Her creds said DHS, but her agency had long ago dropped off any official organization chart or government budget. The highest-ranking official in the building didn’t even approach her security clearance. With a phone call, she could order anything short of a nuclear strike.
Cade thought she was CIA. That was true, a long time ago. Now she was something else entirely.
She’d heard rumors about an agency behind the Agency, doing the jobs that couldn’t be exposed to the light. Black-budget, black ops.
But she had no idea of the size or scope.
When the CIA fought the Cold War, Helen’s employer ran guns and drugs and laundered money to pay for it. Nazi scientists got safe passage in exchange for their discoveries. Mouthy foreign leaders ended up dead, and friendly dictators were installed.
The official leaders of the CIA appeared before congressional committees and denied any knowledge of assassinations, torture or bribes. The president could hold his head up high while he defended the United States.
In the meantime, her bosses did the real work, the stuff that could never be exposed, and descended further and further into the dark. Even the conspiracy theorists would have been stunned to realize what the Company had actually done over the years. All those half-baked ideas about JFK and Roswell and AIDS were nothing compared to the truth.
In time, her employer had evolved into something else, like those fish turned into eyeless horrors by centuries in underground rivers. It grew new appendages, developed different organs and, eventually, became totally separate from its daylight ancestors. It no longer answered to any elected official. It made its own calls, and forged alliances with other things, out there in the night. . . .
Until it stood tall on its own legs, and started carrying out its own agenda. The Company still believed in American supremacy, but only as long as it didn’t interfere with the Company’s supremacy. The War on Terror was the perfect cover. Operatives who hadn’t been seen in years were suddenly back in their old offices, giving orders and taking names.
But, like Helen, no one really knew who was in charge.
It had no official name, but everyone called it the Shadow Company. Helen liked it. It fit.
They were simply there, right next to the other government agencies, using them as cover, always in step. Just like a shadow.
SHE ENTERED the conference room, then unstrapped her 9mm SIG Sauer pistol and set it on the table.
“What do we have?” she asked.
Her two Shadow Company operatives looked back at her from across the table. Shadow Company units operated like terrorist cells—small and mobile, hidden within the larger structure of other organizations.
To her right was Ken. He was as blandly handsome as the doll that shared his name. He’d joined the CIA at the same time she did, went through training with her. She’d been recruited to the Shadow Company long before him, but when she was given a chance to bring him aboard, she didn’t hesitate. She knew he’d do anything she told him.
She remembered back at the Farm, the CIA training program, someone had called them Ken and Barbie the first time they were paired for an exercise. During hand-to-hand practice, she punched that guy so hard he lost a tooth. The nickname didn’t catch on.
The other was assigned to her without her input. The Company, she was reminded repeatedly, was not big on democracy. They gave her Reyes because they wanted her to have someone who knew the area.
Pushing forty now, he was local, a former cop who had been bounced out for massive corruption. Raised in East L.A., it turned out he’d never given up his gang affiliation when he put on LAPD’s uniform. You could see the beginning of a prison tat under the collar of his button-down shirt.
“How are you feeling?” she asked him. His arm was in a sling, a souvenir from last night’s encounter with Cade.
“Fine,” Reyes said.
That was the limit of her concern for Reyes. “And we delivered the package to the new address?” she asked.
The men looked at each other. By some unseen referendum, Ken was elected to speak.
“We had some concerns about that,” he said carefully.
Helen frowned. Both men held their breath. She was not someone you wanted angry.
“What concerns?”
“This is going to cause some blowback. Are we prepared for that? We’re risking some exposure.”
Helen’s face grew tight with rage, but her voice was still controlled. “Are you telling me we did not deliver the package?”
“No, no, that’s not what I said. Not at all,” Ken said. “The package was delivered. Checked everything twice. It’s in place. Ready to go.”
“You’re sure?” Helen asked.
Furious nodding.
“Okay,” she said. “As long as it was delivered.” The anger drained away, and the men relaxed.
“You can go,” she said. “I have things to do.”
They rose and moved to the door. “Keep an eye on Konrad,” she said. “I don’t want him left unguarded.”
“But . . . it’s daytime,” Ken said.
“Thanks for the update,” Helen said. “Tomorrow we’ll work on basic math. Until I say otherwise, you stay on Konrad.”
The door closed. Helen savored the peace and quiet that only came in the complete absence of stupid questions.
HELEN HOLT’S CIA training officer said this in her final evaluation: “If I had just a dozen more recruits with balls like Holt’s, we could rule the world again.”
She would have had that framed, if it wasn’t classified.
The CIA put her out in the field almost immediately. She excelled out there. She was smart and ambitious. Nobody really knew how ambitious. Or even how smart.
Helen had flown past all the usual checks and balances for a CIA operative. She knew the right answers to give on the personality tests, had in fact taken the MMPI until she could deliver whatever score she wanted. The CIA likes a little viciousness in its recruits, but just the right amount. She was within all the right tolerances.
