Chapter 6 #2
“How well did you know your team?” Darius asked. “There’s no judgment in that question. I’ve been burned by my own brothers. It stings. It sucks. But it happens.”
She leaned back. She resented the question, but not the man asking it.
Someone, or a group of people, burned her and the op.
Actually, she wasn’t even sure that was entirely true, based on the intel she’d been gathering about a quiet group of shadow warriors who’d been working off the books, or going rogue, not following orders.
But the only one she’d been able to put a name to anything had been Jenkins.
That information had been hard to come by, and what bothered her was that she’d stumbled onto Jenkins’ name through an encrypted message—one that she wasn’t supposed to see—but it came flying across her computer screen.
Thinking about it now, it felt like a setup.
But considering what she’d just gone through, everything came into question.
She ran what was known as Division 73. That was if anyone dared to say the name out loud, but no one did.
The 73 did the missions that no one else could.
The majority of their missions were technically unsanctioned, even though they took their orders from the highest men and women in the land.
Thing was, if the mission went sideways, it wasn’t going to be the government that took responsibility.
Or even Savvy and her division, because it didn’t exist. It would be the men who and women who took on the op. That was a big ask of those teams and it required trust, secrecy, and above all else… loyalty.
She thought the teams she assembled had that.
Or at least she’d thought they’d been.
“West assigned Ramirez and Mendoza to me. I’ve worked with them before, but not in the field.
Just planning and evac stuff. I’ve sent them in and brought them home,” she said in a monotone voice.
The same one she’d used when she’d been in briefing rooms. The one that always drove Vance nuts.
“Hale and I’ve worked together on numerous ops.
He’s been with the…” She sucked in a deep breath and let it out slowly.
She glanced around the room and then back at the computer screen.
“What I’m about to say can’t ever be repeated. ”
“Division 73,” Darius said, nodding his head.
“How do you know about that?” she asked.
“You’re behind Division 73?” Cross asked. “You were the one giving us the orders?”
Patch rubbed his hand across his scruffy face and sighed.
McGuire held Savvy’s gaze. He said nothing.
He didn’t have to. He knew. He’d always known and perhaps that was a good thing.
She’d never been able to come out and say, hey, I’m the one giving you orders as the head of this division, because I’m your sister.
The shadowy world of covert ops didn’t work that way.
She’d had to protect the government, the constitution, her brother, and his team.
But just sitting there, looking at him now, and knowing that he’d known all along that some of those ops he’d gone on with Task Force Sentinel had come down by her directive gave her a sense of relief.
“Wait a second.” Stone waved his hand. “Are you telling me that you’re the one who could have lost it all if one of those unsanctioned missions went sideways?”
“Technically, they were sanctioned.” Savvy shot Stone a nasty glare. “And what difference does it make if it were me or someone else?”
“Because in part, we were helping with government fuckups,” Stone muttered.
“Yeah, that was the one thing that always bothered me about those missions. Some of them were correcting those screwups the government made.” Cross shook his head.
“A necessary evil, and some of those things you went in to fix were corrections necessary because a human royally messed up during a mission, and not the op itself.” She arched a brow.
“It was my division that made you all ghosts. Two years ago, we worked with MI6 to bring in Nicolas Hurraha. The CIA couldn’t have done that without the existence of Division 73.
It gives the military and the government plausible deniability. ”
“We’ve gotten a little sidetracked,” McGuire said with a pointed stare.
“If the op wasn’t about Jenkins and bringing him back,” Patch asked, “what was it about? Because this is a convoluted way to put a bullet in someone’s head.”
“That’s the thing,” Darius said. “The more I poked around, the more red flags I found. Comms trails go dark. File names don’t match logs. Every breadcrumb leads to a buried protocol tagged with Vance’s clearance code. Whatever this was? It wasn’t about extracting a rogue agent. That was the bait.”
Savvy stared at the screen. “And I walked right into it.”
“You and your team, but Patch is right. There has to be more to this,” Fenmore added gently. “Although that brings me to the next part.”
