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Not after getting the strangest meeting invitation from Kaiser.
“That’s just insulting, Martin,” he muttered, pulling up the message on his phone as he strode to the mini-fridge in the corner for a bottle of iced coffee. He cracked the seal and drank the cold-brewed espresso all the way to its dregs, then tossed the empty bottle in the trash, just barely controlling the urge to hurl the glass at the fucking wall. He scanned the meeting invitation once more, noting that Kaiser had made it clear Benson would be in attendance since his off-the-books Darkwater guys had been watching the Senator’s Georgetown home for the past couple of months and would have some insight that might help Rhett when he took charge until Secret Service protection came through. “I’m not a fucking amateur. No way am I walking into an empty townhome with you two sharks circling for blood. How dumb do you think I am?”
The strong coffee hit Rhett’s system now, the adrenaline and cortisol surging in his blood, making his vision sharp, sparking his throbbing brain, giving him a second wind as nightfall settled outside his Maryland home. He paced to the sideboard beneath the wall-mounted flatpanel screen, snatched up the half-empty prescription bottle with his migraine medicine, popped two pills and crunched them between his molars.
He let the bitter powder linger on his tongue before swallowing. The migraines had been hitting harder over the past year or so. Rhett wondered if it was the increased doses of synthetic testosterone he’d been injecting. If so, it was worth it, he reminded himself as he flexed his pectorals, tightened his triceps, stretched out his muscular back. Once you got past sixty you lost muscle mass alarmingly fast, no matter how hard you worked out. An occasional migraine was a small price to pay for being ripped like a superhero in your sixties.
Of course, tight muscles and a hard cock wasn’t going to help him against Benson and Kaiser right now.
He needed information, intelligence, insight.
Inspiration.
“Think, damn it.” Rhett punched at the air as he paced his basement like a caged beast. “What are you missing? There’s always something you can use. Think harder. It’s in there somewhere.”
He slammed his open palms against the sides of his head, shaking himself like a fighter who’d just taken a hit but was still in the ring, preparing for his counterpunch.
Paige Anderson was a ghost now, he told himself angrily. He had to assume she’d flipped on him—even though there was a chance she’d simply quit her job and decided to lay low for a while. She’d been shellshocked when Benson called her at home pretending to be the CIA Director. And no doubt Kaiser and Benson had rattled her cage pretty hard earlier that evening.
“All right,” Rhett said aloud, striding to the whiteboard on the south wall, picking up a red marker, writing down what he knew because visualizing it helped him see new connections, call on inspiration the way an artist might. “Assume Paige flipped on you, gave up everything. If so, why hasn’t Kaiser immediately suspended you from the CIA, ordered an investigation, already killed your reputation with Robinson and the Intelligence Committee?”
He wrote the question on the whiteboard, stepped back, then grinned when the answer popped into his head from that place in the subconscious where inspiration hid.
“Because Paige doesn’t have any hard electronic evidence that either she or you did anything,” he said, still grinning as he scribbled the answer in red ink. “So it would just be your word against hers, which would just create a scandalous mess—especially if the FBI got involved and leaked it to the press. Wouldn’t just fuckmyreputation, but would also make Kaiser, Robinson, the Senate Intelligence Committee, and the current President all look incompetent. Nobody wants the FBI poking around the Agency—not Kaiser, not Robinson, not the damn President. So that’s off the table.” He rubbed his chin with his fist, swallowed hard as his face tightened. “But still, if Paige talked, then she must have told them about activating that NOC asset . . . Scarlet.”
Now a tremor went through Rhett’s body as the odd connection between the names hit him again. He’d chosen the codename Rhett himself all those years ago when Benson gave him the option. Then, when Bill Morris brought him into the Company two decades later as a legit CIA officer, he’d wanted to keep the name and so they’d sanitized and legitimized the Rhett Rodgers identity, backfilled the details, gotten it all cleared through CIA protocols as they existed at the time. Bill Morris had been instrumental in getting the cleaned-up Rhett Rodgers identity pushed through the vetting process, vouching for the veteran NOC asset. Now, of course, it would be almost impossible to bring a former NOC operator into the CIA as a formal employee. Too many complications with vetting all the previous identities and NOC missions—no way today’s CIA would grant any kind of clearance to bring someone from the shadows back into the light.
Today’s NOC program was a one-way ticket to the shadows, and Rhett had just about slipped back in the door before it closed on that whole shadowy side of the Agency. Nowplausible deniabilitywas more important than ever—especially after that comedy-show of a Congressional Hearing where CIA Legal had worked it so that Kaiser could basically lie under oath about having no knowledge of any active NOC program. Today’s NOC operators were truly nameless, faceless ghosts.
Like Scarlet.
That nagging anxiety clawed at his insides again. Rhett strode back to his laptop, clicked to the open tab where he’d been monitoring the NOC database, watching for any sign of Scarlet’s name popping back onto the AVAILABLE list.
Because that meant Indy O’Donnell was dead.
Giving Rhett a sliver of an advantage.
Not as much now that Paige had turned on him, but still enough that perhaps Rhett could turn the game in his direction, maybe even close it out.
Once O’Donnell was dead, the plan had been to go straight to Senator Robinson, show him the planted evidence from O’Donnell’s phone, then step back and let Kaiser and Benson take the fall once it came out that O’Donnell had been murdered under mysterious circumstances overseas in the presence of a Darkwater man. Oh, and that she’d been recruited by Benson himself.
Darkwater would be done for, Benson would be cut off from any CIA privileges, and Kaiser would almost certainly be asked to resign.
But damn, it was not so clean for Rhett now that Paige might have betrayed him, he thought with rueful anger. But still workable. Kaiser could produce Paige as a witness, but that “trial” would most likely be private, for Senator Robinson’s eyes only. Without any hard evidence proving that Rhett had activated Scarlet—or that Scarlet had even killed O’Donnell—it would still be Rhett’s word against Paige’s.
But Senator Robinson wasn’t an idiot. And the Senator’s wife Delilah had a soft spot for that coyote Benson—thanks to some connection with Gale Caldwell, who’d married Darkwater man Gavin McBane earlier that year. If this thing really got down to a he-said-she-said finger-pointing clusterfuck, Rhett wasn’t so vain as to think that he’d win outright—especially not if Paige was even remotely believable. Yeah, sure, without hard evidence Robinson might not force Rhett to resign, but after hearing Paige out, there was a solid chance the Senator might strike Rhett’s name off the short-list of Director candidates along with Kaiser’s, playing it safe by giving someone like the aging Bill Morris the job.
Still, there was a small chance Paige had not in fact betrayed him, Rhett told himself as he drew out a probability-matrix on the whiteboard to work out his options. The probability of that was admittedly low, but it wasn’t zero. That geeky little blonde had definitely been in swoony puppy love with him until yesterday, and surely Benson and Kaiser couldn’t have turned her heart aroundthatfast.
Unless Benson had showed her the video.
A sharp splinter of pain shot through Rhett’s right temple, making him wince and reach for his prescription bottle. He crunched down two more bitter white pills, then calmed down enough to push the past back where it belonged.
Yes, that video was a smoking gun that Benson had held at Rhett’s head for three decades. But it was mostly irrelevant here. Even if Benson had used it to turn Paige against him, that video was never making it to Senator Robinson. The good Senator would be morally—and legally—obligated to report it to the FBI, and it would create a scandal that would raise so many questions that Robinson, as head of the Senate Intelligence Committee, might find his own reputation tainted by association with Benson and Kaiser and Rhett.
No way would Kaiser and Benson allow that.
Those two old-school patriots were determined to get Senator Robinson to the White House.
