Page 7

CIA Headquarters, Langley, Virginia

Atlas leaned back in their chair at the conference table. Their leather blazer was so fine, it didn’t make even the softest creak when they shifted position. They’d recently grown out their hair from a deep burgundy, and now their short, rich brown Afro set off the golden tones in their dark skin.

They nodded at Gramercy, dashing as usual in one of his three-piece suits with a green-and-white paisley pocket square.

It was Gramercy who coordinated the analysts and tech for Project Maple Leaf.

Atlas took point on operations, while Yardley hobnobbed, flirted, infiltrated, and developed assets as she could.

There were others assigned to the team, but the three of them formed its core.

Gramercy slid a briefing file toward Yardley, fat with all of the need-to-know details of today’s op.

“Aren’t we waiting on Tabasco?” Yardley glanced toward the door.

Instead of responding, Gramercy looked at Atlas. Though Atlas’s expression remained as still as late summer, the two of them were obviously engaged in a silent but heated argument.

“Really?” Atlas finally said.

Gramercy lifted his shoulder one millimeter. “Not my call.”

“Care to tag me in?” she asked.

Gramercy leaned back, his expression easing into what Yardley privately thought of as his congenial boss of everything face. “Tabasco doesn’t have the opportunity to join us at this time.”

Sometimes Yardley really hated spies.

“I’ll start,” Atlas said. “Devon Mirabel’s trip to the District has been planned for a couple of days. Tabasco has accessed lines of communication among people in Mirabel’s network that we’ve used to develop the Unicorn’s credentials as a potential buyer.”

Despite a morning with KC that had made Yardley feel like her heart was full of tears ever since, she was a little bit excited that the mysterious Tabasco would be in her ear today.

She’d tried to get more intel about this silicon mastermind late last night after remembering that an officer she’d partnered with to visit a squirrely asset in Paris a year ago had claimed to have once been in Tabasco’s lab with Tabasco.

Yardley had put in earbuds and FaceTimed her colleague, Delaney, from under the scratchy guest room sheets, and though Delaney enthusiastically answered Yardley’s call from a café in Bern, she only shook her head when Yardley asked about Tabasco.

I’m under orders to keep their identity undercover , she’d said.

That’s straight from Dr. Brown with counterterrorism.

I will say I tried pretty hard to get Tabasco under covers —here, she’d winked at Yardley— but I got the sense I had absolutely no chance. It was fun to try, though.

This was not helpful. Delaney’s type was inclusive, to say the least.

Yardley flipped through the file for today’s mission.

It wasn’t hard to figure out what she’d be doing.

Charm and awe in equal measures. Make sure the salesman didn’t have a chance to think.

Let the dorks in the van pick up intel off the various devices they would plant on her body.

Yardley was always more interested in the people part of the assignment. “What can you tell me about Mirabel?”

“He’s from money,” Atlas said. “Got his start as a London-based lobbyist and slithered his way into a special advisor position to the prime minister before being ousted for unstated reasons.”

“Never great.”

Atlas grimaced. “After that, he opened a consulting firm, began dabbling in arms and antiquities of questionable provenance, and the past few years he’s been comfortably situated in banned, stolen, and dangerous tech.”

Gramercy tapped on the tablet in front of him. The large flat-screen at the head of the table lit up with a gallery of images. “This is Mirabel.”

Fiftyish, with a full head of blond hair and a gleaming mouthful of veneers. “He looks like a talking head on cable news.” She turned her attention back to the folder in front of her. “So I’m…?”

“You’re a real estate financier from Queens with aspirations to represent New York in the U.S.

Senate,” Gramercy said. “You’ve been behind the scenes, working for your father since college, trying to steer him into running for office, but he’s always had cold feet.

He’s now stepped aside, and you’re filling the family’s power vacuum and getting political.

” As he spoke, Gramercy flew through several more slides to offer Yardley a visual sense of her cover.

“Baby Jesus and his fishing pole, where do you guys come up with this stuff?”

“It’s not difficult, actually,” Gramercy said. “Davis Sterling-Chenoweth, your cover’s father, is a former operative and current actual financier. Old money. He’s perfectly willing, in this case, to claim a daughter from an extramarital relationship heretofore unknown to most.”

