Meredith Morris-Dale winced at the nylon webbing gouging her thighs as the hulking Air Force C-17 banked over the field. The flight from Doha to Norfolk had been tortuous, droning on for some twenty-odd hours at the monster’s lumbering pace. She glimpsed the rising brown landscape through a narrow porthole, shifted her weight, and cursed the sadistic straps that passed for seats.
But it wasn’t just the seats that had her wincing. She’d been writhing, pacing, or straining all the way across the Atlantic, often the only passenger awake. She’d stalked the cargo bay as the others, military men for the most part, slept in heaps of camouflage scattered across the vast metal deck. They’d collapsed into Ambien-induced comas immediately after takeoff from Qatar.
Not Meredith. She’d channeled her overtaxed central nervous system into a twisted decathlon of self-loathing. Somewhere over Cyprus, she’d cranked out fifty push-ups. Over the Azores, she’d found a cross-strut where she devised a pull-up challenge. By Bermuda, she’d cleared a space for wall-sits that made her thighs burn.
She’d blown the op. God, had she ever blown it.
Sagebrush. Mother-effing Sagebrush. That was the name of the asset she’d lost in an effort to expose a bioweapons network with designs on Syria. Lost him—probably for good.
Of course for good, she corrected herself as the C-17’s flaps came down with a clunk.
Sagebrush had been snatched right under their noses in a teeming Dubai market district. Pained by the recollection, she twisted her legs. It had to have been SVR, she thought, Moscow’s latest incarnation of the KGB. The tradecraft was just too good for it to be anything but. They’d not only absconded with Sagebrush, her asset, but also her money for the buy, a cool two million bucks.
But a goddamned bargain, she’d argued seemingly ages ago, back in the conference room of the Agency comptroller. Remembering it now, she shuddered and slammed a bootheel against the cargo deck.
A lot of money, sure, but not the kind of dough that could lead to Congressional hearings, she’d said with worldly bravado back then. For a measly two million, CIA would stop the sale of a weaponized virus with an R-naught communicability score of six capable of decimating a rebel-held city in a week. By comparison, the novel coronavirus had been a tepid three.
She’d argued that it would have been irresponsible not to fund the buy. A goddamned bargain, she’d said two or three more times, damn near pounding the table. In the end, she’d gotten them all to agree. Budgets were arranged, funds wired. As one of the few women field leaders trying to crack into the upper ranks, she’d been proud of her own forcefulness.
They’d all remember that now, that meeting where she’d been so forceful.
The plane descended into more turbulence, jostling her. The handful of other passengers were zipping up their mil-spec gear, yawning, shaking off the seven thousand miles.
Meredith closed her eyes, listening to the straining jets, reliving the disaster, cringing to the point of facial cramps. Her team had developed an enviously detailed countersurveillance plan, posting watchers on every corner, setting up a real-time Echelon link with NSA to monitor local calls. They’d done all the difficult due diligence that was supposed to happen.
And yet Sagebrush had been pulled right off his bright green Ninja and tossed into the back of a Mercedes in traffic, right under their noses.
She glanced up at some rough-looking Special Forces types tightening up their equipment cases. Wish I had their job, she thought, admiring the cruel simplicity of combat. See a bad guy in the scope, take his head off.
The fantasy ended. She had this job, a department head in CIA’s Counterproliferation Division—at least for another couple of hours.
God, had she ever blown it.
At last, the brakes shook and squealed on the taxiway. Frigid air streamed over the ramp, reminding her she was home to another gray Virginia winter. She grunted into her green field jacket, muscled a khaki rucksack over her shoulders, and trudged through the freezing rain. A dark Suburban with blacked-out windows was idling just on the other side of the chain-link fence, its wipers batting away sleet. Lights were flashed; a door opened. The fact that her boss, Rance, had sent an escort team made her want to stow away on the plane’s return flight to CENTCOM. But they’d seen her now. There’d be no going back.
Minutes later, she was hurtling up I-64 in the backseat toward McLean. She’d had a brief exchange with the two beefy security men up front, but that was it. CIA drivers were used to tight-lipped passengers. That suited Meredith. She was in no mood.
Staring at the blur of barren trees, thinking of what awaited, she wondered if there could be silver linings. She could be a present mother for her nineteen-year-old daughter for once. Maybe she’d pull a Beltway rebound as a consultant with one of those overstuffed defense contractors, make a pile of cash. Life would go on, sort of. Just not the life that . . .
Knock it off, she commanded herself, straightening on the bench seat. They’d just passed Fredericksburg, according to a sign that whizzed by. Not much time before Langley.
