AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Good.”
Wren said, “Thanks for doing this, Zack. This won’t be easy, but it will be interesting, and I can’t wait to work with you again. Been too long, mate.”
“See you in jolly old England.”
“If it were so jolly, we wouldn’t need you.”
Zack hung up with a smile.
For the first time in a long time, he saw himself as a man with a mission.
FIFTEEN
The lights in the small glass-walled conference room on the fifth floor of the CIA headquarters building in McLean, Virginia, flipped on at three p.m., and the chairs around the long oval table began filling with bodies just seconds later.
Four men in suits sat down, then a pair of women entered, then another man and another woman.
A minute after this, three more personnel arrived.
With eleven at the table now, only one seat remained open.
Soon Jim Pace shuffled into the room, just two minutes or so late but bearing the full burden of the knowledge that his tardiness had likely made the much more senior CIA administrators present wait on him. He struggled with a pair of large accordion file folders under his arm, a stuffed leather folio swinging off his shoulder, and an iPad in his hand, its wireless function disabled for security reasons.
At fifty-two years old, Pace had dark brown hair and a mustache, along with a lean build that belied the fact that he spent his days sitting at a desk. He kept his fitness up rowing in the Potomac most every morning, putting his kayak in at the dock in Old Town Alexandria near his little house, making his way up past Reagan National Airport and then back down, aircraft landing right over his head as he sculled, exerting his back, legs, arms, and core.
Fitness had always been important to Pace; now it kept him healthy, but in his past it had kept him alive.
Previous to landing his posting here at Langley one year earlier, he had worked as a CIA case officer in the Directorate of Operations, primarily serving in the Middle East.
And in his thirties he’d been a paramilitary officer in Ground Branch, a unit in the Agency’s Special Activities Division, now renamed the Special Activities Center.
In Ground Branch, among other duties, he’d operated on a kill/capture/rendition squad called Task Force Golf Sierra, known more colloquially around the Directorate of Operations as the Goon Squad.
And way back in his twenties Pace had served in the U.S. Army’s Third Special Forces Group at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. These were the early days of the war on terror, and he’d been deployed virtually every year since he’d become a Green Beret.
His time in the sand and the mud were behind him now, however, and these days his main concern was that he’d be suffocated by a landslide emanating from the mountain of paperwork on his desk.
As soon as he entered the room, he looked at the head of the oblong table, to the DDO’s chair, and his heart sank when he saw that his boss had beat him to the meeting. William “Trey” Watkins, the new deputy director of the CIA for operations, conferred with his number two, Naveen Gopal, an Indian American who had taught international relations and security studies at Harvard before getting scooped up into the Agency nearly two decades earlier.
As Pace sat down with apologies, he continued looking around. Analysis was well represented, and a few other operations and administrative personnel were in attendance, as well.
An African American woman, maybe ten years Pace’s junior, sat halfway down the table from him on his right. He didn’t recognize her, but she was positioned between other ops personnel, so he assumed she was from the Directorate of Operations.
D/O was the department that had pulled him out of bed at five a.m. and told him to get his ass into the office because a crisis had developed. Pace’s focus here at the Agency was on proliferations, tracking the movement of weapons and defense technology around the world, and as soon as he’d made it into HQ this morning, shortly before six thirty a.m., he’d been given a new assignment that was different from anything else he’d ever done.
Assistant to the DDO Naveen Gopal spoke first, even before Jim could get all his folders and items settled in front of him. “All right, everyone. Jim Pace is in Special Tasks, working on proliferations issues. More specifically, he’s been investigating Chinese commercial espionage for the past year, so we’ve asked him to run point on this. He’s had all day to piece it together.”
All day? Pace thought. Yeah, he’d had eight hours, but this was a rapidly developing situation.
DDO Watkins spoke up now. “Okay, Jim, what do you have for us?”
Pace was nowhere near ready for this shit, but he knew he’d have to adapt and overcome.
“Well, sir, in the few hours I’ve been looking into the matter, I have more questions than answers.”
Watkins raised an eyebrow so high it looked painful. “Do you have any answers?”
Pace nodded. “Ten personalities involved with artificial intelligence and robotics have been assassinated around the world, in seven different countries, all in the past thirty-four hours.”
