15. Operation Explain Yourself
OPERATION: EXPLAIN YOURSELF
MILES
The meeting at the hangar doesn’t go as we had hoped.
Rooke’s people put Maxwell through what amounted to a criminal job interview. Then the woman in the camel-colored coat checked her phone, the man dressed as a mechanic suddenly went alert, and she ended the meeting without explanation.
We still don’t know what spooked them.
We also don’t know whether Maxwell passed.
The one thing I do know is that sometime during the meeting, the woman planted a tracking device inside my jacket.
I found it and returned it to her bag before she left, which will hopefully be interpreted as Maxwell Shaw being observant rather than Maxwell Shaw being annoyingly pleased with himself.
Partial success.
I pull into my garage at six fifty-two, wearing my own face, with eight minutes to review how I’m going to tell Reese the truth. I park and sit behind the wheel for a moment.
Tell her plainly. Don’t bury the truth beneath explanations. Don’t try to control her reaction. Don’t tell her how difficult the secrecy has been in a way that makes her feel responsible for comforting me.
And don’t tell her I’m in love with her tonight.
Abraham’s advice sounded calm and reasonable while I was sitting in his workshop. Now it feels like a list of instructions for dismantling an explosive device with my bare hands. I take one slow breath, then another.
Reese will be here in seven minutes.
I have time to put away the operation gear, change clothes, and possibly spend some more time thinking through how to start the conversation with Reese.
Reese, there’s something about my job I should have told you a long time ago.
No.
There’s something about my life you deserve to know.
That sounds like I’m about to disclose either a terminal illness or a second family.
I work for—
I stop myself. Abraham was right. If I rehearse this until every word is perfect, it’ll sound like a performance.
I gather the garment bag and hard-sided disguise case from the back seat of my car, which is back to having my own plates on it instead of the clean plates and registration assigned to Maxwell Shaw, and get out. I open the door into the house and step inside.
Then I stop.
There is a chair in the middle of my living room.
A desk lamp on the side table is angled directly at it, illuminating the seat with the kind of harsh intensity usually reserved for interrogations and community theater productions.
Reese is sitting on my couch in black pants and a black turtleneck.
She’s wearing her tortoiseshell-framed glasses that aren’t too dissimilar from the ones I was just wearing.
And she has a mustache. Not a subtle one, either.
A large, dark one that is peeling slightly at the left corner.
There’s a notebook open on her lap, and I can see that at the top of the page, in large block letters, she has written, OPERATION: EXPLAIN YOURSELF.
This is not one of the twenty-seven versions I rehearsed.
“Reese.”
“Agent Lancaster.”
My heart stops.
“I didn’t see your car,” I say, finally closing the door behind me. She has the code to my garage, so it isn’t exactly alarming to see her here. Usually, though, I get a heads-up.
“It’s called being covert.”
“Why are you wearing a mustache?”
“I thought it might help you feel comfortable.”
“I don’t think it’s working.”
“You haven’t sat in the interrogation chair yet.”
I set the garment bag and disguise case beside the door, trying to assess the situation. The costume and lamp are reassuring. I don’t think Reese would create a themed interrogation room for someone she intended to remove permanently from her life.
But she called me Agent Lancaster. That is considerably less reassuring. “Can I sit somewhere that isn’t being illuminated like I’m about to confess to a murder?”
“You can sit wherever your conscience allows.”
The corner of my mouth almost lifts. This is Reese. She’s still joking. That doesn’t mean she isn’t hurt. In fact, with Reese, it may mean the opposite. I cross the room and sit beside her on the couch, angled toward her, instead of taking the interrogation chair.
She watches me carefully. Her pen is poised above the notebook.
Whatever she knows, I still need to tell her the truth. I lean forward, rest my forearms on my thighs, and take a breath. “Reese, there’s something about my job that I’ve wanted—”
“So.” She clicks her pen. “How long have you been a spy?”
Every prepared word disappears. My eyes are on hers, and she meets my gaze steadily, but the fingers holding her pen are moving. Tapping once against the notebook. Then again.
“How did you know?”
“My purse is in your trunk.”
I blink. “That doesn’t answer my question.”
“It does if you put an AirTag in your purse because you regularly misplace it, then discover that said purse is sitting at a private aviation complex outside Baltimore.”
Cold alarm moves through me. “You were at the hangar?”
“I was in the parking-lot-adjacent region.”
“How close did you get?”
“Not close enough to ruin your covert airplane transaction.”
“Did anyone see you?”
“I don’t think so.”
