“We are aware of what the possible fallout of this mission will cost certain people. However, the President agrees that this mission is too important to leave on the table,” Nazari said.
“Do I have a choice?” Jamie asked into the silence.
“In this particular instance? Yes, you have a choice.”
“From where I stand, it doesn’t feel like a choice, sir.”
“I’m not one to leave my people out to dry, Callahan. You know that. This will be a joint mission with the United Kingdom’s UMG. You and your team won’t be going in as illegals. You will have the full backing of the United States government for this mission.”
“Full backing in that both governments have a tacit agreement to allow for our undercover operations on Top Secret orders, but does that support extend to the public? Would it cover my father when this blows back on him, because we both know there is no way to keep him completely clean of this when I’m the one the mission is built around.”
Nazari’s silence spoke volumes.
“I see,” Jamie eventually said. “I’d like to speak with you in private, sir.”
Nazari got to his feet and snagged his can of Zing! “Let’s go to my office. Stirling, please join us. Delaney? I’ll leave you to handle the rest of the briefing.”
Kyle had to give the agent credit as Jamie left the room with Nazari and Stirling. Sean seemed undaunted by the prospect of facing down everyone left behind.
Sean was going to be flayed alive and his body dumped in the Potomac.
That was his first thought when the director left him alone with the remaining members of Alpha Team to finish up the briefing. Looking around the table and seeing all eyes on him, Sean swallowed back a sigh. Their intimidating focus was similar to the hostility he’d faced from his former superiors at the CIA three years ago when he’d been on the way out. They hadn’t exactly been pleased with one of their deep cover agents getting caught in a Splice chemical bomb that decimated a market in Belfast. His cover in Northern Ireland with the Reborn Irish Republican Army had been burned when it became clear he wasn’t going to die during a power fight between two factions.
Getting home from that mess had taken far too long due to the power Sean had walked away with. Having control of a phase field that enabled him to phase through solid objects was all well and good, but when that same power disrupted electronics, including all bioware and nanotech implanted in his body, things got complicated.
Not as complicated as this, Sean thought in the privacy of his own mind.
At thirty-one, he hadn’t envisioned he would end up working for the MDF. He’d been career CIA ever since he was recruited at the age of eighteen while screwing around during his freshman year at the University of New Seattle. He’d given up a lot since saying yes to that offer to serve his country—the rock band he and his three brothers had formed and any possible decent relationship with his parents after he lied about dropping out of college. A fractious relationship with his now-famous brothers and increasingly frosty communications with parents who saw him as having squandered away his future for a dead-end bank auditor position they thought he held was Sean’s prize for trying to do right by his country.
Yet here he was again, attempting to put country first, and fucking up someone else’s life on orders from his superiors in the process.
“Did you pick Jamie for this mission?” Katie demanded once the door closed on their team captain and the brass.
“I was ordered to build the mission around his identity,” Sean replied evenly, meeting her fierce gaze without blinking. “I did the best I could to minimize potential damage.”
“Sure you did,” Donovan scoffed.
Sean swiped a finger over the terminal in front of him, pulling up a command window. He tapped on a subfolder and opened it up. Eight files appeared and he sent seven of them to their designated recipients.
“These are your cover identities. Read them. Know them forward and backward. The mission isn’t scheduled to move forward until later this week, so you have time to absorb the facts.”
“If it moves forward. The MDF is asking a hell of a fucking lot from Jamie this time around. If it were me, I wouldn’t agree to it,” Kyle said. A few other members of Alpha Team echoed their agreement of his statement.
Sean tilted his head in acknowledgment to that fact. “The secondary plan I was told to build up isn’t as strong as the first. It involves the same methodology, but with far more effort involved in creating false facts we want to portray as true.”
“Why don’t you enlighten us to your methodology?” Madison said flatly.
“Yeah,” Annabelle agreed. “Enlighten us.”
“That’s what I’m trying to do. Look, Jansen only targets the rich. They have the money the Pavluhkins need, a social status they don’t want tainted, which makes them easy to manipulate with the right leverage. They don’t care about nationalities, they only care about money, power, and keeping their targets under their control. Jamie’s military record with the Marine Corps is a known fact. We can’t hide that. So that leaves us with changing the narrative.” Sean brought up holographic copies of their military jackets in the center of the table. “All of your narratives.”
“Are you fucking kidding me?” Trevor snapped as he leaned forward. “You gave us Other Than Honorable discharges?”
“It was either that, or a dishonorable one, and I shot that option down because it wouldn’t work with the cover we had to build, not with the timeframe we’re running on,” Sean said, raising his voice to be heard over the team’s fierce denial to the discharge detail. “An OTH for all of you and a dismissal for Callahan to get everyone out of your respective branches as of two years ago. Callahan’s cover is that he doesn’t agree with what his father wants him to do with his life now that he’s no longer in the military, so he’s making business deals on his own with the wrong kind of people for his social status.”
“At least you got one thing right,” Katie said snidely.
Sean sighed, reaching up to rub at his temple. He could feel a headache coming on. “These details are all correct for the cover we built you. Can I explain, or are you going to keep arguing?”
