Requisite Operations is not a sovereign nation, but it’s starting to act like one.
The Unofficial Story
Alex is already home when True arrives. The shotgun is out. “Just in case,” he says, but he doesn’t look worried. He pours her a glass of wine and they sit down to high-end Italian takeout that he picked up on the way home. For a few minutes life feels almost normal.
True is pouring more wine when the intrusion alarm goes off: a shiver-inducing bleat that emanates from Alex’s phone on the dining table and from her tablet, left on the kitchen counter.
She gets up, furious. “Get me a location on it,” she tells Alex as she scoops up the shotgun and heads for the mudroom.
“Hold on,” he says, phone in hand as he rises from his chair. “It’s not our robotic stalker. There’s a car at the gate.”
“A car?” she asks suspiciously, because no one ever stops by their house without calling first.
“Looks like Brooke Kanegawa.”
Courier mode: that’s what Brooke calls it. “When information is so sensitive it can’t be conveyed electronically for fear it will be intercepted.”
“So you came in person,” True says wonderingly. She’s also a little afraid.
“Let’s go downstairs,” Brooke says, “into the basement. Leave all your electronics here.”
Lights come on automatically when Alex opens the door. The three of them tramp down the hardwood stairs. The basement is finished but unfurnished. A few forgotten boxes are stacked in a corner. There’s not much else.
Brooke looks around. She’s still not satisfied, so she heads for the furnace room. “In here,” she says, opening the door. The furnace is running, providing white noise, though True doesn’t think that will defeat any truly sophisticated listening device.
They squeeze in. Alex closes the door behind them.
Brooke is a couple of years older than True—a compact woman, only five-foot-two—still attractive, with a soft, round figure, frosty blond hair, and blue-gray eyes that project a no-nonsense attitude. Those eyes are bright as she looks up at True and says, “I don’t have any proof of what I’m about to tell you, but it was told to me by someone I trust, someone in a position to know. And maybe it involves Diego. That’s the reason I came.”
True nods. Brooke knew Diego as a ten-year-old, that year in DC. “We understand,” she says, grateful for Alex’s presence beside her.
Brooke leans closer, eyeing both of them. “There’s a suspicion our Chinese allies knew our men had been taken to Nungsan—but they failed to share that intelligence.”
Below the surface, True feels the stir of an old, familiar panic, a metabolic rush, the demand that she do something. Stiff knuckles resist the tight squeeze of her fist.
Brooke continues, “Diego was held overnight before he was executed. There might have been time enough to go in after him, if we knew where he was. If the Chinese had shared that knowledge with us, but they did not. Worse, they diverted our forces away from Nungsan.”
“But why?” True interrupts in a plaintive tone. “Why would they do that? The hunt for Saomong was a cooperative action. We weren’t at odds. We were sharing intelligence. Both sides wanted them taken out.”
Brooke raises her hand, requesting patience. “You know the official story. The story that was worked out afterward. Right? That no one knew an American prisoner was being held at Nungsan. So when Chinese forces received intel that a Saomong warlord on their hit list was in the village—and that the civilians had fled—they took unilateral action and eliminated Nungsan with a missile strike. In their position we might have done the same.”
Alex says, “I thought this had to do with Diego. He was murdered days before that happened.”
“The unofficial story is different,” Brooke says. “It’s now believed that the warlord, if he existed at all, was an excuse, a cover story for the real goal. The Chinese wanted that village erased along with everyone in it—militants and prisoners.”
This is such a departure from True’s understanding of the Burma operation that she struggles to make sense of it. “You’re saying the Chinese wanted Shaw dead?”
“And Diego. And everyone else.”
“Why?”
“No one knows.”
Alex says, “Someone knows.”
True thinks about it. She has a feeling Jon Helm could tell them why.
The Hunt
Miles awakes to gray daylight seeping through the bedroom curtain. He watches the shadow of a cheap quadcopter drift past and wonders if his parents’ Internet connection has been hacked.
Probably.
He gets up, showers. His mom is in the kitchen, watching him with worried eyes. “I’m all right,” he tells her, giving her a kiss on the cheek.
She’s not convinced, but for now she’s willing to pretend. She cooks breakfast for him, eggs and bacon and pancakes, while he sits at the kitchen table and listens to his dad and his sister describe the phone calls, the government agents, the surveillance drones, and the mediots parked out front.
“I don’t want you to have to deal with this,” he tells them. He explains his plan to find a short-term rental in a secure tower.
Of course they protest, until he tells them, “I’m going to need the quiet anyway. I’m writing a book.”
This is what they expect to hear. It wins their cooperation. His sister offers to call a friend who deals in real estate; by noon he’s put his electronic signature on a month-to-month lease for a fully furnished condo.
He’s got a few boxes stored in the garage—mostly clothes. His dad’s going to drive him over to the new place, so he loads the boxes into the trunk of his parents’ car. Before he leaves, he pulls his sister aside. “As soon as I get a secure connection, I’m going to send you a copy of the manuscript so far. Don’t open it, but stash it somewhere for safekeeping. I’ll give you the name of a literary agent you can trust. If anything happens to me, forward the manuscript to him. He’ll hire someone to finish it and he’ll get you a good deal.”
Her hazel eyes widen. “Miles, what do you mean, if something happens to you? You’re home now. What’s going to happen?”
He smiles, brushes it off. “Sorry. I’m still a little paranoid.”
She wants to believe the story he’s writing is over, but it’s not. He intends to look into what happened at Nungsan and prove a connection between that event, his own brutal kidnapping, and a mercenary known as Jon Helm. If things work out, he’ll end the book with Jon Helm being brought to justice.
He doesn’t tell his sister that the real reason he wants his own place is so that she and their parents will be out of the line of fire if Jon Helm decides that the story should end in a different way.
Brooke made sure she had an official reason for her sudden visit. Since she’s served as liaison between the State Department and Requisite Operations in the past, she’s been assigned to conduct additional follow-up interviews and make recommendations to improve relations and communications in the future.
It’s busy work but True is happy to comply. She takes Brooke on a tour of the Requisite Operations campus and introduces her to Lincoln and Chris and Tamara. No insider information is mentioned and Brooke departs at 1300, in time to make her flight back to DC.