Chapter 6
CHAPTER SIX
Ana was at the office, so she shouldn’t have had her personal phone glued to her ear, once again replaying A.J.’s voicemail from Saturday night. No, she should’ve been focused on the unit’s major crisis, but she couldn’t help herself from listening one more time.
She’d been right to fear A.J. would be a distraction, and a massively inconvenient one at that.
Thoughts of him had bounced around her mind all day yesterday.
And even now, his voicemail, his sweet words .
. . while obviously drenched in booze, somehow brought a smile to her face on such a bleak day.
A day when her world was quite possibly on the verge of flipping upside down.
She ended the voicemail before it finished and set her phone next to her keyboard.
Her desk was sparse. No picture frames. No knickknacks. Nothing personal. No way for others to glean any information about the type of person she was, and that was how she liked it.
Cold. Dead. Heart. But her cold heart had warmed a touch when listening to A.J.’s message. It was all so strange. So unlike her.
Focus.
After her promotion, but prior to relocating to D.C.
, she’d returned to Quantico for a four-week course specific to her new line of work in counterintelligence, which was aptly nicknamed “Spy Hunting” by her colleagues at the Bureau.
And catching spies was pretty much her job for the National Security Branch of the FBI.
Most of her work had to do with recruiting and creating sources. Turning criminals and spies to the side of Uncle Sam. For a price, of course. Some sources made six figures a year, substantially more than her salary, courtesy of the government.
Americans often believed the age of spies was a bygone era that belonged to the Cold War, but that was the furthest thing from the truth.
No, there was a race to steal secrets in every corner and crevice of American society. From universities to corporations—everyone was capable of becoming a target.
Absolutely everyone.
Even me.
“Hey, Red.”
“Can’t come up with anything more original?
” Ana spun in her swivel desk chair to eye Dean, one of the six members on her task force.
Most squads at the FBI field offices were made up of ten to even thirty agents and analysts.
She’d quickly learned Headquarters was different, and also had a lot more layers of power and bureaucracy.
D.C. was where she needed to be, though, even if it wasn’t easy for her to live there again.
Dean’s forearm rested atop the cubicle partition separating her from another workstation. He drummed his fingers. “Ginger?” Dean tested.
“How about Agent Quinn?” she offered with a smirk.
Dean smiled, showing the slight gap between his two front teeth.
“You know I’m just teasing with you.” He winked, the same wink she’d seen him give a source outside the courthouse last week before the commencement of a trial, in which he’d said, “Gonna take care of you at the end. No worries.” That was code for, Keep up your end of the bargain and testify, and you’ll see a payout after.
“Sure,” Ana responded, but it came out more exasperated than she’d meant.
Dean wasn’t an asshole. He didn’t make passes at her, no sexual misconduct, either.
He just liked to make jokes in a friendly way, which was one of his more likable qualities.
But she was grumpy as hell, nervous, and a bit riled up by the fact her ex-husband was somewhere in the building, so much so she’d nearly spilled her coffee on herself in the break room when she’d walked right into someone who resembled Kyle.
And it didn’t help that Dean had interrupted her while she’d been pining for a man she had no business pining over, all because of an adorably awkward drunk voicemail.
But that voice. That Southern accent. Sweet and sinfully seductive.
She wanted to take a bath in it and wrap it up around herself like a blanket when she slept, which was insane because since when did a voice get to her like that?
Since A.J., that’s when. Great, now she was talking to herself. She needed to put her focus back to the here and now, which was Dean, still hanging over her cubicle wall.
“Sorry,” she offered since she’d come off stronger than the dark, cream-free coffee she’d just poured for herself. She preferred sugary, unhealthy French vanilla, but the break room had been all out. “Just a bit on edge.”
“The missing sources are on everyone’s minds.” He offered her a sympathetic look of understanding.
Ana’s hand swept to the middle of her throat in an attempt to hide the hard swallow.
“Gray wants us all assembled.”
Gray was their unit chief, but Porter, who left for the Atlanta field office yesterday, was one level above Gray as the section chief.
“I’m surprised Porter opted to go locate that source himself. I mean, I guess he has a lot riding on this, but the big dogs never go out.” Dean lowered his arm from the partition and fixed the knot of his tie. “Not even for an Iranian spy.”