Darius clicked another tab. “Riven found chatter in the underground. Freelance channels. Contractor message boards. Someone put out feelers on a hit. Not a bounty—this is a contract. Quiet kill. Off the books. Large payout with stipulations on how the kill is to be completed.”
“What kind of stipulations?” Cross asked.
“Details on how it’s to be done. It will attract some of the best hitmen because it plays into their ego. While others will be interested in it for the money, because this high-ranking person will bring on the heat, they might pass,” Darius said. “And, to clarify, the contract is for you, Savvy.”
Even though no one needed Darius to spell that out, the room went dead still.
Patch’s jaw clenched, his knuckles whitening around the edge of the table. “That kind of contract hit is different. That’s not about money. That’s about cleanup, and one that takes the heat off the government. But what about the rest of the team? Are their names on it too?”
“They are.” Darius nodded. “But the amount of money isn’t as high. It’s almost an insult.”
Cross leaned forward. “That certainly does take the CIA out of the equation for the kills. But it doesn’t get them off the hook for what happened.”
“It allows them to put a spin on it,” Savvy said. “To add color to my file. To my team’s file. To weave whatever story they need to sell to the American people so that we come off as traitors.”
“But why? And who did you betray your country for?” McGuire asked. “They need a story that matches, and your record is impeccable, so I don’t see how they can do that.”
“I’m sure Savvy has some ideas on how it’s possible.
” Patch stood, stepping away from the table like he couldn’t sit still.
His jaw flexed once, then again. “But now we have to think about who’s actually coming for her.
A professional hitman. Probably more than one.
Someone who knows how to ghost a target without leaving a trace.
A sniper. Military. Trained. Most likely a little left of normal.
It won’t be the enemy we think it is, and it definitely won’t be the enemy that set her up.
They just washed their hands of that one. ”
“Someone’s making damn sure my little sister looks like a person on the edge who got what was coming to her.” McGuire’s voice was low and lethal.
Fenmore added quietly, “You’re not just being hunted, Savvy. You’ve been prioritized, and not by whoever you think is behind it.”
Savvy sat straighter, spine stiff. “So what now? We wait for them to come to us?”
“No,” Patch said, his voice hardening. He turned back to face the group. “We bring them to our door.”
“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me. Have you lost your marbles?” McGuire’s voice was sharp. “We’ve got an op rewritten, a team erased, a ghost agent feeding lies, and a professional hit on my sister, and you want to bring that brand of crazy right to us?”
Patch looked at Savvy. “I don’t want to bring hitmen here, but they're coming no matter what. I want to get ahead of this, and the only way I know how to do that is to play their game. They knew she’d do what she does best…
go shadow ops. Well, fuck that.” He stared at McGuire.
“You said so yourself, having Savvy live out here like a ghost wasn’t a good idea. Well, let’s bring back the half dead.”
“No. No. No. A contract on her life changes things.” McGuire closed the gap between him and Patch as he puffed out his chest, ready to fight.
Savvy slowly rose. She rolled her neck. The two men she loved the most could pound their chests all day long, but it didn’t matter. “Has anyone ever heard of Black Ledger?”
“No,” half the room said.
Patch and McGuire continued to stare at each, but their demeanor shifted. Their shoulders lowered and both men sighed.
“I have,” Fenmore’s voice boomed through the screen.
“So have I.” Darius nodded.
“What do you know about it?” Savvy asked.
“Not much,” Fenmore admitted. “But an old friend contacted me when her husband was murdered. He was working on a story about this Black Ledger thing. A whistleblower had come to him, saying he had intel about a group of rogue agents and military groups that started out working for the greater good. Still, things went sideways, and now there are bribes and people are dying. She asked me to look into it, and I put Darius on it. We haven’t been able to find much except whispers. We’re still looking into it.”
“That’s part of what my op was all about.
” Savvy held Patch’s gaze. “We don’t know who’s behind Black Ledger, and we believe it started after Division 73 but runs much the same.
The idea is similar. A check and balance of power, but also a way to tip the scales, only it’s run amok and we have no idea who’s calling the shots.
We thought Jenkins was part of that. West and Vance sent me in so they could find out more.
My division, those in the know, is tight. But now I don’t know who to trust.”