CYPHER’S FALL

A TRAVIS BISHOP THRILLER

KJ KALIS

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2025 KJ Kalis, BDM LLC

eISBN 978-1-955990-70-7

ISBN 978-1-955990-71-4

All rights reserved

Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved, no part of the publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise including technology to be yet released), without the written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of the book. The content is not to be used for AI training without permission.

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Published by:

BDM, LLC

ALSO BY KJ KALIS

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CONTENTS

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Epilogue

1

Royal Canadian mounted police officer Noah White took a sip of his now lukewarm coffee and wrinkled his nose. It had been sitting in the cup holder of the pickup truck he was driving for far too long. Shifting in his seat, he looked at the time. It was nearly midnight, too late to run back into town and ask Marcie at the Porthill Diner to heat up his coffee for him. He shook his head. It would have been smart to accept the thermal mug that his wife, Laura, had offered him when he had headed out the door a few hours before. Then again, he’d been running late after trying to help her around the house before abandoning her for the night.

He glanced out the truck’s window. There was something about leaving Laura at home overnight that never sat well with him. Leaving her during the day was one thing. Leaving her all alone at night just didn’t seem right — as if he was neglecting his duties as a husband.

But he had to make money somehow, didn’t he?

Noah sighed and closed his eyes for a moment. As soon as he did, he could feel the exhaustion creep up on him, threatening to put him to sleep.

Hence the need for coffee.

He took a sip, ignoring the cold, bitter taste in his mouth, grimacing once again, but hoping the caffeine would do the job. He checked the time. There were hours left on his twelve-hour shift and hours of deep darkness before the sun would rise and he could get home to his family and maybe, just maybe, get some sleep.

He’d been working the midnight shift for the last two months, patrolling the most remote parts of the border. It was bad enough having to be up half the night, worse yet it had been one of the worst winters in history at the Idaho-Canadian border, with storm after storm peppering the area with snow. At one point, even the Mounties were having issues getting around. Finally, the Superintendent of his outpost, Cole Peters, called in a snowcat with a plow attached to the front of it to clear the roads and trails along the border, the tank-like treads the only thing with enough traction to get through the mountains of snow that had fallen. Noah had parked his truck on a remote trail that had been cleared the month before using one of those snowcats, staking out a spot about ten miles from the Eastport-Kingsgate crossing. Opening his eyes, he realized if he sat in the truck for one more minute, he’d be sound asleep. He waited for a second, then, with a sigh of resignation, decided to get out of the truck.

While the winter had been brutal, it seemed that the worst of it had already passed. Though the northern border could get snow as far into the season as June, the late May weather had brought warming temperatures to the area, melting all of the snow that had troubled them for months. Instead of wearing his normally heavy Royal Canadian Mounted Police issued hat and gloves, Noah had been able to shift over to a light jacket and a baseball cap, the emblems for the RCMP emblazoned on them. It was his spring/fall gear, and thankfully, more comfortable than being bundled up for the weather.

As Noah closed his truck door behind him, he reached to his side, adjusting the gun on his hip. Wearing the heavy gun belt for hours made his back hurt. Maybe walking would help? I’ve gotta do something other than sit in the truck or I’m gonna fall asleep. I don’t need anyone to catch me doing that if I want the promotion to Inspector that’s about to open up.

Noah walked up the trail a little way and then turned back, feeling the slip of the spring mud under his boots from the RCMP trucks that patrolled the border a few times a day. Noah blinked. A few times a day? He shook his head. If they were lucky, they’d get to all of the trails maybe once a week. While there wasn’t a lot of border to patrol in the area, the terrain was rough and frequently closed.

Noah felt himself start to wake up. The cool air helped. If he had to guess, the temperature was probably somewhere in the high forties. He knew that the next day was supposed to bring sunshine and the first of what looked to be a string of seventy-degree days, his wife looking forward to taking their son to the playground.

All of that would have to be done after he got some sleep.

Way after.

Though he was proud of his work, there was no doubt it was hard managing a growing family on an RCMP salary. Working for the Canadian government meant there was only so much upside to his job, not to mention shifts and holidays he missed with his family, plus the inevitable drama at work between coworkers. Despite that, Noah liked what he did, at least for the most part. Other than having to work the midnight shift a couple of months out of the year, in general, the work was pleasant. He loved being outside and helping people get where they were going. He liked the idea of contributing to national security, protecting the sovereign border of Canada from American intruders.

Not that there were many of those.

Aside from a few drunk or lost hikers he found every week, plus hunters who seemed to ignore the border as they were chasing down their next kill, it was a peaceful job. Newer to the department, Noah patrolled the roughly forty-five-mile border between the northern tip of Idaho and the southern tip of British Columbia. There was no fence along the trails, no definitive boundary line or spot where people could tell what side of the border they were on. It was nothing like the border that the United States shared with Mexico, where a high fence, drones, and the presence of border patrol agents sent a strong message. Nope, at the Idaho-British Columbia border, there was just the presence of RCMP officers that monitored the comings and goings of hikers, hunters, and the like on the Canadian side. The US Border Patrol agents were spread just as thin on their side. In the three years that Noah had been on the job, the only real action he’d seen was at the two checkpoints frequented by tractor-trailers carrying goods, and drugs, of course, back and forth over the borders—Port Hill-Rykerts and Eastport-Kingsgate. For the most part, the trails between the two were largely uninhabited by anything other than grizzly bears, mountain lions, and a whole lot of trees.

As Noah walked back to his truck, he realized he liked it that way. Sure, the guys that were working the border crossings came back in the office with tales to tell about how drugs were stashed in the most creative places, the drivers usually feigning surprise when they were discovered.

But then again, the quiet was nice. He and his wife had talked about him transferring to another department or a bigger city at some point in the future. But there was something about being outside and getting paid to do it that Noah really liked.

He looked down at the ground for a second, not able to see much more than the tips of his boots against the moonlight. A second later, his phone rang. Laura. He frowned. It was late for her to be calling. Very late. “Is everything alright?” he asked.

“I can’t get Jacob to sleep.” She paused. He could hear the strain in her voice. “I’m exhausted, Noah. I have no idea what to do.”

Noah’s entire body tensed. No one had prepared him for the fact that having a wife, a son, and another on the way would be so stressful. “What seems to be the problem?” Noah tried to sound calm.

“I don’t know. He’s just all riled up.” She groaned. “I put him to bed hours ago, like right after you left for your shift.”

Noah did a quick calculation. Four hours ago. That meant Laura had put Jacob down around eight. “Did he sleep at all?”

“For a little bit. Then he woke up again.”

Noah wanted to think it was because he wasn’t home, but then again, Jacob was a handful on any day, whether Noah was there or not. His heart sunk for his wife. “Are you okay?”

There was silence for a second, as if she was thinking. “Yeah, sorry. Got distracted for a second. The baby’s just kicking.”

Noah pressed the phone closer to his ear, almost as if he was hoping he could get closer to Laura and the kids, especially the unborn daughter that his wife was carrying. He really couldn’t understand what it must feel like to be pregnant, to carry another life around inside of your body. Laura’s first pregnancy had gone pretty well with Jacob, but the second one she had faced more nausea and exhaustion than he’d ever seen one person endure. Noah had been so concerned that he’d gone to her last obstetric appointment with her. After a full exam and Noah’s worried expression, Laura’s doctor assured them that everything was fine. Noah walked a little further, reasoning things out. And at that point, Laura was two months out. Even, if for some crazy reason, she went into labor, he knew they had a good chance that the baby, who they’d already named Cassidy, would be all right. Part of him wished Cassidy would arrive sooner, wishing mercy on his wife. But then again, part of him didn’t, worried about Cassidy’s safety. Either way, what he really wanted at that moment more than anything else was to be home, helping his wife, or even better yet the two of them on vacation without kids at some warm tropical location like the Bahamas. His mind drifted to the warm sand and the sun, then he sucked in a breath.

On an RCMP salary, vacations like that didn’t come very often.

Noah stared up at the black sky for a moment, seeing a blanket of stars above him. “I wish I could come home. I really do. But I’m stuck out here.” A knot of frustration filled his gut.

“I know,” she said quietly. There was a pause. “It’s just hard, ya know?”

“You’re doing great, Laura. You just have a couple more months and then I’m sure you’re going to feel better.”

By her tone of voice, Noah could tell she wasn’t buying it. “And then I’m not gonna to have any sleep and I’m gonna to be exhausted from having the baby, and then there’s two kids to watch.” There was silence between the two of them again for a second. “What happened to just you and me? Maybe we should rethink this having kids thing.”

Noah tried not to laugh. “Somehow we got saddled with real life.”

As Noah turned back to his truck, still having the phone pressed up to his ear, he turned toward the north, a stand of thick pine trees in front of him. He narrowed his eyes for a moment, trying to make sense of what he was seeing. Was he crazy or were there some silhouettes in the woods? He squinted. At that time of night, it had to be critters. Bear? Elk? Moose? He was used to seeing wildlife, but never this close. Even grizzlies didn’t approach humans, unless someone got between a sow and her cubs. “Huh, that’s weird,” he mumbled.

“What’s weird? Noah? Is there something out there?” Laura’s voice sounded tense.

Noah was just about to suck in a breath to answer the question when he felt a strong hand grab his left shoulder, driving him backwards. As he cried out, he felt a burning sensation across the front of his neck, his fingers loosening on the grip of the phone, it dropping to the wet spring ground.

“Noah? Noah! Are you okay? What’s happening?” He could hear the panic in Laura’s voice, but he couldn’t respond. Though he tried to form words, he couldn’t.

Lifting his hand to his chest, Noah felt a gush of warm blood run down the front of his uniform as his knees buckled underneath him. He hit the cold ground with a thud, hearing Laura’s voice somewhere off in the distance.

A team of men moved silently past the body, barely breaking stride as they headed south through the woods. Their steps were silent, no conversation between them, no comment or reaction to the body they’d left behind.

They were ghosts.

The black shadows slipped into the darkness as they crossed the border into the United States, their steps silent, their dark eyes scanning as they moved in tandem, disappearing from the trail where they’d left Noah’s body on the ground.

And they never looked back.

2

Secret Service agent in charge, CJ Crosswell, stood at the edge of President Pierce Ewing’s yard scanning the preparations that were unfolding in front of her at his mountain retreat. She paced back and forth for a moment, listening to the earpiece jammed in her left ear, wanting nothing more than to take it out and replace the communications device with her finger. The dang thing made her ear itch.

Sighing, she ignored the urge and looked around. The weather in Northern Idaho, though it had been cloudy in the morning, had rapidly cleared up, the crystal-clear blue mountain skies opening up as if an artist had opened a vault of azure paint and splattered it across the sky. There wasn’t a cloud to be seen. A warm breeze had kicked up, chasing away any thoughts of winter.

At least that was something.

In front of her, CJ scanned the backyard again, her eyes never resting, never stopping, as she’d been trained, shaking her head a little. It was certainly a beautiful place to have a gathering and a beautiful day to have it on, but what they were gaining in beauty, they were losing in security. She had suggested to former President Ewing and his wife Jessica that perhaps it would be better to do their entertaining indoors, given the company they were keeping that day. Her argument, no matter how correct, fell on deaf ears. They had insisted that being outdoors was part of the reason that they had purchased their mountain retreat and that they knew their guests would want to be outside, not stuck around stuffy tables indoors. Per usual, the dismissal of CJ’s concerns had taken all of about thirty seconds. The former First Lady, Jessica Ewing, was the one to deliver the bad news. She was a stately woman with long brown hair and almond-shaped brown eyes. After politely hearing CJ out, she lowered her chin. From her expression, CJ knew what was coming next. “We’ve wanted to do this for so long. We realize it’s not your favorite idea, but it’ll be alright, I promise. Our guests will love being outside.”

“Yes, ma’am,” was all CJ managed to mutter before turning on her heel.

She was, after all, dealing with a former President of the United States and his wife. They tended to get what they wanted.

Despite the dismissal of CJ’s security concerns, the preparations for the presidential lunch had gone off without a hitch. There was a long table set up in the middle of the backyard, complete with starched white linens and the glint of silverware in the sunshine. Off to the side, servers were setting up a bar, musicians walking in with their instrument cases, setting up in the corner—two guys with their acoustic guitars chatting between themselves.

“Radio check,” CJ whispered into the microphone hidden in the sleeve of her black blazer.

A round of “all clears” sounded in her ear a second later.

And it still itched.

CJ walked around the perimeter of the yard, listening to her radio traffic, happy that the yard had dried up enough that it wasn’t muddy. The week before, when Jessica had been putting the final touches on the event, there had been talk of having a floor brought in to cover the backyard. That would have meant another round of security checks to go through. The dry weather eliminated that issue. For that, CJ was grateful. CJ stuck her hand in her pocket, checking her phone and then shoving it back where it had been. No calls or last-minute texts from Secret Service headquarters or her boss.

That was good.

CJ tugged at the collar of her jacket. She was dressed in her normal work uniform — tailored black pants, black work boots and a white collared blouse with a black blazer over the top. Standard Secret Service fashion. The coil of her earpiece landed behind her left ear and trailed down her neck to the radio that was clipped to the back of her belt. Her brown hair was tied into a low bun, only a few wisps hanging out around her face, not enough to interfere with her vision, of course. She gazed at the edge of the woods and the tables set up, other agents walking around, their expressions tight and stiff. It was almost game time. On the opposite corner of the house, past the stone patio and the glass doors that led into the house, she saw two of her agents, Bartley and Klein, talking about something, the two of them grinning from ear to ear. She stared at them, catching Bartley’s eye, apparently just long enough that they got the picture that maybe they should move on and do their jobs. There was time for chitchat later.

Now was not the time. Not on her watch.

CJ bit the inside of her lip for a second, feeling butterflies in her stomach. She’d gotten a call from the head of the Secret Service, Zach Brooks, two weeks before while she was waiting at O’Hare in Chicago to fly to Atlanta to deal with another issue with a protectee.

“Mind if I upend your day?”

At the very moment Zach called, CJ was getting ready to board the airplane. The loudspeaker in the background made it hard to hear him. “All passengers for United flight 7253, service to Atlanta, we are now boarding. Please proceed to gate seventeen for immediate departure.”

CJ stood at the back of the line and waited, her phone pressed up to her ear, trying to hear Zach. “I’m in line getting ready to board the flight, sir. You have me headed to Atlanta.” Do you really want me to miss my flight?

“I know, I know. Like I said, I need to switch things up.”

“Of course, sir.” Are you kidding me? Now what’s going on? Frustration nipped at her gut. She’d been with the Secret Service for the last decade, long enough to see two presidents complete their terms and see another one partway through his four-year cycle, President Robert Mosely. She’d done everything from work at the Treasury Department, where the Secret Service was responsible for providing protection to the facility, to heading up small protectee projects for foreign dignitaries, Congressmen and women and going basically anywhere the Secret Service needed her. While she wasn’t the top of the food chain in Secret Service terms, she had managed to work herself up to just below the highest echelons, enough that she got to communicate with the brass, sometimes at least, but was usually out of their range when things went wrong.

But there was a cost.

There were days that CJ felt like she had sold her soul to the United States government—for the most part, they pretty much owned her twenty-four hours a day, three hundred sixty-five days every single year. She traveled where they wanted her to go when they wanted her to go. Her vacation days had stacked up to a staggering amount. She simply didn’t have the amount of free time that she assumed she’d have when she decided to work for the government, not even the ones they’d paid for. She’d learned having vacation days didn’t mean you got a vacation, or even a weekend off for that matter.

And it seemed the deeper she got in the less of a life she had.

CJ blinked. A sense of vertigo swirled around her as she stood seeing the line of people struggling onto the plane heading to Atlanta. At that moment she couldn’t even remember when the last time was that she had been back in her apartment in DC. Was it two weeks ago? A month? Longer? She felt like all she did was live out of her suitcase. The month before, she’d gotten a call from Steel Bend Security, some headhunter type named Mark, who wanted to see if she had any interest in leaving government service and coming to work for them in the private sector. He dangled a doubled salary, time off, and interesting assignments, all of which she could choose. “We’re always looking for female agents, and you’ve come highly recommended.”

“By who?”

Mark wouldn’t say.

You won’t say? That’s weird. “I’m good for now.”

Mark was undaunted. “Well, keep my name and number. You never know when things might change.”

Standing with her phone pressed up to her ear, watching the last few people board the flight, the smell of airplane exhaust filtering down the jetway into the airport, CJ remembered the conversation, wondering whether she still had the man’s phone number or not. Director Brooks was about to mess up her life again. How many more times was she willing to do this? At what point did she get to do the things she wanted to do and not just serve at someone else’s whim?

Zach’s voice interrupted her thoughts. “You’re not going to need to get on that flight.”

CJ frowned. She’d been sent all over the place, but she’d never been interrupted in the middle of getting on a flight before. The last thing she wanted to do was to miss her flight and have him change his mind as soon as they closed the door for boarding. She’d be stuck in the airport for only God knew how long. “And why is that, sir?” She tried to keep her voice calm and even, but all of the changes they’d seen in the agency over the last few months since Zach Brooks had taken over had left her feeling almost tipsy. One day they were doing things one way, the other the next day, things had completely changed.

And here they are again.

“I’ve been watching you, Crosswell. I think you’re gonna like this next assignment.”

Really? You’ve been watching me from where? Your cushy office in DC? CJ sucked in a breath, trying to keep herself calm. “I’m here to serve, sir.”

“I know that.” He cleared his throat. “You should get a text here in a minute with a change in your flight plans. Go grab yourself a sandwich. You’re leaving in an hour.”

At least it’s only an hour. The comment about a sandwich made her stomach rumble. She hadn’t realized how hungry she was. “Where am I going, sir?”

“Idaho.” It felt like a punch in the gut. Idaho? That didn’t sound like much of a promotion. “Of course, sir.”

“Would you like to know what you’re doing?”

I’m afraid to ask. “Sure.”

He cleared his throat. “Well, like I said, I’ve been watching you. You’re ready for more responsibility. Not sure why my predecessor didn’t see that in you already. Clearly, he wasn’t paying attention, and we’re gonna make some changes here. I want the most qualified people, the hardest workers out doing the job. From what I can see, that’s you.” There was a shuffle of papers in the background. “You’re headed to Idaho because Former President Ewing is having a large gathering in his mountain retreat outside of Bonners Ferry. You are going to be the agent in charge. The travel department said the closest airport is Spokane. We’ll have a car waiting for you. You’ll have to drive the rest of the way in.”

“Can you tell me a little bit more about the scope, sir, or will someone else brief me?” CJ stepped away from the queue where people were lining up, the flight attendant standing at the door boarding gate making eye contact as she moved away. She was the last person waiting. CJ held her hand up and waved her off. From what Director Brooks was saying, she wasn’t going to be getting on the flight to Atlanta, at least not on that day.

It was another change to her schedule. It happened so often she didn’t even care anymore.

“Nope, you are getting the assignment directly from me.” He paused for a moment. “I think you’re gonna like this one, Crosswell. Former President Ewing and his wife aren’t hosting just anyone at their house. They’re hosting all of the living former presidents at their mountain retreat. And you’re in charge.”

“All of them?”

“Yes. And you’re in charge of keeping them safe. How does that sound?”

“Good, sir.” CJ swallowed. “Happy to serve.”

“Get on the plane, Crosswell. I’ll be in touch afterward.”

The call ended.

3

The conversation that CJ had had with Director Brooks rang in her mind as she walked around President Ewing’s yard. She stopped off to the side, pausing for a moment, standing on a wide flagstone patio that led to a large kidney-shaped pool. The house was behind her, a rustic style two-story house, the kind that would be expected for the mountains of Idaho, with warm brown siding and shutters, the planting beds newly mulched, a smattering of wildflowers now in bloom around the edge of the yard. The grass, even though it was early spring, had quickly responded to the bright mountain sunshine and had greened up, the yard dry and perfect for an afternoon luncheon. A long table had been set up in the middle of the yard, covered with linens and dishes and silverware, serving people walking around it, adding a few final pieces, their hands gloved in white cotton. CJ shook her head. It was five-star service out in the middle of nowhere.

And that was the only good thing about it as far as CJ was concerned.

Security-wise, it was an absolute nightmare. Thinking about it made her heart flutter. Why Director Brooks had thought that she would want this job, she wasn’t exactly sure. But he was right about one thing—it was a promotion. Given the stakes, there was no doubt about that. Not only was she now responsible for one high-profile protectee, but she was also responsible for ten of the most high-profile people in the free world, the former presidents of the United States of America and their wives.

She felt perspiration start to gather on her forehead.

Come on, Crosswell. This is what you wanted. You wanted a shot at a bigger job, so maybe the White House was a possibility. Maybe this is it? You just gotta get through the next few hours. That’s it, then back on a plane and hopefully back to D.C. for a little bit.

The positive self-talk didn’t help one bit. Even telling herself she could put in for vacation after this didn’t help. She sighed. It was at that moment that CJ reminded herself that they were in the middle of nowhere. She’d coordinated with Jessica Ewing, former President Pierce Ewing’s wife, as well as her aide and the aides of the other presidents and their wives, making sure that she had a clear picture of exactly what the afternoon would entail. Luckily, it was pretty straightforward. The former presidents would all arrive, be seated for lunch, enjoy some guitar music that had been provided by the Ewings, then enjoy a BBQ lunch from a local restaurant where former President Pierce Ewing and his wife liked to go when they stayed in the mountains in the summer.

After a few hours of dining and chatting, hopefully, the former presidents would all depart to their various locations, reducing the security risk back down to a normal level.

Based on the information that CJ had, she knew that all of the presidents and their wives were already in town. The only one that was still left to arrive was former President Wes Mercer. Tugging on the sleeve of her blazer, CJ checked the time on her watch. She realized that former President Mercer had just landed or should have just landed. Was he on time? Running late? CJ pressed the coms button that was hidden under the cuff of her jacket. “We have status on Mercer?”

There was a pause and a crackle as the channel opened up. “He just touched down. We’ll have him en route to you shortly.”

CJ nodded, glad that she had sent Glenn Stankus to go and retrieve the former president and his wife from the airfield. Luckily, it was only about a ten-minute drive between the airfield and President Ewing’s mountain retreat. From the chatter on her radio, she knew the other presidents were all inbound at that moment, clusters of black motorcades all descending on former President Ewing’s home like a swarm of black bugs.

CJ moved closer to the glass doors, looking around the corner toward the kitchen. The white-coated staff was hard at work, their heads down over a long line of plates, voices calling out to each other. By the focused chatter she heard, CJ assumed they were doing fine, just feeling the pressure as the arrival of the former presidents was just about to happen.

Replaying some of the planning in her mind, she knew that the former presidents were scattered around the area of Bonners Ferry. Like her, they had flown into Spokane. That was the easy part. The hard part had been trying to figure out exactly where to keep them the night before the event. That had been part of the nightmare that Director Brooks had saddled CJ with.

A week before, during her initial meetings with Pierce and Jessica, they’d told CJ that they really wanted all of the former presidents to come in the night before and stay at the ranch house, like a giant presidential sleepover. After a call to Director Brooks, CJ had to be the bearer of bad news to tell them that there was no way that the Secret Service was going to have all of the former presidents of the United States of America bunked down in exactly the same house in the same location all at the same time even if it sounded fun.

Jessica Ewing had looked at her with steely eyes as if CJ had just told her that someone else had gotten the last scoop of ice cream she wanted. “But we’re not in office anymore. I don’t know what the big deal is. We have our family up here all the time.”

CJ remembered feeling her body stiffen as she replayed the scene in her head again. She’d wanted to yell at Jessica. Are you crazy? CJ stared at the floor for a moment, then swallowed. Hard. She held her ground. “I’m sorry, ma’am. I’ve spoken with Director Brooks personally.” Better to use his name, she decided. “I understand how you feel, but we simply can’t have all of you in one place for that long of a time. It represents a significant security risk.”

That was Secret Service speak for no way, dude.

Jessica and Pierce had relented, and the former presidents had ended up staying in a variety of rental homes, all of which had been secured by CJ and her team.

And now that they’d kept them safe overnight, it was showtime.

“All stations, can I get an ETA on our guests?” CJ spoke quietly into her radio she stood, her back to the ranch house, watching the servers move in and out of the glass doors that were to her left. They looked like bees busily flying back and forth to the hive. In the background, she heard the guitar players tuning their strings. Her radio crackled a second later.

“Hernandez — thirty seconds out.”

“Hall — two minutes out.”

“Ellis — one minute out.”

That only left former President Mercer.

CJ knew where they were since she had just touched base with Glenn. If she’d had her tablet with her, she could have actually tracked their locations using the GPS on the security Secret Service vehicles that were carrying the former presidents.

Once they get here, you’ll be fine. It’ll be like any other event. Keep an eye on them. Get them fed and get them out the door, and you can get back to D.C. What was the name of that headhunter again?

CJ felt a tingle run up and down her spine. She forced herself to take a deep breath, feeling the weight of the assignment land on her heavily. While she understood what Director Brooks had asked her to do, the reality of it hit her in that moment, tension running like a wave through her body. She was now responsible for the lives of five former presidents and their wives, men and women who knew more about the inner workings of the United States than nearly anyone else on the planet. There was no room to get this wrong. CJ scanned the perimeter a final time, checking to make sure her agents were in position on the perimeter. Seeing them milling around the backyard, CJ gave a nod and then made her way through the house, crossing through the great room, her eyes never stopping moving, never settling on anything, just the way that she’d been taught.

Outside the front doors, CJ stood off to the side as former President Ewing and his wife greeted the first of the black SUVs to arrive, standing with their shoulders back as if they were receiving dignitaries at the White House. There were lots of hugs and smiles and handshakes, former presidents bonded in a way that most people would never be, part of a small group who knew the most intimate secrets and the power struggles of the United States of America. To say it was an elite club would be an understatement. Statistically speaking, at one time, there were usually fewer than five former presidents living. Sometimes, depending on their age while they were in office and their health afterward, there might be six, or there might be four, but the average was five.

And CJ was responsible for all of them.

CJ stood off to the side, feeling perspiration gather on her forehead. You know how to do this. Director Brooks wouldn’t have asked you to if you couldn’t. One minute at a time. That’s all. Just do the next minute.

CJ turned away for a second, gathering herself. She hadn’t felt this much pressure since she’d been part of the detail that had protected the newly sworn-in vice president on inauguration day a few years before. A second later she heard a voice. “You okay there, boss?”

It was Glenn. He’d moved in next to her, his voice low, nothing more than a whisper. They’d been working together for the last three years, their paths crossing on a regular basis.

“Yeah. It’s all good.”

Glenn offered nothing more than a slight nod. With his dark blond hair and rough beard, it always gave her the impression that he was only slightly amused by her discomfort. “This is a slam dunk. We’ve got this.”

“Right,” CJ said, probably a little louder than she needed to as if she was trying to let herself know that everything was fine.

The party proceeded through the main house, Jessica Ewing leading the pack past the elk heads and deer racks that were hung on the walls, pointing and waving with all the flourish of a Smithsonian tour guide. “It’s such a beautiful day that we’ve decided to have lunch outside.” There were smiles all around as the group, shoulders clapped and hands shook, proceeded through the house and out into the back patio.

CJ stayed at the perimeter of the group, moving with them, watching the former presidents as they made their way through the house. They all had on basically the same outfit, some sort of khaki pants in a button-down shirt. Former president chic. The only exception was former President Hale, who had on a navy-blue polo shirt with the Office of the President insignia emblazoned on it. There was a baseball cap on his head, his pants rumpled as if they had gotten wrinkled on his trip to Idaho. He didn’t seem to care. It matched his reputation. From what CJ knew, former President Griffin Hale had been a bit of a renegade.

CJ pressed her lips together. Now the only way he could be a renegade was by wearing something completely different than the rest of the group.

As the group proceeded outside, CJ heard the guitar music start. It was a nice touch, the rich tones of the guitars fitting in with the early summer breeze and the birds moving through the trees. The group sat and relaxed, the servers arriving the moment the former presidents sat, pouring water and retrieving wine and beer and cocktails for the guests from the small bar that had been set up at the edge of the lawn. A couple of the former presidents, Joe Hernandez and George Ellis, wandered over to the bar by themselves, immersed in a conversation. By the serious looks on their faces, they were doing business.

CJ resumed her position next to the house, which was slightly elevated on the stone patio. Things were going exactly as they’d planned. She scanned the yard, watching her people as they moved silently around the edges, ever mindful of where the former presidents and the first ladies were. An eruption of laughter from the table caught her attention. CJ had always wondered how it was for the protectees knowing that someone was continuously watching them. When someone took the oath of office, they had a team with them no matter what they did — while they were sleeping, when they traveled, when they were in the shower or making love to their wife. It didn’t matter. The Secret Service was always there just outside the door to the most intimate moments of their lives. Did they even notice the agents after a while or did their presence just blend into everything else? CJ’s guess was that they didn’t. As days elapsed into months elapsed into years of having someone watch you that at some point you no longer saw it.

The thought seemed strange to her. Maybe that was because she was doing the watching.

4

“All stations report?” CJ whispered into her microphone. It wasn’t as though it was any secret that the agents were on duty, but CJ didn’t want to interrupt any conversations between the former presidents and their wives. She’d been trained to melt into the background. That was what the protectees and the agency expected.

So that’s what they’d get.

The rumble of close to two dozen “all clears” ran through her ear. She’d been doing a station check every fifteen minutes since the luncheon had started. So far, the former presidents and first ladies had enjoyed conversation, cocktails, and the appetizer course, served by silent staff members who had all been vetted by CJ and her team, given their proximity to the dignitaries. CJ fought a gathering tension in her gut. Couldn’t they eat a little faster so she could get them back into the house?

She shifted her weight from one foot to the other, feeling her leg falling asleep from standing still. CJ glanced at the ground for a moment, then lifted her eyes back to the party trying her best not to frown as the servers started filing out of the open doors of the house, white plates balanced on their arms. From the briefing, she knew the next course was the lunch itself, grilled bison steak served over a bed of braised wild escarole. What escarole was, she wasn’t exactly sure, but by the look of the food on the plate, it must have been the green stuff.

CJ’s eyes followed the trail of plates into the backyard, the figures seated around the table smiling as their next course was delivered. With gracious nods from the guests, the servers retreated. The birds chirped in the background, adding another layer of music to the guitars that were being played. Hearing the clink of silverware against the dishes, CJ felt herself straighten. Things were going fine. Maybe Director Brooks was right. Maybe she was up to the task of protecting all of these people.

For a moment, she felt a single ray of optimism rise in her chest, something that didn’t happen very often.

Maybe she could lead a team. Maybe she had chosen the right career after all.

Three servers had just headed back to the kitchen carrying empty glasses and appetizer plates when CJ turned to take a lap around the house. She walked towards the sliding glass doors where a new round of servers was walking outside, carrying baskets of cornbread and sourdough rolls. CJ stood at the door and waited, letting the rest of the servers pass when she glanced back at the table, watching the servers and the former presidents. You just looked a second ago. Everything was fine then. It’s fine now. Why don’t you relax?

Sighing, CJ paused for a moment. There was a part of her that couldn’t let it go. The last thing she needed was a former president choking on a piece of steak and making a scene. Scanning the table, she realized that everyone looked relaxed, the former presidents telling stories and the first ladies laughing over something they were sharing between the group of them. She turned to look back to walk into the house when she saw a shadow out of the corner of her eye moving in the woods. She stopped, her mouth falling open. What is that? Am I seeing things?

By the time CJ answered the question in her mind, she didn’t have time to think. A team of five men came out of the woods dressed in full camo. CJ didn’t have time to respond. As a spray of gunfire from fully automatic weapons covered the area, all CJ could do was hit the deck and scream into her radio. “Code red! Code red!” She rolled on the ground, pulling her Glock G47 nine-millimeter pistol from her holster. Fighting the urge to cover her ears with her hands against the noise, she scooted on her belly towards a concrete planter that was nearby. Rolling on her back, CJ waited for a beat, her breath ragged, her eyes wide. Gritting her teeth, she moved to her side and peered into the backyard. As she stared into the backyard, she realized there was nothing she could do. The bodies of the former presidents were strewn everywhere, some of them slumped on the table, some of them toppled over. She could run into the backyard, but she’d get mowed down before she made it more than a few steps. Her hands shaking, CJ got off a couple of shots and then retreated behind the planter again, rolling onto her back, her breath heavy in her chest. No one had responded to her emergency call. What was going on? Where was everyone?

CJ stayed behind the planter for another second, feeling sweat run down her back. From a few different angles in the backyard, she heard what sounded like pistol fire. Was that her team? She shook her head, blinking quickly. Their Glocks were no match for the fully automatic weapons that the intruders had on them. CJ brushed a trickle of sweat away from the side of her face, wincing as another volley of shots flew overhead, raining down debris on her as the rounds hit the side of the house, the sound of glass shattering somewhere nearby. CJ tried to make herself as small as she could, drawing her knees toward her from where she was lying on her back. She held her gun in two hands in front of her chest looking left and right, praying that whoever had attacked them would retreat. She was in an indefensible position if the intruders came through the backyard. They’d make their way up to the deck and find her. With the weapons they had, one twitch of their finger on the trigger would cut her in half. CJ felt dizzy. She tried to think clearly. All she knew was that she couldn’t stay there for long.

She’d be the next victim.

5

President Robert Mosley rubbed the back of his neck. What most people didn’t understand about being the President of the United States was that it was just like any other job—there were too many meetings, too many people looking to him to make a decision or get on his good side, and worse, there were a whole slew of things that he was responsible for that he just didn’t like to do.

Like argue about the budget.

President Mosley had spent the last three hours sitting in a closed-door meeting with Congressional leaders trying to hammer out a budget plan that could pass through both the Senate and the House without stalling the work of the United States government. In years past, it had been a bone of contention between the two governing parties of the United States, each of them threatening a government shutdown at least once a year if their demands weren’t met, regardless of what was actually best for the country. The first few times it happened, the stock market had dropped, politicians were flooded with angry and scared calls from their constituents, and the press had a field day. No more. It had happened so often that it was no longer exciting to anyone except those who were responsible for making the deal stick. It fell on the deaf ears of the American public, no one except for a few media hounds giving it even the slightest bit of attention.

And yet it still had to be resolved.

President Mosley had just lifted his head and sucked in his breath to say something to Senator Bernard Skerletts of New York, who was being particularly annoying, when he saw the Secret Service agent standing at the doorway of the conference room drop his eyes. Robert could tell that Nathan was listening for something. As he looked up, Nathan’s face paled, his mouth dropping open briefly before clamping shut, his jaw clenched, the muscles of his face tightening his expression into a hardened mask. Nathan charged across the room in a blur. The next thing President Mosley knew, he felt strong hands from behind lifting him out of his chair. His body man for that day, Blake Croft, forced him to stand, shoving the padded leather chair out of the way so fast it toppled over. Robert opened his mouth to say something, but didn’t have a chance. Before he could address the people in the room, he was gone. Nathan, Blake, and a couple of other guys dragged Robert along, a phalanx of other Secret Service agents joining them outside of the room, their footfalls as they ran towards him heavy, echoing off the high ceilings and the west wing of the White House. They half ran and half dragged Robert toward the elevators, the agents around him with their guns drawn, a dozen or more of them clustered around him in the hallway. As soon as the doors whooshed open, Robert felt hands push him into the elevator, four men surrounding him, the remainder guarding the doors to the elevator as they closed.

Robert realized his heart was pounding in his chest from the sudden departure from his budget meeting. He looked at Nathan, his eyes wide. “What in the⁠—”

Nathan glanced at him, his expression stony. “There’s a situation, sir. We’ll fill you in downstairs.”

By downstairs, Nathan meant the subterranean bunker that was built underneath the east wing of the White House, called PEOC, or the Presidential Emergency Operations Center. It had been constructed during World War II to protect then-President Roosevelt in the case of an air attack on Washington, D.C. The bunker itself was comprised of a series of tunnels and rooms that included everything from a fully functional medical bay, including a surgical suite and ICU, to bedrooms, a kitchen with a stockpile of food and water that would last for two years, conference rooms, and a fully secured telecommunications array that could reach out to U.S. forces and government officials anywhere around the globe. The PEOC, as it was known, was evaluated, updated and upgraded every single year without fail as part of the very budget that Robert had just been working on. As they rode deep into the ground, Robert grimaced. The PEOC was one of the few things that didn’t get argued about in the budget. It was one of the most modern, secure facilities that the United States government owned, that along with the Cheyenne Mountain Complex buried deep in the Rockies. The site in Colorado was an alternate site for NORAD, U.S. Strategic Command, U.S. Space Command, and U.S. North Command in the case of issues in D.C.

As the doors to the elevator slid open silently, Robert felt a cool chill on his skin and heard the hum of the ventilation systems filtering the outside air deep into the bunker. He’d been working in his customary white shirt and tie, the top button undone, his sleeves rolled up. In the fuss of being dragged to PEOC, he must have started to perspire. He stepped out of the elevator. “Somebody get me a jacket. It’s freezing down here,” he barked.

Nathan stepped forward. “Sorry, Mr. President. I’ll get them to adjust the temperature and get that jacket for you.” Nathan waved at another one of the agents who disappeared.

Robert gave Nathan a nod. It wasn’t exactly an apology for interrupting his meeting, but then again, Nathan was doing his job. Robert stopped for a second, the remainder of his security detail pausing with him. He straightened, putting his shoulders back, sucking in a deep breath, trying to gather himself. To say that it was unsettling to be bum-rushed out of a meeting and down into the PEOC bunker was an understatement. It happened periodically, maybe once or twice a year, primarily because after the first time it had happened, he’d threatened to fire the then Director of the Secret Service if they didn’t use a bit more discretion.

The threat had worked.

Although they had practiced the evacuation to the PEOC with him when Robert started his term as president, there was nothing he could do about the adrenaline rush that had dumped in his system at being dragged from the conference room three stories above where he stood at that moment. Suddenly feeling grouchy, he looked over his shoulder at Nathan, who hadn’t moved. Their job was to deliver him to the bunker. What the president did after that was up to him. President Mosley narrowed his eyes. “This better be good, Nathan, and not just another one of your false alarms.”

Nathan held his hand out as if he was ushering the president forward, his face not revealing any information. That wasn’t a good sign. Acid churned in President Mosley’s stomach. Did they have Tums in the PEOC?

“I would suggest the communications room, sir. There are people waiting for you.”

As President Mosley strode down the dimly lit hallway, his footsteps echoed on the hard concrete floors. He made a sharp left turn into the underground secure communications room, which looked eerily similar to the Situation Room in the structure above. The room itself was quite large, with soft navy-blue carpet, a long conference table, and wooden paneling on the walls, especially given the fact that they were hundreds of feet below ground. Monitors were hung around the room, each of them displaying the White House emblem, white on a blue background. Originally, the PEOC bunker had been designed to withstand a nuclear attack, a place where the current president and his family and staff could hunker down and make decisions about the country while all hell broke loose on the surface. And though it wasn’t as plush as the upstairs version of the White House, it did have its perks. It was quiet and private, a place that not everyone in the White House could get to, staffed twenty-four-seven with military officers and anyone else the president could need in a crisis.

Robert walked to the head of the table and threw himself onto a chair, glancing at Nathan. “Where’s my jacket?” From the tone of his voice, he knew his irritation was obvious.

Easy, Robert. They are just doing their jobs.

Nathan said something into his microphone. A second later, a Secret Service agent showed up with a presidential bomber jacket. Robert shrugged it on over his shoulders and settled into the chair as a telecommunications specialist wearing an Air Force uniform quickly connected the call that was waiting for him, pointing to a monitor hung on the wall. She gave the president a nod. “Sir, they are ready when you are.”

Robert didn’t respond as she stepped away. He hit a button on one of the remote controls that was stationed at his seat and waited for a second. As he waited, he heard the elevator doors open and close again. The Director of the Secret Service, Zach Brooks, ran in, his dark eyes wide, his suit jacket rumpled as if he had just put it on. “Have you heard, sir?”

Robert shook his head. “No, but you better have a very good reason for dragging me out of a Congressional Budget meeting.”

Zach took a seat next to him, tugging at his jacket, then brushing a lock of dark hair off of his forehead. “The budget is far from our biggest problems today, sir.”

Robert didn’t say anything, holding off the sarcasm that was sitting on the tip of his tongue. Isn’t that always the case, Zach?

A second later a live feed came on. There was some static in the background as the camera cleared. It looked like someone was using a satellite phone. “Am I on? Sir, can you hear me?”

President Mosley leaned his forearms on the table trying to make out what he was seeing. It looked like wherever the call was coming from, they were out in the woods. “Yes, Agent. Identify yourself.”

“Sorry, Mr. President. I’m Agent Tanya Robinson.”

“Where are you, Agent Robinson?”

“Sir, I’m at a secure facility outside of Denver. I’m a drone operator. The feed that you are seeing is from a drone we are just getting into position at this moment to get a first look at the situation.”

Robert Mosley shot a look at Zach, widening his eyes. Everyone was being so cagey. What had happened?

Robert’s look must have conveyed his irritation. Zach lowered his chin looking at the table. When he looked up, his face was stony, the expression that told Robert he was about to deliver bad news. Very bad news. “Sir, approximately thirty minutes ago, there was a brutal attack on President Ewing’s mountain retreat.”

“What?” Robert blinked. A brutal attack? What does that mean?

Zach continued. “Yes, sir. We’re still working to figure out what happened and to make contact with the site. There seems to be some kind of communication issue. Not sure if it’s weather or what. We received a code red call from the agent in charge but haven’t heard from her since. We immediately deployed drones. They’re quicker and faster to launch, especially given where President Ewing’s house is in Idaho. We also have extra Secret Service inbound, but they are still a few minutes out.”

President Mosley held up a hand. “Wait. What are you saying exactly, Zach? You’re telling me all about the response, but what happened?” President Mosley wondered if maybe the news was too difficult to deliver and that’s why Zach had skipped to the end of the story.

Zach looked at the table for a second, his cheeks puffing as he blew out a breath. He blinked and looked back at President Mosley. The new Director of the Secret Service had only been on the job for about six months. Robert had hand-picked him. He was young, energetic, and probably slightly too green for the position, but he was enthusiastic, brilliant, and someone that was not only a good communicator, but who had excellent strategic vision, one that could propel the U.S.S.S into the next century. President Mosley put him in the position knowing that the experience would come. From the expression on his face, it looked like he was getting a dose of it at that moment.