Katie waved at him to continue while taking the most vicious sip of tea he’d ever seen anyone swallow.
“We made Ovechkina the founder of a cybersecurity startup company and your second hire was Dvorkin. It’s completely legit and we’ve backdated all relevant business application forms needed to incorporate it. Ovechkina opted not to go the venture capital investor route for seed money in favor of offering Callahan a controlling stake in the company if he bankrolled it for the first couple of years. Callahan agreed. He’s the money, your company is the lure, and I’m the person who’s going to guide you through this as your CFO for the cover and as your handler for everything else.”
“Why you?” Kyle demanded.
“Because I have experience in deep cover work and none of you do. My job is to make sure you live and breathe your covers while we’re overseas. This isn’t like your field missions when you’re in constant contact with headquarters. This requires you to be in a communications blackout as much as possible and act on your own toward the end goal.”
“You do deep cover,” Alexei said, his eyes narrowing. “You CIA?”
“He’s an ex-CIA officer,” Katie answered for Sean in an even voice. “I cleared him last summer myself.”
Sean winced at the memory. Knowing that the infiltration of MDF headquarters and its ranks was perpetrated by someone who had broken oaths to protect the country had been a bitter pill to swallow. For Sean, coming from the CIA, it had meant a deeper telepathic scan than his fellow MDF agents received to root out any possibility of him being a traitor. He’d been in the field when the attack occurred and then was almost immediately recalled, forcing him to break cover on a mission in Canada that never got finished. Having Katie dig through his mind, reading every last one of his thoughts, sifting through
memories Sean would rather leave buried, had not been pleasant.
Neither was this.
Alexei’s mouth curled in a distasteful snarl. “Not like CIA.”
“I’m aware of that,” Sean replied tiredly. Pretty much every MDF agent knew why Alexei and Kyle hated the CIA. “But I’m not CIA anymore. I’m an MDF agent, which means we’re all on the same side here.”
The silent looks the team exchanged told Sean he would probably be the odd man out for the duration of this mission. It wasn’t the most comfortable place to be, but he’d work through it. He always did, whether on the job or back home with family.
“The goal here is to dangle a big enough prize in front of Jansen and the Pavluhkins that they bite and we get access to the inner workings of their criminal circle. I’m sorry you don’t like what the director ordered me to put together, but this is the mission on the table and I’m not done briefing you,” Sean said into the hostile silence. “So let’s finish.”
Sean could read the mutinous expressions on all of their faces, but Alpha Team was made up of professionals. They might not like their orders, but they’d follow them. Whether or not this mission would be theirs all depended on Jamie’s answer. Until then, Sean had a job to do, so he let out a quiet breath and got to work.
“Does my father know?” were the first words out of Jamie’s mouth once the doors to the director’s office closed behind them.
“He will once we read him in on the mission parameters if it goes forward. We opted not to bring him in prematurely in the event you shut us down. We understand the hardship this will cause your family, which is why we’re letting you decide if you want to take this mission,” Nazari replied.
Jamie stayed standing at parade rest, hands clasped behind his back, while Nazari took a seat behind his desk and Stirling claimed a comfortable chair off to the side. “And if I don’t? What then?”
“We reconfigure the mission with another team in mind and the timeframe gets pushed back. It’s not ideal in any way, but we’d make it work. We had Delaney and others in his division work out a secondary plan, but it won’t hold up as easily as this one will,” Stirling said.
“You’re asking me to risk my family’s good name and possibly ruin my father’s political career, to say nothing of my own, all for the sake of a chance?” Jamie asked.
“Our intelligence division has spent the last six and a half months working to find a way to break into the criminal alliance your team discovered last summer. They profiled the people involved and laid out the best possible plan. This mission was drawn up by our people, not anyone else, so I trust that they did their best to minimize the personal damage.”
“I understand your hesitancy—” Nazari began.
“With all due respect, sir, no, you don’t,” Jamie cut in. “Agreeing to this mission puts my family in danger. My team and I, we signed up for this job. We knew the risks that came with putting on a uniform. My parents—my little sister—are civilians. They didn’t agree to any of this.”
“I’d argue that your father is a career politician and long ago dedicated his life to this country, and that this falls within the boundaries of his job as a senator. I will agree your mother and sister shouldn’t be dragged into the middle of this, but they share your last name, Callahan. We can’t carve them out of this. Believe me, we tried.”
Jamie ground his teeth until he thought several might crack. “Did you?”
Nazari leaned back in his seat and studied Jamie with a calculating look in his dark eyes. “I’ll overlook your attitude since I know the issue at hand is personal to you. Yes, we planned for a second team in the event you say no, but the cover won’t be as tight. People who come from your kind of wealth know each other. You run in the same social circles, you show up at the same parties, you know who’s who and who’s not. Throwing someone into that viper’s nest as a nouveau riche person won’t get them very far and it sure as hell won’t get the Pavluhkins to bite. But you, Callahan—you they would do anything they could to reel you in.”
