A sober silence, some shuffling of papers. Nobody wants to go first; nobody smiles.
The overhead sprinklers triggered by the stun grenade whisper on the ambient audio, raining down.
Sentro fills the awkward quiet with a comment: “That water felt heaven sent.”
No one around the table reacts.
Adrenaline and endorphins laid down underexposed snapshots that flood back to her, of Grey Wolves spilled in the hallway, of the naked female shooter she was forced to put down. As is her habit and means of self-protection, Sentro chooses not to think of them as dead but rather erased. No longer active obstacles.
But she remembers nothing of their flight from the hotel, the city, the island, their airlift back to Frankfurt, or the next thirty-six hours of her cool-down. And this is why she has, privately, gone to see the brain doctor. If there’s a decision that has to be made about her ability to do her job, going forward, she wants to make it herself.
“Why the hesitation in the hallway prior to contact?”
Shit. Sentro touches the Band-Aid covering where the bullet nicked her and looks down the conference table to the former NSA woman Lucky calls Lady Bug, but only behind her back. “Sorry?”
Okay, okay, don’t panic, but what’s Bug’s real name?
Tap-tap-tapping her mechanical pencil on the open report, the NSA woman looks back at Sentro, quizzical. “You asked your control for confirmation of the suite number.” Her taupe lipstick matches her No.6 clogs. Who does that? When the Bug—wait, got it: Laura, Laura Bugliosi—when Laura came aboard at Solomon Systems, Sentro hoped they might be friends. Discounting support staff, there are still only a handful of women on the Solomon Systems employee roster.
It didn’t happen; will never happen. Laura Bugliosi worships in the church of SIGINT. Sentro is a heretic.
“Eight seconds pass”—the senior man, Falcone, picks up Lady Bug’s thread—“and then the asset comes out of a different suite, and he seems to have surprised you.”
“I didn’t fully trust our intel,” Sentro lies. “The local recon was sloppy. I didn’t want to stumble into the wrong room.”
“You were out of position for what followed?”
“No. In position but requesting confirmation.”
“Had you not paused for it, might this all have transpired differently?”
Sentro’s been asking herself the same thing. The truth is she doesn’t know. And that scares her. “The world turns. There are no sure things or do-overs,” Sentro says a little defensively, and the room falls silent again, save for more idle flipping of pages. She likes her colleagues; they mean well. Like her, they’ve had to come to terms with a chosen profession rife with ethical and moral contradictions. Everyone finds their own way through it, and no one emerges unscathed.
Jenson, from operational finance, clears his throat. “Okay. So. Our total exposure . . .”
“Will greatly exceed our fee, yes,” Sentro concedes. “And that’s on me. I apologize. The cleanup, the local payoff, the necessity of an emergency exfiltration of the whole team after the event went south. It was just one of those days.” Of course it was. But she’s bothered by how much she suddenly wants them to believe this.
“The baseline goal for this operation was to facilitate a clean exchange,” someone says. “The money for the man.”
“Didn’t happen as planned, but we got a good result,” Sentro reminds them and looks for the source of this flinty criticism.
“You seem to be having more and more of ‘those days’ than any of our other active field operatives. Of late.” Bob Drewmore is the critic, a former ranger who, absent army fitness requirements, has been slowly eating his way toward an approximation of Jabba the Hutt. His assessment stings, because he was the one who first recommended Sentro go private sector with Solomon as she was mustering out, back in the day.
“A clean exchange happens between rational parties.” Her temper flares. “But I’m sorry—nobody calls us to deal with rational people, do they? We go in when all the other options have failed. And once in, if there are lives in play and I can save them, I do it. Goes where it goes. But I think my record speaks for itself.”
“Port Isabel.”
“What about it?” Drewmore just stares at her, smug, as if he’s just played an ace. In a way, he has; hardly a day goes by when Sentro doesn’t think about Port Isabel and wonder what she could have done differently. Better. “The boy was alive when I delivered him.”
“I guess you can look at it that way, sure. But we’re still paying on that civil suit.”
“Fuck you. That was one of my first jobs here, Bob, and I recovered the asset. You shouldn’t have settled.”
“Just saying.”
But he’s not. “For the record, you weren’t even there; you were sitting on your fucking thumbs in Islamabad, letting teenage soldiers get sent into an unwinnable sectarian civil war.”
The folds of Drewmore’s chin and jowls clench and shift. His stubby hands flutter up, defensive, backing off. “Hey. Okay. Sorry. Nothing personal, Aubrey.” He’s a good guy, she reminds herself, still married to the wife he met while in basic, commemorative rings from West Point and his multiple Middle East tours on almost all of his fingers. “It’s just, business-wise, we gotta factor the optics. Our investors don’t do nuance, nor give a runny shit about your record, or mine, only how it affects their bottom line. And you’ve become reckless, girl.”
Has she? Sentro takes a deep breath. Reminds herself that ever since the Solomon board decided to seek venture capital, these operational reviews have become public shamings.
“Caracas, Lagos. That rat fuck in the Bahamas. Now this?”
“Wasn’t me who ran the op in the Bahamas.”
“Still. History. Liability. Exposure. It’s a new game, Aubrey. I mean, hell, if you weren’t practically a founding partner here, wouldn’t we be likely looking to find cause to fire your bony ass?”
“My ass has never been bony.”
There’s some uneasy laughter, allowing release.
“Back off, Bob. Point taken,” Bugliosi says, in a friendly tone. She trades a blank look with Sentro, who is a little astonished that the Bug has stood up for her. “Don’t be an armchair quarterback.”
“Maybe if she took a stretch of time off,” Falcone suggests, trying to de-escalate. “Until we get this all sorted out. Cooler heads and whatnot. She’s earned a break. Full salary.”
“Maybe you shouldn’t talk about me in the third person,” Sentro tells the room, thinking that the last thing she wants is a break. Another job is all she needs. The discipline, the narrowing down. The comforting sense of purpose. Her mind will settle down.
“I’m with Laura. What the hell is all this?” Elsayed asks in Sentro’s defense. “She’s not operating in a vacuum. We’re a team.”
Falcone spreads his hands in a vague gesture of helplessness. “We have three dead Turkish right-wing militia to explain to State. Weapons violations the Cypriots are squeaking about. Extensive damage to the hotel premises, ditto the leased vehicles used during the operation and subsequent exfiltration. Local fees and fines. NATO has been inquiring about an unauthorized dark flight through restricted airspace of four member countries.”