Chapter Six
Ty
No one had ever questioned Ty’s ethics to his face, or as far as he knew, behind his back.
He wasn’t perfect by any stretch of imagination.
He didn’t strive to be. His goal was to smooth his edges while staying potent, like aging whiskey.
Ty consistently worked to develop a strong character, a steady ethos, and a high level of integrity.
He strove to be dependable on and off mission.
“Tell me about your current girlfriend.” Dr. Banyon unlaced her hands, uncrossed her legs, and leaned back until she rested against the cushion behind her.
See? She was open to what Ty had to say.
“How did you meet?” Ty had learned a lot from Johnna White and her micromanagement of him when she was commanding him to manipulate himself onto the Tanzanian mission to eliminate Omar Imadi.
Ty shut everything down. His eyes became blank. “That’s a conversation I cannot have with you, ma’am.”
Banyon quirked a single eyebrow. “Even if it means losing your opportunity to become a Cerberus handler?”
“Classified, ma’am.”
Pulling up the manila folder that she’d wedged into her seat cushion, Banyon leafed through some pages, pulled one out, and slid it, face up, along the table toward Ty. Leaning in, she tapped the bottom. “You recognize the signature?”
Ty lifted the single page and read that he had his commander’s permission to answer questions about the Johnna White mission as it pertained to Ty’s relationship with Kira, as long as Ty didn’t reveal the location, mission objective, sources, or methods.
Banyon’s having a letter from his commander made sense to Ty, after all, Iniquus had tight ties with the Pentagon and JSOC.
And that tight connection was how he thought he could perhaps keep a foot in both worlds as an IMA—an individual mobilization augmentee, a twenty-eight-day-a-year gig that allowed him to use his expertise handling K9s for The Unit to help advise.
And, honestly, his desire to remain connected to the Pentagon was the topic he’d thought would be hardest hammered today.
But it hadn’t been brought up even once during the two days of interviews and trials.
“I’m not interested in your mission, per se,” Dr. Banyon assured him. “I am, however, interested in your conduct and choices during the mission as it applies to your relationship with Kira. Is it all right with you that we call her Kira?”
He wondered if he should insist that Kira be called by her whole name to add some formality to Banyon’s line of questions. But in the end, one of the main reasons Ty thought that Iniquus was a good career move for him was that, as a company, they were fiercely protective of their own.
And though Kira was almost two years out from the mission that endangered her freedom and survival, Ty worried that she still wasn’t safe.
Every time he was out on a task with Echo, all he wanted was to get back home and be ready to protect Kira from the dangers posed by her family, which formed a perpetual cloud over their relationship.
Ty knew that if he was out on a mission for Iniquus, Kira’s well-being would be managed by the most successful private security business enterprise in North America, possibly in the world. If she were to be part of the Iniquus family, Ty should make her sound that way from the start.
“Kira is just fine.” He cleared his throat. “But I’m not going to discuss Kira without her permission.”
“I’m not asking you about Kira’s thoughts or feelings. I’m asking you about your conduct. Would you characterize your role in your present relationship with Kira as her boyfriend?”
“I would.”
“And you manipulated her into her girlfriend role with the help of the CIA, Johnna White to be exact.”
“Yes.”
“You did so willingly.”
“On a professional level, I followed my oath and accepted my orders. On a personal level, I did so hesitatingly. In hindsight, I am nothing but grateful for all aspects of that mission.”
“You were ordered to function on U.S. soil?” Banyon asked.
“My functions on U.S. soil did not use any of my soldiering skills. My job for the CIA was to develop a relationship with their asset within the United States. My domestic activity was strictly concerning a foreign intelligence mission.”
“Johnna White has a knack for human manipulation. It’s a good thing that she uses it for the safety of American citizens. It would be catastrophic if she were our enemy.”
Ty said nothing.
“White took you under her wing and taught you how to manipulate to get your way.”
“That’s not how I’d characterize this situation, ma’am.”
“No? Let me start in a different spot. Storm Meyers is an Iniquus friend. She is a woman of immense intelligence and fortitude, and Delta Force Echo views her as a sister.”
“I will not discuss Raine Meyers without her express permission.”
