Page 61 of Every Last Breath

She was different. Stronger. She had to be, had to shake this off. Catching Novak was all she had the strength to handle, so she sat and opened the file again. Time to dig into his military record.

Gaining acceptance into the Albanian Special Forces program was a painstaking, grueling twelve-week process. Evaluations tested navigation and marksmanship. Marches with sixty-pound rucksacks for physical endurance. Psychological testing to see who wouldn’t crack under torture. They cycled through twenty-four-hour nonstop periods of physical drills and tasks. And that was just to get accepted into the program.

Afterward, candidates underwent a rigorous fourteen-week training process, learning survival skills, honing their sharpshooter and hand-to-hand combat techniques. As a final test, candidates were left in a remote area of the country without food, water, or gear. To graduate, they had seventy-two hours to evade capture by a team sent to hunt them and return to base undetected.

Jeez. Everyone on Maddox’s team had survival and evasion training to varying degrees, but she’d never tracked someone with this type of specialized skill set. And time wasn’t on her side.

Words blurred on the page. She had to pack it in.

She stood, her bones leaden with exhaustion. A dark emptiness chipped away at her, abrading her gut. What if she couldn’t get into Novak’s head? What if he slipped through their fingers again?

Doubt was static whirring in her mind. She needed sleep. After solid rest, she could tackle anything. She knocked out her after-action report, omitting details that’d indicate they had a mole, locked Novak’s classified file in her desk, and took the unclassified version with her.

Turning to take the elevator, she spotted Harper coming out of the restroom, headed to the analysis section.

“Hey, Harper.”

The analyst stopped, smoothing back the hair of her tight bun. “What do you need, Maddox?”

“It’s pretty late. Why don’t you go home and sleep?”

Not that she appeared to need any. Harper looked flawless and alert without a hint of makeup. She wasn’t classically beautiful but had a captivating face and enviable stamina that defied her fragile frame.

“I went home earlier for a break, and just now, I got to thinking,” she said without making eye contact in her odd-bird way, “about Novak and his son and it hit me. I can run my facial recognition program through the city’s video surveillance system.”

“That’d be helpful. How many cameras are we talking about?”

“Couple of thousand scanning streets, sidewalks, parks, rooftops. Another thousand in the Metro, and I can tap into some private security cameras scattered throughout the area as well.”

“How soon to get it running?”

“I came back to get started writing the algorithm.” Harper’s fingers wiggled wildly, tapping the side of her leg. “I’ll plug into the public and private feeds available and get real-time video analytics I could cross-link.”

“If you find something, make sure you contact me first.”

Harper usually worked behind the scenes on missions, but Sanborn was using her more and more these days as an analytical point person for operations. On those occasions, she tended to walk information to Sanborn before notifying the tactical team leader, against protocol. A protocol Sanborn didn’t enforce with her.

He made lots of allowances where she was concerned. Harper kept her distance from everyone, especially operatives. It was as though she was only comfortable interacting with Sanborn.

“You don’t want me to go to the DGB first?” With her bright eyes widening, she had the innocent look of a porcelain doll.

“No. I need you to follow protocol. This mission could succeed or fail based on how long it takes Tactical to receive relevant information. Updating the DGB is my job. Okay?”

The reasoning was sound, unquestionable, yet Harper stared at the wall as she hesitated.

She needed a nudge.

“I know you wouldn’t want to do anything to hinder our efforts or inadvertently tank this op.”

Whether a traitor or an introvert, there was only one logical response. “Okay,” Harper said.

“And work on this task alone.” Whoever the leak might be, they were a single point of failure. Reducing layers would increase transparency.

Harper nodded.

Maddox took the elevator up to the main level. She glanced at her smartwatch. Almost 3:00 a.m. Her stomach growled. She’d kill for a juicy burger loaded with cheese and bacon, but she’d nuke something lean and mean, then crash. She pushed through the heavy door, walking outside into the chorus of cicadas.

Mother Nature had the humidity cranked way too high for this hour. Six cars remained dispersed throughout the quiet parking lot, Knox’s truck blanketed in darkness at the far end. Stretching her neck, Maddox rolled the bunched knots in her shoulders as she walked. The small, shady lot was a far cry from Langley’s color-coded, amusement-park-sized one.