He folded his forearms on the table. Robert could see Zach’s fingers were knitted so tightly together that his knuckles were white. “It wasn’t just President Ewing and his wife that were at his mountain retreat in northern Idaho. He had all the former presidents there with him.”

Robert didn’t have a chance to process what Zach had said before Tanya interrupted. “Mr. President, we’re flying over the site now. This is the first pass.”

President Mosley stood, feeling his heart pound in his chest hard enough that his fingers were prickling. As he absorbed what he saw, his first thought was that he was impressed by the resolution the drone was able to achieve. He had no idea how high it was up in the air, but he knew that typically reconnaissance drones were several thousand feet up, somewhere in between helicopter height and airplane height. As the optics continued to focus on the backyard at President Ewing’s mountain retreat, Robert’s heart nearly stopped in his chest at what he saw. “Focus in, Robinson,” he managed to mumble, a lump the size of a grapefruit in his throat threatening to choke him.

The devastation was breathtaking, something that was akin to a bloody battlefield during the Civil War. There were bodies everywhere, some of them slumped on a table, some of them on the ground. “Dear Jesus,” Robert Mosley whispered. He looked at Zach, whose face had gone white, his lips devoid of color. Robert looked back at the monitor, walking toward the other end of the room where it was hanging. He didn’t know what to say. His thoughts were swirling in his mind. Robert stopped, looking at the floor, putting a hand on his forehead. He looked back at Zach, who was staring at the surface of the conference table, his head hanging. Robert faced Zach. It was time for him to lead, to be the President. This wasn’t just a run-of-the-mill assassination attempt; this was a major attack on the government of the United States. “Zach, get everyone here. Everyone. Send choppers and I want everyone here now.”

President Mosley looked at Nathan, his Secret Service agent. “Get my chief of staff down here now.”

A second later, a short, balding man came running in the room, the tails of his gray blazer trailing behind him, his pink tie flipped up over his shoulder. “I’m sorry, Mr. President,” he said, straightening his jacket and tie. “I was at a meeting across town. The Secret Service dragged me here. They briefed me on the way. What do you need?”

Billy Weiss had been with President Mosley for years, even before he was Governor. They worked together well. “I need everyone. Get me the Secretary of Defense, Homeland, FBI State, Treasury, and the Attorney General. I need the Joint Chiefs on standby.”

Billy nodded, holding his phone to his ear, his eyes never leaving President Mosley.

Robert continued. “And for God’s sake, have Anna clamp down on the media. We need to get a handle on this, and we don’t need any panic happening.” Anna Gallego, the White House Press Secretary, was strong-willed and feisty, the stare of her black eyes keeping the media in line. As Billy turned away, chattering on his phone, Robert turned to Zach. “I’m assuming you’ve secured everyone who has to do with the continuity of our government?”

Robert waited, hoping for the answer he was looking for. Anyone who was gonna go after a whole group of former presidents had to have their eyes on toppling the United States government. There was no question in his mind about that. If that was the case, then Zach and his team had done the right thing by rushing him to the PEOC. But what had they done about the rest of the line of succession? Had Zach even thought about that? Robert knew there were protocols in place before Zach ever started to handle this kind of issue, but Robert felt his chest tighten anyway. He didn’t even give Zach a chance to answer before Robert asked his next question. “The Vice President? And my family?”

Zach nodded. “Already handled, sir. Anytime there’s a code red we do that automatically. The line of succession has been secured. Your wife should be here in the next few minutes. Your kids as well. The vice president and his family are safe, too.” Zach didn’t say where everyone was. It didn’t matter. Robert had to take Zach at his word. In case of an emergency like this, the vice president was kept separate from the president for security reasons. He was just glad to know that his wife and kids were inbound. At least that was one less thing to worry about if there was a legitimate threat to their lives.

Then again, when wasn’t there?

Robert looked back at the feed. The drone had taken up a steady position over the former president’s mountain retreat. Robert could see that people were starting to arrive, individuals running out onto the back lawn carrying AR-15 style rifles slung over their chests wearing full tactical body armor, followed by blue-gloved, orange-bag-toting medics. Robert looked at Zach. “Start from the beginning. Who exactly was there?” Robert closed his eyes, waiting for the answer, wanting to absorb every syllable coming from Zach. It was an answer he was sure he wasn’t going to like.

“Unfortunately, sir, all of the living former presidents were there. Obviously, Pierce Ewing and his wife since it was their home, also Wes Mercer, Griffin Hale, Joe Hernandez, and George Ellis, plus their wives.”

Robert continued to pace, hearing the whoosh of blood in his ears. “And do we know if any of them are still alive?”

It took Zach a second to answer. “We’re still gathering that information, sir, but I have to be honest, it’s not looking good.”

Robert shot Zach a look. He needed answers. Now. “Not good enough, Zach. I need to know exactly what’s going on. I need to know about the casualties.” He pointed a single finger at the screen, his cheeks heating up. “And I need to know who did this.”

6

The late May afternoon in Burton, Texas, had turned hot and dry in the space of just a few hours. Travis bumped the bill of his baseball cap up with the back of his hand and wiped his forehead with a red handkerchief he had sticking out of the back pocket of his jeans. He stopped for a second, scanning the horizon as far as he could see in the flat lands that surrounded Travis Bishop Performance Horses, the horse training operation he’d built from nothing when he’d left the CIA. There was nothing moving, no dust trails coming down the mile-long driveway that led to his house and the barns.

The mare he was leading, a four-year-old named Maddie, short for Madison Avenue Girl, stopped next to him and then started to chew on the lead that was attached to her halter as if she was frustrated by the delay in getting back to the barn. Travis stared at her, then shook his head. Though she was four, she acted like a two-year-old, which was part of the reason her owners had given her to Travis for training. In the sunshine, her chestnut coat glistened, the star on her forehead evident underneath her black forelock. He waited for a second to see if she would notice him looking at her and drop the lead out of her mouth. A second later she did, a guilty look on her face, or at least as much of a guilty look as any horse could give. Travis shook his head and then stroked her neck. She was so pretty and quirky that it was hard to be mad at her for more than a minute. That said, Maddie was a handful. There were so many ways that she reminded him of Kira’s mare, Scarlett, the one that had died after the fire at the ranch. Sadness welled up in his gut for a second and then dissipated like a puff of a cloud blowing away on a summer day. Kira, his fiancée, had betrayed him and her country, first by faking her death and running off with his coworker, Gus, and then through the attack that had nearly cost the president his life. Travis slammed the door on the memories that were trying to resurface. Kira had been gone for a long time. Scarlett had been the last piece of her to leave his life.

But now he had Maddie.

Maddie flipped her head in the breeze as if she was tossing the wind off of her nose and then with a snort, she reared. Not acceptable. Travis stared at her, giving a sharp yank on her lead. “Knock it off,” he growled. Unlike most quarter horses, Maddie’s energy hadn’t calmed down as much as he would have liked. She was an amazing athlete, thickly muscled and beautiful, but more highly strung than Travis would have liked.

Seemed like most of the women in his life, both human and equine, fit into that category.

He clucked his tongue and got Maddie moving forward again, heading for the barn. As he crossed the lawn from the pasture where he’d collected Maddie, he thought about Ruby. They’d had an on-again, off-again relationship, one of convenience, it seemed. Ruby Dudayeva had been the first woman since Kira that Travis had been involved with. She had hung around the ranch for a few weeks after she’d driven him back from the East Coast, his concussion from the bomb that went off in D.C. at the Capitol Building too severe for him to get on a plane. Travis was too antsy to stay on the East Coast and heal. Remaining in D.C. was just an excuse for him to get caught up in yet another one of the CIA’s messes.

Plus, he was bringing back the dog that had saved his life. Bear.

After driving for three days, they’d arrived at the ranch. They’d enjoyed time together for a few weeks, heading into town to get feed for the horses, Ruby enjoying a new barbeque place Travis had found, Bear acclimating to life in Texas. She’d even come out to the arena to watch him ride. Travis had been just beginning to think about what a future with Ruby would be like when he walked back into the house after doing an early feeding of the horses to find Ruby standing in the kitchen drinking a cup of coffee, dressed, her bag packed and sitting next to the counter, a sly smile on her face. He looked at it and then at her. “You going somewhere?”

She cocked her head, then shrugged. “Back to work,” she said in a thick Russian accent.

“You don’t want to stay?”

Ruby didn’t say anything for a second. She turned away from him, dumped what was left of her coffee in the sink, rinsed out her cup, and wiped the red stain of her lipstick off with her thumb before putting it in the dishwasher. It was as if she’d never been there.

She turned to look at him. “You know that’s not the life I’ve chosen for myself, Travis. I have clients. They have needs.” It was the kindest way for her to tell him that she was going back to her work as an assassin. As she walked over to him, she gave him a hug, planting a lingering kiss on his cheek.

“Do svidaniya,” Travis whispered in her ear, soaking in the scent of her skin one last time. “Bye, Ruby. Be careful out there.”

Since that initial time at the ranch, Ruby had been in and out of his life. She’d stop in for a day or a weekend, whenever she was nearby. It wasn’t often, given that most of her clients were overseas. Travis sucked in a breath, realizing as he walked Maddie back to the barn, that he hadn’t heard from Ruby in probably two months. He’d been busy, spending March and April getting his horses ready for the upcoming reining season. Travis and his barn manager, Ellie, had been working long days and nights, making sure the horses were conditioned properly, had their vet checks, and organized everything they’d need to haul with them to shows. There were training logs that had to be updated for their clients and plans to complete each week so they could perfect all of the moves they would need for the summer reining circuit. It was hours and hours of labor, but Travis loved it. He loved being outside, loved being with the horses, and loved the precision and challenge of trying to teach equine athletes how to spin, slide to a stop, and roll back—all moves that had been cut from real-life ranch maneuvers and turned into one of the most competitive equine sports in the world. It wasn’t just the Americans that had gotten in on it, in fact, the Italians were making a run to capture some of the biggest titles in the United States.

And in that space of time, he’d lost track of Ruby.

Or had she lost track of him?

Ellie met Travis at the barn door, Bear following right behind. He seemed to like to tail Ellie while she did her chores. She had on her typical daily attire, a pair of well-worn, low-slung jeans hugging her hips, a T-shirt, a leather belt, cowboy boots, and a baseball cap, her blonde hair braided down her back. Ellie didn’t have any makeup on, the early spring sun having pinked up her forearms and cheeks. Over her shoulders, she’d pulled on one of Travis’s flannel shirts he kept hung in the tack room. “You stole my shirt.”

Ellie shrugged. “It’s a little chilly in the tack room. She stuck her head outside looking at the sky. “It’s nice out here, though.” She bobbed her head in Maddie’s direction. “How is she today?”

Travis shrugged, handing the lead to Ellie. “Well, we’ve already had one bout of lead chewing. She even reared on the way back from the pasture.”

“Same old, same old, huh?” Ellie shook her head. “I’m gonna put her on the lunge line for ten or fifteen minutes, let her work the sass out before I get her tacked up.”

Travis nodded. That was a good idea. The lunge line would let Ellie stay on the ground while Maddie circled. “Yeah. Have her do a bunch of trotting. I need to make sure she’s limbered up so we can work on those circles.”

Ellie narrowed her eyes. “You still thinking about taking her to the Derby?”

The National Reining Horse Association’s annual Derby was being held in Oklahoma City in two weeks. Travis had registered a bunch of his horses to go, including Maddie, but there were a few that were still on the bubble. Maddie was one of them. “I don’t know. She’s certainly good at the spins and the stops for it, but with those circles and lead changes, I’m not sure.” The patterns that were prescribed by the NRHA included some real showstopper moves, stops where the horses were galloping along and then locked out their back legs, tossing dirt up in the air as their front legs ran along. It was the thing of magazine covers, that and the high-powered spins that the horses could do, but Travis knew the truth. Reining competitions were won and lost on the finesse moves, the slow and fast circles, and the lead changes that made up the figure eight patterns. There were lots of things that a pro could do to help his horse fudge the stops and the spins and even the rollbacks to some degree, but the circles and lead changes told the judges everything they needed to know. That included how good the trainer was and what the horse was actually capable of.

Was Maddie ready for that? He didn’t know.

Travis was just about ready to answer Ellie’s question when he felt his phone vibrate in his back pocket. He held up a finger to Ellie, pulled it out and looked at it. It was a text message from an unknown number. It said nothing but 911. Travis sucked in a breath and looked at Ellie. “I gotta go.”

Ellie raised an eyebrow. “One of those?”

Travis shrugged, not saying anything. He couldn’t. Ellie was former military, so she understood that Travis had some duties that didn’t have anything to do with the horses, ones he couldn’t talk about. She was always good about holding down the fort.

She was even better at not asking questions.

7

Travis stepped aside as Ellie took Maddie back into the barn. As he turned, he saw Maddie look over her shoulder at him, her tail swishing as if she was irritated by the fact that Travis had handed her off. Travis shook his head. She was a pistol, that one. He walked around the front of the barn and got into the four-by-four he’d parked outside. He pressed on the accelerator and drove up the driveway to the ranch house, pulling around the back. Leaving the four-by-four outside, he walked around the side door, keyed in the code and stepped inside, sliding off his boots. Yes, it was a 911 call, but they could wait, at least for a minute.

On his way through the kitchen, he grabbed a bottle of cold water out of the refrigerator. Ellie might need a flannel shirt to keep her warm, but the summer heat was already starting to gather as far as he was concerned.

That was life in Texas.

Twisting the top of the bottle off and taking a drink, he walked into the family room where he approached a bookshelf, then stopped. Curving his hand around the edge, he flipped up a hook that swung the bookshelf away from the wall, the entire thing rotating. Behind where the bookshelf had been located was a door. He pressed his thumb on the fingerprint reader and keyed in the code. It only took a second for the lock to pop open.

Travis’s war room had originally started off as an oversized pantry that had been built between the kitchen and the family room. When he had found the property, his plan was to build a life with Kira there. Of course, at the time, he had no idea she’d betray him.

So, his plans changed.

Travis had converted the pantry to a secure room where he could work without having to be concerned about prying eyes. At the time he’d built the room, he had planned to use it for his other business — a skip-tracing operation where he’d find things that were missing, whether people, jewelry or valuable items. But then the CIA came calling again. And now, with a six-figure contract in play anytime they called, Travis had decided to use the war room as a base of operations, a place where he could have secure communications and keep documents and not have to worry about who might be in his house.

Not that he had a lot of house guests.

Travis sighed, looking at his phone again as the door clicked closed behind him. There was only one person who would text him from a non-traceable number and only send him a 911.

David Freeman, the Director of the CIA.

Being able to report directly to the President and David Freeman was part of the deal when Travis had agreed to be available for work that the CIA didn’t feel like they could do in-house. He’d had enough years of working his way up the chain, dealing with case officers and other middlemen in the CIA’s vast bureaucracy, everyone a professional liar, everyone ultimately out to protect their own interests. If the U.S. government wanted his skills, not only would they have to pay for it, but they would have to cut through the red tape and let him just do his job, his way. It was like most things in Travis’s life — he preferred to figure out what the problem was and get it fixed. No need for a lot of talking. No need for a lot of paperwork. Just get the job done.

That was just the way he was tuned up.

It took David Freeman all of half of a ring before he picked up. “Took you long enough.”

Travis frowned. “I do have other things to do.” Neither he nor David used any names during their conversation. Though Travis was sure that David was using a secure line, it was just a good habit. Technology, particularly signals intelligence, was constantly evolving. One minute your communications were secure, the next minute, they weren’t. It was something that Travis tried to keep up with, along with the ranch and all of the work it required.

But then again, he had to be prepared in case they called. And now they had.

“I need you.”

“How soon?”

“Now.”

Travis winced. Was he kidding? “Like now, now?” Travis thought of Maddie and the other horses he was getting ready for the Derby.

“Yep.”

Travis swung his head from side to side. “I’ve got stuff going on. I’m not sure if⁠—”

David’s voice was low when he responded, deadly serious. “Listen, we’ve got trouble. It’s the kind that we need you to help us with, and the need is urgent.”

Travis stood up and stared at the ceiling, cracking his neck. “All right, you wanna give me an idea what I’m walking into?”

“Not over this line.”

Travis frowned. If David wasn’t willing to tell him anything about what he was walking into, even over a secure line, it must be a major problem. “Okay, fine. What do you have in mind?”

“Your ride is inbound.”

That meant he wasn’t doing something local, not that he expected it to be. “The same spot as usual?” Travis usually flew in and out of a small private airport that was just about a half an hour from his ranch in Burton, Texas.

“OK. I’ll be there in thirty minutes. Where am I going?”

“That’s not important. The pilot has the manifest. I’ll see you on the other side.”

The call ended.

8

After hanging up the phone with David, Travis shoved his phone in his back pocket. Out of one of the cabinets in the war room, he pulled out a black backpack that was already prepacked with clothes and toiletries that would last him for three days. Pretty much everything he would need was already in there—a couple changes of clothes, a jacket, and an extra pair of boots, plus cables to charge his phone. From a safe hidden behind a picture on the wall, he pulled out two new unused identity packs with clean passports and driver’s licenses that he could use to make his way around the world depending on exactly what Director Freeman needed him to do. He also grabbed cash in several different currencies, dollars, euros and even rubles.

After closing the safe, Travis walked over to another cabinet and opened the door, pressing his thumb on the fingerprint reader of his gun safe. In general, Travis wasn’t sure how he felt about gun safes. They were designed for people that had kids or who were concerned about someone who shouldn’t be getting into a cache of firearms. But in an emergency, the idea of having to try to fumble with a safe to get to a weapon that might save his life didn’t make much sense to him, hence the thumb reader. Even if he needed to move fast, he could shove his thumb up against the reader and get what he needed.

He raised an eyebrow. Luckily this wasn’t one of those minutes.

From inside the gun safe, he selected a Smith and Wesson nine-millimeter pistol, grabbed two prefilled magazines and a holster, settling it on his hip after making sure that the gun was loaded. On most planes, they would never let you travel with a weapon.

But then again, Travis wasn’t traveling for just anyone.

He was traveling for the CIA.

After locking his house, Travis walked out to the garage, opened the garage door, and heard the panels clatter as they ran along the track. He made a mental note to grease it when he got back.

Sliding inside his pickup truck, Travis tossed his go bag on the seat next to him. As he started the engine, he dropped his cell phone in the cup holder and put the truck into gear, backing it out of the driveway. As he pressed the button to close the garage door, he looked over his shoulder toward the barn. Ellie was walking Maddie outside. He looked down the long driveway and decided to make a quick detour to the barn. As he drove toward them, the tires kicked up plumes of dust he could taste. Ellie met him, holding Maddie, whose chest had darkened with some sweat after her warmup. Travis leaned out the window. “I gotta go. Got a job.”

“When will you be back?” Ellie knew better than to ask exactly where he was going or what he was doing. Even if she had, he wouldn’t have told her. She knew that Travis did occasional work for the government. What it was, he’d never said, but Ellie was smart. He was sure she’d put the pieces together at some point.

“Not sure. Hold down the fort.”

Ellie looked concerned for a second, as if the reality of having Travis gone was hitting her. “We’ve got a lot of horses to work over the next few days if you want them ready for the Derby.”

Travis nodded. This was one of the challenges of being on call with the CIA. The horse business was all day, every day. Even on Christmas, the horses needed food and water and to be cared for. Ellie was right. There was a lot of prep to be done if they hoped to have the horses ready, not disappoint the owners, and manage to have a good showing in Oklahoma. Travis looked away for a second and then back at Ellie, whose face was still, as if she was waiting for something. “Wasn’t there a new guy in town you wanted to give some hours to?” Travis had hired an assistant trainer the year before, but he had bailed, moving out to California or some other place. Travis didn’t care where. All he knew was that the guy was gone.

Ellie’s face brightened. “Yeah. He’s former military, too.” Ellie looked away. “I think Air Force.”

Travis winced. Being an Army guy, he was partial to the ground forces. “All right. Just make sure he isn’t flighty.”

Ellie wrinkled her nose and then grinned. “You couldn’t resist, could you?”

“Nope.”

The drive to the airport didn’t take very long, Travis humming along to a few songs on the radio he didn’t know as he drove, lost in his thoughts. He had no idea what David needed him for, but it had to be something serious.

Time would tell, wouldn’t it?

Travis pulled his truck into the parking lot as a sleek white Gulfstream waited on the tarmac. He grabbed his cell phone and backpack from the front seat and strode across the span of concrete between him and the plane after having exchanged his cowboy boots for work boots at the house. A man with a shock of gray hair and pockmarked skin, wearing black pants and a white uniformed pilot’s shirt met him at the door. “You Travis?”

Travis gave a nod. “I am.”

The pilot stepped aside. “Welcome aboard. I’m Rick.”

As Travis climbed up the steps, he heard rustling behind him. Rick had already pulled the steps up and secured the hatch by the time Travis found a seat. He stopped to look at Travis, eyeing the cockpit. “It’s just the two of us today. I’ll have you to your destination in about three hours, so feel free to have a snack and enjoy the in-flight entertainment as they say.” He pointed. “Galley is stocked. The head is in the back if you need to use it. I checked the weather on the way up. Should be smooth for the most part, but we might hit a couple of bumps. If I put on the fasten your seat belt sign, then I’d recommend doing it.”

Travis tossed his backpack on one of the seats and looked at Rick. “How come you’re flying solo today?”

Rick shrugged. “They called me in at the last second. Had just enough time to throw on my uniform and fuel up the jet. That was it. The guy that normally flies with me is at Disney or something. I don’t know.”

Travis nodded.

Rick checked his watch. “I gotta get you in the air. Come on upfront if you need anything, okay? This is gonna be a kind of a self-serve plane flight.”

As Travis turned back towards his seat, he realized that was just fine with him. The fewer people the better.

It felt like Travis had barely sat down in his seat when the plane engines revved, the motion pressing him back in his seat as they moved toward the runway at a quick clip. A brief pause at the top of the runway was all the warning Travis had before Rick throttled the engines up and the plane hurtled down the tarmac and into the sky. Gripping the armrests, Travis raised his eyebrows. This guy wasn’t playing around. Wherever the CIA needed to get him to, they needed him there fast.

As the plane leveled off, Travis stared out the small round window, waiting for the plane to establish a course after a few initial banks. Even the pilot hadn’t said exactly where they were going. The thought stuck with Travis. All the cloak-and-dagger secrecy was pretty normal for the CIA, but usually they gave him a clue where he was headed to. Travis looked out the window. It had been late morning when he was leaving Texas. The sun was directly overhead, just slightly to the right of the plane as it slid to the west, anticipating the sunset in half a day or so. That meant they were going north.

But where exactly north of Texas he was headed, he had no idea.

9

Three hours and some change later, after taking a nap on the plane, eating a sandwich, and drinking a bottle of tepid water, Travis felt the plane start to descend. Rick came on over the intercom. “We’re just about to land, Travis. You might wanna put your seat belt on. Wind gusts out of the mountains can make things a little bumpy during the descent.”

Mountains?

Travis knew they had been headed north, but how far north they were going had been almost impossible to establish. He knew that the Gulfstream would travel approximately six hundred miles per hour, but that didn’t really help. It could be six hundred miles per hour in any direction. The one thing that was true about aviation is if you altered your course by one degree over hundreds of miles, that could put you in a completely different place. Travis had no idea where they were.

But he had a feeling he would soon find out.

The Gulfstream bumped down onto the tarmac without any drama or any of the blowing out of the mountains that Rick had warned him about. As the Gulfstream taxied away from the buildings that Travis could see out of the window, he unfastened his seat belt and pulled his backpack close to him, looking around, making sure he had everything. Not that he’d really gotten anything out of his bag. He had only used his cell phone just to check a few emails. He got up, tossed the trash he’d accumulated in a trash can he found near where the food had been stowed and sat back down on his seat. A minute later, the airplane slowed and then stopped. From out of the window, Travis could see that there was only a single low building nearby, a black SUV sitting and waiting.

As soon as the airplane stopped, Rick hopped out of his seat, the metal buckles of his safety harness clanking as they disengaged. He walked toward the main hatch, opening it and dropping the steps. Travis shook his hand. “Thanks for the ride.”

Rick nodded and smiled. “You bet. Good luck.”

As Travis walked down the steps, it occurred to him that Rick’s comment was a little strange. Did the pilot know something that Travis didn’t? Travis glanced back at the plane. Rick had already disappeared inside, leaving Travis with a hollow feeling in his belly.

What exactly had he gotten himself into?

As Travis walked toward the black SUV, the driver’s side window rolled down. It was none other than David Freeman, his expression stony. He said nothing, just motioning for Travis to get in on the passenger side. Feeling surprised that the Director of the CIA himself was on airport pickup duty, Travis jogged around the front of the SUV, opened up the back seat and tossed his backpack inside, sliding in the passenger seat next to David. Surprisingly, there was no one else in the car. He skipped the “hello’s” and “how are you’s?” “Must be serious if you’re the one coming to pick me up.”

David’s face looked ashen. “You have no idea. There was no one else to come and get you. Everybody else is at the scene.”

Travis waited for a beat before he looked at David, the words hanging heavy in the air. David’s jaw was tense, his cropped dark hair tight to his scalp. He was wearing casual clothes for the Director of the CIA — a plaid shirt and khaki pants. Nothing too outlandish, nothing that would make him stick out in a crowd. In fact, David could have passed for a middle-level manager driving around town. Travis adjusted the gun on his hip. “All right, David. I’m here, wherever that is. What am I getting myself into? What’s such a big deal that I had to drop everything?”

David shook his head, resting his left elbow on the window ledge as he drove. “Like I said on the phone, we’ve got a problem to solve. And this one is big.” He glanced at Travis. “A few hours ago, all of the former presidents of the United States were meeting for a lunch at former President Pierce Ewing’s mountain retreat.” David shifted in his seat. “Just in case you want to have an idea where you are, you’re in Idaho. We’re not too far from the Canadian border. Nearest town is called Bonners Ferry.”

Travis grimaced. “Thanks for that, I guess. What’s going on with the former presidents? Why am I here?” Travis knew that any gathering of more than one former president would have put the event on high alert for the Secret Service. There was nothing that security people hated more than to have more than one high-value target within half a mile of each other. The farther apart they could keep the targets, the higher the likelihood they had of keeping people safe. While Travis knew that former presidents were not as big of a target as the current president and vice president would be for foreign governments, they still had secrets to share, top secret clearances, and information stored in their brains that no one else ever had.

David sighed. “Well, I guess Former President Ewing and his wife got it into their heads that they wanted to have a pow-wow with the rest of the former presidents. They organized some sort of outing or something.” He waved a hand in the air dismissively as if the reason they were meeting didn’t really matter. David continued. “I was just on the phone with Zach, and he said they knew about it and had done what they needed to do for security, but…”

Travis knitted his eyebrows together. Zach Brooks was the new Director of the Secret Service. “What happened, David? And why on God’s green earth is the CIA involved? We’re in the U.S., not abroad.” The CIA’s charter focused on work overseas, not on American soil. That was the territory of the FBI.

David chewed his lip for a second. “I was getting to that. Anyway, from what I’ve heard, the formers all sat down for lunch and long story short, a highly trained team comes out of the woods with fully automatic rifles. Basically, mows everybody down that’s within a hundred feet.”

Immediately, Travis’s mind visualized the scene. The spray of automatic weapons was not something that you could avoid, especially at that close of a range. His mouth went dry. That was an enormous amount of firepower in a small area. “Oh my God. Did anyone survive?”

David’s face paled even more. “Of the presidential families, only Jessica Ewing. She apparently bent over to adjust her shoe when the shooting started. The noise startled her so badly she fell over onto the ground. The assailants likely assumed they killed her. She was smart. Played dead until they left.”

“Anyone else?”

“If you’re asking me about the rest of the former presidents, then the answer is no. Whoever did this managed to single-handedly murder five former United States presidents in the space of about ten seconds. And that isn’t all. They managed to take out almost a dozen Secret Service agents, a lot of the wait staff that was at the house, and even a couple of musicians that were in the backyard playing their guitars.” David glanced at Travis and then back at the road. “It’s bad. Really bad.”

Travis sat, staring straight forward, letting the details sink in. His mind went to President Mosley. Had Robert been told? Travis knew the answer. It was obvious. The minute anything like this happened, he would have been ushered down to the bunker below the White House, with his security detail, kept on lockdown in PEOC until the Secret Service could be sure the attack was over. Travis turned towards David. “Any idea who did this?”

David shook his head. “No. The agent in charge managed to survive. She’ll give us more information when we get there. I landed just a few minutes before you did, so I haven’t been to the scene yet. But Zach has been blowing up my phone for the last hour.”

“Where’s he?”

“With the President.”

“I’m assuming he’s in PEOC?”

David nodded. “He is, at least for the time being. You know as well as I do that Robert doesn’t like being down there. I’m sure he’s putting up a fuss.”

That still didn’t answer the most pressing question in Travis’s mind. “And the role of the CIA in all of this?” Travis asked. He was pretty sure he already knew the answer, but it was worth confirming. Things with the CIA were always murky. Better to have at least an initial understanding before he put boots on the ground.

“To help the Secret Service figure out exactly who did this.”

The answer annoyed Travis. That was stating the obvious. The better question was why. Travis began to calculate. If the CIA had been called in, that meant they were considering all options — foreign and domestic. And if Travis had been called in, that meant they wanted action and they weren’t interested in a big team to handle it, nor did they want to wait for a full analysis. It could be dangerous, but then again, whoever had gone after five former American presidents didn’t seem to care too much about danger. “Is the FBI here?”

David shook his head, then gave Travis a knowing look, one that said politics were already involved. “No. Zach called. He told me that the head of the FBI is screaming bloody murder about not being involved, but President Mosley is afraid that there will be leaks, especially if any local press happens to see a whole bunch of black SUVs rolling up to President Ewing’s mountain retreat. The FBI isn’t always known for their discretion, if you know what I mean. Too many agents with too many different agendas.” David looked straight forward for a moment, as if he was considering what to say next. “President Mosley wants the Secret Service and the CIA to head this up. He’s got Homeland and FBI doing some work in the background, but he’s keeping them away from the site. Only the Directors and their immediate teams know what’s going on. Gotta keep a tight lid on it for the time being until we know more. Can’t afford a leak. The press is gonna have a field day. This is the kind of thing that could really shake people up — tank the stock market, the whole thing. Might be as bad as 9/11 in terms of what it does to everyday Americans.”

“It’s not an election year, David.”

David pressed his lips together. “Don’t tell Mosley that. When you occupy the White House, it’s always an election year.”

Travis lifted an eyebrow, ceding the point. On the face of it, it would make sense in Travis’s mind to have the FBI involved. After all, they were the agency that was in charge of all domestic investigations, especially ones of this magnitude and scope. But on the other hand, the FBI had experienced issues in the recent past of people leaking information that shouldn’t be leaked, getting the press all riled up. He knew from David that a cleanout had begun at the agency, but clearly President Mosley wasn’t convinced the changes had taken hold yet. And given the fact that murdering five former presidents was probably not done by someone domestically, it made logical sense to loop the CIA in from the beginning. Travis adjusted to the baseball cap on his head. “So, what’s the plan?”

He saw that flicker of muscles across David’s jaw. “Figure out who did this and make them pay.”

Travis stared out at the mountains looming in front of them. Find someone who’d managed to sneak past the Secret Service and do this kind of destruction? He drew in a long, deep breath, feeling the muscles in the back of his neck tighten.

Simple enough, right?

10

Travis and David drove the rest of the way to former President Ewing’s mountain retreat in silence. Travis watched the GPS in the SUV as they drove, noticing the time count down, the two of them getting closer and closer. He braced himself for what he was about to see at the scene.

Eight minutes later, the SUV bumped from the road they were on onto a long, winding gravel driveway with nothing but a black mailbox at the street. It took a good two minutes for the front of the house to come into sight.

The house itself was stunning, something that Travis knew would be the kind of house that he’d like to live in: steeply pointed rooflines accented with brown wood siding, rough-hewn beams, and carefully manicured landscaping. The view of the front of the house was obscured by at least two dozen glossy SUVs in a variety of different colors and styles, most of them black, most of them looking like they were owned by the government. The front door of the house was open, four Secret Service agents spread equidistant across the front perimeter as if someone had measured exactly the distance they should be separated.

Typical Secret Service. They needed to lighten up.

As Travis got out of the car, he heard the engine from a four-by-four off to his left, glimpsing it going up a hillside on some sort of a trail toward the woods, two agents inside of it.

David walked toward the front door, where a Secret Service agent held his hand up. David flashed his credentials and kept walking as if he wasn’t surprised the agent had no idea that he’d just encountered the Director of the CIA. The agent pointed at Travis without saying anything. David looked over his shoulder. “He’s with me.”

The two of them passed through the house quickly, striding out to the backyard, passing by a large great room adorned with overstuffed furniture, a large rug on the floor, a stone fireplace. The heads and antlers of animals were hung as artfully as could be done on the walls. Travis stared at them for a minute. Had Mrs. Ewing wanted her great room covered in dead animals? Travis himself had no problem with it, but it was a little surprising given what he knew about former President Ewing, who was a city guy.

As they kept moving, Travis heard quiet weeping. They passed a white kitchen where plates and food had been abandoned, a few of the staff members sitting on stools sharing a box of tissues. They were getting close. From what David had said, Travis knew the backyard was the site of the devastation, but as he stepped through the glass doors at the back of the house, he wasn’t prepared for what he saw.

Minus the death and destruction that had been inflicted on President Ewing’s mountain retreat, the scene was spectacular. There was a set of snowcapped mountains rising up in the background, the sky clear and crystal blue, stands of thick evergreens and hemlocks surrounding the property. Off to the right there was a kidney-shaped pool, a pool house, and a sprawling deck. From what Travis could tell, it looked like the party had been set up in the middle of the lawn, a long table hauled out to accommodate the former presidents and their wives.

But now, it didn’t look like a picturesque scene from the Bonners Ferry Chamber of Commerce, but like a clip from a horror film.

Travis felt his mouth go dry. Even though David had told him what had happened, it didn’t prepare him for what he saw in front of him.

Bloodied bodies slumped over the tables and on the ground, their arms flailed across their food or dangling lifelessly where their body had fallen. Chairs were tipped over. Bile forced its way up to Travis’s mouth. He couldn’t imagine what Hernandez’s face looked like. If he had to guess, it was probably gone. Travis scanned the scene, deciding that looking in too much detail wasn’t worth it. He got the gist. It was exactly as David had described — a devastating, horrifying mess, bodies twisted in every direction.

And worse yet? Travis could tell they hadn’t had a prayer of making it out alive. The back of the house was a security nightmare. No fence, just what looked to be acres and acres of wilderness behind it. Whoever had done this had gone for maximum impact.

They’d gotten what they wanted.

Travis lifted his eyes from the dead bodies. Crime scene techs wearing filmy yellow coveralls, gloves, and masks moved around the scene silently, taking pictures like ghosts visiting the dead. What agency they were from exactly, Travis didn’t know. In his mind, it didn’t matter. They were there to do a job. So was he.

Looking to his left, Travis noticed that several of the back windows of the home had been shattered from the gunfire, the shards of glass left in the window jagged, glinting in the bright sunshine. His eyes traveled back to the scene. The white-shirted serving staff who’d gotten caught in the crossfire peppered the ground, crimson blooms of blood staining their shirts. In the process of the bodies falling, a few chairs had been topped over. A few bodies were draped over them.

As Travis’s eyes moved toward the wood line, he saw the silhouettes of dark uniformed Secret Service agents who had been completely caught off guard by the attack from the dark of the woods. Based on how they had fallen, they’d gotten flanked, dead before they had any idea that a dangerous threat was coming out of the woods at them. They were probably some of the first to fall.

Travis swallowed and looked away again, shaking his head. It was a lot to absorb, probably one of the bloodiest scenes he’d ever viewed, even in his time with the military and when he was an active CIA operative. He watched as the crime scene photographers and investigators moved silently around the sight as if they were visiting a sacred shrine, only stopping to speak in whispered tones. Fully outfitted tactical officers had taken up a perimeter around the house, not that there was anyone else really left to protect, unless you counted David Freeman and Jessica Ewing.

The damage had been done.

“What a disaster,” David whispered under his breath. As Travis glanced toward him, he noticed that David’s fists were balled, his thumbs rubbing against the side of his curled index finger as if he had pent-up energy he was trying to get rid of. A second later his hands relaxed. Was it forced? Travis didn’t know. Travis hadn’t spent a lot of time with David in person. But he’d known him to be calm, maybe overly so. His white-knuckle grip was telling of how tenuous the situation was.

Travis was just about to walk out into the yard to survey the damage up close when a brown-haired woman wearing a black suit with a white blouse strode over to them. She held her chin up, her lips thin, her skin pallid. She looked at David. “Director Freeman, I’m CJ Crosswell. Director Brooks told me to introduce myself. I’m the agent in charge.” She looked at the bloody scene. “Or I was.”

Travis’s heart tightened in his chest. There was nothing he could do but feel sorry for this poor woman that was standing in front of them. She looked like she was doing everything she could to hold it together. He couldn’t blame her. What had happened was nothing short of a complete and utter security breach, something that the Secret Service didn’t tolerate.

David turned to her. “Agent Croswell, it’s nice to meet you.”

CJ stiffened. “I’m sorry sir, I don’t agree. Not under these circumstances. I don’t know exactly what to say⁠—”

David held a hand up. “Apologies aren’t going to get us anywhere, Crosswell. We need information. That’s all.”

Travis lifted a single eyebrow. David was right, of course. There was nothing they could do about the blood that had been spilled just a few hours before.

The only thing that they could do was investigate and respond.

To do that they needed information. They needed to know who had gone after the former presidents and why. They needed to know their motivation and their endgame. It was like trying to figure out the pieces on a chess board when someone already had checkmate. Travis’s mind started to churn, thinking through the possible options. Who would want five former presidents dead? And who was willing to risk this type of bloody assault on the United States knowing the type of response it would have? And probably the best question of all, how had they gotten the intel that all of the presidents would be in the same place at one time?

David’s voice interrupted his thoughts. “Agent Crosswell, can you give me a rundown on what happened as best as you can remember and what steps have been taken up until now?”

CJ straightened. “Well, sir, it’s probably easier if I start with where we are now. The scene has been secured. Director Brooks authorized me to call in every Secret Service agent within a twenty-five-mile radius. Given where we are, there aren’t a ton of us nearby, but we have more on the way.” She pointed. “Luckily, we had an evidence team in Spokane doing some training. They were flown in. Got here about an hour ago and have been processing the scene since then.” The words came out measured, as if it was hard for her to admit there was a scene to process. CJ paused and then started again. “And we have re-established a perimeter.”

“Have you done any investigative work as of yet?” Travis asked, pointing at her. He wondered if CJ had just been busy acting as an administrator or if she had a taste for figuring out what was behind the attack.

CJ turned toward him. He noticed she was pretty in a very practical way, with evenly spaced features, brown eyes, and brown hair that he guessed had started off that morning tightly tied behind her neck. He could tell by the way that she moved that she worked out regularly, her stride as she had approached them, athletic and confident despite the circumstances that she’d been through just a few hours before.

“I haven’t exactly had time, sir. I’ve been busy securing the scene and dealing with communications back to Director Brooks.” CJ regarded Travis with the even, cool look of an interloper. She clearly didn’t appreciate his line of questioning. Travis pressed his lips together, sizing her up. She was looking at him like he had no business even addressing her in that moment. Standing there in his jeans and his baseball cap, he understood why. He gave her a slight nod. “Understandable. By the way, I’m Travis Bishop.” He extended his hand to CJ. She took it and shook it briefly, her fingers so cold they felt like she’d stuck them in the freezer. As she pulled her hand back, he noticed it was shaking. When she looked up, her gaze told him that she knew that he’d noticed her hands shaking. She quickly stuffed her hands in her pockets and looked up at him. “I’m assuming you’re with the CIA?”

The shaking will stop. It just takes a few hours. He nodded. “You could say that.”

By the look on her face, he could tell that she had questions about who he was and what his relationship was to the CIA. After all, he wasn’t dressed in a suit or even in work clothes that might even be close to business casual like David Freeman was. But Travis didn’t owe CJ any explanation about who he was or what his relationship was with the CIA.

At least not yet.

Travis glanced at David. David looked back at him and then reached for his cell phone. Apparently, he wasn’t ready to give Travis any instructions yet. As David stepped away to take a phone call, Travis looked at CJ. “Come on. Let’s go take a walk.”

As Travis stepped off the deck, he saw CJ following him out of the corner of his eye. Given how she’d reacted to him, he was half surprised that she did. Travis walked across the broad flagstone deck and down two wide steps into the backyard. He stopped as soon as they hit the grass, looking at CJ. “It would be helpful to know where you were and what happened. Think you can tell me that?” Travis tried to make the request as gentle as possible. He was asking for the information, but he needed her to talk to him. She was one of the few witnesses they had.

But would she?

11

CJ’s trembling hands were evidence of the fact that she’d been shaken by the attack. Then again, who wouldn’t be? He knew what was going through her body — the adrenaline pumping through her body that could leave people feeling lightheaded and nauseated, their blood pressure surging out of control. Shaking hands, the inability to concentrate, stumbling over words, those were all things that were common to someone who’d just been through what CJ had been through. Sure, the Secret Service’s training and live fire situations would help her to recover, but from Travis’s time in the field with both the Army and the CIA, he knew there was nothing that would actually prepare anyone for the moment when everything hit the fan.

And clearly that was what had happened here.

As he looked over his shoulder, he saw CJ stop, her face paling, now a ghostly white, her features frozen as if she was back in the moment. She sucked in a deep breath and then glanced at him. “Sorry,” she said, shaking her head as if it was filled with cobwebs. “I’m just trying to piece it all together.”

“That’s no problem. Just tell me what you remember. If I don’t understand, I’ll ask you a question.” He smiled. “You’re debriefing me, not the Director, Crosswell. We’re just having a conversation, that’s all.”

CJ’s shoulders relaxed. She stood on the step for a second and then followed him down onto the grass. Her movements were tentative, as though she was a small child putting her toes into the cold ocean for the first time. She stopped for a moment, staring at the grass and the scene in front of her. “Everything was going fine,” she said, staring into the distance, “and then it all changed so fast.” A dark shadow crossed her face, her features tightening, her cheeks pinking, and then the color retreating as if the memory fading away had taken her very life with it.

