Author: James R. Hannibal
Category: Thriller
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Now they were encroaching on dangerous ground. What would happen if Jenni guessed that Talia worked for the CIA? “I . . . travel a lot.”
“And those places don’t have Facetime? Twitter?” The boat dipped left again and Jenni let out a labored huff. “This isn’t working. I feel like I’m talking to your ponytail. I want to talk to my sister.”
Another two strokes went by. When Talia spoke, her voice was quiet, barely louder than the slosh of the oars. “I’m not your sister, Jenni. I never was.”
“Could’ve fooled me. We shared a room for half of high school and all of college, not to mention a set of parents.”
The boat wobbled a little more with each stroke. Talia could feel their rhythm failing. “Focus, Jenni. You’re going to flip us.”
“Like I care. And speaking of our parents, Dad knows you blocked his number. He doesn’t understand why you’re so mad.”
There it was. Had Bill sent Jenni to force a meeting? “Yes. He does.”
He hadn’t been the worst of Talia’s foster fathers—far from it. Most foster kids would say she’d hit the jackpot. Bill had treated her with respect, even love. And he had worked from home, so he had been there for Talia—a lot and in the best ways.
Right up until the day he wasn’t.
“He didn’t come, Jenni. The one day in six years I really needed him, he didn’t come.”
“This is about nationals?” The boat dipped way left as Jenni dug in with her oar. “Dad had to travel for work. You’re looking for an excuse to be angry. Can’t you see that?”
“He didn’t have to work. He wanted to. And he never told me he was going. He just . . . wasn’t there. Bill shouldn’t have tried to be my dad if he never planned on following through.”
The moment he had come home, Talia and Bill had a knock-down, drag-out, fight—and not only about nationals. His absence there had been a symptom of a much larger issue. After six years, a lot of foster kids with a lot less attentive caregivers would have been adopted. He had made excuses. She had moved out the next morning. She hadn’t spoken to him since.
“He made it to our graduation a week later.” Jenni had missed the fight, and she was still missing the point.
“For you, not me. He had to see the return on the four years of Ivy League tuition and books he shelled out for his real daughter.”
Talia heard a sniffle from behind. “That’s not fair. You had a scholarship.”
Waves sloshed over the side. The boat shimmied, as if the oars were moving in opposite directions, attempting to rip the hull in two. Talia knew what was coming next.
They flipped.
Talia had expected Jenni to flip them early, before they left the shallows, not a mile upstream in the Three Sisters channel. The water there in late spring was eighty feet deep.
Talia surfaced with one hand on the upturned shell. “Jenni!”
She heard a sputtering cry. Jenni popped up near the center, where the current was strongest, waving an arm and moving away. “Talia, hel—” She sank, and the river closed over her.
Chapter
twelve
POTOMAC RIVER
GEORGETOWN BOATHOUSE
TALIA PUSHED THE BOAT to her front, oars dragging in their locks, and kicked with all her might. She had to catch the same current as her sister.
Jenni popped up again, closer now, gasping for breath.
“Grab the bow!”
She tried. She missed. She went down again.
Momentum threatened to carry Talia past. But with a heavy kick, she changed her vector and caught Jenni’s arm. She pulled her up to the hull.
Jenni threw both arms over the top, coughing. “Thank you.”
They made several attempts to right the pair on the way in. None were successful, and both girls were laughing by the time they dragged the shell up onto the dock—the hysterical relief following a trauma. They dropped the boat into the slings and collapsed cross-legged under the boathouse lights.
Jenni looked up at a rack of life vests hanging just inside. “Where were those an hour ago?”
She was kidding, but Talia understood what scheming to avoid a conversation had almost caused, and it hit her hard. “I . . . I didn’t . . .”
Jenni met her eyes, held Talia’s worried stare for a long moment, and then burst out laughing. Talia laughed with her—the way the two had laughed on so many nights in high school, until Bill had to march up the stairs and tell them both to go to sleep.
Once the laughter subsided, Talia nodded. “I’ll call more. I promise.”
“Dad too?”
