Even though the bathroom was warm, she shivered as she wiped her body down again. It was always like this, always -and how many times, this was the ninth, right? — she felt depressed and blue and angry and everything else, like it would be for a drunk the morning after an all-night bender after successfully navigating years of sobriety through AA.
She took a brush, started working it through her hair. Number nine. Another shiver. She knew what it was, why it happened. Easy enough. She had been in this country for years and years, holding herself in tight, living a lie day after day, always wondering if today, this day, the CIA’s Office of Security would come into her office and take her away to a safe house somewhere out in Maryland, to be injected full of babble juice and squeezed dry of what she had been planning all these years.
All these years. From the very start, when Adrianna knew she was going to get revenge against her parents’ murderers, she knew that it would be something big, something spectacular, something lethal. And she knew that the only way to do that was to get into the power centers of this mongrel country and to take that one chance to do something spectacular, something that would make them pay for what they had done to her and to her family…
It had been hard, long, bitter work. And keeping everything closed up led to sleepless nights, shaky days, and a feeling that somehow, somewhere, she had to let off steam, make her feel sharp again, and to resurrect those old feelings of rage.
An accident, the very first time. Adrianna had been working for the CIA for two years, and the burden of carrying the secret had seemed almost too much to bear. She had been lonely, too, and had occasionally dated the sharp and muscular young men who worked for a number of agencies and administrations that sprouted immediately outside that enormous ring of power known as DC. Yet in dating those men — who’d always been track stars or football stars or baseball stars at college — she had often remembered those innocent but loving touches from her first boy, poor young Hassan, probably dead now, after all these years, no doubt wondering to the end what had happened to his special girl.
Ah, yes. His special girl. And her first special man. Craig Poulton. Some sort of liaison to Congress with the Department of the Army. First date, back in his apartment, he showed off his war souvenirs, for he had served in the first Gulf War, and proudly displayed a framed Iraqi flag, tattered and stained with blood, that he had retrieved from the Highway of Death after the ceasefire. When he had turned to put the framed flag back up on his apartment’s wall, Adrianna had picked up an unopened bottle of wine and had smashed it against the back of his skull.
Again and again.
And had finished him off with a knife.
The very first one. Never caught. And after the shock had worn off that first night, when she hadn’t been questioned, hadn’t even been considered a suspect in Craig’s murder, Adrianna had felt a thrill that she had killed, had killed the enemy in his own home, and never had she felt better.
That had lasted for many months, before the tension returned, the sleepless nights, the jittery days. Then she realized what she had to do. To keep that edge up, that hate, that anger that allowed her to pass through this American culture day and night with a smile and bright eyes, meant that occasionally she had to strike back.
Just like tonight. Against that lumpy Henry Spooner.
She sighed with satisfaction. The last one, no doubt, until…
Until Final Winter.
That brought forth a smile.
She looked in the mirror again, just before leaving the bathroom. Adrianna Scott was not looking back at her.
It was Aliyah Fulenz.
And she knew it was going to be a good day.
Brian Doyle waited impatiently outside the man’s office, sitting there, reading the day’s Washington Post. His left foot jittered a bit while he waited. The wait-and-see tremor, his old partner called it. Whether on surveillance at some bodega in Queens, or waiting in an ER while one of his precinct buddies was being worked over, or waiting outside some office like this one, the old wait-and-see tremor would start.
Especially when waiting outside an office. Brian had no good memories of waiting outside any such place while on the Job, especially when it involved something with Internal Affairs, a/k/a the Rat Squad, and this time it was worse. Instead of being interrogated by some flunky from the Rat Squad, this time Brian was the Rat Squad, and he hated it, hated every second of it.
The door opened. A tall man with broad shoulders that indicated lots of weights being tossed around in a gym some-where leaned out.
‘Detective?’
He stood up. ‘Sir.’
‘I’m ready to see you now.’
Brian walked into the office, heard the muted roar of jets taking off and landing from the base outside, Andrews Air Force Base, and he idly wondered where the hell Air Force One was being kept when he sat down across from the Director, the man in charge of Foreign Operations and Intelligence Liaison, the so-called Tiger Teams. The Director, a former Army Special Forces colonel, was limping as he went around his desk and sat down with a muffled grunt.
The Director said, ‘You did a good job on the Darren Coover investigation.’
‘Thanks.’
The Director seemed to eye him in a peculiar way. ‘Your tone of voice suggests otherwise.’
‘It does, does it? If you don’t like my tone of voice, then release me from my Tiger Team. I wouldn’t mind going back home.’
The Director smiled. If the gesture was meant to cheer him up, Brian thought, then it didn’t work. ‘We all have places we don’t want to be, detective, but there are places where we belong. For now, you work and you belong with us. And again, you did good work on Darren Coover.’
The Director opened up a file folder and Brian said, ‘So. What happens to Darren?’
The older man shrugged. ‘He enjoys viewing pornography of large-breasted women on the Internet. So what? Any other place, especially in the private sector, such interests can get you fired. We’re at war. And in wartime, when you have someone talented working for you — like Darren — I don’t give a shit if he enjoys looking at some knockers.’
‘Some war,’ Brian said.
‘Only one we’ve got,’ the Director said. ‘And don’t sell yourself short. You’re playing an important role.’
‘Some role,’ Brian said, rising to the conversation. ‘You know what I am? I’m a fucking rat, true and simple. I work with these people and do missions with them, travel with them and eat with them, and you’re asking me to betray them, one right after another.’
The Director said, ‘Catholic, are you?’
‘What does that have to do with anything?’
‘Too young to have gone to the Latin Mass?’
‘Yeah,’ Brian said. ‘And I haven’t been to Mass in a hell of a long while. Look, sir, what I’m saying is—’
The Director interrupted with a sentence of Latin words. Brian stopped, and said, ‘All right. Say that again, will you?’ ‘I said, “Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?” A Latin phrase from the first century. It loosely translates as, “Who will guard the guardians?” Or, “Who will watch the watchers?” Different phrases, same meaning.’
The Director spread an arm out, as to emphasize a point, and said, ‘Since 9/11, we’ve been working in the shadows. The Tiger Teams — thank God — haven’t received any news-media attention at all. If any of our work ever does get out to the public, it’s always attributed to intelligence agencies. That’s it. The title and concept of the Tiger Team hasn’t been revealed. Which has allowed us to do tremendous work, here and abroad, in disrupting terrorist cells, disrupting terrorist planning, and even helping some regimes see the error of their ways. We have been given great power to protect this country.’