Travis didn’t say anything, waiting for her to continue. C’mon, Crosswell, you gotta give me something. I don’t want to strongarm you, but we need answers.

“I’m sorry,” she said, shaking her head as if she was trying to get the cobwebs out of her thoughts. She lifted her chin again as she started to speak, pointing toward the table, then dropping her hand. “All of the former presidents and their wives had arrived. They were seated around the table. Things were fine. The serving staff had just cleared the appetizer course and had served lunch. A few of them were returning to the kitchen with dirty plates.” CJ pointed to her right. “The guitar players were over there playing away while everyone ate.” She squeezed her eyes closed for a moment and then looked at Travis. “It all seemed normal. The serving staff was buzzing in and out, the music was going. President Ewing seemed in his element. We had completely vetted everyone that was here.”

Travis didn’t doubt that and yet something horrific had still happened. Whether CJ felt like she had dotted all her I’s and crossed all of her T’s was inconsequential. There was a gap somewhere. That gap had been leveraged to kill five former U.S. presidents. “And you had a full perimeter set up?”

CJ nodded. “Yes, with the focus being the front of the house because that’s where the access to the roads are. The back of the house,” she pointed, “goes up into the Selkirk Mountain range. We’re pretty close to the Canadian border. The only thing that’s that way is rugged terrain, bears, and mountain lions. We had a perimeter around the edge of the yard. It never occurred to me that⁠—”

Travis shook his head, looking down at the ground. What a disaster. He looked at CJ. Now that he’d gotten her talking, she seemed a little more relaxed. The color was slowly coming back to her skin. He cocked his head to the side. “It wouldn’t have occurred to me either if that makes you feel any better.” The truth was, it had, but only now that something had happened. The decision not to secure the backyard better was a calculated risk that hadn’t paid off. Then again, trying to secure it would have been a monumental task.

“All due respect, it doesn’t.” Her voice was stony. She leveled her gaze at Travis. “I now have five dead former presidents and four dead former first ladies on my record. That’s not a good day by anybody’s account.”

Travis stood silent, not sure what to say. CJ was right. It wasn’t a good look. History would remember this day. It probably wouldn’t remember CJ or her team or the other people who had lost their lives, but it would be remembered, nonetheless. And CJ had the dubious distinction to carry that with her for the rest of her life.

If anyone knew about carrying the past, Travis did.

Travis was going to tell her that it wasn’t her fault, that it was a team effort, that somehow something had gone awry that she had no control over and couldn’t have planned for, but he didn’t bother. He could tell by the look on CJ’s face that she was busy holding onto a barrel full of guilt. If that was what she wanted to do, then he wasn’t going to get in the way. She’d have to figure it out on her own. “Then what happened?”

CJ’s eyes became unfocused for a second, then she started to speak. “I was just about to walk into the house to do a sweep around the front perimeter when I saw something moving at the wood line out of the corner of my eye.” She paused for a second. “By the time I realized it was a person and turned to reach for my weapon, we were buried under a full volley of automatic weapons fire.”

“You’re sure it was full auto?”

CJ narrowed her eyes at Travis as if she couldn’t quite believe he was asking the question. “Yes, I’m sure,” she answered, an edge of impatience in her voice.

Travis crossed his arms in front of his chest. He didn’t mean to insult her. He just needed to know. He’d learned long ago that wasting time on worrying about people’s feelings got people killed. If it was fully automatic rifle fire, then the overwhelming spray of ammunition from the weapons aimed against the former presidents, the serving staff, and the Secret Service agents would have been completely overwhelming. From his own training, Travis knew a fully automatic AR-15 style rifle could send about ten rounds a second, or nearly six hundred every minute. Fully automatic weapons weren’t designed for precision. They were designed for complete dominance, best used for cover fire.

He looked to his left at the shattered windows across the back of the house, casualties of the attack. A few workmen had just arrived, carrying sheets of plywood, probably called in by the Secret Service or better yet, probably employed by them to secure the Ewing home. Travis looked back at CJ after noticing that the siding on the back of the house was pockmarked with rounds. The crime scene techs would be there for days trying to dig them all out. “And then what?”

CJ shook her head. “I’m sorry to say I did what any other person would have done. I dove for cover.” She pointed at a concrete planter that was about two and a half feet high and probably four or five feet wide. “I ended up on my back. I flipped over, got off a couple of shots around the edge, but against automatic fire, what’s a measly nine-millimeter going to do?”

Travis gave a short nod. She was absolutely right. Automatic fire was nearly impossible to defend against unless you had some sort of an armored vehicle. Given the fact the Secret Service agents didn’t have warning or weapons that could match their attackers, they were seriously outgunned. In Travis’s mind, it was almost as bad as bringing a knife to a gunfight. “Any idea how many gunmen there were?”

CJ shrugged. “It happened really fast, but if I could guess, I think there were probably anywhere from four to six. As soon as they finished spraying everything down, they retreated into the woods. Disappeared as fast as they came.” She licked her lips. “By the time I got up, they were gone. Disappeared like a bunch of shadows. Honestly, I’ve never seen anything like it.”

Travis raised his eyebrows. “Let’s hope that you never see anything like it again.”

She looked away for a moment. When she looked back at Travis, her eyes were filling with tears. “I ran out into the yard. I tried to render aid, but there was nothing I could do. It was too late.”

Travis had just started to extend his hand toward CJ to console her, when he saw Director Freeman emerge from inside of the house. He pointed at CJ and waved for her to come and join him. Acknowledging that their briefing was done, CJ looked at Travis, gave him a short nod and then walked over to where the Director was standing. He watched as she straightened. It was like seeing someone march off to the principal’s office.

But much worse.

Turning away from them, Travis walked down into the yard, walking through the crime scene slowly, trying to absorb as many of the details as he could given how much there was to notice. He was moving at the same careful pace that he would if he was looking at a horse he was interested in buying, except this time the only thing his eyes saw was carnage.

Then again, no matter what he saw and no matter what he figured out, the result was the same. They were all dead.

As Travis approached the table where the former presidents had been eating their lunch, he slowed. He recognized all of the people around the table. After all, who wouldn’t? These were former presidents. He saw Wes Mercer with his shock of gray hair slumped over the table, blooms of blood out of the back of his shirt. Griffin Hale and Joe Hernandez had ended up on the ground. George Ellis and his wife had tumbled off their seats, and Pierce Ewing had fallen across the table as though he’d tried to stand up or been standing up when the attack happened, his torso landing across his place setting, his face turned off to the side, his eyes staring at nothing. How Jessica Ewing had managed to survive, he wasn’t sure. A few flies buzzed over the food that had been left behind, the glint of broken glass spread over the table and on the lawn like shiny little jewels in the late afternoon sunlight. It was eerily quiet, only the quiet rustling of the new spring leaves on the Aspens nearby, plus the slow shuffling of the crime scene technicians and the click of the cameras as the photographers cataloged the scene.

Travis stopped to take a look at a few of the bodies. If he had any doubt about whether automatic fire had been responsible for the devastation, the thought evaporated. Each one of the bodies that he looked at had multiple gunshot wounds scattered all over them like pockmarks. These poor people, he thought, shaking his head; they had been mowed down when they least expected it.

Travis made his way over to where the musicians and the bartenders had been. Their bodies had crumpled on the ground where they stood, just like the former presidents and their wives. A half-mixed drink was on the counter, a bottle of Jack Daniels tipped over on the lawn. Travis glanced toward the musicians. Their sheet music had holes in it like Swiss cheese, their guitars splintered in the firefight. Travis sighed, feeling tension mount in his chest. He couldn’t imagine the onslaught. Had they been afraid? Given how fast CJ had said it happened, Travis guessed lives were snuffed out before anyone had a chance to be scared. Maybe there was mercy in that. Travis stood for a moment, frozen among the bodies. A sinking feeling collected in his gut. There was no chance for anyone to escape. Whoever had done this had chosen this method of attack for a specific reason. It was instantaneous and devastating with no hope for survival.

Just as CJ had described.

Travis had seen enough. He walked back across the lawn. David and CJ had disappeared somewhere. Where, he wasn’t exactly sure, so Travis went back inside the house. Off to the left, in the big ranch kitchen, there were people quietly cleaning up. He could hear sniffling from the staff that was left behind, seeing one woman dab at her eyes as she packaged up food that was left from the luncheon. She looked up at Travis with watery eyes as he walked past. To his right, in the great room, he spotted Jessica Ewing, the former first lady, sitting by herself in an overstuffed armchair covered in a western-inspired print in reds, tans, and yellows. She was looking out the front window, her eyes not focused on anything. Travis approached her, his heart sinking. She, like CJ, had a dubious distinction on this day. Mrs. Ewing was the only one of the presidential couples left standing. “Ma’am, can I get you anything?”

She looked over at him evenly, then moved her eyes back to the window. “No. But thank you.”

Travis sat down on the couch next to her and waited for a second. “I’m sorry to ask this, ma’am, but I wondered if I could throw a couple of questions your way?”

She narrowed her eyes as if suddenly seeing Travis for the first time. “I don’t know you.”

That was fair. He couldn’t imagine that she’d want to talk to anyone she didn’t know. The poor thing had just lost her husband. “Yes, ma’am, I realize that. My name is Travis. I work for the CIA.”

She furrowed her eyebrows. “You don’t look like you work for the government,” she said dryly.

Travis gave her a gentle smile. “Well, that’s part of the plan, ma’am.”

Jessica nodded as if she just realized that what she had said sounded kind of silly. “Yes, I suppose it is, isn’t it?” She straightened. Travis imagined she was rising to the occasion, like any first lady would have to do thousands of times during their term, facing down both allies and enemies of the United States. “What would you like to know?”

It was typical first lady behavior. The only people in government service that were steelier and more suspicious than the presidents were their wives. They’d been trained over the years to not answer questions, know how to get away from the press, identify who was a friend or foe with a simple glance. Foreign governments were always trying to work an angle to try to get information on what the United States was up to. The last thing that a sitting president needed was to have their spouse be the weak link, spouting off information that needed to be kept quiet.

“First of all, let me say I’m so sorry this happened. And I’m very sorry for your loss.” Travis knew that manners mattered, especially in a crisis. Barging headfirst into an interrogation would do nothing but cause Jessica to stonewall him. There was a time to be gentle. This was it.

Jessica closed her eyes for a second and then looked at him. “Thank you. Now, how can I help?”

Right to business? Okay. “Ma’am, did you have any concerns about security today? Any inkling that something seemed off? Even though the smallest thing might help us figure out what happened.”

“You’re not the first person to ask me that in the last couple of hours. No, everything seemed fine. If you’re looking to jam up that Secret Service agent, that gal named CJ, I don’t think she’s your problem. She seemed to have everything covered pretty well.”

Travis hadn’t thought that, but it was interesting that Jessica had brought it up. “Why do you say that, ma’am?”

“Listen, I’ve been around Secret Service agents for decades at this point. They’ve been assigned to us since my husband was vice president. That went on for eight years, then another eight years when he was president, and now in his retirement. CJ is one of the strictest I’ve seen. She did a good job today. Gave me a heck of a hard time about having the party outside.” Jessica stopped and stared at nothing. Her hands balled in her lap. “Whoever got to us was someone that we just weren’t prepared for.”

It was an interesting observation. “Ma’am, was your husband concerned about anything? Had he shared with you that there was anything that he wanted to talk about with the other former presidents?” Travis knew a dirty little secret about former presidents—as much as they were former, they weren’t, not really. Former presidents still had the right to be read in on the status of the United States, including security threats and concerns. They’d been known to assist the sitting president and or their political party in government operations long after they were out of office from a position behind the scenes. People might not see a former president on the television anymore, but that didn’t mean they weren’t active in government. After all, former presidents were not only part of an elite group, but they were also some of the most skilled negotiators in government operations that the United States had. Their collective knowledge and understanding of not only the history of the United States, but they also knew all of the undocumented, undisclosed backroom deals, negotiations, threats, and situations during their term was something that would be foolish for the current government officials to ignore.

“No, Pierce wasn’t worried about anything. I know he had a couple of things he wanted to discuss with a few of the guys. You know, things change after you are out of office. A lot of the partisanship erodes. This group in particular, they were really concerned about how they could help the country move forward. Mosley’s doing a good job. They just wanted to come together to help.”

So, there were things on the agenda to talk about. I wonder what those were? Travis pushed the thought aside. It probably didn’t matter now that Pierce and the other men were no longer alive.

But then again, it might…

Travis decided to go at the question another way. “But was there anything in particular that was on your husband’s mind? Any projects he was working on?”

First ladies knew as much about what was going on in the government as anyone. While they didn’t attend the same meetings or take part in the same briefings, all of them had the same level of clearance as their husbands. It was the government’s way of protecting the institutions that led the country. No one in their right mind would expect a president to go to bed late at night concerned about something, and when his wife asked for him to say, “Oh, it’s nothing, honey. Everything is right in the world!” then roll over and go to sleep. Even presidents needed their confidants, and it couldn’t just be their Chief of Staff.

Jessica twisted her wedding ring around her finger. “There’s not really anything specific, Travis. It was just normal banter. We all got along really well. We liked to hang out together. Pierce and I thought,” she paused for a second, “that this would be a relaxing and enjoyable way to spend the afternoon.” She looked toward the backyard then quickly back at Travis. “And it didn’t turn out that way. Not even close.” She lifted a hand dismissively, a look of sadness, anger, and fear twisting her expression as if she was simultaneously discouraged and scared to death. “Look what’s happened.”

“There’s no doubt it’s a horrible tragedy, Mrs. Ewing.”

Jessica didn’t say anything, her eyes once again drifting off into the distance, locked on the Selkirk Mountains that wrapped around the valley where the house was.

That was his cue. Travis knew he’d lost her to grief and tragedy. He stood up. “Thank you, ma’am. And again, I’m sorry for your loss and I’m sorry for what you’ve been through today.”

Jessica didn’t say a word. Not one.

But then again, when Travis walked away, he realized there was nothing left to say.

12

After talking to Mrs. Ewing, Travis walked back outside to find David and CJ still deep in conversation. They stopped when they saw him approaching. CJ had her hands shoved into her pockets, her gaze riveted on the ground in front of her.

“Anything?” David asked Travis.

Travis narrowed his eyes. “Other than you’ve got a mess on your hands? Nope.”

“I meant about the First Lady.”

Travis raised an eyebrow. He didn’t realize that David knew he’d been inside talking to Jessica. Once a CIA agent, always a CIA agent, huh, David? “Not much. She said they all liked to hang out together, did the normal amount of talking that you’d expect from former presidents who would prefer not to be former. All in all, it was just supposed to be a fun afternoon. She didn’t give me anything specific. Might be too soon to get that from her.”

David shoved his hands into his pockets. “So, no significant intelligence goals with this get-together?”

Travis shook his head. “No, not that she shared with me.” His answer was pointedly specific. By the look of recognition on David’s face, he knew exactly what Travis meant. Yup, that’s right. There could be something there, but she didn’t fess up to it.

CJ interrupted their exchange, furrowing her eyebrows. “If that’s what Mrs. Ewing said, then that’s the case. My experience with her is she’s a real straight shooter. If anyone would know, she would.”

Travis adjusted the brim of his baseball cap. She might be a straight shooter, CJ, but that doesn’t mean she’s gonna show her hand. “If it means anything, I agree with CJ’s assessment that this was automatic weapons fire. Whoever came through here wasn’t trying to pick people off, their goal was exactly what they got. They wanted to leave a bloody mess behind. Nothing surgical about what they did.”

“Not sure knowing that makes me feel any better.” David winced. He looked down at his phone again, which vibrated as if on cue. “I’ve got a couple more calls to make. Why don’t you two go see what else you can figure out?”

Travis nodded. He wasn’t sure exactly what else David wanted him to try to determine, but it had to be better than just standing around. “Copy that.” He looked at CJ, whose face looked drawn. She looked like she needed something productive to do, too, something that would take her mind off what had happened. “Come on, let’s go take a walk.”

Travis didn’t stop by the mess in the Pierce’s backyard. He’d seen what he needed to already. As he made his way around the edge, he noticed two crime scene technicians were walking around, spreading yellow sheets over the dead bodies that had been left in the yard. Apparently, they had gotten all the pictures and forensic information they needed and were moving on to the recovery portion of the project.

Travis bit the inside of his lip. At that moment, Travis wasn’t sure exactly which coroner would be receiving close to two dozen bodies that afternoon, but he was glad it wasn’t him. If he had to guess, they’d probably be flown to Washington, D.C., and sent to Quantico’s crime lab. Then again, the FBI wasn’t there, so who knew? Where they were going was above his pay grade.

Striding past the table where the former presidents and their wives have been seated, Travis headed for the wood line. He pointed, looking at CJ, catching her eye. “You said you think they came from this direction?”

She nodded, just half a step behind him. “I know that’s where they came from. The first shadow I saw was coming due south, from right over there.”

I’m glad you feel so sure of yourself. “All right. Anybody go back here and take a peek yet?”

CJ had a blank stare for the first time since he’d arrived, as if she had somehow missed the obvious. “No. Not yet. We were just busy trying to secure the scene and make sure everyone who needed medical attention got it.”

Who was she kidding? So few people had needed medical attention after the attack that it probably took the paramedics less than a half hour to clear the scene. She was covering, but then again, Travis couldn’t blame her. This kind of thing happened in war all the time — decisions needed to be made in a split second and sometimes the most obvious next step was the very one that was overlooked. Travis knew that protection was always the primary focus of the Secret Service, not as much investigation, so it didn’t concern him at all that no one had bothered to walk back in that direction. He was, however, glad that he had his gun on his hip. Not that he’d be any match for automatic weapons fire, but if his guess was correct, whoever had attacked the Ewing’s mountain retreat was already long gone.

It’s what I would have done.

As Travis approached the first few trees that divided the manicured lawn with the rugged woods, a stand of thickly needled Douglas firs and Norway maples with bright green leaves, he slowed down and stopped, seeing the first glint of brass casings on the ground. He bent over and picked one up. Just in that single spot, there had to be several dozens of them, what was left over from the rounds that had been shot into the Pierce’s backyard. Without saying anything, he showed it to CJ, who did nothing but shake her head and look away.

Travis stood up and studied the area that stretched out in front of him. He realized that the forest he was entering spanned hundreds of miles between where he stood and the Canadian border. In his mind, he imagined what the scene must have looked like as the attackers emerged from the woods. CJ had said that she guessed there were four to six shooters. He visualized them spread out, wearing camo and moving slowly between the trees. How long they had been in the woods watching the Ewing’s house, he didn’t know. Travis guessed for at least a few hours, unless they had specific intel about the plans for the day, including the arrival times of the former presidents.

If they did, that would explain a lot.

The thought made Travis’s gut twitch. He moved forward, laying out the scene in front of him, imagining each man finding a spot where they could take cover behind a tree or a log, then waiting for a silent signal before they pulled the trigger. With the rate of fire of an automatic weapon, the Secret Service agents would have barely had a chance to get a single shot off before the entire incident was over and the assailants were on the retreat. It was a brutal but effective tactic.

Travis moved forward, stepping onto a bed of dry leaves that crackled under his boots. As he did, the breeze kicked up, a couple of birds chirping off in the distance. He headed deeper into the woods, staring at the ground. As part of his work as a skip tracer, before he’d gone back with the CIA, he found himself in the woods tracking people from time to time. All he needed was one bootprint. Just give me one. Let me try to do some good here today.

A second later, he found what he was looking for. It was nothing more than a slight depression on a soft patch of dirt between two evergreen trees. He knelt and then looked up at CJ, giving her a wave. “Over here.”

She frowned as she strode toward him. “What did you find?”

“A bootprint.”

He picked up a stick and pointed. “See this little depression with the ridge right here? That’s where the heel went into the ground.” Travis tipped his head to the side, studying it. “We’re lucky, the ground is still a little soft from the winter. It makes it easier to see these things.”

CJ scowled. “How did you see that?”

Travis shrugged as he stood up. “I’ve got an eye for stuff like this.” There was no need for a long discussion. “Let’s see where it takes us. It’s possible they are still in the woods, but it’s not likely.”

To be on the safe side, Travis pulled his gun out of his holster as he moved quietly forward. He nodded at CJ, silently encouraging her to do the same. She pressed her lips together and reached for her gun, her expression suddenly stony. The odds of the assailants still being anywhere in the vicinity were about nil, but there was no reason to take a chance.

Then again, if they were up against automatic weapons, pulling their pistols would be about as helpful as a screen door on a submarine.

Travis moved slowly, stopping and looking down at the ground every few steps, keeping an eye on the woods and following the boot tracks at the same time. He pointed using two fingers stuck together to the right as they moved forward, CJ staying off to his left side. She was half a step behind him, in a traditional search pattern formation, her own pistol drawn and pointed toward the ground, her hands wrapped around so tightly Travis noticed her knuckles were white.

They moved for about another fifty feet when Travis saw the bootprint turn abruptly to the east. They altered their course, continuing to walk along silently. The trail continued for about a half a mile up an incline. Travis stopped to look up the hillside. If whoever had killed the former presidents was lurking in the woods, he and CJ were walking into a trap. Whoever was on the hillside had a superior position. Travis looked back over his shoulder down into the valley where the Pierce’s mountain home was positioned. The rise into the Selkirk Mountains wasn’t steep. Where they were standing, it was more gradual than anything.

But that still didn’t eliminate the issue of going up an incline when he had no idea what was at the top.

Travis decided speed would be his best option. He picked up the pace, striding for the top of the hill, CJ right behind him. As they crested it, Travis held his hand up and made a fist. He looked around, not seeing anything save for a red squirrel with a white belly scurrying off into a tree. A second later Travis holstered his gun. As he’d expected, whoever had committed the crime was already gone. CJ did the same. They’d ended up in a flat section on a ridge with muddy ruts in the ground. Travis looked down. “All right, Agent Crosswell, what do you see?”

CJ nodded, her cheeks pink from the hike in the woods. “Tire tracks. Wide ones. Had to be a van or some sort of a truck.”

It was good to see her with some color back in her face. Travis put his hands on his hips. “Good. That makes sense.”

CJ scowled. “Listen, Travis, or whatever your name is, you don’t have to try to make me feel better if that’s what your plan is. If Director Brooks sent you here to make sure I’m good to go, I can assure you I am.”

Travis tried not to grin. The last thing he was trying to do was to insult her intelligence. She’s spunky. I like that. “Well, my name is actually Travis. And no, Brooks didn’t send me here. Like I said, I’m CIA. Freeman called me and told me to get my butt on a plane and come and help. So that’s what I’m doing.” He smiled. “I’ll be sure to make a note that you don’t like compliments.”

CJ looked at the ground and sighed. “Sorry. I’m just a little⁠—”

“Out of sorts?”

She grimaced. “You could say that.”

“To be expected. You’ve had a heck of a day.”

Travis’s mind flickered back to Maddie, the mare he’d handed off to Ellie before he jumped on the plane to get to Idaho. Maddie was always better after she got her training in. Part of Travis wondered if CJ would feel better if she got to work too. “You know, in my experience the thing that works the best after this kinda thing is to get to work to solve the puzzle.”

CJ didn’t say anything. Travis didn’t add to his thought. While he was there to help, he wasn’t there to cheerlead CJ.

He didn’t even really know her.

13

Travis waited while CJ took a few pictures of the van’s tire tracks. He pointed out a few more of the boot prints as they walked back toward the house. Travis looked over his shoulder, retracing the steps of the attackers. As best as he could figure, if the assailants had come in using the trail where the tracks were, they’d gotten out of their vehicle and made their way down the hill. Once the attack was over, they could have escaped easily, especially if they had double-timed it back to their vehicle. In his mind, Travis estimated that trained men could make the run in less than five minutes. That wasn’t enough time for anyone to recover from what had happened at the Ewing’s house, let alone give chase, especially on the mountain roads. Travis rubbed his chin. By now, hours had passed. They’d have to pick up their trail another way.

As CJ and Travis emerged from the woods, passing two more piles of spent ammunition being cataloged by a crime scene tech, David waved them over. He yelled across the yard. “I need you two.”

Travis picked up a jog as he ran through the yard, meeting David on the back patio. His expression was grave. “It’s the President. He wants an update. Let’s go out front. They have a secure link established out there.”

Travis followed David as he led them around the exterior of the house, most likely just giving Mrs. Ewing a little privacy while the investigation was still going on. At the front of the house, Travis squinted in the bright afternoon sunlight. He saw a couple of agents standing by one of the black SUV’s, leaning over a laptop they had opened up, the white and blue insignia of the White House on the screen. This is going to be fun.

Travis followed as David and CJ led the way to the call. With their slumped shoulders, they looked like they were walking to the gallows. David gave one of the agents a nod. “Alright, let’s get this over with,” he grunted assuming a position in front of the laptop’s tiny camera.

A second later the screen flickered, Robert Mosley’s face in front of it. Travis blinked. Given how big Robert’s face was on the screen, it looked like he was standing just inches from the camera, his face red, his eyes staring back at them. “David!” he shouted. “What in God’s name is going on? How could this have happened?”

Travis arched a single eyebrow. He’d never seen Robert so angry. But then again, this was an embarrassment that would make news globally — to both American allies and enemies alike. Given the rise of China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, and factions in the Middle East, the United States couldn’t afford to be seen as weak. Not for a second.

“Mr. President, I am⁠—”

“Don’t sugarcoat it. I want information now.”

David sucked in a breath. “I’m not exactly sure what to⁠—”

President Mosley’s face reddened even more. He pointed behind him. “They still have me locked down in this stupid bunker. I have work to do. You need to tell me something so that these morons will let me get back to work.”

Travis turned away for a second, rubbing the stubble on his chin, then looked back at the President. He hadn’t seen President Mosley that mad, probably ever. In the background of the shot, he saw Zach Brooks, the new head of the Secret Service, standing with his arms drooping at his sides. From the way he was standing, he looked like a beaten man, which made sense. He’d probably been Robert’s first target. Travis understood why they were keeping the president locked down, but he wasn’t sure it was actually necessary.

Zach piped up, his pointy chin jutting out. “That’s not fair, Mr. President. With respect, we are just trying to protect your life and the continuity of government as we are charged to do by the Constitution.”

Robert looked over his shoulder, his tone cutting. “Save it for a press conference, Brooks.” Robert refocused on the screen, his eyes cold. “This is an act of war. I don’t care what anybody says. If somebody comes in and kills all of our former presidents, they want a fight and they’re going to get one.” Robert’s eyes narrowed for a second. “Travis!”

Travis focused on the screen, surprised that President Mosley had called him out. “Yes, Mr. President.” His tone was calm and cool. As sad as Travis was that the entire situation had happened, he wasn’t responsible. Someone had dropped the ball while he was busy working his horses. He had no skin in the accusation game. David, Zach, CJ, and the President would have to duke it out among themselves.

Robert threw his hands in the air. “Could you please be the first person in the last several hours who will tell me exactly what’s going on?”

Travis tried not to grin at the emphatic way that Robert had said it. Not being responsible for the daily management of the CIA projects was one of the best benefits of his position. He didn’t report to anyone except for David Freeman and the President himself, and that only happened when he was on a job. When he wasn’t, he was a citizen, like anyone else. Granted, he knew a lot more than the average Joe and carried a top-secret clearance, but other than that, he was like everyone else. And given the fact that he had a life outside of government work, he had nothing to lose by shooting straight. If the President or David didn’t like what he said, he’d happily go back to his ranch and live out the rest of his days. “I’ll do my best, sir.” He adjusted the brim of his hat. “I’m sure you’ve seen pictures of the scene. It’s a mess.” He looked over his shoulder at CJ. She was doing nothing but staring at the ground. “Agent Crosswell and I just took a little stroll into the woods to see what we could find.”

“Finally, some facts other than a body count. What did you find?”

“Quite a bit. There were boot prints, sir. They led up the rise behind the house to what looks like an old hunting trail. There’s a set of fresh tire tracks up there. Agent Crosswell took pictures. I’m sure she’s sent those in already for analysis.” Whether she had or hadn’t, Travis had no idea. He was just trying to help her recover her position. “It’s likely a four-wheel drive vehicle. Maybe a van or a truck. My guess? Whoever did this drove in, hopped out of their vehicle and made their way down the hill. Once they had the party in sight, they sprayed them with automatic gunfire and then retreated and escaped before any type of defensive action could happen. We found piles of spent casings, the kind you’d expect to see when someone assumes a standing position with a fully automatic rifle.” Travis pointed over his shoulder to CJ, who had finally looked up. “Agent Crosswell believes there were four to six intruders. I would agree. You’d need that many in order to prevent any type of responsive fire from the Secret Service. Whoever did this came in with one goal and one alone—to kill as many people as quickly as possible as they could.”

“And they succeeded,” Robert grunted.

A second later, Travis heard another voice. He couldn’t see who it was, but the voice was female. “I have something if you have a moment, Mr. President.”

President Mosley stepped aside and a woman with long dark hair and large eyes stepped in front of the screen. Travis recognized her instantly. It was Shannon Bell, the Director of Homeland Security. She’d been the Governor of South Carolina before her appointment to President Mosley’s cabinet, having led her state through a fast recovery after a devastating hurricane. The media had tried to nickname her the “Southern belle,” a play on her name, when she’d been appointed, taking a dig at her roots. Their attempt to undermine her ended when during her first week on the job as the Director of Homeland Security, she went out with Border Patrol agents, wearing a Kevlar vest, a pistol on her hip and an AR-15 style rifle strapped across her chest.

The memory made Travis grimace. There was a reason he didn’t watch television, preferring to spend his evenings reading books. The media. What a bunch of darlings.

Shannon looked into the screen, then down at what Travis imagined was her phone. “One of my analysts just sent me this a couple of minutes ago. Apparently, there was a border incursion just north of your position by about twelve miles about forty-eight hours ago.” From what Travis had read in the news about Shannon Bell, she’d grown up hunting alligators with her family out in the wild of South Carolina. Her dad had been an expert marksman, a Navy SEAL. Her mom had been a Navy doctor and had completed several tours to the Middle East. Based on that history, he felt like whatever Shannon said was probably highly reliable.

“An incursion? What exactly do you mean? CJ asked, crossing her arms in front of her chest. It was the first time she’d spoken on the call.

Shannon lowered her chin, leveling her gaze at CJ through the screen. “Agent Crosswell, I’m sorry for what you’ve been through today. We’ve got your back. Know that.” Shannon paused for a moment, her eyes hard, as if she was warning everyone to stick together and not play the blame game that was so common in government. “All right. So, what we know is that Royal Canadian Mounted Police Officer Noah White was found dead about two days ago. Throat had been slit.”

Travis winced. They weren’t talking about a hunting accident. Slitting someone’s throat was a different kind of death. Silent. Intentional. “What? Are you sure?”

Shannon nodded, her eyes locking on Travis’s through the screen. “Travis Bishop, nice to meet you in person. I’ve heard great things about you from the President and from Director Freeman.” She paused. “That’s exactly what I said, and I meant what I said. He didn’t report back after his midnight shift. Luckily the truck that the RCMP had given him to drive had a tracker in it. When he didn’t show up at the office at the end of his shift, they pinged the GPS and headed out. Found his body next to his truck, his cell phone on the ground next to it. Based on the report from the Canadians, he had been on the phone with his wife at the time of his death. She thought the call had just cut out. Whoever killed him has now widowed her, not to mention taking a father away from a young child and a baby about to be born.”

David furrowed his eyebrows. “And you think this might be tied to the attack today?”

Shannon shook her head slowly, a smile creeping across her face. “Always the cynic, Freeman, aren’t you?” She pointed to someone in the background that Travis couldn’t see. “Show them the map.”

A detailed map of the area they were in flickered onto the screen. Red stars had been put at the location of the Ewing house, plus a few others. “See that yellow dot north of your position?”

Travis, David, and CJ nodded in unison. “Yeah, we see it,” David said.

“That’s the spot where Noah White was killed.”

Travis folded his arms across his chest, studying the map for a second before Shannon’s face reappeared on the screen. “What you’re saying is you think that whoever did this today might be tied to the murder of Officer White?”

Shannon shrugged. “I mean, I don’t have any conclusive evidence, but it’s possible. I think it’s a good working theory and something we can look into, especially given the fact that you said the attack happened from out of the north. You gotta think that if the attackers were moving as a group, it would be easier to cross the border in an uninhabited area. I’ve looked into it. There’re only a couple border crossings up there on the Canadian side. Once you cross the border it’s mountains for miles. Would make for an easy entry into the country. We don’t have a lot of security up there right now. The mountains have always been enough of a deterrent.”

President Mosely threw up his hands in the background, his voice booming off the walls in the PEOC’s underground conference room. “There will be now!”

Shannon continued, ignoring Robert’s outburst. “Tactically, it makes sense to connect White’s death to your incident. Think about it. The attackers fly into Canada separately, maybe into Banff or Calgary, but it makes more sense for them to get to Cranbrook. Lotsa tourist traffic there for the end of the ski season.”

Travis flinched. “How do you know that?”

Shannon shrugged. “Been there skiing. Great powder.” She paused. “They could hunker down for a few days then meet up, make the crossing from British Columbia to Idaho, trek through the mountains and pick up a vehicle somewhere along the way. They do the dirty deed this morning and then slip back out the same way.” Shannon stepped back from the screen, crossing her arms in front of her chest. “To that end, I have alerts out to all the major airports, et cetera in the area, but the problem is we don’t have any idea what we’re looking for.”

Travis mulled what Shannon had said. It was a solid analysis, one that definitely got them started in a direction. The way Noah had been killed — his throat slit — hinted at someone with training, not a random murder. Despite what people saw in the movies, sneaking up on someone and being fast enough with a knife took practice.

The same kind of practice that it would take to invade a country, traverse the Selkirk Mountains, and murder five former presidents.

14

The drive to the Kaniksu Information Repository had only taken about thirty-five minutes from the moment the van hit the pavement on I-25 just outside of Bonners Ferry. Uri Bazarov’s men sat quietly in the back, Uri and the driver, Anton, occupying the front seats. There was little to no chitter chatter, exactly the way that Uri liked it.

Molchaniye zoloto. Silence is golden.

Uri glanced over his shoulder. The men were quietly checking their weapons and reloading their ammunition from the boxes of prefilled magazines that were shoved up against the side of the van. One of them, a short man with round eyes named Boris, cracked open the lid of the cooler pulling out bottles of water for everyone, then leaning forward and handing one to Uri and one to Anton. Uri had worked with a lot of different crews in the past, but this group, one personally assembled by him at General Semyonovich’s behest, had gotten him some cream of the crop operators, men that were unflinching in their mental capacity and physical prowess. A satisfied smile tugged at Uri’s cheek, though it stopped before he actually smiled. He didn’t do that too often. Russians didn’t have a lot to smile about usually. But if he was going to smile, he would do so happily after thinking about his team and what they had accomplished already. His job had been easy.

Almost too easy.

Uri thought back to moving down the hillside with his team, each of them acutely aware of where the others were, completely and utterly focused on their mission. During the planning, he was absolutely sure that the break of a twig or that even their camouflaged movements in the daylight would have alerted the Secret Service agents protecting the former presidents of the United States. But surprisingly, nothing happened. Uri had been prepared with medical supplies for his team, Boris, with his wide eyes, a trained Russian combat medic. But they hadn’t needed as much as a Band-Aid. The Secret Service agents had been so focused on the people in front of them that they hadn’t bothered to check behind them for what could be lurking in the mountains.

Uri’s gaze narrowed. It was a rookie tactical mistake demonstrating the continued weakness of the United States of America.

Russia would never have made that same mistake. Russians were prepared day in and day out for war. Clearly America wasn’t.

Uri glanced out the window, watching the heavily wooded acres of Idaho stretch out in front of him. And now it was time for phase two.

As they drove, Uri reflected on the fact that he generally preferred operations that had more than one phase to them. In his mind, the added elements decreased the amount of risk and increased the confusion of the enemy. With a single operation, he could get in and get out, but with an operation that had two or three phases to it, generally his adversary was so busy dealing with the first problem that they never saw the second problem coming. It was a satisfying way to deal with his adversaries, like a one-two punch in boxing.

And the Americans, like every other one of Russia’s enemies, fell for it every single time.

Uri shook his head. It was incredible to him that the Americans hadn’t figured out the pattern yet. It had been decades and decades of exactly the same attack pattern, whether Russia acted covertly, with their subs, Army or the mighty Russian Navy. And like many Russian strategists, General Semyonovich, the man currently in charge of Russia’s FSB, couldn’t see any reason to change things that were working.

As the American’s were fond of saying, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”

Uri focused on the drive, pulling the same black ski mask he’d worn earlier that day out of his pocket. He tugged it on but kept the face mask portion folded up over his head, covering his brown hair. It was a bit warm for a hat, but protecting their identities was paramount to their mission. They had already left bodies behind. They would leave more, but they needed something to protect them from the massive amount of surveillance where they were going.

Uri checked the GPS, then started running through a checklist in his mind. They were eight minutes out. He looked over his shoulder, barking at the men at the back. “Be ready,” he told them in Russian.

A chorus of “Da’s” echoed through the van as they drove, as each of them said yes.

Knowing that his team was ready, Uri stared down at a few muddy boot prints that he’d managed to get on the floor mats of the white van they were in. It wasn’t the only mud he’d left. The truck that they’d driven on the hunting trails behind President Ewing’s mountain retreat to escape had been left inside of a garage on the other side of Bonners Ferry that had been secured for their use. That was also the place they’d found it when they’d made their way over the Canadian border.

After the attack, they’d retreated to the garage and waited for a few hours, wanting American law enforcement to have a chance to all flock to President Ewing’s house. Trying to move too quickly right after the initial assault would have been a mistake. And, after the success of the morning, Uri felt that his team deserved a bit of a rest. They’d relaxed, watched a little soccer on their phones, eaten a sandwich, and waited for things to slow down.

When it was time to leave, Uri considered what to do with the truck they’d used to make their way down the mountain. It would have been easy to dump gasoline all over it and light it on fire, but that would have attracted attention, the wrong kind of attention in Uri’s mind.

He rubbed his hands together, glancing at the tips of his fingers. They were smooth. Completely smooth. Even if someone found the truck, the locals, or for that matter any investigator with the inept federal government of the United States, could spend all the time they wanted to gather fingerprints from the truck, but the reality was that for all intents and purposes, Uri and his team were nothing but ghosts. Their fingerprints and DNA wouldn’t appear on any database anywhere. Mother Russia had made sure of it, removing their fingerprints with a dose of painful acid, their DNA profiles carefully wiped out and monitored by the FSB’s cyber division.

Uri cracked his neck, steeling himself. Unlike the approach to President Ewing’s house, the second part of their attack was a frontal assault. During the planning, Uri had commented to his team, a glint in his eye, why not change it up and go in the front door? They had laughed at his comment then became serious all over again when they realized that there was no other way to get into the building.

And now it was time to put that plan in motion.

To anyone who didn’t know what they were looking for, the unmarked driveway that cut off of Allen Road would have thought that someone had just cut a mountain retreat back into the side of the hill like so many of the other homes owned by billionaires in the area.

But the Kaniksu Information Repository was far more interesting than some billionaire’s Rocky Mountain retreat. In fact, the KIR held a collection of top secret and classified documents that had been retrieved from some of the most sensitive locations in the American government.

And except for the people who worked there, and a few select others, the secret had been held well.

In fact, the FSB had heard whispers about it for a long time but had never been able to get any information as to exactly where it was or what was there. Then one day, one of the FSB agents who was working undercover in the US government got wind of it and was able to transmit a message back to Moscow. Lubyanka Square, home of the FSB, lit up like a tree on Christmas Eve. Green lights from General Semyonovich on down got a plan in motion. It took a little time, but subsequent information finally confirmed that top secret information from a long line of presidents were held there, things that were so secret they likely should have been destroyed. For some reason, in the complicated thinking of the American government, they hadn’t. Instead, they had been dispatched to KIR.

That’s when General Semyonovich and Uri knew that they needed to get in.

Pulling up in front of the repository, it looked like nothing more than a small, single metal door that had been cut into a hillside. The paint was the same color as the door, the entrance shrouded by a stand of overgrown bushes. It was a meek attempt at camouflage, in Uri’s mind. There were no signs, there were no people stationed outside, no fences and no guards. The lack of guards was not something that Uri was surprised about. It was part of the plan. When they had heard from their source that the KIR was secured by the Secret Service, the entire plan fell into place like a gift wrapped in a gold bow. The whole point of pulling off the massacre right before was that he guessed the Secret Service, in predictable American fashion, would pull all of their resources to the dead bodies, not realizing that something else was happening right under their noses.

Uri sniffed. Typical.

Parking the van right outside the door, Uri and his men slid out of the vehicle. They were each armed with a silenced Tinck SBR — a short barreled rife — plus a Makarov pistol and each man’s preferred type of blade, a variety of short and mid-length switchblades and daggers to give them options depending on the distance to their enemy.

Moving quickly, Uri’s team went to the front door, not making a sound, their ski masks pulled down over each of their faces. Anton moved away from the group, cutting a lock that protected the door to an external security panel, quickly clipping the wires inside. Uri gave a single nod. For all intents and purposes, the people inside of the Kaniksu Information Repository were now blind.

The hardest part was over.

Uri pulled the door open, allowing his team to filter in first. He heard the quiet pop of three separate shots, then three more. As he walked inside, he saw two bodies of Secret Service agents on the ground already, each of them now sporting two shots to the chest and one to the head, a classic execution move.

Very nice, gentlemen. General Semyonovich would be pleased.

Uri trailed along, his gun up, but allowing his team to do the work. They’d received a basic map of the facility from their mole within the U.S. government, plus some general information on how things were organized and the security at the facility. It wasn’t a lot to go on, but with the help of the FSB’s cyber team and a few black hat hackers they paid in Slovenia to get information, they apparently had enough.

So far, the intelligence they’d gotten worked perfectly.

The Kaniksu Information Repository had been carved out of the side of a mountain giving it a cave-like, almost claustrophobic feel. Uri didn’t much like caves, but there was a job to do, and he was there to do it.

Just inside the door where they found the two guards was a security checkpoint. With those two guards out of the way, Uri and his team breezed through, Anton in the lead, the muzzle of his gun sweeping across the space as they moved deeper into the mountain. Uri, as the commander of the unit, brought up the rear, his guys spreading out in front of him like a rushing wave.