“You know Porter,” she replied with a smile, doing her best not to let him read her nerves. “He’s hands-on unlike most.” She took a breath, hoping Porter would call soon with good news. God, she really, really needed good news.
“We better not make Gray wait,” Dean said. “He told us to meet in the SCIF. He’s got his Monday-morning pissy look going for him already, and I’d prefer not to be the one to make him any angrier, not with the shit storm we’re facing right now.”
It was too early in her new HQ career to be dealing with a shit storm that might wind up getting pinned on her, but what choice did she have? Plus, she knew what she’d signed up for when moving to D.C., and in her mind, it was not only her duty, it was her destiny to be there.
“Right.” Ana smiled. Another fake one. Perfectly crafted over the years. Most were incapable of knowing the difference in her expressions. Even the most skilled agents with the best tradecraft were unable to read her.
She locked up her personal and work cell phones in her desk since they weren’t allowed in the SCIF, which was a sensitive compartmentalized information facility.
She followed Dean down the hall, and he swiped his badge to allow them access to the room. The rest of their unit was inside waiting for them at the conference table off to the side of the work area.
The office was at the backside of the building that faced Pennsylvania Avenue, and in the distance was the National Mall—well, that’s what they would’ve seen had there been any windows.
Ana sat between Dean and Griff. Dean was in his late forties.
A family man. Two kids at home. A nice and friendly smile.
Always joking. He’d been in the Army before joining the FBI at the age of thirty.
Griff, on the other hand, was what she called career-FBI.
A rarity, like her. Joining straight out of grad school.
Minimum age to join the Bureau was twenty-three, but most joined around thirty.
The max age to become an agent was thirty-seven.
Griff was harder around the edges than Dean.
Guarded. Not prepared to accept Ana as a new member on the team, given the loss of the man she replaced, as well as the manner in which he died—kidnapped, tortured, and brutally murdered.
She wasn’t looking to fill someone’s shoes, or to get overly friendly with anyone in the unit, but she understood the hesitation by a few on her task force to welcome her with open arms.
Halle, who sat across from her, had been a bit cautious toward her when Ana first joined, but she’d started to open up within the last few weeks or so.
Halle was also the only other female on the team. The Bureau was doing its best to become more diverse, but the men-to-women ratio was still skewed toward men.
A smile played across Halle’s lips, her way of saying good morning to Ana. Halle resembled the actress who, ironically, shared the same first name with her. Well, back when the movie star was in her thirties with shorter hair. Dean, of course, had nicknamed her Hollywood because of it.
Hollywood. Red. Yeah, Dean wasn’t very original even though he worked for an elite task force to help bring down spies. But when it came to UC work or dealing with sources, Dean had proven himself highly capable.
The other three team members at the table were studying the chicken scratch notes they’d taken over the weekend during the brainstorming sessions to determine “what the fuck” went wrong, as Griff had so eloquently put it.
It’d been his mantra since Friday, sounding like a broken record over the weekend.
Their unit chief, Gray, entered the room a moment later, and Ana was grateful she’d arrived before him. Tom Gray was basically every screenwriter’s vision when creating his type of character for TV.
Gray wore a crisp black suit and navy tie.
He switched back and forth between what Dean joked as democrat blue and republican red.
From what Ana could tell, Gray did his best to act politically neutral, which was her preference as well, especially now that she was in the beating heart of the nation, the nerve center of the country where there was a political tug-of-war going on, even with the newly elected President Bennett.
Knox’s dad.
Knox is A.J.’s teammate.
And here I am thinking about that man again when I shouldn’t be. Repeatedly listening to his voicemail wasn’t going to help get A.J. out of her head, either. Maybe if she deleted the message, the distraction would disappear?
Gray’s lips twitched, barely noticeable beneath his thick, black mustache. “Deputy Winters will be here shortly with an agent joining the unit on special assignment.”
Special assignment? Kyle’s words replayed in her mind from Saturday. Double shit.
“Let’s recap before Deputy Winters gets here.” Gray unbuttoned his jacket and worked his hands into the pockets of his slacks.