“Would you gentlemen please avert your eyes?” she asked. “I need to change.”
They stuttered an awkward assent and Meredith went about transforming herself from GI Jane to corporate exec, girding for an ambush of a different sort. She pulled a skirt, heels, and a clean blouse out of her bag. A fit brunette with thick dark eyebrows, now forty-three, she could still turn a male head when it counted. If the two drivers stole a glance or two in the rearview while she was in her bra, Meredith didn’t much care. She reached for her makeup kit.
An hour later, the Suburban was waved through a security gate off Virginia Route 123 and flew down a couple of driveways, coming to a stop in an underground parking garage. Once on foot, she encountered more gates, more guards, and eventually an elevator that took her to the seventh floor, home of CIA senior management. There she found more security, including a TSA-style millimeter-wave-detection machine.
As though she were about to board a flight to Cleveland, Meredith threw her bags on a conveyor belt. She pulled a Glock 17 out of her backpack, ejected the ten-round magazine, pulled the slide to open the breach, and handed it to the guard. So long, old friend, she thought, watching the guards tag and stow it. She’d oiled and babied that thing for years, to the point that it felt like an extension of her hand. She supposed she would never see it again.
Rance’s administrative assistant was pacing on the other side. “He’s waiting,” the plump woman said unhelpfully.
Meredith logged a small triumph when she caught Rance’s hungry eye. He was just on the older side of good-looking, fiftyish. His once reddish-blond hair was thinning, a second chin just beginning to form. About five years earlier, he’d made a boozy pass at her. Two years after that, he’d made a sober one, which had been far worse.
Meredith smelled his cologne from five feet away. He was standing in his doorway, showily checking his expensive watch, turned out, as usual, in a suit he shouldn’t have been able to afford.
“About time,” he started with a quick halfhearted handshake.
She wasn’t about to give him the satisfaction. She smiled breezily, muttered a greeting.
He stood there looking at her for a moment, barring the way into his office, a little too close. “No point in sitting down,” he said. “We’re off to see Dorsey.”
A gut punch. Dorsey was the big boss. It was even worse than she’d feared.
“That’s great,” she replied through her smiling teeth. “Lead the way.”
Walking through a maze of cubicles, he leaned in to ask her what the hell had happened to Sagebrush. She responded that if she hadn’t had to interrupt her work to answer his summons, she’d have been working on the answer to that question right now. As the words came out, she was thinking that after she’d been fired, it would all be his problem. At least there was that.
He nodded without comment. There were people around them now.
Midway to Dorsey’s office, Rance indicated a restroom and stopped. He said, “You might want to step in here and freshen up. You look tired.”
Asshole.
Balding and wiry with ropy veins spidering toward his hands, Jeff Dorsey was the head of National Clandestine Services, two rungs below the director of CIA. When it came to spies undercover in the field, Dorsey ran the show. After ascending to his post a few years back, he’d swapped the bad habit of smoking for the nervous tic of chewing on cheap plastic pens. One dangled from his whiskered lip when the door opened before he snatched it away and stood. Tie askew, sleeves rolled, leaning on knuckles, he let his eyes linger on Meredith one second longer than they should have.
Two for two, she thought. Not bad for a backseat dressing room.
He motioned Meredith and Rance to a conference table, and called for coffee before asking for an update on things. The question was open-ended. She spoke broadly for twenty seconds, avoiding Sagebrush. Dorsey listened, saying nothing. Before long, she was running out of topics, wondering what to do, gesturing with her hands a little too much.
She was saved by an opening door.
Sheffield, the general counsel assigned to Counterproliferation, entered with a red-striped manila folder stamped with exotic classification markings. Dorsey held up a palm, cutting her off. The moment had apparently arrived.
Fine, she thought. Let’s get it over with.
The boss placed an open metal box on the table. “Phones and watches in the casket, everyone. We need to have this next conversation in the SCIF.”
SCIF, pronounced skiff, stood for Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility. It was a hardened room, a vault impervious to radio waves. No watches or phones allowed, not even secure ones. Meredith couldn’t understand why her firing would be of such a sensitive nature, but supposed it didn’t much matter.
Once installed around another table in the claustrophobic SCIF, Dorsey looked at the lawyer Sheffield. “All right, Dave, let’s have her review and sign.”
Head in guillotine, blade rising. She smiled woodenly.
Sheffield passed her a three-page document. It was a nondisclosure agreement, but one with the promise of prison if she were ever to acknowledge the existence of a code-word program called Active Archer. Bewildered, Meredith signed her name and dated the document. Sheffield applied a stamp and countersigned. He said his goodbyes and left.
