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“Yeah, same here,” he says. “You ghosted your way here?”
“Yes, and did you?”
Liam says, “I did. I also took a gamble, picking you up here so close to headquarters, but they probably wouldn’t think I’d be that crazy.”
A traffic light is ahead and the light turns yellow. Liam speeds through it. She grabs a door handle, takes a calming breath, not wanting him to see that he’s shaking her up.
“Who’s ‘they,’ Liam?”
He makes another turn, gets on an exit to I-495. Joining theheavy flow of traffic seems to ease Liam, and he lets the Jeep’s speed match that of the surrounding traffic.
Liam says, “Think I’m getting a bit nutso? Losing it?”
“No,” she says.
“Wish your voice was more convincing.”
Noa says, “I’ll work on it. What’s going on?”
Liam says, “A few hours ago I was talking with an old Army friend, a doctor, now assigned to the White House Medical Unit. Yesterday he told me that he believes the president is mentally ill, a paranoid. About an hour after we got off the phone today, saying he would let the right people know about the president’s state, he was murdered. That’s what’s going on. Give me a few minutes. I’ll park my Jeep and we can talk things through.”
“Great,” she says. “Because I have something to tell you, as well.”
“Fantastic,” he says. “Gonna be a hell of a night.”
She says nothing, just looking at the white and red lights from the surrounding traffic move quickly along.
About thirty minutes later, Liam pulls his Jeep into a crowded Walmart parking lot in the town of Vienna, and he finds an empty spot at the far end of the lot. He switches off the engine and settles back in his seat, rubbing at his face.
Liam says, “Mind going first?”
“No,” she says.
“Thanks.”
“The president is losing it,” Noa says.
“No disagreement here. I’m feeling that, and so was my friend Doc. Go on.”
She says, “I had a meeting with him this morning. I asked him if he had informed the Gang of Eight as to what we’ve been doing. Check that, what my team and I are doing. Liam, you’ve got cover, you’re operating overseas. But unless Congress signs off on what we’ve been doing in the States, my team and I are all facing decades in jail.”
Liam swivels in his seat. “I bet he took that well.”
“I was surprised, he didn’t shout or bellow or toss papers around the office. He just said, no, he hadn’t informed the Gang of Eight. I told him I was done. He told me otherwise, but I was still working for him, no matter what.”
“Then what?”
Noa feels that little flame of shame for what Barrett showed her and did to her in his private office.
She says, “Our last action got complicated. We were trying to capture three Iranian Quds members who were planning an attack on the National Ground Intelligence Center in Charlottesville. They decided to fight it out. One of them was severely wounded, and we couldn’t take him to a civilian hospital, and an Agency-affiliated ER was too far away.”
“What did you do?”
“What I had to do,” she says. “And Barrett showed me a drone video of me doing just that. He said that my ass belonged to him, and that if I tried to leave, that drone footage would be given to the AG’s office. Oh, and to round it off, he said he could rape me in that office, and I couldn’t do anything about it. Or he’d make me disappear. Permanently.”
Liam murmurs, “Oh, damn,” and turns away for a moment, like he’s embarrassed for her. Noa wants to say,What, this is news to you? That powerful men have always taken what they wanted from us women?
“And you?” she asks. “Tell me about your Army captain.”