Again, Ty watched as Banyon reached beside her, pulled out her manila folder, leafed through the pages, extracted one, and slid it across the table toward him.
Ty lifted the single sheet with neat print in black ink, followed by the flourish of Raine’s signature.
Raine gave him permission to talk about her in this meeting, and she wished him the best of luck and every happiness.
It was a simple, direct, two sentence letter with no nuance, and no information that he should glean of when he could speak and when he should shut up.
“What do you want to know?” he asked, placing Raine’s letter on top of his commander’s.
“White chose your unit for her mission because she owed you, she said. When she researched your teammates, she decided that you would be best for the psyops part of the mission. She said she picked your team because of Storm Meyers. The person responsible for hurting Storm was White’s target—I know that to be true.
I know the story from White. It sounds to me like a revenge mission. Are you vengeful, Ty?”
“I’m interested in justice and the safety of the United States and its citizens. I follow my orders.”
“Perhaps, then, you can share your version of how White offered the mission to your team.”
“Raine Meyers was known as Storm Meyers at the time that she was in the military,” Ty said.
“At that time, she was engaged to my Echo brother, Damian Prescott.
She was a member of the Army's cultural support team. She went out with the Rangers and special operations forces to interact with the women we encountered. One day, she was traveling in a convoy. The insurgents attacked her line. Most of the soldiers were killed in the ambush. Those who survived became hostages. Echo tracked the hostages. We arrived as they were making a snuff video of Storm. A Terry Taliban held a sword to the front of her throat, and they demanded that she read a board. She refused. As I shot to remove the threat, Terry pulled his blade across her throat through her windpipe. I was able to start a trach tube and hand her to the PJs. She survived. The commander of that group of insurgents also survived and wanted to do more harm.”
“A tracheotomy performed with water bladder tubing. Quick out-of-the-box thinking. I like that.”
Ty frowned. At least he knew that she wasn’t bluffing when she said that White had told her the story.
“Storm received a medical retirement, and she moved on to put her skills to use with the DIA, now retired. During her time with the DIA, she was sent down to Fort Bragg under cover to rescue Delta Force from the Russian psyops campaign that threatened The Unit’s existence.”
“Did that inspire you to seek revenge for what happened to her?” Banyon asked.
“Ma’am, I was issued orders to work with White. I didn’t seek out the mission.”
“What was it like seeing Storm again?”
Now, how in the world was he supposed to answer that?
“It was a gut punch,” seemed like the wrong approach.
“She came to the fort telling us that she wasn’t using her military name ‘Storm’ any longer to please call her by her proper name, ‘Raine.’ She was definitely different.
Storm was a force of nature, and Raine was demure.
It was unsettling. But I had Rory with me, and Rory treated her with compassion and quiet.
It’s hard to get a Malinois to chill. Around Raine, he was almost docile.
I recalibrated how I acted around Raine to match Rory’s kind of energy, so she’d feel safe. ”
“Because of Rory’s behavior, you think that while she acted out of character and was demure, there was also an aspect of her that would be more comfortable around latent protection.”
“Yes, ma’am. That’s what I thought then. Not to take anything away from Storm—Raine, she was fiercely protective of the Delta Force family, putting her life on the line time and again. I just think that it was a good plan for her to retire from violent work.”
Dr. Banyon adjusted her glasses. “And you think the same for yourself?”
“I think that I did the work I was called to do. And I think that my life’s calling could effectively translate into the missions that Cerberus Tactical performs worldwide.”
“You’re looking at different possibilities because of Kira.”
“She is a large part of my calculus, yes ma’am,” Ty acknowledged.
“And it’s thanks to Storm, way back when, that you even know Kira. Isn’t it interesting how life works? But for Storm being an Echo sister and you going in and saving her life, White could well have chosen a different team.”
Ty sat perfectly still. He couldn’t imagine a life where he hadn’t met Kira.
“But meet Kira you did,” Banyon said. “And that’s when you performed your own psyops mission, manipulating her into loving you through applied behavioral science.”
Ty reached out and laid his hand on the letters of permission from his commander and Raine. “The CIA approached me because they needed information about the interior of a compound. They needed me to get in there and get the information for them. Kira was a means behind the gates.”