58

Jennifer Morris had once been a rising star in the Agency.

Now in her midthirties, she was ideal for this assignment.

On paper, at least.

A graduate of Cornell with an MBA from Wharton, Morris was fluent in Russian, Arabic, and Farsi. She had served in Army intelligence in Afghanistan and Iraq during the darkest days of the fighting, though she had never run across either Ryker or Stone back then. Upon Morris’s return to the States, Martha Dell had personally recruited her to join the CIA and had overseen her training at the Farm. From there, Morris had been assigned to the Commerce Department. Her cover was that she was an economic attaché serving in U.S. embassies in some of the most sensitive countries in the world. In fact, she was a consummate Langley case officer—one of the most impressive Dell had ever seen—and had even been promoted to serve as the CIA’s station chief in Moscow. She’d been the youngest station chief in the Agency’s history before her ignominious fall from grace.

Morris had never met Kailea Curtis. But she certainly knew Marcus Ryker. And therein lay the problem.

It was Morris, after all, who had helped Ryker and a Kremlin mole known as the Raven pull off a daring escape from Russia. At the time, Morris had insisted she hadn’t known the two men had just masterminded the assassination of the Russian president and the head of Russia’s premier intelligence service. And in the subsequent lengthy investigation, both Ryker and the Raven had steadfastly backed her story, maintaining that they had never told Morris of their plans to take out the Russians but had simply employed her services to get out of the country. Given they had just prevented a NATO war with the Russian Federation, brought out of Moscow a treasure trove of the Kremlin’s most closely guarded secrets, and gone on to defuse a crisis involving Iran and North Korean nuclear warheads, President Clarke had granted all three of them full pardons. He had secretly given the Raven political asylum in the U.S. and tasked him with assisting the CIA in making sense of all the computer files he had brought out with him. The president had also drafted Ryker into the employ of the Central Intelligence Agency, though his cover was that he worked for DSS.

Morris, however, had been left out in the cold. Though she had been seriously wounded in the Russia operations—and in fact had nearly died—when she finally came back to Washington, Stephens made certain she was assigned to a desk job at the Commerce Department, had absolutely no contact with either Ryker or the Raven, and would never set foot in CIA headquarters again. The reason was simple. She had lost Stephens’s trust. Unlike Ryker, she had not developed a personal relationship with President Clarke. Dell had gone to bat for her, but none of her entreaties had worked. Stephens couldn’t stand Ryker, had little use for the Raven, and utterly disagreed with Clarke’s decisions with regard to all of them. Jenny Morris was the only one whose fate Stephens controlled. Thus, her banishment from all contact with Langley.

Until today.

All eyes were on her, waiting for her answer.

The ones that most interested her, however, were Stephens’s.

Jenny Morris knew he didn’t want her there. One didn’t come in from the cold only to be tasked with an operation this sensitive and this complex. Dell had to have advocated for her, she concluded. But if Dell’s opinion had been sufficient, she would have been welcomed back into Langley long before now.

Jenny stared into the eyes of the director. She had made her peace with her banishment. It was unfair, but so what? That was life. She wasn’t going to complain and moan about it. Fully healed of her wounds and in peak physical fitness—she’d run both the Boston and New York marathons in recent months—she went into the Commerce Department every day and did her job, mind-numbingly boring though it was. She was not campaigning to come back. She had not called in favors or cajoled her network of heavy hitters. She had been tempted to in the beginning but concluded it was not worth it. She knew what she had done. She knew she had been right. If Stephens didn’t like it, that was tough.

The look in the director’s eyes was almost certainly imperceptible to the others. But she saw it. The disdain. The contempt. It was almost as if he wanted her to say no. To make a scene. To storm out. Anything but say yes.

So she smiled. “How soon do we leave?”