Savvy couldn’t look at Cal as she left the club. She didn’t want her boss to know Cal would be her partner on this op. Not yet. She knew how the man’s mind worked, and she needed to build her case slowly and methodically if she had any hope of forcing Harry out of this mission.
Because of her past with Harrison Evers, Seth Olsen would dismiss her objections as emotional, unless she could back up her stance with well-reasoned logic.
She regretted telling Seth about what happened in that motel room. He’d been appalled, and he’d rightly warned her that if she chose silence, if she didn’t take legal action, she would have to work with Harry. He’d also warned her that in a case of she said/he said, benefit would be given to the man with the longer track record with the Agency.
It had been five years since the incident, and two years since Harry had joined their working group within SAD, forcing her to face him on a daily basis. This assignment to Djibouti had been her escape from that nightmare. She’d figured she wouldn’t have to face the threat of being sent on an op with him until she returned stateside. Now here he was, in Djibouti and apparently eager to be paired with her on a mission where she would be required to play his sex toy.
Not just no, but hell no.
When she’d requested SAD send an operator, she’d specifically excluded Harry from the list of potential partners. Seth knew why.
But then, her objection was emotional. Harry could well be the better choice over Cal, but there was no way he’d ever touch her again, even under the guise of a mission.
“It was kind of you to travel all this way, Seth.”
“My pleasure, Savannah.” The name was stiff on his lips, but then, it wasn’t the name he usually called her. But they were in public, and Seth had always been a stickler for rules.
“I’ve read the reports you filed on Drugov,” Harry said. “Nice work.”
His praise meant nothing to her. Well, except for making her skin crawl. She ignored him and spoke to Seth. “How long will you be here?”
“I fly back Tuesday. Tomorrow, I’ll meet with Agency personnel at the embassy.”
“The case officer is doing a great job.” She refrained from using Kaylea’s name or female pronoun, because she was just as much a stickler for rules as Seth.
“Glad to hear it.
They reached the temporary structure that housed SOCOM. Savvy had a tiny office in the back. No name on the door, no title. But then, her name wasn’t hers anyway. She was immensely pleased with the small, windowless room because she’d earned both it and her undefined role with SOCOM through years of hard work. She made sure she was always the most informed person in the room. She spent her evenings memorizing maps and political alliances, studying up on warlords and their goals. Chasing down intel leads on relatively unknown men who aspired to great power.
Men like Lubanga, who’d been in her sights from the moment she stepped on African soil.
She spent her mornings listening to detailed daily news podcasts during her five-mile run. She was the first person at the table for SOCOM’s morning meeting and the last to leave the building each night if they were operating on a normal business-hours schedule. When teams were deployed, as they had been to South Sudan a few weeks ago, she barely saw her cot in her Containerized Living Unit. She might as well give up the private wet CLU and move into her office.
She led her boss and her nemesis to her place of pride and took her seat behind her desk. She’d give up the power seat without issue if Seth were her only visitor.
On the wall opposite her desk was a picture of the memorial wall at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. The anonymous stars of fallen agents. She studied it, visible just over Harry’s shoulder. Uncle James was represented by one of those stars. She’d never met James Lange, her father’s brother, as he’d died within months of her birth, but she hoped her work for the organization he’d given his life to would make him proud just the same.
“I wish we could have some sort of ceremony to honor your successes, Freya, but you know Agency policy,” Seth said, using her real name now that they were alone in her office.
It was weird hearing Freya again after months of being Savannah. She hated the name Savannah, but she’d understood why Seth had given it to her.
That which doesn’t kill us makes us stronger.
The name was a constant reminder that she was on her own here. No one had her back. The choices she made, she’d have to live with.
But she was Freya to Seth and Harry, and her real name had its own strengths and reminders. Hearing her name from her mentor’s lips brought back memories of her father. It had been fifteen years since she’d heard her father say her name. Fifteen years since she’d had a family. It hurt just as much today as it had when she was twenty-one and graduated from American University without a single relative to watch her walk.
It had been too far for her remaining aunt and uncles to travel. They hadn’t been close anyway. Hadn’t known how to cope with her ongoing grief.
She slapped a lid on that emotional well. This conversation was going to be difficult enough without adding the death of everyone she cared about to the emotional mix.
She focused on Seth’s words, before she’d been distracted by hearing her name. The Agency wouldn’t acknowledge her role in Drugov’s takedown. Just like the anonymous stars for the dead, praise for the living was classified.
