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What a fucking relief.
After all, it was those damn swimmers of his that had flipped his life upside down thirty years ago, when he was just settling in as the youngest Dean of Virginia’s Prescott Law School.
A sharp pain stabbed at the inside of Rhett’s left eye, making him wince. Or maybe it was the memory of that raven-haired third-year law student from New Delhi, India, that dark-skinned whore who’d gotten herself knocked up and then refused to do the right thing, insisted on keeping the child.
If only Rhett had been the man he was now.
If only he’d had the balls to break her neck before she popped out that bastard child and set this whole thing into motion.
“You will change your mind when you lay eyes upon your daughter,” the bitch had insisted, batting her long black lashes, widening her big brown eyes. “Wait and see. Your natural instincts will kick in and you will be grateful we kept the child. I know it.”
Rhett rubbed his eyes, trying to push away the memory of that woman. They’d been together barely a year, but Rhett couldn’t deny that their time together had been electric, ecstatic, almost transcendent.
Maybe it was just how exotic the Indian woman had seemed to a Southern boy like him. But Rhett had always suspected it wasn’t just that. It wasn’t just the sex, wasn’t just the craving for her flesh, wasn’t just the way she moaned out words in her mysterious mother-tongue as she came. There had been something more with that woman, a connection that had always felt different, deeper, maybe even darker.
But that connection was dead now.
Along with the woman and that bastard baby who ruined everything.
Now Rhett’s jaw tightened as he stared out the window blankly. It had been thirty years and he was still unsettled about how everything had gone down. It had been a blur of accidents and events, hasty decisions and life-changing choices.
With John Benson somehow at the center of it all.
And now Benson was back in Rhett’s life.
Bringing all those old memories back with him.
“Get back into the system.” Rhett forced away those unsettling memories which had been dredged up by Benson’s visit that morning. “See if we have any NOC assets in Mumbai.”
Blondie stiffened. “Non-Official Cover Operatives? I . . . I don’t know if I can get into those files, Rhett. They’re the most protected layer in the entire CIA system. I don’t know what sort of alerts might get triggered if we try to activate an NOC asset. Kaiser himself might get an alert.”
Rhett shook his head, his eyes sparkling. “No, he won’t. That’s the whole point of NOC. Non official means no connection to the CIA or any U.S. agency. Plausible deniability. The system was redesigned to leave no electronic trails. Only the asset’s handler has knowledge. It’s strictly compartmentalized. The CIA Director needs to be able to deny all knowledge if Congress asks him under oath. And there are no electronic records that can be uncovered via Freedom of Information Act requests.”
Blondie’s eyelids fluttered as she thought. She bit her lower lip, hunched forward in her chair, rocking back and forth slowly. Rhett watched her carefully. Blondie was smart enough to know that this was crossing a very dangerous line, perhaps the final line.
“Hey,” he said, flashing a warm smile as he walked over to her. He went down on a knee in front of her chair, leaned in and kissed her gently, carefully, cupping his right hand around the back of her neck, sliding his tongue into her mouth, stroking her nipple with his other hand until it stiffened under his touch. “You know I love you, right?”
Blondie moaned gently and nodded as Rhett broke from the kiss. She took a long breath, sighed it out, then swiveled her chair around and got to work.
Rhett stood behind her, watching as the firewalls came down. He knew his own name was once in this database. Just the first name Rhett, the codename he’d selected all those years ago. But it was long gone from the system now. There were no case files on NOC operations. All electronic communications between asset and handler were sent via the system through military-grade encryption with tightly enforced disappearing messages. It was quite literally aburn-after-readingsystem. There would be no records on any computer server anywhere in the world for these sorts of operations which were unconstitutional at best, downright criminal at worst.
“Damn.” Blondie glanced back at him, an incredulous smile on her clumsily made-up face. “What are the chances?”
Rhett leaned over Blondie’s shoulder, squinted at her laptop screen. She’d gotten into the NOC database, had run a geo-location search on available assets in the Mumbai area.
There was just one hit.
A woman.
CodenameScarlet.
Rhett and Scarlet?
Nice try, Benson. How stupid do you think I am?
Rhett swallowed thickly, certain it was a dark joke, that Benson had predicted this move and gotten into the NOC database to set a trap or perhaps just taunt Rhett, flip him the bird like it was all a game. It would be just like that old coyote to plant a nonexistent fake asset codenamedScarletto trap a predator namedRhett.
After all, Benson had been right there thirty years ago when the man formerly known as something else became Rhett.
