Prologue
Bogotá, eight years earlier…
The rain had stopped an hour ago, but the panadería's awning still wept onto the sidewalk in slow, irregular drops.
Three drops in eleven seconds. Then five. Then nothing for a minute and a half. CIA agent, Sterling Fox, counted. He did this because if he didn't, he'd lose his focus, and if he did that, he'd put the mission at risk.
The water gathered along the green canvas, beaded, fattened, let go, and where it hit the concrete it carved a small, dark line that ran toward the storm drain as if it were being chased.
He sat with his back against a cold cinder block wall, three stories up in a half-finished apartment building that wouldn't see another worker for months, watching the panadería through the gap in the unfinished wall. He didn't need the rifle scope. What he needed was patience, and patience he had.
Six hours in this position.
The cold pushed through, dry and thin. Andean air, at altitude, surprised people who thought South America meant heat.
Sterling's mind logged the cold along with the rest of his surroundings. His shoulders ached where they'd locked into thesame angle for hours, but moving meant losing the read on the street, so he didn't move.
The rain had quit at 1842 leaving the sidewalk dark and steaming. Colombian music drifted from a radio two buildings over. The panadería's grate complained every forty minutes when the owner came out to check the street.
She was due in seven.
"Bravo One, comms check," Marlow said, low and even in Sterling's ear. Marlow was Air Force. He held overwatch and ran comms from a rooftop two blocks east.
"Bravo One, good copy," Sterling said.
"Bravo Two, good copy," Nick answered. Nick held the rear perimeter and was the other CIA man on the op—a Langley guy, too. He and Sterling had collaborated a few times in the field. If Sterling wanted a guy to have his six, Nick was the man.
"Bravo Three, copy," Doyle said. The Green Beret had a face that fit anywhere. If he shaved and put on a golf shirt, he could stroll into a country club like he owned it. If he let his beard and hair grow, dress him in jeans, flannel, and a Stetson, and he could blend in with the cowboys.
"Bravo Four, copy," Nelson Snow, Delta Force and the breacher, said. Sterling had worked with him twice before, and Nelson was about as solid as they came.
"Bravo Five, copy," Driscoll said. He was a SEAL. He sat in a stripped-down delivery van in the alley behind the panadería stand and never made noise over comms unless he had to. Those three words were a lot for him.
The line cleared.
Sterling let his eyes adjust back to the street and tracked the third-floor window above the panadería.
Curtains drawn. Dim light from a lamp instead of an overhead.
Mateo Restrepo was up there. Forty-three years old, mid-shift coordinator at a freight company that moved cargo through El Dorado. His name appeared on three bills of lading a week that didn't match the manifests they should've.
He'd been on Sterling's board for eight months. Pattern-of-life mapped down to the brand of cigarettes Mateo bought on Tuesdays. The man washed his shirts in cold water and hung them on the railing of the small interior courtyard because the dryer in his building never worked right.
Sterling knew the shirts. Three of them. White, light purple, pale blue. Always in that order, left to right.
He also knew Restrepo had a sister.
The brief hadn't included her because she hadn't mattered—until she did. She was Sterling's leverage and addition. He'd moved her three days ago. A quiet pickup from her apartment six blocks south into a safe house outside the city, no one the wiser. Sterling had pitched it to the COS (Chief of Station) as a non-negotiable.
Without it, Restrepo wasn't ever going to talk.
And Sterling wouldn’t pull a man out and leave his sister behind as the lever someone yanked to make the guy recant. The COS had grunted his permission and asked Sterling to keep the paper thin.
There were a lot of things regarding this op that were "thin" or only registered in Sterling's brain. That made him nervous. It meant the government could leverage Sterling.
Wasn't the first time, and it sure as shit wouldn't be the last.
The window above the panadería went dark.
