His words came back to give her hope. She clung to that hope as the memory of that day came pouring out of her head like that beat-to-shit piñata her father had strung up in a tree for her tenth birthday party…
“This is a stretch, Agent Duvall. Even for you,” Edens said, leaning back in his desk chair and folding his arms over his burly chest. His office smelled like breath mints and stale coffee. Neither scent did anything to soothe Chelsea’s frayed nerves. “You can’t judge a man by his family ties. Especially not over there, where everyone is related to everyone if you go back a generation or two.”
“That may be true. Maybe it’s nothing. A coincidence.”
“That’d be my guess.”
She firmed her jaw. “But shouldn’t we at leastalertAgent Zoelner to the connection?”
Edens narrowed his eyes, studying her for a full ten-second count. She had been working for the man for a few years, but she’d never gotten to the point where she could give him her unqualified respect. Edens was too much of a politician for her taste. It was no secret he had big aspirations, wanted to be the next director of the CIA. She couldn’t shake the feeling that sometimes he acted for political reasons instead of strategic ones.
“We’ll let Waleed’s handoff go through first,” he finally said. “We don’t want Agent McShane to start his relationship with Waleed acting squirrelly. Assuming Waleed is legit and this flimsy connection to Mullah Zahed is just that, a flimsy connection, the last thing we need is Waleed getting suspicious or feeling unsafe. If he doesn’t trust Agent McShane, he’ll shut off his information pipeline.”
Chelsea took exception to the word “flimsy.” Yes, Abdul Waleed and Mullah Zahed were very distant relations. But in that part of the world, blood ran true no matter how far apart the branches were on the family tree. “Agent McShane is a professional. I hardly think he’ll give Waleed any cause to doubt—”
“And can you say the same for Agents Walker and Moore? They’re going to be there supplying backup for the handoff. Can you assure metheywon’t give themselves away if they suspect Waleed might be playing both sides?”
“I can’t be one hundred percent certain of anything, sir. You know that. But—”
“I’ll make note of your concern, Agent Duvall.” Edens sat forward, placing his forearms on his desk and steepling his fingers. “But I’ve made my decision on this matter, and I expect you to respect it.”
“Sir—”
“Let’s not fall into the Chicken Little trap and proclaim the sky is falling, huh?”
Chelsea gritted her teeth. “Yes, sir.” Turning on her heel, she marched from Edens’s office, back straight, arms stiff, sure that steam poured from her ears.
“As you know,” she told Dagan, coming out of the reverie, “a day later the sky fell.”
The dimness inside the sub didn’t hide Dagan’s sawing jaw or the harsh light in his eyes. “And what did you do then?” he asked.
His hand was no longer on her butt. She was pretty sure he had it fisted against the yoga mat. With reluctance, she pushed off him, settling herself with her back against the cold hull.
Love conquers all…
Did it? She wasn’t so sure.
“I stormed into Edens’s office.” She left out the part about the tears of rage that had burned the back of her throat. When she’d come in to work that day, the first thing she’d heard about was the bombing, and for a moment the whole world,herwhole world, had gone dark. Then she’d learned that Dagan was alive, and relief and light had flooded into her. It had quickly been tempered by the fact that while the man she secretly loved had survived, three other valiant agents had not. That fact would haunt her for the rest of her life. “I screamed, ‘Itoldyou!’ at him. Followed that up with ‘Iwarnedyou!’”
“What did he do?”
“He just sat there blinking at me, this blank expression on his face. And then he asked me, ‘What do you mean?’”
Once more, the memory of that day nipped at the heels of her mind like a pack of angry dogs.
“Abdul Waleed!” she screamed at her boss.
“Calm yourself, Agent Duvall. You’re being hysterical.”
“Hysterical?Hysterical?Men aredead, sir! Men we might have been able to save, had we warned them!”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
She was so taken aback that she just stood there blinking at him. And then she suddenly understood. He was covering his own ass. He’d made the call to delay telling the agents about Waleed’s connection to Zahed, and it had come back to bite him.
“I’ll go above your head. I’ll tell the director everything,” she swore.
A terrible look came over Edens’s face then. “And it will be your word against mine, Agent Duvall. I’ll deny everything, and there’s no way for you to prove otherwise. There’s no paper trail, no emails or taped phone conversation. Tell me, do you have mental illness in your family?”
