Total pages in book: 34
Estimated words: 31295 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 156(@200wpm)___ 125(@250wpm)___ 104(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 31295 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 156(@200wpm)___ 125(@250wpm)___ 104(@300wpm)
10
KING
I’d been away from Stella for a fucking month, and it was killing me.
But at least we had shit to show for it.
Joseph and I had code words that were just between the two of us in case an operation went to hell. Similar to a word that a parent would give a child so that they would know a person was safe for them to interact with.
Wizard had scoured the dark web for nearly two weeks before finding evidence of the code word in a phishing email sent to a defunct address. The email had been set up on a public server with no evidence leading back to anyone and was quickly disabled. But any messages sent to the address were bounced to a server where they were stored indefinitely.
The code word he’d used told me that he was alive and underground. Most importantly, he wasn’t being held by the enemy.
Once we’d handled the situation within The Company, Wizard would get a message back to him that would let him know he was in the clear. Until then, he would remain invisible.
Weston and Alex Shaw had concocted a plan for me to “rejoin” the CIA. I went through the proper channels so that nothing led back to the director, and we could pretend we’d never met. It was imperative that the traitors thought they could get away with taking me out without getting the attention of the head of the CIA.
He researched and watched from his end so that we could narrow down suspects from the top and bottom, hopefully meeting in the middle at the same person.
The story for my return was that I’d regretted leaving after taking out Trailblazer and felt it was my duty to come back to the fold. As a former operative who had received countless commendations—not that anyone outside The Company knew about them—and a reputation for getting shit done with as few casualties as possible, my request to work in the Directorate of Operations, overseeing undercover agents and covert missions, made sense.
It was unlikely that the buck stopped with any of the mission centers or field offices. Someone had to be high enough in the food chain to access the information collected for a NOC list.
I would subtly look into questionable operations and hint to people that I felt Trailblazer hadn’t been working alone. If everything went to plan, then I would be given a special assignment and asked to reactivate as an operative for one “off the books” mission. The ball should already be rolling to burn me, and the notice would go out while I was in the field, with word being sent to the higher-ups only after it was issued. There would be plenty of evidence that there had been no time to go through channels before I betrayed the operation and got people killed.
After a week in the office, I’d opened an untraceable backdoor to let Wizard into the system. He watched for suspicious money trails that would come down the line to case officers, analysts, or specialists.
The call had finally come twenty-four hours ago. My superior asked me to meet with him, where he laid out all kinds of patriotic bullshit to convince me to take on this onetime operation.
It had been obvious that he was reading from a playbook and was a little bewildered as to why he was issuing this order. This meant he was being used as a tool and, despite being a trained intelligence officer, was clueless to his own involvement in the conspiracy.
I put Wizard on the trail to find where the directive had come from, but so far, he hadn’t been able to unravel the convoluted chain.
He’d been passing the financials off to Ace, who was doing some forensic accounting magic. Through the money trail, he’d confirmed that my boss wasn’t in on the scheme. Somehow, it was trickling down to a case officer and an operative who were completing sales of operative names from the field.
“You know what to do when you reach the safe house?” Weston asked me for the third time. We’d met up for “coffee” so he could give me some information passed along from Alex Shaw before I went dark.
I was leaving for Switzerland in a few hours. The impartial country had popped up in our records as a possible place for the handoffs, and when I found out it was where my op would go down, we knew we were on the right track.
I nodded.
“And you memorized the numbers and codes Justice gave you?”
My eyes narrowed in annoyance, but again, I nodded.
“And you—”
“Stop fucking treating me like this is my first time in the field, Davis,” I growled. “It’s been a while, but I spent eight fucking years leading operations. I know what I’m doing.”
He blew out a breath and ran his hand through his hair. “I know, but you’re not the one who will have to face your badass woman if you die.”