“Glad that’s out of the way,” Rance said, pushing some of his thin hair over his forehead. “Now we can finally tell you why you’re here.”
She nodded, speechless, saliva returning to her tongue.
Dorsey chewed furiously on the end of a Bic, watching her. “I’m going to ask Ed to do the honors,” the spy chief said, eyes narrowed in appraisal. “He’ll read you in.”
Rance nodded, tapped the document, and cleared his throat with theatrical purpose. “Meredith, you’ve been on the bioweaps end of the doomsday spectrum for a while, so let me start by refreshing your memory on uranium enrichment.”
“You don’t have to, Ed. I know how—”
“It starts with dirt pulled out of a mine, usually somewhere in Africa,” he continued, oblivious. “After sifting, the raw ore is ground down to a uniform particle size and chemically leached, isolating the natural U238 in a powdery residue called yellowcake, due to its light color.”
He cleared his throat again and waved off another protest from Meredith. “Now, U238 is fissionable, splittable, usable as fuel for power plants. But if a neutron can be separated from it, turning it into U235, it becomes fissile, comparatively easy to bombard with force, setting off the atomic chain reaction that results in a mushroom cloud.”
Meredith plastered a neutral look on her face. Rance was a world-class mansplainer. But why is he telling me this?
Her boss went on. “To separate that neutron, you ionize the U238 into gas form and apply massive centripetal force through a centrifuge. Since you need about a hundred pounds of it for the critical mass to make a bomb, you need a lot of centrifuges. Thousands of them spinning at the speed of sound, night and day, perhaps for years.”
Dorsey removed the Bic from his mouth and levered it back and forth between his fingers, watching her reaction. “Meredith, Iran has had tens of thousands of centrifuges spinning secretly for years. You ever wonder why they haven’t achieved breakout?”
“Breakout” was intel slang for nuclear-weapons-capability enriched U235.
“I’m guessing it’s this, Active Archer?” She tapped the papers she’d just signed.
“You bet your ass.” The pen returned to Dorsey’s mouth, angled up by a modest paternal grin. “Welcome aboard.”
She nodded, relieved—but confused. “Right . . . so how does the op work?” she asked, stalling, thinking this must be some sort of demotion.
The pen returned to Dorsey’s fingers. His voice fell by five decibels. “We have an asset in their enrichment program. A senior scientist code-named Cerberus. Simply put, if it weren’t for him, all of these escalations going on right now—our hit against Soleimani, their retaliatory strike against us in Iraq—all of it would be under the threat of an Iranian nuclear response.”
“A relief, of course,” she said. “I’m just a little confused about my role in it. . . . Why the sudden flight back from Doha when . . .” She let the sentence drift, avoiding self-incrimination, Sagebrush.
Dorsey looked away suddenly, tossing the crumpled pen in a bin. Rance recrossed his legs, turning away from her, fiddling with his tie.
What’s this?
“Well,” Rance said from his peculiar angle, “here’s the thing. We need you to bring your husband back.”
“What?” she blurted. It came out an octave higher than she’d have liked.
The two men suddenly looked very worried. Eye contact was lost.
She pressed on. “First of all, he’s my ex-husband. Second of all, you have way more control over him than I do. You’re the ones that PNG’d him off to the wilderness two years ago, stripping him of his pension. You know he’s flat broke now? And what the hell does John have to do with all this anyway?”
Still no eye contact. The pressure release of offense felt too good to stop now. She glared at Rance, speaking to the end of her breath. “You actually want me to run an op where the first task is to recruit my own ex-husband. That’s why I just crossed the Atlantic in the middle of an op? Of all the bullshit. What the fuck, Ed?”
Dorsey fumbled with a fresh box of pens. Rance told her to calm down.
“Stop, both of you,” she said. “You have to tell me how John is even remotely involved in this. Now.”
“Meredith,” Rance replied, running a hand over his scalp, “remember the circumstances under which you met John? Back in Montreal?”
“What of it? He was a junior case officer. I ran him. And I had the bad judgment to fall in love with him. Nothing ever came of the op itself.”
“Actually, that’s where you’re wrong,” Rance said.
“John never told me anything about it.”
Dorsey leaned in. Eye contact returned. “He couldn’t, Meredith. See, in 2005, while he was posing as a student at McGill, he somehow came in contact with an Iranian national studying, we think, quantum physics. At the time, it didn’t seem to mean much to John . . . or to you for that matter. There were no contact reports, nothing mentioning him that we could find.”