“You don’t think so?”
Her eyebrows rise above the glasses. “I stayed beside the charter office. I didn’t cross any restricted lines, interrupt your meeting, or run toward you yelling your real name. I have watched spy movies.”
“This isn’t a movie.”
“Yes, I became aware of that when I saw my best friend wearing someone else’s nose.”
I look toward my front windows even though there’s nothing to see but the closed curtains. She was close enough to observe the meeting. Close enough to hear at least part of it. And none of us saw her.
That doesn’t mean they didn’t.
The woman checking her phone flashes through my mind. The maintenance worker straightening. The meeting ending seconds later.
Cold settles lower in my stomach. Reese might be what spooked them.
“How long were you there?”
“Not long. Five minutes?”
Five. Minutes. Long enough to be photographed. Long enough for someone to get her plate number. Long enough for Rooke’s security to decide an unidentified woman watching Maxwell Shaw deserved attention.
I pull out my phone.
Reese watches me. “What are you doing?”
“Letting Charlie know. If you’re what ended that meeting, we need to figure that out now.”
I send her a quick message telling her Reese was near the charter office for approximately five minutes and asking her to start pulling every exterior camera angle we can access. Then I put my phone away.
“How did you recognize me?”
She looks offended. “Because I know you.”
“Reese, Abraham changed the shape of my nose, darkened and restyled my hair, changed the shape of my jaw with the beard, and put glasses on me. You weren’t supposed to recognize me.”
“You stood like you.”
I stare at her.
She pushes her glasses back up. “You adjusted your cuff the way you always do. Then you looked at the reflection in the plane instead of turning to look around the hangar.”
“I was monitoring for people approaching.”
“I know.”
There’s something unsettling about hearing her describe the habits I’ve spent years perfecting. There’s also something deeply, painfully warm about the fact that Abraham made me nearly unrecognizable, yet Reese knew me from the way I shifted my weight.
“You texted me,” I say.
“I needed confirmation.”
“I thought you were checking whether I was ignoring you.”
She shakes her head. “I was conducting confirmation surveillance.”
“That’s… not a thing.”
“I’m new to the terminology.”
Despite everything, I laugh once. Her mustache lifts with her smile, then begins peeling again. She presses it back into place.
I study her face. She’s excited. Alarmed. Proud of herself. And underneath all of it, something else is gathering. I need to stop postponing this.
“Yes,” I say. “I’m an intelligence operative.”
Her pen stops moving. Even though she already knows, the confirmation changes something in her expression. “A spy.”
“An intelligence operative.”
“An intelligence operative? That sounds like something spies call themselves when they want dental insurance.”
“That may be true.”
She looks down at her notebook and writes CONFIRMED beside something.
I glance at the list. Moving away. Dying. Getting bangs. Angry mob boss. Found someone. My gaze catches on that one. “You thought I found someone?” For half a second, I think she means an assignment to locate a person. Then I see the way she looks down.
“You said at the engagement celebration that you wanted what Ledger and Zoe have. That you were ready to go find it.”
“I didn’t find someone.”
Her shoulders lower a fraction. “Good.” She says the word fast, then draws a firm line through that item on the list. “Because that would be too many major revelations for one evening.”
“Right.” I found the person I want five years ago in a university library. Abraham specifically told me not to tell her that tonight.
Reese taps her pen against the notebook. “So. Intelligence operative.”
“Yes.”
“Start with Lancaster Business Solutions.”
“Okay, it’s a cover organization for a government intelligence agency called the Clandestine Services Agency. The CSA.”
“The entire company is fake?”
“It legally exists.”
“That wasn’t my question.”
“It doesn’t perform the services the public-facing company claims to provide.”
She turns to a clean page. “Charlie.”
“She’s a handler and technical operative. She supports operatives during missions. She’s on comms, watching cameras, opening doors remotely, things like that.”
“Her vague computer job is fake.”
“Oh, the computer part is very real. She’s quite good.”
“Jace?”
“Field operative.”
“Ledger?”
“Field operative.”
“Emerson?”
“Analyst.”
“Your mother?”
I hesitate, and Reese points the pen at me.
“Your mother is absolutely a spy.”
“She was. She’s the director now.”
Her mouth falls open. “Of the whole CSA?”
“Yes.”
She nods, then shakes her head. “Of course she is.” In large letters, she writes, EVELYN—SPY BOSS.
“Blake?” she asks.
“Dentist.”
Her eyes narrow. “Just a dentist?”
“Yes.”
“No secret dental espionage?”
“No.”