The KIR had a single hallway that led to the area where the documents were stored, the walls rough and whitewashed as if the government had decided that either they didn’t want to put a lot of money into trying to figure out how to drywall a whole bunch of rock, or they were going for the rustic look. Which one it was, Uri wasn’t exactly sure. Dim lights were mounted on the wall about every ten feet in parallel sets. From the checkpoint, they kind of looked like landing lights on a runway. A dampness from deep in the mountain hung in the air, mixed in with cool air from the ventilating system. Uri sniffed. He’d breathed in this kind of air before. Where was it? Oh, yes, at the State Tretyakov Gallery. The weight and humidity of the air felt as if someone had installed an archival unit to keep the temperature and humidity perfect for the documents stored at the repository, just like they had at the Tretyakov Gallery, the most famous art museum in Moscow.

Uri and his men made their way down the hallway silently until it widened out. He paused for a second looking left and right. He’d anticipated there would be more guards, more friction as he and his men got closer to the coveted documents that were under the Secret Service’s protection.

But there weren’t.

Almost feeling disappointed, Uri stood at the opening to the repository. The repository itself was nothing more than an enormous space that had been hollowed out of the inside of the mountain, industrial-sized shelving units stretching floor to ceiling in neat lines. Off to his right, there was a small pod of desks that were all abandoned. That was to be expected given the fact that most likely everyone within the Secret Service’s employ had been pulled over to President Ewing’s mountain retreat to help with the cleanup.

Uri stopped and smiled. Two-phase operations. They always worked.

Uri watched as his men fanned out among the shelves. Anton had been charged with going for the prize they were seeking while the other men did a quick sweep. Uri had told them that it wasn’t important whether they had completely cleared the space or not. Their goal was to get in and get out. From where he stood, Uri could see Anton charge between two sets of shelves, yanking two cardboard banker-style boxes off of the shelves, quickly digging through them and then replacing them where they’d been stored.

A second later, Anton double-timed it back to Uri and gave him a nod, handing over a black-covered journal. Through the ski mask he was wearing, Uri saw Anton’s eyes crinkle at the corners. He was smiling. Uri gave a single nod. If Anton had gotten the right document, he should very well be smiling. He’d be a national hero when they returned to Moscow. Clapping Anton on the shoulder, Uri gave a low whistle. The rest of his men came running and they walked quickly back exactly the way they had come, slipping out the front door and getting into the van, Anton guiding the van away from the facility and disappearing down the road.

Uri leaned back into the seat and closed his eyes. It would be wise to take a rest. They had a long night ahead of them hiking back into British Columbia, then an even longer flight back to Moscow. Uri imagined the look on General Semyonovich’s face when he arrived back at FSB headquarters at Lubyanka Square.

And he smiled.

15

Travis and CJ were standing off to the side, waiting for David Freeman, who was deep in conversation with someone on his phone when a look of concern crossed CJ’s face.

“What is it?” Travis asked as CJ stared at her phone.

“Gimme a second.” CJ stepped away from Travis, her phone pressed up to her ear, her expression tight. She was just out of earshot enough that he couldn’t figure out what she was talking about or who she was talking to. His curiosity didn’t last long. She hung up the phone less than twenty seconds later.

“There’s been another incident.”

“What?” Travis frowned. “What kind of incident?”

“At the Kaniksu Information Repository. We gotta go.”

The two of them ran over to David, who was just hanging up the phone. CJ explained the situation. “Yes. Go!” He pointed at Travis. “Keep me in the loop.”

“Will do.”

Travis ran behind CJ, who’d pulled a key fob out of her pocket, her movements efficient. She darted for one of the black SUV’s that was near the entrance, waving at a couple of the other Secret Service agents that were hanging out in the front of the former president’s mountain retreat. “You two — with me!”

CJ jumped in the front of the SUV, Travis sliding into the passenger side, the other two agents, with their tightly cropped Secret Service hairstyles, sitting in the back. Travis blinked. Why did every male Secret Service agent look like they went to the same barber?

Travis held on to the handle that was just above the passenger side window as CJ sped down the driveway. “Where exactly are we going?”

“It’s about twenty minutes from here. It’s called the Kaniksu Information Repository.”

Travis frowned. He’d never heard of it. “And what is it exactly?”

CJ pressed her lips together, her hands gripping the steering wheel hard.

“What level of clearance do you have?”

Travis’s lips flattened. “Top secret. You can check with David.”

CJ flared her nostrils. “Good enough. Actually, at this moment, I don’t care.” She stared at the road in front of her, then glanced at Travis. “The Kaniksu Information Repository is another Secret Service protected property. It’s a place where the former presidents keep their most secret documents. It’s the kind of stuff that they amass after over years and years in office and want to keep, but it’s too classified for them to have in their homes.”

Travis frowned. Why would someone want to break into the repository? Did they want to steal old historical documents out of it? Something wasn’t right. First, five former presidents were killed and then someone broke into where their information had been held. He’d be stupid to think they weren’t linked, but the question was how. Was there a black-market play at hand or something more critical to American security? Questions thundered in his mind. His gut told him the real story was right in front of him.

“Do we have any idea what they took?” One of the men in the back asked.

Travis didn’t bother to introduce himself. He wasn’t going to be in Idaho long enough to get to know the guy. He wasn’t there to make friends. He was there to work.

CJ shook her head. “The only thing I know is that one of our guys went over there to check on a surveillance camera outage and found dead guards.”

Travis looked at CJ. “Any survivors?” CJ was accumulating quite the body count on her record. Secret Service agents wanted saves, not losses. CJ now had five big ones to account for.

Her face paled at the question. “I don’t know.”

Travis rode with CJ and the two Secret Service agents in silence the rest of the way, the only noise the revving of the heavy eight-cylinder engine in the black SUV that was taking them to the Kaniksu Information Repository. They spent a few minutes on I-95, then got off on Allen Road, making a turn onto a long-paved driveway that looked like it led to nowhere. There were no gates and no guards out front, just a hole cut in what looked like the side of some bedrock, closed off with a metal door painted in the same color as the rock, a few straggly, overgrown shrubs obscuring it from view. CJ stopped the SUV in front of the door, Travis and the two others following.

As they approached the door, CJ keyed in a code and pulled it open, a heavy magnetic lock clicking open. As soon as Travis stepped inside, he could smell a combination of damp and dry air as if it had been swirled together by the ventilation system in the building. There were dim lights scattered through a tiny lobby and security checkpoint, a long hallway in front of them. Just inside the door were two guards, Secret Service agents, their bodies splayed on the floor. Travis stopped and looked at them. They looked the same — two shots to the chest and one to the head. It wasn’t the same automatic fire that he’d seen at President Ewing’s retreat. These were different. He pointed at the bodies, looking at CJ, keeping his voice low. “This is an execution-style attack. Someone didn’t want these guys to be able to stand up.”

Travis could see the muscles ripple across CJ’s jaw. She had her gun pulled, holding it low in front of her. Travis didn’t bother pulling his from the holster. Whoever had come into the building was long gone. It stood to reason, of course, if the modus operandi, or M.O., from the massacre at President Ewing’s mountain retreat was any indication. Whoever had put these attacks together wanted to be in and out.

The question was why.

Travis followed CJ and the other two agents as they walked down the hallway. On the way, they found the agent who had discovered the dead bodies. He ran over to CJ. “Ma’am, I don’t know exactly what to do next. I don’t know anything about this kind of stuff. I’m only on the technical side, not field operations.”

CJ looked at him, her face stony as if she was waiting for him to stop stuttering. “Did you touch anything?”

“No, of course not.” The agent, a young guy, blushed as if he’d gotten his hand caught in the cookie jar.

“All right, then go to your vehicle and stay there. One of us will come and get you if we need you.”

Travis watched the man, a younger guy with dark hair and sallow skin, run down the hallway and disappear outside like he’d been lit on fire. As he looked back at CJ, he noticed she was watching his reaction. She shrugged. “He’s a tech guy. They don’t get the same kind of training we do.”

Travis nodded. At CJ’s command, the other two Secret Service agents fanned out throughout the building, doing a sweep. A minute later, they were back to the group of desks that was located by the shelving. The two men looked at CJ. “All clear, ma’am.”

“You sure?”

They both nodded. Travis scowled and then walked off, heading toward the wall that was on the other side of the desks. He’d been watching the Secret Service agents complete their search. They said they’d checked everything, but not exactly everything had actually been checked, at least in his mind.

Travis pushed open the door to the men’s room and walked inside, his hand on the grip of his gun. The odds that any of the attackers were still in the building were about zero, but it was worth checking. The men’s room was completely empty. He poked his head into the janitorial closet that was next to it. It too was empty, save for a bunch of cleaning supplies and an old mop leaning up against the wall. Travis walked to the door that was marked for the ladies’ room and pushed it open. He stepped inside, noticing that the lights were brighter than in the men’s room, as if someone had just changed the bulbs. There was a long mirror that ran across the wall above three different sinks, a line of toilets partitioned into stalls off to his right. He bent over and checked for feet. There were none. He was just about to turn and leave when he heard what sounded like something scraping on the floor. Pulling his pistol and holding it low, Travis walked back toward the stalls, moving silently. He stopped in front of each one, slowly pushing the doors open. The hair on the back of his neck stood up as he approached the last stall. He stopped, raising the barrel of his pistol. As he looked inside, he found a woman with dark hair and glasses cowering in the corner. She cried out as soon as she saw him. “Please! Please don’t hurt me!” she cried, holding her hands up over her face.

“I’m here to help. My name is Travis.” Travis holstered his gun, took a deep breath and held his hand out. Close quarter searches weren’t fun. The woman, who had been balled up on the floor between the wall and the toilet stood and made her way toward him. She’d managed to push herself so far back in the corner that when Travis had initially scanned the floor, he hadn’t been able to see the rest of her. As she stood up and took his hand, Travis noticed her fingers felt like she’d been gripping a block of ice. She had on a pair of navy-blue pants, a white shirt with a dark pink sweater over the top. Brushing off her pants, she crossed her arms in front of her chest, pushing up a pair of glasses further up onto her nose, her expression frozen. She didn’t move; her feet pressed together. It was classic fawning behavior, the non-violent, passive cousin of fight or flight.

Travis held a hand out towards the door. “Maybe we could get out of the bathroom?”

The woman blinked like she’d been snapped out of a trance. “Sure.”

Travis waited for the young woman to walk through the door first. He scanned her waistband for any signs of a weapon but didn’t put her through a pat down. He didn’t see any lumps or evidence of a holster. By her demeanor, she didn’t seem to be a threat.

But then again, the way the day was going, nothing was as it seemed.

When Travis emerged from the bathroom with a young woman, CJ’s lips parted, her mouth hanging open. She stared at her other two agents, her eyes widening, her gaze accusatory as if she was embarrassed that her own agents hadn’t bothered to search the bathrooms.

Travis cocked his head to the side. “Found a straggler.”

CJ stared once again at the other two agents, both of whom dropped their eyes to the floor.

The young woman walked towards CJ and then stopped. “Are they gone? Is it safe? I was so scared!”

CJ furrowed her eyebrows. “Who are you?”

The young woman blinked as if she was surprised by the question and then handed the ID badge that was clipped to the front of her waistband to CJ. CJ passed it to one of the other agents, who immediately started typing on his phone. “I’m Ivy. I’m one of the documentarians.”

A documentarian? What’s that? Travis grimaced. Why did everything need some fancy title? Couldn’t people just say what they do without the fanfare? “What do you do here, Ivy?”

Ivy looked confused. “I’m a documentarian. I said that.”

Travis nodded slowly. “How about in English for those of us that don’t know what happens here.”

Ivy blinked again. “Oh, gosh sorry. I thought you—” She paused for a second, looked down and then looked back at CJ and Travis. “I’m one of the people who helps keep track of all of the documents here at the repository. We catalog them and keep them organized, to determine their suitability for our public view. You know, those kinds of things.”

CJ handed Ivy’s ID badge back to her. She looked over her shoulder at one of her guys. He gave a nod. “Yeah, she’s with us.”

Travis looked at Ivy. “You want to tell us what happened? How did you end up hiding in the bathroom?”

The reality of what she had seen must have hit her at that moment. Ivy’s chin began to quiver, and she dropped her arms from where they were across the front of her chest, knitting her fingers together in front of her protectively. “I was just standing up from my desk when everything started.” She pointed. “I can see the surveillance monitor from where I work.”

Travis looked at her. “And where is that?”

She pointed to the desk that was closest to the bathroom. “All of a sudden, all the surveillance cameras were out. I thought it was really strange. I bent over the terminal to see if it needed to be rebooted or something when I heard a popping noise echoing off of the walls. It wasn’t loud, like regular gunfire, but it sounded like it, you know what I mean?” Ivy searched Travis’s face. “I don’t shoot guns or anything, so I wasn’t sure, but something wasn’t right. I got scared so I ran into the bathroom. When I heard another pop, I stood up on top of the back on the toilet and hid in there.” She looked down for a second. “After a couple of minutes my feet started to cramp so I crawled down and stayed in the corner where you found me. I didn’t know what to do. My phone was on my desk. It wasn’t like I could call for help or anything.”

“So, no one came into the bathroom looking for you until Travis found you?” CJ’s tone was suspicious, her arms crossed in front of her chest.

Ivy nodded. “That’s right.” As the words came out of her mouth, she looked toward where the repository itself narrowed into the hallway, apparently seeing the body of one of the Secret Service agents down on the floor. She covered her mouth. “Oh my God! Is that?”

Travis, in one quick move, stepped in front of her and turned her shoulders, making her face in the other direction. He needed her to be calm and clear, not freaking out about what was in front of her. “Listen, Ivy,” he leaned toward her, staring right at her. Behind her glasses, she had round brown eyes. He noticed they were welling with tears. “I need you to focus on me, okay?” he said, not letting go of her shoulders. “What’s going on over there, it can’t be fixed. That’s over. We need to move on.”

“But it looks like Andre? Was it Andre? Did they kill him?”

CJ stepped forward. “Yes, Ivy. Andre is dead. But Travis is right, we need your help. We need you to focus.”

The question was whether she could…

16

Travis took his hands off of Ivy and stood back for a second, waiting and hoping that she could gather herself. People all responded differently in the face of a crisis. Some of them became overly emotional, some of them froze, and some of them got cold and focused. Whatever Ivy’s natural bent was, he needed her to get back to work if they had any hope of figuring out what had happened at the repository.

Ivy sniffed for a second, looking down at her shoes and then looking up at CJ and Travis, her eyes darting between the two of them. “Okay. Yes, of course. I understand. I’m all right. What can I do to help?”

That a girl. Travis was impressed by her quick recovery. For a gal working in a cave with a bunch of papers, Ivy seemed pretty tough. He looked toward the shelving units. How were they ever gonna figure out what had been taken from the repository? He glanced back at Ivy, adjusting the baseball cap on his head. “I’m assuming everything is cataloged here? That’s your job, right, Ivy?”

Ivy nodded, her back straightening. “Yes, I’m in charge of a team that keeps detailed records about the type and content of every piece of paper, journal, and file that’s here. It’s a big job. The stuff that you see out on the floor here has been thoroughly cataloged. The stuff in the back has not.”

Travis’s stomach tightened. With the number of papers and journals and files that were kept at the repository, how were they ever going to know what had been taken?

It was at that moment that Travis realized the genius in cutting the surveillance. With the feed gone, there was no way for the Secret Service to replay exactly where the intruders had gone in the building. For all intents and purposes, they were blind. Travis shook his head. They were now stuck in a room the size of half a football field trying to figure out what had been taken. It was like trying to find a needle in a haystack.

For real.

CJ rubbed the back of her neck and let out a big sigh, as if she had come to the same conclusion that Travis had. “Ivy, how about if we take a walk around and maybe you can see if anything looks like it was disturbed?”

Ivy paused and then finally spoke. “I guess.” She looked toward the shelving as if she was seeing how much was actually stored at the KIR for the first time. “I’m not sure how much help I can actually be.”

Well, you’re gonna have to try, Ivy. You’re all we’ve got. Travis almost said the words, but kept his mouth shut. “Let’s give it a try.” He was attempting to be encouraging.

Waving Ivy forward, Travis followed her across the space between the series of desks and tables, angling for the towering sets of storage shelves. As they started to walk, Travis could smell the dusky scent of old paper get stronger. On any other day, the whole process might have been kind of fascinating. People like Ivy saw the innermost thoughts and scrawlings of some of the most powerful people in the world. Travis’s fascination ended when he saw Ivy eye up the dead body of Andre, one of the Secret Service agents that had been killed. He slowed for a second, using his body to block her view. As if Ivy understood what he was doing, she looked at him and gave a slight nod, her lips flattening.

“How is the information organized?” Travis asked as they started down the first aisle.

Ivy stopped, staring past Travis, then looking back at him and CJ. “We found that the best way to organize everything is by date. The presidents that have been out of office the longest have their things moved back in the repository as current presidents become former presidents. It’s for convenience. We mostly get requests for information on the most recent presidents, so pushing the other stuff to the back just makes sense. Saves a few steps when we need to find something, you know what I mean?” She put her finger on her lip, then dropped it. “New items are added regularly as former presidents find documents and journals that might be lying around at their house.” Ivy’s eyes widened for a second like she’d said something she didn’t want to. “Those wouldn’t be classified documents, though. Those would be personal documents they want to keep here at the repository.” She kept walking, pointing, acting like a tour guide of the facility, her voice even. “We use these old-fashioned boxes with lids — I think somebody called them banker boxes — to store everything. We’ve looked at other systems, but as crazy as it sounds, this simple system seems to work the best. Every month or so, we get more documents in from the National Archives. Our two agencies work together closely. They send us stuff and we send them stuff. Kind of like an exchange program.”

Travis surveyed the lines of boxes in front of him. He spun around, seeing several tall A-frame style ladders folded against the wall next to a machine that looked like a forklift with a bucket on the front instead of the tines used to move pallets. He stared at it for a second, then absentmindedly rubbed the stubble on his chin. The equipment was neatly placed behind wide yellow lines on the floor.

“Is that stuff always there?” Travis pointed.

“The lift and ladders?” Ivy nodded. “Yep. That’s where we keep it. Has to stay behind the lines when it’s not in use. A safety thing or something.” Ivy waved her hand in the air.

Travis walked toward the equipment and stared at the floor. As Ivy had said, it was behind the lines. No overlapping. Nothing crooked or haphazard as if it had been used.

As he walked back, CJ lifted her chin. “What are you thinking?”

Travis pushed the brim of his hat up, rubbed his forehead and then tugged it back down. “I’m thinking that if I’m in a hurry, I’m not gonna put equipment back.”

Ivy held a finger up. “You think they went after something they could reach.”

“Yup.” He glanced back at the lift. “Whatever the intruders took had to be at a level where a man could reach it on his own. Might limit our search slightly.” Travis rubbed his finger across his beard as they walked, thinking.

“That’s a good thought,” CJ said, turning back to Ivy as she started down an aisle. They walked for a moment in silence and then turned a corner. Travis noticed that the front of every shelf was marked with a wide strip of yellow tape, the same color as the safety lines on the floor by the equipment, the edge of each box lined up exactly against it, a white label printed off with a barcode and a date.

CJ, Travis, and Ivy were about halfway down the center aisle when Travis noticed there were two boxes that looked a little different. They were pushed back off the yellow lines just the slightest bit. He paused for a second, frowning. “Ivy? Is there some sort of a rule about the placement of the boxes on the shelves?”

She blinked. “Yes. I’m kinda surprised you noticed. The guy that runs this facility is super precise. He wants everything lined up at the front of the yellow tape.” She rolled her eyes. “He’s a former Marine. Sometimes he gets a little over the top if you know what I mean.”

Travis pointed to the two boxes on the left-hand side of the shelf he’d noticed. “What about those? Are they where they should be?” His stomach tightened.

“No, sorry. No idea what could have happened here.”

Ivy reached for the boxes to adjust them, but CJ quickly knocked her hand away. “Hold on.”

“Wait, you’re thinking⁠—”

CJ nodded and produced a set of blue gloves from her pocket, handing extras to Ivy and Travis. Ivy frowned. “We only use cotton preservation gloves when handling the boxes and documents.”

Travis fought off the urge to shake his head. C’mon Ivy, think. “Ivy, this entire place is now a crime scene. That means you get the blue gloves.”

She nodded slowly. “Oh yes, sorry, of course. Not sure what I was thinking.” She scanned the lines of boxes. “Yeah, these aren’t in the right place. The others look okay. What do you want to do?”

“Can we see if there’s anything missing from these two?”

Ivy nodded enthusiastically. “Yeah, I can tell that pretty easily.”

CJ took a couple quick pictures of the location of the boxes and then stepped back. Travis grabbed one and Ivy grabbed the other. Ivy bobbed her head to the side. “We have worktables over there.”

“You think you can figure out what’s missing?”

“I should be able to. We have everything in this section documented already.”

17

Travis added his box next to the one that Ivy carried as she put hers on a long worktable at the center of the cluster of desks where the documentarians worked. She reached over and flipped on a light that was attached to a flexible arm and then pulled on a pair of white conservationist’s gloves over the blue ones she was wearing, the kind that would be used when handling old, priceless pieces of art. She gave CJ the side eye.

From her desk, Ivy retrieved a laptop computer and set it up nearby, quickly typing on the keyboard. She looked up at Travis. “We keep detailed records on everything that’s in the boxes. Some of the documentarians don’t like to actually read much of what’s in there. But I do. I think the story of our country is fascinating.”

Ivy carefully laid the box lid off to the side, moving her hands slowly, deliberately, like she was opening a priceless Egyptian tomb. She reached two gloved hands into the box and laid them out in order, never taking her eyes off of what was in front of her. Travis scowled. What was taking so long? If they were papers, it wasn’t like they were gonna break. “I guess I just don’t quite get it,” he said, looking at her. “Why hasn’t this information been destroyed? I mean, isn’t it a lot of it classified?”

Ivy looked up from where she was working, her face calm, as if she had answered this question a million times before. “Yes, a lot of it is classified. Probably at least eighty percent of it. But everyone that works here has a top-secret clearance. The documents that we keep are ones that are out of date, but some of them do have ties to the past or to current policy.”

“It’s still classified,” Travis grunted.

Ivy rested the palms of her hands on the table, looking at Travis. “Think of it this way, imagine if I told a secret that you had shared with your best friend in first grade. It’s still a secret, right?”

Travis nodded.

“But there is no power to it anymore. That was years ago. And probably whatever reason that you thought it needed to be kept secret at that point was no longer important.”

Travis understood what Ivy was getting at, but he still didn’t understand why all those papers were kept. Moreover, if they didn’t have any power, why had someone broken into KIR? “I still don’t get it. Why not just burn everything? Other agencies,” he skipped mentioning the CIA, “do it all the time.” He knew the CIA wasn’t the only one—the Department of Defense, NSA homeland, ATF, and FBI all had red-bag burn procedures.

Ivy straightened. “You have to remember that a presidency isn’t just about leadership, Travis, it’s also about history. That’s what we do here. We preserve the history of the United States of America.”

Travis arched an eyebrow. Pretty strong words from someone who, with all due respect, had been hiding in a toilet.

Ivy went back to work, looking at the items from the boxes and sorting them, moving them forward as she checked her computer. She went through the first box in silence, meticulously checking off the items and then reloading them in the box. With the second box she did the same thing, placing the lid off to the side, lining up the documents and files that were there. Halfway through she stopped, scowling. Travis watched as she pointed a finger to her computer and a finger to the items that were in front of her, matching each item with the list on her computer, moving along the line until she stopped again. “There’s a journal missing,” she said, her tone seemingly surprised.

In the line of documents and files there was a gap. She tapped on the surface of the table. “It should be right here. But it’s not. Everything else is here. Where’s the journal?”

By the tone of her voice, Travis could tell that she was getting frustrated. He guessed that as a documentarian, Ivy had a pretty precise personality. Now, her whole world had been shaken up. The place where she worked had been invaded, people she knew had been killed, she’d been forced to hide and now something under her care had been taken. Travis took a step forward. “Ivy, slow down. Can you tell us about this journal?”

She nodded sharply. “Yes. This belonged to former President Pierce Ewing, from the last year and a half of his presidency. He loved his journals. We have dozens of them, records of his personal thoughts, deals he wanted to make, projects he was working on—things of that nature.”

CJ frowned. “Any idea what was specifically in that journal?”

Ivy’s eyes widened. “I’d have to access a different database. I went through all of President Ewing’s documents last summer, preparing them for his presidential library.”

Travis lowered his chin and growled. “Do that.” They needed to know what was in that journal if someone took it.

Ivy slipped off the conservation gloves and the blue gloves and sat down on a chair at the table in front of her laptop. “When we’re getting things ready for a presidential library, we have to go through every single page of what’s in the documents we’re sending. After all, these are things that are going to be viewed by the public. And even within some of the documents we can show parts of it but not others.” She stopped for a second staring at CJ and Travis. “In this case, President Ewing’s doodles and countries he wanted to visit might be fun for someone to see, but his notes about how he felt about a particular foreign leader would not be appropriate.”

Travis sucked in a breath and held it for a second. Too much detail, Ivy. Get to the point. “All we need to know is what was in that journal, Ivy. That’s it.”

Ivy blinked as if she was suddenly aware that she had said too much. “Yeah. Sorry.” Travis saw her eyes drift over to where Andre’s body was lying in a pool of blood. She paled and then stared back at her computer. A second later she twisted it toward them. “Our database doesn’t go into a granular detail about what’s on every page, but we try to go page by page and write down what the general theme is.”

Travis leaned over the table, CJ at his side. There was a numbered list that apparently coordinated with the pages in the journal that was missing. The first few entries weren’t all that exciting—travel plans, ideas President Ewing had for better using Camp David, a few notes for the Prime Minister of Canada on an upcoming diplomatic trip, and then a whole slew of pages with lists of gifts he wanted to get for his aides, Cabinet, and Secret Service team for that year’s Christmas. Travis scanned the list and as he got to page forty-nine, he stopped. “Oh my God,” he whispered under his breath.

CJ looked at him. “What is it?”

“Page forty-nine.”

Travis stared again at the entry. There was a code name written in the document list. The entry read: “Project Cypher targets.”

Travis stood up and started pacing, pushing the baseball cap up off of his forehead and rubbing his head. He closed his eyes for a moment. “That’s not good.”

CJ shook her head, knitting her eyebrows together. “Travis? What is it?”

Travis leaned over the list that Ivy had provided again and realized there were five or six pages of Project Cypher information, the journal then reverting to more standard content — meeting notes, a task list for the vice president, even a sketch of a ring that president Ewing wanted to purchase for his wife, Jessica.

But what was in the dead center of that journal made Travis wonder if everything suddenly made sense.

Travis felt a chill run through his body. He pulled CJ off to the side. “Come over here.” This was a conversation they needed to have in private.

Leaving the other two Secret Service agents and Ivy at the worktable, Travis moved the two of them out of earshot. CJ leaned forward, her brown eyes boring into him. “What is it, Travis?” she asked impatiently. “I’ve got bodies cooling every direction I look. I need information. No CIA games, okay?”

Travis nodded, then looked over his shoulder. Ivy was staring at him and then quickly stared at her computer. He turned his back to her. She looked like the kind that could read lips. Whispering, he looked at CJ. “Project Cypher, are you familiar with it?”

CJ shook her head. “No. Should I be?”

“No. Probably not. In fact, it’s probably a good sign that you’re not. It fits with the timeline of the journal that’s missing. Project Cypher was an undercover CIA operation to locate the names and locations of all the current Russian dissidents and their families throughout the globe.”

“Russian dissidents? You mean like people that wanted to fight the current regime?”

Travis nodded. He wasn’t exactly sure how much to tell CJ, but he figured since her clearance was the same as his it was okay. More than that, if he was right, she would need to know what was going on. Not the redacted, CIA-sterilized version, but the real deal. “I was still with the CIA when Project Cypher was launched. It’s an ongoing operation. The CIA locates Russian dissidents and their families and supports them.”

CJ’s face twisted. “Supports them? Like how?”

“We give them money, technology, access to information and sometimes some other things.”

CJ seemed to know better than to ask what those other things might be.

Travis continued. “It was President Ewing’s brainchild. Though the Soviet Union fell decades ago, the current Russian regime is still all about Mother Russia and trying to reconstruct that. They want the power back. They want the global reputation that they used to have but don’t anymore. More than anything else, they want control over their people and the territories around them.”

“And the dissidents keep them at bay?” CJ folded her arms in front of her chest.

Travis stuffed his hands into his pockets and nodded. “Having the dissidents in play, people who want a western style democracy and freedom in Russia, help to keep the regime a little bit off balance. It also gives Russians a voice, a sense of hope that perhaps a different future was possible, so they don’t totally cave.”

“Like a revolution?”

Travis nodded. Though Travis didn’t want to acknowledge it, she was more right than she could ever imagine. What CJ didn’t know, and what Travis wasn’t comfortable saying, was that he and Elena, his former partner with the CIA, had spent a lot of time recruiting project Cypher dissidents, setting them up, and making sure that they were in a place where they could start to build support. It was dangerous work, tremendously dangerous. It felt like every single day the FSB thugs were somehow on their trail, but Elena and Travis had managed to get their part of the work done, visiting not only Russia but many of the Eastern Bloc countries like Romania and Bulgaria, helping Russian dissidents speak out against what was going on. They’d recruited everyone from displaced Russian generals who now had militias they commanded to shopkeepers who helped to hide dissidents and their families. There was work for everyone to do, no matter their talent. It would take a village to keep Russia at bay. Travis had been part of recruiting and supporting that village.

Travis stopped to think for a second. His mood sunk. “This is bad, CJ.”

CJ blinked as if she couldn’t quite understand what was going on. “Travis, that was years ago. I mean, at this point, Pierce has been out of office for six years.”

Thoughts started to crowd Travis’s mind. There was really nothing else of value in that journal other than the Project Cypher names of dissidents and their families, but that information alone was worth a thousand of President Ewing’s journals. “You don’t understand, CJ. This was a long-term operation that Tom’s Stewart put into place. The project is still running.”

Travis almost hated saying Tom Stewart’s name. His boss, who he’d considered a friend, had turned out to be a coward and a threat to the United States. Travis stopped for a second. Then again, Tom had done a few good things.

Project Cypher was one of them.

CJ shifted her weight from one side to the other. “So, what are you saying? That somebody broke in here and stole this journal specifically for the lists of the dissident names? I mean, at this point it would be totally outdated, wouldn’t it?”

Travis started to pace. “Maybe, but based on the timeline of the journal, those would be legacy families. At this point, some of the kids that were teenagers in those families would now have branched off and become their own dissident families, expanding the network. If someone had access to the original list of dissidents, it wouldn’t be difficult at all for them to track down who else they’re connected to and root out the entire operation, destroying the entire thing and killing hundreds of people in the process.” Travis stopped, staring up at the ceiling for a second, feeling a chill run down his spine. “President Terasovich has a reason for doing this. And there’s only one reason.”

“What’s that?”

“He’s consolidating power. He’s ready to rebuild the Soviet Union.”

18

On the way back to the mountain retreat that former President Pierce Ewing and his wife Jessica owned, Travis stared out the window as CJ drove. He felt a ball of anger in his gut. Whose brilliant idea was it to hold on to documents like these? They should have been burned. He set his jaw. This was one of the reasons that he’d left government work. Things that seemed to be completely sensible to him were kept in play by some government bureaucrat that had absolutely no idea what was valuable and what wasn’t, or even what could happen if the information had gotten out.

And now it looked like it had.

As they pulled up in front of the presidential retreat, having handed off the disaster at the repository to another cleanup team, CIA Director David Freeman met them outside. “What was that all about?”

Travis spoke first, shaking his head. “It was a phase two operation.”

“You think it was the same people that attacked the former Presidents?” Travis could see David’s blood pulse through a vein in his temple. “Are you kidding me?”

“Makes sense if you think about it. Secret Service pulled everyone back here to help. The repository is a Secret Service protected site. They were left vulnerable.” As the words came out of Travis’s mouth, he glanced at CJ. Her face reddened.

David continued without taking a beat. “You’ve got to be kidding me? How many dead?”

CJ held up two fingers.

“Anybody make it out alive?”

“A documentarian named Ivy,” Travis answered.

David shot him a look. “A what?”

CJ shrugged. “Somebody that keeps track of all the paperwork at the repository. Like a historian type.”

A shadow crossed David’s face. “Was anything stolen or did they just drop a bunch of bodies?”

Travis crossed his arms. “One of Ewing’s journals.”

The next words that came out of David’s mouth were slow and deliberate. “Do we know what was in it?”

“Other than some plans for Camp David and places to visit, there was one thing — Project Cypher.”

David turned away, shoving his hands in his pockets. When he turned back, he looked at Travis, his skin gray. “Do we know what level?”

Travis nodded. “Legacy.”

David didn’t say anything for a minute, silence settling over the group of them as they stood in the driveway in front of former President Ewing’s house. “So, whoever has the list of the Russian dissidents that we are backing now knows the names and locations of the original families. Is that what you’re saying?” David’s face was grim, lines etched under his eyes and around the corners of his lips.

Travis gave a single nod, then flattened his lips. “Yep, thanks to some person that thought that saving personal journals from presidents was a good idea.”

David’s eyes bulged. “Seems to me it might be a good idea to call in a bomber and have that entire place incinerated with all the documents in it.” David looked away for a second. When he looked back, his expression was flinty. “You and CJ are going to D.C. with me. The President wants to meet with you personally. He needs to know what’s going on.”

CJ groaned. “Seriously?”

“Yes, Agent Crosswell.” Travis couldn’t help but notice the impatience in David’s voice. “The plane’s waiting.”

By the time that David, CJ, and Travis made it to the small airport where Travis had landed a few hours earlier, it was dark. As they got out of the SUV, he spotted the plane, the engines already running. By Travis’s estimation, it looked like the same plane that had brought him to Idaho earlier that morning. The glow from the yellow interior lights streamed down the steps as he collected his backpack from the SUV and followed David and CJ across the tarmac to board. David wasn’t carrying anything, but CJ had a backpack that was similar to Travis’s, plus a black nylon roller bag. In her black suit, she looked like any other business traveler heading to a meeting or a conference.

If only it was that easy.

The captain and copilot greeted them as they got on board, each mumbling a hello. It wasn’t the same guy that flew Travis there that morning. Travis wasn’t surprised about that — flight regulations would only allow pilots to be behind the wheel, so to speak, for so many hours before they were required to rest. Travis sized up the pilots as he found a spot to sit. The two men were typical aviation types — close cropped hair, one looking like he’d spent a lot more time in the air than the other one, white shirts with black epaulets and gold stripes on them. The captain gave a wave and then excused himself. The co-pilot gave a brief introduction, pointing out where there was food and a bathroom. Travis nodded but didn’t make much eye contact. David, CJ, and Travis stored their gear and each took a spot, spacing out. Finding a seat off to himself, Travis pulled the seat belt across his hips and clipped it, hearing the clink of the metal buckle as it snapped closed.

Travis hadn’t entirely settled into his seat before the plane started to move, taxiing away from the spot where it had been waiting for them at the airport, an invisible ground crew removing the wheel chocks and sending them on their way. Travis spotted the SUV parked off to the side. For all intents and purposes, they had just abandoned the vehicle where it was. But knowing David Freeman like he did, Travis was sure that someone would be along to pick up the car within the next few minutes.

More CIA cloak and dagger, even with the cars.

The small plane made its way out to the runway, pausing briefly before Travis felt the speed pick up, the force of the engines pushing him back in his seat as the Gulfstream practically leapt into the air. He sat for a second, staring straight forward, waiting for the plane, and his stomach, to level out. As soon as it did, he started to relax. He looked around. He, David, and CJ had pretty much spaced out as far as they could from each other on the small plane. Then again, it wasn’t that small, at least by private jet standards. From what Travis could tell, there was seating for about ten people, grouped in two seats of four, plus an extra row of just two seats on their own. CJ had taken a spot in the middle of the plane in the two-seat section while David had stayed at the front of the plane spreading out over the four-seaters. Travis had done the same in the back of the plane, happy to have a little space to himself. He watched David and CJ for a second. David was already on his phone, alternately talking to someone and then texting, likely dealing with some of the fallout from earlier that day or maybe even from another part of the world. Travis didn’t know. He didn’t want to.

CJ got up from her seat and walked forward to the galley, gripping the back of each seat as she did to steady herself, grabbing a bottle of water from the refrigerator and a sandwich and then making her way back to her seat. She didn’t make eye contact. That was fine with Travis. He was happy for the quiet. Travis stared at the two of them for a moment, reclined his chair and then pulled the brim of his baseball cap down over his forehead, closing his eyes. He had long before learned that when he was on an operation he had to grab some sleep when he could get it.

And now was the time.

As the plane started to descend, the change in altitude woke Travis. He opened one eye and then the other, yawned and rolled his shoulders, getting the kinks out of them. He sat up in his seat a little straighter, returned it to an upright position and tilted his head left and right, hearing it crack. After a minute, he looked out the window and then checked the time. Three hours had passed. Below the blinking lights on the wing, he could see the congested lights of the Washington, D.C. area laid out below him. He got up, used the restroom, washed his hands, and then walked forward to the galley, grabbing two bottles of water, a sandwich which he discovered was turkey, bacon and, cheddar, and a banana. Sitting back down in his seat, he cracked the first bottle of water open, drinking the entire thing down in one gulp. When he looked up, CJ raised an eyebrow as if she was impressed by his ability to chug it. For his part, David was sound asleep.

Travis took a bite of the sandwich. It was surprisingly good, but then again that wasn’t that much of a surprise. He wasn’t eating typical airline food. He was eating the food that they had on a Gulfstream that was meant for people who were paying a lot of money for a private air service, even if it was the U.S. government. The bread was soft and fresh, the turkey not too salty and carefully roasted. Travis ate the whole thing down in a few bites, realizing how hungry he’d been. The last thing he remembered eating was a snack on the flight to Idaho and that had been more than twelve hours ago.

He sighed. Twelve long hours of looking at dead bodies and sifting through multiple attack sites. What else could go wrong?

Oh yeah, there was their upcoming meeting with President Mosley.

He finished the banana and the second bottle of water and made it back to his seat just in time for the plane to touch down. The three of them were on their feet a second later, gathering up their things and getting off the plane. David was the last to get off the plane, only stirring when the plane touched down.

As the three of them made their way down the steps, they were met with virtually an identical black SUV as the one they had left in Idaho a few hours before. A driver stood by, opening the door for Director Freeman and pointing for CJ and Travis to grab seats in the back without saying a word. A moment later, they were on the road, passing a sign letting them know they were exiting the corporate airfield for Reagan National Airport. Just that little piece of information told Travis that they were close to the White House. Reagan was just across the Potomac from D.C. proper. David looked up from his phone a minute later, glancing over his shoulder. “The President is waiting for us. We’ll be there in just a couple minutes.”

Travis didn’t say anything, just looking out the window. The SUV passed over the wide dark waters of the Potomac, other headlights buzzing past them going the other direction, the hum of the SUV’s tires on the pavement. Unlike where Travis lived in Texas, Washington was truly a city that never slept. There was a constant flow of diplomats, government workers, operational agents, and the military flowing in and out of the city like ants going in and out of an ant hill at all hours of the day and night.

Travis looked over at CJ. Somewhere along the line, she’d managed to change her clothes and brush her hair, even adding a little makeup to her pale skin. She was wearing a freshly starched white shirt and a navy blue suit, armor for the meeting ahead. The stray hairs that had curled around her face at former President Ewing’s house had been brushed back into place, her brown hair tied behind the back of her neck in a simple ponytail. Travis blinked. The lights from the oncoming traffic brought out the red undertones, making her hair look almost the same color as Kira’s. Travis swallowed, looking away, but not before CJ caught him.

As if she could tell he was looking at her, CJ looked at him. “What?”

“Nothing. I just noticed you changed your suit.”

“Yeah. I did that on the plane. You were sound asleep, snoring under your hat.”

“I don’t snore.”

CJ grinned. “Are you sure?”

The words had a little bit of a challenge to them. Travis shook his head, then looked away. He hadn’t seen this side of CJ at the scene, but a little bit of levity wasn’t bad, though if they were headed to the White House, he was sure it wouldn’t last.

Neither of them said anything more. Travis sat quietly in the back of the vehicle as they wove through the streets, making their way to the White House, lost in his thoughts, some of them about what he’d seen in Idaho and some of them about what he’d left behind in Texas. Had Maddie settled down? He’d been ripped away from the ranch so fast, he’d hardly had time to think about the rearing incident from that morning. He checked his phone. There was nothing from Ellie.

No news was good news.

Approaching the White House, they stopped at the outer perimeter, handing over their passports and badges, the Marine on duty making them wait for a moment even though David was in the car. Finally, he waved them through. As they circled around to the back of the expansive buildings that encompassed the home and offices of the leader of the free world, Travis looked around. He’d been to the White House before but had never seen so much security. There were multiple teams of camouflaged Marines with highly trained military K9s on their leashes moving around the fence perimeter, their shapes nothing more than a silhouette in the dark. A second perimeter that was closer to the White House had been set up with more K9s and their handlers, plus Jeeps with soldiers in tactical gear, AR-15 style rifles strapped across their chests, handguns in holsters on each of their hips. Travis frowned. The White House looked more like a fortress at that moment than the home of the people.

But then again, at that moment, it was the home of one very important person—the President of the United States, an office that had been under attack just a few hours earlier.

The driver, a man that Travis didn’t know, and David didn’t bother to introduce, drove the car under the back portico of the White House. David opened the door, calling over his shoulder. “Bring your stuff.”

Travis did as he was asked. Grabbing his backpack, he opened the back gate so CJ could retrieve her roller bag. She looked up at him. “Thanks.”

As they made their way inside, President Mosley’s chief of staff, Billy Weiss, and a Marine met them in the doorway. Billy shook David’s hand. “The President’s waiting for you,” he said without bothering to introduce himself to CJ and Travis. “You can leave your things here.”

Billy and David started down the hallway while Travis shrugged off his backpack and handed it to the Marine, who took CJ’s as well. The Marine looked at Travis, his eyes stony. “Your weapon, sir.”

Travis handed over his pistol, quickly unloading it for the Marine and giving him the extra round. CJ, even though she was Secret Service, handed over her gun as well.

Travis followed along behind Billy and David. He glanced at CJ. “You had to give up your gun, too?”

CJ nodded. “Yeah, I’m not part of the White House detail. These guys don’t trust anyone. Not even one of their own.”

Travis didn’t say anything. After what had happened earlier, maybe they were right not to.

