Page 9

Indy in her dreams.
And then when the dream became joining the CIA,Indy O’Donnellseemed like a nice neutral name for a secret agent.
Noncommittal and asexual.
Sort of like her.
Because how long had it been since a man had touched her?
Yeah, exactly, Indy thought stiffly as she paced the safe-house. She loved being here in Mumbai, but there was still a vast distance between her and the common man on the street. Most people spoke at least some English, but language was still a problem.
So was her job at the Embassy.
Her job title was just “local political analyst.” The CIA made up cryptic titles like that for all their Embassy liaisons in countries where official CIA presence was unwelcome.
Though of course, the Indians weren’t dumb. They knew CIA was everywhere. It was more of a don’t-ask-don’t-tell game than any serious deception.
But finally she was on a serious operation, Indy thought as that nervous energy made her toes curl in her canvas shoes. Edwin Moses was a legit CIA asset—she’d gotten an encrypted message from Langley informing her that he’d be getting in touch.
She’d come dressed for action, with hip-hugging black cargo pants that had some serious stretch to them. A long sleeve black tee with her standard issue Glock 19 in a shoulder holster that made her bra itch. Lightweight windbreaker that served no purpose other than to hide her weapon. After all, her stretchy pants were too damn tight to stick a gun down along the small of her back. And what if the barrel got stuck between her buttcheeks just when she needed to draw and fire?
Indy patted down the front of her tee shirt, which had ridden up over the gentle swell of her reasonably tight belly. She stretched her arms out wide, opened up her hips with side-to-side moves she’d learned in yoga, raised each knee in succession to stretch out her hamstrings.
She’d hit the weight room at the Embassy last night, doing deadlifts and squats until her quads and glutes burned. Indy was a believer in leaning on your strengths, and women were designed to develop lower body strength rather than upper body power. Something about carrying babies in the womb for nine months and then perching the little critters on your hip for another year or so. The female body-design came from two million years of evolution, and Indy was a fan of going with the flow.
Except now the flow seemed off. Moses had been gone for almost ten minutes. He’d told her to stay inside the safe-house, that he didn’t want to spook the informant-woman who supposedly had some information for him about India’s nuclear program, which was always a matter of interest to the CIA.
After all, India, China, and Pakistan all shared borders with one another and each had nuclear weapons in its arsenal. Put that together with the disputed territory of Kashmir up north and it was a potentially explosive situation—certainly one that warranted attention from both CIA and DOD.
In fact just last month Indy had put together a position paper about the implications for the U.S. if China, India, and Pakistan got into a real war rather than the everyday border skirmishes that didn’t even make the mainstream news. It was a standard position-paper, drawing up scenarios for the higher-ups in Langley to consider as they hatched their schemes. Langley got hundreds of such reports every month from CIA liaisons all over the globe.
There hadn’t been a peep from Langley about the paper, but now Indy wondered if somebody had noticed and decided to get her more active in the field. So Indy shrugged off that rising nervousness as she adjusted her bra and tried to get used to the shoulder holster. She told herself this was a good thing, that her hard work was paying off, her intelligence was making higher-ups take notice, her potential becoming obvious to the movers-and-shakers of the Company.
Still, Moses had struck her as being slightly tense on the trip from the Embassy out here. He’d insisted on picking her up two blocks away from the secured gates of the Embassy, which seemed slightly odd but OK, whatever, what did she really know, she was still relatively junior, still learning.
But one thing Indy had learned early on was that intuition and instinct were your friends.
You needed to trust them.
Listen to them.
Obey them.
Because intuition and instinct had been honed by those same two million years of evolution.
Two million years of brutal struggle for survival.
Two million years of playing the endless game of life and death.
But this wasn’t that sort of game, Indy told herself as she forced a smile and took several deep breaths to slow her racing heart. Yeah, Moses had seemed nervous, anxious, twitchy, edgy. For a moment she’d even wondered about his motives. After all, he’d instructed her not to tell anyone in the Embassy about this. That was no problem—Indy worked alone, didn’t have a boss or a supervisor or a team. But it made her tense.
She did relax a bit when she finally got into the Range Rover with Moses. Because although he was certainly tense, it wasn’tthatsort of tension.
In factthatsort of tension had been sorely missing from Indy’s supposedly exciting life of being a shadowy spy. There’d been no assignments to seduce ruthless billionaire Sheikhs or manipulate hunky psychotic dictators with her womanly charms. Those sorts of assignments were more rumor than reality, Indy had discovered after she’d been let behind the curtain of the CIA, seen that much of the work involved squinting at computer screens rather than sneaking through the sewers of a dark city at midnight.
At leastherwork had been mostly drudgery. There were certainly specialist CIAagent provocateursemployed by the Company.
And others who did what was calledwet work—assassinations, hits, kills, strikes, what have you. All of it unofficial, of course. NOC—Non-Official Cover Operatiions—was the secret program where these ghosts operated. It was so secret that most in the CIA didn’t even know if the NOC program still existed after some bad publicity that resulted in a Congressional Hearing about a decade earlier. Indy certainly had no idea. Her clearance didn’t get anywhere close to that kind of stuff.