Page 13

CIA Headquarters, Langley, Virginia

KC waited in the hallway as Yardley snapped on a light to reveal a closet-like room adjacent to a tech lab. They were in a mysterious and apparently abandoned wing of the headquarters building.

“Ignore the wear pattern in the carpet.” Yardley gestured at a bare spot about the length of a person pacing back and forth. “I promise no one has ever been kept prisoner in here.”

“Isn’t that exactly what you would say just before you locked the door?” Reluctantly, KC made her way inside and sat down on a creaky rolling chair opposite another broken-looking rolling chair. There was a small metal table between them. The room was otherwise empty.

“No locking, I promise.” Yardley pulled the door halfway shut behind her. “This was the best I could do on short notice before I organized a few things. I’ll be back.”

She exited without further comment, leaving KC to her own devices.

On the way from the Situation Room at the White House to this dilapidated and abandoned office, Yardley had said nothing.

Secret Service had escorted them to the helipad, they’d flown and landed, KC had trudged behind her new mentor to a familiar tech lab where Yardley got a comm earpiece and took KC’s cell phone, and now she was here, with no debrief after the briefing.

She jiggled her leg, staring at the door. She’d already heard Yardley walk down the hall and bang through the double doors at the end. Likely to be gone a while yet.

“Keep it moving, Nolan.” Her voice fell flat against the acoustic tiles and hard-wear carpet.

She looked for and found the security camera, mounted in a discreet corner.

It was a TaborView wired continuous feed cam that looked more than a few years old.

No way to tell if it was recording without a specialized scanner.

She gave the dark lens a wave. Even if they were watching, she wasn’t going to sit here like an obedient child. She left the room and stepped into the dim hallway.

The door on the dark tech lab was locked. She keyed in a door code she’d established for herself in her first week at the agency, one she used when she didn’t want her movements—physical or digital—to be tracked.

The lock clicked open. Banks of overhead fluorescents blinked slowly to life. KC stepped out of the doorway, her back against the wall, and waited a moment, listening.

No footsteps. Nothing.

She slid a laptop off of a metal cart and returned to the room she was supposed to be in. It took her a few minutes to wipe the computer and cloak its signal.

Very little had happened to her in her life that she hated more than sitting in a meeting with the president of the United States and her ex-girlfriend-slash-peerless-spy and telling them 90 percent of the truth.

Especially considering the remaining 10 percent that was a lie was a big one.

In fact, I made the weapon, Madam President. I pinky swear it was for a legitimate reason that will be explained at a later time.

As the president herself was now fully aware, KC had gotten into some messes, but she’d never been in this deep.

She didn’t know what Ada Williams knew about Dr. Brown’s black op, much less McLaughlin, Gramercy, Atlas, or Yardley.

No question, the president should know everything.

The CIA’s entire purpose was to gather intelligence and present it without bias to the president, so nothing should be happening at the agency that the executive branch was unaware of.

But just because things were supposed to work a certain way didn’t mean they did.

She would have liked to inform the people in the Situation Room that Dr. Brown was hurt and off the grid, and he would explain when he was able to reemerge.

She hadn’t been able to do that, however, because he’d been injured in the course of the very same black op she couldn’t talk about, which meant even his injuries were a secret to anyone outside of the op.

Which was everyone, so far as KC had been told.

All she’d been able to do was remind herself over and over again that Dr. Brown had said to keep the op a secret until she heard directly from him.

Directly. He had been explicit.

So KC would just have to be grateful that the president and the director hadn’t asked her any questions about Dr. Brown’s whereabouts or his involvement with the weapon.

What the president had given KC was an opportunity, as Gramercy pointed out—the opportunity to find Kris Flynn, figure out how bad the mess was and how many copies or versions or pieces there were of the weapon, and clean it up in time for Dr. Brown to answer the SOS that KC had left for him in his encrypted inbox.

With one ear to the hallway, she got to work. It didn’t take her long to track down a couple of Canadian hackers who owed her a favor. Almost as soon as she posted her request to them, she got a message back from one and heard a noise from the hallway at the same time.

Footsteps. Still far off, but KC needed to move.

She decrypted the message.

Take a look at this, it said.

