She picks up her glass, puts it back down. “What does your gut say about Caleb?”
He doesn’t answer right away. When he does, his voice is careful. “He wrote a book that predicted a terrorist attack. Maybe it’s a coincidence. But given where he works, I think he’s being used. And if that’s the case, we’re helping him.”
“Are we?”
“I think so. He seems pretty hapless.”
They move to the kitchen to clean up from dinner, trading their spy lives for their domestic life.
He loads the dishwasher and washes the pots and pans. She puts away the leftovers and wipes down the counters.
The front door opens. Finn and Fiona return, breathless and grinning.
“We’re going back tomorrow!” Fiona announces. “And Yasmin invited me to her house on Saturday!”
Finn adds, “Marco says the robotics team is building an autonomous rover. He asked if I wanted to join.”
Sasha smiles. “Sounds great.”
“It is,” Finn tells her.
The kids race upstairs to finish their homework.
“Looks like we don’t have to worry about those two finding their way.”
Chapter Fourteen
Linda sits at her dining room table with a cup of tea and her laptop. She’s already run these searches, but a few details trouble her. So, she tries again. She open the proprietary search engine that finds records not available to the general public and types in a name:
Sasha McCandless-Connelly.
Well-regarded lawyer from a big family. Started her career in a large, prestigious firm. Opened her own office after eight years. Publications in law journals. A surprising number of high-profile cases that made national headlines. Married since 2013 to Leo Connelly. Twins born twenty months later.
This is all normal.
Krav Maga expert. Stabbed in a park. Stalked by a defendant. Cleared of wrongdoing in the death of a dirty FBI agent. Arrested for a bar fight.
This is not so normal.
“Scrappy little thing, isn’t she?” she murmurs to the Boston fern.
She closes the tab and opens another.
Leo Connelly.
Raised by a single mother who came home pregnant from serving as a nurse in Vietnam. No father listed on his birth certificate. A traveling nurse, she homeschooled her son as they moved around. He traveled to Vietnam alone as a teenager, a failed effort to find his father. College. History major. Recruited by DHS, who also failed to find his father during their background investigation. A stint as an Air Marshal. Then several years of federal employment with no explicit employer.
She knows what this means.
He worked for one or more shadow agencies. Which means he did things to protect his country that the government doesn’t want to admit to. It’s not surprising then, that information about him is thin.
His father makes contact after the twins are born. He’s a notorious Vietnamese gangster, and his son turns him in to the authorities. Once again, protecting his country.
At some point, he opens a private investigator’s office with another former fed. Leo Connelly and Hank Richardson go three years without taking a single case that she can find. Then another stint of federal employment for a no-name agency.
And now, suddenly, here he is, a high school history teacher at a school catering to the families of spies and diplomats.
She turns to look at the fiddle-leaf fig in the corner. “These gaps don’t mean anything good,” she tells the plant. “Classified work. Black operations. Something scrubbed so thoroughly it might as well have never happened.”
