“Good question,” Katie said from where she waited nearby in front of a different bank of secured elevators. “That’s what we’re going tofindout.”
Like them, Katie was in uniform, her long blonde hair twisted up into a tight bun at the base of her neck. Alexei glanced at the elevator control panel, seeing she’d already requested one, so she couldn’t have been waiting very long. As metahumans, they had access to nearly all the restricted levels of the base, and those included the command levels located farabovethem.
“Is Jamie flying in for this?” Kyle asked as the elevator doorslidopen.
Katie shook her head. “No. I was told he’ll be briefed on the situation, but they aren’trecallinghim.”
“He won’tlikethat.”
“Iknow.”
The four of them stepped into the elevator and Katie leaned down for the retina scan. Seconds later the elevator startedtorise.
“Why’d they send Sean to New Miami?” Madison asked more as a general musing since it was obvious none of them had anyanswers.
Alexei was curious as well. He didn’t know why Sean had given Antonovich his number for an extraction when Alexei wasn’t his emergency contact. Agents working out of the intelligence division had a different set of protocols to signal when their cover was compromised or burned and they needed an extraction. Calling Alexei wasn’t in Sean’sprotocols.
Alpha Team hadn’t worked much with Sean in the field since the January mission in London, but that didn’t mean they didn’t interact. Sean had sat in on their briefings and debriefings around the few jobs they’d taken to keep Stanislav happy, but he rarely went into the field with them for those missions. Likewise, Alpha Team had been kept updated on Sean’s missions on a need-to-knowbasis.
They were assigned to completely different divisions, but that hadn’t stopped Alexei, like everyone else on the team, from getting to know Sean a little better. Alexei had made it a point over the past few months to track Sean down in headquarters and share a meal with him if their schedules allowed it. For the most part, Sean was a nice guy. Dedicated to his job, sure, but they all were, and Alexei didn’t see that as adetriment.
For all the meals they’d shared at headquarters, they hadn’t yet managed to meet up after work. Alexei was deployed with Alpha Team more often than not when Sean was free, and inevitably, whenever Alexei had downtime, Sean was off on a mission of his own. The only time Alexei had seen Sean outside of work was the night he’d gone to Sean’s apartment back in January. He’d dropped by to make sure the agent wouldn’t report Kyle and Jamie to the brass for being in a relationship against regulations. Jamie had trusted that Sean would keep quiet, and so far, he had. Alexei had reluctantly followed his captain’s lead in continuing to trust Sean, something that didn’t come easily to him, but he’d been working on hisprejudices.
His interactions with Sean since January had been mostly positive. Alexei liked the agent’s dry sense of humor; liked hearing him laugh. Alexei honestly wouldn’t have minded spending more time with Sean if their schedules allowed for it, which had surprised him when he first realized that over a late lunch one day with theolderman.
For the most part, Alexei didn’t like spies. Before coming to the MDF, he and Kyle had been with Strike Force, the top Special Operations Forces group in the entire United States military. They’d run a lot of classified missions with a lot of different agencies, but the CIA had been his least favorite even before a double-agent’s betrayal. He and Kyle had survived the mess in Geneva all those years ago only because they’d been turned into metahumans during the attack. Everything that came after Geneva only reinforced why Alexei wanted nothing to do withspies.
Yet here he was, staring down another mission full of them, in order tosaveone.
The four got off on Level 36, walking past the command nerve center that monitored, in real time, major active missions the MDF was overseeing. The night shift was just as busy as the day shift because there was always daylight burning through the hours somewhere in theworld.
Their usual conference room was open; beverage options were prepped on the side table with a carafe of synthcaf and a couple cans of the energy drinkZing!Considering the hour, everyone lined up to make a cup of synthcaf, with Katie muttering under her breath about how she’d havepreferredtea.
“>” Alexei saidtoher.
“>” Katie said, mouth twitching with asmile.
Coffee was a luxury most people couldn’t afford, which made Alexei grateful his brother was in love with Jamie. Admittedly, Alexei was grateful for other reasons—it got him an apartment all to himself most of the time—but the perks of being friends with a billionaire were fuckingamazing.
It didn’t take much to make Alexei happy food-wise. He had hazy memories of his early childhood in a campground of refugees in the Eastern European contested region before ending up in a refugee city in the Ukraine. Food and water were rationed and doled out by aid groups, and it wasn’t uncommon for people to bribe the volunteers with whatever they had to get more sustenance. Alexei had hoarded food growing up, even after being granted asylum in America with his family when he was eleven years old. He never really kicked the habit until he joined the Army, where cleanliness was just as important as how well you took orders. Hiding rations in his bed was something he learned to stop doing within the first few days of BasicTraining.
The door slid open, and Alexei looked over his shoulder as the last three members of their team arrived. Annabelle Brown, Donovan Williams, and Trevor Sanchez stumbled into the conference room and made a beeline for the synthcaf. Alexei got out of the way and carried his cup with him to the conference table, choosing a seat atrandom.
He placed his left hand on the opaque screen spanning the tabletop, waking up the terminal. Tapping his wrist against the import sensor, Alexei downloaded the recorded call off his bioware and the location that had come through from Sean’s number by way of Antonovich during the drivetobase.
Alexei flicked the data into the center of the table, watching as a holographic globe of the Earth snapped into view. “Ceres, pulllocation.”
“Private villa located in New Miami’s East Shore neighborhood,” the MDF’s smart building AI informed him in its crisp, female-designedvoice.
“Ooh, tacky Russian-American mafia. I bet the inside of his mansion is covered in gold leaf,” Madison said as she plopped down in a seat across the table from Alexei. “Can you get us a picture,Ceres?”
“Been watching too many reality shows,” Trevor told her throughayawn.
“It’s called reality for areason.”
Ceres relegated the map to a different position before pulling up an aerial view of the villa in question. Perched on the edge of a manmade beach, with a solid-looking security wall surrounding the premises, the villa took up a great deal of space in a city clinging to what land remained after the sea levels rose. That was enough to tell Alexei they were dealing with money and weapons, a dangerouscombination.
The door slid open again, and everyone stood up as MDF Deputy Director Ranisha Stirling stepped inside. The group saluted at her in greeting, receiving a sharp nod in return. A former Rear Admiral Lower Half in the United States Navy, Stirling currently helped Director Amir Nazari lead the MDF, overseeing key missions of her own when the needarose.
