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Situation Room, the White House

Ada Williams, president of the United States, looked silently at the group sitting at the table in her Situation Room.

KC did her best not to fidget.

“Your plan”—the president crossed her arms—“turns my hair gray.”

“Yes, ma’am.” McLaughlin, the director of the agency, shuffled his stack of file folders. “There is some risk.”

The president turned her attention to KC.

Her merciless eye contact made it necessary for KC to remind herself that she’d voted for this woman in large part because she recognized the sovereignty and dignity of all people, and so President Williams was unlikely to send KC to a post in Antarctica to scan penguins for surveillance devices.

“I heard a lot from you in our first meeting,” the president said, “but obviously not everything.”

“I think who you didn’t hear enough from was Dr. Brown.

” KC said this with as much confidence as she could muster.

She did understand that the failures of Dr. Brown’s leadership had led to her assigning total accountability for the device to herself, instead of to Dr. Brown, but it was difficult to integrate this perspective with the peril she, her colleagues, and civilians had been put in due to her ignorance.

Her thoughts still strayed to the twenty-foot flames shooting from the propane tank on Mirabel’s property, and to the sound of gunfire from helicopters raining down around them.

No one wanted anything they did to come to that.

“If I may,” Yardley interjected. She was leaning back in the leather executive chair, her crossed arms echoing the president’s posture.

“Whitmer,” the director warned.

“No.” Yardley glanced at him. “This is important. The president’s right that this is a dangerous plan.

Also, its meticulous design, bolstered by literal reams of intelligence gathered by myself, Nolan, MI6, CSIS, and our asset, Kris Flynn, is backed by a cavalcade of military on standby to descend by air, land, and sea.

This is a no-failure mission with a breathtaking level of resources behind it. ”

“On civilian soil.” President Williams’s tone made her distaste for this aspect of the plan more than clear.

Yardley leaned forward. “I have a reputation in the agency for making my own rules.” President Williams lifted an eyebrow.

“My reasons are the same reasons why you have consistently operated by your own code.” Yardley pointed down the long, shiny table and circled her finger at the digital displays of the Situation Room.

“This is a room that never imagined people like us. The agency is the endpoint of a system that prioritizes strict hierarchy with inflexible protocols. Those protocols are in place to protect mainly the people at the top. It’s a system that enforces all of the biases of the society we live in, ensuring that everyone at the top looks like everyone else. ”

“Not like me,” President Williams said.

“No. This office never imagined you. And how easy has it been?”

The president nodded in acknowledgment of Yardley’s point.

“My power in this agency isn’t that I know eight languages,” Yardley said.

“It’s that I’m a woman and I’m queer. I make every decision with my experiences as a woman and a queer person behind me.

That means I’m going to examine the variables a different way than they’ve been examined before, and that diversity of thinking in an agency like this—my perspective that considers angles and pitfalls and options and perspectives no one else might think of—keeps us safer.

Safer still if there’s even more of that diversity.

It’s exponential. What you’re able to imagine for our country as a Black woman and our president is much different than the nearly three hundred years of leadership our country had previously. ”

President Williams nodded. “I like to think so. And, of course, I’m able to take into account their perspectives, too.”

Yardley leaned forward. “Exactly. So now you can see why this entire situation, which we have had to design a dangerous plan to resolve, has been a clusterfuck from day one.”

The president’s expression of attentive listening didn’t waver, even as Director McLaughlin looked as though he might like a trapdoor to open beneath him.

Then Yardley looked at her, and KC realized she was giving her the floor.

Far from being nervous, she liked it.

“It has been,” she agreed. “Such a cluster. And that’s not just because Dr. Brown recruited and sequestered me away for his own use.

It’s not just because so many of our mechanisms of reporting are easy to manipulate that he made us all believe he was somewhere he wasn’t, or that those same mechanisms meant the United States effectively paid for an act of terrorism on Toronto perpetrated by one man”—here, McLaughlin winced—“and now we have to spend and risk even more to make sure it doesn’t happen again. ”

“Tell me why you think it is, then.” The president was focused only on KC.

