Chapter Five
Ty
In a spacious office decorated in muted colors and void of anything personal, Dr. Banyon wore a charcoal-gray suit that was tight on her form—not in a sexy, look-at-me way, more in a constrained, regulated way.
Ty vaguely wondered if this was a uniform that she wore to elicit from her interviewees the sensation of being a child in the principal’s office.
She had slicked her hair into a bun that gave Ty the impression that she had a military background. Or maybe she’d been a dancer. Normal citizens didn’t sit that ramrod straight.
Every bit of how Dr. Banyon presented herself seemed psychologically purposeful.
Perhaps Ty thought that because he’d seen Johnna White on his way into the building.
Yeah, while Dr. Banyon and White didn’t have the same stature or look, they shared the same vibe of manipulation.
Where he’d met Dr. Banyon a few hours before, Johnna White had been a character in his world for years, and from his time knowing her, he knew White was a master mind of games.
“A blessing and a curse,” as his mom liked to say.
The biggest blessing? White had offered Ty a mission with an endgame he’d wanted for a long damned time.
Two end games: to take down a specific terrorist and finally find the love of his life.
And as White had wanted, the terrorist was flatlined, and Kira was in his arms, thanking him.
Kira both loved him and didn’t fully trust her feelings for him.
Understandable.
He’d come into her life by design. Sent in to form an attachment so he could get the information his team needed. Nothing about the beginning of his relationship with Kira was happenstance. It was all White, hovering over the stage, pulling at the marionette strings.
Selfishly, he hoped Kira would reach a point where she could trust herself and believe in them, like he did.
He wasn’t going to push.
If the day never came when Kira believed her love was real, Ty was still hugely grateful that White chose him for that fateful mission that potentially saved Kira’s life and protected her from a vicious future.
Just knowing Kira breathed easily and lived her gentle life of books and walks in the woods was a gift to Ty.
Right now, though, Kira was dealing with PTSD from the fallout of his mission and a terrorist attack that came right on its heels, where she saw her best friend shot in the head.
Ty twiddled the pen in his hand, and when Dr. Banyon said nothing more to him, he gingerly placed it on the table and pushed back in his chair, lifting his palms to his eyes.
During his time in the military, Ty had been through his fair share of psychological assessments, aptitude and IQ tests, but nothing like the battery of evaluations he had just gone through with Dr. Banyon.
His brain was mush.
There was not a single fold of his gray matter that hadn’t been lifted and palpated for rot.
He’d been warned that the vetting at Iniquus was intense, and he’d kind of brushed it off. He didn’t earn his place in The Unit by letting anything intimidate him. He’d decided to take it one step at a time and do his best with each step.
But the good Dr. Banyon kept her foot on the gas the entire time.
When Ty was out on a mission with his working K9, Rory, sometimes they were in situations where he couldn’t run his dog to burn off all that Malinois energy. So Ty devised different games to engage Rory’s brain.
“Tell me your thoughts,” Dr. Banyon said, gathering up the papers from in front of Ty and sliding them into her briefcase.
“Two things, a question I had about the pen, and I was thinking about Rory.”
“I’ll answer your question if I can.”
“Why did I take the test with pen and paper and not on a computer? From what I know of Iniquus, you all do nothing without forethought and distinct reasoning.”
“That’s true.” She leaned back in her chair, looking comfortable while Ty sat with military erectness. “If you were guessing, what would those reasons be?”
“Perhaps handwriting analysis? To be honest, I haven’t done a lot of handwriting since back in high school. Everything’s done with a keyboard now. I can’t say that the analyzer is going to have a good time trying to make out my writing.”
“Nothing like that.” Dr. Banyon smiled. “We do it to give our interviewee every advantage. And I would highly suggest that you start writing with a pen again. The motor skills you use in the formation of the letters activate different areas of the brain. It helps you with the recall of facts, memories of events, and thoughts. The slower process and the effort it took for you to write gave you time to use your critical thinking skills instead of just getting things down.” She steepled her fingers.
“I acknowledge that today’s testing was long. ”
Ty didn’t respond to that. He wasn’t about to show weakness over a psych test.
“And because it was long, using the pen and paper helped to improve your focus. The questions we asked you were very personal. Thank you for trusting us and the process and answering to the best of your ability.” She paused and looked at him.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“When you hand-wrote your essays, using pen and paper was supposed to help you work through the emotions we asked you about.” She swung one leg over the other to sit cross-legged. “And hopefully it helped lower the stress.”
“The stress was fine, ma’am. Perhaps I’ve become too reliant on autocorrect.” He sent her a good ol’ boy grin, the kind that endeared him to his teachers growing up. “Good luck to you reading all that.”
She smiled in return. “You mentioned you were thinking of Rory?”
“I did.”
“I understand that Rory is a Malinois originally assigned to Trip Wire Williams when Trip Wire was with the SEALs. Now, Trip’s with Cerberus Team Alpha?”
