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Questions about how CIA recruited their shadow-warriors.
Questions whose answers straddled that murky space between right and wrong, good and evil, darkness and light, heaven and hell.
“Why isn’t he in prison?” came the first of those questions from over by the coffee area. Paige was shaking where she stood, a potent mix of what Benson sensed was humiliation, indignation, and straight-up anger making her eyes flash a startling blue. “That’s murder. He pinched that baby’s nostrils closed, covered the child’s tiny mouth, waited until the child went still, then calmly sat back and lit a cigarette. He’s a psychopath, and he should be in prison, not working for the fucking CIA! Wasn’t there a background check? Isn’t there a vetting process? How long have you had that video? Who made that video? Why was Rhett under surveillance all those years ago? And if someone was watching, why didn’t they intervene? Why didn’t they save that innocent child?”
Benson sighed, rubbed his eyes, said nothing.
He just waited for Paige to connect the dots.
It didn’t take long.
“Oh, no, please tell me you didn’t let a newborn baby die simply to have something on Rhett, to trap him into working for the CIA, blackmail him into joining the NOC program.” Paige’s voice trembled with the sort of disbelieving rage that Benson knew was a sign of a strong moral compass.
Now he just had to make sure to recalibrate that compass to point towardshisversion of true north.
“Nobody’s telling you a damn thing,” Benson said with cold authority even as his heart pumped hot blood through every artery and vein. “In fact it’s time foryouto tellussomething, Paige. Preferablyeverything. Now sit back down on that chair. You can save the moral indignation for someone who gives a shit.”
Paige’s eyes burned with what Benson knew was beautifully pure hatred. This woman was definitely Darkwater material, and good luck to whoever got pulled into her fiery vortex when the time came.
But that was a game for another day, another mission, another story.
Right now Benson only needed one thing from Paige Anderson.
He waited silently as she stormed back to her chair, sat down hard, crossed one leg over the other knee, folded her arms over her chest, then shrugged her shoulders and waited sulkily for the question.
Benson shot a quick look at Kaiser. The Director had sunk back into his swivel chair, was gazing in Benson’s direction, his fingers tented expectantly. Kaiser knew Benson well enough to guess there was more to the story, that Rhett Rodgers was just the tip of the iceberg, that there were more bones buried in that closet, maybe an entire skeleton.
Benson pursed his lips, swallowed dryly, then asked the question whose answer would confirm what he already knew in his heart, already sensed in his soul, already dreaded in his depths. “Did Rhett ask you to activate an NOC operator in Mumbai?”
Paige stared blankly past Benson, nodded with trancelike resignation, like the adrenaline had worked its way through her system and now she was crashing back to earth, spinning down to reality, a grim gray reality in which she was very much a part of this game, very much lost in that space between right and wrong, good and evil, darkness and light, choice and circumstance.
“Yes,” she said, her shoulders slumping as she exhaled. “He asked me to hack into the Non-Official Cover database. There was an operator available in the Mumbai region. A woman. Rhett asked me to activate her.”
Kaiser sat up straight in his chair, his face clouding over. “You hacked into the NOC database? That’s impossible. And if you did, that’s a serious breach. Do you have any idea what you’ve—”
“I think she’s well aware of what she’s done, Martin. But she’s also well aware of whatwe’vedone.”
Kaiser snorted. “Speak for yourself, John. We’ve crossed many lines together over the years. But Rhett Rodgers was all you.” He shook his head, his eyes flashing in a way that reminded Benson that Kaiser was a father again, a husband again, emotionally vulnerable in a way he’d perhaps never been. “I’m well aware that we’ve recruited convicts and criminals, murderers and psychopaths, used mafia hitmen for wet jobs, cut deals with cartels who traffic both drugs and people. But this was a newborn baby, John. As innocent as life gets.”
“I didn’t think he’d kill the child,” snarled Benson, his jaw tight as wire, his gray eyes blazing silver at the accusation that he’d evenconsidersacrificing a child. “Look, I’d been working on Rhett for months, trying to bring him into the Agency as a regular recruit. But he didn’t want to do it, was having too much fun being the top alpha dog in his little law-school world.” Benson shrugged. “But as I dug deeper, got a better sense of his psychological profile, it lined up well with what we wanted for our NOC program that was just ramping up in a big way back then. I made an offer, but he turned me down again.” Benson ran his fingers through his hair, shrugged again. “Look, Martin, you remember the pressure we were under to staff up the NOC program back then. The Berlin Wall had come down, the Cold War was over, there were all these new nations popping up in Eastern Europe. We needed smooth-talking operators to get in there and help put the right people into power, the right regimes into place, get rid of players we didn’t want on the board—and do it all in a way that could never be linked to the CIA. Rhett fit the profile. He was born to do that kind of work. He just didn’t know it yet. Needed some time to find out what kind of a man he was. Maybe needed a nudge in the right direction.” Benson’s gaze hardened. “Sometimes you need constraints to force that part of you to surface. You need the pressure of locked-in circumstance to bring the shadow out into the light.” He felt his own shadow flash in his eyes as he gazed at Paige. “Kaiser knows this but you might not. CIA designed the NOC recruitment and training program based on Carl Jung’s theories of the Psychological Shadow, the secret parts of our psyche, dark drives and evil emotions that exist in all of us but are repressed by the conventions of society, the rules of civility, the ethics of religion, the teachings of tradition.”
Benson’s jaw relaxed a bit, his eyes shining with the conviction that he knew how to walk this line, understood better than most how the shadow worked, how sex and violence were the two hissing heads of that serpent coiled in the dark side of the human psyche.
“Look,” he said. “I set up the cameras back then just in case I got something on Rhett to give me leverage—just enough to nudge him in the right direction, turn the screws a bit until he realized he was born to work the shadows.” He rubbed his jaw, blinked as he exhaled. “But I didn’t think he’d kill the child. His own daughter.” He glanced at Paige, hoping she’d see the truth in his eyes—well, not thewholetruth, but Benson hoped to hell that the whole truth could stay buried, prayed that the NOC operator was someone else even though his gut told him who she was, that she couldn’t be anyone else, had to be that woman, fate twisting back on itself, destiny closing the loop Benson had unintentionally opened decades ago. “Remember, this was thirty years ago. We didn’t have live streaming capabilities with the tech back then. The Internet was too slow for that. Those cameras would record video on tiny hard drives hidden in the device, then upload the files to a CIA server every half hour. After that I needed to download the files on my clunky laptop before I could view them.”
“So there was a 30-minute lag in the video,” Paige said, the burning hatred in her eyes settling to a simmer. “You saw it too late to save the child.”
Benson rubbed the back of his neck, nodded noncommittally, wishing he could explain the mechanics of how it had all played out back then.
Played out in a way that defied human biology, thumbed its nose at conventional science, hinted at what Benson had only just started to understand back then and was certain of now.
That there were forces and phenomena that science did not yet understand, could not yet explain, and therefore side-stepped by simply ignoring these forces, denying their existence because it couldn’t be measured in a lab, couldn’t be repeated in an experiment, couldn’t be captured on camera, had to befeltto be understood, had to beexperiencedto be believed.
“Why did he do it?” whispered Paige. “If he didn’t want the baby, why not just give her up for adoption? And . . . and where was the mother? Did Rhett . . . did he kill her too?”
“No.” Benson sighed. “I did.”
24