“Okay.” Her mind was racing, groping.
Her job back then was to supervise greenhorn CIA case officers who were trying to build up a network of contacts through various means. One of the officers in her employ was John Dale, ex–military intelligence with a Persian background, fresh off the Farm on his first undercover assignment. Since Dale spoke a little French and Farsi, the Agency had shipped him up to Canada to recruit students because the Iranians sent all their promising academics to school there.
She and John Dale had fallen for each other and married soon after, too young. An accidental baby followed, too young. But that was another story.
“We logged dozens of contact bumps over the two years I was running John. But you’re saying one of them actually came through? What’s his name? Maybe I’ll remember him.”
“We don’t know, Meredith,” said Dorsey. A fresh pen had made its way to his mouth. “We got a ping to the LinkedIn page of John’s alias back in 2012, which we kept alive through another intermediary. Long story short, the query referenced John’s time at McGill. After bona fides, we assessed it as coming from a scientist in Iranian weapons research. The real deal. But still, after all these years, Cerberus has managed to keep himself a mystery to us.”
Rance nodded, picking up where Dorsey left off. “John recruited him based on the ping in 2012, well after your time in Montreal. Whoever Cerberus is, he, uh, likes John. They seem to have developed some sort of trust with each other. After John moved on from the Agency, we just kept running the scientist. It wasn’t that hard because Cerberus simply kept software doors open for us, doors that we used for operations to throw off their centrifuges. That changed a week ago. Cerberus is demanding to work with John now. Only John.”
“Well . . . John can be very likable,” Meredith said. Her ex had never spilled any of this. Of course, that was something of an occupational hazard, a fault line in their marriage. “So what’s John supposed to do anyway? What does this guy want?”
Rance smoothed the fabric over his crossed knee. “We think Cerberus wants John to bring him out. We’d prefer he keep doing what he’s doing, of course. If we lose him, we lose Active Archer.”
“I don’t see why you need John for that,” Meredith said, desperate to leave her train wreck of a personal life out of this. “Why don’t we do what we always do to defecting assets? Blackmail him, lie to him. Let him know that if he leaves, he’s a dead man because we’ll out him as a spy. You guys know how this goes.”
“We do,” said Rance. “But this is different. Cerberus is telling us that if he doesn’t get to John, he’ll expose the whole operation through some kind of code embedded in the Iranian system long after he’s gone. We’ll lose everything.”
“He’s reverse-blackmailing the CIA? That takes balls. Why not take him out? We’re good at that sort of thing.”
“Yeah,” said Dorsey, chewing. “He seems to have thought of that already.”
“Oh?” She raised a thick eyebrow.
Dorsey pushed his drooping sleeves up past his elbows. “We don’t know who he is or where he is. And as of last week, he’s cut off our access to their program. We’re blind now. That’s why we need you . . . why we need your husband.”
“Ex,” Meredith said. She leaned back in her chair, pushed out a short sigh.
A long moment passed. She felt the need to fill the void. “So, in summary, my mission is to talk John into rejoining the Agency that called him a traitor so he can go bring out an asset that he may have recruited almost ten years ago. Or maybe kill him. All of this from the woman that asked him for a divorce eighteen months ago. That about it?”
Dorsey grimaced. “More or less.” He tossed his second crimped Bic in a bin. “Look, Meredith, Cerberus is our best asset in this little quasi-war with Iran. He’ll only talk to John. John’s not going to listen to Ed—or me for that matter—after what happened. Without John, without Cerberus, we’re looking at the very real possibility of a nuclear strike against us one of these days. You’ve simply got to make this happen. I need you.”
She didn’t have a good response to that. She nodded quietly, lowered her eyes to the table.
Dorsey’s assistant arrived then, holding the door open so he could shuffle off to his next urgent catastrophe.
On his way out, the spy chief pushed up his drooping sleeves again and glanced back at Meredith. “Sheffield will fix everything legally for John to come back.” He nodded once at her, then turned to Rance. “All yours, Ed.”
With Dorsey gone, Rance looked at her sideways, one brow lowered. “We still haven’t talked Sagebrush.”
She felt her stomach tighten. “No,” she said.
He nodded curtly. “We know John’s living somewhere out near Seattle. I’m authorizing a plane for you. Leaves Andrews in the morning.”
She stared at the table.
“Look,” Rance said, softening. “I’m sure you can handle John, bring him back. You’re good at that sort of thing. And we can talk Sagebrush later—this is frankly more important. Get home and rest up a bit. You really do look tired.”
Asshole.