“Yes, ma’am. That’s correct. After Trip Wire got sick and left the service, Rory was assigned to my unit, and I became his handler. The separation’s been hard on Trip.”
“Trip Wire’s notes to me indicate that you kept him abreast of Rory’s antics, sending pictures and videos, and funny stories weekly as you could.”
“As I could, yes, ma’am. Depending on my mission.”
“And Rory is retiring. The military is giving Rory to Trip Wire for adoption. Rory has been with you for years. You’ve been through a lot together. What would it mean to you if you didn’t get the job with Iniquus, and you might not see Rory around?”
“Focusing my answer specifically on Rory, I always knew he would go live with Trip at retirement. Always seemed the right thing to do. Rory and I are the best of buds. But he belongs with Trip. If I do find a place on Cerberus Delta where I’d get to hang out with Rory from time to time, that would be awesome.
If Iniquus doesn’t think I’m a good fit for their program, Trip will keep me up with Rory, the same as I did for him. It’ll be fine.”
“But that’s not what you were thinking about when I asked you to tell me your thoughts.”
“No, ma’am.” He offered a sheepish grin. “As you said, Rory’s a Malinois. He’s like a marine hyped up on too much caffeine. He’s go-go-go all the time. In order to get him tired enough to follow the rules on any given day, I have to take him out for a ten-mile jog in the mornings.”
“Every morning you run ten miles?” she asked. “Even in the rain? What if you’re sick?”
“I use a treadmill on occasion. But that’s not always available to me. And sometimes, when I’m out on a mission, we have to hunker down, so we’re not spotted. Under those circumstances, I can’t run Rory.”
“How do you handle that?” she asked.
“You can tire a dog out with physical exercise, or you can tire him out with mental exercise. So I might, for example, take out kindergarten cards with colors or shapes, letters, or simple words, simple designs. I’d pick two, tell him what they were—lemon, orange—then I’d ask him, ‘Show me the orange.’ He’d paw the orange, and he’d get a piece of kibble.
By the time he got through his breakfast, his brain would be tired, and he’d lie down for a nap. ”
“Your brain is tired.”
That thought seemed to please her, and Ty wondered if that wasn’t the goal.
He’d been through SERE training—survive, evade, resist, escape—and he knew that the enemy often put the prisoner through a grueling experience, and the words didn’t flow because of torture; they happened in the presence of kindness.
“Here, have some coffee and a cookie. Are you hungry? Here’s a plate of delicious food that my mother made for me.
I’ll share it with you.” Ty didn’t feel a need to be on his guard.
Just maybe maintain an awareness that this might be the application of those same lessons on a gentler scale.
They might have been tiring him out, so his resistance was low.
“That’s not the kind of thing I do every day, ma’am. Glad to do it, just not what I’m used to.”
“You have a lot of people pulling for you to get the position of Cerberus Team Delta leader. Trip Wire Williams and Ridge Hansen both know you from your communications about Rory. They’re both with Team Alpha. Damian Prescott, your former Delta Force brother, now FBI, Johnna White, CIA.”
“Yes, ma’am, it’s an honor to have them speak up for me.”
“Ty,” she lifted her chin and spoke softly. “What were two of your earliest memories?”
That wasn’t hard for him to answer. Kira had asked him that very question last week as they lay in bed holding hands.
“I remember being in a sandbox in the back yard, very far from the house. My mother tells me that I was a year and a half old when we moved from that house. I remember that my father drove in, and I was going to tell him a story that had just happened to me. But then I realized it hadn’t happened in the time since I woke up.
That was the first time I was aware of things that had happened in the past, though I didn’t have words for it, and I felt very uneasy that I didn’t understand how to say it wasn’t that day but a different one. And to realize that time passed.”
“Thank you,” Dr. Banyon said. She didn’t have a pad in her hands, and she wasn’t jotting notes. She simply folded her hands in her lap and looked at him with the soft gaze of someone having a conversation, not the intense gaze of someone scrutinizing him.
“The second one I remember was being very tiny in my blue plastic car bed. I was lying there by myself in the dark when I realized that I was breathing. I’m sure I was sick, and my nostrils were dry or something.
But as I breathed in, I didn’t like the sensation, and when I breathed out, it was a different sensation, and I didn’t like it any better.
I told my mom about it and told her how I wanted to stop breathing.
And I asked her to help me stop breathing.
” Ty looked down at his lap. “My mom started to cry really hard, asking me never to say that again, and I didn’t know why. ”
Ty wondered what Dr. Banyon would make of those two stories.
“I’m going to be honest with you, Ty,” Banyon clasped her hands and leaned forward, looking him directly in the eyes, “Iniquus is not convinced that you’re a good fit for our organization despite the high recommendations that you’ve received.
” She leaned back again, regaining a bit of space between them.
“This has nothing to do with your capacity to handle tactical K9, and as a Delta Force operator, you absolutely have the skill set Iniquus is seeking. It’s a matter of character. ”
“Ma’am?”