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“Next!”

The rumpled, middle-aged traveler in front of Vanessa rolled his bag up to the female customs agent at Dulles's International Arrivals Building.

Vanessa nudged her carry-on impatiently to the painted red line. The soft leather bag and its basic contents were given to her by her contact when she had arrived in Prague, along with her full-cover alias and passport, and the message “You'll be debriefed at safe house Stag.”

She let her fingers slide over the U.S. passport in her jacket pocket. “Make sure you thank the tech guys,” the Prague inside officer had offered coolly, pocketing Tia Harris's Canadian driver's license. “They were up all night getting your visa stamp close to perfect.”

She found herself staring now at the snaking queues of noncitizens, travelers carrying a collective sense of nervous exhaustion. Inevitably, her thoughts turned to Arash's wife and daughter.

She knew the odds were high that Yassi Farah might already be in the custody of the Revolutionary Guard. But Vanessa didn't believe it. She'd walked Arash and Yassi through the emergency protocols at least a dozen times. While Yassi had never made any effort to mask her distrust of “the American spy,” she was tough and smart—a natural at tradecraft. And she'd backed Arash's decision to become an Agency asset—for complex reasons having to do with her hatred of Iran's regime, dollars in a U.S. bank account, and the potential of defection.

And Arash would have made sure his wife could deliver vital intelligence if the worst happened.

She pictured Yassi's delicate features and sharply intelligent eyes and felt certain she was already on the move with her daughter.

“Next!”

Vanessa stepped past the painted line, offering up her passport to the uniformed agent. She resisted the urge to touch her cheekbone. She'd done a decent job of masking the bruise with makeup.

“Welcome to the U.S.A., Ms. Gray. Where's home?”

Vanessa hoped her practiced smile covered the fraction of an instant her mind blanked.

Damn
—she thought she'd finally shaken off the haze that lingered through most of the eight-and-a-half-hour flight from Prague. The haze that came with complete exhaustion—the shock of traumatic events, the mind's obsessive replay, the endless turning of details. Had she missed something that could have saved Arash's life?

She sensed the other woman's rising curiosity.
Claire Gray. U.S. Citizen.
Pushing away other thoughts, summoning her energy and her voice. “New York City's home now, but I do a lot of business in D.C.”
Partial truths.

“Where's family?”

Pennsylvania.
She pictured her mother in her bright yellow kitchen.

“Connecticut,” she said, lying automatically. “Waterbury area.”

“Oh, it's pretty around there this time of year; the fall colors are so spectacular. Anything to declare?”

Vanessa blinked.
I've burned through identities to the point I can hardly remember who I am? I've graced CNN in a wig? I'm at least partially responsible for a good man's death?

“Nothing, thanks. Traveling light.”

She walked quickly
from the terminal into the gray twilight of the Virginia evening, ignoring the pain from too-tight shoes and the glances from men attracted by the physical package—young, blond, lithe, and nicely sexy.

But one man wearing black sunglasses standing in the shadows smoking a cigarette caught her attention.

David Khoury, ops officer, counterterrorism. He'd gotten her text from Prague:
coming into IAD can u run traps?
A message she never should have sent. It was out of bounds. And it revealed her level of desperation.

He turned, moving ahead of her, six feet tall, taut and lean, slowing only to stab out his cigarette in a receptacle of sand. She caught the lines of exhaustion on his face, felt a deep pang of concern, but was almost instantly pulled back to the questions racing through her mind.

Who ordered the hit?

Was Bhoot involved?

Was Arash's intel valid?

If she'd followed orders, would Arash still be alive?

She followed Khoury toward the daily parking garage, bypassing the cab queue.

By the time she turned onto the covered walkway, he had disappeared. No one ahead, just row after row of parked cars trapped in the gloom. The click of her heels against concrete and the hush of her roller bag's wheels echoed eerily through the closed space.

But twenty paces later he reached out to pull her into the dark corner of a stairwell.

She inhaled, a sharp, startled breath, as he pressed his lips to hers. Her roller bag toppled with a clatter. He'd taken off his sunglasses. He tasted of cigarettes, and his day-old beard scraped her chin. His hands were warm against the small of her back, and she pressed against him, absorbing his heat. They kissed again, this time neither of them breathing until they had to.

When he eased his hold enough to meet her eyes, a complexity of emotions played over his features, but she couldn't pin them down before voices rang through the garage and he released her and she stepped back sharply. Khoury turned his face to the shadows, and she busied herself by reaching down to right her bag while a handful of people passed by.

Meeting like this was a serious protocol breach, and, given the dog-eat-dog environment at Headquarters, a serious risk he'd taken for her benefit.

As soon as they were alone she shook her head, shifting restlessly. “This is too crazy, meeting here. I shouldn't have asked.”

“We've done crazy before.” His face lit up unexpectedly, and he grinned at her. Thick dark-brown hair, square-jawed, handsome as hell, but the slightly crooked front tooth and the faded scar on his chin from a childhood dare made him look like a kid.

She couldn't help but smile. “You're right, we have.”

He stepped onto the walkway, guiding her into the endless rows of parked cars, speaking quietly, soberly now. “A body turned up in Stockerau, an industrial district—”

“About thirty kilometers outside Vienna, I know,” she said, hearing how abrupt she sounded.

But Khoury took no umbrage. “Early twenties, wearing cheap leather gear like your bike jockey from the Prater. A small-time Austrian-Chechen punk, executed with two close-range shots to the head. If your hit man was cleaning up loose ends, he used the 9×19-millimeter 7N21 cartridge—a high-velocity Russian round used by some of their special forces.”

