17
LANGLEY, VIRGINIA
Marcus exited the G.W. Parkway onto Route 123.
Three minutes later, he was pulling into the George Bush Center for Intelligence. Showing his badge, he drove onto the campus, parked his ugly brown ’86 Nissan Stanza, and entered CIA headquarters. Clearing through security, he stepped onto an empty elevator, swiped his ID, and hit the button. On the way up, his phone vibrated. It was a text from Annie.
she asked.
Marcus smiled.
he wrote.
he asked.
The bell dinged. The elevator door opened. Marcus stepped off onto the seventh floor and checked in at the security desk.
“Good morning, Agent Ryker,” a uniformed officer said.
“Morning, Tony.”
“Ryker, you look like crap.”
“You should see the other guy,” Marcus deadpanned. “The boss in?”
“Breakfast at the Pentagon.”
“Dell?”
“Conference room,” the officer replied. “Is she expecting you?”
“I sure hope so,” Marcus laughed, handing over his mobile phone and weapon.
Passing through another magnetometer, he headed down the hall, grateful to learn Stephens wasn’t in the building. He was greeted by officers and administrative staff who congratulated him and asked him how he was doing. One even whispered that she’d been praying for him.
Knocking twice, he entered the conference room and found Dr. Martha Dell chairing a meeting already in progress. At fifty-seven, Dell was the Agency’s highest-ranking African American officer. Far more important to Marcus, she was the smartest person he had met, inside the CIA or out. The woman had graduated first in her class from Georgetown University in national security studies. She had a master’s degree in Russian-Sino relations from Oxford. What’s more, she’d earned not one but two PhDs from Stanford, both dealing with aspects of Chinese foreign and military policy. Fluent in Russian, Mandarin, and Arabic, she’d been a field officer in the National Clandestine Service. She’d successfully recruited and run agents, been an instructor at the Farm, and worked in a wide range of increasingly sensitive management positions over her thirty-plus years before being named the Agency’s deputy director. There was no one in the building that Marcus liked or trusted more, but the shocked look on her face just then was trouble.
“Ryker, what are you doing here?” she demanded.
Everyone turned, and Marcus found himself staring at an equally shocked Pete Hwang, Jenny Morris, Geoff Stone, Donny Callaghan, and Noah Daniels.
“Good to see you, too, Doc,” Marcus quipped and quickly took his usual seat.
“No, seriously, what are you doing?” Dell shot back. “You’re supposed to be home. You’re supposed to be recovering.”
“I’m fine.”
“You’re not.”
“Where are we with the compound?” Marcus asked, seeing satellite images of western Libya on the flat-screen monitors all around them. Clearly the sandstorm wasn’t yet over. A brown haze was covering the entire border region with Algeria.
“Go home, Marcus,” Dell finally said.
“I don’t want to go home.”
“Then take your mom for a walk around the Tidal Basin.”
“I just took her to the airport.”
“Then take Annie for a walk around the Tidal Basin.”
“Very funny, and besides, she and Dayton are meeting with the crown prince.”
“Then buy a dog. Play Nintendo. Take up scrapbooking. I don’t care what you do. Just go. Now. That’s an order.”
Marcus sat there for a moment, incredulous. Dell was serious. And he wasn’t getting any sympathy from his team. They were his team, after all. But that didn’t seem to matter at the moment. So he took a deep breath, forced himself to his feet, and left.
Soon he was driving back down the G.W. Parkway without the foggiest notion of where he was supposed to go. Yes, his body needed sleep. Obviously he needed time to recover and lots of it. But there was no way he was going back to his apartment. Not now. There was too much to do, too many loose strings to tie up.
His phone rang, and McDermott’s number flashed on the screen. Marcus tensed. Given how his morning was going so far, that couldn’t be good news.
“Hey, you home?” McDermott asked.
“No.”
“Why not?”
“What do you care?”
“You’re supposed to be in bed.”
“What do you need, Bill?”
“It’s not me. It’s the president.”
“What about him?”
“He wants to see you.”
“When?” Marcus asked, surprised.
“Now—how quickly can you get your butt in here?”