he thought she’d ask him to explain, but she didn’t. She’d only demanded he answer whatever questions she asked, and he planned to do just that. He also planned to honor her silent request to not provide information she could have requested, and didn’t. When he could. If he felt she had to know something in order to get them both through this, he’d tell her whatever he had to. She already hated him. If it meant keeping them both alive, what did it matter if he pissed her off a little more?
“Is that what you think CJ wants me to do? Waste hours on end looking through what amounts to the who’s who of terrorist mug shots?”
“It’s a place to start. Do you have any other suggestions?”
“Yeah, that we start anywhere but there.” She slumped back in her chair and rubbed a hand over her face.
“Tate—”
She held up a hand, stalling whatever comfort he might have tried to give her. Probably just as well. Nurturing didn’t come naturally to him. Unless it involved how to raise a good agent.
“I can mentally go back over it,” she said quietly. “Our time out there. Not just at the end, when we’d been found out and taken into custody, but before, when we were still undercover. I know CJ, or I did, better than anyone. I can try to figure out how she might have gotten back in with them, and how she might need to get out, but even with all the mental analysis I can apply, given my three-year-old intel, it would, at best, be a stab in the dark if you don’t have any additional information on where she might be, specifically, and with whom.” She looked at him expectantly.
“I don’t have anything else. We only had those two communiqués. She hasn’t been in contact since. And I wasn’t able to verify anything through what proper channels I felt I could access. My only lead was you.”
“Do you know, for certain, that the faction that held us is still in existence, in power? Are they still operating as they were? Three years, as their world turns, is an incredibly long time for them to remain intact.”
“We’ve of course kept them in our sights since extricating you. But we haven’t been assigned to anything on them since then. As you say, their world changes quickly, as does ours, and they ceased to be the dominant threat.”
“Did you look to see if, perhaps, there has been any other activity with them? Other countries working anything having to do with them? Our allies? Or enemies? Or possibly some other faction within our own government?”
He slowly shook his head. “I did look, yes, but no, there have been no operations that I’ve been able to uncover dealing with them or those who surround them. Definitely not with us.” And they both knew his clearance was the highest there was. What he didn’t have personal access to, he usually had an alternate source to tap into. However, this time he’d been limited in who he could reach out to. “I had to be careful how deeply I searched, and who I asked.”
“But you feel confident that you didn’t miss anything.”
“As confident as I can be.”
“And yet your entire department missed the fact that CJ has been alive for the past three years and apparently working with the same group we were sent to infiltrate.”
“You know as well as I do how easy it is to fall off the radar if that’s your goal.”
“Harder today than it used to be.”
“True. But intel is only as good as the direction we’re aimed in. We can’t gather information on what we’re not looking at.”
She dipped her chin, but her attentions seemed turned inward. He didn’t want to know what she was seeing in her mind’s eye. “So, if they’re no longer a threat, no longer the focus of any kind of real scrutiny, then are you saying they abandoned their plans to acquire plutonium? I know it’s been a couple of years, but surely they haven’t given up on their quest to gain global presence by becoming a nuclear power?”
“No, they haven’t. But the world changes, partnerships change, channels of communication become harder to maintain in the face of continued opposition. Hell, the opposition itself changes.”
“But they’re still trying to do exactly what they were trying to do when CJ and I were sent to infiltrate them? So why aren’t we looking at them? Why aren’t they dead center on our radar?”
“The chain of command changed, theirs and ours, and so did our focus. Some of their alliances crumbled, new ones were established, it’s not the same game now. From what I could learn, the division that held you shot and killed their leader in a double cross six months after you were extricated. It was chaos for a short time as a new power grid was established, but the man who finally prevailed and restored some order to the regime didn’t trust anyone who was left from the original group, so he brought in his own guys. Same mission, same game, but new alliances, new mergers, new connections. The new internal faction was tight and impenetrable, so our focus shifted upward and outward.”
Tate looked up. “So, if all the players changed, then who is CJ working for?”
“Specifically? She didn’t, or couldn’t, say, but she intimated she was working for the same group, so I can only assume she moved up the chain when the regime changed.”
“Then how in the hell can I be of any help? I don’t know any of those players. We infiltrated the lowest level, as supposed foreign operatives working with Italian counterspies they’d tapped a year before. It’s the only reason they’d have anything to do with us as women. We’d just begun to make inroads when Buonfiglio was found out to be a triple threat, working for the Afghanis as well as his government and ours, and flipped on all of us to save his sorry, cowardly ass.”
“Which he didn’t, by the way. He was killed shortly after you retired.”
Something flashed across her face, but she said nothing. Derek thought about letting it go, but decided to nudge, just a little. He needed to know where she stood. “What?”
“Nothing. I just—” She held his gaze, and hers was all steel now, reminding him of their days working together. She’d been rock solid then. She still was now, though she probably thought she wasn’t. Some of that had been trained into her, but mostly it was who she was. You couldn’t make an agent out of nothing, you could only hone and enhance the elements that were already there. And being unshakable was one of her sharpest natural components. It was why she was sitting across from him today, and not in a dusty grave in a desert halfway around the world. “I’m not sorry he’s dead,” she said, at length. “I don’t know what that says about me. No one deserves to die, especially not like he probably did.”
“He was directly responsible for the death or torture of a half dozen people, four of them his own countrymen and working directly on his team. He was a mercenary and, you’re right, a coward. Neither of those qualities generally lends itself to a happy end.”
She didn’t say anything.
“What else?” he asked.
She looked up. “What else, what?”
“You had a look. And it wasn’t simply satisfaction over Buon’s death.”
“You know what I miss the least about not being part of the team any longer?”
“The team, or my team?”
“Yes,” was all she said.
His lips curved slightly. “What do you miss the least?”
“Having my every blink of the eye, flicker of emotion, twitch of the lips examined, analyzed, and probed.”
“You know better than anyone that you can’t just keep your opposition under a microscope. In the world we operated in, you had to keep close watch on your own as well. As Buonfiglio so rightly proved. If the Italians had been paying closer attention to their own, he’d never have gotten far enough to do what he did.”
“We could say