Oath of Office

Bobkova was obviously intelligent and wanted him to think she had more information than she actually did. The masquerade of which he was a part made her little games look silly by comparison. He pushed away the uneaten half of his lemon cake and looked hard at the woman. The poor thing had no idea what she was up against, what she had become a part of. Her arrogance was… well, remarkable, and it would be her undoing.

* * *

“This is just plain weird,” an FBI counterintelligence agent named Murphy said, taking a sip from his coffee cup at a table sixty feet up the corridor from Bobkova.

“’Tis indeed, Grasshopper,” the senior of the two agents muttered. This one’s name was Coyne. He’d been with the Bureau for seventeen years, eleven of those with the Counterintelligence Division. Hailing from Tennessee, he counted his southern roots as a badge of honor and an outward sign of his savvy as a hunter of men.

The two agents watched the Iranian and the Russian with their peripheral vision while they drank their coffees and chatted. They wore neck lanyards with color-coded badges that allowed them access to the Pentagon, like half the other people in the underground shopping mall.

“The Russians have always played patty-cake with Tehran,” Murphy said. “I don’t get it. Why would Elizaveta Bobkova be meeting with the leader of a group trying to topple the present regime?”

“And better yet,” Coyne said, “why did she park herself right where Corey Fite would see her during his morning commute?”

“Corey Fite?”

“Guy with the puffy lips,” Coyne said. “He’s Senator Michelle Chadwick’s top adviser and boy toy. No, Elizaveta’s a smart lady. A certified no-shit brainiac. She’s the queen of the maskirovka, the big show. Crystal City is the Serengeti Plain of counterintel officers. This place has more spooks per square foot than anywhere in the nation. We’re everywhere, either training or running real ops. There’s no way Bobkova holds a meeting down here if she wants to keep it secret. She wanted to be seen — for sure by Fite, probably by us.”

“Why?” Murphy asked. “What’s the angle?”

“Skullduggery and shenanigans, Grasshopper.” Coyne set his coffee down hard enough that some of it geysered out of the little hole in the plastic lid. “We got the apparent leader of what’s shaking out to be a viable Iranian coup sharing cake with a known Russian spymaster — who wants Senator Chadwick to be aware of the meeting. I don’t know if they taught you this at Quantico, but if the Iranians and Russians are involved, they are up to their treacherous asses in no good.”

3

United States Air Force Captain Will Hyatt pulled his red VW Passat into the parking lot of the twenty-four-hour Walmart just west of Highway 95. People assigned to Creech Air Force Base tended to designate where they lived by the zip code alone rather than saying North Las Vegas. He’d just scored a house nearby in 89149. The kids were loving the new pool. The Walmart was just around the corner, so he’d offered to stop by “on his way into battle” to grab a few things for the twins’ birthday party.

Hyatt was sweating by the time he got out of the car, thinking he should have done a few laps himself just to cool off before work. It was early, not even seven in the morning, but heat already shimmered up from the asphalt.

He was in and out in a half-hour — mainly because he couldn’t buy anything that melted or went bad during his twelve-hour shift, which was pretty much everything on his wife’s list except paper plates and napkins. He’d grabbed a couple of bags of water balloons even if Shannon hadn’t told him to. All seven-year-olds liked water balloons, didn’t they? Will was only thirty, but it seemed like it was half a century since he’d been seven years old.

Flying drones aged you — and not for the reasons one might think. It wasn’t particularly physical. He wasn’t pulling any G’s. Hell, the MQ-9 would suffer catastrophic failure if it had to pull two G’s. He wasn’t sweating his ass off in some bunker in Kandahar, or trying in vain to keep his kids’ attention over an iffy Skype connection. He got to sit in a comfortable leather chair in a temperature-controlled trailer, and then go home at the end of his shift. He even had the day off tomorrow for the party.

It sounded like he was whining when he said it out loud, but therein was the problem.

Captain Hyatt was home, and yet he wasn’t. Not really. How could you loiter over some ISIS shithole for weeks, watching for signs of some high-value target — and then blow that same HVT to hell and then jump into the family Volkswagen and make the hour drive back to zip code 89149 to kiss your kids and try to screw your head on straight enough to keep the wife happy. He wondered if the guys downrange missed the endless list of honey-dos that seemed so mundane, if not downright pointless, next to hunting terrorist assholes.