19

As they wove their way through the hallways of the White House, Travis noticed that the uptick in security wasn’t just outside. In fact, it was throughout the building as well. There were Secret Service agents positioned at the intersection of every hallway, their hands resting in front of their bodies, their fingers laced together, their heads swiveling left and right like robots, scanning for any threat, each of them wearing the same uniform — a dark suit, a button-down shirt, a white earpiece curling out from underneath their ear.

Clearly, the attack on former President Pierce Ewing’s mountain retreat had gotten under someone’s skin. The obvious uptick in security was a telling sign.

Seeing Billy Weiss, the Chief of Staff, approach at a quick clip, the President’s secretary hopped up out of her seat and ran to the Oval Office door, pushing it open before Billy, David, CJ, and Travis could get there.

As they passed through the door, Travis’s eyes had to adjust to the bright lights of one of the most photographed offices in the world. The decor of the Oval Office was classic — pale beige walls outlined with heavy, saffron yellow curtains that framed a view of the South Lawn in the daytime. Portraits of George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Andrew Jackson in wide gold frames hung on the wall. A bust of Winston Churchill, completed by artist Jacob Epstein in 1947, and one of Martin Luther King, Jr., flanked the Resolute desk on a heavy credenza that also held framed pictures of the Mosley family. At the other end of the room, a set of couches and chairs had been arranged around a fireplace, the wood softly crackling as Travis entered.

As much as Travis was glad to see the grandeur of the Oval Office again, it also brought back some difficult memories. He felt a tingle run down his spine. The last time he’d been in the office, the woman he had loved, Kira Pozreva, along with his former partner, her new lover, Gus Norman, were in the middle of the final stage of a plot to end the President. As Travis looked around the room, his heart skipped a beat as if his body remembered every moment of the last time he’d been in the room. Blinking, he forcibly chased the ghosts of that day out of his mind. Kira was gone. Gus was gone. So was John Spector, the then head of the Secret Service who had died trying to protect the President. Ultimately, Travis had been the one to save the President, but it came at a steep price.

He’d had to shoot Kira and kill her as she held the President hostage, threatening to inject him with poison.

And now he was back at the Oval Office in the face of another disaster. He shook his head slightly. If there was one thing he could count on, it was chaos somewhere in the world.

President Mosley’s voice interrupted the stream of memories crowding into his head.

“You made it.” The words came out sharp.

Travis looked at President Mosley. He was dressed in khaki pants and a red polo shirt with a presidential bomber jacket over the top, the kind that Travis had seen presidents wear at the scene of a disaster when a suit just seemed far too formal. His thick salt and pepper hair, still more pepper than salt, sat atop a face with rough, rugged features and dark brown eyes. “Mr. President.” Travis nodded, not acknowledging the dig. I was in Idaho, for God’s sake. How fast did you expect us to get here?

President Mosley didn’t wait for Billy to start the meeting. “Can someone, anyone, tell me what is going on?”

A second later, the door to the Oval Office opened. Travis looked over his shoulder to see the head of the Secret Service, Zach Brooks, and the Director of Homeland Security, Shannon Bell, come in, joining the group. President Mosley lifted his chin. “Glad you could make it.”

By the strained looks on their faces, Travis could tell it had been a long day for everyone at the White House.

Travis waited, watching, not saying anything. He was a guest, not part of the administration. There was no reason for him to do anything other than listen, unless someone had another plan for him. Maybe he’d be lucky and after the meeting he could head back to the ranch.

President Mosley reiterated his question. “I want to know what’s going on and who is responsible.”

Travis glanced at CJ. She was staring at the ground. He couldn’t imagine how she was feeling at that moment. Not only had she been dragged in front of her boss, but in front of his peers and the President of the United States. It was a virtual firing squad. She was there because of an epic failure, the failure to protect five former presidents. Travis looked away. As much as he wanted to try to shield her from what was coming, there was nothing he could do. She’d taken the job. She’d have to answer for what had happened.

Or for at least some of it…

David started first. “Mr. President, we came straight from the scene. There were very few survivors of those who were positioned at the back of the house. Mrs. Ewing was one of them. There were a couple of other servers and wait staff that managed to get away with minor injuries. We have two Secret Service agents in the hospital. One is in surgery as we speak. Of the detail of two dozen, only seven survived.” David looked over at CJ. “That includes Agent Crosswell.”

Travis watched as every head swiveled toward CJ. Her face reddened and then paled again. She looked up at the President, straightening. “I’m sorry, Mr. President. I was in charge and⁠—”

Travis held his breath. This was the moment he was sure that CJ had been dreading. Travis knew Robert. He was reasonable. Then again, he could be a hot head — something that the voters never saw. But Travis had seen it. He just hoped that Robert would control himself. Getting worked up at this point would do nothing to solve the problem they were facing.

The President waved her off. “An apology isn’t necessary, Agent Crosswell. From what I’ve heard, you would have needed an Army battalion to fight off what happened. You were outgunned for sure.”

Travis blinked. It was amazingly conciliatory words given the strained look on the President’s face.

The President pivoted to his directors, his face suddenly tight. “How does this happen?” he said slowly, allowing space between each word. He threw his hands in the air and started to pace. He was clearly shifting the blame higher up. “I need answers. We can’t expect our people on the ground to defend against something like this when our opponents have automatic weapons. How did we not know? And who leaked the location of the formers?”

Travis raised his eyebrows. So much for being calm.

Shannon Bell, the Director of Homeland Security, shook her head. “As I said to you earlier, Mr. President, we had no chatter. The only connection that I can make for you is the murder at the northern border a couple of days ago.”

Travis frowned, then spoke up. “You mentioned that before. What are you talking about?”

Shannon turned toward Travis, her long hair cascading over her shoulders in perfect waves. “A Royal Canadian Mounted Police Officer had his throat slit at the border a couple of days ago. The location where the body was dropped was about twelve miles north of President Ewing’s mountain retreat.”

Travis cocked his head to the side, then frowned. “You’re thinking that whoever did this came in over the border, happened to bump into this Mountie, and took him out as they passed through?”

Shannon nodded.

The Director of the Secret Service, Zach Brooks, piped up, “I’m sorry, sir, I don’t have anything additional for you either. We’re busy working the scene. I’ve been in close contact with Agent Crosswell⁠—”

President Mosely spun around. “I’ve had enough!” he said, his face beet red. “All day long, it’s exactly the same story. You don’t know anything. I want to know who does. One of you must have an idea who did this.” He stared at Shannon. “And how could you not put that together? You have the murder of a Canadian border agent so close to President Ewing’s retreat, especially given he was having all the former presidents there forty-eight hours later?”

Travis winced. It was more than accusatory. He didn’t say anything. No reason to get involved in this scrap. Let them duke it out on their own. Shannon narrowed her eyes and looked at the President. “Mr. President, Homeland had no knowledge that there was going to be a meeting of all of the former presidents a mere twelve miles inside of the border. Likewise, given that the murder of a RCMP officer happened on Canadian soil, our neighbors to the north didn’t notify us until we started asking questions.” She shot a look at Zach, who was staring at a spot on the floor. “Secret Service didn’t bother to notify us.”

When Zach looked up, his expression was stony. “We shouldn’t have to. You should keep the border secure.”

Shannon shot Zach an icy look. Zach stopped talking. Travis stuck his hands in his pockets. He made a mental note not to mess with Shannon. She’d just gone toe to toe with the President and Zack Brooks and backed both of them down.

Impressive.

But it didn’t solve the problem they had in front of them.

The conversation was just about to descend into bickering when Billy Weiss, the President’s Chief of Staff, stepped in. He jumped up from a chair he was sitting in at the edge of the room, his thin, gray hair floating above his head, the color the same as the suit he had on. He held up his hands. “Listen, this is not productive.” The directors became quiet. Billy was known as a bulldog around the White House. He was the gatekeeper to the President, the Oval Office, and anything else that involved Robert Mosley. If he said it was time to simmer down, it was.

David looked at the President. “Yes, we have some communication issues that likely opened a door for this kind of a situation, but the most important thing is that we figure out who did this.”

“Again, a question I have been asking all day long.” President Mosley threw his hands in the air and then leaned on the edge of the Resolute desk. He shook his head. “Any ideas?”

Shannon shrugged. “We’re looking at domestic terror groups, possibly a cartel.”

Travis pressed his lips together. That wasn’t it.

Zach shook his head. “I have Secret Service agents combing through years of threats made against that particular group of presidents to try to see if there were any common threads. They’ll work day and night until we figure this out.”

Travis felt his gut tighten. They were off track. It wasn’t a cartel or a domestic terrorist. He glanced at David, who gave him a tiny nod.

“It’s the Russians, Mr. President,” Travis said evenly.

Every eye focused on Travis. The President’s mouth fell open. His eyebrows furrowed. “The Russians? What are you talking about?”

Travis went on to describe the second attack, the one at Kaniksu Information Repository.

“Why wasn’t I briefed about this? I had no idea this place even existed.”

Travis raised his eyebrows. “Well, Mr. President, number one, we were busy getting here. Number two, whoever put this attack together is highly sophisticated. They’ve been planning this for months, probably years, looking for the right time and the right opportunity. This isn’t something that you send a text about, if you know what I mean. We have no idea which channels are compromised. We are talking a very high level of access to have any of this information.”

President Mosley nodded, seemingly calm since the first time since Travis had arrived at the Oval. “Understood. Continue.”

Travis couldn’t help but notice that the President shot a disappointed look at Shannon and Zach, who were standing silently nearby, like a father who was unhappy at some of his children’s behavior.

“Agent Crosswell and I,” Travis looked at CJ, including her in the conversation. At least he could give her a hand with the damage control. “We discovered that a journal had been removed from the repository.”

President Mosley crossed his arms in front of his chest. “A journal? That’s it?”

Travis nodded. “Yes. Specifically, it was one of President Ewing’s journals. The documentarian at the repository⁠—”

“The what?” The President asked.

Travis shrugged. “I don’t know. She was some gal that’s in charge of all the papers there. She said that President Ewing was a prolific writer. Had journals and notebooks that covered just about everything. Their job was to catalog what was in it and determine if it was safe for public knowledge or not.”

“And I’m guessing this wasn’t?”

Travis nodded. “Correct, Mr. President. This particular journal had a list of all of the Russian dissidents that were used for Project Cypher.”

President Mosley frowned. “I’ve heard about this project before.”

David entered the conversation. “Yes, Mr. President, Project Cypher is something that was started under President Ewing’s tenure. It was an operation to plant and support Russian dissidents to help push Russia towards democracy or at least keep them off balance. It’s ongoing.”

Robert narrowed his eyes. “And the journal documented the initial people that were embedded into this operation?”

Travis nodded. “During my time with the CIA, I actually helped plant some of those operatives. As far as I understand it from Director Freeman, the operation has spread since my tenure with the Agency.”

“What’s the damage?”

Director Freeman shook his head. “Travis and I talked about it. The exposure of these Russian dissidents could be devastating on a personal and diplomatic level. The operation has been ongoing for years at this point. There are people who are buried deep in the Russian government who are working for us. There are also people all over the world working to try to bring democracy to Russia. It’s one of our most powerful non-lethal operations, one of the few things we can do without starting World War three. If the Russians figured out who these people were…”

“They’d bring hell against them.”

Travis nodded.

Silence settled over the room. No one said anything for a moment. President Mosley finally looked up, catching Travis’s eye. “What else do I need to know?”

Travis sucked in a breath. “If President Terasovich figures out who these dissidents are, not only will he kill them, but he will be able to consolidate his power. It will expose how the CIA works at levels never brought to light before. There will be a retaliatory strike in the intelligence community. Some of our people will be exposed, including people like me. You could see hit squads taking out Russian dissidents and American sympathizers who have supported them all over the globe.” Travis looked away for a minute. It was a devastating analysis. Hundreds, if not thousands of lives were at risk. He turned back to the President. “You’ll see a shift in Russian power like you haven’t seen since the formation of the Soviet Union. Pretty much anything that was holding them back will have been eliminated.”

“And then we’ll have a real problem on our hands, won’t we?” The President said, his voice quiet.

Yes, we will.

20

Travis looked down for a moment, weighing what to say next. He’d had interactions with Robert before. The man was sharp, good at asking questions, and a fierce protector of the United States.

Robert pushed away from the Resolute desk and started pacing, his hands stuffed into his pockets. He glanced sidelong at Travis. “So, the Russians, huh? That’s what you’re thinking?”

Travis nodded. It all of a sudden occurred to him that he was the only one having a conversation with the President. All of the directors, Director Freeman included, had become eerily silent.

“Any idea who could pull this off?”

Travis looked away for a second, rubbing his forehead and then readjusting his baseball cap on his brow. “Well, I think we could be pretty safe in assuming that this kind of an operation has the FSB written all over it. And although I don’t work for the CIA full time anymore, I can tell you that when I was there, there was only one person who could pull off this kind of a two-phase operation right under our noses, not to mention get the intel to figure it out in the first place.”

The President stopped moving. “That would be?”

Travis looked at David, waiting. David gave him another nod. In for a penny, in for a pound. It wasn’t as though Travis needed Director Freeman’s permission to speak. After all, he was talking to the president of the United States. But he did work for David. “Uri Bazarov.”

David interrupted, holding up his phone. He looked at the President. “Sir, if you don’t mind, I need to⁠—”

The President waved David off. “Yeah. Whatever you need to do.”

David disappeared out of the Oval Office.

Robert turned toward Travis. “Tell me about Uri Bazarov.”

Travis spent the next couple of minutes describing the history he’d had with Uri and the kind of threat he posed to the United States, at least in years past. David came back into the room, interrupting the conversation. “We’re working on securing the Russian dissident network, their handlers and supporters right now.”

The President nodded. “Good.”

The conversation continued for the next few minutes, the group of them — Robert, Travis, CJ, David, Shannon, Zach, and Billy — discussing the next steps. A whole host of ideas were thrown out, including calling the Russian President, who didn’t always know what was going on with the FSB. That idea was knocked down almost immediately after Travis reminded them that President Terasovich would like nothing better than to consolidate power. Even if he didn’t know about it, he’d be delighted to hear of a successful strike against the United States. They discussed financial sanctions, the withdrawal of aid, and a million other options. Travis stood off to the side with CJ while Robert, Shannon, Billy, Zach, and David hashed out the logistics. The conversation started to get more heated, Shannon and Billy not agreeing on whether reaching out to their Russian counterparts would make sense or not.

CJ whispered under her breath. “What do you think?”

Travis grimaced. “I think these ideas are flimsy. The Russians aren’t gonna respect sanctions.”

The President held up his hand, leveling his gaze at Travis. “Do you have something to add, Travis?”

He shrugged. “You know, you can do all those things you’re talking about, but it’s not gonna slow the Russians down. They’ll swat your sanctions and phone calls away like a mosquito trying to fly a straight line in a tornado.”

Robert grunted. “All right, Travis. Point taken. What would you do?”

Travis looked up at the ceiling. “You need to do something that will level the playing field, that will remind the Russians who they are dealing with. It has to be an equivalent response. They’ve taken something from the United States that’s incredibly precious—priceless, in fact. Losing all of those former presidents and first ladies in one fell swoop isn’t just a blip on the radar. Add that to the missing journal and you have to do something substantial. Losing a couple billion dollars in aid isn’t going to hurt them. They’ve got more money coming in through the Russian mob than we could ever hope to keep track of. On paper, Russia might look like it’s a financial disaster, but you know as well as I do that’s not the case.”

President Mosley’s nod conceded the point. “You still didn’t answer my question. What would you do?”

Travis pressed his lips together. When he spoke, the words came out just above a whisper. “I’d steal something from them that they value, just like they did to us.”

There were mumbles around the room. President Mosley held his hand up. “Are you talking about stealing the journal back?”

The ideas were forming in Travis’s head as the words were coming out of his mouth. He walked toward the windows, seeing the silhouette of the Marines patrolling the South Lawn. At that moment, he wanted nothing more than to be home, outside, sitting on his porch. But he’d gotten swept up in another one of the CIA’s messes. He suddenly felt tired. Maybe this will be the last time.

Maybe.

Travis pushed the thought out of his head. “Yeah. That’s an option. But to truly stop Uri and President Terasovich and his goal to consolidate power, we’d have to steal something bigger. Something that would sideline the FSB for decades, something that would give us the upper hand and tip the scales our way.”

“What would that be?”

David was the one to answer that question. “Well, if we had the names and locations of all of their FSB agents, that might help.”

The President froze, his mouth hanging open. “Are you kidding? I mean, how would you even get that information? Trying to get it would be a suicide mission.”

Travis grinned. “My favorite kind.”

Travis paused for a second. What had he just agreed to? He thought about it for a second. David was right. It was one of the few things they could do that would spook the Russians enough to leave the Project Cypher dissidents alone. They’d be so busy rebuilding the FSB’s networks that it actually might give the dissidents a real chance at change — something they hadn’t had in a decade. “Mr. President, it’s the only way to swing the power back in the United States’ favor.”

He turned away from the view out on the lawn. “I know that you’ll be able to keep the deaths of the former presidents quiet, or at least minimize them for the time being, but this is a huge win for the Russians. We can’t let them win this battle. We’ve got to send a message they won’t ever forget. If we can get the names of the FSB agents, it will take them at least five to ten years, if not longer, to rebuild their networks. They’ll be limited to cyber-attacks which, as you know, the United States, with our new focus on AI, has been winning anyway. You’d basically take Russia off the playing field in any significant way for a decade.”

No one said anything for a solid minute, including Billy Weiss, who Travis knew always had something to say. Travis noticed each of them was lost in their own thoughts. He waited feeling the skin on his forearms start to tingle. Did I just offer to go to Russia? Seriously, Bishop? He shook his head. He should be focused on getting back to the ranch, to helping Ellie get Maddie and the rest of the horses ready for the Derby in a couple weeks. He had no business taking on this kind of mission.

Or maybe he was the perfect person to do it.

He looked around, realizing that he was once again standing in the Oval Office, feeling the weight of his position with the CIA, even if it was just on a contract basis. It was no different than when he was with the Army or when he worked full-time for the CIA. His country needed him. He needed to answer the call.

“All right, do it,” the President said as he looked at the ground. As he looked up, his gaze tracked across all of the people in the room. “I don’t want to know anything more about this.” He looked at Shannon and Zach. “Neither do you. Let CIA handle it. Keep it compartmentalized.” Robert looked at Billy and David. “You both know what to do. Let me know when it’s over.”

Robert could say what he wanted to, but Travis didn’t believe for a moment that President Robert Mosley wouldn’t have his finger on the operation.

David motioned to Travis. CJ and Billy followed, walking toward the door of the Oval Office. As they turned to leave, the President called behind them. “Travis?”

Travis turned around, staring at Robert Mosley, who had slipped behind the Resolute desk, leaning his hands on the surface. “Yes, Mr. President.”

“Be careful. I don’t want this to be the last time I see you in my office. And God’s speed.”

Travis nodded. “Thanks, Robert. I’ll do my best.”

21

Travis followed David and Billy down the hallway in the White House, passing more Secret Service agents and aides who were moving around the White House at that late hour, CJ trailing behind them. Halfway to the exit, Billy had disappeared after whispering something to David. So had Shannon and Zach, for that matter. David dipped into one of the conference rooms and closed the door. He looked at Travis and CJ. “Travis, are you sure about this?” His expression was grave. “I can easily go back to the President and tell him we couldn’t make it work. We can come up with something else.”

Travis shook his head, his stomach tightening. As much as he wanted to go back to Texas, he had to see this through. “Honestly, David, I’m not sure what other play we have here. I’ll stand behind what I said. Sanctions and all that other nonsense — it’s just flimsy. The Russians won’t respect that.”

David nodded. “I agree, but what you’re signing up for could very well be a suicide mission. Once you’re in Russia, you know we have to disavow you. They get their hands on you, I can’t make any promises about trying to get you out or get you home.”

“I get it.” Travis sucked in a breath. The reality was that he had no wife, no family, and no kids. Though his dream had been to marry Kira and raise horses and a family with her in Texas, it hadn’t happened. No one else had come along since then, at least no one he’d wanted to think about a future with. He’d been raised as a foster kid, ended up running away, and had spent the majority of his life on his own. Someone needed to avenge the deaths of the former presidents, their wives, and the dozens of people killed at Bonners Ferry and settle the score on President Ewing’s journal. It was better for someone like him to try to do it than someone who had a family and children that could be left behind.

CJ had been quiet during the majority of their visit to the White House. “I’m going with you,” she said suddenly.

Travis’s head whipped around. “What?”

CJ stared at the floor and then looked up at him. “You can’t go and do this by yourself. I’m gonna go with you.”

“I can handle it, Crosswell. I’ve done solo missions before.”

“Not one this dangerous. You need backup.”

David stared at her. “You’re a Secret Service agent, CJ. If Travis needs backup, I have people I can send with him, people who were trained by the CIA.”

CJ set her jaw. “No. I want to go. I need to make this right. It was on my watch that our country lost five former presidents. I wouldn’t be able to sleep at night knowing that you were risking your life to fix my mistake.” CJ straightened, then looked at the two men. “What am I going to do if I stay here? They’ll bench me. I’ll spend the next three weeks writing reports about what happened over and over again. For all intents and purposes, my career is over. I know you both have been through stuff, but I can’t begin to tell you how awful it was for me today to look at all of our former presidents, realizing they were dead and knowing it was because I missed something.”

Travis didn’t say anything for a second. He bumped his hat up on his forehead and looked at her. He could tell she was serious, but did she have any idea what she was offering to do? “CJ, you gotta listen to David. There’s nothing for you to feel bad about. The Secret Service isn’t prepared for that kind of attack. That’s something you’d need an Army battalion to defend against. It should have never happened.”

CJ took a step forward, her eyes hard. “And yet it did. And then they went after a repository that we also protect. Right now, in the eyes of other governments, the Secret Service is a joke. And they’d be right.” She wrapped her fingers over the back of the chair in front of her, her knuckles white. “Like you said, Travis, the only way to get them to wake up and take notice and realize how strong we are is to get back at them. And that’s what I want to do.”

David narrowed his eyes. He studied CJ for a second and then turned to Travis. “Travis, you okay with this?”

Travis dropped his head, staring at the toes of his boots for a second. He didn’t know CJ, at least not in the way he’d be comfortable with from an operational level. He didn’t know how she’d act under pressure, and he definitely didn’t know much about her as a person, or for that matter, much about her training. But what he did know was that she wanted to do the right thing. Despite the pressure, she hadn’t crumbled at any point during the day, and she’d held her own in the Oval Office. That has to count for something, right? “All right. I’m willing to roll the dice.” Travis only hoped he wouldn’t regret giving her the chance.

“Roll the dice?” CJ’s eyes widened. She looked offended.

Travis shrugged. “Listen, I don’t know you. I just met you a few hours ago. But I think you can handle it. This kind of overseas operation is nothing like you’ve ever done before, I can promise you that. You’re going to have to learn on the fly.”

CJ stared at him. “Then why let me go? It sounds like you don’t think I have what it takes.”

“That part, I don’t know. I guess we’ll find out. But what I do know is that you’re right, you do have something to prove, and you do have something to fix. And that might just give you everything you need.”

22

Travis and CJ spent the next hour at the White House, mostly waiting in the conference room where David had taken them after their meeting in the Oval Office. Where exactly President Mosley had gone, Travis had no idea. Part of him hoped that the President had been able to wander back to the residence and get some sleep.

At least someone should.

A few minutes after David stepped away to secure travel and paperwork for the two of them, a blond-haired White House aide with an ID badge swinging on a lanyard opened the door. “Director Freeman told me to come and escort you downstairs.”

“Where are we going?” Travis asked.

“Director Freeman said to get you some dinner before you depart.”

Without another word, Travis and CJ followed the aide down to the White House kitchen. The aide was a young man wearing a suit that screamed of a college intern. Travis could only imagine he was spending his semester ferrying people around the building, one errand after the next just to get “White House” on his resume.

He stopped at the doorway, looking at them. It was late, nearly midnight, but there was a chef and his assistant working behind the line. “Please let the chefs know what you’d like to eat. They’ll cook you anything you want.” He disappeared without saying anything else.

The White House kitchen looked like an absolutely spotless version of a Michelin star restaurant’s kitchen—gleaming stainless-steel counters, high-end ranges with dozens of burners, the two chefs wearing starched white chef’s coats and White House baseball caps on their heads. In the middle of the kitchen was a long stainless-steel counter with chairs put in front of it. Travis imagined that during a diplomatic dinner, the chairs were probably moved out of the way to allow for serving hundreds of dishes all at one time. But, from the looks of it, when the White House wasn’t serving meals in the diplomatic wing or in the executive suites, they were more of a short-order operation for whoever needed a meal. Given the number of hours — and odd ones, sometimes all night long — that Travis knew White House personnel worked, it made sense to keep the kitchen open. For people working in the building, it would be a hassle to leave the building, have to clear security to go get food and come back, clear security again, and then finally make their way back in the building. It was much easier on both the employees and the security personnel to just eat where they were.

The chef walked over to Travis and CJ, motioning for them to sit down, laying two white paper placemats with the White House emblem in front of them. “What can we get you?”

“I’ll take whatever you have handy. Doesn’t need to be anything fancy.” Travis answered. He had no idea what they could cook, though given the fact that this was the White House, he was sure he could ask for surf and turf and they’d get it for him. But then again, he wasn’t that fancy.

CJ nodded. “Me too.”

The chef narrowed his eyes. “Either of you allergic to anything or have any dietary restrictions?”

They both shook their heads no.

The chef smiled. “Perfect. Two orders of whatever we’ve got handy coming up. We’ll get you something to drink while you wait.”

Travis barely had time to settle in on the stool, watching the chef get to work when two glasses of ice water appeared in front of them. Two more glasses filled with ice appeared a second later, along with a tray carrying an assortment of different kinds of pop. Travis cracked open a Coke and poured it over the ice. As he watched the bubbles settle, he thought about what was ahead of them. In a way he felt like it was almost his last supper, the meal they gave to inmates before the death sentence.

His stomach fluttered. In a way, it probably was.

Going into Russia wasn’t for the faint of heart, not even for casual civilian travelers. Recently, the Russians had cracked down on all sorts of violations. He’d even heard about a guy who’d carried a minuscule amount of medical marijuana into Russia with a doctor’s prescription and had ended up spending four years in jail, the State Department only able to rescue him after they made a trade for someone that the Russians wanted in return.

And while carrying marijuana of any kind was probably not a smart move going into a foreign country, what Travis and CJ were about to do was way dicier than that.

The sound of pans clanking on the stove caught his attention. As he looked up, Travis saw the chef and his assistant bent over two plates, carefully plating their meals. The prep had been fast. Travis had barely finished his thoughts when the chef turned around and set the two plates in front of him and CJ. His assistant arrived a second later with silverware and napkins, topping off their water glasses. “Bon appetite. The whatever-you-have-handy-dish-of-the-day is marinated chicken breast, sauteed vegetables, and a whole grain rice pilaf. Not sure what you’re up to, but it will keep you going. President Mosley likes it when we feed the staff healthy food. Says it keeps them on their toes. Let us know if you need anything else.” The chef and his assistant moved away, dealing with the cleanup.

Travis dug into the food, cutting off a piece of chicken, spearing it with a fork and sticking it in his mouth. It wasn’t BBQ, but it was delicious nonetheless. He gave CJ a nod. She was hunched over her food as though she hadn’t eaten in a couple of days. Travis knew how she was feeling. Other than a couple of sandwiches on the plane as they traveled across the country, he really hadn’t had anything substantial to eat either.

There’s just something about a hot meal, especially when you are about to do something crazy.

Travis had just wiped his face when David appeared in the doorway. Without a word, he waved them out into the hallway. Travis shot up from his stool, nudging CJ in the shoulder. She took a last sip of her water and then joined him.

David motioned for them to follow, still silent. Travis fell in behind David and CJ as they made their way through the maze of White House hallways. After weaving their way back upstairs, just inside the portico entrance where they had arrived, David stopped. Travis noticed a set of bags were sitting right by the door, a black SUV idling outside. Another aide, one that Travis hadn’t seen before, was standing by the doorway. David stopped, holding out his hands as if he was waiting for something. The man handed over a stack of documents and two phones.

David cleared his throat. “We got you clean identities with new passports, drivers’ licenses, the works. The team is backstopping them as we speak. By the time you land, you’ll be clean and good to go. I don’t have to tell you, this is a high-risk mission so keep your heads on a swivel.” He handed cell phones to each of them, motioning for them to hand over their personal phones. “These are some of our newest toys. There is end-to-end encryption, so you don’t need to worry about making calls. Your current phone numbers have been forwarded to these, so any calls you need to get will bounce right through. We normally wouldn’t do that, but Travis, I know you have a business to run. The line will automatically secure without you having to do anything too. They’ve been enabled with your fingerprints already. Don’t lose them. This is the only way that we’re going to be able to track you.”

He pointed. “Each of you has a gaming app on your phone. Travis, you have mahjong, CJ, you have solitaire. Those are firewall communication apps. You’ve been set up for group play. There is no actual group. If you send a message to the other players, you’ll be reaching out to us. Stay in touch. Once you get on the ground, if you can give me regular updates about your progress and your location, then we can make sure we have an ex-fil plan ready for you.”

He lowered his chin, his expression serious. “I don’t have to tell you how dangerous what you’re trying to do is. Remember that if you get into trouble, ex-fil doesn’t happen immediately. We’re going to preposition some assets, but given we don’t know exactly what you’re up to or what you’re going to find, it makes our job a little bit harder when you are ready to come home.”

Travis gave a single nod, “Where are our bags?”

David pointed to the luggage sitting by the door. It was nothing more than two black backpacks. “This is your luggage now. We’ll hold your personal stuff — including your weapons — here. For all intents and purposes, you are now the people it says you are on your IDs.”

Travis flipped open his new passport. It read Travis Davenport. At least they used my first name. That was a bonus.

David nodded. “One way or the other, we’ll get your things back to you.” David looked at the aide, who did nothing but nod and disappear.

Very CIA.

David put his hand on the door that led outside. “There’s a plane waiting for you at the airstrip. It’ll take you directly to Moscow. Good luck and Godspeed.”

Travis only had one thought as he stepped outside.

We’re gonna need it.

23

Three hours into their flight to Moscow, Travis woke up. He’d slept for a couple of hours, but all the travel from Texas to Idaho then to Washington with all of the time zone changes were beginning to take their toll. He stood up, his body stiff from so much sitting, used the bathroom and went to the galley, retrieving a bag of chips and a bottle of water. He went back to his seat and started to play with the new phone that David had given him when a call came in. He looked at the number, not recognizing it then realized it was from overseas. David said all of his contacts had been forwarded, but this one didn’t show up as a name, just a set of numbers. He sniffed, then picked up. Nothing to lose, right?

“Hello, love,” a voice with a strong British accent said.

Catherine.

“I didn’t expect to hear from you today.”

“I didn’t expect to be calling you today.”

Travis smiled. Catherine Lewis was a legend in MI6 circles, one of the toughest British agents he’d ever met. She was known for her adaptability and her uncanny way of morphing from one person into the next. During the years that Travis had known her, Catherine had appeared to him as everything from an old woman, hunched and wrinkled using a cane with silvery gray hair, to a party girl complete with a short skirt and false lashes ready to go out on the town. Not only was she a crack undercover agent, but she was an expert markswoman and skilled in all types of deception.

But most importantly, she was his friend.

“I haven’t heard from you in a while. What have you been up to?”

“Oh, you know, this and such.” She paused. “I heard you’re having a presidential-level problem over there stateside,” she asked cryptically. “Is it true?”

Travis felt his stomach tighten a little bit. Was she referring to the massacre of the former presidents earlier that day? His visit to D.C.? “Maybe. Kinda depends on what you’re talking about.” The murders of five former presidents wasn’t something they could keep under wraps for long, especially from other foreign agencies and from the ravenous American press. They had a day or two to get ahead of it, at best.

“Darling, let’s not be cagey, shall we? We’ve heard all the chatter about the unfortunate dear departure of your former presidents. Tragic. I simply can’t imagine.” Catherine sounded serious. If there was something that the British valued, it was their royals. Had the same situation occurred with British royalty, there would likely be a revolt of everyone from the commoners to the upper crust of British society.

Travis frowned, trying to keep his voice down. He glanced over at CJ. From what he could see, she was sound asleep. “How did you guys find out?”

“How do we find out anything, Travis? The CIA is not the only one that has eyes and ears everywhere. The better question is, what are you doing about it, and do you need any help?”

So that’s what this is about. “That would be a better question for Archie to direct to Director Freeman, especially given the fact that I don’t work for the CIA anymore.”

Catherine giggled. “Oh, my God, Travis. Are you serious? You don’t work for the CIA. Come on.” She groaned. “If anyone knows what’s going on, it’s you.”

He shifted in his seat. As much as he wanted to share with Catherine the whole story of how he’d gotten pulled from his ranch and jetted off to Idaho to see the whole grisly scene at President Ewing’s mountain retreat, he didn’t know how much he could say. “Problem is getting handled, Cat. I appreciate you reaching out, though.” Travis wondered exactly how much Catherine and MI6 knew. Did they only know about the massacre of the former presidents or did they know about the journal that was stolen from the Kaniksu Information Repository?

Obviously, The United States and Great Britain were staunch allies—had been for years, but there were even things that the United States didn’t want their most powerful allies to know. Travis had to think that what had happened earlier that day was part of it.

“Well, all I have to say is if you are involved, then be careful. It’s not safe out there right now.”

The words hung in the air for a moment. “Thanks. I’ll keep that in mind.”

As Travis hung up with Catherine, he was left with more questions than answers. Not only did she know about what had happened earlier that day, but she was obviously warning him that the situation was degrading. But what situation was she actually talking about?

Travis sat and stared out the window for a second, seeing nothing below him but black, one of the lights on the plane’s wing blinking on and off as they crossed the globe in the dark. Part of him wanted to call her back and give her the whole story. Maybe she had intel that could help them.

But then again, maybe she didn’t.

Travis knew that the more people who had their hands on an operation meant there was more risk, not less. He took a sip of his water. No, he wouldn’t call her back. This was something that he and CJ had committed to doing themselves. One way or another, he’d handle it.

Or he’d die trying.

Trying to distract himself from the gravity of what they were attempting, Travis stared at the phone David had given him. As he thumbed through it, he realized it was almost identical to his personal phone. That was probably by design. No learning curve with a new piece of technology. Smart little suckers, those CIA techs. It had all of his texts and phone numbers on it, a natural backstop. The only difference was that it wasn’t his. It belonged to the CIA.

Travis spent the next few minutes going through all of the apps, particularly the mahjong game that had been installed. As David had said, there was a group play option that included messaging. He almost sent a message to make sure it was working, then changed his mind. No need to bother David at this hour. He’d hopefully headed home to get some rest while Travis and CJ were in the air.

If things went the way he suspected, they’d all need it.

Travis tapped his fingers on the armrest, then looked out the window. The view hadn’t changed. It was still dark, practically black outside. There was no way for him to know if they were over land or water, mountains or flatlands. But where they were at that moment didn’t matter, his gut was telling him he was missing something, that he and CJ were going in even less prepared than they needed to be. He blinked. They had been working on a faulty assumption. A tingle ran over his skin.

Assumptions were what got agents killed.

Travis had no interest in being interrogated by the FSB or sent to one of President Terasovich’s famous gulags for the rest of his life. They were headed to Russia to retrieve the journal and to steal something infinitely more valuable — the identities and locations of every FSB agent employed by the Russian government. The natural place for those to be held would be at Lubyanka Square, the headquarters of the FSB.

But was that actually true?

If there was one thing that Travis knew about working with the Russians was that nine times out of ten, they wouldn’t do what you were expecting them to do.

And this might be just one of those times.

Travis felt the plane lurch and then right itself, bumping past a patch of turbulence. He glanced towards CJ. She never moved. Travis felt sweat start to collect on his palms. He wiped them on the legs of his jeans. But he wasn’t sweating because the plane had hit a little turbulence. He was sweating because he didn’t know exactly what they were walking into.

Suddenly feeling like offering to take on this mission was possibly the biggest mistake of his life, Travis sucked in a sharp breath and looked out the window once more, his eyes unfocused. It was still doable, wasn’t it? In his gut, he thought it was still possible for them to retrieve the information that had been stolen from the repository and make the counter move to capture the FSB employment rolls, but they needed more information. Good, reliable information, not a shot in the dark. He and CJ would have one chance to do this. Any fumbling around inside of the Russian territory would probably end up getting them killed, at best. At worst, they’d get sent off to an FSB black site never to see the light of day again.

Travis closed his eyes for a second, trying to settle his mind from the cascade of thoughts. He could send a message to David and see if the analyst could figure out where the information was being held, but David had sent him off thinking that it was already in Lubyanka Square. What if it wasn’t?

Travis stared down at the phone then opened it, finding a single number. He dialed.

“Where are you?” he asked.

“Wouldn’t you like to know?” Ruby was toying with him like she always did. “It’s late there, no? Why aren’t you sleeping?”

“I’m not at home.”

“I know. You’re on a plane. I can hear the hum in the background.”

The girl loved to play gotcha. It was no secret that she was a step ahead of nearly everyone. “I’m taking a little trip.”

“And I take it this wouldn’t be for one of your ranch projects, now would it? Or maybe, you’re coming to surprise me. That would be nice.”

Hearing the energy in Ruby’s voice suddenly made him miss her. He remembered the time they’d spent together, her pale porcelain skin, and jet-black hair, the way that she’d always carried a mysterious air about her, as if she held the world’s secrets in the palm of her hand.

But then again, she pretty much did.

Travis knew that Ruby wasn’t the kind that would settle down. Probably never. But that made her a safe bet for him. She could pop in and out of his life, working for the heads of cartels and mobs and governments and doing their bidding, slipping in and out of dark corners, leaving bodies behind. The way he figured it, as long as his heart didn’t get tangled up with her, they could have some fun, and then he could move on.

Or at least that’s what he kept telling himself.

He straightened, sitting in his seat. “Listen, I need some information.”

“Um, okay, this sounds quite serious.” Her voice dropped, all of the playfulness evaporating like raindrops on a hot sidewalk.

“I need to know where the FSB keeps their employment records.”

He heard Ruby suck in a sharp breath. “Are you kidding? Their employment records?” she answered in her thick Russian accent. He heard her swear under her breath. His Russian was rusty, but not that rusty. He knew exactly what she said. “What have you gotten yourself into?”

He shook his head. “That’s not important. I just need to know that where I am going is the right place. My guess is they have them at Lubyanka Square — the headquarters. Is that right?”

Ruby paused for a moment before answering. “No.”

Travis sat and blinked. Part of him was relieved to know that he and CJ were heading to the wrong location before they got there, but that still left the question of where they were exactly. “Do you know where they are?”

“I might.”

You know where they are, Ruby. Don’t play with me. Not now. “Will you tell me?”

“Only if you name your next horse after me.”

Travis looked down and smiled. “Okay, yeah. Sure.”

“And she better be pretty.”

“I’ll make sure of it. Beautiful, just like you.”

Ruby laughed. “You have a way with words.”

There was a pause for a moment, silence settling between the two of them the way it did with people who shared an intimate relationship. “Ruby, where am I going?” Travis felt his stomach tighten. Ruby had the information. The question was whether she would tell him or not. There was silence at the other end of the line for a minute as if she was considering her options.

“Mount Yamantau.”

Travis furrowed his eyebrows. “The secret mountain?”

“Yeah. It’s up in the Ural Mountain range. Runs north and south, but what you are looking for is southeast of Moscow.”

“That place is real? I thought it was just a Russian legend that the KGB used to like to talk about?” In 1991, with the fall of the Soviet Union, the KGB had been “dissolved,” though no one in the intelligence community actually believed that to be true. The KGB had their fingers in every corner of the globe. A political move wouldn’t change anything. By 1994, a newly formed FSB took the world’s stage. Travis knew the reality was that the FSB and the KGB were exactly the same thing—super secret espionage organizations dedicated to protecting Mother Russia. “Are you serious?”

“Yes, as a heart attack, as you say in America.”

24

Travis rubbed his forehead. “Where do you think the information is exactly?”

“That part I can’t say. I know that there is a large tech facility within the mountain. The FSB has been stocking it for years, moving most of their actual operation there. You were right, the original information was out at Lubyanka Square, but a few years ago, President Terasovich and General Semyonovich decided they wanted things even more secure. The building at Lubyanka Square is nothing but a front. There’s a bunch of admins that go in and out of that building and a few meetings are held here and there. But the real work is done out of Mount Yamantau now. There’s a training facility there too. General Semyonovich is still in Moscow so he has easy access to the president, but the rest of the FSB brass only pop into Moscow here and there. The majority of them work at Mount Yamantau now.”

Travis nodded. What Ruby said made sense. The Russians had become increasingly paranoid over the years. In fact, the Americans had too. While the Russians had Mount Yamantau, the Americans had a parallel facility called Cheyenne Mountain near Colorado Springs. “So, if there’s a tech farm at Mount Yamantau, there has to be a way to access that information.”

“Provided you survive getting in there, yes,” she answered, her tone grave. “I have a contact there. I can get the exact location of the FSB data, but they keep the information siloed. The FSB is not the only one who is running operations out of there — ground forces, special operations, and strategic rocket forces.” She paused for a moment. “Getting in and getting out is going to be extraordinarily dangerous, Travis. You have to know that.”

I do, Ruby. Believe me. “Yes, but I have something I need to take care of, a right that needs to be made wrong.”

“I understand.”

Travis looked away for a second. Whether Ruby knew about what had happened to the former presidents earlier that day or not, he couldn’t tell. Unlike Catherine, she hadn’t played her hand. That was typical of Ruby.

Ruby’s voice interrupted his thoughts. “I’ll be in touch.”

Travis didn’t waste any time. If the information they were looking for wasn’t in Moscow there was no reason to go there. He found the mahjong app on his phone and quickly sent David a message. His phone rang a second later. “You wanna divert already? What happened?”

“I just talked to a contact.”

Travis was sure that David knew that he had an on-again-off-again relationship with Ruby, who was a person that most major espionage organizations would be more than grateful to get their hands on. Ruby was an assassin-for-hire, someone who knew the inner workings of most major governments across the globe as well as many of the prominent crime families. She was an expert at what she did, leaving bodies behind, cold and lifeless, with no one ever the wiser. Even though Travis was sure David knew, he didn’t ask. The CIA, like every other intelligence organization, had muddy moral boundaries. If she could help them, then Travis was sure that David wouldn’t make any demands to know where she was.

