Hawk
D.C. smelled exactly the way I remembered—old carpet, over-polished wood, recycled air, too many people in suits who’d never bled for anything more dangerous than a paper cut.
I’d been in the same windowless conference room for nine hours.
Nine.
The fluorescent lights buzzed overhead. Coffee cups littered the table. Charts and data streams were projected onto the wall—lines, graphs, statistics, probabilities. Everything to them was numbers.
Everything except one thing.
What I wanted.
“What we need,” the Deputy Director was saying, pacing back and forth in front of the screen, “is stability. A public face that the committee respects. Someone with field experience, psychological resilience, and demonstrated capacity for decisive leadership.”
He turned to me.
“We need you, Jensen.”
The other agents around the table murmured their agreement. Some nodded. Some pretended not to look too eager.
A younger suit leaned forward. “You’d have oversight on the next-gen AI protocols. You’d be the firewall. The conscience. The one who ensures Echo never happens again.”
My jaw tightened.
They kept saying “never again” as if they’d learned something.
As if they understood the cost.
The Deputy Director stopped pacing. “We can’t afford another Reese. You know that better than anyone.”
I blew out a slow breath. “That’s exactly why I’m telling you this is a bad idea.”
Silence froze the room.
Every pair of eyes turned toward me.
“Explain,” the Deputy Director said calmly.
“You don’t want oversight,” I said. “You want absolution. You want someone to stand in front of cameras and reassure the world you’ve got everything under control while you experiment with systems you barely understand.”
“You’re oversimplifying—”
“No,” I cut him off. “I’m not.”
The younger suit frowned. “Look, Jensen, we’re offering you influence. Authority. A chance to—”
“Manipulate me the same way you manipulated Reese,” I said flatly.
Several jaws dropped.
The Deputy Director’s eyes narrowed. “Careful.”
“Or what?” I asked. “You’ll demote me? Reassign me? I don’t work for you. I work for the field. For the team that almost died as a result of your oversight. I have a Team, and we are The Brave; we are good at what we do. I am a boots-on-the-ground man. You need to make sure this never happens again.”
The Deputy Director slowly sat down. “You’re angry.”
“Damn right, I’m angry,” I said. “You built Echo. You funded Veridian. You approved Halcyon’s project oversight after warnings were flagged. You sent me in to fix your mistake and buried the truth in a thousand pages of redacted reports.”
