Tripoli was all the way out the door when Triumph called out to him. “Love you, bro!”
He heard the smile in Tripoli’s voice, even through the closed door. “Love you too.”
Sighing, he took another swig from his beer bottle. Like their friend Cosmos, Tripoli had been more than right to call him on his shitty behavior. In this case, instead of trying to drown his guilt in meaningless, anonymous sex, he’d been working to the point of exhaustion. He was no more straight in his head than he had been when he’d arrived in London two months ago. He’d one hundred percent fucked up.
So, here he was. Wasting away in his own version of Margaritaville. Where the hell had he even gone? When Tripoli left his office, he’d pulled up a travel website on his phone and clicked on the first last-minute vacation deal they had. It hadn’t mattered at the time. Wherever he was, it was warm, on the ocean, and he was in another country where the native language wasn’t English.
While sucking down cold beers and listening to the ocean waves, he’d do this right. He’d rest and reset. In the process, he’d figure out how to let go, at least a little bit, of his guilt over Tilly’s death and pick up the pieces so he could move on.
And how was that going for him?
He snorted. About the only real positive was that he wasn’t craving a visit to Shadowlands. What that said about him right now, he had no idea, and he didn’t want to think about it either.
Then again, he also didn’t want to think about work, and that never happened.
Resolved to putting his Tilly issues on the back burner for one more day, he extricated himself from the hammock and returned to his bungalow. As he entered, he heard an unfamiliar, muted beep.
Pulled from his musings, he frowned. Maybe he’d imagined it. He chucked the empty bottle into the recycle bin and headed toward the outdoor shower.
The beep sounded again. Was something running low on power? Glancing around, he searched for the smoke detector or anything else that would use batteries.
Finding nothing, he wondered if his phone or computer might be dying. A quick opening of the laptop showed it was at full power and connected to the backup battery. His phone was lying on the dresser and almost fully charged. What the hell was beeping?
The sound pinged again, this time clearly at his back. The only thing behind him was his computer case.
Crossing to the bag, he found nothing in the main compartment that would make any noise. Just as he was about to put the bag down, he heard the beep again. It was definitely coming from somewhere inside the bag.
A few seconds later, he made a tsking sound at his own stupidity. His second phone. The one he charged religiously every day, but never used, and kept in a pocket deep inside the bag. To be honest, he was surprised it still worked, and he really wasn’t sure why he still carried it. It was an old, old phone. A leftover from his NSA days. A fail-safe that was unregistered in case of emergencies. No one had called him on it in years. Who could possibly be calling it now? It had to be a misdial. Unless…
The alternative didn’t bear thinking about.
And yet…
Hurriedly, he dug down into the interior pocket of the bag, searching for the BlackBerry and slid the cover down to reveal the keyboard. On the screen was a series of texts. As he read, his eyes got wider and wider.
“Holy shit” was all he could manage.
After scanning the incoming messages, he slumped to sit on the edge of the bed and went back to the start, reading through them more carefully as he translated the old NSA code language like he’d been doing it this morning and not years ago.
G: HAPPY BELATED BIRTHDAY M. (Standard greeting when it had been a while.)
G: ITS G. (Agent G.)
G: GOT BAD NEWS TODAY. (I’m in trouble.)
G: COMPANY DOWNSIZING. (Mission shut down.)
G: SA BRANCH CLOSED DOWN. (South America job exposed at the source.)
G: LOOKING FOR A NEW JOB. (CIA burned me.)
G: NEED A CHANGE. (Need an exit strategy.)
G: KNOW OF ANYTHING? (Can you help?)
Wow. Talk about a blast from the past. Agent G. The last time he’d talked to her, she’d just started her operation in South America. When she managed to catch the eye of the Colonel Cartel’s eldest son, he’d been assigned to create her legend, instruct her on which files the CIA wanted to take him down, how to encrypt them, and then how to send them. They’d talked daily over secure channels, sometimes multiple times a day.
Wow. Yeah, he knew he’d thought that already, but this deserved a repeat. What the hell was she doing in his text messages? She couldn’t possibly have been undercover and with the cartel all this time, could she?