Talia looked away to the trees.
Jenni touched her knee. “I get it. Too much, too soon.” She pushed herself to her feet, searching out the wash bucket. “But we could hang out more often than once a year. With other people if you want. Our Young Grads group from church eats at the Tombs all the time, right there on campus. And we’re restoring a place in the Heights for a new campus.” She slapped a sponge into Talia’s hand, holding it there. “The guys in the group are nice. No . . . expectations.”
No expectations. That didn’t sound too bad. Talia’s entire year had been filled with expectations. But group settings meant meeting people. Questions. A CIA officer could handle questions anywhere in the world except Washington, DC, where everyone was only two steps away from guessing the truth. “I’ll . . . think about it.”
Jenni hadn’t brought a change of clothes. “I didn’t know we were going swimming,” she said, smirking at Talia as they walked to the parking lot.
There was a Taurus at the far end, the only vehicle besides theirs. Talia squinted at the windshield, trying to see if anyone was behind the wheel.
“Thank you.” Jenni gave her a wet hug.
“For meeting up, or for saving your life?”
The hug got a little tighter. “For both.” Jenni leaned back. “You’ll call. Right?”
“I will. Count on it.” Talia truly hoped it wasn’t a lie.
NIGHT HAD REACHED FULL BLOOM by the time Talia came out of the showers. The Taurus was still there. With the change of light, she could see past the reflections on the windshield. Movement. Someone was behind the wheel—a man, she thought.
“Speaking of guys and expectations,” Talia said under her breath as she half walked, half jogged to her Civic. She tried to write the guy off as an everyday creep, but the instincts she had developed at the Farm were on fire.
After turning the corner onto Prospect Street, Talia lingered. She didn’t have to wait long. The black Taurus rounded the corner behind her.
Her heart began to pound. Talia fought to settle it down, taking 34th toward the Francis Scott Key Bridge. The whole episode could be a matter of coincidence, but Talia couldn’t shake the image of Brennan standing outside Jordan’s office. And she couldn’t shake his strange goodbye.
“Stay safe out there.”
“Okay.” Talia glanced in the mirror, watching the Taurus follow her across the bridge, three cars back. “Let’s see if you’re a bona fide tail.”
She picked one of three SDRs— surveillance detection routes—she had developed specifically for travel between Georgetown and her apartment as part of a Farm exercise. Making precisely four superfluous turns, Talia moved south through the mini skyscrapers of Rosslyn and then took the Roosevelt Bridge back across the river. Any driver that stayed behind her through that mess was either a tail or lost.
Talia glanced in the mirror as she pulled off the bridge, a block away from the Lincoln Memorial.
No Taurus.
Jordan had warned Talia about the common paranoia of new ops officers. And here she was, four days in, informing on her boss and seeing killers in the night. She pulled into an empty space by the curb, put the Civic in park, and dropped her head to the steering wheel in a mixture of laughter and sobs.
Talia sat motionless, head on the wheel, for a long time, and then took a deep breath. She fixed her hair in the rearview mirror, and then took th
e Roosevelt Bridge back across the Potomac. The streets of Rosslyn were empty, the office buildings and medical suites dark for the night. But when Talia turned down a one-way street, headlights swept across her mirror.
The Taurus.
“How?” she asked out loud, but she already knew. The Taurus had goaded her into using an SDR, designed around strange pathways through less traveled areas, and then waited for her to let her guard down and double back. The driver wasn’t tailing Talia. He was corralling her.
She stepped on the gas, but a white delivery truck lurched backward into the next intersection, blocking her path. Talia slammed on her brakes, skidding sideways.
Two men stepped out of the sedan. Two more jumped down from the back of the delivery truck, one the size of a house, the other small and wiry. All four carried submachine guns, raised and ready.
Instinct told Talia to go for the 9mm she kept in a special holster under the Civic’s front passenger seat, but the wiry guy’s submachine gun had a cylinder mounted beneath the barrel. He tilted it up a few inches and fired.
