3:04 P.M.
CIA HEADQUARTERS
LANGLEY, VIRGINIA
In a small glass-walled office three doors down from the director of the Central Intelligence Agency sat a young woman with eye-catching wheat-blond hair. It was one of her most distinctive features even though she rarely gave it a thought, and kept it in the simplest of styles because she didn’t care. It was straight, cut so that it just touched her shoulders, and in front were bangs in a neat, perfect line above her blue eyes. Her face was soft and chiseled, with smooth skin and reddish cheeks, and beautiful lips perhaps a size too big. Not glamorous but a rather old-fashioned, elegant, timeless beauty. She had a reserved manner and style, a bit standoffish, to most even a little cold. Her looks, demeanor, and most of all her accent were quintessentially British. Her name was Jenna Hartford.
Jenna was focused on two large LCD screens on the desk in front of her. Jenna had once been British intelligence’s top operations architect, responsible for the design of black operations across the globe, including the assassination of Fao Bhang, the head of MSS, China’s intelligence agency.
When her husband, Charles, was killed by a car bomb in London intended for her, she had attempted to quit MI6. Instead, Derek Chalmers, her mentor and the head of MI6, convinced her to move to the United States and work for Hector Calibrisi at the CIA. In the four months since arriving at Langley, Jenna had been a cipher. She worked incredibly long hours and spoke to almost no one, with the obvious exception of Calibrisi, and Bill Polk, who ran the National Clandestine Service.
The job of an architect was a mixture of an understanding of a situation on the ground, in extremely personal terms, in order to pinpoint possible actions, with an almost preternatural instinct for mapping operators into the ground-level picture. There were only four really good architects in the Western coalition of CIA, MI6, and Mossad. But everyone acknowledged that the five-foot-five, thirty-two-year-old Jenna was far and away the best.
That she’d turned down more invitations to drinks, dinner, bike rides, or coffee was well known already inside Langley’s hallways. For the most part, she didn’t give the time of day to anyone.
Jenna’s door was three down from the office of Hector Calibrisi, the director of the CIA. Her office was glass-walled on the interior and exterior, but bookshelves occupied the walls adjacent to other offices. It was part of a larger suite of offices, the CIA director’s suite, behind a wall of steel, flanked by gunmen. The director’s suite constituted the southeast penthouse corner of the building.
She was currently designing an action for her former employer, MI6, tracking down a former British intelligence agent who had been believed dead, but who’d been seen in Novosibirsk, the largest city in Siberia, by a French DGSE field agent. After analyzing bank records, various signals intelligence, and the agent’s detailed biographical file, Jenna had been able to pinpoint the rogue with the help of MI6 hackers, by focusing in on the man’s known thoracic issues. He had a bad heart, and had been born with it. After a thorough, and quite illegal, scan of health facilities across Russia, then pushing the data against financial activities, Jenna had found the traitorous man in a town forty miles outside Kiev. She didn’t care how or why the agent, a man named Perkins, had gone to the dark side. Instead, her focus was on designing a mission to eliminate him.
Her cell phone vibrated. It was a “44” phone code, which meant the call had come from Britain, her homeland. It was her mother. She didn’t answer it, and reached to turn it off, clicking a button on the side.
Her attention moved to her computer. An icon on her second screen caught her eyes. She opened the application. It was a so-called green flash, indicating a real-time situation involving one of Langley’s NOCs, or non-official cover agents. NOCs were Jenna’s primary architectural building blocks.
In this case, it was one of the few agents she knew well—and her eyes shot to the screen:
DCPD GEORGETOWN 9144. BLKG 3 A S 881
ASC 6, REPRO 42
3:08:31 PM EST
GPS: ALTA STRADA 36/H
: GUNFIRE
: MULTIPLE CASUALTIES
: DC METRO PO SWAT ON SCENE
: EST 17–22 FATALITIES CIV 14
FLASH
: POSSIBLE TARGET NOC 2495–6
: ANDREAS, DEWEY
NEED FOR IMMEDIATE DCIA ATTENTION
FLASH
DCPD AT SCENE/FBI QUANTICO, CASE TEAM 4 (VA BEACH #1)
6.R [DOMESTIC ECA]
PER STATUTE 44.B.2: POSSIBLE CONTRAVENTION OF LOCAL/STATE LAW ENFORCEMENT WITH CIA NON-OFFICIAL COVER AGENT
FLASH FLASH FLASH FLASH FLASH
: IMMEDIATE EXFILTRATION REQUIRED
: IMMEDIATE EXFILTRATION REQUIRED
: IMMEDIATE EXFILTRATION REQUIRED
Jenna looked at her watch. It was 3:09. Whatever had just happened had literally just happened.
Suddenly, a red alert—another icon—appeared on the screen. It was a garbled text from Bill Polk through some sort of encryption engine.
We have Dewey. Run a quick analysis on this with preliminary op response, also ref approx 800k wired through GID tertiary to HEZB forget file no, yesterday. Back in 10
Polk, the head of NCS, the deputy director of the agency, wanted to know what, or rather, why what just happened to Dewey happened, and what to do about it.
She smiled ear to ear. It was the first real challenge since coming to Langley. That it involved Dewey Andreas crossed her mind. Jenna had already exposed Dewey to life-threatening operating parameters, in China and North Korea. She was used to exposing agents to danger in an operation and had no emotion whatsoever about it. It was one of the reasons she was a good architect. But there was also something about him. Jenna remembered meeting him for the first time and feeling a tingle when he looked at her. He was rugged but he had something else about him still. She scanned the spec sheet again and realized there had been a firefight and a team had been sent to kill Dewey, but that he’d survived.