“When I retire, please don’t approach me with a dossier on my fake love child that I have to vouch for in order to reassure an arms dealer.” Yardley raised an eyebrow at Gramercy. “Won’t do it, and just try to find me on the deck of my boathouse in the Outer Banks.”

Gramercy didn’t smile in response to her joke. Yardley had never coaxed a smile from him. He must have been brutal in Russia.

“Our friends downstairs will complete your cover with photo documents and disguise,” Atlas said.

“We’re not going too deep on this. We’re mostly interested in if Mirabel has tech on him that Tabasco can pull anything from.

If he warms to you, there’s always the hope of completing a sale.

I’m sure Uncle Sam would be happy to pay through the nose for the privilege of putting this threat to bed. ”

“What you’re telling me is that once again, this op is thin and messy.

I hope I’m going in there looking like Margaret Thatcher’s kid sister, because I have to tell you, I am right on the end of the diving board, hovering over the pool of getting made.

I haven’t loved being sent all over North America and Europe with little more than a fake ID and sunglasses.

I at least want a good prosthetic nose.”

Gramercy picked up his gold fountain pen from the conference table. “Your New York boroughs accents are impeccable.” He rose to his feet. “Go downstairs. There’s a lot of tech for them to sort. I need to check in with my people.”

She gave him a sharp salute. After he’d gone, she turned to Atlas. “Where am I headed for this?”

“The Starbucks on Pennsylvania and Third.”

The bottom dropped out of her stomach. “Make it easy, then. Starbucks on a gorgeous afternoon in the fall, in the middle of a district of thirty thousand people, half of them with a hankering for a Pumpkin Spice Latte. The president wasn’t available to drive by in a motorcade?

Because I’m not sure this is challenging, honestly. ”

“It’s what Mirabel requested.”

“Well, if it’s what Devon wants.” Yardley pushed her chair back from the conference table and crossed her legs. She’d lodged her protest, but there was no real conviction behind it. Her heart was too sore.

Atlas wore a gold band on their left ring finger. Once, when they took the ring off to rub their finger during a meeting, Yardley had noticed a tattoo on the same finger with the initials MW. It made Yardley wonder who Atlas went home to.

This morning, when KC had come into the house from her run, her bloody knee had caught Yardley off guard. It was just a scrape, but the small path of blood tracing down KC’s shin made every moment of danger Yardley had navigated in her career flash through her mind in a nickelodeon of horror.

She’d always worried, but it was worse since they moved in together.

Coming home to see the blue light of the computers glowing through the windows of the room KC used as her office made Yardley sick with fear.

There were woods in the back. Anyone could see in and know KC was alone, wearing headphones, distracted.

Who was going to protect KC when Yardley was out protecting the world?

She reached across the table to tap Atlas’s ring. “How do you do it?”

Atlas lifted their hand up with a small smile and rubbed the ring with their thumb. “Slow. With a soundtrack.”

Yardley snorted.

Atlas put their elbows on the table, leaning in. “Do you have something you need to get off your chest before this mission?”

Yardley received the very faint implied rebuke in Atlas’s question. Her head was not in the game.

“Nothing I didn’t bring on myself,” she said. “You know I never thought of any other choice than to do this work since I was a preschooler begging for one more spy story on my granddaddy’s knee. It’s just… Have I ever told you my Nana Nancy divorced him?”

Atlas shook their head.

“It was after he got declassified. She learned the truth about where he’d been going all those years and kicked him right out. Hired a crackerjack divorce attorney, took half the savings, and kept the house besides.”

Yardley paused to unfasten the clip on the slim gold watch KC had given her, loosening the band so she could flip it around her wrist.

Out of all the mistakes she’d made, one of the biggest had been to take KC with her to North Carolina. In that world, among everything and everyone Yardley loved, she’d listened too hard to her heart, bonging with recognition, telling her KC was her person. Her home.

Drunk on that feeling, Yardley didn’t hesitate to accept when KC presented her with her mother’s gold watch and a key to her house, but she also didn’t tell KC that what she really yearned for was a ring, forever, and to give KC every part of herself.

Yardley could have a watch. She couldn’t have a wife.