Truth be told, he didn’t know himself. And that was probably better.

“The information that CJ and I need to get is at Mount Yamantau.”

“Are you kidding me? That place is actually real?”

Travis nodded. “Yeah. According to my contact it is. That was the same reaction I had. I’m going to go tell the pilot. Just wanted you to know where we’re headed.”

“Holy—” David didn’t say anything for a second. “Are you sure you wanna do this, Travis? We can turn the plane around and get you back to D.C. and try to handle this another way. No operative has ever gotten into Mount Yamantau before and come out alive.”

Not really, but what other choice do we have? Travis sighed. “It’s the only way. We have to put a stop to this. They killed our former presidents for God’s sake. That can’t be handled with sanctions or a slap on the wrist from the UN or a terse phone call between Mosley and Terasovich. They will think we’re weak, and they’d be right. You know that.”

David was quiet for a second. “All right. Let’s do this. Stay in touch.”

As soon as Travis hung up the phone with David, he unbuckled his seat belt and stood up. He made his way forward, bracing his arms in the doorway of the cockpit. “We’ve had a little change in plans.”

The co-pilot looked over his shoulder. “We just heard from Langley. We’re rerouting now. You might want to hold on to something.” Travis reached for a grab bar and held on as he felt the plane adjust its course. As soon as the plane leveled out, he looked at the pilots. “How long till we land?”

“Two hours. We’ll put it down at Mezhgorye. Not much there, but it should work.”

Travis nodded. “Thanks.”

Travis made his way over to where CJ was still sleeping. He sat down next to her, strapping himself in, gently bumping her shoulder with his. “Wake up.”

She opened her eyes and blinked, her eyes unfocused. “Where are we? Is it time to land?”

Travis shook his head. “Two hours. But there’s been a change in plans.”

She adjusted the lapels of her jacket as if she was getting ready to go into a meeting. “Okay, I’ll get up in a few minutes and change.” She looked down at her clothes and then smiled. “Can’t exactly run around Moscow in this suit, can I?”

“No, probably not. But before you do, we’ve just been diverted.”

The muscles in CJ’s jaw tightened, as if she was anticipating bad news. “Diverted? To where?”

Travis quickly explained to her the conversation he’d had with Ruby and then CIA Director Freeman. “Listen, things just got exponentially more dangerous. If you don’t want to go, I totally understand. You can just stay on the plane. They’ll drop me off and you can head back stateside with the pilots if you want. Worst case scenario, they’ll get you to Europe and you can grab a flight back to the States from there.” He waited, wondering what CJ would say. This was her out, her opportunity to walk away from what was shaping up to be an incredibly dangerous operation. Part of him wanted her to bow out. Part of him didn’t.

CJ didn’t say anything for a second, then she looked at Travis, locking her eyes with his. “When I said I had something to make right, I wasn’t kidding. I’d never forgive myself if I stayed on this plane and let you walk into that mess without backup. If something happened to you, I’d have yet something else to carry on my conscience for the rest of my life.”

Travis rubbed the back of his neck, trying to ease the tension that was accumulating in the muscles. The words were good, but would she actually perform in the field? “I get that, but there’s no guarantee that you’re going to be able to protect me from what’s coming anyway.”

CJ straightened, her mouth a thin line. “At least I can try.”

You can, but are you really prepared for what we are about to see?

Travis and CJ spent the next two hours scouring through background information that David Freeman had quickly cobbled together on Mount Yamantau, their phones pinging with messages from the games loaded on their phones. Unfortunately, there wasn’t much to go on, just a general location, some information on the city closest to the facility, and a few satellite images that showed little to nothing, except for a stream of people walking in and out of the mountain.

As the plane touched down at the Mezhgorye airport, Travis stood up. CJ had emerged from the back wearing a pair of jeans, tennis shoes, and a charcoal gray sweater with a jacket over the top. She’d let her straight hair down, the brown tendrils covering her shoulders, a set of sunglasses perched on her head. She was still pale, but the addition of a little bit of lipstick made her look more like a tourist that had just suffered through a long flight then someone that was coming to exact revenge on Mother Russia. Travis had changed too, putting on a fresh pair of jeans, a navy-blue T-shirt and a jacket, leaving his baseball cap behind in his backpack. As they gathered up their bags the captain came out. “We’re gonna jump the plane across the border into Kazakhstan and wait for you there. We’ve got some friends there that will let us refuel and park the bird there. It’s a twenty-minute trip for us. It’ll take me a couple of minutes to get the plane in the air, so give me a thirty-minute heads up when you wanna leave. We’ll drop down, and open the door so you can jump in.

Travis shouldered his new black backpack, CJ picking up her brown one and they headed off the plane. The pilot moved to the doorway as they walked down the steps. “See you on the other side.”

He didn’t bother wishing Travis and CJ good luck.

By the time Travis turned around to respond, they’d already closed the hatch door, the engines revving, leaving CJ and Travis in the dark.

25

Uri Bazarov strode through the grand lobby at Lubyanka Square with his head held high. He’d put on his finest sport coat for the occasion, a brown tweed one with arm patches that he’d had since he was new to the KGB. He wore a pair of brown pants, dress shoes, and a gold watch that General Semenoyvich had given him the year before. How many other officers could say they were in the same shape as the day they started protecting Mother Russia?

He caught a glimpse of his silhouette in a floor-to-ceiling gilded mirror as he walked past. Whoever said that Russian men weren’t vain was a liar, like most people in Russia, he thought to himself as he walked through the gold-accented, marble-floored space. Though he was three or four inches shorter than he’d like to be, he’d managed to stay fit by boxing with some of the other FSB officers two nights a week. Smoothing his thick beard as he walked, a satisfied expression crawled across his face as he nodded at other officers as they passed. He looked good and had just pulled off a historic attack against the United States.

It was a good day.

Angling for the right side of the lobby, Uri stopped at a set of elevator doors. As soon as they opened, he used his ID card to access the top floor of the building, a place that very few FSB officers had automatic access to. It was the General’s floor, a sprawling space that had offices for his personal staff, conference rooms, and planning spaces. The elevator hummed as it rose slowly upward, giving an occasional shudder that made Uri hold his breath every time he went to go visit General Semyonovich. Why the Russian government hadn’t bothered to replace the elevators with a faster, more reliable version, he had no idea. But then again, this was Russia, a place where the old and the new bled together, the Titanic-like structures of the government slow to change and move. Unlike other parts of the world, the Russians prided themselves on maintaining tradition, even if that meant dealing with old, creaking elevators.

By the time the elevator doors opened on the top floor, Uri was bored. The utter joy he felt striding through the lobby had dissipated. He tapped the chest of his jacket, feeling for the outline of the journal that was inside. That little book held the secrets that could change world history.

And he was part of it.

Correction: he was it, the man who would change Russian history.

He shook his head at the realization. Him, the peasant Uri Bazarov, from a little farming village on the outskirts of Omsk, had single-handedly managed to turn the tide in favor of the country he loved. If tradition followed, after his death, his name would be taught to school children all over Russia, the name Bazarov taking a place next to Stalin and Khruschev. He smiled. No one, not even the mighty United States, would be able to stop Russia’s ascension to the single global leader now.

No one.

Just thinking about it made his skin tingle. He was already famous in the FSB. This would elevate him to a legend, he was sure of it.

Uri made his way down a maroon-carpeted hallway, the rug plush and thick under his boots. The walls were covered in a matching patterned burgundy wallpaper, glowing gold sconces every ten feet or so. They reminded him of the lights and the long hallway of the Kaniksu Information Repository, except that what Russia offered was much more beautiful, much more ornate.

Then again, everything Russia did was better.

At the end of the hallway, after passing several dark conference rooms, the space widened out into what could best be called an anteroom. Truly, it was the same size as many lobbies that Uri had waited in. A woman wearing a starched green uniform with pale skin and short brown hair combed back away from her face, sat at a desk, her back ramrod straight, her fingers poised over a keyboard. She didn’t say anything as Uri approached, only giving him a nod, her lips flat against her face. That was his signal to go in and see his boss, General Semyonovich.

As Uri laid his hand on the gold door lever that opened the heavy, carved wooden doors, he could have sworn he smelled cigar smoke. He leaned into the doors as he twisted the lever down, his heart skipping a beat. Thinking about this moment had been all he could focus on since he and his team touched back down in Moscow.

The General’s office widened out in front of him, the same burgundy carpet spanning the space, a wide walnut desk, one that rivaled the Resolute desk in intricacy. The General’s desk stood in the center of the space, probably at least ten feet long, Uri estimated. General Semyonovich had his back turned to Uri, his chestnut-colored leather chair turned toward the view of the Monument to the Victims of Political Repression. As usual, Uri couldn’t help but smile at the irony of seeing the monument from the General’s office. Just past the monument was the Central Children’s Store, the largest of its kind anywhere in Europe, as well as the golden-domed church of St. Sophia and the Gulag Museum across the park. As General Semyonovich turned toward Uri, a cigar hanging from his lips, he smiled. “It seems you had a productive trip, Uri.” He waved a blocky hand at Uri. “Sit.”

Uri did as he was told, lowering himself into one of the soft leather chairs carefully placed in front of General Semyonovich’s desk.

“Would you like a cigar? They’re Cubans. They just arrived, courtesy of our friends on the island.” The general pushed the box toward Uri. “Not from our friends, directly, of course. It was actually President Terasovich that sent them over. He was so delighted at our progress that he sent an entire box over for the two of us to enjoy as a thank-you gift.”

“That was very kind of him, but I’ll pass.” Uri wasn’t much for cigars. He always thought that the people smoking them looked like they had a tree stump stuck in their mouth.

“Your loss.” General Semyonovich crushed out the end of the thick cigar he’d been smoking in a yellow glass ashtray on his desk. Uri noticed that it was filled with ashes. Apparently General Semyonovich had started the celebration before Uri had ever arrived. The General held out a thick, calloused hand waving his fingers at Uri. “Well, do you have it? Let me see it!” His voice boomed off the coffered ceiling above his desk.

The question wasn’t really a question. General Semyonovich knew that Uri had the journal and that he was bringing it in. They had been in nearly constant contact since Uri had broken his radio silence once they were on the jet back to Russia. Uri slowly reached into his jacket and pulled out the black-covered journal. It felt warm in his hands from the heat of resting against his chest where he’d kept it hidden. He stood so straight he was nearly at attention as he passed it across the massive desk to his boss.

“I’m assuming you read it on the way back?” The General snatched it from his hands.

“Of course.” Uri sank into the chair again.

“And?”

Uri looked down at his hands for a second, making the General wait for a moment. General Semyonovich might be the boss, but Uri was the one in control at that moment. He’d been the one to get the information. He was the one that would be remembered. When he looked up at General Semyonovich, he smiled. “I think it will meet with all of your expectations. There is a full list of all of the traitors that the American government has placed around us to hamper the growth of Mother Russia. While the information is dated, I’m sure the analysts will have no problem building out the likely connections after this. Then it will be simple for our agents to just go round them up and end their deceit.”

“They should be that lucky.” The words came out quietly.

Uri nodded. The FSB had absolutely no patience with anyone who was working at counter purposes to the Russian government. At times, the FSB had even gone to extremes. Uri remembered a case two years before when a local piano teacher had taught a particularly American song. After a brief interview with the FSB, that person had been relocated to a work camp to reevaluate their priorities. Uri knew that to other countries their monitoring of Russian citizens seemed harsh, but they weren’t, not in Uri’s mind and not in the mind of many people in the government. The Russian people needed to be reminded who was really in control.

And it wasn’t them.

General Semyonovich thumbed through the journal, picking up the half-smoked cigar, sticking it between his lips as he stared at the sheets. He thumbed through the pages slowly, nodding. When he looked up at Uri, his face was red. Uri had seen that look before. The General was starting to fume about the Americans again. It was better to avoid his office when that happened. “Yes, Uri. This is excellent work.”

“Thank you, General.”

The General did nothing but nod, his eyes still focused on the pages of the journal.

As much as he wanted the General to heap on the praise for what he and his team had done, Uri knew that was his signal to leave. He didn’t want to overstay his welcome. It didn’t take much to end up on the General’s bad side, and that wasn’t a place that Uri wanted to end up. He turned to walk away when the General called after him. “Uri!”

“Yes, sir?”

The General handed the black-covered journal back to Uri. “I think you should be the one to deliver this to Mount Yamantau. I was going to do it myself, but I’m needed here in Moscow. You should have that honor. Take a few days. Get this dropped off first and then maybe stop by one of the mineral baths up there. I’ve heard they’re very good for what ails you.” The smile he had on his face faded. The General paused, tapping his thumb on his desk. “There will be a lot of work for you to handle once we get this information analyzed. You’ll need to be ready. Have your team at full strength. Requisition whatever you need.”

Uri knew exactly what the General was talking about. When they discussed the plan in the first place, the General told Uri that he wanted him to be the one to go collect all of the dissidents and bring them to Moscow. It would be his reward for handling the retrieval of the information and the destruction of the presidential legacy in America. He licked his lips. Uri was looking forward to it. He imagined it just then — seeing the looks on the faces of the dissidents when they were met at their homes, at their work, and out and about with their families by the cold stare of FSB agents there to collect them. Destroying the work of Project Cypher could change the trajectory of Russia for the next fifty years or more, returning her to strength and power on the global stage, not to mention, embarrass the American intelligence machine with its failings. With no internal opponents left in Russia, they could do whatever they wanted.

Uri nodded. “Thank you, General. I will.”

26

After walking away from the small airstrip where they’d been let off, Travis led the way through the dark. He felt a sense of vertigo and confusion wash over him as they slipped into the shadows. It didn’t alarm him. He’d felt that way on nearly every mission he’d completed with the CIA. Being dropped into a strange country at night with little information was about as unsettling as trying to slide onto the back of an unbroken colt. You’d never know what you’d get.

Travis waved at CJ to follow as he headed for a few dark buildings that would serve as cover as they moved further into the city. Based on the research he’d done while they were flying, he and CJ were still about fifteen miles from Mount Yamantau. The plane had landed outside a small town, Mezhgorye, that had not much more to it other than the airstrip, a few bars and restaurants and a couple of stores. According to what he’d read, the town itself had been closed by the Russian government until about two years before. In a sudden move, it had been reopened as Moscow started to transfer more of their operations to the mountain hideaway, the action even more evidence of the importance that President Terasovich put on the secret operations in the Ural Mountains.

Travis stared in front of him, glad for the darkness. The sun would be coming up soon. When it did, they needed to be ready, with a plan in place, otherwise they’d risk exposure before they ever got anywhere near Mount Yamantau. He looked at CJ as they walked. “Do you know any Russian?”

CJ shook her head.

“Okay, then I don’t want you to say much at all while we are on the ground. Just let me do the talking.”

CJ looked at him. “Da.”

Travis cocked his head to the side. At least she knows how to say yes. “That’s a good start.”

As they walked down the street, Travis knew they had to get out of sight for a little while. There was literally no one out and about, only a few paper food wrappers tumbling along the side of the road. The fact that they were the only ones moving in the darkness made their presence even more notable to anyone who was looking out a window. Travis looked over his shoulder. What had happened to the town? He’d heard of times when the Russians had come in, carted off the residents in a particular city and forcibly moved them with little or no warning, all in the name of state security. Was that what had happened when the government decided to build Yamantau into a secure Russian fortress?

Travis shook the thought from his head. There was no point in diving into a history lesson at that moment. For now, they needed a place to lay low until they could better assess the situation. After passing two boarded up buildings with peeling paint and faded signs, he ducked into a building that had a sign out front that read “Mezhgorye Hostel.” Hoping his Russian wasn’t too rusty, Travis quickly secured a room for them from a humorless clerk who handed him an old, worn key. Apparently, his language skills were passable. Wishing he’d done a better job at keeping up with it after he’d left the CIA, Travis looked at CJ. He put his arm around CJ, whispering in her ear. “Just play along.”

CJ nodded. She stayed silent.

Travis could almost feel the clerk’s eyes on him as he and CJ walked away. People in Russia were suspicious by nature, but they’d be far less suspicious if Travis had his arm around CJ, pretending they were lovers. Russians were partial to good love stories.

The two of them made their way up a narrow set of steps and unlocked the door to their room, Travis securing the door behind him. He looked at her. “Sorry to have to do that, but thanks for playing along. The clerk was really eyeing us up.”

CJ nodded, tossing her bag down. “No problem. What’s the plan?”

Travis sat on the edge of the bed. “We need to hunker down here for a few hours. Then we need to figure out how to get the fifteen miles between here and Mount Yamantau.”

“And then we have to figure out how to get inside, right?”

Travis nodded. That was going to be the big hurdle. “Yeah, but with an operation like this, we’ve got to take one piece at a time.” As much as he believed the words that were coming out of his mouth, he also knew that he needed to get information back from Ruby. They could keep moving — even get inside of Yamantau — but if he didn’t have the information about where the journal was being held and where the employment list of the FSB was, then he’d be wandering around Mount Yamantau blind. It was dangerous enough just being on the ground. He didn’t need to get caught because they were lacking information. His mouth went dry.

You’re in it now, Bishop. One step at a time.

CJ, who had who was leaning against the wall, her face staring at her phone. “It looks like there’s a train that leaves from here and heads to the mountain. Maybe about a ten-minute walk to get there? Looks like it would get us close. I’m guessing that’s how the employees get there.”

He had to give CJ credit. It was a step in the right direction, though Travis still didn’t feel confident. A train ride that would get them close. Then what? Would they be walking right into a trap? He felt his pulse quicken. “That might work,” Travis mumbled. He stopped to think for a second. As much as he didn’t want to take any form of public transportation in Russia, a crowded train would probably be better cover than if he and CJ tried to rent a car or tried to pay for a ride. “How close does it look like it would get us?”

CJ walked over to him, showing him the screen on her phone. “See? It looks like we could get within a mile.”

Travis nodded. A plan was starting to form in his head. He guessed that the train from the town they were in headed straight up to Mount Yamantau to ferry workers that helped keep the facility running. He hadn’t seen any intelligence that suggested that the workers actually lived in the mountain, though he was sure there were some that did. If the train stopped a mile away from the entrance, that made sense. It would give the FSB and the military a chance to check everyone in, funneling them into the mountain in an orderly fashion. Travis rubbed his chin. Funneling was a nice word. Herding them into a kill box like cows off to slaughter was more accurate. “We still have to figure out how to get in without being noticed.”

CJ smirked. “Don’t we need some kind of disguise? Aren’t you CIA people good at that?”

Travis raised his eyebrows, his eyes widening. He gave CJ a cautionary look. “Be careful what you say.”

CJ clamped her hand across her mouth as if she had just committed a grievous sin. Travis was relatively sure that they were fine. After all, they were way out of range of Moscow’s listening ears, but then again, no place was really safe in Russia, especially one this close to their most secret base of operations. But what was done was done. They needed to move forward. And anyone listening would realize they were American. “What kind of clothes did you bring with you?”

CJ shook her head and then looked inside her bag. “I have some pants and sweaters that were packed for me. Not much else. What are you thinking?”

“I have an idea.”

Travis got up from the bed and walked out of the room, whispering to CJ to lock the door behind him. He found a back stairwell and took it downstairs, past the lobby level to the basement. Opening the door, he smelled the dank of long winters and short summers. It was dimly lit, with a few worn wooden doors along a narrow corridor. He walked halfway down the hallway and found a door that he was looking for. It read “maintenance” in Russian.

Pushing the door open, Travis walked inside. He looked around, seeing a couple bags of tools along the wall. He slipped back out, not taking anything. At the next door, he slipped inside again, this time finding the laundry. There was a dryer rattling at the back of the room as it ran, the room filled with humid, damp air. A makeshift clothesline spanned the space, a collection of clothes from people that were staying in the hostel hanging limply. Travis ducked under the clothesline and strode toward the dryer and opened it up, looking over his shoulder. It was easy enough to say he’d made a mistake if someone found him rooting through their clothes.

But he might get lucky.

As soon as he opened the dryer door, he realized he’d hit gold. There were two sets of navy blue pants with matching work shirts. He wasn’t sure if they were the right uniforms from Mount Yamantau, but it was better than the street clothes they had. He grabbed them, not paying attention to the sizes and slammed the metal door closed. The dryer went back on, starting to rattle again. Travis wadded the uniforms up under his arm and then walked out into the hallway. As he passed the maintenance room, a young, heavily bearded man passed him, wearing a heavy set of earphones over his ears. The young man, his eyes half closed as he listened to whatever was pumping into his ears, paid no attention at all to Travis as he got in the elevator. The doors slid silently closed.

A moment later, Travis, having made his way down the hallway, knocked on the door of the room he was sharing with CJ. She opened it up quickly letting him in. “What did you find?”

Travis closed and locked the door behind him. “This.”

CJ scowled. “What are those?”

“Our ticket into Yamantau.” Travis laid the uniforms on the bed.

CJ eyed them up suspiciously. “Are you kidding? Those don’t look like Russian uniforms. You think that a quick change of clothes and they’re going to let us in?”

Travis raised a single eyebrow. Did she think she was going in as a Russian general? “Something like that.”

“You’re crazy. Are you kidding me? Shouldn’t we have military uniforms?”

“Actually, no. Think about it. Who gets access to the entire facility?”

CJ didn’t say anything for a second and then looked up at him, her eyes wide. “The maintenance people.”

“Right.” Travis was pretty sure at that moment that CJ had made the right choice when she’d gotten involved in the Secret Service. It seemed like clandestine work wasn’t for her. On the other hand, if Travis had Catherine with him, she would have not only found the unforms herself, but she probably would have brought along the right accessories to really sell it. But he wasn’t with Catherine. He had CJ. Everyone had their strengths. He just hoped that CJ could rise to the occasion. If she didn’t, they might both go home in body bags.

Travis rubbed his index finger across his bottom lip, studying her. He reminded himself that CJ was green when it came to Agency-type work, but she was smart. She’d get it.

Or they’d die trying.

Travis focused on the task ahead of them. “We’ll blend right in when we get there. They have the train line that runs close to the front gate.”

“It’s still a mile or two out, right?”

“I thought you said a mile.”

CJ pressed her lips together in a pout, staring at her phone. “Yeah, I guess a mile.”

Travis picked up the smaller set of uniforms and tossed them to CJ. “That makes sense. It’s a funnel. That’s when they’re going to do all their security checks. If we can get past the security checks, then my bet would be that we can move around the facility with not too many problems. They’re gonna be focused on who’s coming in the front gate, not the people who are floating around inside.” He nodded toward the navy uniform that was next to him on the bed. “My guess is that these clothes might help us get in.”

CJ didn’t seem convinced. “So, what are we going to do, pose as a couple of plumbers?”

Travis shrugged. “If we have to.”

CJ swung her head definitively from side to side, holding up a single finger. “Hold on just a sec. This isn’t much of a plan. They’re going to see us coming from a mile away.”

Travis rubbed the back of his neck. Literally, yes, CJ. You’re right. “Listen, I know you Secret Service types like to have a plan⁠—”

CJ threw her hands in the air. “Here we go. A little interagency squabbling while we’re sitting in enemy territory. Nice, Bishop. I didn’t know you had it in you.”

“This isn’t squabbling, CJ,” he said matter of factly. “In the Secret Service, you’ve got all sorts of time to plan stuff. In the CIA, we fly by the seat of our pants a little bit more. I’m not being judgmental, I’m just telling you that’s the way it is.”

“You are so being judgmental. What, you don’t think I can do the job?”

Travis sighed. Here we go again. The conversation was slithering down a deep hole he didn’t want to fall into. “Bickering isn’t gonna help us get what we came here for. And to answer your question directly, I wouldn’t have brought you if I didn’t think that you were capable. I don’t have the time or the energy to try to fight with you through this operation. It’s dangerous enough on its own.”

CJ looked away, then rubbed at the back of her head as if a headache was threatening. When she turned back, she hugged her arms across her body. “Don’t I know it. But this plan, it’s just so flimsy. You expect me to risk my life on a hunch that putting on some work clothes is gonna get us into Yamantau, probably one of the most highly secured Russian government sites in the world.”

“Yup. That’s the job.” Travis shrugged. “And you’re right. Other than the Grand Kremlin Palace, where Terasovich hangs his hat, this place is gonna be tight.” He pointed at the door. “You can always walk out of here. I’m not keeping you. You can call the pilots and have them come and get you. They’ll pop you back over the border and you can wait to see what happens.”

“Are you saying the only option I have is to work the plan we have?”

Travis arched an eyebrow. “Unless you’ve got a better one.”

Her silence told him that she didn’t. Travis sat down on the edge of the bed. “The sun’s gonna be coming up soon. I’m guessing that the Russians run on twelve-hour shifts. It would be better for us if we arrive in a crowd. Why don’t you go get changed into your maintenance outfit and then we’ll make our way to the train station.”

“All right.”

Travis called after CJ as she disappeared into the bathroom. “I’m serious, CJ. If you have a better idea, I want to know. I’m not holding you hostage here. You can turn back anytime you want.”

All he heard was a grunt as she closed the bathroom door.

Just a few minutes later, CJ emerged from the bathroom. She’d scrubbed her face of any makeup, put on the uniform that Travis had found, and tied her hair up in a messy bun at the back of her head. Travis was impressed. She transformed herself much like Catherine Lewis would, from a European traveler to a sad, low-level worker at a high security facility in just the space of a couple minutes. Travis smiled. “The clean face is a nice touch.”

CJ shook her head. “Honestly, all I’m missing is a babushka.” She lifted her shoulder. “I figured that Russian women going to work at Yamantau wouldn’t exactly be too concerned about how many coats of mascara they put on.”

“You might be surprised.” Travis chuckled. “But I think scrubbing your face was smart.” He stood up, tightening his belt another notch. The pants he’d snagged from the laundry were a size too big, but they would do for what he needed them for. He picked up his backpack. “Ready to head to the train station?”

CJ nodded. “As ready as I’m ever gonna be.”

27

Travis slung his backpack over his shoulders, glad that he had given David his extra identities and phones. If they were searched when they went into Mount Yamantau the fewer questionable things he carried the better. He glanced at his phone. Still no word from Ruby. If she didn’t come through with the information about the location of the FSB employment list, they might have to wing it when they got into the facility.

He glanced at CJ. If she had realized they didn’t exactly know where they were going once they got into Yamantau, she hadn’t said anything. Not knowing exactly where they were going was part of the plan that Travis didn’t like. Not one bit. All he could do was hope that Ruby would come through in time and they could get in and out of Yamantau without attracting too much attention. Travis looked at CJ. “Ready?”

“As I’ll ever be.”

CJ and Travis closed the door to the room behind them, moving silently down the hallway. Travis heard some voices coming from the direction of the elevator. He made eye contact with CJ and pointed in the opposite direction, moving towards the stairwell. They opened the door and slipped inside. Travis watched for a moment. Three men dressed in similar uniforms to the ones that Travis and CJ wore emerged from the elevator door, the three of them laughing and chuckling. Travis waited to see if the men would adjust their course and come toward them. They didn’t, heading inside of one of the rooms and closing the door behind them. CJ gave Travis a nod. He closed the door to the stairwell silently and the two of them made their way downstairs. Travis was initially impressed, happy that CJ had intuitively understood they needed to be quiet as they moved.

As they made it outside, Travis noticed the sun was barely up over the horizon, dusk still hanging over Mezhgorye, with its rundown buildings, a lot of them still shuttered. A few cars passed by, but not too many. Walking down the cracked sidewalk, Travis’s stomach tightened. What if they had miscalculated the start time for the shifts at Yamantau? He pushed the thought from his head. They were on the move. They’d have to adjust as they went. It would be okay. He was sure of it, or at least he needed to act that way. Fake it until you make it, Bishop. That same attitude had saved his hide plenty of times.

He could only hope it worked now.

He thought for a brief second about reaching out to David or Ruby or even Catherine to get some additional intel, but it was too risky. He didn’t want to take the time or risk being distracted by his phone as they walked. There was also no telling if they’d be able to get the information back to him in time even if he did ask for it. He and CJ were on the move now. They couldn’t afford to wait. If they did, they’d have to hunker down at the hostel for another twenty-four hours and attempt the retrieval later. By then, the FSB would probably have started the extermination of the dissidents.

No, it was better if they just kept moving. Travis, while he’d been waiting for CJ to get changed in her uniform, had memorized the directions to the train station. It was about a ten-minute walk from where they were staying, the two of them moving along in silence. There wasn’t really anyone else on the sidewalk at that time of morning, the few shops and restaurants and cafes that lined the streets were still closed, save for a single small market and restaurant, the grainy smell of kasha cooking and tea steeping escaping from inside. Travis kept his eyes down as he walked, a typical Gray Man posture—the best way to disappear into the background. It was a skill he’d perfected over years and years of CIA operations.

Thinking about it at that moment, it was one that he wished he could perfect when he was at horse shows. His success with Travis Bishop Performance Horses had gotten him a fair amount of notoriety. He pressed his lips together, thinking about the number of women that chased him down at the horse shows. He discouraged it, immediately, not only because he didn’t want their attention, but because there was no telling who was actually watching. After all, Catherine Lewis had approached him a couple of years before when there had been a bounty on his head, arriving at one of the horse shows where he had been.

Less attention was always better. Always. He’d learned that the hard way as a kid.

Travis glanced up, his heart skipping a beat. What are you doing, Bishop? Get your head in the game. He’d told CJ not to get distracted, and yet here he was thinking about his life at home and not paying attention to what was right in front of him. He glanced over at CJ, checking on her. She had her head down and was walking along just behind his right shoulder. Her posture was slumped as if she was bracing for another long day of labor at Yamantau.

It was perfect.

The road they were following led directly to the train station. In the distance, Travis heard the horn of the train approaching. He started to move a little faster, glancing at CJ over his shoulder, silently encouraging her to pick up the pace. She didn’t say anything, just making eye contact and speeding up to match his stride.

The Mezhgorye train station was an abysmal building, Travis decided as they walked inside. It was painted gray throughout the interior, the tile floor scuffed and dirty, the building smelling like a combination of body odor and food. Travis kept his face expressionless as they walked. There were lines of plastic chairs bolted to the floor throughout the center of the waiting area. Travis half expected to see a crowd, but he didn’t. He shot a look at CJ. Had they missed their window?

Travis checked the board, seeing that two trainloads of people had already gone off to Yamantau. He felt his shoulders relax a little bit when he saw that there were still two more trains scheduled to head in that direction within the next hour. From the looks of it, they had about a thirty-minute wait before the next train departed.

Travis went to the ticket booth and purchased two tickets with rubles he found in the wallet that the CIA had put together for him, one for him and one for CJ. The man who sold him the tickets didn’t even bother to look up. Travis had run into a lot of Russians that were that way. Their basic posture was to keep their eyes down, trying to avoid scrutiny by anyone who might be an undercover FSB agent, or a local detective, or someone from the military. It didn’t take much in Russia to get sent to a work camp or a gulag. Keeping your eyes down was a necessary tactic for everyday Russians.

Travis muttered, “Spasibo” — thank you in Russian — under his breath and walked away, finding CJ. She’d picked chairs in the corner of the room on the far side between a bank of windows and the bathrooms. She looked at him and then whispered. “Success?”

Travis nodded. “Da.” He looked around. There was no one else really hanging around in the train station, just a couple of stragglers wearing work clothes that looked similar to the ones that they had stolen. CJ looked back at him and then looked down, whispering under her breath. “If more people don’t arrive, we are going to stick out like two sore thumbs.”

“We might have to go to plan B then.”

“What’s plan B?”

Travis shook his head. “I don’t know yet.”

28

Travis sat quietly, staring at a spot on the floor. He and CJ had been waiting in the Mezhgorye train station for what felt like forever. Travis looked at the time on his phone. In reality, it had been only about twenty minutes when he heard some voices from over his shoulder. Travis turned slowly, not wanting to attract any attention. A band of Russian Army soldiers had just walked into the train station, bags over their shoulders, joking with each other, their green uniforms neatly pressed, matching flat caps on their heads. Travis felt heat run through his body. He straightened and then shot a look at CJ before dropping his eyes to the ground. The last thing he wanted to do was stare. People knew when they were being watched. Russian Army? This isn’t good. He looked at CJ, who had paled. He mouthed the word “Relax.” She didn’t move a muscle, just sitting and staring at the floor like he was.

At least she was following his lead.

Keeping his eyes riveted to the floor, trying to adopt the slouched posture of someone who wasn’t happy to be going off to work, Travis just listened to what was going on around him. The swirl of voices seemed to intensify the closer they got to the time for the train to leave. The soldiers weren’t the only ones that arrived for the trip up to Yamantau. Not wanting to look like he was in a daze, Travis finally risked a glance around him as the hum of voices got louder. People had started to trickle inside the station in twos and threes, carrying bags and wearing backpacks, taking seats in the train station as they waited. Two women eyed up Travis and CJ as if they had taken their seats at the train station. Travis looked away, grimacing. Were there brass nameplates bolted somewhere that Travis had missed? Travis realized they probably had. He felt his stomach clench. One of the women, with broad shoulders and hips wearing a dark gray dress like he’d seen maids wear on his other trips into Russia, glared at him with a set of angry, dark eyes. Did she have a job as a maid at Yamantau, cleaning up after the people that lived there? How long had she worked there? How many secrets did she carry behind those black eyes?

Travis stood, deciding to walk outside to the platform. If the women wanted their seats back, so be it. There was no reason to risk a confrontation. He didn’t have to say anything to CJ. She did the same, following him.

As they pushed open the doors heading to the platform, the cool morning air coming out of the Ural Mountains covering them, Travis could hear the blaring horn of a train off in the distance, warning of its arrival. “Sounds like our ride is on the way,” he whispered to CJ.

CJ tugged at the waist of her ill-fitting uniform. “Did you see the stare we got from those two women inside?”

Travis dipped his chin, keeping his voice low. “We probably sat in their seats. I bet they sit there every morning.”

CJ’s face was tense. “Let’s hope that we don’t ever have to take their seats again. The one woman looked like she was ready to fight you.”

Travis tried not to laugh. It wasn’t that CJ wasn’t right; it was the way she’d said it. Underneath the polished Secret Service exterior, she had a quirky sense of humor. He liked it and the way that it broke the tension, even for a moment. He motioned for CJ to follow him. They walked around the corner of the building, disappearing out of sight of the doors leading into the station. Travis looked over his shoulder and then back at her, moving slowly. “It’s not a huge group of people in there. They’re going to come out and cluster on the platform. Once they start to board, we’ll slide in towards the back of the pack. Will be less noticeable that way.”

CJ didn’t say anything, just nodding as they returned to the platform.

The train rumbled into the station a few minutes later, the nose of it pointed north, towards where Travis knew that Mount Yamantau was. Off in the distance, he could see the rise of the Ural Mountains in front of him. As the train clattered into the station, he could smell diesel fumes. It slowed to a stop, a line of probably twelve cars behind it. Travis looked at CJ and held a finger up.

The train horn sounded again, this time closer. Travis could feel the vibration of the heavy engine as it approached, creeping around the bend. A second later, he saw it, a Soviet IS, a steam locomotive named after Joseph Stalin, burping puffs of white clouds into the air, the clatter of cars following behind. Travis swallowed. If Russia Railways was using an IS, they were really way out of civilization. Travis had only seen an IS one other time, when he and his former CIA partner, Elena Lobranova, had nearly gotten killed by a team of FSB agents as they ran for the Finnish border. They’d taken an IS, trying to escape the team that had been tailing them out of St. Petersburg. They hadn’t been successful. Rather than risking an altercation, Travis and Elena had jumped off in the darkness, hiking almost five kilometers to a spot they could slip into Finland. Travis swallowed, hoping they didn’t face the same issue on that day. Russian Railways IS steamers weren’t exactly a pleasant memory for Travis.

Focus, Bishop, or you’re gonna get yourself killed. Travis scanned the area around him. A stream of people started moving through the doors, clustering on the platform. Travis watched as the two women who had stared at them inside the station were at the front of the line, just ahead of the group of soldiers. He looked at CJ. “We’ll let them board first.” That way the angry woman could have her choice of seats.

CJ nodded.

As Travis stood, watching the people filter onto the train platform, a knot formed in his stomach. He suddenly felt uncertain. Was he really going to attempt to break into Mount Yamantau, Russia’s most secret military installation with an ill-prepared Secret Service agent by his side? He’d done crazy things before, but nothing like this. He pressed his lips together. It was too late now to rethink his promise to President Mosley.

As Robert Frost said, “The only way around is through.”

The crowd started to dwindle on the platform. Travis motioned for CJ to move up in line with him. He glanced at her, getting her attention. Speaking, he barely moved his lips, his voice nothing more than a whisper. “Pretend we’re relaxed about going on the train, but don’t be loud. Just stay calm and keep your head down. Don’t look at anyone and don’t smile.” People in Russia very rarely smiled unless they were drunk.

CJ looked away then whispered something to Travis that he couldn’t make out. He nodded and kept moving toward the passenger car, feeling a single drop of sweat run between his shoulder blades. Every step of the process to get into Mount Yamantau was like a field of landmines. One wrong move and the whole thing could blow up on them.

Just get on the train, Bishop. That’s the next thing.

The next thing was all he could do.

As they made it to the front of the line, they handed their tickets to a humorless, blue-uniformed Russian Railways employee collecting them at the door. He didn’t say a word. Like the man who had sold them the tickets, the porter didn’t bother to look up, just punching a hole through them. Travis realized how old-school everything seemed. In the United States, there were kiosks and tablets and scanners and everything was automated. Apparently, the train system in Russia hadn’t been updated at all. He guessed that if he’d ridden this train fifty years before, they would be using the same equipment.

As they walked on board, he turned to CJ and whispered something to her in Russian, just loud enough for the two women that had been staring at them in the train station to overhear. Out of the corner of his eye, Travis saw the two women look at each other and giggle. Although CJ didn’t know what he’d said, his comment about wanting to grab her and take her into the back of the train where they could be alone didn’t go without notice.

It was just as he intended. He hoped it was enough to make their presence unremarkable, just like anyone else on the train heading to Yamantau.

Travis and CJ made their way to the end of the third train car in the line. The first two were each about eighty percent full, the passengers electing to spread out. The third car was only about half full. CJ whispered under her breath as they got to the back of the third car, “Shouldn’t we go into one of the empty cars? Wouldn’t that be better?”

Travis shook his head and pointed to some seats that were about three rows away from two men that looked like a father and son going off to work. He followed her as she slid in and sat down. He leaned over to her. “We want to be part of a crowd. We’ll be less noticeable that way. If we went and sat all by ourselves, the porters would assume that we’re either lovers or were up to something.”

CJ arched an eyebrow. “Maybe we’re both?”

Travis shook his head. At least she’d held on to her sense of humor. That was something.

The train gave two long honks of the blaring horn and then lurched away from the station. Travis and CJ swayed in their seats as the train picked up speed. Travis didn’t know exactly how long of a ride it would be, but he guessed, given the age of the Soviet IS steamer, it wouldn’t be fast. Maybe thirty minutes to an hour to cover the miles to Yamantau? He and CJ sat silently, CJ closing her eyes. Travis was staring out the window when he felt a tap on his shoulder. Looking up, he saw one of the soldiers that he’d seen on the platform. “Brother, don’t I know you from somewhere?” The man asked in Russian, his breath smelling of cigarettes and maybe even faintly like alcohol even at that early hour. Travis noticed the stubble on his face and the dark circles under his eyes. Had the guy been up all night partying with his buddies or had he gotten into something to steel his nerves before he got to Yamantau?

Travis knew he had to think quickly. He pointed to himself, responding in Russian. “No, brother. I can’t say I know you. But I wish I did!”

The soldier stood up, frowning. “Are you sure? You look like someone I met during basic training.”

Travis felt a wash of relief. The guy was clearly mistaking him for someone else. Now he just had to get rid of the guy without insulting him. He shook his head, allowing his face to sag. “How I wish that was true. If only I could serve Mother Russia that way. But I don’t have the skills you do.”

Flattery would get you everywhere.

The soldier nodded, his face softening at the compliment. “Well, they say that everyone has a twin somewhere. Apparently, you do, too.”

Travis sighed in relief as the soldier kept moving, turning to CJ. “I’d prefer not to have any more of those interactions, if you know what I mean.”

CJ opened her eyes and nodded. Her skin had gone pale, though she’d had the presence to pretend to sleep. But Travis couldn’t help but notice the stress of being undercover was getting to her already. He rubbed his chin. He knew that could be problematic. Hopefully, CJ was as much of a pro as she said she was. His gut told him he’d know soon. “Me too.”

The two of them rode the rest of the way to Mount Yamantau in silence, no one else stopping to talk to them, the soldier only giving Travis a nod as he passed back in the other direction, rejoining his Army buddies that were riding in the first car of the train.

Feeling uneasy, Travis checked the time, looking for messages from Ruby. How much longer would it be? He had no idea if he’d be able to get a signal from the CIA’s satellites when he was in the mountain and he needed the location of the journal and the FSB employment database. There was still nothing. As he looked up, he felt the train start to slow. Ahead of him, a platform jutted out toward the train, sandwiched between a station and the tracks, almost identical to the one at Mezhgorye. Travis bit his lip. What did he expect this far north? This was Russia after all, the home of everything from the gilded political structures of Moscow to the drab gray neighborhoods that kept the Kremlin running. Staring at the building, Travis realized it looked like the Russians had tried to save money by just duplicating the design and build of the station. There were probably hundreds, if not thousands, of these identical stations throughout the enormous nation.

As Travis looked out the smudged glass of the window where he was sitting next to CJ, he saw what they’d come looking for. Mount Yamantau. The mountain itself jutted up toward the sky, the face of it stubbled with rock and barren, the dark green of evergreen trees covering the shoulders like a shawl. At the base, just beyond the platform, was an open hole into the mountain, several sets of gates and checkpoints ahead of it. He saw half a dozen UAZ’s four-wheel drive vehicles — Russia’s answer to America’s Army jeeps — buzzing back and forth between the gates. The path into the mountain was not only littered with jeeps, but attack dogs on leashes barking at people as they marched toward the open mouth of Yamantau, their shoulders slumped, like something out of a bad war movie.

CJ looked over to him, her eyes wide. “I thought you said it was a mile or two to the entrance.”