There was a small package of code that appeared to have been transmitted from a household smart device.

KC scanned through it as fast as she could until she heard the doors clang open at the end of the hall.

Then she wiped the laptop and leaned it against the wall on the far side of the room as though someone had left it behind after a meeting.

Yardley appeared in the doorway. “Did I give you enough time?”

“For what?”

She glanced at the computer. “If you weren’t quite ready for me, I could step out and get us something to drink.”

“Were you watching me on the camera?”

Yardley narrowed her eyes. “No, but I was certainly hoping that Tabasco , if left alone for the first time since her run this morning, would engage in a bit of tradecraft. You surely haven’t been sitting there this whole time waiting for me.”

“Maybe I took a power nap.”

Yardley sighed. “Where’s Flynn?”

KC sighed back, but her heart rate hadn’t slowed down. “Probably in trouble. After she bounced from the Ritz, she hacked a smart device, some kind of appliance that’s connected to Wi-Fi, to send a signal.”

“To whom?”

“Hard to say. Anyone who would know it was her, looks like.”

Yardley tapped her finger against her bowed upper lip. “If she’s talking to the world with a toaster oven, that means she doesn’t have her phone on her. Or access to a computer.”

“Probably not.”

“Her phone and computer weren’t in her suite at the Ritz. I assumed she’d taken them with her. Then she drops momentarily out of the Sisters’ eyesight and disappears, but she doesn’t have her things with her anymore. That says ‘kidnapped’ to me.”

“Or on the move and not interested in being located by the wrong people.”

“Where did she send it from?” The easy cadence of Yardley’s fast-paced questions was pleasantly familiar.

“I can’t tell, but it doesn’t matter. It’s an old signal, I think. If it were actionable, I doubt my source would’ve given it to me.”

“But you don’t know for sure? Do you want to grab that laptop and take another look?” Yardley issued this challenge with a raised eyebrow. Sassy.

“Don’t you have to teach me how to waltz and wear emerald earrings that double as poison darts?

” But KC walked over to retrieve the laptop.

A few seconds, and she restored the message she’d wiped.

It took a few more to rapidly scan through the rest of the package she’d been sent. Then her eyes crossed. “Holy night .”

“What?” Yardley sat down on the broken chair across from hers.

KC double-checked what she was looking at. “Weren’t we all just at a briefing? It was my understanding that at a briefing, information is shared.”

“KC.” There was a warning in Yardley’s voice that KC usually only heard when she flipped through the streaming menu options for too long, searching for the perfect show.

“Like.” KC exported everything she could to her own private server, because fuck the agency. “Come on.”

“Katherine Corrine Nolan, if you don’t tell me what you’re going on about, I will lay you out.”

“You and what upper body? That whole set of pink-and-aqua dumbbells in the corner of our room has dust on it.”

“Hey!”

KC looked up from the laptop to Yardley, knowing she’d see laughter in her face—the laughter they always shared when they fake-fought.

Of course, now KC knew what their real fights were like.

Yardley seemed to remember at the same time, and it made KC’s stomach hurt to watch her school the amusement in her eyes and retreat behind her new, professional Unicorn expression.

She forced herself to focus on the laptop screen. “So Flynn sent this message, and within a few hours, it was picked up.”

“By whom?”

“That’s what’s making me spin. By us.”

“Us, as in—”

“Looks like Corsen saw it. Corsen reports to Gramercy.”

Yardley pointed the toe of her crossed leg. “But you said this message must be old, or your contact wouldn’t have given it to you. So she sent it, we saw it, and we went after her? Stashed her away somewhere?”

KC thought about it. “That’s more than we can infer. All we actually know is that at some point after she was last in our sights in Toronto, Kris Flynn broadcast a message from somewhere, and Corsen intercepted it and may or may not have reported it to Gramercy.”

“All right.” Yardley wound a strand of dark hair around her finger while KC savored her agreement.

All right wasn’t a term she’d heard much from Yardley recently.

“You’re right that it’s the kind of intel I should’ve been given.

How do I know what’s hinky if I don’t know where she’s been or who would lock her in a room with nothing but a toaster oven?

Or why she would pass a note to the agency? ”