Tell Bishop the Traitor Wore His Ring

The warehouse was loud with metal and boots and the specific shouting of people who had believed the situation would go differently. I was still holding position over the fourth man when the loading door exploded open.

Tactical lights hit everything simultaneously. The brightness was disorienting for the men on the floor, who had been standing in warehouse shadow for long enough that their eyes had adjusted. I had been watching the door since I heard the vehicles outside, so the light was less of a problem for me.

Military police came in fast and organized. Behind them, moving with the unhurried pace of a man who has arrived at a situation he intends to own, was Major General Alan Bishop.

I had seen Bishop in three briefings over four years. He was the kind of senior officer whose name appeared in the classified portions of documents without explanation, which in my experience meant one of two things: either he was someone the document was protecting, or he was someone the document was protecting. The distinction mattered, and I had spent eleven months trying to establish which one applied.

The men on the floor raised their hands with the speed of people who recognized the general's uniform and understood that the calculation had changed.

"She assaulted us," one of them said, and his voice carried the specific complaint of a man who has decided his story needs to be established before anyone else's.

I laughed once, because the alternative was something less productive.

"That's your story?" I said.

Bishop crossed the floor toward me with his jaw set and his eyes doing the thing that general officers' eyes do when they are determining whether they are going to be angry or have the situation explained to them before they decide. He was furious. He was furious in the specific way of a man who runs a clean operation and has arrived to find something messy in a location he did not know about.

Then he saw the patch on my vest.

A red star over a black dagger. Small. Precise. Faded around the edges in the way that old fabric fades when it has been handled many times over many years.