Travis licked his lip, suddenly feeling his mouth go dry. “That’s what it looked like on the map. I guess it’s not. Ready to improvise?”

“Do we have a choice?”

“No.”

29

Travis and CJ shouldered their bags and followed along behind the line of people who were getting off the train, CJ in the lead. The bottom of Travis’s backpack bumped against the seats as he walked. Travis, as he had earlier, kept his head down, shuffling along behind the other workers, matching their pace and posture. Only the soldiers seemed to be chatting and laughing.

But all of that stopped as soon as they got off of the train.

The platform at the train stop for Mount Yamantau was nothing more than a concrete slab with a set of steps at one end. Like the train station at Mezhgorye where they’d gotten on, the station itself was painted gray with the same plastic chairs bolted to the floor, a group of workers waiting to board.

Part of him wondered if there was a warehouse somewhere that had thousands of those same chairs in it. Bulk buying was an art of the communist regime. It was a one-size-fits-all culture. If anyone thought that died when the Soviet Union fell apart, they were sorely mistaken.

Travis and CJ followed along to the end of the platform, going down a set of wide concrete steps that led directly toward the first set of gates.

All of a sudden, Travis felt CJ grab his hand. It was ice cold. He looked at her. She cocked her head to the side as if she was trying not to alert anyone that she was panicked. “They’re checking ID’s. We don’t have any.” The words came out in a hiss.

Travis lifted his chin. She was right. He quickly grabbed her by the elbow, pulling her into the train station.

He looked at her, speaking softly. “Did you do any bump and grab drills with the service?”

CJ nodded, her voice tight. “A few. But it’s been a while.”

Travis shook his head. “Well, it’s time for you to brush up on your technique. Try to find someone that kinda looks like you in case they check. I’ll meet you outside in two minutes.”

“Two minutes?” CJ said, her mouth hanging open. “That’s not very much time.”

Travis looked at the gathering crowd in the train station and the dwindling one at the gates going into the mountain. They had two minutes to decide if they were going to try to get in or abort the operation. They couldn’t get in without ID. If they both couldn’t get IDs that would work, he’d have no choice but to calmly get back on the train and try to figure out an ex-fil plan to get out of Russia. “You want to be the only ones walking into Mount Yamantau? We need to be a part of that group going in. We can’t go in solo. We’ll never make it.”

He’d just spent precious time explaining something that he never would have had to if he had a trained CIA agent as a partner.

CJ clamped her mouth closed. Travis watched her for a second. She shouldered her bag and headed for the bathroom.

Trying not to curse under his breath, Travis looked down and walked away from CJ. He headed toward the ticket counter where there was a line of people purchasing their ride home. Ahead of Travis in line, there was a man that was roughly his same build and size with the same kind of maintenance uniform Travis was wearing. It was a good option, but was it the best?

Travis stopped for a second, pretending to kneel down to tie his shoe, scanning the people around him. He needed to find someone who looked similar to him with a similar job title. It would do no good to pull an Army ID. He wasn’t wearing the right uniform.

The man that Travis had seen in the crowd looked like his only option. In Travis’s hesitation, he’d turned away from the ticket counter already. He was fumbling with his wallet, getting ready to pocket his ticket. It was now or never. Travis saw his ID, a white plastic card, clipped to his waistband from where he knelt. As the man got close, Travis sucked in a breath and then stood up, angling his shoulder for the man’s torso. He intentionally looked the other direction as if he wasn’t paying any attention at all to the man. The collision between Travis and his target was sudden, the man dropping his wallet, his train ticket floating away and landing on the floor ten feet from them. He scowled at Travis. “Watch where you’re going, you idiot!” he said in Russian.

Travis held his hands up. “Izvini,” he mumbled. Sorry.

He actually wasn’t that sorry. As Travis walked away, he pocketed the man’s ID. He’d managed to snag it as he stood up, the man so distracted by losing his wallet and the physical contact that he had no idea that Travis had grabbed it. Without looking at it, Travis stuffed it in his pocket, not wanting anyone to notice what he’d done. It wasn’t like he could just stop in the middle of the train station and clip it on his waistband. He shouldered his bag up a little bit higher and hooked his thumbs on the straps, walking outside. His heart skipped a beat. Where was CJ? He sucked in a deep breath and waited for a count of ten, trying to decide whether he should go in and try to help CJ or stay where he was. Time was running out. The line at the check in from Mount Yamantau was dwindling down to a dangerous level, one where Travis wasn’t sure they should attempt to get in. He was just about to run into the building to find her, when she bolted out the door, her cheeks pink, her eyes wide. She gave him a nod.

CJ fell in beside him as they walked toward the security gates for Yamantau. He whispered under his breath. “Did you get it?”

She nodded, her words nothing more than a sharp whisper. “Yep.”

As they walked, Travis felt every nerve in his body tingle. He glanced towards CJ. Her mouth was open, as if she was taking her last breaths of freedom. She looked at him as if she suddenly realized something. “What do I do if they ask me a question?”

Travis nodded. “Cough and then point to your throat. I’ll tell them you have laryngitis.”

As if on cue, CJ coughed.

Thankfully, Travis and CJ weren’t the last people entering Yamantau, but they were close to it, with maybe only a couple dozen others in line behind them. Travis could tell by the agitated way that the soldiers outside of the mountain were moving that they were anxious to get everyone inside and finish their initial security checks. If Travis had to guess, they had a break coming.

That’s right. Just rush us through. Don’t bother looking too closely. Travis knew that Russian workers were partial to their hot tea and pyshki, the Russian equivalent of coffee and donuts. He kept his head down, moving along with the crowd, watching CJ from the corner of his eye. They both needed to make it inside. They’d blow their covers if they got separated. As they moved along, Travis knew they had one hope — that the men running security were getting tired and bored.

What most people didn’t know was that working long security lines was dry and exhausting. There wasn’t a moment where you could lower your vigilance. If you did, then someone might get into a place that they were not supposed to and someone would lose their job, there’d be an incident, or worse — if you were in Russia — you’d get accused of being part of it and get shipped off to a work camp. Still, it was mundane work, the kind of environment where mistakes could be made.

That’s exactly what Travis was hoping would happen.

Travis surveyed the security in front of him. There were two sets of gates before the wide mouth of Mount Yamantau. He and CJ had made it through the first part of the funnel, the part where there was just a chain link fence on either side, like a chute. Then there were the gates. As Travis glanced toward the first set of gates, he saw that people were showing their badges and then walking right on through. Then the chute narrowed, cordoned off by chain link fence from about twenty feet wide down to maybe five, funneling the workers into the building, like cattle to the slaughter. As the space narrowed, people were scanning their ID cards and then heading into the darkness.

Show and then scan. He and CJ could handle that, couldn’t they?

Travis had just passed the first checkpoint, holding up his badge and keeping his eyes to the ground as he heard the approach of vehicles from the right side. A trickle of sweat ran between his shoulder blades. He kept moving but glanced up for a fraction of a second. Out of seemingly nowhere, three black Mercedes G-Class SUVs pulled up in front of the Mount Yamantau entrance, the gates quickly swung aside. Travis looked away as he realized whoever was in the cars would avoid the funnel that was sending people into the bowels of the mountain.

Whoever it was, they were important.

Travis looked up, narrowing his eyes. He heard voices, car doors opening and then slamming, seeing men leave wearing camouflage pants and black sweaters heading into the building. Travis didn’t look too carefully, but it seemed like some of the Russian military brass had arrived at Mount Yamantau. Their uniforms looked like military, but Travis knew they’d been changed recently.

Were they actually Russian military?

Travis didn’t dare look again for fear of them looking right back at him. The trail of Mercedes SUVs was no more than thirty feet away, the only thing between them was the spot where he and CJ would have to scan their badges.

Travis walked a little slower waiting for the men to get inside, then scanned his badge, trying not to make it obvious that he was intentionally stalling the line behind him. He waited for a second then heard the scanner give a loud chirp. He looked at the officer who was standing there. The man scowled. “Why are you here again? You just left!”

Travis shook his head and allowed his features to sag as if he was completely disgusted, then pointed at CJ. “Double shift. And she’s sick. Can you imagine?”

On cue, CJ coughed.

Travis didn’t move for a second, his heart pounding in his chest, waiting to see what would happen. The odds were not good if they had to fight their way out of the chute. It was almost certain that they would be apprehended and then probably dragged in front of the officers that had just arrived. Sweat gathered on his palms. The man narrowed his eyes at Travis and CJ and then with a frustrated wave sent them back through. “Next time, tell your supervisor to reset the system.”

Travis didn’t say anything, just nodding and hurrying along, reaching for CJ’s elbow to give her a shove.

You don’t have to ask me twice, pal.

As he looked over his shoulder at the bright morning daylight behind him, Travis realized it could very well be the last time that he saw the sun. If they got caught, he’d likely spend the rest of his life stuck in a hole somewhere. Feeling his chest clutch, he suddenly wanted nothing more than to be back in Texas dealing with the likes of Maddie and her antics.

“The only way around is through.”

All Travis could hope for was that there was something on the other side for him and CJ, something that didn’t include a life in Russia. He sucked in a breath and went inside.

30

Travis pulled CJ off into the shadows as they made their way inside the darkness just inside the entrance of Mount Yamantau. Given that they were surrounded by people who would have nothing but pure joy at capturing them, they needed a plan, and fast. After the interaction they’d just had with the guard outside and seeing the Russian brass pull up in their polished Mercedes G-Class SUV’s, there was no time to wait. He checked his phone. Still nothing from Ruby. He shook his head.

CJ leaned close to him, her voice barely above a whisper. “What is it?”

Travis’s expression tightened. “Still no word from my contact about the location.”

A man walked by them, wearing the same kind of uniform that they had on, glancing at them out of the corner of his eye. “Get to work,” he growled under his breath in Russian.

“Da, konechno.” Yes, of course, Travis replied. His stomach flopped. They’d have to do a better job of looking like they were meant to be there.

For a second, Travis was surprised that the man didn’t stop them and sound an alarm. After all, neither of them looked particularly Russian, nor did they look much like they fit in at Yamantau with their oversized, ill-fitting uniforms.

Then again, it was pretty dark. He probably just saw our uniforms and us standing and talking and assumed we were part of the crew. If that was the case, that was good news.

As Travis looked around Mount Yamantau, he realized it was much more than just a bunker—in fact, it was a complete underground city. Whatever the American intelligence community had assumed about what the Russians were doing inside the mountain, they were completely wrong. They had utterly underestimated the amount of development that was going on. If he and CJ accomplished nothing else, they needed to sound the alarm stateside that Yamantau was a significant threat, not just to their neighbors, but to the rest of the globe. Travis immediately began to wonder what the Russians were up to. Why all the investment into Yamantau? Why now?

And Travis had barely been more than a few feet inside the mouth of the mountain.

His mouth dry, Travis realized that the space was open enough that there were actual roads inside the mountain, steel beams supporting the underground structure. Travis looked up, seeing signs mounted on the walls that pointed to everything from a cafeteria to a medical bay. A second later, in the dim light, an electric vehicle passed him, the hum of the engine getting louder and then dimming. He felt a chill crawl down his back, a memory surfacing. He hadn’t realized how similar being inside Mount Yamantau would be to the inside of the Chunnel. On his last mission for the CIA, he’d tracked terrorists into England’s underground train tunnel that connected Great Britain with France. He hadn’t managed to prevent the Chunnel from imploding and drowning two train cars filled with innocent people, but he, with the help of Catherine and Ruby, had managed to save a lot of lives even though the terrorists got away. Thinking about how he’d had to resuscitate Catherine after she nearly drowned caused every muscle in his body to tighten.

Travis fought off feelings of claustrophobia. Everything in him wanted to run back outside into the sunshine, get on a plane, and get back to the wide-open spaces of Texas. That was where he belonged, not walking deeper and deeper into a dark mountain filled with Russians. He pulled CJ deeper into the shadows. He needed a minute. She pressed her lips together, looking at him. “Are you okay?”

He nodded. “Yes. Always.” He tried to be reassuring. There was no time to tell her what had happened to him in England, not that it was any of her business. He would deal with it like he always had. “I just need a minute.”

What’s the next thing, Bishop?

Travis watched a few more people and vehicles pass by, not feeling comfortable walking out into the open. He realized if they had any hope of retrieving the information they were looking for, they needed to improve their cover so they could blend in with the rest of the people at Yamantau. Walking along wearing backpacks and looking lost wasn’t going to do it. He saw another vehicle pass with people who were wearing similar uniforms to theirs. Travis dipped his eyes to the ground, avoiding eye contact. He lifted his eyes as they headed into the darkness. Maybe they were headed to a work area. He motioned for CJ to follow him.

As they walked deeper into the mountain, Travis looked around, though he did it in short glimpses, not wanting anyone to realize how new he was to the facility. He knew it was those little types of nonverbal actions that made someone stand out. That was the last thing he wanted to do. He looked at CJ, whose mouth was open, her head on a swivel. She looked like she was on a protection detail. “Don’t stare. Look at the ground,” he warned.

His warning couldn’t have come at a better time. As she dropped her eyes, a vehicle filled with four Army soldiers wearing tightly fitted camouflage passed them, the electric motor of their UAZ, which looked exactly like a jeep, quietly humming. Travis realized it made sense why they used electric inside of the mountain. Gas or diesel vehicles would have polluted the air inside the space. His heart skipped a beat. If they needed vehicles, just how big was the installation? His stomach sunk. All of a sudden, finding the journal and the FSB database seemed a whole lot harder, like finding a needle in a haystack.

C’mon, Bishop. Get the job done. You’ve got horses to ride.

Travis wagged his fingers at CJ, motioning for CJ to keep moving. He stared at the ground. Movement was his friend. They’d look less suspicious if they weren’t gawking at the facility. He had no idea where he was going. It wasn’t as if there was a published map of Yamantau that he could find on the Internet for reference. The secret mountain was the stuff of legends, of whispers in the dark over half-consumed glasses of whiskey by grizzled intelligence operatives, spinning tales of the things that happened inside. Half of those things he was sure weren’t true, and the other half he was sure were far more terrible than he ever wanted to know.

And now he was the one inside.

The two of them walked along trying not to make eye contact. Travis read some of the signs as they passed. Each room seemed to be numbered, a steel door cut into the stone walls. After walking for a few minutes, Travis saw a sign that read “maintenance.” He glanced at CJ, holding up the key card he’d stolen from the unsuspecting man at the train station. “Think this will open the door?”

She shrugged. “Only one way to know,” she whispered.

Travis held the key card up to the door, hearing a beep and a click. He opened it slowly, looking over his shoulder. He heard the rumble of another vehicle coming, this time it filled with black-shirted men, ones that were wearing the same uniform as had piled out of the VIP vehicles when they had gotten in there. Travis’s chest clutched. He reached for CJ and dragged her into the room, closing the door quickly behind them. Travis hadn’t been able to see their uniforms well enough earlier, but he knew those colors.

Those weren’t Army officers; those were FSB agents.

The back of his neck tensed as he waited inside the room by the door with CJ, his back plastered against the wall, listening for the vehicle to pass by. Realistically, the FSB agents had absolutely no reason to stop at a maintenance room. They had bigger fish to fry if they were at Mount Yamantau, but then again, this was the FSB. They had the right to go anywhere in Russia, and they would. If Travis and CJ were found, the operation was over. The agents would enjoy torturing a couple of Americans found lurking in the shadows of their most secret location. Travis shuddered, trying not to think about exactly what they would do to the two of them were found. Travis wasn’t one to struggle with fear, but at that moment, the reality of what they were attempting crashed down on him. He stood, frozen for a second. CJ grabbed his arm. “Are you okay?” she whispered again.

First the Chunnel, now Yamantau. I’m gonna have to tell Freeman I’m not doing these tight spaces anymore. Especially if they involve the FSB. Travis sucked in a sharp breath. “You don’t have to keep asking me that. I’m fine.” His words came out a little more snappish than he wanted them to. He knew CJ was just trying to be nice, but they were there to do a job. She wasn’t there to be his keeper.

Travis pushed himself away from the wall and started looking around. The interior of the room that they had entered was square, a line of shelves along one wall filled with neatly arranged bottles of cleaning products. A second set of shelves held tools and parts. Along the opposite wall was a line of maintenance carts. They looked similar to laundry carts that Travis had seen used in commercial laundry facilities, except for the fact that they had a shelf attached to the back of them, making them some sort of a laundry cart and grocery cart hybrid, one that could hold tools and parts. He looked over the carts and then had an idea. “Let’s use one of those.” CJ nodded, striding to the other side of the room and pulling one away from the wall. The wheels clattered the tiniest bit as she did. She frowned, pushing it back against the wall and choosing another. Travis nodded. It was a smart move. They needed to be as quiet as possible.

As she pushed it toward him, he pulled the backpack off of his shoulders and tossed it inside. CJ added hers to the mix and then pulled a couple of tarps off of the shelf, unfolding them to cover up their backpacks. Travis grabbed some cleaning supplies and some tools, loading down the cart as if they had a project they were heading off to do. He glanced inside the tool bag he grabbed. It had a variety of wrenches and screwdrivers, plus a couple of hammers. It wasn’t a gun, but it was better than nothing.

Travis gave CJ a nod. They headed for the door. As they approached it, Travis looked at her. “We need to figure out where the servers are so we can access the FSB database. We also need to see if there is a room where the FSB analysts are working. If the journal is here, that’s where it would be.”

CJ frowned for a second. “And if we can’t get the journal?”

“We’re not going to worry about that. We’ll try, but our priority is to get the FSB database.”

CJ tipped her head left and right like she was a boxer ready to enter the ring. “There’s no time like the present, Bishop. Let’s get this done so we can get out of here.”

“Copy that.”

Travis pushed the cart forward as CJ opened the door. He watched as she poked her head out and then gave him a slight nod, pulling the door the whole way open. As they walked back out in the hallway, they both put their heads down, walking slowly as if they were headed off to handle a project. Travis felt the wheels of the cart vibrate through the handles as he was pushing. Questions peppered through his mind. Was the journal that had been stolen from Kaniksu Information Repository even there yet? Where would it be and where could they find the database of FSB agents? He pulled his phone out of his pocket, holding it low so that no one passing them would see him checking it. Still nothing from Ruby. He was just about to shove it back in his pocket when he noticed they had a cell phone signal. How that was possible exactly, he wasn’t sure, but then again, the CIA techs were filled with tricks that he didn’t understand and didn’t care to know. All he knew was that they had a way to connect if they needed it.

That was a break.

His mind drifted for a second. He’d heard chatter a few months before about new satellite technology that the U.S. was using to piggyback off of signals controlled by other countries, allowing communications and the tracking of personnel deep into enemy territory. Maybe that was what was going on? His expression tightened. If Travis and CJ had a signal, then the White House had to know they were inside of the mountain by now. Travis thought for a second about sending a message back to CIA headquarters, but he decided against it. There was no telling what type of counterintelligence was present within the building. Just because he could get signal didn’t mean he should use it. There was no reason to alert anyone of their presence.

At least not yet.

Travis and CJ continued to make their way down the hallway, trying to figure out where the FSB had taken the journal, if it was even there. As they walked, Travis realized that they were turning to the right, as if the mountain had been scooped out and they were walking in a circle. As they got towards the back of the mountain, the space opened up. There was a wide bay in the back — nearly the size of an American football field — that looked like a parking lot. There were at least four dozen military vehicles parked there, armored Tigers carrying a Kord 12.7-millimeter machine gun mounted to their roofs, a fleet of UAZ utility vehicles, four Vityaz-2 personnel carriers, three or four Vodnik submersibles and even three T-14 Armata tanks. The Russians were prepared for war at Mount Yamantau.

Travis’s throat tightened as he looked over his shoulder. They must have made their way to the back of the installation. As he looked in the direction of the opening where he and CJ had gone through the checkpoint, he saw a wide hallway that would allow for the military vehicles to move straight out of the mountain to get into position to protect the secrets of Yamantau.

With this much firepower, the Russians were definitely planning something. His stomach sunk. He had to get the information back to D.C. They had to know that the Russians were escalating… and fast.

Travis and CJ kept moving, their heads down. After a few minutes of silence, Travis looked at CJ and gave her a little nod of encouragement. So far, no one had given them a second look. But while that was a good sign, they’d been walking for a while and hadn’t seen anything that looked like a server farm or a place where the journal was being held. He frowned. Every minute they were in the mountain they were in danger. They needed to get what they came for and leave. Travis set his jaw, wondering if the mountain had what he was looking for after all. If he’d broken into Mount Yamantau and Ruby was wrong, and they got caught…

He couldn’t continue the thought in his mind.

As they moved away from the motor pool, heading down another smaller corridor, Travis stopped, looking around and then dipping his head, his stomach knotting. There was a glass-enclosed room in front of him, analysts hunched over computers. In the back of the room he saw tall server stacks, their lights blinking, cables attaching them from one to the next. Travis’s heart skipped a beat. Was this what they were looking for? He glanced at the analysts that were working in the room; there were only three of them, probably thirty other computer stations empty. Why they were so short staffed, he had no idea. CJ looked at him, catching his eye. “Is that?”

He nodded. “Da.” He’d said yes, but were there other servers in the building? That was something he didn’t know. C’mon, Ruby. I’m counting on you.

CJ looked at him. “How are we going to get in there?”

Travis shook his head. “I have no idea.”

31

Travis needed time to think. They’d spotted where at least some of the data was being held. That said, he still had no idea which server it was being held on or even if he could access it. And there was another problem he had to solve. Not only did he not know if the journal that had been stolen from Kaniksu Information Repository was in the building, but even if he could find the data on the FSB agents, he had to have a way to get it out of the building. Travis frowned. Normally the CIA was better about prepping for these kinds of projects. But then again, their operation had been cobbled together quickly with no time for a conversation that would better prepare them. Travis glanced down at the tarps covering their backpacks as they pushed the cart along.

What if?

Travis started watching the signs, looking for a place that they could dart in and regroup. He needed to figure things out. In his gut, he knew their window of opportunity was closing. He and CJ could only stay so long in the mountain without being discovered. The best-case scenario would be they find what they were looking for and hide until shift change, leaving the same way they came in.

If that wasn’t possible, then they’d have to make it up as they went.

He picked up the pace, pushing the cart in front of him, the wheels vibrating quietly. He kept his eyes down as they passed three people walking in the other direction, mumbling something unintelligible to CJ. She played along, nodding. He used his peripheral vision to keep track of where they were. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw a sign for a storage room on his left. Travis walked up to it, opened the door using his key card, and slipped inside with CJ and the cart. As soon as the door closed behind them, CJ whispered, leaning so close to him he could feel the heat of her body. Her eyes were wild. “What are we doing, Travis? I thought we were going to try to get into the server room. We just seem to be making laps around the mountain.”

“I need to figure out something. Give me a second.”

CJ threw her hands in the air. “Again? Seriously, Bishop? Here I am, trapped in a secret Russian mountain with a man who has questions and needs to stop to figure out things. Shouldn’t we have figured out things before we walked in here?”

Travis didn’t bother answering. It was the same argument they had earlier—the Secret Service’s need to plan versus the CIA’s way of running operations by the seat of their pants when it was necessary. He yanked his backpack out of the cart and set it on the floor, then knelt in front of it and unzipped it.

CJ stood, her arms folded across her chest, a look of disgust on her face. “What are you doing, Travis? At least have the courtesy to fill me in.”

Travis glanced up at her, but didn’t say anything. He knew she was feeling impatient. That much was clear. Whether she was always like that or he was just getting the brunt of it, he had no idea. But part of him wondered if it was just her way of expressing her fear. Either way, he had to keep her calm. Their lives depended on it.

“I didn’t stop to catalog what was in these bags they sent with us. There might be something helpful in here.”

“You mean the CIA’s concierge service?”

On any other day, Travis probably would have chuckled thinking about the CIA packing a bag for him, but now, what they had put in his bag would likely impact how successful he and CJ would be on their mission.

Or even if they survived.

Let’s just hope the CIA prep team is smarter than I think they are. Maybe we’ll get lucky, and they will have put something interesting in this bag of tricks. Travis pulled out a few changes of clothes, which he’d already seen, but he hadn’t gone through the things that were in the pockets. He’d found a toiletry pack that he’d already used, but as he dug deeper he found a cache of some other interesting things—two flash drives, one he expected was a backup in case they needed it, some cables, likely to charge his phone with, though whatever kind of battery they had put in the phones didn’t seem to get depleted very easily. If he had to guess, the CIA was probably testing some new version that wasn’t even on the market yet. There was a lock pick set and a pen. For a second, Travis wondered why it was segmented off with the other tools of his trade and then he realized it was a tactical pen, made of carbon steel, something that could be used as a weapon. He stuck the pen in the pocket of his shirt and then glanced at CJ. “You might want to get yours out. You might want it.”

“Is that a tactical pen? I’ve just read about those online.”

Travis nodded. “Yeah, use it just like a knife, but remember it stabs, not cuts.”

CJ pulled her bag out of the cart and unzipped it, unearthing the tactical pen that the CIA had given them. “Geez, I wish we could have brought our guns.”

Travis shrugged. “And it would have immediately signaled that we aren’t who we are. The CIA doesn’t do things that way⁠—”

CJ nodded. “I know, I know. It’s all cloak-and-dagger stuff. I get it. But what’s next?”

Travis paused. “Well, let’s see if we can find the journal.”

CJ narrowed her eyes. “I thought that’s what we were doing. What about the FSB database? You’re still waiting on your contact?”

Travis stared at his phone, the taste of bile in his throat. Nothing from Ruby. He fought the urge to grab one of the tools and launch it at the wall. He grimaced, feeling a ball of anxiety build in his gut. Why had he thought he could count on her? A flash of anger in his gut told him Ruby was just like all of them — Kira, Gus — everyone who had betrayed him. And now he was stuck with CJ in a dark Russian mountain. They couldn’t wait any longer. They had to make a move.

Though it was against his better judgement, he sent a text message to her number with nothing more than a question mark. She had to know that they would be at Mount Yamantau by now. Why Ruby hadn’t gotten back to him, he wasn’t sure. He stared at his phone, pressing his lips together. Though he was intrigued by Ruby and her mystery — not to mention her beauty — Travis knew he couldn’t fool himself about who she was. Ruby was an assassin whose skills were for sale to the highest bidder. While she had no love for the Russians who had betrayed her, trying to kill her in a plane crash, he also knew that Ruby was only loyal to one person.

That was herself.

CJ closed her backpack and tossed it back inside the cart next to Travis’s, covering it up with the tarps. “All right, let’s go. This place is making me jumpy. I wanna get out of here.”

You think you’re the only one? “All right. But patience is what will get us what we want. Now that we know the lay of the land, let’s take another lap around the building and see if we can figure out where the journal might be.”

As they left the storage room, still pushing the cart in front of them, Travis realized that he hadn’t seen the FSB officers again. If the journal was here, then it would make sense that they would have a section of Mount Yamantau dedicated to secret intelligence operations. As they walked, Travis tried to pay more attention to the signs. He’d been watching them before, but had been just trying to get a general idea of how the installation was laid out. The place was huge. It was like being dropped in the middle of Disney with no map and no idea how to get from Epcot Center to Cinderella’s castle. Everything was new to him, and in the dim light, with the suffocating damp air of the mountain around them, he was finding it hard to focus. He shook his head a little bit as they walked, a wave of disappointment washing over him. Was he losing his touch? Get it together, Bishop. CJ’s right, you need to get this data and get out of here.

As they rounded a corner, Travis heard voices. He stopped suddenly, staring ahead of him. Bingo. There was a cluster of FSB agents standing in the hallway, whispering to each other, clapping each other on the arms as though they had just scored a big victory. From somewhere, he could smell cigar smoke, as if there was a celebratory mood in a room near to them. As Travis stared, one of the men looked up, narrowing his eyes at Travis. Bishop, you know better. His stomach immediately clenched into a tight ball. He looked down and away, his mind racing. Did the FSB agents suspect anything? What should he and CJ do? Everything in Travis wanted to run, but he controlled himself. It was a tactic he had learned during his CIA training at Camp Peary, the facility called “The Farm” by all of the CIA recruits. He knew it was one thing to get noticed by someone, but it was something else to give them more information to follow up on their suspicions. What he did next would be a life-or-death decision.

Travis looked down in the cart, noticing there was a clipboard. He picked it up and looked at CJ, mumbling some Russian under his breath and pointing the other direction. She nodded, following along, picking up the tool bag as they turned, walking the other way, as if they suddenly realized they had gone down the wrong hallway. Travis felt the hair on the back of his neck stand up as they rounded the corner. Everything in him wanted to turn around to see if the FSB agent was following him, but he couldn’t. He knew that would be an absolute signal that he and CJ weren’t who they said they were.

As they turned the corner, CJ looked at Travis. “That was close. Were those⁠—?”

Travis nodded. “FSB agents? You bet they were. And those guys were pretty high up by the insignias on their jackets.”

“You think the journal is here?”

Travis nodded, finally feeling certain that they’d made the right decision. “I don’t know any other explanation for why those guys would be here. And then there’s the smell of cigar smoke. They are definitely celebrating.”

CJ nodded, frowning. “I smelled that too. They’re smoking inside?”

To Travis, it was a funny question. “This is Russia, CJ. They don’t do things like we do in the United States.”

“I guess not.”

Travis knew they needed to find a way to get to where the FSB analysts were. If the brass was huddled on that side of the building, then perhaps there was another entrance. After all, even the FSB areas might need maintenance, wouldn’t they? Travis felt his confidence begin to build. Everything in his gut told him that they were close.

Travis pushed the cart down the hallway until he saw a sign that read “Access Room 1.” He held his breath for a second as he lifted his key card up to the reader. Would it even let him in?

A second later he had his answer. The light blinked green and clicked open. He opened it up and pushed the cart inside, pretending to check his clipboard again.

Inside the door, he saw a brief glimpse of a group of FBS agents on the other side of a glass wall, all huddled over a pile of papers, a black journal sitting in the middle of the table. Some of them were sitting. Others were standing or leaning on the table. All in all, there had to be half a dozen of them. With the way they were positioned, Travis couldn’t see any of their faces. A cloud of cigar smoke hung in the air, the table covered in crystal glasses and several carafes of what Travis expected was expensive Russian vodka. Travis’s heart pounded in his chest once again. They’d walked right from the frying pan into the fire. First, they’d seen the FSB agents in the hallway, now they were practically on top of them. They needed to slip away. He glanced at CJ, starting to turn the card around when he heard a voice behind him. “Hey, you?” they yelled in Russian.

“Da?” Travis adopted a surprised expression.

It was a woman with blonde hair and a pointed chin. “What are you doing in here?”

“I’m sorry,” Travis apologized in Russian. “I thought our work order said to⁠—”

“No one comes in here.” She held out her hand. “Give me your key card.”

Travis knew his only hope was to play along, hoping that the woman would let them go in a second. He saw a few of the men look up from the table and then look away, as if it was enough to have the woman yell at them. She glanced at his key card for a second and then shoved it back at him. “I don’t have time for this. Get out of here. I don’t care what your work orders say. You’ll have to come back another day.”

Travis looked down, hanging his head. “Of course,” he responded in Russian.

He turned the cart around slowly, his sweating hands nearly slipping off of the handles. He and CJ walked quickly to the door and pushed it open. They went down the hallway heading back in the other direction and retreated into the storage room where they’d looked at the contents of their backpacks. Travis locked the door behind them. “That was close,” CJ said, her eyes wide.

Travis nodded. He wasn’t sure CJ knew how much danger they were in. He decided not to tell her. “Don’t I know it.”

There was a noise at the other end of the storage room. Travis froze. Someone was in there with them. Out of a shadow, a man appeared, wearing the same kind of uniform that Travis and CJ were wearing. Travis’s entire body tensed. He reached into the tool bag and wrapped his fingers around the handle of a heavy wrench, leaving his hand hidden inside the bag.

The man narrowed his eyes. “Chto ty zdes’ delayesh’?” What are you doing in here?

Travis knew he had to stay calm. One wrong move and his mission — and their lives — would be over. “Prosto poluchayu koye-kakiye pripasy.” Just getting some supplies.

Neither of them said anything for a moment, Travis’s heart pounding in his chest. His palm was sweating against the metal of the wrench. Travis looked at the man in front of him trying to adopt a cool exterior. The man had to have heard them speaking English. Had to. He was short and square, with broad shoulders, thick wrinkles around his eyes, and a bald head. Dangling from his lips was a joint. Travis raised his eyebrows, the sweet smell of marijuana hitting his nostrils.

The man was the first to look away. He crushed the joint with the toe of his boot and stuck it into a pocket of his coveralls. He brushed past Travis, only glancing at CJ, his eyes to the ground. “U gory yest’ sekrety. Bud’ ostorozhen.” The mountain has secrets. Be careful.

The door closed behind the man with a click. Travis stared, his mouth open.

“What was that?” CJ hissed, grabbing at Travis’s arm and tugging him toward the door. “We need to get outta here. Now!”

Travis didn’t move, only staring at the door and listening. There were no alarms, no sound of footsteps coming toward them. “I don’t think so,” he said, as his heart slowed.

“Are you crazy? He heard us speak English. I’m sure of it.”

“You’re right,” Travis said slowly.

“Then why aren’t we bailing?”

“Because we saw him smoking pot. It’s illegal in Russia.”

“He’s not gonna tell because we saw him smoking a joint?” CJ put her hands on her hips. “That doesn’t make sense.”

Travis nodded slowly. “No, he’s not. He doesn’t want to get sent to a Russian jail any more than we do. He said, ‘The mountain has secrets,’ and said to be careful. That’s not someone who’s gonna flip on us. We need to keep going. If we keep his secret, he will keep ours.”

CJ grimaced. “He knows we are here, Travis. Are you sure?”

Setting his jaw, Travis nodded. Russians were funny that way. They were masters at turning the other cheek. Reporting anything — even something as significant as Americans inside Yamantau — would turn the FSB’s spotlight on them. No one wanted to tangle with the FSB. Especially Russians who just wanted to get a little high. “Yes. We’re gonna keep going.”

“But how? Did you see the journal in the middle of the table? There’s no way we can get it back, can we?”

Travis nodded, his heart sinking, thinking about all of the names that were in that book. “Yeah, I saw it.” He racked his brain for a second, trying to come up with a solution to what appeared to be the reality of a failed mission. Trying to retrieve the journal when it was sitting in the middle of room surrounded by senior FSB agents now seemed impossible. He rubbed the back of his neck. Was retrieving it worth the risk? By now, he was sure that the FSB had probably already catalogued what was in the journal. For all intents and purposes, the damage had been done. “I don’t think we’re going to be able to get it. It’s too new. They’re too excited about it. They’re gonna keep that thing under lock and key until they juice every bit of intel out of it.” He looked away for a second. As much as he was a man of his word, he also wasn’t crazy. He wasn’t coming up with any way to get that book away from the FSB. And even if he tried, it would be a suicide mission. He pressed his lips together. “No, we need to refocus on getting the FSB database. That’s our only hope. If we can get a copy of it, we can level the playing field.”

“And if that doesn’t work?”

He lowered his head and his voice. “Then the best we can hope for is that we can escape.”

32

“We can’t stay here forever, Travis,” CJ said, looking at him then glancing at the door.

Really? I had no idea. I was ready to redecorate and make a home in this squalid little room. “I know. Just waiting on a message.” The more impatient CJ got, the more Travis realized that covert work probably wasn’t for her. How many times had he had to wait for hours or days for something to happen so he could make his next move?

Too many to count.

After their near run in with the FSB, Travis and CJ had hunkered down in the storage room, Travis waiting for a message back from Ruby. They were sitting on the floor against the wall, Travis silently praying that no one would enter the room. While they waited, he’d managed to get a message out to David too, but David had replied that the CIA analysts agreed that the FSB database was being housed at Mount Yamantau, but they didn’t know exactly where, at least not yet.

But the longer they sat there, the more Travis realized that wasn’t good enough.

After waiting for another half hour, Travis stood up. “No one is getting back to us and we’re not safe here. We’re going to have to try to figure this out on our own.”

CJ shook her head. “Are you crazy? You think we’re just going to be able to saunter into a server farm, plug in your handy dandy little flash drive that the CIA sent you with and it’s gonna download the right stuff?”

First you want to move, now you want to stay? Make up your mind, CJ. Travis shrugged, trying to stay calm. “At this point, doing something is better than doing nothing.”

“Why don’t we just leave?” CJ said, standing up. “I mean, we’ve been here all day. They have to be doing a shift change pretty soon. We can just slip out with the rest of the workers just like we came in.”

Travis set his jaw. “If we leave empty-handed, we will never get back in here again. This isn’t the kind of operation that you scrap and then make a second try at, CJ. It’s not like we’re gonna go back to the hostel and try again tomorrow. By then, our covers will be blown. The keycards we stole will be reported by tomorrow at the latest, if they haven’t been already.”

He looked at the floor for a second. From inside of his pocket, he pulled out the flash drive that the CIA had sent with him. The technology had become more and more sophisticated. Maybe the flash drive was designed to download the information automatically? That would be very CIA—esque, wouldn’t it? But it had to be inserted in the right port.

This wasn’t something they could guess about.

Given the fact that server farms had hundreds of places where you could insert a flash drive into a USB port, knowing which server had the information they were looking for would be nearly impossible without help. He opened up his phone and reread the message from David. All David had said was to download the information and that they didn’t know exactly where it was. Travis had to assume, and it was a big assumption, that the CIA techs had figured out a way to put code on the flash drive that would capture what they needed. They knew Travis wasn’t a coder or a developer. They knew he was an operator. Then again, he hadn’t run an operation like this in a long time, so it was entirely possible that they thought he knew what to do when he didn’t. In that case, it was a simple lack of communication.

But unfortunately, that was the kind of lack of communication that could get him and CJ killed.

“All right, you wanna go, we’ll go. But we are going to try to retrieve this information first. I didn’t come this whole way to go home empty-handed.”

The words sounded a lot more confident coming out of Travis’s mouth than he actually felt. He didn’t give them good odds on being able to complete the operation, at least the retrieval of the FSB database, but he at least needed to try. He couldn’t go home and feel like he’d done nothing. While he wasn’t like CJ, who felt like she had something to prove after the deaths of the former presidents, he did want to complete what he’d started.

Travis headed down the hallway with CJ in tow, pushing the cart again. CJ had been right, the crowds at the Mount Yamantau facility were thinning, everyone seeming to move toward the entrance while they were going the other direction. In Travis’s mind, that could be a good thing or a bad thing. The fact that they were going the other direction would make them different, which wasn’t good. But the fewer personnel that were around, the better. Maybe they would have an overlap of at least a few minutes between shifts to get what they needed and then get out.

Maybe.

Travis reasoned that if the FSB agents and the journal they’ve managed to steal from Kaniksu Information Repository were in one section, then he expected that the FSB would keep the rest of their information segmented from everyone else. The FSB was nothing if they weren’t territorial, even with their own people. That meant that the analysts he’d seen earlier in the computer room were probably not the same people that had the FSB database.

So where was it?

A trickle of sweat ran down Travis’s back between his shoulder blades. His heart skipped a beat. They’d had a couple of near misses already. There was no guarantee that their luck would hold out.

In fact, he could guarantee it wouldn’t. It was only a matter of time.

And if his gut was right, they were running out of it.

Travis thought back to where the FSB agents had been celebrating. There were a few more doors in that same section of the building. If Travis had to guess, that’s probably where they kept their information. The FSB was just as cloak and dagger as the CIA. There’s no way their servers would be kept out in the open for people at Yamantau to see, even if they were on the same team. No, the FSB would keep all of their assets in one area, tightly controlled and monitored. He felt the muscles in the back of his neck tense, his mouth dry. If he was right, they would be walking right into the lion’s den.

He turned his head, whispering to CJ. “We need to look for the servers that are specifically for the FSB. I don’t think the other ones we saw were for them.”

She nodded, not replying. Half a dozen workers passed them going the other direction, their heads down, no one making eye contact. Quite the unfriendly place, isn’t it? Travis kept moving, going back towards the spot where they’d seen the FSB agents ogling the journal. On the opposite side of the hallway, there was another door. As they passed by, Travis felt cold air coming out from underneath the door, cold enough that the breeze nipped at his ankles. He stopped, looking at the sign, hearing a hum from behind the door. He frowned. It was one of the few rooms that wasn’t marked with a name. The cold air told him one thing — there was something inside that needed to be kept cool.

Like servers.

As he stared at the door, he heard a noise behind him. Glancing over his shoulder, he saw three FSB agents dressed in their black jackets heading out of the room where the journal was being kept and going the other way. He pushed the cart faster, continuing to walk down the hallway, flashing his key card on every single door. Unlike the other part of the building, the doors weren’t opening. They needed to get out of the view of the FSB. He needed to talk to CJ and that wasn’t going to happen in the middle of the hallway. A trickle of sweat running down the side of his face, Travis finally found one that worked. They popped inside, leaving the door cracked. Travis watched as a few more FSB agents filtered out of the room where the journal was, this time coming their way.

Travis braced the door and pushed it closed. It made only the quietest click, one that he was sure no one heard. He looked at CJ. “Did you feel that cool air when we walked past that room back there?”

She nodded, her expression tense. “You think the servers are in there?”

“Unless they’ve got bodies in a deep freeze, I can’t figure out why it would be cold.”

CJ didn’t say anything for a moment. She looked straight at Travis, searching his eyes. “Are we really going to do this?”

Travis nodded. He knew she was looking for reassurance. “Yeah. Let’s get this done and go home.”

CJ blinked as if the idea of going home seemed preposterous. Travis didn’t know if that was because she was worried about getting out of the mountain or because she still had to account for what had happened in Bonners Ferry. “Anything from your contact?” she asked, glancing at his pocket where his phone was.

Travis checked again. “Nothing.” He replaced his phone, then reached for the flash drive, which was hidden deep in his pocket, rolling it between his fingers. “Let’s just hope the CIA has this thing preprogrammed to pull the data it needs.”

CJ raised an eyebrow. “Yeah. Let’s hope your Agency is as good as they’re supposed to be.”

Travis winced, then smiled. He knew she was baiting him, trying to mess with him a little. “They are. Let’s do this.”

33

As they left the room, Travis’s entire body tensed. He wondered if CJ felt exactly the same way that he did. Focused. Fearful. Confident. Travis pushed away any emotions that were swirling inside of him. He didn’t have time for them or for thoughts about home. Their lives depended on what they did in the next few minutes. Every decision would impact their ability to get home. From his experience, he knew they didn’t need to be perfect, but they did need to make more right moves than wrong ones.

