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“I’m busy.”
“You’re always busy. But this is Uncle Sam,” she reminded me—as if I’d forget my deal withthatdevil. “You can’t be too busy for him.”
“I’ve done Sammy Boy enough favors for him to leave me alone for the rest of my damn life. You owe me for finding that bug in the NSA servers. You were begging hackers to come in and explore.”
She tutted. “You know how it works.”
“I do, but I think it’s time to renegotiate.”
“You don’t renegotiate with the United States,” she retorted, tutting for a second time. “Do I need to remind you of what happened when you were seventeen? The reason I told you that you needed a personality transplant?”
I huffed.
“You were the one who decided to go exploring NASA. You were the one who decided that a single visit to a top-secret agency’s database wasn’t enough.”
I grimaced at the memory. At the time, I’d needed to access a satellite.A now obsolete satellite. It so wasn’t worth the punishment.
Deciding to play hardball, I stated, “I need to leave the country.”
Her voice grew sharp. “Why?”
“Not for good. Just for a short period. Maybe a few weeks.”
“You know you’re not allowed to leave the continental US—” She sighed. “Ah. You want to do a deal.”
“You catch on quickly.” I rocked back in my seat and stared at the footage one of my monitors played on repeat.
Star sitting right where I was.
In my home.
It was the nearest I’d ever gotten to her. The nearest, sometimes, it felt like I’d ever be.
“For a woman?” she guessed, sounding bored by the idea.
“Thewoman,” I corrected.
“They always are,” she dismissed.
“Not with me. You know that.”
“Do you even date?” She sighed. “Never mind. I’ll see what I can do. Where do you need to go?”
“Russia.”
I waited for the explosion. It came in the form of a growl. “Why the fuck do you want to go to Russia?”
Riggs, a church-going Evangelist, never swore. That meant I enjoyed it all the more when I made her do it.
As much as we were friendly, she was my handler. Granted, she didn’t ‘handle’ me much anymore. Once every four or so years I tended to hear from her. It was both bad and good luck that she’d called today.
Bad because I had other shit I needed to do.
Good because I needed to get to Star and I hadn’t been sure if I’d be able to leave the country without being stopped by TSA first.
A private jet was always an option, and I’d sneaked in and out of our borders via that method of transport in the past, but something about what was going down told me I needed to stay on the good side of the US government.
If that meant doing their bidding for a little while, jumping through some hoops, and dancing to their tune, then I’d do it.