It wasn’t until two years into her career, when she came back alone from a four-man mission in Montreal, that she raised any warning flags for anyone in the system. The other three operatives on her team—all senior to her—had been killed while watching a radical Muslim cleric believed to be a recruiter for al-Qaeda.
They put her in guest quarters at Langley—not a prisoner, not exactly—while they debriefed her. Different men questioned her, over and over and over, checking her story for holes.
She wasn’t afraid. She told herself this was standard agency procedure whenever anyone died in the field. But it was exhausting. Fifteen, twenty-hour sessions, the same mind-numbing interrogation the entire time. Fifteen minutes here and there for a break. Then back to the questions.
That night, like every other night, she was out as soon as her head hit the pillow in her antiseptic dorm room.
And then she was standing, naked, in a pool of harsh light in a dark room.
She could barely see anything outside the glare of the uncovered bulb over her head, but she knew someone was out there. In the shadows just a few feet away, a group sat behind desks. Watching her. Examining her body in a curious, sexless way.
It had the unreal quality of a similar dream, the one where you show up at school for finals, only you’re not wearing anything, and you haven’t studied, and you can’t find your classes.
But this was worse somehow. Her feet were cold. She wanted to retreat from the light, to cover herself, but she couldn’t move. She looked down and saw she was standing in a circle of painted lines on the stone floor. It was made up of odd symbols—like an alphabet of a language she’d never seen before.
One of the people in the shadows spoke to her. “We’re considering you for a very special program, Helen,” he said. She was pretty sure it was a he. She still couldn’t make out faces, but when he leaned forward, she saw the dull white of the collar and cuffs of his oxford shirt, underneath his black suit and tie. D
im light reflected off his wire-rimmed glasses.
“We’re impressed with what we’ve seen so far,” he said. “But we need to ask you a few questions.”
“Who are you? What’s going on?”
She heard paper rustling. The man in the shadows continued as if she’d never spoken.
“When you were four years old,” he said, “you stayed with your grandmother. She had a bird she named—rather unimaginatively—Petey. What happened to Petey?”
Helen laughed. This had to be anxiety, mixed with too much fast food and coffee. She didn’t remember any damn—
And then she did. It came back to her as vividly as daylight.
“I don’t know,” she said.
Her right arm suddenly sang with pain, like a razor blade slicing cleanly up to her shoulder. She gasped for air, and would have dropped to her knees, but something held her in place. It didn’t stop the tears from rolling out of her eyes.
You weren’t supposed to be able to feel pain in your dreams, Helen thought. She was sure of that.
“Please don’t lie to us again,” the man said mildly. “Now. What happened to the bird?”
“I killed it,” Helen said, and it all came blurting out. “She loved that goddamn thing more than me. It bit me, and all I wanted to do was pet it, it bit me, and she wouldn’t do anything about it, so I got one of the little green pellets out of the rat poison box, and the greedy little shit took that right out of my hand—”
He cut her off. “Thank you. That’ll do.”
But the memory stuck in Helen’s mind: the stiff little body of the bird on the bottom of the cage, her grandmother’s tears, her mother taking her home early.
Her grandmother never had her to stay again.
“Next,” the man said, and the images vanished. “What happened to your first lover?”
Helen didn’t try to lie this time. In fact, she was still a little proud of how she’d handled herself back then.
She was a freshman in college, saving herself for the right guy, he was a TA, and it was all so predictable. She was in love, she thought, or something close to it, until she saw him exit another dorm room one morning, still wearing yesterday’s clothes. She went to a lawyer, the dean and the department head, in that order. In the space of two days, he was fired and expelled, and facing the threat of criminal charges. She didn’t have to pay another dime in tuition.
“Thank you, Helen,” the man said, stopping her again. “I meant, what happened to him after that?”
“He killed himself. Pills.”
“Are you at all sorry?”
“No,” Helen said, and felt the same flush of triumph she did when she’d heard the news years before. “He was weak.”
“I see.” The sound of a pen, scratching notes. “So, what really happened in Montreal?”
Helen knew she couldn’t tell the truth. Not to this one.
As if sensing her reluctance, her arm began to throb with pain again.
Helen’s mouth was dry. She swallowed hard. “Start at the beginning,” the man prompted.
“We were there to watch a target named Khalil Haj-Imad. He’s gotten a little following in the past couple years. Young Muslims. Kids, really. Six months ago, some former members of his mosque turned up in pieces in Iraq, after they strapped on suicide vests and tried to get inside the Green Zone—”
“Yes, yes.” Impatient now. “So what did you do?”
“I wasn’t given much to do,” Helen said, unable to keep the resentment from creeping into her voice. “I maintained communications while the senior members of the team”—arrogant pricks, she thought—“tracked the target’s movements and evaluated the chances of removing him from the field for questioning.”
“You disagreed with that?”
“I felt I could convince him one-on-one. He liked blondes.”
“I see. Continue.”
“Then our cover was blown. All three of the other field agents were killed.”
