Chapter 4
He looked at the pack. He looked at me. He looked at Barrett, who was watching with his arms at his sides, and at Pierce, and at the junior operators who had finished after the man whose opinion of this situation had been set in stone since the first morning in Building 437.
What happened after the finish line took the rest of the morning and part of the afternoon. The qualification officer submitted the run times to base command, which produced a query about the Rebecca Morgan entry, which produced a call to the NCIS liaison who was not supposed to exist but who answered, and the conversation that followed was conducted in an office with a closed door and lasted forty-five minutes.
Deputy Director Webb had been waiting for the thread in Building 437 to show itself for eleven months. It showed itself the following week, not because of the run specifically, but because the run had changed the specific quality of attention that Team 7 paid to their building, and changed attention means changed behavior, and changed behavior in a person running an intelligence operation means changed operational patterns, and changed operational patterns are visible to someone who knows what they are looking at.
I was the person who had been in the hallways for fourteen months, watching, and I knew what I was looking at.
The arrest was made on a Thursday, quietly, the way NCIS preferred it, without the theater that would have required explanations that the public record was better off not containing. The individual involved was a communications specialist who had been in Building 437 for three years, and whose access to certain briefing schedules had been the last piece of Dresh's network that had not yet been identified and closed.
The case closed eleven days later. Webb called me on a Friday morning and said the thread was gone, the operation was concluded, and my cover assignment at Meridian was complete.
I asked him what came next.
He said that was up to me.
I thought about that for a while. I had been Lieutenant Alexandra Thorne and then a deceased notation in a service record and then Rebecca Morgan with a mop and burn scars, and I had crossed a finish line in front of men who had spent fourteen months treating me like furniture, and the thing that had been true through all of it was the same thing: the work was what I was, and the work was done when it was done, and what came next was the next thing that needed doing.
I told Webb I was ready.
May you like
He said he had something in mind. He said it was classified at a level that meant I would need a new name, a new assignment, and probably a new pair of coveralls, and he said it in the tone of a man who has found something amusing in the consistency of his own requirements.
I told him I was familiar with the wardrobe.