“It’s because we’re protecting hierarchies and tradition instead of people ,” KC said. “Dr. Brown was protected by this agency to do exactly what he did. He used the system that was already in place. Our communication protocols, our forms, our methods.”

There hadn’t been anything out of protocol about her recruitment from MIT.

Nothing officially wrong with Dr. Brown threatening her with arrest as a way of converting her into an officer of the CIA.

So how was KC supposed to have figured out when he’d crossed the line that separated acceptable coercion from the self-serving deeds of a bad actor?

“What I’ve learned from Yardley,” KC continued, “is that intelligence isn’t really about secrets and power games.

It’s about people and the concerns people have.

She’s able to secure an asset because that asset wants people to be safe, or for their own family to be safe.

” KC thought of Kris climbing out of the wardrobe, tear-streaked, and how Yardley had stopped everything to make her a calming mug of tea and ask her, How’s baby?

“The asset trusts her because she cultivates a relationship with them, and that relationship is real. She’s the Unicorn because she’s Yardley, and, like she said, a woman and queer. ”

KC glanced around the table. She was gratified to see that Gramercy, Atlas, and Yardley were clearly very satisfied with how this meeting was going.

“I think what Yardley is asking,” KC told the president, “is that once we complete this mission, we take the opportunity to prevent anything like it from happening again. And that we do that not with more protocol and consolidation of power, but by trusting that the agency needs more people like Atlas and Yardley and poor hacker girls from Reston.”

The president covered her mouth with her hand, studying KC for a long moment. It was easy for KC to meet her eyes. She believed everything she’d said. She trusted her own judgment.

But most of all, she didn’t have any secrets to keep.

“That’s quite the speech,” President Williams said.

“It’s easy to learn when you care. Also, the agency might want to think about what it gained from withholding information from Yardley and me about each other.

We fixed it for you, but the country is in more danger, not less, if two spies have to break up on a mission.

I didn’t even have sad music to listen to. ”

The president laughed. “Noted.” She looked around the room. “No time to waste, then. The clusterfuck ends tonight.”

Leesburg, Virginia

Dr. Brown’s hideaway was the faux-rustic love child of a mountain cabin and an oil billionaire’s mansion, six thousand square feet of rough-hewn stone, curving wrought-iron staircases, and unfinished pine paneling sitting on ten acres of pristine lawn and mature hardwood.

He’d purchased it under a false identity from a local Realtor who cheerfully ID’d him to the agency and shared nearly a hundred high-resolution images of the home’s grounds and interior that she’d commissioned for the listing.

The agency had also located and interviewed the installation tech for the security company that wired the property.

“What a great corker of a house,” Kris Flynn said in KC’s ear. “I guess arms dealing isn’t only about the bragging rights. There’s a fair bit of coin in it, too.”

KC and Yardley were presently crammed alongside Gramercy, Atlas, and three techs into the dark, airless interior of a twelve-foot-by-eight-foot POD container.

It sat in the driveway of the home across the street from Dr. Brown’s “headquarters,” which turned out to be—as predicted—his two-and-a-half-million-dollar Leesburg pied-à-terre.

Kris Flynn’s voice was being beamed to KC from the agency’s actual headquarters, where she and Declan were safely ensconced and ready to help out in any way possible with the deployment of the countermeasure Kris had coded.

It was a clever bit of programming. Brilliant, actually.

KC never would’ve come up with the solution Kris had found to shut down and annihilate her own invention, but Kris had cheerfully pointed out that she’d always been her own worst enemy, so it made sense that she’d be best equipped to identify and exploit the device’s weaknesses.

The helpful Leesburg Realtor had been willing to install a SOLD sign at the end of the drive across from Dr. Brown’s and back it up with a fake listing, which provided the cover necessary for them to drop the POD.

It was the same Pack-On-Demand service container that currently sat at the end of the drive of KC’s house in Reston.

Full circle.

You know your name will be in the history books , Gramercy had told her with a smile after the briefing with the president. I can see that you don’t know, which is why I wanted to say. And why I wanted to also say that I’m not at all surprised.

It was nice to have a handler who believed in her.