“This is Charlie Patrol, we are taking fire. I repeat, we are taking fire. Need help.”
Static. Reception could never be counted on out here on the border. Not when you needed it.
He raised himself up, jerking his Heckler & Koch .40 semiautomatic from its holster on his hip. He leaned forward on the boulder, firing downrange at the shadowy figures moving in the gulch below him.
Another ragged burst and Zac’s carbine fell silent. The silence of death. Gutierrez fired until his H&K’s slide locked back on an empty magazine, bullets whistling through the air around his head.
He thumbed the magazine release, metal clattering against stone as it fell free, his fingers fumbling with the pouch on his belt.
A slug tore through the flesh of his arm, half-turning him around as another round smashed into his chest. The Border Patrol agent crumpled backward, his sidearm falling from his fingers.
Darkness. The stars seemed to swirl over his head as he lay there. It didn’t seem real, none of it. How long had the firefight lasted? Two minutes? Three? Not long, not long at all compared to the years of war he’d survived.
And yet he was dying.
Gutierrez coughed, blood flecking his lips. Voices, footsteps moving closer in the rocks.
Searching. For him.
The voices were closer now, talking in their native language. It wasn’t Spanish, he realized in a moment of sudden clarity. But he had heard it before…somewhere.
He closed his eyes, straining to remember, a nagging doubt probing at his brain.
And he was in Afghanistan again, ferrying supplies up into the north. Along the Pakistani border. Listening to their ‘terp talk with the villagers. He had even learned a few words over the months. Words of…Pashto.
But this wasn’t Afghanistan. He was home. In the United States.
His eyes flickered open and Gutierrez found himself looking up into the swarthy, bearded face of a young man. Into the muzzle of the pistol in the man’s hand.
Another voice in the distance, speaking in Pashto. It took a moment for the question to filter through his darkening mind, then the translation came to him. “Is he dead?”
Above him, the Pakistani shook his head, drawing back the hammer of his pistol. “No.”
Chapter 1
The room was spartan in its furnishings, white walls on three sides and a pane of one-way glass beginning waist-high on the remaining wall. A folding table sat in the exact middle of the room, a chair on each side, beneath the panel of bright fluorescent bulbs in the ceiling.
Three men were the sole occupants of the room, the one a young Asian technician working over a polygraph machine mounted on the table. The second man was in his mid-fifties, heavy-set, dressed in a dark suit that had seen better days, the permanently bored expression of a bureaucrat plastered on his face. His name was Lucas Henderson Ellsworth IV, and he was proud of it, along with a pedigree that stretched back to Jamestown. What those illustrious ancestors would have thought of his position as CIA inspector general was unknown.
The man that sat across from him was thirty-eight years of age, tall — six-foot-three according to his personnel records — a lean, wiry frame concealing its potential for power, its capacity for violence. Eyes the color of blued steel shone from a smooth-shaven, rugged face. A smile might even have made him somewhat handsome, but the man beneath those lights was not smiling. Wires ran from the polygraph machine to electrodes attached to his arms and a strap encircling his bare chest.
The technician and the bureaucrat exchanged a few words and then the tech left, the door closing with the finality of a cell door.
Ellsworth smiled, opening the folder on the table before him. “You have an impressive history, Mr. Nichols. Fifteen years in the Clandestine Service — actually several in the former Directorate of Operations before the formation of the NCS. Awarded the Intelligence Star five years ago for an operation…the details of which have been redacted. Most regrettable. I’m sure it would have made for an interesting read. But that’s not why we’re here this morning.”
The man shifted restlessly, clearly annoyed at the small talk. “I was waiting for you to come to the point.”
“Very well. Let me ask a few preliminary questions to establish a baseline for the machine. Your full name?”
“Harold Nichols. I was given no middle name.”
“In early October of this year, you and Alpha Team of the Special Activities Division were involved in an operation in the Middle East. You’re the leader of Alpha Team, are you not?”
“That is correct.”
“Very good. May I call you Harry?”
“My friends call me Harry,” the man replied, his voice perfectly level, without a trace of inflection.
A moment of embarrassed silence followed, then the bureaucrat cleared his throat. “Good. We’ll begin, Mr. Nichols.”
The man lifted a hand from the table, gesturing around at the wires, the equipment. “What do you hope to accomplish with all this?”
Ellsworth seemed to consider the question, then he replied, “The truth, Mr. Nichols. I hope to get at the truth.”
A smile crossed the man’s face, an ironic, cynical parody of a smile. “Let me tell you something. I lie for a living. In 2008 I was captured by a Taliban splinter group in the passes of the Hindu Kush. I spent three months in captivity before a team was able to extract me. I was tortured on a daily basis for information. It was five months before I could run the mile again. My body still bears the scars of those days. In all those months, all they learned was what I wanted them to know. Disinformation, and they never knew the difference. Now, if you think this machine of yours can accomplish something they couldn’t, you’re wasting your time…”
Anymore, the alarm always seemed to come too early. David Lay opened his eyes and stared up through the darkness at the ceiling as the alarm continued its discordant clangor.
With a groan, he swung his legs out of bed and fumbled for the luminous display. At the age of sixty-two, he wasn’t as young as he’d once been, which had to be a contributing factor. But hitting the snooze button wasn’t an option for the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency.
Wrapping a robe around his body against the morning cool, Lay pushed open the door that led into the hallway. The temperature had dropped below twenty degrees Fahrenheit the night before, a snow squall blowing in from the west, forecasted to leave a dusting to two inches on the ground. The faint odor of smoke struck his nostrils and his steps quickened as he made his way toward the kitchen.
“Good morning, boss,” was the nearly clairvoyant greeting as a short, stocky man emerged from the smoke shrouding the stove.
“Well, Pete, I see you’re giving them the old college try,” Lay observed, casting a critical eye at the stack of pancakes that surmounted the island.
Peter Ramirez laughed, waving his spatula in the DCIA’s direction. “They taste better than they look, comprende?”