“I’ll be working next door.” Addison stopped in an open doorway. “Welcome to ALPHA BLACK OPS.”
Dakota stood at the doorway to the next office, gestured for Caroline to enter. Besides a desk, a few chairs, there was nothing.
She crossed the threshold.
“Nothing personal is kept here,” he explained as he sat behind the desk. “It’s for the safety of our employees and the security of what we do.”
While he set up her laptop, he continued talking. “ALPHA is a top-secret organization that was started by two FBI agents. It was designed to go after the country’s most wanted criminals who’d escaped prison or had been convicted of a crime, got paroled, then went right back to their heinous crimes. I’m talking serial killers, serial rapists, child molesters.”
“Understood,” Caroline said, soaking up his words.
“ALPHA’s located in Tysons and my wife, Providence Luck, co-runs it. You’ve been brought in to work under my group, BLACK OPS. We’re a specialized group that, like ALPHA,doesn’t exist on any org chart. Only a handful know either group exists.”
“My division chief, Maria Konya, couldn’t even brief me,” Caroline said.
“Despite her security clearance, she’s not privy to the organization or to our mission.”
“Which is?”
“BLACK OPS is a joint operation between the FBI and CIA. Our team eliminates the most violent career criminals in the world—wherever they might be—or we deploy our rescue team on save-missions both here and abroad.”
This is cool… and I want in.
Caroline acknowledged him with a nod.
Dakota spun the laptop around. “The password must be a minimum of sixteen letters, numbers, and symbols. Commit it to memory.” He rose. “Take your time with it. I’ll grab us waters from the break room.”
“Any chance there’s coffee?”
“I got you. Black, cream, sugar?”
“A little milk or cream or whatever you have.”
After he left, she leaned back and exhaled.
This is crazy.
Though having been with the CIA since graduating college, she was thrilled to be hand-selected for such an elite mission. She couldn’t wait to learn more about an organization she hadn’t known existed less than an hour ago.
After typing in a password, she re-typed it, and was granted permission. The laptop was a bare shell. No files existed, she couldn’t even click on an email icon because there was nothing there.
Dakota returned with a coffee and two waters.
He spent the next thirty minutes doing a deeper dive about the organization and the expectations.
“This is temporary, right?” Caroline asked. “Chief Konya told me I should think of it like an overseas assignment.”
“It depends,” Dakota replied. “If you’re happy here, and you bring value to the group, you could transition into BLACK OPS.”
He pushed out of his chair, stood in front of a wall scanner next to a closed door. The light turned green and he entered a walk-in closet, exiting with a Glock, a harness, and a Kevlar vest, which he set in front of her. Next, he handed her a picture ID with her photo on it.
“These are yours,” Dakota said. “I’m quoting Providence since she’s not here to onboard you. ‘The Kevlar does you no good if you’re not wearing it.’”
She stared at her picture ID and the name on the badge. “So, my alias is Rebecca Slater and I work for the FBI?”
“Since ALPHA and BLACK OPS don’t exist, use this when you question a suspect or a witness or you work the case with an agent from another agency.”
“Got it,” she said as she pulled on the harness.