Again, Jenna’s cell phone vibrated and again the number “44” appeared on the screen. Her mother again.
“Oh for fuck’s sake,” she said.
She placed an earbud in her ear and hit the phone screen.
“What is it, Mother?” she asked impatiently. “I’m in the middle of something.”
“It’s your father’s birthday,” said Jenna’s mother in a lilting aristocratic British accent. “The entire family will be there,” she added, “including your aunt Winifred.”
“I know, Mother, I just don’t think I can get away,” she said, reading the screen.
“Jenna, it is your father’s seventieth birthday,” said her mother in a patrician tone. “Bring a friend. You’ve been in the United States for six months. Surely you have made some friends, perhaps a … boyfriend?”
Jenna was silent.
“You know how much your father and I want grandchildren,” her mother intoned.
In six months, Jenna had been on a grand total of zero dates, despite being asked many, many times.
“You have a way with words, Mother,” said Jenna.
“I’m sorry. I just.… well, can you try, Jenna dear?”
Bachelor SOG agents as well as rising single officers in the CIA hierarchy all knew of the arrival of Jenna Hartford. She was on loan from MI6, beautiful, mysterious, talented, and elegant, and sat three doors down from Hector Calibrisi. So many had asked her for a drink or dinner she’d lost count, her answer invariably being “No, thank you.”
Calibrisi and Polk protected her as best they could, though really it wasn’t necessary. She was fully prepared to take care of herself.
“I have a very active social calendar,” said Jenna to her mother, lying.
“The Austin boy from Yale told your father he’s attempted to call you on several occasions. He’s a successful hedge fund man and I don’t need to tell you he went to Eton and was president of his form. He said he attempted to reach you more than once.”
Jenna typed, looking for more information on the situation in Georgetown.
“Well, Mummy, maybe that’s the problem now, isn’t it?” said Jenna.
“I have only the best of intentions for you, my love,” said her mother.
“I know, Mummy,” said Jenna softly. “I’ll try and make it.”
Jenna heard the sound of activity. The footsteps grew louder but there was no discussion. She saw Bill Polk pass quickly by her door, followed by Calibrisi. Several moments later, Jenna saw Dewey walking behind them. He moved across the front of her doorway. He was bleeding; his shirt was torn.
“Dewey?” she said, calling out from behind her desk. “Dewey?”
Nothing happened and then a moment later, Dewey turned. He stepped into the frame of the door.
“Jenna?” he said. “Hey.”
“Hi,” she said. “Are you okay?” she asked with a concerned look on her face.
Suddenly, in her ear comm, she heard her mother’s voice.
“Of course I’m okay,” said her mother. “I was just—”
Jenna tapped her ear, cutting off her mother.
“Yeah,” said Dewey.
“I read the scans,” she said with a concerned look. “They knew you were coming.”
Dewey pretended he didn’t hear, and changed subjects.
“So, how’s it going so far?” Dewey asked politely, looking around her office in curiosity. “Do you like working here?”
“Sure.”
“What’s it like?” he said. “Don’t you get tired of being in an office all the time?”
“Not really,” she said.
Dewey smiled.
“Do you like living in Washington?” he asked. “I meant to check in on you after we got back. I apologize.”
They both knew he was talking about North Korea.
“It’s great,” she said.
“Where do you live?”
“Kalorama.”
“Schmancy,” said Dewey. “I hear even the homeless people wear Gucci.”
Jenna smiled. “How about you?”
“What about me?” said Dewey.
“Where do you live? Do you like it?”
“Georgetown,” said Dewey, “but you already knew that.”
“Because of the attack earlier? That doesn’t mean you live in Georgetown.”
“You know the profile of every person in this building,” said Dewey, grinning.
Jenna giggled.
“I do not,” she stammered with a pretty English accent.
Dewey nodded toward Calibrisi’s office.
“I have to go,” he said.
“What is it?”
“I assume it’s about what just happened,” said Dewey.
“Well, your meeting won’t officially start until I arrive,” said Jenna. “Bill asked me to run analysis on it.”
Dewey felt blood dribbling from his elbow. He looked down. There was a small pool of red on Jenna’s carpet. Her eyes followed his.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’ll clean it up.”
“Don’t worry about it.”
He glanced around, then stepped outside her office, walked into the central cubicles, which were mostly empty, and returned with a newspaper someone had been reading. He threw it down over the pool of red, even as he then dripped on top of the newspaper. “That should soak it up,” he said. He attempted to wipe up the blood, though it only made his shoulder bleed more. Jenna watched as he turned the small pool of blood into a larger one. Finally, he stood back up. “Sorry about that.”
“It’s fine, Dewey.”
Dewey was several inches taller than Jenna. She was close to him now, less than a foot away, looking up at his shoulder, then into his eyes. She wanted to hold the shirt tighter, to take care of him, though she didn’t do that; in fact she didn’t move.
“So what you’re saying is, you have to do analysis for those guys?” said Dewey.
“Yes.”
“Do I have time to get some stitches?”
“Yes, of course,” she said. She put her hand on his wrist. She walked him to the door.
“Go get sewn up,” she said. “I won’t start until you get there, promise.”