Jamie knew what it was like to be seen only for his last name: the wealth and prestige it meant to a friend, a lover, a hanger-on. When he was a teenager, before he’d gone to Annapolis and joined the Marines, Jamie had measured himself by his family’s wealth and status. He knew better now, even if everyone in that world he’d left behind didn’t. But his last name and the billions that came with it would open more doors than the MDF could scheme to open alone. If they used his identity, if they played their hand right, the story wouldn’t have to be made up of a house of cards.
It would only have to be his life.
“What are the parameters that pertain to me?” Jamie asked, practically biting off the words.
If Nazari took his question as a win, the director was smart enough not to telegraph it. “We can’t ignore the fact that you’re military, but we can change the story. A dismissal put you out of the Marines two years ago. Several members of your platoon went with you. Ovechkina used her skills with a computer to build up a cybersecurity company with Dvorkin’s help. You backed it with your money in defiance of what your father wanted you to do.”
“Politics, I assume?”
“It fits the narrative, so yes. You’ve been fighting your father on that for two years since your dismissal and are branching out into business on your own. We thought about trying to work Empyrean into your cover, but Delaney argued against it. He said your parents would never agree to something like that.”
“No, they wouldn’t.”
Empyrean was a luxury space cruise line that catered to the wealthy elites of the world. The small fleet of civilian owned and operated space ships flew routes around the Earth and the Moon, each trip lasting a week or longer, depending on the package, providing their well-heeled passengers with an unparalleled and extravagant experience. The company’s launch terminals were located in over a dozen countries. From there, smaller, space-faring shuttles ferried customers up to a civilian-run space dock halfway between the Earth and the Moon where the cruise liners stayed when not in use. It wasn’t the only civilian company geared toward travel branching out beyond Earth, but it was one of the most successful to date. Luxury and exclusivity was a selling point the rich would never stop ignoring.
Jamie’s maternal grandmother had backed the company in its early years and eventually bought out the other owners for full control. Charlotte had inherited ownership of the company when her mother signed it over to her. Jamie’s grandmother was enjoying her golden years by living the high life in whatever country caught her fancy these days while Charlotte oversaw a board of directors and CEO who ran the day-to-day functions of the company. One day in the future, Empyrean would belong to Jamie and Leah in a fifty-fifty split. If this mission ended badly, most likely it would all go to Leah. Jamie couldn’t see his parents giving him half the family’s crown jewel if he dragged their name and reputations through the dirt.
“Delaney has a good read on people, Callahan. When you work deep cover, you need to have that skill if you want to survive. He’s built backgrounds for you and your team that we believe will hold up under deep vetting. We wouldn’t have signed off on this mission if we thought otherwise,” Stirling said.
“At the end of the day, you’re the money man. That’s all that matters,” Nazari said.
“Where does the UMG come into play?” Jamie asked.
The United Metahuman Guardians was the United Kingdom’s equivalent of the MDF. Jamie had an idea of who Nazari would request as their contact and wasn’t surprised when he guessed right.
“Lt. Colonel Liam Wessex is the UMG’s choice for the mission since apparently you two know each other.”
That was putting it very mildly.
Jamie and Liam had met as children at the Royal Ascot in London when they were ten. Liam, youngest son to Prince Samuel, Earl of Wessex, had been bored out of his mind when he and Jamie were first introduced, though you’d have never known by his polite expression
. Their mothers were friends from years spent working the charity circuits, and the Callahans had been invited as special guests of the Countess of Wessex. He and Liam had stayed in touch over the years, and when Jamie entered Annapolis, Liam entered Sandhurst. Liam eventually joined the Special Air Service, the same way Jamie found himself becoming a Recon Marine. And like Jamie, Liam’s squad fell victim to a Splice chemical bomb attack during a mission. Unlike Jamie, Liam was the only survivor.
“I see,” Jamie said slowly, looking past Nazari and out the heavily shielded windows behind the director. Outside the sky was overcast, with the local forecast one of mild temperatures for the rest of the week and through the weekend.
Jamie knew he wouldn’t be here to enjoy the weather.
Nazari would claim he gave Jamie a choice, but in truth, there was no choice. Declining meant the MDF fielding a team that had no hope of succeeding, not how Jamie and his team could. Success depended on an airtight lie, and the best lies, as everyone knew, were ones based on truth.
If the MDF wanted him to revert to the rich fucking bastard he once was before the Marines beat sense into him and Katie beat the arrogance out of him, then so be it.
“You realize I’m going to bill the government for the entire cost of this mission, don’t you?” Jamie asked mildly.
“I see you’re already getting into character,” Nazari replied dryly.
Jamie smiled, the cold twist of his lips familiar from a childhood of knowing he was better than everyone else in the world. He sat down without asking for permission, digging deep for the remnants of a personality he’d buried in pieces over the course of years on the front lines of a war that would always, in some ways, exist.
“Let’s talk business, Director.”
Katie found him afterward when she tracked him down at his office. Jamie wasn’t surprised when she stepped inside and locked the door.
“Ceres, initiate privacy blackout mode,” Katie ordered.
In the Ruins (Metahuman Files Book 2) Page 9
