She was, in a word, stunning.
She was seated, but Sigler guessed that she was about the same height as Klein; the Company man was about 5’ 10”. Her blousy top mostly concealed her figure, but her arms, where they emerged from her rolled up sleeves, were slender and toned. It was her face however, framed in a cascade of long and straight black hair that arrested Sigler’s attention. Her almond-shaped eyes, the irises brown with flecks of gold, hinted at some recent Asian ancestry, as did her high cheekbones, but her face was longer, with a prominent forehead and a strong jaw.
“Hel-lo,” murmured Parker, slipping into the Lair behind Sigler.
Command Sergeant Major Pettit, Cipher element’s senior non-commissioned officer, directed a scathing look at the young operator, but no one else at the table seemed to notice, least of all the woman, whose attention was fixed on the screen of her laptop computer.
Klein rose and extended a hand to Sigler. “Jack, good to see you.”
Sigler accepted the firm handclasp, but his reply was guarded. “Scott. Why do I have the feeling that you’re about to ruin my day?”
Klein’s grin confirmed Sigler’s suspicions, but the CIA officer withheld further explanation until Sigler and Parker were settled in at the table. “First, congratulations are in order. The guys you nabbed last night turned out to be a lot more important that we expected.”
Sigler felt his apprehension growing; he could tell where this was headed. The couriers had given up something actionable — maybe a location for a high value target — and now Cipher element was going to have to postpone their rotation back to the States to take on one more mission.
Ordinarily, that wouldn’t have bothered Sigler. It wasn’t as if he had anyone waiting for him back home.
He wasn’t really sure what ‘home’ was anymore. For the last eleven years of his life, home had been wherever the Army sent him, and somehow that seemed more real to him than his childhood home in Richmond, Virginia. His mother still lived there, but he didn’t visit often. There were too many bad memories at the house on Oak Lane: memories of his sister Julie who had always been there for him, and of his father who never had.
He’d been adrift back then, a punk, more interested in skating and hanging out with the other losers in the neighborhood, than in trying to be a good son. He didn’t care what his mother or his mostly-absent father thought of him, which seemed to suit them just fine. Julie, however, had refused to give up on him. In her own gentle but insistent way, she had equipped him to make his own path in life, encouraging him to find a dream and follow it, just as she had ultimately done.
When he was fourteen, Julie had joined the Air Force, intent on becoming one of the nation’s first female fighter pilots. Two years later, against all odds, she had succeeded. Then, just a few weeks before she was to wed her high school sweetheart, while on a cross-training flight in a Navy F-14, she crashed. Julie’s death had been the final straw for an already strained domestic situation. Three months later, Sigler’s father left abruptly and didn’t come back. Shortly thereafter, Jack Sigler left as well, to join the Army.
Unlike his father, Sigler wasn’t running away. At first, he’d thought that it was Julie’s death that had motivated him to enlist, but later he realized that it was really his memory of her life that was driving him. Military service had given her focus, a challenge she knew she was capable of meeting and beating, and that was what he felt he needed. His mother, though heartbroken, had agreed to sign the waiver that would allow him to enlist at seventeen.
The rigors of basic training had shown him what he was capable of accomplishing. His natural athleticism and agility made him a perfect candidate for specialized training — Airborne school, the Rangers — but he wasn’t content to simply test his physical prowess. While serving in the 101st Airborne, he managed to earn a college degree, and then he attended Officer Candidate School. Not long after receiving his commission, he set his sights on a new goaclass="underline" Special Forces selection.
The challenges…the successes…had transformed him.
He’d joined the Army because he wanted to make a difference, to do something that would have made Julie proud, and now here he was, leading a team of the most elite counterterrorist shooters in the world, saving lives by taking out the bad guys before they could kill innocents.
Making a difference.
The uniform was home. He preferred being on alert status, whether forward positioned as they had been for the last four months, or standing by in the on-deck circle at Fort Bragg, waiting for the shit to hit the fan somewhere.
Yet somehow, this time he’d actually been looking forward to going back to the States, and he wasn’t the only one.
Casey Bellows had seen his newborn son only via webcam. Mark Adams, the old man of the team at thirty-eight, was just two years shy of his twenty, and he had already received approval for transfer to a non-deployable headquarters unit. Even the Boss, Rainer, had made no secret of his plan to leave active duty and start up his own private security firm.
They’d had a good run, but maybe it was time to cash out and enjoy their success, not risk it all on one more throw of the dice.
Stow it, Sigler, he admonished himself. This is what you signed up for.
Sigler focused on Klein.
“Sasha can explain it better,” Klein continued, with a gesture to the woman. Then he hastily added, “Sorry, I skipped the intros. Jack, Danno, this is Sasha Therion. We brought her in to consult on this…”
He paused, as if expecting the woman to engage with the conversation, but she continued to gaze at her computer screen, seemingly hypnotized.
Sigler felt compelled to speak, if only to end the awkward silence. “Brought her in? I thought your new boss put the kibosh on outsourcing.”
It was no secret that Domenick Boucher, the new director of the CIA, under orders from the President, had put an end to the former administration’s practice of outsourcing the detainment, rendition and interrogation of suspected terrorists. It was partly as a way to restore accountability to the relevant agencies and partly to stop the hemorrhage of taxpayer dollars into what some journalists had taken to calling the ‘terror-industrialist complex.’ The President had made other changes too, some public and some under the radar, to streamline the nation’s intelligence-gathering apparatus and repair the lingering damage to America’s public image following too many incidents of abuse, brutality and torture — oft times with official sanction.
The President, a former Army Ranger, was by no means soft on national security issues, but he did have what one primary opponent had disparagingly called ‘an obsolete sense of integrity.’ Old-fashioned maybe, but not obsolete. Evidently the American people had liked the idea of a leader with integrity.
Klein shook his head. “This is different. But, I should let Sasha explain.”
When she failed to pick up the cue a second time, the CIA man laid a hand gently on her forearm, and as if speaking to a young child, he said: “Sasha, why don’t you tell the men about your work?”
The woman looked up suddenly, the spell broken. She glanced around the table as if just realizing that she wasn’t alone. “Uh, I do the math.”