“I saw the shooter leaving the park,” Vanessa said flatly.

Khoury tensed. “Can you identify him?”

“It was dusk and he was roughly twenty-five meters away . . .” But she nodded. “It's enough. What I saw, I won't forget.”

“Does he know that?” Khoury asked. “If you're burned—”

“I'm not burned.” Heat surged through her body. “He killed my asset. He gunned him down in cold blood.”

In the abrupt silence that followed her words, she heard her own question. Khoury heard it, too, because he said, “Your asset was dead the moment he landed in Vienna.”

“I was ordered to abort the op, David. But I went ahead.”

For an instant he cut his gaze away before he said, “You did the right thing; you got the intel.”

She wished she could believe that absolutely.

Neither of them spoke again while he walked her to a small, dark sedan parked in a corner of the structure, away from the full glare of industrial lights. He lifted a compact carry-on bag from the trunk, replaced it with her bag, and pushed it closed.

She reached out, touching his arm. “You know I have one more question you haven't answered yet.”

Evading her eyes, he shook his head almost imperceptibly.

“David.”

“It wasn't their hit. That's the word from my assets—somebody else had a message to send.”

She went still. Khoury was Lebanese American, and his sources were linked to Hezbollah and Hamas, so, in turn, to Iran. His access was part of his value to Headquarters, part of why he'd been so heavily recruited by the Agency. Now he was confirming what her instincts had already told her.

She worked to keep her voice cool. “Your assets—have they heard anything to connect this hit to Bhoot?”

He had inherited his mother's green-flecked hazel eyes, and they narrowed now with wariness. “I know where you want to go with this, but you're so fixated on bringing down Bhoot, it blinds you to other possibilities.”

“But it makes sense; this is the way he works—he eliminates anyone, anything standing in his way.”

“Then you should be even more careful, Vanessa, because you were in the fucking line of fire in Vienna.” He spoke roughly, in a voice she'd never heard him use.

She took a step back. “I don't expect this from you. You're the one person in my life . . .”

His eyes met hers, and she saw the quick, dark dilation of his pupils. His fingers grazed her cheek. “I don't want to wake up next time and hear they got you—” His voice broke off.

“I know.” She nodded. “That's how I feel each time you walk away.”

He reached for her hand, placing the small set of keys in her palm. “Take the car.” He stood, staring at her intently, hesitating too long before he said, “I'm on a flight back to Cairo in less than two hours.”

“You look like you haven't slept for weeks, David,” she whispered, acutely aware of the strain etched on his face. “Something's going on; something's wrong.”

“It's nothing, just the usual work shit that always blows over.”

“Then tell me.”

His fingers brushed lightly through her hair, but then, as if sensing she was focusing too closely on him, he pulled his hand away. “Next time.”

“When is next time going to be?” She asked the question softly, knowing it was impossible to answer.

“Soon.”

“Khoury—”

But he intended to change the subject, and he said, “You might want to wear that brunette wig when you talk to the DDO. Your YouTube clip's been running on CNN today. Every segment.”

She resisted for a moment, wanting to force him to confide in her, but she knew how stubborn he was—
anta aa-need,
according to his mother.

So she relented. “How much shit am I in?”

He cocked his head, and his mouth twisted into a smile. “Up to your neck?”

She smiled, too, but she felt the distance between them. “At least it isn't over my head.”

“Listen,” he said, abruptly serious. “I watched that fucking video a hundred times. Somebody let you live.”

•   •   •

As he walked away,
she thought again about the risk he'd taken to meet her. Relationships between ops officers who shared the same cover were commonplace. It was so much easier to fall in lust and love with someone when they knew what you did for your day job, so much easier to live with someone who hadn't heard the lies that came before the partial truths.

But relationships between NOCs and “inside” officers (like Khoury, who ostensibly was a political officer at the embassy in Cairo) were forbidden. Love affairs gone bad did not breed trust in the field. If Chris and the seventh-floor management became aware of her relationship with David Khoury, at the least they could both be forced to come “inside.” Or they could be fired. Either was a fate she would hate. They would end up blaming each other, and maybe worse.

So how had they let their affair go this far?

The question pushed her back to training days at the Farm during an interrogation simulation. The metal hut locked in heat and humidity and the stink of a dozen “prisoners.” The hood snuffed out all but the faintest light.

Heavy footsteps of guards coming back. Vanessa snapped out an internal command that carried the echo of her father—
They push you, push the hell back!

The footfalls faded. But she couldn't breathe with the stupid hood. And then, a
not
unfamiliar tickling wave of euphoria lifted her out of herself, and her mind caught up.
Her hands were free, weren't they?
Her mouth pulled into a taut little smile.

She raised the edge of the hood and blinked into dusty light—and found herself staring straight at another prisoner who had pulled his own hood up. For a moment his dark eyes sparkled with a manic gleam. Then he winked and she winked back. Kindred souls.

They yanked their hoods back down just in time. The guards were back, taunting and shoving. Later she had introduced herself more formally to David Khoury.

Now he was almost out of sight, on his way back to Cairo, his post at the U.S. embassy, and she felt a sense of foreboding and the fleeting and impossible impulse to call him back.

Under the intensity of her gaze, he turned briefly, just a glance, barely a nod. And then he was gone.

For a moment, his last words echoed silently—
Somebody let you live.