They made their way back slowly to the room that had the cold draft coming out from underneath it. Travis held his badge up, waiting and hoping that the door would pop open just like most of the others had. He held his breath. It was strange to him that the key card he’d snagged from the man at the train station had access to everything. But then again, he had no idea who the man was, only that he was wearing the kind of key card that they needed to get into the building. Maybe the security was tight enough on the exterior that the people in Mount Yamantau felt that everyone else could have pretty much the run of the building, the workers having a good sense of where they were supposed to be and where they weren’t.

And luckily for him, minus the few rooms they’d been unable to enter, maintenance people usually had the run of everywhere.

As the door popped open, Travis breathed a sigh of relief, though it didn’t last for long. More FSB agents were coming down the hallway — three of them in their black sweaters and camouflage pants. They were talking among themselves, walking animatedly as if they were having the best day ever.

Let’s see if we can change your perception of today, gentlemen.

Travis shoved the cart and CJ into the room and closed the door behind them. He heard a click as the door shut, the two of them plunged into the darkness. Cold air washed over him tingling over the spots where he was sweating. He heard the hum of fans running in the background. The only light in the room was a dim bulb near the door and the banks of blinking lights on the rows and rows of servers. He didn’t move for a second, waiting, expecting that someone would come out of the shadows, but there was no one there.

Travis stood for a second scowling. It couldn’t be that easy, could it? He motioned for CJ to grab her backpack. They strapped them on their backs as they started to move through the room.

Travis looked around. The space itself was large. There was a space in the front of the room where there were a few desks and chairs with computers and monitors. Each desk was unoccupied, as if the workers had already gone home for the day.

The servers themselves were behind an unlocked glass door just behind the group of desks. Pulling the door open, Travis felt cold air wash over him, cold enough that he felt a chill run through his body. The space itself was approximately the size of a quarter of a football field, rows and rows of black blinking towers stretching up towards the ceiling, separated by six feet or so between them. The floor was polished stone from the mountain, the ceiling the same, but rough hewn. Where exactly the cold air was coming from, Travis didn’t know, but clearly it was meant to keep the servers from melting down.

In the dark, CJ looked up at Travis. He couldn’t completely make out her features, but he could see the strain on her face. “All right, now we’re in here. What do we do?” she asked, the words coming out in rapid fire.

Travis stood, frozen. His breath was shallow in his chest. This would be a moment, and it would be good to have a plan. They didn’t have one. “I don’t know. Hold on a sec.”

As he was just about to reach for his phone, he heard a noise, the click of the door to the server room opening behind him. He grabbed CJ’s hand and they ran, going deeper into the stacks of servers. They made it around the corner and out of sight just as a young man with dark hair wearing a pair of black slacks, a long-sleeved white shirt, and a blue knit vest entered the room, carrying a tablet. Travis, from where he was positioned saw the man stop and look at the cart and then frown. He ducked his head around a couple of the lines of servers, but didn’t bother checking the last one where Travis and CJ had plastered themselves, their bodies huddled behind the hulking tower. Travis turned his head slowly, looking at CJ. His face held no expression, simply holding a finger up to his lips, telling CJ she needed to stay quiet. This was not the time for one of her commentaries about the CIA flying by the seat of their pants. If they were found inside the server farm, there was no telling what would happen to them.

Or rather, Travis knew exactly what would happen.

Travis didn’t move, every muscle in his body tense. He had to force himself to breathe, hearing the person that had entered the server room moving around near the desks. As Travis watched, he saw the young man sit down at a desk and then get up, an irritated expression on his face. He pushed the cart outside. Thank God we got our bags out. Travis waited for a beat, wondering if he was going to return.

CJ whispered, “What do we do now?”

Stop asking me that, CJ. “I don’t know.” He gritted his teeth. Come on, Ruby, where is that information?

Travis had just started to walk around the servers, trying to look for any identification that would tell him where to put the flash drive in, when his phone chirped. Ruby. He let out a breath. It felt like he’d been holding it in for hours. The message was nothing more than a series of numbers broken up by the words tower and port. There were no niceties, only a single location. He showed it to CJ and started looking. They moved quietly, crossing between the rows. CJ pointed. “Look! There!” she whispered under her breath.

Travis looked down at his phone and compared the numbers. That was the tower they were looking for. Now they just had to find the port. He glanced at CJ. “It’s port 235.”

As Travis scanned the server, CJ did the same.

“There!” CJ pointed. “Hand me the flash drive.”

Travis had just handed the flash drive to CJ, watching her push it into the port on the front of the server when he heard the door that led out into the hallway click open again. Travis’s heart started to race. Keeping his back plastered against the server in the darkness, he glanced around the corner. The young man was back. He clicked on a light at one of the desks and sat down, looking at his computer, not lifting his eyes. Travis pressed his lips together. He looked at the flash drive. It was doing something, a red light blinking. Was it supposed to go green when they had the information they needed? Travis cursed under his breath. Next time, he was going to tell David he needed a full briefing from the tech people before they sent him out on any operations.

Then he caught himself. If there is a next time.

A second later, his question was answered. The blinking red light on the flash drive turned green. CJ pulled it out and pressed it into his hand, catching his eye in a knowing look, just the flicker of a smile on her lips. They had it. They had the FSB database in their possession.

Fighting off his excitement, Travis narrowed his eyes. He quickly capped it and shoved it in his pocket. Just as he did, he heard a noise from the front of the room. The analyst had stood up from his computer suddenly, staring at the screen, his mouth hanging open. He looked over his shoulder as if something was wrong, his expression strained. Had the computer system sent him an alert that someone was downloading?

Travis waited for a second, pointing for CJ to go around the far side of the server tower. “Head for the door but wait for me there,” he whispered. All they needed to do was get out, but that analyst who was standing by the door was blocking their every move.

She nodded, moving silently away from him, the shadow of her body with her backpack on sliding along the floor. Travis moved around the back of the server tower out of sight of the analyst. If his assumption was correct, then the guy working on the servers would come toward the tower they’d just accessed to look around and see what had happened. A second later, the analyst did just that, striding down the aisle, his head cocked to the side, a look of concern on his face. Travis glanced around the corner, noticing that the man was probably not much older than his mid-20s. If Travis had to guess, he’d been plucked right out of the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, probably one of their star computer science students, then sent to Yamantau to protect the FSB’s most dangerous secrets.

What a horrible career path.

Travis pressed his back tighter against the server as the young man approached. From what Travis could see, the analyst was probably a good five inches shorter than him. At least he had the advantage. Travis held his breath as he reached for the tactical pen in his pocket and then paused, watching as he approached. The analyst stared at his tablet and then looked at the server, frowning, his head down.

In one smooth movement, Travis pivoted around the corner, wrapping his forearm around the young man’s neck bracing it with his other arm in a chokehold. The man’s tablet dropped to the ground with a clatter. He began scratching and grabbing at Travis’s arm, but it was too late. Travis had already locked in the chokehold. Travis squeezed his muscles a little tighter, waiting for the blood flow to the analyst’s brain to stop, rendering him unconscious. It happened just a few seconds later; Travis felt the man’s body go limp.

Travis let the young man’s body down to the floor gently and then ran to his desk, fumbling through the drawers. CJ looked at him, her eyes wide. “What are you doing? We’ve got to get out of here!”

Travis looked up, searching a drawer. “Buying us some time.”

Travis ran back to the man carrying a roll of tape. He could have easily killed the man, but there was no reason to waste a life. Keeping him quiet would buy them enough time to get out. With any luck, they’d only need a few minutes. He flipped the man over on his belly, wrapping his wrists and ankles in tape and securing another piece across his mouth. He knew that if they had just left him, the man would wake up and then sound the alarm.

That couldn’t happen.

Travis tossed the roll of tape on the desk and headed for the door. “Come on. We gotta go.”

As Travis put his hand on the door to leave the server room, he felt for the flash drive in his pocket and looked back where the young man was on his side, unconscious. Knowing he had the flash drive with the FSB database on it, he turned, swallowing. He had at least one thing they’d come for.

Now, if they could just get out of Russia.

34

Travis and CJ had just made it outside the door when they heard a voice behind them. “Hey! What are you doing in there?”

A heavy-set man wearing the same kind of uniform that Travis and CJ were wearing Was glowering at them from the other end of the hallway. “You know you’re not supposed to be in there. Stop! Stop!” he yelled in Russian, his voice booming off the rock-faced walls. Travis just waved and kept moving, walking quickly toward the main entrance of Mount Yamantau as if he couldn’t hear the man behind him. The man didn’t give up. He kept yelling, getting the attention of more people in the hallway, who stopped to stare at the scene unfolding between them, even though there seemed to be a smaller night crew working in the mountain.

Travis’s head swiveled. He picked up a jog. With the man behind them making such a ruckus, walking out the front door didn’t seem plausible. They needed to hide and figure out a way out of the building. But where? He and CJ made a couple of quick turns, picking up the pace, simply outrunning the out-of-shape man that was yelling after them. They bolted into yet another one of Mount Yamantau’s storage rooms and slammed the door behind them. Travis was breathing hard. He pulled his phone out and quickly sent a message to David. “Need exfil from mountain. Main door no longer option.”

A second later an image came back with a message. “Thought you might. We just discovered there’s a service tunnel that leads out the side of the mountain. When you get out, head due west into the woods. There’s a main road about three miles from your location. We can try to get you there.”

Thankfully David didn’t stop to ask if they had the information or not. Travis looked at the map and showed it to CJ. “We got to get there then get into the woods.”

As Travis emerged from the room, he looked both ways. The angry man was nowhere to be seen. Travis and CJ started running down the hall, earning a lot of stares from people as they passed. Somewhere behind them, he could hear the man still yelling, the sound of heavy boots on the stone floors. People were running toward them. The man, with all of his yelling, had drawn attention to their presence. Travis ran faster wishing they had just waited until the man had passed. They were in real trouble now. Turning a corner, he stopped pulling the phone out of his pocket again, counting the doors trying to figure out which one it was. Sweat poured down the sides of his face. As he looked down the hallway, he saw a sign that had a red dot. The emergency exit. That was it. He sprinted for it, holding his key card up as he got there, barely breaking stride. The door popped open, CJ slipping through in front of him. If nothing else, she was fast.

Inside, Travis skidded to a stop, looking around him. If they thought they were deep in the mountain before, they hadn’t experienced anything yet. As his eyes adjusted to the light, Travis saw that the tunnel only went one way. It was nothing more than a narrow, arched hallway cut into the mountain, cables and pipes attached to the ceilings and sides. It looked more like a maintenance tunnel than anything else, red lights placed every ten to fifteen feet guiding the way outdoors. He and CJ ran as fast as they could with their backpacks, not stopping. He had no idea how long it would take them to get out of the mountain. Was the emergency tunnel a hundred feet long or a mile?

Travis didn’t slow down, pushing CJ in front of him. After running for a couple of minutes, he saw a door dimly lit up ahead of them. They had maybe another hundred yards to go. All of a sudden, he heard an alarm go off in the building. The lights that had glowed in a steady red now started to blink. Travis glanced behind him, hearing something. Footsteps. Their luck had just run out. Someone had found the analyst and had realized they were in the tunnel. Now they were in real trouble. Travis ran faster, pushing CJ from behind. They had to get out of the mountain, and at least into the woods where they’d have a shot to hide. From there, they could at least hunker down for a day or two if they had to in order to get an exfil plan from David or try to make it to the road he mentioned. That was their only hope.

The door to the exterior of the mountain couldn’t come fast enough. Travis skidded to a stop at the door, jerking at the handle. It wouldn’t move. CJ pushed his hands away and then twisted. As soon as she rotated the handle, it popped open, just like one on a ship. It popped away from the frame, the door creaking open. Fresh air covered him, the cool mountain breeze lifting his hair as the dark of night enveloped the two of them.

Travis turned to slam the door behind him when he heard someone yell, “Ostanavlivat’sya!” the command to stop in Russian. He couldn’t tell how close the voice was, so he slammed the door behind them. Not that closing the door would buy them very much time. Still not seeing anyone, Travis grabbed for CJ’s hand and started to run for the woods, only to stop again when bright lights illuminated their path. He scanned around them, fear ripping through his body. They were surrounded by FSB agents who had encircled the exit to the mountain. He backed up two steps. Could they get back inside again? As he glanced over his shoulder, he saw the door behind him open. FSB agents filtered out of the door, their faces red from the exertion of chasing Travis and CJ.

They were trapped.

It took a second for Travis’s eyes to adjust in the darkness, his stomach sinking. He heard a voice with a thick Russian accent call out to him. “Well, Travis Bishop. I have to say I am just a little surprised to see you here.”

Travis narrowed his eyes. Someone knew him. More importantly, he knew that voice. It belonged to the one man that had escaped Travis over and over again during his career, including, most recently, at the Chunnel disaster.

Uri Bazarov.

“You didn’t expect your antics in the United States to go without a response, did you, Uri?” The words came out angry and tight. Travis watched as Uri walked toward him from the darkness, the other FSB agents closing the gap where he’d stepped out of the circle. Travis’s stomach flipped. He wondered if any of the agents that were around them now were the same ones that mowed down the presidents. That would explain the celebrations, the cigar smoke and the jovial mood of the FSB. Capturing Travis would just be icing on the cake.

As Travis stood and waited, his mind began to swim, time bending. He felt like he’d just walked through the grotesque scene in Idaho and at the same time, after the day they’d spent in Yamantau, it seemed like it was months ago.

Uri walked right up to Travis, stopping just a foot or two in front of him. He cocked his head to the side, his face twisted in a sneer. “I expected the cowardly United States to do something, but nothing as bold as sending one of their out-of-date agents to Mount Yamantau.” He paused. “Or maybe it wasn’t bold. Maybe it was desperate and stupid, like most of the things that America does.” Uri’s gaze pivoted to CJ, his expression hard and cold. She met his gaze with her own, her eyes just as cold as his. Uri stared at her for a moment and then smiled. “I see you have a new partner. I’m interested to hear your story. I’m sure you’ll tell me all about yourself.” He stopped, then narrowed his eyes. “Wait, I recognize you. You are a Secret Service agent, one of the inept ones from President Ewing’s mountain home.”

Travis watched CJ stiffen. “You don’t know anything about me.”

Uri laughed as if CJ’s reaction was the funniest thing he’d seen all day. He looked at Travis, pointing at CJ, a look of glee on his face as if he was enjoying every single minute of Travis’s discomfort. “She’s mouthy, this one? How did you get stuck with her? Did they have no other real agents that were willing to take on this suicide mission?”

Travis didn’t say anything. His mind was racing, the breath shallow in his lungs. They were surrounded by the FSB. “What happens now, Uri? Firing squad? Would you like to parade us through Lubyanka Square in front of General Semyonovich?”

Uri took a step closer to Travis, close enough that Travis could smell cigar smoke trapped in his black FSB sweater. “Oh, my friend, I’m not sure that it will go that easily for you. By the time we’re done with you, you will be begging for a firing squad.”

Travis’s stomach sank. It was bad enough that he’d gotten caught by Uri Bazarov, but CJ had too. There was nothing that could be done for them. Any negotiations for their release would take months, if not years, during which time the FSB could have a go at them as many times as they’d like.

And that was if the United States government would admit they were there, which was highly unlikely. David had already told them they would be disavowed if they were caught.

This was one of those moments that Travis wished the CIA outfitted their agents with the same cyanide poison that the Russians used. If he’d had it, he would have happily chewed a tablet than facing a future with only Uri Bazarov in it.

Clenching his hands into fists, Travis was just about to say something when he stopped. Maybe he could negotiate his escape. Maybe. His mind churned, trying to find an option that would work, but the reality was that he had nothing to trade for his freedom. Even giving Uri back the flash drive wouldn’t buy him a release.

His life was over. He glanced at CJ, trying to tell her he was sorry with a single look. She just lifted her chin and gave him a nod.

That’s one tough cookie.

Travis sucked in a breath to say something when he heard something off in the distance. By the increasing noise, it was approaching fast. As it got closer, Travis realized it was the sound of engines. Uri reached a hand toward Travis as if he was going to take him into custody, but then stopped. All of a sudden blinding lights shot out in front of them, bright enough that Travis used his arm to cover his eyes. Three pickup trucks arrived on the scene. Uri turned around as if he expected that they were friendly, holding a hand up in a wave. When the gunfire erupted, Travis realized they weren’t.

At least not to the FSB.

Travis tackled CJ just as the bullets flew overhead. Travis had no idea what was going on. His mind raced as they lay on the ground for a second. Was this a friendly coming to help or a Russian faction coming to attack the FSB?

Travis scrambled to his feet, trying to run to the darkness. Uri grunted, rolled over and then stood up with an amazing amount of speed, probably from years of Russian wrestling with his team. He grabbed for Travis, catching him by the shoulder. Off balance, it took Travis a second to get his footing with his backpack still strapped to him. By the time he had it, Uri had cocked his arm back, landing a right hook to the side of Travis’s jaw. Travis saw stars but managed to hold onto Uri as he went down.

As they hit the ground, Travis realized it didn’t matter who had the guns. Either he or Uri was going to die. It was just a question of who. This was the fight that they’d been dancing around for two decades.

It was now or never.

Uri ended up on top of Travis, punching him again in the face and then trying to choke him. Travis bucked his hips up and rotated to the side, scooting out from underneath Uri. The Russian was strong, but the years of physical work in the barn and training horses had made Travis stronger and more agile. He hooked his leg through Uri’s and flipped him over, the Russian landing on his back with a thud. It didn’t stop him though. Uri quickly pulled a gun from the side of his waistband, aiming it at Travis’s face. Travis dodged to the side, grabbing at the joint below his thumb to loosen his grip, then twisting the gun to the side. It skittered away from them, but Travis was still on the ground. Uri jumped up, pulling a knife from his waistband. Travis reached for his tactical pen, knowing he was outmatched. Uri lunged for Travis, nearly slicing his arm. As Travis recoiled, a shot went off right next to Travis’s ear.

CJ.

Somehow, she’d managed to get free of the FSB and grabbed Uri’s gun, letting off two shots just like the Secret Service had trained her. Crimson blooms appeared in the center of his chest, his face suddenly surprised. He didn’t say anything, only looking at CJ and then at Travis before his body crumpled to the ground. Blood began to bubble out of the corner of Uri’s mouth. Travis knew they didn’t have time to wait. They needed to get away. Now. He looked at CJ. “Thanks.”

There was no time to wait. Travis grabbed CJ’s hand and started to run into the darkness when he heard a voice call. “Yoohoo! Travis! Over here.”

Travis froze, blinking. “Catherine?”

MI6 agent Catherine Lewis emerged from the back of one of the pickup trucks, jumping over the side of the bed. She was dressed in all black, her blonde hair caught up underneath a black baseball cap, eye black covering her perfect skin, though Travis saw she did have on a little bit of pink lipstick. Very Catherine. “Hurry up. We’ve got to get you out of here.”

Questions thundered through Travis’s head. He waited a beat, watching CJ jump up into the back of the pickup truck next to Catherine. She didn’t have to be asked twice. Travis joined them a second later, the back of the pickup truck the only familiar spot he’d found since they landed in Russia. He and CJ shrugged off their backpacks. Catherine pulled a tarp over the top of them. The trucks that carried Catherine’s team thundered off onto an unmarked mountain road into the deep darkness that surrounded the Ural Mountains.

The ride itself away from Mount Yamantau was almost uncomfortably bumpy until they got to a main road. It was probably the same one that David had told Travis about. The three of them hid in the darkness, not saying anything, not moving, each of them caught up in their own thoughts. After traveling for what Travis estimated was a half hour or so, the convoy of trucks pulled off onto a dirt driveway. Catherine motioned they could sit up, brushing a few strands of hair away from her face, a grin tugging at her cheeks. Travis looked at her as he sat up. Catherine loved field ops. It was her happy place.

With a win like today, he remembered he used to feel the same way.

Until Kira had betrayed him.

Travis pushed his back up against the chassis. The metal bed wasn’t exactly a comfortable place to rest after what they’d been through. He looked around. In the darkness, as best he could tell, they were driving on nothing more than a rutted, dirt track that led to a barn. The door opened and closed as the pickup trucks pulled inside as if someone was expecting them. Catherine hopped down from the back of the truck, waiting for Travis and CJ.

“How did you—?” Travis asked, hugging her.

Catherine shrugged. She smiled. “I told you, we have eyes everywhere. Thought you might like a little help with the exfil.”

Travis looked down at the ground. Without Catherine, he and CJ would be in Uri’s custody. A lump formed in his throat. He looked at Catherine, who smiled and gave him a nod. Her expression told him that she understood. As he looked away, he pulled his phone from his pocket and then glanced at CJ. “I’m going to call the pilots to get them here while it’s still dark.”

Catherine nodded. “That’s smart. We have a vehicle outside that you can use to drive back to the airstrip. I’m assuming you got what you came here for.” Her tone was cryptic.

It was a vague question, but Travis knew what she was actually asking. “Part of it.”

Catherine nodded. “I’m assuming that Director Freeman will brief Archie when he has a free moment?”

Travis nodded. Archie was the head of the MI6 and as far as Travis was concerned, the U.S. owed him for the rescue. Big time.

“Of course.” Travis stopped himself. What did he know about it? “I hope so. I’ll let the Director know.”

“Do that.” Catherine cocked her head to the side looking at CJ. “I’m Catherine, by the way. You are?”

CJ extended her hand. Travis noticed that she was not nearly as pale as she had been earlier, but then again, they still weren’t out of Russia. “CJ Crosswell. Secret Service.”

“Oh, one of the President’s men.”

CJ shrugged. “Or in this case, a President’s woman.”

Catherine grinned. “Touché. Well, the pleasure is mine.”

Catherine leveled her gaze at them. “As much as I’d like to stand here and chitchat, we both have exfils to hit unless we want the FSB to come and join the party.” She tossed Travis a set of keys. “The car’s outside. It’s all gassed up. You can just leave it at the airport.”

As Travis strode towards the door, he looked back at Catherine. “Thanks. I mean it.”

Catherine took her baseball cap off and shook her blonde hair out. She smiled. “You’re welcome, Travis Bishop. You would have been toast, as you Americans say, without us tonight.”

The Brits. They have a way of stating the obvious. “You could say that again.”

35

The comfort that Travis had felt at seeing Catherine quickly dissipated as he and CJ ran out to the car that was waiting for them, courtesy of Catherine’s MI6 team. They tossed their backpacks in the back seat and headed directly for the airport. Travis had gotten a text from the pilots that they were ready to go, but because of some fog they weren’t going to be able to get off the ground for another thirty minutes. That put them an hour out.

That was an hour longer than Travis wanted to spend inside of Russia. He shook his head as they drove. “The pilots are delayed.”

“What does that mean?” CJ asked.

Travis could hear the concern in CJ’s voice. “It means we’re going to have to wait a little bit and hope we don’t get found before the plane gets here.”

After a day filled with darting from room to room at Yamantau, he was sure the idea of hiding sat about as well with CJ as it set with him. As Travis drove down the freeway, everything in him wanted to speed up so they could get to the airport faster, but he knew that speeding would risk him being pulled over by the Russian police. Knowing the FSB, even with Uri dead, Travis was sure that by now that their pictures were out on every wire, every police officer in the country looking for them. He could only hope that the fog dissipated and the pilots could get the plane in the air.

The two of them drove back toward Mezhgorye in silence, each of them lost in their own thoughts. Travis glanced at CJ. She was leaning her head against the back of the seat, her brown hair half undone from the bun she’d put it in that morning after running from the FSB. At that moment, he felt truly grateful. CJ had saved his life. She’d been looking to even the score after what had happened in Idaho. While she may not have been able to save the former presidents’ lives, she had saved his.

And that was something.

Because of her, he now had a shot at getting back to Texas, back to his horses and the life that he loved.

They arrived at the small airport in the darkness, Travis cutting the lights on the sedan that Catherine had given them, parking the car deep in the shadows next to one of the hangar buildings. They sat in the car, both of them sliding down so that they couldn’t be seen if anyone drove past. Travis kept his eyes on the runway, hoping to see their ride swoop down out of the sky. The fog had started to lift. They knew the plane was coming. It was just a question of when and how quickly they could get into international airspace.

After a few minutes, CJ glanced over at him. “Any news from the pilot?”

Travis’s phone buzzed. “They’re inbound. Landing in two minutes.”

It was the longest two minutes of Travis’s life. He could almost feel the FSB closing in on them. The two of them sat in silence for another couple of minutes, each of them watching, their eyes glued on the runway, waiting for their plane to arrive. Travis felt a nervous wash of anxiety running over his body, a tingle that ran continuously through his gut. He stuck his hand in his pocket. He still had the flash drive. Rolling it in his hands, he could only hope that they had retrieved the information that they had promised the President they could get.

Travis looked over at CJ. “Tell me something.”

She rolled her head toward him. “What?”

“What does CJ stand for?”

She looked away. “Nothing.”

Travis lifted his chin. “Aw, come on. We just did something that no other Americans have ever done successfully. The least you could do is tell me what it stands for. You saved my life.”

“Then I shouldn’t have to tell you. I saved your life, not the other way around. And we are still in Russia, if you haven’t noticed.”

“CJ, let’s see… Cathy, Carrie… oh, I know, Constance!”

CJ grimaced. “Cynthia Jamison. I’m named after my grandmother.”

“Cynthia Jamison!” Travis laughed. It felt good after the tension of the mission. “That’s quite the name. I like that. Way better than what I came up with.”

CJ’s eyes narrowed. “Don’t you dare ever tell anyone that Travis Bishop. I’m being serious. I’ve spent years getting rid of that name. I hate it!”

“What would your grandmother say about that?”

CJ shook her head and pointed. “Doesn’t matter. Our flight’s here.”

Travis snapped his gaze to the runway. She was right. It wasn’t a moment too soon in his mind. They jumped out of the car, grabbing their backpacks, sprinting low and fast across the tarmac. The plane barely stopped when the steps flopped down from the fuselage. Travis pushed CJ up first, following her, helping the co-pilot close the door. The door wasn’t even secured before the engines revved, the plane moving again. The co-pilot checked the door and strode for the cockpit. Travis heard the pilots shout over his shoulder. “We’ve got incoming. We got to get this thing off the ground. Get your seatbelts on and hold on!”

Travis ran to a seat and buckled himself in, grabbing for the armrest. A hot takeoff might be the only thing that could save them. Travis plopped down in a seat and struggled to get the ends of his seatbelt buckled. He’d been on other hot landings and hot takeoffs. That didn’t mean he liked them.

He stared out the window as the plane careened down the runway. The FSB must have figured out where they were going. He saw two black pickup trucks filled with men chase the plane just off the left wing. He closed his eyes for a second as he felt the plane lurch powerfully forward, the engines howling. He glanced at CJ. She had her eyes closed as well. From behind, he heard what sounded like gunfire. A second later, the plane leapt into the sky, going straight up, Travis’s body plastered against the seat. He fought off a wave of nausea, breathing deep.

Twelve minutes later it was over. The pilot came on the intercom and announced, “We’re now over international airspace. The two of you can rest easy. We’re going to make a quick stop at Estonia just to make sure we don’t have any damage and then we’ll get you both home, which in this case means a stop in Washington, D.C.”

36

Their brief stop in Estonia ended up lasting for about two hours. The plane had taken a little gunfire to the rear fuselage. The pilots stayed outside, supervising the patching and repairs, making sure it was safe to get them back to the United States. That gave CJ and Travis time to touch base with the CIA and Secret Service stateside and grab a hot meal at the terminal, though they didn’t go far at all. Neither of them seemed to want to leave the safety of the plane and the promise of getting them home.

Back on the plane, the captain lifted his chin. “You ready to get out of here?”

Travis nodded. “You have no idea. This bird safe to fly?”

The captain nodded and smiled. “Listen, I don’t wanna die today either. She’s good. Gonna need a little bit more work when we get home, but it’s all cosmetic.”

Travis knew that was good enough for him.

Ten hours later, the jet touched down back at Reagan National, the exact spot where they had left from. As the cabin door opened and the steps dropped, Travis stood nearby, feeling his first whiff of American air, the bright sunshine making his eyes hurt. Following CJ off the plane, shaking the hands of the pilots and thanking them, he noticed they weren’t just getting dropped off at the airport.

Not that he was surprised.

CIA Director David Freeman was standing next to a polished black SUV waiting for them. He gave them each a wave, motioning them to the car. “Welcome back.” He held out his hand to Travis. Travis knew what he wanted. Without any fanfare, Travis deposited the flash drive in it. David looked at the other CIA agent who was standing next to him. The agent was holding something that looked like a fabric bag with a lock on it. David deposited the flash drive inside of it, zipped it closed and locked it. The agent ran to one or the other SUVs and took off, the tires peeling on the ground. Travis shook his head. They weren’t wasting any time, were they?

“We’ll get that over to Langley for a full analysis. But right now, you guys are due back at the White House. Hope you got a little sleep on the plane.”

Their welcome back to the White House was much like their first visit there, except that President Mosley wasn’t nearly as angry this time. That was a good thing. Travis and CJ dropped their CIA-issued backpacks at the door, headed to the Oval Office and brought Robert up to speed on the operation. Travis lowered his voice as he described how they had managed to get into Mount Yamantau but we were unable to retrieve the journal. He shook his head. “I’m sorry about that, Mr. President.”

Robert put a hand on Travis’s shoulder, then looked at CJ. She seemed to be standing at attention. “You are both heroes. The fact that you came back with anything at all and alive is an absolute miracle. David said you ended up in a confrontation with the FSB?”

Travis nodded. “Yeah. MI6 got us out of it.”

Robert swayed; his expression pained. He groaned. “Oh man, I’m going to hear about this for months with the Prime Minister.”

Travis smiled, then glanced at David. “Yes, I’m sure you will. Catherine Lewis said that she’s hoping you will share information with Archie as well.”

Robert shook his head. “That old coot? Yeah, I suppose we’ll give them a little bit of information to keep them happy and to thank them for assisting with the exfil.” The President looked at David. “Director Freeman, you’ll handle that exchange with the utmost delicacy, I’m assuming?”

David nodded. “Yes, of course, Mr. President. However, I’m expecting that the British Prime Minister would prefer to hear directly from you.”

“I’m sure he will. I’ll take care of that part.” President Mosley, who’d been leaning against the Resolute desk in the Oval Office, slapped his thighs. “Now, we do have something else we need to take care of. I think it’s time I had a little chit-chat with President Terasovich, don’t you?”

Travis elbowed CJ as the President motioned for them to follow. CJ shot a look at Travis. He grinned. This was the fun part of the job. He grabbed her arm as they followed.

“Enjoy this. It’ll probably never happen again.”

CJ looked at the floor, then up at Travis, her cheeks pink. She gave him a nod through thin lips.

“We have the Situation Room all set up. I want you two to at least appear in the background for a second so that he knows you made it home and back on American soil safely. Once he and I start talking the nitty gritty, you can move out of the shot, but feel free to stay and listen to the fireworks. After what you’ve been through, you’ve earned that.”

Travis didn’t say anything as they walked down to the Situation Room, the President’s Secret Service detail following them. He glanced over at CJ. She looked at home at the White House, as if she was in her element. And if he had to guess, after what she’d pulled off, making it into Mount Yamantau and saving a CIA agent’s life, she’d be able to write her ticket. Part of him wondered if she would ask to be part of the Presidential Detail or even lead it.

In his mind, she was capable of all of it. Heck, if she wanted to be head of the Secret Service, she could probably do that too, though he’d bet that Zach Brooks would give her a fight over that position. Only time would tell if she’d be able to overcome the guilt she carried from the attack. Would it stall her or propel her forward?

Travis didn’t know.

As the President entered the situation room, the cabinet members that were in attendance—Shannon Bell from Homeland, Secret Service Director Zach Brooks, and Billy Weiss, President Mosley’s Chief of Staff stood as was customary when the President entered the room. Robert looked at Billy. “We all ready?”

He nodded, a few wisps of hair floating away from his forehead. “Oh yes. I’m sure that Moscow is so happy to be having this conversation tonight.”

Robert pointed for Travis and CJ to stand behind him. He gave Billy a nod to start the call. He hit a button on the video screen setup that was in front of them, which instantly changed from a blue screen with a White House emblem on it to a video call.

President Terasovich appeared a second later, seated in a heavy leather chair, wearing a red sweater that matched the burgundy walls behind him. His thick black hair was combed neatly to the side, a matching mustache spanning his broad features. “President Mosley,” he said dryly.

“President Terasovich, nice to see you on this fine day.”

“Night.”

Travis looked down. They were already bickering. It was amazing the level of posturing between political rivals.

Robert leaned back in his chair, crossing his arms in front of his chest. He was dressed in a black suit with a white shirt and a red tie, an American flag pin on his lapel. “Seems like we’ve had a bit of a situation, doesn’t it, Andre?”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about. All I know is that you have a couple of American traitors who broke about twenty different treaties by traipsing onto Russian soil.”

“We could say the same about the FSB death squad that had a little vacation in Idaho, now couldn’t we?” Robert growled. He glanced over his shoulder, waving for Travis and CJ to move out of the shot.

Happy to do so, Mr. President.

The last thing that Travis wanted to do was attract attention to himself or be a part of geopolitical maneuverings among presidents. He just wanted to go home to his horses, the fresh air and the freedom to do as he pleased. They’d call him again. Of that, he was sure. There was always another mission. But for now, he just wanted to get back to his ranch.

“Let’s cut to the chase, Andre. We know you sent a team here to the United States to kill all of our former presidents and that it was just a foil for stealing one of President Ewing’s journals from the repository.”

“I have never!” President Terasovich began to protest, pounding his fist on his desk, reminiscent of something Nikita Khruschev might do.

Robert leaned forward. “Listen, Andre. We’ve known each other for a long time. I know you mowed down all those presidents. You know you mowed down all those presidents, and I know you stole that journal.”

The Russian President seemed to concede the point. “And then what do you do? You send agents to violate a sovereign country and kill FSB agents?”

“You did the same.”

There was silence between the two of them for a minute, tension that you could cut with a knife, though there was no mention of Catherine’s involvement. Travis wondered if President Terasovich knew the British had helped. Maybe he was just ignoring their involvement. It was at these moments that Travis wondered if the personality differences between world leaders were the ones that would either lead to or prevent war.

After a few more minutes of posturing, Andre seemed to calm down. “So, what are we to do?” he finally asked.

“Well, I’m just getting confirmation,” Travis saw a nod between David and President Mosley, “that we have the names and identities of every Russian FSB agent that is on our soil, not to mention ones that have been planted in other countries and the entire employment list of the FSB.”

“There’s no way—” Andre said, his tone flat.

David smiled at Travis and CJ. They’d done it. They’d gotten the FSB database and brought it back home.

Robert waved a single hand. “There’s no point in denying it. I’m sure your analysts have already told you what we were able to accomplish. But I’m ready to make you a deal. We’ll pretend that we don’t have any of that information if you pretend that you don’t have the information about the Russian dissidents.

“We have a right to protect the sovereignty of our government even if our citizens don’t like it.”

“You do, but you’ve killed far too many people because of your big ego already.” Robert paused for a second. He leaned forward, his voice low and as hard as steel, his eyes fixed on his adversary on the other side of the screen. “Let me tell you something, Andre. Democracy isn’t a bad thing. You have been shying away from it for decades, but it might actually do you some good if you let the people speak. They’ll be happier, your economy will improve, which both you and I know it’s hanging on by a thread. You’d be able to get rid of a bunch of corruption in your government and maybe become net producers rather than people we have to give aid to. I mean, seriously, how embarrassing is that?”

Travis saw President Terasovich’s face redden on the monitor. Robert had definitely pushed him. It would be interesting to see how he responded.

“All right, Robert,” Andre spat. “Have it your way.”

The call ended abruptly.

Robert stood up from his place at the head of the table and walked toward Travis and CJ, shaking each of their hands. He looked at Travis. “Once again, Travis, thanks for coming to the rescue. We’ve got flights booked for you to get back to Texas this afternoon. I’m sure you’re anxious to return to your ranch.”

Travis gave a curt nod. “I am.”

“Director Freeman has your original backpack that you brought with you. We’ll get you on the plane and get you situated. I know we have some follow-up information we’d like to collect from both of you about what goes on at Yamantau, but we can do that remotely. There’s no reason to hold you here in D.C.”

For that, Travis was grateful. “Sure.”

Robert held his hand out. “Again, many thanks from a grateful nation. You saved a lot of lives today.”

Robert was about to turn to CJ when Travis interrupted him. “Mr. President, if I may?”

“Sure, Travis. Anything.”

Travis looked at CJ. She looked tired. There were dark circles under her eyes, but despite everything she held herself well. She was a true asset to the Secret Service. “I’m not the only one that saved lives today, sir. CJ, I mean, Agent-in-Charge Cynthia Jameson Crosswell, saved mine. Uri Bazarov had me dead to rights, but she stopped him. I’m not sure if there will be any fallout from what happened in Idaho, but I can tell you it was unavoidable. The way that CJ handled herself deserves a lot of praise.” Travis glanced at Zach Brooks. Technically, he should have directed his comments at Zach. He was CJ’s boss, but Robert was the one in charge. Robert needed to know exactly what CJ had done.

CJ shot a look at Travis. He had a feeling he was going to hear about him using her full name in front of the President later, but he didn’t care. They all needed a moment of levity. “Yes,” Robert nodded. “I get that.” He looked at CJ. “Agent Crosswell, if you are carrying any guilt about what happened in Idaho, I’m hoping you’ll let that go.” He glanced at Director Brooks. “Director Brooks and I have reviewed the surveillance footage. There was nothing you could have done. This wasn’t the type of attack that we were prepared for.” The President looked at Zach, whose face reddened. “It’s something that we need to address.”

Zach cleared his throat. “We could definitely use your help preparing for it in the future if you are still game to stay with the agency.”

CJ nodded. “I’d be honored, sir.”

Travis tugged at the brim of his baseball cap. Looks like you’ve got a bright future, CJ. Maybe not with covert ops, though. The thought made him smile.

The President frowned and then looked at Zach. “That sounds like a lot of responsibility to me, Zach. There’s a promotion attached to that analysis, isn’t there?”

Zach nodded slowly as if he was just starting to understand what the President was saying. “I’ll see to it, sir.”

With that, the President disappeared out of the room with the other cabinet members leaving Travis and CJ behind with David Freeman. David walked them to the door. As had happened before, when they got to the portico their luggage was waiting for them — Travis’s black backpack and CJ’s roller bag and backpack. An aide handed them their guns back. CJ shook David’s hand and looked at Travis. She stuck out her hand, her shoulders back, her spine straight. Travis frowned and shook his head. This wasn’t a hand-shaking kind of moment. He wrapped his arms around her and planted a kiss on her cheek. “You did good, Crosswell. You can be my wingman anytime.”

CJ’s face reddened. She walked towards the first SUV and hopped in the passenger side, the vehicle quickly disappearing down the driveway.

“Where’s she off to now?” Travis asked David as they stood in the doorway.

David shrugged his shoulders. “Not exactly sure. I thought I overheard Zach say something about giving her a couple days off and then they were going to get back to work. They’ll probably debrief her before they let her go, though.”

Travis shook his head. Vacation for Crosswell? She didn’t seem the type. “Knowing her, she’ll probably be back in the office this afternoon.”

“Sounds like somebody else I know.” David arched an eyebrow.

Travis lowered his chin. “I’ve got a question no one has answered.”

In the shadows, Travis saw David nod. “Shoot. What’s on your mind?”

“What were those former presidents really meeting about? That wasn’t just social, was it?”

David looked away for a moment. “You’re right. It wasn’t just social, but as for what they were up to, that was between them and Robert. There are some things that only presidents share, if you know what I mean.”

Travis looked down, wondering if that secret would end up in Ivy’s hands at the repository someday.

Then again, he’d never know.

Travis picked up his backpack, slinging it over his shoulder. He looked at his phone. Although he hadn’t heard anything from Ellie in the last couple of days since he’d been gone, suddenly there were three messages from her. He scanned them quickly.

David frowned. “Everything okay at your ranch?”

Travis nodded. “Normal ranch crises. I’ve got horses to get ready for the Derby, owners freaking out, and one of our mares just threw a shoe. It’s no big deal. My barn manager just likes to keep me informed. I think it’s her way of telling me to get home.”

David clapped Travis on the side of his arm. “Yeah, sounds like the life, but Travis, I can’t thank you enough.”

Travis smiled. “Check’s in the mail?”

“Already made the transfer. The President said to send you a little bit of a bonus, considering how dangerous this one was.”

Combat pay. Nice. “Thanks.” Travis knew that the six-figure-plus fee that the government paid him for picking up these kinds of jobs would help with some new equipment around the barn and show fees that were coming up. Maybe he’d even buy that mare that Ruby wanted. He’d have to think about that.

Maybe he’d even think about her.

As Travis walked away, he turned back to David. “About the Project Cypher dissidents?”

“They’re safe.”

“And was President Mosley serious when he said that we wouldn’t go after any of the FSB agents?”

David smiled. It was a smile that Travis knew well. “There are certain things that the President just doesn’t need to know about, now aren’t there?”

EPILOGUE

Travis was sitting on the plane at Reagan National when the flight attendant came on over the intercom. “We wanted to welcome you to flight 7375 with service to Dallas. We are waiting for the last few passengers to board and then we will close the door and get started on our journey to Texas. If Dallas is not your destination, then please check your boarding pass and deplane now.”

Travis shifted in his seat. The CIA had been nice enough to get him a first-class ride back to Dallas, but he’d spent enough time on planes over the last few days that he wasn’t really looking forward to sitting for another three hours. But at least he would get home. As he was waiting, he stared at his phone. Catherine had just texted. She’d made it back to Great Britain safely. That was good news. Travis looked at the seat next to him. It was empty. Hopefully it would stay that way. He leaned his head back in the seat and pulled the brim of his baseball cap over his eyes when he felt someone rustle against him. Just what I need, someone to interrupt my sleep. He shifted, looking up under the brim. A woman with jet-black hair cascading over her shoulders, a narrow figure, and porcelain skin slid into the seat next to him wearing oversized sunglasses and bright red lipstick. She pulled the glasses down her nose, pressing her lips together in a pout. “Hello, Travis.”

Ruby.

Travis smiled. Maybe flying home wouldn’t be too bad after all.

* * *

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