The smoke of the oncoming grenade traced an arc through the air. Talia dove from the car and hit the ground shoulder first in a half somersault. The canister clinked on the pavement. She heard it roll under the car. Slow. Lazy. Maybe she had a chance. Her feet found purchase, and then she was up, sprinting for the granite pillars of an office building.
She never made it.
Talia’s world vanished in a dazzling white blur. A thunderous bang ripped through her brain.
Her senses spun. She couldn’t keep her feet. Dark figures in ski masks—balaclavas—converged. Talia swung wildly and her right fist connected with a jaw. Her victim let out a surprised grunt. Her knuckles stung, but she kept swinging until strong hands caught hold of her arms. She kicked, bucked, fought, screamed, but within moments they had her lying in the back of the truck, hands and feet zip-tied.
The biggest of the four dropped his shin onto her thighs, pinning her legs. He yanked a black cloth bag down over her head and cinched it tight.
Talia heard the ratchet and creak of the door coming down. Someone outside pounded on the side of the cargo bay and shouted, “Poyekhali!” Let’s go in Russian.
Chapter
thirteen
LOCATION UNKNOWN
A HAND WHISKED THE BAG from Talia’s head perhaps thirty minutes later, exchanging one darkness for another. Wherever they had taken her, the lights were off. Talia breathed deep. Increasing her oxygen intake would aid her night vision, another trick from the Farm. Her eyes adjusted and she became aware of a silhouette beside her, seated in a chair, hands behind his back. Talia couldn’t see enough to be sure, but the shape of his glasses looked familiar.
“Eddie?”
“Talia?” The other prisoner half turned his head. “What’s happening? Who are these guys?”
Riding helpless in the back of that truck had given Talia time to think. A suspicion had been growing in her mind, a new and simpler answer to the same questions Eddie had just posed. She had counted turns and stops, counted the minutes on the highway. She had listened to the accents of the two men who rode with her, naming them Thing One and Thing Two after a pair of characters in her favorite Dr. Seuss story. She had taken note of the way they handled her as they dragged her out of the truck.
Talia dropped her voice to an urgent whisper. “Don’t tell them anything.”
“Yeah. No kidding.”
Thing Two’s gravelly voice came out of the darkness before them. By his silhouette, she pegged him as the wiry guy—the one who had launched the flash bang. “Oh, you will tell me what I want to know.”
With an electric clang, blinding white work lights flashed on, smashing into Talia’s senses. Through the spots in her eyes, she watched Thing Two bring a short rod close to her face. An electric arc crackled at its end. “You will tell me everything.”
Thing One was there as well. He began the interrogation, leaning down between Talia and Eddie from behind their chairs, still wearing the balaclava. “Who do you work for?”
Neither answered.
A heavy foot kicked Talia’s chair. “I ask you question!”
“And I hear question.” Talia mimicked his poor English. “But I’m not in a talkative mood.”
Anger. Frustration. Talia had always kept plenty of each in reserve, and at the Farm she had learned to channel both to suppress panic. She could have descended into tears, but most thugs and terrorists were sociopaths. They lacked the mental wiring for sympathy. Tears might buy her a bullet—though she suspected not.
“Who do you work for?” The cattle prod advanced toward Talia’s nose, then shifted. Thing Two brought it close enough to Eddie’s side to make him squirm in his chair. “Tell me now, or I make Four-Eyes suffer.”
“All right. Take it easy.” Talia played along, allowing the guy a small victory for his efforts. “I work for the US State Department.”
“Liar.”
The prod dug into Eddie’s side. He let out a constrained cry, body convulsing.
Talia’s eyes widened as her friend slumped in his chair. She hadn’t expected them to escalate so quickly. Every candidate for the Clandestine Service had been tased, flash-banged, shot with Simunition, and given a drug that inflamed the nervous system, so she knew Eddie could take the abuse. That didn’t make watching it any easier. “I’m not lying. I’m sure your friends pulled my backpack from the car. Look inside, you’ll find a State Department ID.”
“Yes, we have bag. And we found ID. It is prop. A fake.” The prod crackled. Eddie convulsed again. When it was over, his breathing grew labored.
