Clark patted him on the back. “We all got our secrets, son.”
Clark got Foley back on the line as soon as he had the team convened in his hotel room.
Dom sat in a padded chair, his bad leg propped up on an ottoman under a bag of ice. Jack Junior barely contained his displeasure at having missed the action — even if that action was a helicopter crash. Frankly, Clark knew how he felt, but had seen enough action in his life that he didn’t feel cheated.
Vietnam had good relations with the United States at the moment, but Clark had still taken time to sweep the room for listening devices. They’d drawn the curtains and set up white-noise “chirpers” by the door and each window to defeat laser mics anyone might be bouncing off the glass. Even so, they spoke in vague terms and coded names.
“Thanks, Chief,” Clark said, when the DNI had finished her thumbnail brief. An enlisted sailor at heart, Clark used the title as a term of endearment, having generally reserved his top level of trust for the crusty old senior chiefs over most officers.
“So,” Ding said, once Clark disconnected the call. “Two targets. Mother and daughter. We’ll have to split up.”
Midas lay on his back on top of Clark’s bedspread, drawing imaginary circles in the air with the gimme hotel pen from the nightstand. “The kid should be a simple find. We’re going to need something else to go on to find her mama besides ‘hiding out with some terrorists somewhere in China.’”
“Yep,” Clark said. “We’ll get more from CROSSTIE anytime now.” Everyone in the room knew CROSSTIE was CIA operations officer Adam Yao. They’d worked with him before, built that kind of rare trust that comes from spilling a lot of sweat and a substantial amount of blood together in the field.
“And they have a mole,” Ding said, restating Mary Pat Foley’s larger concern. “Will CROSSTIE’s initial cables to his chain of command compromise him at all?”
“Remains to be seen,” Clark said. “The boss believes his identity has been compartmented enough to keep him in the black. But we have to be careful. Without knowing the mole’s identity and level of access, we can’t be certain what he or she knows.”
“Does it sound like she has any suspects?” Adara asked from her spot at Caruso’s side. She’d been coddling him from the moment they got back to the hotel.
Clark gave her a knowing nod. “At this point, I imagine they suspect everyone.”
11
Monica Hendricks stood barefoot on a padded office chair, her lips pursed around a mouthful of tenpenny nails. Like most of the bean counters in government buildings around the world, the powers that be at CIA paid an inordinate amount of attention to little things, like the tiny holes left by hanging framed plaques, certificates, and photographs on an employee’s I-love-me wall. A certain type of hanger was mandated, or… Monica didn’t exactly know the consequences, but she suspected it would entail either a firing squad or a flurry of e-mails from admin weenie bosses to operational bosses — who had, by virtue of their jobs, become admin weenies themselves. Hanging anything with something as large as a tenpenny nail was strictly verboten. Monica smiled, dabbing a bit of Colgate toothpaste into the tenpenny holes to cover her treachery. She was on her way out the door, anyway — the admin weenies would have to run fast if they wanted to catch her now.
Known for being a snappy dresser, Hendricks wore faded jeans and a Georgetown sweatshirt today. The Agency had a robust program to help see people through the transition to the private sector, help them understand that they are still relevant when they turn in their parking pass and building ID. It was a big step, leaving all this behind, and like most people who’d worked anywhere for as long as she had, she’d spent her last day reminiscing about her career, with colleagues and in her head. That reminiscing was doubly important now, because there was a lot she would never be able to talk about once she stepped out the door.
Fifty was young to be retiring from the CIA. Armed federal law enforcement agents had to pull the plug at fifty-seven. CIA officers didn’t hit their sell-by date until they were sixty. Even then, they could come back as contractors to teach. By fifty you’d paid your dues. You’d just begun to untie the Gordian knot that was the Central Intelligence Agency. The best promotions came around fifty, when they still had ten good years to wring out of your soul. Everyone on the Asia desk thought she was making the biggest mistake of her life. She’d served in leadership positions in the headquarters and the field, including chief of station, and was on the short list for several plum promotions to the seventh floor. For the last three years, virtually every iota of intelligence regarding China had crossed her desk or the desks of those who worked for her. Some even thought she had a shot at deputy director if she played her cards right.
But she wasn’t much of a cardplayer.
She missed the field to be sure, and lamented the “mom body” that came with sitting behind a desk — and her affinity for daily lattes from the Starbucks in the CIA food court. She wasn’t particularly out of shape, but she wasn’t in shape, either. Monica had never been the stereotypical slender female operator of the Hollywood spy genre. She’d been a bit on the chunky side when she was recruited. She was worried at first, but made it through The Farm fine, realizing quickly that a few extra pounds of fighting weight made defensive tactics easier to handle. She knew her way around firearms but rarely carried one, though her husband and two sons routinely chided her for not doing so for her own protection. Her adult sons had both known she was a CIA officer from the time they were in high school — old enough to keep a secret — and still they believed there was more gunplay in the life of an intelligence officer than there actually was. Both seemed to think that every CIA officer, including their mother, was a part of the ground branch — the paramilitary guys that the world equated with the CIA overseas. It made her smile. While the Russians, Chi-Comms, Iranians, and jihadis were all watching the bearded white guys who ate barbed wire for breakfast, the slightly chunky black woman slipped by unnoticed.
It was good work, but twenty-six years was enough. Now she was going to give back, to teach high school. Her friends with teenagers joked that she was leaving intelligence work to go into law enforcement.
Hendricks’s family was accustomed to service. Her husband taught history at Georgetown. Her eldest son was an officer in the Army, in his final year of residency to become a trauma surgeon at Fort Sam Houston. Her youngest was in his second year with the Secret Service, stationed in the Seattle Field Office.
She’d grown up in a middle-class home outside Dallas, where her father was an engineer designing integrated circuits for Texas Instruments. She’d been a child at the end of the Civil Rights movement. Her parents kept themselves to themselves for the most part and were not politically active. She graduated high school in the late eighties with a handful of token minorities in her senior class — the doctor from India’s kid, some Hispanic families. Monica had balked when her mother insisted she take a second language but found she had a knack for Spanish — the only language besides Latin offered by her high school. She took it all four years — and Latin, too, because the puzzles the languages provided seemed to fit well with the way her brain worked. She had plenty of kids to practice her Spanish with, but there were few kids like her. Reggie Good, the fastest wide receiver on the football team, was black, and in a Texas high school, football transcended color — up to a point. There were a few unwritten rules. She was a popular academic kid. Pretty, but not skinny enough to be a cheerleader. She could go out with virtually any boy in the school, no matter the color, so long as it was nothing serious. Reggie could date her, and possibly a couple of the Hispanic girls, but the line against him dating white girls was clearly drawn.