screens that scrolled through trillions of lines of data and code. But instead of deleting the information like his colleagues, he was tasked with backing that collective information up to the GSF satellite. The same satellite that Grimes had used against them to trigger this very evacuation in the first place.
“Bryce, we have to go! Now!” Grace jogged over from her desk and hovered close, glancing back at the locked doors and tugging on Bryce’s shirtsleeve.
“Almost done.” Bryce stole a look at his laptop, which monitored the CIA and FBI agents slowly breaking through their security barriers outside, ready to whisk him off to some Guantanamo-style jail cell where he would be tortured until he turned or was killed.
The doors burst open, and Hank entered, locking the doors again before he made the run over, his six-foot-six, two-hundred-fifty-pound frame rattling the floor. “The rest of the building is clear.” He gave a snarl that revealed the large gap between his front teeth as he gestured to the closed doors. “They’re coming up the stairs now, and they’ve cut the main power to the building.”
“The generators will stay on until we’ve left,” Bryce said.
The lines of code slowly disappeared from Bryce’s screens, and as they did, the monitors flicked off one by one until only the bottom middle remained. The sealed doors to their floor buckled from a heavy blow on the other side.
“Bryce,” Grace said, tugging on his shirt.
“Just one second, honey.” Bryce’s thin fingers flew across the keyboard in a blur, and another thump reverberated through the room as the FBI tactical team pounded against the reinforced doors. He snapped his head around and saw Hank draw his pistol. “Don’t shoot unless you have to.”
Three more heavy smacks landed against the doors in quick succession, the last of which knocked the doors flat against the floor. Five FBI agents dressed in tactical gear rushed inside, and Grace yanked Bryce down as bullets zipped through the air.
Computer screens shattered, and the composite desks splintered as the gunfire intensified. Bryce kept hunched low, finalizing the backup, and at last, the final monitor flicked off. Bryce reached into his desk drawer and removed the service pistol he had been given after his training eight years ago, which was exactly the last time he’d used it.
Bryce slid his laptop into his pack, slung the straps over his shoulders, and with one hand holding the gun, he reached for Grace’s hand with his free one. “We’re good! Let’s go!”
The trio kept low on their retreat to the building’s center staircase, which led down to the tunnels. The FBI agents kept close, clustering their fire down the narrow alleyways between the desks where Bryce led them past Mack’s office, where the glass walls cracked with each bullet that smacked against the surface.
Hank brought up the caboose of their three-man train and returned fire in random spurts, with Bryce and Grace doing the same when they could manage. But the pistol in Bryce’s hand might as well have been a slingshot with rocks. Every squeeze of the trigger made the gun recoil and sent a jolt of pain from his wrist to his shoulder, missing his target every time.
The group huddled near their escape door, and Bryce pressed his hand against the biometric scanner. A red beam of light passed underneath then switched to green, granting them entry. He grabbed Grace by the shoulder and spun her around to the door while Hank continued his cover-fire. “Grace, you first!”
She hurried inside, and Bryce turned to Hank. He grabbed the meaty shoulder of the security guard, and just as Hank lowered his pistol, a bullet sliced through the big man’s right temple and exited his left. Blood and bone sprayed the wall, and Hank’s body crumpled into a pile of meat on the carpet.
Bryce froze, staring at the dead eyes of the man in front of him—a man whom he had said good morning to every day for the past eight years. A man who had always greeted him with a smile and a friendly wave. A man who had stayed behind to make sure everyone got out safely.
“Bryce!”
Grace’s voice echoed from inside the stairwell, and Bryce quickly stepped inside, bullets connecting with the doorframe, then sealed the door shut behind him.
The cacophony of bullets and shouts faded the farther Bryce and Grace descended the tight spiral staircase. Emergency lights guided their path, and when they reached the bottom and entered the hangar where the vehicles were kept, he entered the code to fuse the door shut.
All but two of the cars had been used in the evacuation, and Grace sprinted to the one on the right, immediately going for the assault rifle in the trunk. When Bryce passed her on the way to the driver-side door, she looked around in confusion.
“Where’s Hank?” Grace asked.
Bryce opened the door and simply shook his head. A twinge of pain scrunched her face, but she jumped around to the passenger-side door, just as an explosion catapulted the sealed door off its hinges. Plumes of smoke crawled out like fingers, followed quickly by a host of FBI agents.
Bryce cranked the engine to life, shifted into drive, and slammed the accelerator. The FBI squad unleashed hell, and while the car’s armor plates protected them from the worst of the bullets, the vibration from every hunk of metal shook Bryce’s fingers, which were curled around the steering wheel.
“Bring up the evacuation route on the display!” Bryce said.