But SOCOM knew her role, and key leaders in the CIA knew. That was enough for her. She wasn’t in this for glory or medals. She was here to make a difference. Like her uncle.
She was here to stop other teenage girls from being stripped of family as she’d been. Losing everyone who mattered in a single instant had a way of changing a person. Weeks shy of her eighteenth birthday, she’d gone from being a typical, self-centered, and well-loved senior in high school to utterly alone. Her work since then could have—and probably had—prevented attacks like the one that killed her parents and brother.
“I don’t need a ceremony,” she said. “What I do need is to be able to go after Gorev and Lubanga as planned, with the partner I selected. I’ve done my research. I’ve lined up the best operator for the mission, and it’s not Harry.”
She didn’t even look at Harry as she said this. His reaction was irrelevant to her. Only Seth mattered here.
“I’ve got five more years in the Agency than you, Freya,” Harry said. “I think I’m a little more knowledgeable than you about how to run these sorts of covert ops.”
“You may have experience, but you don’t know these men like I do. Can you name Jean Paul Lubanga’s three wives and eleven children? Can you tell me what year he first met with Mobutu Sese Seko?”
Harry simply glared at her.
“Allow me to fill you in,” she said. “When Mobutu traveled across Zaire, he appropriated the droit de cuissage—the right to deflower—virgins offered up to him by local chiefs. In 1995, Lubanga offered Mobutu his daughter, hoping to gain a grandchild who was son or daughter of the dictator. But the daughter was only thirteen, and she was rightfully terrified. She refused and fled the village. To demonstrate his allegiance to Mobutu, Lubanga had her hunted down and killed. He then gave Mobutu his eleven-year-old daughter. She too was a virgin, but she hadn’t started menstruating yet, so there was no hope of Mobutu offspring.”
“How can you possibly know this?” Harry asked.
“I do my homework,” she said. She wasn’t about to say she’d interviewed the now thirty-three-year-old woman who’d been raped by her country’s leader at her father’s behest when she was a prepubescent child. Harry would demand to interview Zola too, and she would protect the woman—who now resided just over the border in Ethiopia—from Harry at all costs.
The CIA had sent her to Djibouti to gather intel on a number of rising powers in east and central Africa. Jean Paul Lubanga had topped that list, and she was nothing if not thorough. Savvy had tracked down and interviewed his daughter just two months after arriving in Djibouti, and she’d hidden Zola—who’d been far too easy to find—to protect her in the event Lubanga managed to seize full power in DRC.
Finding the planned gathering in the mountain of intel that had been collected from Drugov’s yacht had been a gift. Now she had a chance to nab Lubanga’s files. She could only hope the black bag job she had planned would give Team USA what they needed to take action against Lubanga.
The CIA wasn’t political and didn’t set policy. Clandestine operators like her gathered intelligence, sometimes breaking in and copying documents. Case officers developed assets for HUMINT. NSA collected and analyzed SIGINT and passed the intel to the CIA. CIA analysts used that combined intelligence data to form opinions on actions individuals and governments and terrorist organizations might take. Their analysis was passed to the Executive and Legislative branches, who used the informed opinions to shape policy decisions.
Politics was the last step, and it happened beyond Agency walls. There had been slips in that regard over the years, but for the most part, the Agency worked very hard to separate intelligence gathering from policy.
Clandestine operators and case officers were the first cog in the intelligence community machine. But the first cog was vital. Without her, no other gears would turn. Without her, there would be no IC, nothing to analyze. No way to create informed policy.
She met Seth’s gaze. “I can do this, but I need a Lingala speaker. I’ve got one with native fluency. He’s US Army Special Forces. He knows how to blend, and he’s a top-notch soldier with charisma in spades. Lubanga will covet him as an ally. On the flip side, Gorev would only look at another Russian as a rival, and he’d immediately start digging into Harry’s ID.”
Seth leaned back in his chair and crossed his arms. “Your argument is good, Freya, except for one point.”
She cocked her head in expectation.
“We don’t need Lubanga to covet your soldier as an ally, and Harry’s ID wouldn’t have to hold up for long. Orders for this mission have been revised. Lubanga is too big a threat to leave in place, and who knows when we’ll have another opportunity like this when the man is outside Congo.”
“What are you saying?”
“Lubanga is to be taken out in a way that makes it look like Gorev is behind his death. Operation Zagreus is an assassination mission.”