The images came back to her, in brilliant detail. Corman, the lead operative, half his head blown away, his brains all over a wall in a coffeehouse. Marta, her throat slit, her body found in an alley ten blocks from the mosque. And David—whom she kind of liked, actually—dragged from the wheel of his van, later found beaten to death on a back road.
They didn’t get her, because she was safe in their rented room, behind a wall of computers and surveillance equipment. She was on a flight out of Canada, back to the U.S., when her team failed to check in. The worst she’d had to face was a cranky Customs inspector.
“How was their cover blown?”
“I don’t know . . .” she began, and this time the pain did drop her to her knees.
She woke a second later—she’d never passed out in a dream before—with drool strung from her mouth.
“Strike two, Helen,” the man in the dark said. “There won’t be a third. Do I need to repeat the question?”
“I did it,” Helen said. It almost felt like a relief to get it out there. “I was sick of being stuck in the background. I thought I could move out front if Marta’s cover was compromised.”
“How did you do it without your superiors finding out?”
“That was the easy part.” A stupid surge of pride here. “I snapped a quick shot of her in the street with a disposable cell phone that had a camera. Uploaded that in an Internet café on a lunch break. Sent it through an anonymizer in Finland, bounced it back and forth through some message boards, and then made sure a Jihadi website picked it up. She was blown. Never even knew it.”
“Why would you risk another operative’s life like that?”
Helen considered lying again and then decided fuck it, it’s just a dream, right? And it would feel good to say it out loud, finally.
“I hated that bitch,” she said, her lips pulled back in a snarl. “Just because she had dark skin, they put her in the mosque, make her out like she’s Marta Fucking Hari and had me answering the phones, for Christ’s sake. I knew I could have gotten him. We’d seen him go to the strip clubs. He would have followed me anywhere.”
“So you got her killed.”
“I didn’t think the entire team would get blown.”
“Still. They did. Three people dead. Because you felt . . . what? Professionally slighted?”
She looked down, feeling the eyes on her again. “Yes.”
“Last question, then,” the man said. “Are you sorry?”
She looked up, defiant. “No,” she said. “They should have listened to me. None of it would have happened if they had just done what I said.”
Another image flashed in her mind. Helen herself. In junior high. Alone, as she was every day, despite her clothes, her hair, her family’s money, her shiny good looks. As if the others could sense the hole inside her, and they stayed well clear, afraid to fall.
The man looked at the other figures in the gloom, then nodded. “Thanks for your time,” he said. “We’ll be in touch.”
Helen woke up immediately, still in her bed in Langley.
She turned on the light and examined her arm. There wasn’t a mark on it, but it hurt like hell.
They came for her the next morning, right after the final Board of Inquiry. The man with the wire-rimmed glasses, the one she would come to call Control, gave her a new set of credentials.
Then her training began for real. Her new job turned out to be far more demanding than the CIA. And far more rewarding.
It only took her a little while to realize what happened in Montreal wasn’t a black mark to her new employers. Far from it.
The Shadow Company liked survivors. That was really the only reason they recruited her. They didn’t care about her schoolgirl crush on fascism, or the twigged brain chemistry that made her believe other human beings were expendable. Those were bonuses, yes, but they weren’t essential.
Bottom line, they wanted Helen on their side because she would do anything to gain what she wanted. And she hated—absolutely hated�
�anyone or anything who got in her way.
They could use that.
THIRTY-ONE
Dylan stood in line at the impound lot. Everyone waiting with him seemed just as hung over, sweaty and tired as he felt. The man ahead of him had a burst blood vessel in one eye and a large bandage around his head.
When he’d discovered the truck was gone, he had stifled the urge to catch a cab to the airport and run like hell. He still had a chance, as long as no one looked inside the truck. . . .
He had spent the night before locked inside his hotel room, too scared to even look at his cell phone. He knew it was Khaled, every time. He didn’t need that stress on top of everything else. He opened the door only for room service and then only after checking through the peephole. He was sure he was screwed. There was no way his truck could be impounded without anyone checking the cargo.
When morning finally came without a knock on the door from any cops, Dylan steeled himself. Then he ran to the bathroom and puked out room-service Jack Daniel’s. He went downstairs and found a place in the casino that would give him the cash advance. That was the easiest thing he’d done since the trip started.
Next, an insufferable cab ride with an old driver who smelled like the inside of a coffin, a long wait in the wrong line, followed by a longer wait in this line.
Dylan looked up and saw the CCTV cameras in the corners of the room, wondered who was watching. The longer he waited, the more he became convinced that this was all a ploy to stall for time as they examined the truck.
He played it out in his head, saw it happening right now. One of the pricks would look at him through the lens and say, “That’s him. That’s the sick bastard.”
Would they understand what was inside the truck? Or would they simply assume he was dangerous and had to be killed?
Dylan knew what he would do in their position.
When he reached the front of the line, he was certain that at any moment black-suited thugs from Homeland Security would appear from nowhere and gun him down in a hail of bullets from their automatic weapons. Or torture him first. He heard that happened a lot.
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