Talia strained against her bonds. “Stop that!”
Thing One intervened. The big guy gently pushed Thing Two aside and stepped around Talia’s chair, crouching down in front of her. “You want us to stop, yes? Then talk.”
Thing Two paced behind him. “Our people watch you drive onto the same compound day in and day out, Agent Inger. We know answer to question already, so why not tell us?”
“I’m a low-level State Department employee, a nobody who works in a cubicle on a joint government compound.”
“Have it your way, Agent Inger.” Thing Two pressed the prod toward Eddie’s neck.
Thing One caught his wrist with millimeters to spare. “Please, Miss Inger. My friend, he is . . . touchy, yes? Do not press him.”
What choice did she have? “I work for State. Take it or leave it.”
“Enough lies!” Thing Two shoved the barrel of his submachine gun up under Eddie’s chin. “Answer question or your friend dies. Who do you work for?”
“You! All right?” Talia refused to play any longer. Either she was right, or she and Eddie were dead. “I work for the same organization as you.”
Thing Two cocked his head and lowered his weapon. Thing One let out a relieved breath. Both straightened and looked back through the lights, as if waiting for instructions.
With another electric clang, the bright lights shut down. Softer overheads came on in their place. Talia blinked, willing her eyes to adjust for the third time. Etched into the opposite wall was a Bible quote. AND YE SHALL KNOW THE TRUTH, AND THE TRUTH SHALL MAKE YOU FREE.
Mary Jordan strode into view, clapping, with Brennan at her shoulder.
Chapter
fourteen
CIA HEADQUARTERS
LANGLEY, VIRGINIA
JORDAN’S ASSAULT TEAM had planted Talia and Eddie at the dead center of the CIA seal in the Old Headquarters Building. Five paramilitary officers from the Directorate’s Special Activities Division—knuckle-draggers and throat-slitters as the operations officers liked to say—stood off to one side of the work lights, pulling off their balaclavas and muttering to one another.
Other Directorate personnel loitered at the periphery, watching the show. Talia recognized several faces from REED. She frowned at Brennan. “I thought we were done with tests.”
“Consider this more of an initiation.�
�� He opened a folding chair and sat down in front of her. “And it isn’t over. How did you know you were at the Agency?”
“How about we cut these zip ties first?” Talia glanced at Eddie, whose forehead had gone clammy. Sweat colored the neck and armpits of his I Heart Wookies T-shirt. “And maybe get Eddie a soda?”
Jordan folded her arms, cocking a hip. “You’re stalling, Inger.”
“Not in the slightest.” Talia leaned forward and stretched her arms high behind her back as Thing One drew a stiletto from his boot. He had a kind face for a gorilla. Thing Two, however, reminded her of a weasel. “It started with him,” she said, tilting her head back to indicate Thing One. “He dropped his knee on my thighs to pin me down—the standard alternative to straddling a woman during a violent exercise.” The zip ties snapped and she brought her hands around in front of her, rubbing the marks on her wrists. “And then there was the placement of his hands.”
Thing One had moved on to Eddie. He looked up in shock. “My hands? But . . . I was careful.”
“Exactly.” Talia gave him a wry smile. “Too careful. I doubt any girl has ever been manhandled in so gentlemanly a fashion.”
The big guy looked away, bending down to shove the knife back into his boot. Talia thought she caught a hint of red in his cheeks.
Thing Two laughed, twirling his cattle prod. “Way to go, Tom.”
“And you.” Talia shot him a scowl that burned the smirk right off his face. “Your Russian accent is all over the place—Moscow, Vladivostok, Siberia. Pick one and stick with it.”
An ops officer brought Eddie a cola and handed a bottle of water to Talia. She twisted off the cap. “And what was up with the whole ‘Agent Inger’ thing?” The wannabes from Homeland and the FBI loved the agent title, but the CIA reserved the term for the foreigners they recruited to steal intelligence. Most Russian organizations understood that. “Did you steal that villain persona from a B spy movie? They teach acting at Georgetown. Audit a class or two and get back to me.”