He sat, opened his mouth, closed it, and opened it again. I sat too and kept quiet as I watched him scan the room. His expression changed as he realized what was written beneath the images were dates of death.
“Paxon—”
I held up my hand. I wasn’t ready to speak and didn’t want him to, either. Whenever I entered this room, I forced myself to take several moments of still and reverent silence.
When I was a kid, I went to a Holocaust museum on a school field trip. Our entire class, usually boisterous, was solemn as we studied the images and realized what they represented. This was the same. Each image was a life lost. Worse, it was a name forgotten by those who should’ve honored their memory.
Before standing, I took a deep breath. I walked over to the first wall.
Cope stood too and walked closer. He pointed to the three images above the names. “These are the guys who died on your mission,” he said.
“That’s right. Peter Samuels, Albert Baker, and Eric Berg. All died in the line of duty two years ago in Hong Kong.”
Cope slowly walked around the room, scanning images, reading the notes I’d written about each one. When he got to the fourth wall, he turned to me. “How many?”
“Number fifty died last week.”
“Jesus. Fifty,” he repeated under his breath. “Why haven’t you shown me this before?”
I had no answer. I didn’t know why I chose to now. Until he arrived, I had no intention of doing so. Maybe it was the tally reaching a milestone number that made it too hard to bear on my own anymore. Maybe I wanted someone besides me to know. To remember. And maybe, if I met the same fate they had, I wanted Cope to find out why. Why had more agents died in the last three years than in the twenty prior combined?
5
Irish
Washington, DC
Six Years Ago
It had been three years since Cope and I began the mission we undertook with no authority or funding, both of us knowing our careers as well as our lives were on the line if anyone found out about it.
Thus far, every theory we contrived led nowhere. If it weren’t for the sheer number of deaths that couldn’t be explained or attributed to anything, it would be easy to think it a tragic coincidence. Except I couldn’t do that. Agents I’d worked with directly had been gunned down in front of me. I was convinced their deaths had nothing to do with the op we were on, and yet nothing about them was random.
The only apparent link was that three sets of murders I’d witnessed took place either in Beijing or Hong Kong. Two were close calls for me too. One, I was at a safe distance away, but the end result was still the same—agents were dead and no one had any idea why.
Without any other leads, the Chinese became the center of our investigation. Given relations between our two countries were strained even more than with Russia, it wouldn’t be a stretch of anyone’s imagination to believe either communist nation was behind the loss of so many of our agents.
While, to a certain extent, Cope influenced the missions I was assigned, he certainly wasn’t the person who ultimately decided what they were. That was a couple of steps above his pay grade. He did make sure, though, that I was put front and center for every mission related to China—including those in Hong Kong.
Most of my other assignments had enough downtime that I could continue looking for patterns in what appeared to be systemic execution. There had to be something that tied the deaths together—other than China, which both Cope and I believed worthy of more investigation. How they were involved specifically, though, remained a perplexing mystery.
Today, like every other time we met on the subject, we were careful about where and when we talked. We set off from the CIA headquarters in separate cars and drove an hour to Annapolis, Maryland. Once there, we left our cell phones in our vehicles, met at the public docks, and rented a boat.
It was a warm mid-September day that felt more like summer than the beginning of autumn, so we chartered a thirty-two-foot cruiser. Once we were far enough out in the Chesapeake Bay, Cope cut the engine.
“Does the name Malin Kilbourne mean anything to you?”
“She’s one of the agents you handle, right? Code name Starling.”
“That’s right.” Cope looked over his shoulder. There was nothing but water within a couple hundred yards of us. “She’s picked up a lead on something I’m going to let her run with.”
“Let her run with? Isn’t she brand spanking new?”
“To me, yeah, but she trained under Dutch Miller. She’s got chops.” Cope looked over both shoulders a second time. “I’ll monitor her closer than she realizes.”
“What the fuck has she gotten herself mixed up in that has you so tightly wound that you keep looking over your shoulder?”
“Somebody from DHS gave her a tip on money coming into a super PAC.”
I knew there had to be a hell of a lot more to it than that. “Get to the point, Cope.”
“She starts looking into it, and within a couple of days, Ed Montgomery steps in and assigns her a mission in Afghanistan.”
“Whoa. Back up. Isn’t he with Congressional Affairs?”
“Yep.”
I cocked my head, trying to figure out why someone Cope didn’t report to was giving missions to an agent he handled.
“Is there a new chain of command I’m unaware of?”
Cope shook his head. “Right? Striker asked me what the fuck I thought I was doing.”
“And?”
“I told him to ask Stevens.” Striker Ellis was Cope’s and my boss. Ellis reported to Paul Stevens, who was the head of the National Clandestine Service branch of the CIA. Stevens answered directly to James Flatley, Director of the CIA. Ed Montgomery was nowhere in that chain of command.
“What did Stevens say?” I asked.
“He told Striker to stay in his lane.”
“Striker? Not Montgomery?”
“You heard right.”
“Whatever this super PAC is, someone doesn’t want Starling poking her nose into it.”
“Don’t call her that, by the way. She hates it,” said Cope.
“So, what’s the deal with the super PAC?”
“No clue. All information about it has been burned.”
“What’s Kilbourne know?”
“I’m going to let her lead me to it.”
“You don’t think she’s going to drop this even though she’s been assigned something else.”
“Hell, no.”
“What’s her mission, anyway?”
“Infiltrate the Islamic State.”
I shook my head and looked out over the water, finally understanding why Cope and I were discussing Starling and the super PAC. “Montgomery wants her out of the picture—permanently.”
“You got it.”
“How closely are you monitoring her?”
“Close enough that if someone kills her, I’ll have a lead on who’s behind it.”
“But not close enough to stop it.”
“Look, Irish, she’s one of how many now?”