fine for combat. Send me,” he said. He’d been anxious to join Cindy since she’d left for the Ukraine. He had no worries about her abilities, but Cindy’s heart for this line of work had waned. She’d had serious misgivings about staying with Caliban since her last mission to garner the location of a nuclear warhead from a terrorist financier had ended in the messy death of her target. Some operatives could handle the killing that came with the work; some couldn’t. Cindy had told Ritter about her plans to quit the program the morning before she had a meeting with Shannon. Instead of being freed from the program, Cindy and the rest of the team had deployed to the Ukraine later that day. What had Shannon said to Cindy to get her to go on the mission?
Shannon looked him over with her basilisk stare and slowly swiveled her chair from side to side. Her hand shot toward Ritter’s face. A pen speared through the air, and Ritter’s hands went up out of reflex to block the projectile. His left hand batted the pen from the air; his right arm wasn’t nearly as fast, as if his shoulder joint had rusted.
Ritter grimaced and swore under his breath as he rubbed his burning shoulder.
“Don’t bullshit me, Eric. You’d be a liability to the mission in your current state. Besides, you can’t even speak Russian,” Shannon said.
“And what is their mission?” Ritter said through clenched teeth.
Shannon ignored his question, pulled a manila envelope from her desk, and slid it across her desk. Tamper-proof tape was over the sealed flap, the name “Eric Gamil” printed above the tape.
“That’s you,” she said.
Ritter looked at the envelope but didn’t touch it.
“Seven hours ago, a bomb exploded in Ashburn and killed a man named Michael Bendis. Michael Bendis was…a mentor.” Shannon drifted away for a moment, her mind someplace far away and long ago. She shook her head and continued.
“You’re going to join up with the FBI and figure out who killed him and why,” she said.
Ritter pressed his lips together. This was damn peculiar.
“Shannon, is this a sanctioned operation? We don’t operate in the United States. You made that clear when I first came on board, and we’ve stuck to that rule ever since.” US law forbade the CIA and its covert elements such as Caliban from conducting any intelligence activities on American soil. That was the remit of the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security.
“This is sanctioned by the directors, and that’s why Eric Gamil is an FBI agent.” She pointed to the envelope. The directors, the leaders of the Caliban Program, were a mystery to Ritter. Only Shannon could communicate with them, and they were rarely spoken of.
Ritter snatched a letter opener from a cup on Shannon’s desk and sliced it across the tamper tape. Inside was a badge and ID for an FBI agent with Ritter’s face and a slew of credit cards and driver’s licenses for the same man.
“A bombing on US soil is in ‘kind of a big deal’ territory,” she said. “The FBI will elbow out any and all other parts of the intelligence and law enforcement community to keep this their baby, which is why you need that cover identity.”
“I’ll be guilty of half a dozen felonies when I put this badge in my pocket. Why is this so important? What aren’t you telling me?”
Shannon let out a slow breath and looked away.
“Bendis is—was—a director. Their identities are known to a select and very small group of men and women in the United States government. We need to know who ordered the hit and why.”
Ritter stayed quiet. This was the first concrete thing he’d ever learned about the directors. That one had been murdered begged a very scary question.
“This is about the nuke, isn’t it?” he asked. Ritter and the rest of Shannon’s team had captured a North Korean nuclear warhead, which fell into the hands of Somali pirates months ago. Ritter took a bullet when his erstwhile Israeli Mossad