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And the cold hard truth was that Ice sometimes preferred the CIA rulebook.
What happens in the shadows, stays in the shadows.
Because sometimes the American people don’t need to know what goes on in those shadows.
They don’t need to know what it takes to keep them safe.
Like Churchill supposedly said: We sleep soundly in our beds because there are rough men who stand ready in the night to visit violence upon those who would do us harm.
And Ice was one of those rough men standing ready in the dark to visit violence upon those who would do harm.
Do harm to what lay peacefully in bed beyond that door.
“So Benson hasn’t given you any specific orders?” Ice asked. “How is he organizing the hunt for Diego? Who’s in charge?”
“Ax and Edge are calling the shots on day-to-day operations. Fay and Hannah are handling logistics, finances, database access, aliases.” Jack sighed. “But it’s a bit messy right now. There was a woman—Nancy Sullivan—who handled all of that stuff.”
“Yeah, she was at Hogan and Hannah’s wedding. She’s Brenna’s mom, right?”
“Yeah. She was also Benson’s right-hand woman for the past seven years. Benson’s a bit lost at sea without her. Fay and Hannah are trying their best to take over Nancy’s responsibilities, but it’s going to be a while before things settle down.”
Ice was quiet for a bit. It wasn’t clear why Nancy had quit Darkwater, and it didn’t seem appropriate to ask the other guys or their wives at the wedding.
“Fay’s in close contact with Nancy, though,” Jack continued. “They’ve both been helping Kaiser and his wife Alice get settled with the twins they just adopted.”
Ice frowned up at the ceiling. He’d heard about the twins from Fay and Fox. After all, Fay was their aunt. Her sister Maya had died in childbirth, and somehow Benson had convinced Kaiser and his estranged wife to adopt the orphaned twins.
It was a tangled web of connections that crossed agencies and organizations, blurring the personal with the professional, the past with the future, Ice thought as he stared a hole into the ceiling.
Yeah, a tangled web of coincidences and connections.
And John Benson was the spider at the center of that web.
“Still haven’t answered my question,” came Jack’s goading voice from where the phone was balanced on Ice’s chest. “Given the situation you’re in, would you make the same choice to join Darkwater if you could do it over? I say you would. Including whatever dumb-ass choices you made that got you hog-tied to the bathroom pipes.” He chuckled into the phone. “Maybeespeciallythat choice. Rubbing-post and all.”
Now Ice cracked a grin that he was glad Jack would never see. He was about to hang up without confirming or denying anything, but then another man’s voice came through from Jack’s end of the line.
Ice brought the phone closer to his ear. It was Keller, one of the other new Darkwater guys. Keller was somewhat of a mystery so far. He was also former Delta, but he’d left the Army almost a decade earlier. Ice himself had never crossed paths with the guy, never even heard his name. His military record was bare-bones, almost non-existent.
Which made Ice think Keller had been poached by the CIA early on in his Delta career.
And when Jack had dropped Keller’s name around some older Delta guys a few weeks ago, their response pretty much confirmed Ice’s suspicion that Keller had been recruited by the spooks.
“Keller the Killer,” one of those Delta veterans had replied. “Broke a guy’s neck on a training exercise. They wrote up the death as accidental, but nobody believed it. He was gone within weeks after that. Good fucking riddance.”
There was nothing in Keller’s file about him causing someone’s death—accidental or otherwise. Which pretty much guaranteed CIA swooped in and snatched him up, forgave his sins, purged his record.
And now Benson had brought Keller the Killer into Darkwater?
Had Benson been the guy who recruited Keller into the CIA all those years ago?
Just like he’d recruited Indy O’Donnell into the CIA?
Too many connections.
Too many coincidences.
Too many fucking “signs from the universe.”